BobOnTheKebab
1996
This review contains spoilers
I'm very surprised by how well this game aged; with the way people talk about the original Pokémon games, you'd think they were broken messes. I enjoyed my time with Pokémon Blue. It took me 38 in-game hours to beat the game, so it isn't that long for RPG standards but it can take a while for sure. Took me about a week or two to beat since I took long breaks from the game and I was playing other games in-between. The team I used to beat the game included a Venusaur, Gyarados, Marowak, Hitmonlee, Magneton, and Moltres.
I'm just gonna take this paragraph to do a run-down of version differences for clarity's sake. There are zero differences in the story, gameplay, and overall design of Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version in the USA. It is true that, in Japan, Blue came after the original two games - Red and Green - to fix some problems and give the sprite work a facelift, but Red is pretty much the exact same as Blue in the USA so I will be referring to them interchangeably despite having played the Blue Version. I say "pretty much" because Red and Blue do have one difference: the availability of certain Pokémon. For an easy example, Vulpix is in Blue but not Red and Growlithe is in Red but not Blue. They did this to encourage in-game trading between people, which was pretty smart and it's the reason there's always been two versions of every mainline Pokémon game. Nonetheless, the version exclusive Pokémon are only a problem if you want to complete the Pokédex - which I didn't bother with doing - or you just really wanted the Pokémon.
Pokémon is one of the few RPGs I can think of where simplicity is king, and nowhere is that more evident than in the story and characters of Red and Blue. Its all incredibly simple and that's honestly for the better in my opinion, at least for this duology that started it all. Your goal is to travel around the Kanto region and beat the Gym Leaders so you can go fight the Elite Four and become the Champion. Not much different from any other Pokémon game, but of course it gets some novelty points for being the first. Along the way, you are also tasked with completing the Pokédex by finding and catching every Pokémon, but this is just a side activity so you can choose to not do it. When you're on your journey, you take down Team Rocket too, who I imagine need no introduction but they're basically a mafia run by doofuses. The game is very linear with little to no side activities, but sometimes the main quest feels like a side activity since it tends to have you go out of your way to do stuff unrelated to the main goal so you can progress. For example, when you reach Lavender Town and go into the Pokemon Tower there, you can't see the ghosts, so you need to go to Celadon City and fight Team Rocket there to get the Silph Scope which will then let you see the ghosts. You also rescue Mr. Fuji there and help put the spirit of a grieving ghost to rest. Little things like this make the world feel a little more lived in. As for characters, the first major character you meet is Professor Oak, who gives you and your rival your starter Pokemon and the Pokedex, but you never see him again until the very end when he congratulates you for becoming the Champion. Your rival is the grandson of Professor Oak. The rival's canonical name is Blue in the United States and Green in Japan, but you can name him whatever you want (I called him Bogus). I suppose that would make his surname Oak unless there was a surname change along the family tree. Something I find interesting about Blue is that, for a long time, people had a tendency to mischaracterize him as an egotistical jackass. Yes, Blue is overconfident and he likes to make childish remarks, but he really isn't anywhere near as bad as people said he was and he humbles out later in the story anyway. He even congratulates you sometimes and regards you as a friend. Unfortunately, there aren't any other major characters; everyone else is either a random NPC, a side character that helps you out, or essentially a glorified obstacle to your goal (Gym Leaders and Elite Four). There are a lot of NPCs in the game to make the towns feel more populated, but a lot of what they actually say to you is just tips on game mechanics or dropping some miniscule worldbuilding lore. Of course, as a longtime Pokémon fan I already knew all the advice they told me, but its good that it's there for anyone new to the series. It's especially important for these games to have since they're the first (I know I keep reiterating this point but it's important).
I may be biased since I have a good amount of experience playing through Gen 1 before my current playthrough, but I found that, for the most part, figuring out where to go and what to do was relatively straightforward. Of course, that's very much intentional since the Pokemon games have always been intended for anyone to be able to pick up and play. I did get stuck in Silph Co. building's maze, but that can be chalked up to me just being awful at puzzle solving. The only thing that tripped me up as far as progression goes was finding out where I needed to go for some of the HMs. The Surf and Strength HMs are accessed through the Safari Zone; Surf you get from finding the Secret House there and Strength you get from finding Golden Teeth to give to the Safari Zone warden in Fuchsia City. Its stuff I genuinely would not have thought to do. Unfortunately most HMs are required for progression since it teaches your Pokemon moves you can use in the overworld to progress. One HM, Fly, is completely optional but is basically a must-have considering that it serves as this game's fast travel. You find this...in the house of a random person near an ordinary route. I genuinely think I would have completely missed this if it weren't for the internet and that would have sucked considering just how useful Fly is. I figure something like that would be more transparent to find, but oh well.
In my opinion, there is a certain charm to the simplicity of the gameplay of Pokemon Blue (and, by proxy, Red). It's a fun glimpse into the past of this series, before it seemed to know just how gargantuan it would become. It feels like it has just the bare essentials of the core formula since this was a time before the series had a lot of features that are considered staples in the current games. Gender, breeding, Abilities, Natures, Shiny Pokemon, double battles, berries, friendship evolutions, some evolution stones, the Dark Type, the Steel Type, and the Fairy Type all didn't exist in Red and Blue. Unfortunately that does come with some design quirks that were patched up in the newer games, some of which are quite annoying even when playing the game casually. Notably, this was before the Special Defense and Special Attack stats existed; instead, both are grouped under "Special", which frankly was not a good idea in my opinion and I'm glad it got split in two later. Critical hit chance was defined by speed, too, so fast Pokemon could hit you like a truck. The types of some Pokemon and moves are also entirely different here and some of the type weaknesses are different too. The Psychic Type is infamous in Red and Blue for having essentially no weakness since almost every Bug Type move is garbage and the Ghost Type does not effect Psychic even though it is Super Effective to Psychic in every main series Pokémon game after Yellow. You can usually take them down with strong physical attacks (Psychic Types tend to have terrible Defense), though, so they're not that overpowered in casual play. Some types also just felt way more shafted than others in Red and Blue, particularly Ghost Types, Poison Types, Bug Types, and Dragon Types. There is only one Dragon Type move in the entire game and two Ghost Type moves, and both types have a move that only deals fixed damage (the one regular damaging move for Ghost Type also sucks since its only 20 base power). Poison Type is awful offensively since its highest damage move only has 65 base power and it is only Super Effective to Grass Type and Bug Type (which both tend to have Poison Type as a second type anyway), but it does at least have some utility since the Poison status effect is decent. Bug Type is the worst type in the game because all the moves are terrible and its weak to a lot of types. There are only three Ghost Type Pokemon and three Dragon Type Pokemon, and they aren't bad Pokemon necessarily but it feels like they can't make use of their special unique type. Another problem is with the Pokemon learnsets. They are just very bizarre to me, since a good amount of Pokemon either don't learn any damage moves of their types or only learn very low damage versions of those moves for a long time. Sometimes this can work out for them, like Gyarados is Water/Flying Type and it gets good use out of hard hitting Normal Type moves, but I find in most cases its kind of weird. TMs and HMs help fix this, but, since TMs are limited use, they aren't super helpful. I was surprised by just how common this issue was, I'm glad I found these looking through websites for info on building my team so I didn't have to end up lugging around one of these Pokemon the whole game only to not have it learn anything of its type. Worth mentioning that some Pokémon just fundamentally don't seem designed to fit into their type. This is because each type has a specific damage type assigned to it: physical or special. Some Pokémon primarily learn moves of a type that use physical or special despite that stat being low on that Pokémon. A funny example is Hitmonchan, who's whole learnset gimmick is that it learns punch moves of a few different types but the damage is awful because they all use Special and its Special stat is abysmal. It's also another Pokémon that does not learn any damaging moves of its type until a high level. The final minor gameplay design annoyance I'd like to mention is the fact that there aren't viewable descriptions of what the moves do. Of course, in this internet age, it takes five seconds to go on Serebii or Bulbapedia and read move descriptions there, but it would have been nice to have a little in-game blurb for each move. Otherwise, you would have no idea which moves are good and which aren't. But, all in all, Red and Blue just had some major growing pains that can ultimately be overlooked since they were the first games of the series, but may be a deal-breaker for people revisiting these games. That's why I gave this such a long in-depth section. Its kind of fascinating just how weird Red and Blue's core design can be.
Overall, Red and Blue are pretty great for the time. They have a bad case of what I like to call "first-game-itis", which really shows in how bizarre the game balance can feel at times. Nonetheless, I think it can mostly be avoided by knowing its faults...not that you'll need to worry too much since the game is easy. I was able to stomp the Elite Four my first try with a comically underleveled team by just exploiting Super Effective moves and buying a lot of healing items. Nonetheless, I did find it to be a fun experience. I believe it has too many flaws to give it a four star so I went with three and a half stars. It's overall solid and deserves props for starting such an iconic series.
I'm just gonna take this paragraph to do a run-down of version differences for clarity's sake. There are zero differences in the story, gameplay, and overall design of Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version in the USA. It is true that, in Japan, Blue came after the original two games - Red and Green - to fix some problems and give the sprite work a facelift, but Red is pretty much the exact same as Blue in the USA so I will be referring to them interchangeably despite having played the Blue Version. I say "pretty much" because Red and Blue do have one difference: the availability of certain Pokémon. For an easy example, Vulpix is in Blue but not Red and Growlithe is in Red but not Blue. They did this to encourage in-game trading between people, which was pretty smart and it's the reason there's always been two versions of every mainline Pokémon game. Nonetheless, the version exclusive Pokémon are only a problem if you want to complete the Pokédex - which I didn't bother with doing - or you just really wanted the Pokémon.
Pokémon is one of the few RPGs I can think of where simplicity is king, and nowhere is that more evident than in the story and characters of Red and Blue. Its all incredibly simple and that's honestly for the better in my opinion, at least for this duology that started it all. Your goal is to travel around the Kanto region and beat the Gym Leaders so you can go fight the Elite Four and become the Champion. Not much different from any other Pokémon game, but of course it gets some novelty points for being the first. Along the way, you are also tasked with completing the Pokédex by finding and catching every Pokémon, but this is just a side activity so you can choose to not do it. When you're on your journey, you take down Team Rocket too, who I imagine need no introduction but they're basically a mafia run by doofuses. The game is very linear with little to no side activities, but sometimes the main quest feels like a side activity since it tends to have you go out of your way to do stuff unrelated to the main goal so you can progress. For example, when you reach Lavender Town and go into the Pokemon Tower there, you can't see the ghosts, so you need to go to Celadon City and fight Team Rocket there to get the Silph Scope which will then let you see the ghosts. You also rescue Mr. Fuji there and help put the spirit of a grieving ghost to rest. Little things like this make the world feel a little more lived in. As for characters, the first major character you meet is Professor Oak, who gives you and your rival your starter Pokemon and the Pokedex, but you never see him again until the very end when he congratulates you for becoming the Champion. Your rival is the grandson of Professor Oak. The rival's canonical name is Blue in the United States and Green in Japan, but you can name him whatever you want (I called him Bogus). I suppose that would make his surname Oak unless there was a surname change along the family tree. Something I find interesting about Blue is that, for a long time, people had a tendency to mischaracterize him as an egotistical jackass. Yes, Blue is overconfident and he likes to make childish remarks, but he really isn't anywhere near as bad as people said he was and he humbles out later in the story anyway. He even congratulates you sometimes and regards you as a friend. Unfortunately, there aren't any other major characters; everyone else is either a random NPC, a side character that helps you out, or essentially a glorified obstacle to your goal (Gym Leaders and Elite Four). There are a lot of NPCs in the game to make the towns feel more populated, but a lot of what they actually say to you is just tips on game mechanics or dropping some miniscule worldbuilding lore. Of course, as a longtime Pokémon fan I already knew all the advice they told me, but its good that it's there for anyone new to the series. It's especially important for these games to have since they're the first (I know I keep reiterating this point but it's important).
I may be biased since I have a good amount of experience playing through Gen 1 before my current playthrough, but I found that, for the most part, figuring out where to go and what to do was relatively straightforward. Of course, that's very much intentional since the Pokemon games have always been intended for anyone to be able to pick up and play. I did get stuck in Silph Co. building's maze, but that can be chalked up to me just being awful at puzzle solving. The only thing that tripped me up as far as progression goes was finding out where I needed to go for some of the HMs. The Surf and Strength HMs are accessed through the Safari Zone; Surf you get from finding the Secret House there and Strength you get from finding Golden Teeth to give to the Safari Zone warden in Fuchsia City. Its stuff I genuinely would not have thought to do. Unfortunately most HMs are required for progression since it teaches your Pokemon moves you can use in the overworld to progress. One HM, Fly, is completely optional but is basically a must-have considering that it serves as this game's fast travel. You find this...in the house of a random person near an ordinary route. I genuinely think I would have completely missed this if it weren't for the internet and that would have sucked considering just how useful Fly is. I figure something like that would be more transparent to find, but oh well.
In my opinion, there is a certain charm to the simplicity of the gameplay of Pokemon Blue (and, by proxy, Red). It's a fun glimpse into the past of this series, before it seemed to know just how gargantuan it would become. It feels like it has just the bare essentials of the core formula since this was a time before the series had a lot of features that are considered staples in the current games. Gender, breeding, Abilities, Natures, Shiny Pokemon, double battles, berries, friendship evolutions, some evolution stones, the Dark Type, the Steel Type, and the Fairy Type all didn't exist in Red and Blue. Unfortunately that does come with some design quirks that were patched up in the newer games, some of which are quite annoying even when playing the game casually. Notably, this was before the Special Defense and Special Attack stats existed; instead, both are grouped under "Special", which frankly was not a good idea in my opinion and I'm glad it got split in two later. Critical hit chance was defined by speed, too, so fast Pokemon could hit you like a truck. The types of some Pokemon and moves are also entirely different here and some of the type weaknesses are different too. The Psychic Type is infamous in Red and Blue for having essentially no weakness since almost every Bug Type move is garbage and the Ghost Type does not effect Psychic even though it is Super Effective to Psychic in every main series Pokémon game after Yellow. You can usually take them down with strong physical attacks (Psychic Types tend to have terrible Defense), though, so they're not that overpowered in casual play. Some types also just felt way more shafted than others in Red and Blue, particularly Ghost Types, Poison Types, Bug Types, and Dragon Types. There is only one Dragon Type move in the entire game and two Ghost Type moves, and both types have a move that only deals fixed damage (the one regular damaging move for Ghost Type also sucks since its only 20 base power). Poison Type is awful offensively since its highest damage move only has 65 base power and it is only Super Effective to Grass Type and Bug Type (which both tend to have Poison Type as a second type anyway), but it does at least have some utility since the Poison status effect is decent. Bug Type is the worst type in the game because all the moves are terrible and its weak to a lot of types. There are only three Ghost Type Pokemon and three Dragon Type Pokemon, and they aren't bad Pokemon necessarily but it feels like they can't make use of their special unique type. Another problem is with the Pokemon learnsets. They are just very bizarre to me, since a good amount of Pokemon either don't learn any damage moves of their types or only learn very low damage versions of those moves for a long time. Sometimes this can work out for them, like Gyarados is Water/Flying Type and it gets good use out of hard hitting Normal Type moves, but I find in most cases its kind of weird. TMs and HMs help fix this, but, since TMs are limited use, they aren't super helpful. I was surprised by just how common this issue was, I'm glad I found these looking through websites for info on building my team so I didn't have to end up lugging around one of these Pokemon the whole game only to not have it learn anything of its type. Worth mentioning that some Pokémon just fundamentally don't seem designed to fit into their type. This is because each type has a specific damage type assigned to it: physical or special. Some Pokémon primarily learn moves of a type that use physical or special despite that stat being low on that Pokémon. A funny example is Hitmonchan, who's whole learnset gimmick is that it learns punch moves of a few different types but the damage is awful because they all use Special and its Special stat is abysmal. It's also another Pokémon that does not learn any damaging moves of its type until a high level. The final minor gameplay design annoyance I'd like to mention is the fact that there aren't viewable descriptions of what the moves do. Of course, in this internet age, it takes five seconds to go on Serebii or Bulbapedia and read move descriptions there, but it would have been nice to have a little in-game blurb for each move. Otherwise, you would have no idea which moves are good and which aren't. But, all in all, Red and Blue just had some major growing pains that can ultimately be overlooked since they were the first games of the series, but may be a deal-breaker for people revisiting these games. That's why I gave this such a long in-depth section. Its kind of fascinating just how weird Red and Blue's core design can be.
Overall, Red and Blue are pretty great for the time. They have a bad case of what I like to call "first-game-itis", which really shows in how bizarre the game balance can feel at times. Nonetheless, I think it can mostly be avoided by knowing its faults...not that you'll need to worry too much since the game is easy. I was able to stomp the Elite Four my first try with a comically underleveled team by just exploiting Super Effective moves and buying a lot of healing items. Nonetheless, I did find it to be a fun experience. I believe it has too many flaws to give it a four star so I went with three and a half stars. It's overall solid and deserves props for starting such an iconic series.
This review contains spoilers
Small disclaimer: I am only marking my playthrough of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition as completed because I did technically see an ending. After beating Orochi X in Chapter 4 of the Story Mode, you get a cutscene meant to signify the end and the credits start to roll. I imagine this is how the original game ends, but, of course, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is an expanded rerelease, so they have plenty more content and story to go through after the original ending. I plan on playing through at least most of that content since I unlocked Chapter 5 shortly after typing this review, but I feel I have experienced enough to review the game. All of that being said, here is my review.
So, Warriors Orochi is a Musou series that I have never actually tried until my time playing this game on Steam. I'm also very surprised I have not given this series a look before since I really enjoy both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, which this game heavily features a crossover between. It serves as a crossover between Koei Tecmo IPs in general, too, with characters like Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Ayane from Dead or Alive popping up to join your ranks of playable characters. You have to unlock the characters over time by completing missions in Story Mode, but this game has 140+ characters and that's just insane. With a game that has that many characters, you'd think leveling them all might be a pain, but the developers must have thought to give players a helping hand since Growth Points exist. Simply distribute some points to the characters you want to level up in the dedicated menu for it and watch those levels soar. Unfortunately, some characters have the same weapons, but I found that most of the characters have original move-sets. I enjoyed experimenting with the characters every time I unlocked them; although I have not unlocked everyone, I did get my hands on most of the characters. I genuinely think that the roster is probably the best part about this game. I actually got a nice blast of nostalgia since a lot of the Samurai Warriors characters play pretty much exactly the same as they do in Samurai Warriors 2 Xtreme Legends, which was my childhood Musou game alongside Dynasty Warriors 6. Every character has a good amount of costumes and, as far as I know, this version of the game has most of the DLC costumes. I was particularly happy to see that nearly every samurai that was in SW2XL has their alternate costumes from that game to use here and so do the characters that were in DW6, but the primary designs for the characters used in things like their portraits in dialogue come from SW3 and DW7. I found myself pleasantly surprised with the guest characters. Ryu Hayabusa was one of my most played characters, as I expected, but I also really liked Nemea even though I don't even know what game he comes from. Other fun guest characters are here, too, like Achilles (I think he's from another Koei Tecmo IP), some anime-looking knight called Sterkenburg Cranach (I heard he's from Atelier but I dunno if that's true), and Sophitia from Soul Calibur. The game also has a good amount of what seems to be original characters to me, though they may have been in other Musou games that I just haven't played. These include the likes of Kaguya, Susano-o, Sun Wukong, Nezha, Kiyomori Taira, and plenty more. I found them to be a fun addition, even if you don't unlock a good chunk of these guys until way later in the game from the looks of things. My most played characters in this game were probably Ryu Hayabusa, Hanzo Hattori, Masamune Date, and Dong Zhuo. I actually used a somewhat varied selection of characters - I had a decently leveled Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Nobunaga Oda, Katsuie Shibata, Zhang He, Zhou Tai, Kotaro Fuma, Sterkenburg, and Nemea - but this list includes the characters I remember playing the most (as far as I could tell, there's no way to directly see who you played more). By the end of the story mode, my go-to team consisted of Ryu Hayabusa, Dong Zhuo, and Hanzo Hattori. They were all in the Level 70 - 80 range and my frugalness with Growth Points has resulted in me having a huge surplus of it, way more than I think I could ever spend. Once I pick the game up again to play through the rest of the story, I plan on trying out more characters to see if anyone else is as fun to play to me as my current go-to team.
As far as gameplay goes, I found that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is a fairly standard Musou experience. You're there to kill thousands of faceless goons, complete objectives to gain advantage in the battlefield, level up to get even stronger, earn powerful new weapons from the lambs of your slaughter, and just absolutely decimate anyone that dares to get in your way. Musou games tend to share a very repetitive formula, which is highly critiqued (and I understand why), but for some reason I almost never get tired of it when I grab a new Musou game. I think that the main way this game distinguishes itself from the rest is through its focus on team composition. In every battle, you pick three characters you can swap between at any time. The three fighters all have their own health and Musou bars, so you can swap to the next one if you're getting low or you want a quick and easy Musou attack. Characters regain health and Musou when you're not playing them. Pressing down on the D-Pad summons all three and they can help you out in fights, but definitely the main point of this feature to me is the team Musou attack that can be done if all of your characters have max Musou bar. You have some special moves you can perform through pressing the R button using some of your Musou up, which I think is a new thing but I really don't know if it is or not. Also, one small quirk with the game that's probably worth mentioning is that the Samurai Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters) have to hold the button to use their Musous, but the Dynasty Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters again) use it as soon as you press the button once. This was something I did not realize until looking it up, so I just assumed Samurai Warriors characters did not have Musou attacks until I saw I was doing it wrong. Kind of silly in retrospect considering that this game only does that because the Samurai Warriors games also have you hold the button down to do Musou attacks. The last noteworthy thing this game does differently from the Musou games I've played in my opinion is through its classifications of characters. Every character is under a specific type: Attack, Speed, Technique, and Wonder. As far as I could tell, these don't really change the way you play much, but the types do have their own special thing about them. Power types basically get super armor so no regular attack will make them flinch, Speed types get a double jump, and Wonder types can dash in the middle of their attacks by using a tiny bit of their Musou bar. I couldn't figure out what the special ability of Technique types is (if they even have one). I like these classifications, but they look more important than they actually are. For example, you'd think Power characters have stronger weapons, but that's not always true.
When playing Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, Medium difficulty is the default I went for with all required story missions until I reached Chapter 4. When your characters get to around Level 30 or 40, the levels become way too easy on Medium difficulty, and by the time I got to Chapter 4's main story missions (after doing all the side missions of the other chapters) my main group of characters were around Level 70. I also got the strongest weapons - the special Mystic weapons, only obtained once by fulfilling special criteria in a specific mission - for two out of the three characters, so my team was plowing through bosses in Medium difficulty with just two or three hits. Naturally, Hard became my new default difficulty for Chapter 4 and beyond, which really isn't very difficult either with how strong my go-to team was. Before starting Chapter 4, I only changed the difficulty when I wanted to go on Easy difficulty to quickly finish the first level several times (I did this because raising bonds requires you to play a level to see the bond increase and it would feel like a waste of time not doing it on Easy imo) or when I needed to go on Hard difficulty to unlock the faster horse and the Mystic Weapons for my most played characters. Once I get to playing through Chapter 5 up to Chapter 8, I will likely try turning the difficulty up to the second most difficult option (Chaos) once I get to playing through Chapter 5. The difficulty feels like more of a level curve thing than actually making the game harder for you.
The story of this game felt rather unimportant to me, but that's not to discredit the tons of effort put into it through things like cutscenes and a metric shitload of dialogue. In fact, there's a lot of focus put on the story; I'm just not really looking for a great story when I'm playing a Musou game, so its inclusion is nice but inconsequential for me (and its still not all that great). You start off as Sima Zhao, Ma Chao, and Hanbei Takenaka fighting against a demon army and a huge hydra. The characters soon realize that they are completely powerless against it and try to retreat. They nearly die trying, but a woman from the Mystic Realm comes to save them. She reveals that her name is Kaguya (I believe that comes from a Japanese myth but I couldn't tell you about that) and she has the power to go back in time using the memories of people that were there. They use her power to wind the clock back to a time before the hydra attacked. The goal is to amass an army of the strongest warriors in the land to take down the hydra with. You learn more about the hydra, the godlike beings of the Mystic Realm, and other important characters like the trickster spirit Da Ji and Orochi himself later down the storyline, but in the beginning you don't really know who these people (or beasts) are. Basically, the entire game after the prologue mission is going through battlegrounds to fight some dudes either to recruit them or because they're in your way, and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. The motivation for the characters tends to be at least a little different depending on who it is, but a lot of them either join because they got captured, want to go back in time to save someone (or correct a mistake of theirs), or they join the army for the greater good. A lot of stuff happens - typically within missions themselves - and there are a few fun twists and turns. I liked how, in the end of Chapter 2, everyone in your army is essentially left with no choice but to trust Da Ji's plan of using her own memories to go back even further in time. I think it would have been interesting if we saw a more good side to Da Ji through this, especially since there's a character that is unshakably loyal to her, but unfortunately she is just evil and using the army to revive Orochi. Maybe that's explored more after Chapter 5, I don't know. Nonetheless, the story does ultimately (heh) feel more like set-dressing for the sake of an epic scale to me. For the most part, I saw the story as just a way to add flavor to the missions, make you feel more invested in the characters, and give them reasons to fight each other. The funny thing about the latter point is that a lot of characters just kinda act like they know each other already, although the dialogue between characters highly suggests that this is because WO3U is a sequel to the other games. I wouldn't know because I haven't played those games. Still, its amusing how Achilles can threaten to take his opponents to Hades while fighting alongside fantasy ninjas, magic ninjas, samurais, magic samurais, warriors with weird weapons, sorcerers, Yōkai, demons, Oni, and gods from Taoist, Buddhist, and Shinto stories.
In the Story Mode, you get a base that serves as a small hub you go to after beating missions. Characters show up in the base depending on what mission you beat or what characters you're playing and you can talk to them. This either leads to fun banter between characters, discussions of what happened in the mission you just did, or a conversation that will unlock a new mission for you. Unfortunately I found that a good chunk of missions are only attainable through talking with characters, so sometimes there's a pressure to talk to everyone you see and keep swapping between characters to find the right one for unlocking a mission. I'm no completionist for most games I play, but I did still talk to everyone in the camp when I could and often swapped characters just to see if any of them made a new mission show up. I found that most of what I did in the hub was fuse weapons or buy new ones from the Blacksmith. With the sheer number of characters that are in this game, I liked to micromanage them all and make sure they all had decent weapons, even the ones I didn't play once. One feature that annoyed me about the camp in this game is the bond system, which a good amount of missions are locked to. The bond system is just a few gauges that represent a character's relationship with other characters. You have to have the character your playing talk to another to start a bond, then raise it through various ways. The easiest way is to host tea parties by talking to the dedicated tea shop guy and going through some menus. Don't even bother with the bond system until you get moon viewings (the most expensive tea party option), it will save you a lot of headache. Once you get that, you just dump some of the in-game currency into two or three moon viewings for the characters that need the bond, then play a mission with them all in your party and you can unlock the mission. This whole system is more of a minor nuisance to me than anything, but it was something I was often wondering how I would ever raise until I looked it up online and found out that its a pain in the neck to raise bonds before you get the moon viewings. It felt pointless to me overall, yet characters and missions are locked behind it. I would have preferred not having to keep playing the first level on Easy difficulty with all these characters since it felt like a waste of time to me.
To be frank, I really did not think I would have a lot to say about this game, but of course its nearly impossible for me to write a short cohesive review on this site. I give Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition four stars. I really enjoyed my time with it and I see why people say its one of the best Musou games out there.
So, Warriors Orochi is a Musou series that I have never actually tried until my time playing this game on Steam. I'm also very surprised I have not given this series a look before since I really enjoy both Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, which this game heavily features a crossover between. It serves as a crossover between Koei Tecmo IPs in general, too, with characters like Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Ayane from Dead or Alive popping up to join your ranks of playable characters. You have to unlock the characters over time by completing missions in Story Mode, but this game has 140+ characters and that's just insane. With a game that has that many characters, you'd think leveling them all might be a pain, but the developers must have thought to give players a helping hand since Growth Points exist. Simply distribute some points to the characters you want to level up in the dedicated menu for it and watch those levels soar. Unfortunately, some characters have the same weapons, but I found that most of the characters have original move-sets. I enjoyed experimenting with the characters every time I unlocked them; although I have not unlocked everyone, I did get my hands on most of the characters. I genuinely think that the roster is probably the best part about this game. I actually got a nice blast of nostalgia since a lot of the Samurai Warriors characters play pretty much exactly the same as they do in Samurai Warriors 2 Xtreme Legends, which was my childhood Musou game alongside Dynasty Warriors 6. Every character has a good amount of costumes and, as far as I know, this version of the game has most of the DLC costumes. I was particularly happy to see that nearly every samurai that was in SW2XL has their alternate costumes from that game to use here and so do the characters that were in DW6, but the primary designs for the characters used in things like their portraits in dialogue come from SW3 and DW7. I found myself pleasantly surprised with the guest characters. Ryu Hayabusa was one of my most played characters, as I expected, but I also really liked Nemea even though I don't even know what game he comes from. Other fun guest characters are here, too, like Achilles (I think he's from another Koei Tecmo IP), some anime-looking knight called Sterkenburg Cranach (I heard he's from Atelier but I dunno if that's true), and Sophitia from Soul Calibur. The game also has a good amount of what seems to be original characters to me, though they may have been in other Musou games that I just haven't played. These include the likes of Kaguya, Susano-o, Sun Wukong, Nezha, Kiyomori Taira, and plenty more. I found them to be a fun addition, even if you don't unlock a good chunk of these guys until way later in the game from the looks of things. My most played characters in this game were probably Ryu Hayabusa, Hanzo Hattori, Masamune Date, and Dong Zhuo. I actually used a somewhat varied selection of characters - I had a decently leveled Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Nobunaga Oda, Katsuie Shibata, Zhang He, Zhou Tai, Kotaro Fuma, Sterkenburg, and Nemea - but this list includes the characters I remember playing the most (as far as I could tell, there's no way to directly see who you played more). By the end of the story mode, my go-to team consisted of Ryu Hayabusa, Dong Zhuo, and Hanzo Hattori. They were all in the Level 70 - 80 range and my frugalness with Growth Points has resulted in me having a huge surplus of it, way more than I think I could ever spend. Once I pick the game up again to play through the rest of the story, I plan on trying out more characters to see if anyone else is as fun to play to me as my current go-to team.
As far as gameplay goes, I found that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is a fairly standard Musou experience. You're there to kill thousands of faceless goons, complete objectives to gain advantage in the battlefield, level up to get even stronger, earn powerful new weapons from the lambs of your slaughter, and just absolutely decimate anyone that dares to get in your way. Musou games tend to share a very repetitive formula, which is highly critiqued (and I understand why), but for some reason I almost never get tired of it when I grab a new Musou game. I think that the main way this game distinguishes itself from the rest is through its focus on team composition. In every battle, you pick three characters you can swap between at any time. The three fighters all have their own health and Musou bars, so you can swap to the next one if you're getting low or you want a quick and easy Musou attack. Characters regain health and Musou when you're not playing them. Pressing down on the D-Pad summons all three and they can help you out in fights, but definitely the main point of this feature to me is the team Musou attack that can be done if all of your characters have max Musou bar. You have some special moves you can perform through pressing the R button using some of your Musou up, which I think is a new thing but I really don't know if it is or not. Also, one small quirk with the game that's probably worth mentioning is that the Samurai Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters) have to hold the button to use their Musous, but the Dynasty Warriors characters (and some of the guest characters again) use it as soon as you press the button once. This was something I did not realize until looking it up, so I just assumed Samurai Warriors characters did not have Musou attacks until I saw I was doing it wrong. Kind of silly in retrospect considering that this game only does that because the Samurai Warriors games also have you hold the button down to do Musou attacks. The last noteworthy thing this game does differently from the Musou games I've played in my opinion is through its classifications of characters. Every character is under a specific type: Attack, Speed, Technique, and Wonder. As far as I could tell, these don't really change the way you play much, but the types do have their own special thing about them. Power types basically get super armor so no regular attack will make them flinch, Speed types get a double jump, and Wonder types can dash in the middle of their attacks by using a tiny bit of their Musou bar. I couldn't figure out what the special ability of Technique types is (if they even have one). I like these classifications, but they look more important than they actually are. For example, you'd think Power characters have stronger weapons, but that's not always true.
When playing Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, Medium difficulty is the default I went for with all required story missions until I reached Chapter 4. When your characters get to around Level 30 or 40, the levels become way too easy on Medium difficulty, and by the time I got to Chapter 4's main story missions (after doing all the side missions of the other chapters) my main group of characters were around Level 70. I also got the strongest weapons - the special Mystic weapons, only obtained once by fulfilling special criteria in a specific mission - for two out of the three characters, so my team was plowing through bosses in Medium difficulty with just two or three hits. Naturally, Hard became my new default difficulty for Chapter 4 and beyond, which really isn't very difficult either with how strong my go-to team was. Before starting Chapter 4, I only changed the difficulty when I wanted to go on Easy difficulty to quickly finish the first level several times (I did this because raising bonds requires you to play a level to see the bond increase and it would feel like a waste of time not doing it on Easy imo) or when I needed to go on Hard difficulty to unlock the faster horse and the Mystic Weapons for my most played characters. Once I get to playing through Chapter 5 up to Chapter 8, I will likely try turning the difficulty up to the second most difficult option (Chaos) once I get to playing through Chapter 5. The difficulty feels like more of a level curve thing than actually making the game harder for you.
The story of this game felt rather unimportant to me, but that's not to discredit the tons of effort put into it through things like cutscenes and a metric shitload of dialogue. In fact, there's a lot of focus put on the story; I'm just not really looking for a great story when I'm playing a Musou game, so its inclusion is nice but inconsequential for me (and its still not all that great). You start off as Sima Zhao, Ma Chao, and Hanbei Takenaka fighting against a demon army and a huge hydra. The characters soon realize that they are completely powerless against it and try to retreat. They nearly die trying, but a woman from the Mystic Realm comes to save them. She reveals that her name is Kaguya (I believe that comes from a Japanese myth but I couldn't tell you about that) and she has the power to go back in time using the memories of people that were there. They use her power to wind the clock back to a time before the hydra attacked. The goal is to amass an army of the strongest warriors in the land to take down the hydra with. You learn more about the hydra, the godlike beings of the Mystic Realm, and other important characters like the trickster spirit Da Ji and Orochi himself later down the storyline, but in the beginning you don't really know who these people (or beasts) are. Basically, the entire game after the prologue mission is going through battlegrounds to fight some dudes either to recruit them or because they're in your way, and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. The motivation for the characters tends to be at least a little different depending on who it is, but a lot of them either join because they got captured, want to go back in time to save someone (or correct a mistake of theirs), or they join the army for the greater good. A lot of stuff happens - typically within missions themselves - and there are a few fun twists and turns. I liked how, in the end of Chapter 2, everyone in your army is essentially left with no choice but to trust Da Ji's plan of using her own memories to go back even further in time. I think it would have been interesting if we saw a more good side to Da Ji through this, especially since there's a character that is unshakably loyal to her, but unfortunately she is just evil and using the army to revive Orochi. Maybe that's explored more after Chapter 5, I don't know. Nonetheless, the story does ultimately (heh) feel more like set-dressing for the sake of an epic scale to me. For the most part, I saw the story as just a way to add flavor to the missions, make you feel more invested in the characters, and give them reasons to fight each other. The funny thing about the latter point is that a lot of characters just kinda act like they know each other already, although the dialogue between characters highly suggests that this is because WO3U is a sequel to the other games. I wouldn't know because I haven't played those games. Still, its amusing how Achilles can threaten to take his opponents to Hades while fighting alongside fantasy ninjas, magic ninjas, samurais, magic samurais, warriors with weird weapons, sorcerers, Yōkai, demons, Oni, and gods from Taoist, Buddhist, and Shinto stories.
In the Story Mode, you get a base that serves as a small hub you go to after beating missions. Characters show up in the base depending on what mission you beat or what characters you're playing and you can talk to them. This either leads to fun banter between characters, discussions of what happened in the mission you just did, or a conversation that will unlock a new mission for you. Unfortunately I found that a good chunk of missions are only attainable through talking with characters, so sometimes there's a pressure to talk to everyone you see and keep swapping between characters to find the right one for unlocking a mission. I'm no completionist for most games I play, but I did still talk to everyone in the camp when I could and often swapped characters just to see if any of them made a new mission show up. I found that most of what I did in the hub was fuse weapons or buy new ones from the Blacksmith. With the sheer number of characters that are in this game, I liked to micromanage them all and make sure they all had decent weapons, even the ones I didn't play once. One feature that annoyed me about the camp in this game is the bond system, which a good amount of missions are locked to. The bond system is just a few gauges that represent a character's relationship with other characters. You have to have the character your playing talk to another to start a bond, then raise it through various ways. The easiest way is to host tea parties by talking to the dedicated tea shop guy and going through some menus. Don't even bother with the bond system until you get moon viewings (the most expensive tea party option), it will save you a lot of headache. Once you get that, you just dump some of the in-game currency into two or three moon viewings for the characters that need the bond, then play a mission with them all in your party and you can unlock the mission. This whole system is more of a minor nuisance to me than anything, but it was something I was often wondering how I would ever raise until I looked it up online and found out that its a pain in the neck to raise bonds before you get the moon viewings. It felt pointless to me overall, yet characters and missions are locked behind it. I would have preferred not having to keep playing the first level on Easy difficulty with all these characters since it felt like a waste of time to me.
To be frank, I really did not think I would have a lot to say about this game, but of course its nearly impossible for me to write a short cohesive review on this site. I give Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition four stars. I really enjoyed my time with it and I see why people say its one of the best Musou games out there.
This review contains spoilers
Goodbye, Geno. I will always hope that you will be able to return in the flesh in literally anything one day, but, at the same time, I can't really blame Square Enix and Nintendo for not doing that considering how underutilized you are and how old your debut game is. I like to believe that Rosalina takes care of you alongside the Lumas. Maybe one day you will be promoted to an actual fighter in Smash, that's legitimately the best shot you have at ever appearing in anything again and that's already a low chance...for now I'm fine with pretending I'm playing as you with the Mii costume.
With that out of the way, yea Super Mario RPG is a very basic RPG (I even get why people would call it middle of the road or mediocre) but I really do enjoy this game a lot. It's just very special to me, partly because of nostalgia and partly because it feels very unique. The other two Mario RPG series - Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi - carried the spirit of this game and I'd say that they're better in their own ways, but they just aren't the same. In the current age of Nintendo, there is no Mario RPG in sight; Paper Mario games have moved away from the RPG formula since Sticker Star and the Mario & Luigi series has been in limbo since AlphaDream had to shutdown in 2019 due to bankruptcy. In my eyes, there's no better time for a remake or even a sequel of the original Mario RPG than now, but of course Square Enix and Nintendo have no real reason to care for this game so that probably wouldn't happen (would absolutely love to be proven wrong though). I'm hoping it at least shows up on the Nintendo Switch Online SNES game service.
Alright, let's talk about the actual game now. I'll start with how the game looks. Super Mario RPG has a very distinct visual style. As far as I know, everything in this game was modeled in 3D and then converted into sprites for the SNES, kind of like the Donkey Kong Country games. You can actually find renders online of the 3D models for most of the enemies, characters, items, and even some of the weapons and armor your characters can equip in Super Mario RPG. However, this design choice does make it to where the game's visuals didn't age the best. I personally don't mind it and I even think it adds a lot of charm to the look of the game, but you will not like how this game looks if you don't like that late 1990s / early 2000s 3D style. The game is still very colorful, so it doesn't look bad, but it's obvious how much the game is trying to be 3D. There's even a few cutscenes that seem to replicate the 3D models that the sprites were based on, but they are very rare. My only real personal issue with this style is that the pseudo-3D look of everything can make it tricky to tell where exactly something is, which can really mess you up when you're trying to do precise tight platforming (which thankfully this game doesn't ask of you too much outside of certain instances). It also asks you to make semi-3D movement on a controller that was never meant to be used for that; it feels fine honestly, but expect to be holding two directions on the D-Pad very often.
Also, I figured I would take a paragraph to mention a big visual issue with this game: if you are sensitive to flashing lights, you will absolutely hate certain moments and attacks in Super Mario RPG. As far as I know, this has mostly been fixed on the Wii U and SNES Mini/Classic versions, but I was playing the original SNES version and got treated to some eye-bleeding flashing. Some special moves have a strong and unpleasant strobe effect. Bowser has a specific type of weapon - the ball and chain weapons - that causes a few irritating white flashes for a few seconds whenever you use it. For the record, that is literally every time you use a regular attack on a character that is built to pretty much only use regular attacks. I had to use a weaker weapon, lowering my overall damage output in the brief moments I had the Koopa king in my party, just because I didn't want to have to deal with that flashing. Another notably irritating example was with the Axem Rangers, who are big fans of flashing (makes sense considering they're parodies of the Power Rangers) and the fight against them in Barrel Volcano used flickering light very frequently, especially once you defeat them since it causes a big explosion with a bunch of flashing lights. This is the only game I have played in recent years where I had to look away from the screen a few times because of the annoying flashing lights, I can't imagine how bad this would be for someone that has seizures when a bunch of lights flash in their eyes. Maybe some people are cool with this but I absolutely despised that blinding lights were present, to the point where I had to find workarounds like deliberately using weaker weapons for Bowser or looking away when an unavoidable flash happens.
Something I find very noteworthy about Super Mario RPG is the quirky dialogue and characters. This game was essentially the progenitor of the trademark witty humor that it's successor series - Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi - became very well known for, and, if you've played those other games before, this is very noticeable. There's usually some kind of gag, joke, or silly thing a character says thrown in most interactions in the game. I really enjoyed that aspect of the dialogue, but it definitely feels like it isn't going to hit for everyone. The quips and jokes thrown in can feel very out of place in the Mario universe and even within this game's own strange rules, like when Mallow rhetorically questions if Mario thinks he's Bruce Lee (apparently he exists in this world) and that moment when Toad says "I forgot my bazooka at home" in response to Mallow asking him why he didn't stop Croco. One of the main recurring gags is Mario's ability to literally transform into other characters, which is something he only ever does when recapping or demonstrating something that happens to other characters. Usually it's also followed up by very overexaggerated movement and body language that he can't do by himself in any other context. Personally I like how, even though Mario doesn't speak and can barely emote in this game, he still has a personality portrayed through his behaviors, like in the scene where Mallow meets his parents and Mario puts up an umbrella because he knows Mallow is about to cry (Mallow's powers make it to where the area around him rains when he cries). All the jokes are not meant to be analyzed, but I wouldn't blame anyone for finding them too jarring, forced, or random. Nonetheless, I love this game's bizarre dialogue and characters. I've had an attachment to Mallow, Geno, and a few of the other characters ever since I was a kid and the writing played a big part in that.
The story of the game isn't really anything all that special, but it is interesting in its own way. The story is one of the first blatant subversions of the Mario formula. Super Mario RPG starts you right off at Bowser's Castle to save Peach from him like usual, but, once you defeat him, an earthquake sends Mario, Peach, and Bowser flying out of the castle. Mario lands at his Pad, going through the conveniently placed warp pipe roof entrance. Interestingly, this just might be the first instance in Mario game history where we get a good look at the place the Jumpman himself calls home, not counting the animation of Mario sleeping in his bed in SMB2 USA. The game does not say where Peach and Bowser landed at, but of course you do eventually find them and, in another interesting subversion, both of them actually join your party at some point so you can play as them (not technically new for Peach since she's playable in SMB2 USA but Super Mario RPG is the first time Bowser has been playable in the series). Anyway, after Mario gets blasted, he goes back to Bowser's Castle. At the castle, he sees that a giant sword with a face named Exor has taken over the castle in the name of the Smithy gang. Once Mario explains that to Toad, Toad tells Mario to go to the Mushroom Kingdom. Once you get to the Mushroom Kingdom, that's when the journey really starts. After explaining what happened to the Chancellor (the game just kinda treats it like the Mushroom Kingdom has always had a Chancellor), you get an introduction to the first of many wacky side characters you will meet on your journey. Mallow is a cloud boy who thinks he's a frog, which gets explained later in an honestly pretty touching cutscene with his adoptive grandpa. When Mario meets Mallow, the cloudy lad got his coin stolen by a purple crocodile man named Croco. You agree to help Mallow once Mario sees him cry, which makes rain fall because of his magic powers. I think Mallow and Croco's introductions here serve as a good way to show the player a weird new hero and a weird new villain. It also hints at the fact that every new place you go to after leaving the Mushroom Kingdom is entirely new terrain for Mario that hasn't shown up in any other spin offs as far as I know, although you do revisit the kingdom a few times in the story. So, after leaving the Mushroom Kingdom, the story focuses on exploration, expanding on the world, and helping other characters on their own quests. The wider narrative is hinted at by various characters, like Mallow's wise frog grandpa, but it isn't fully explained until you meet Geno, a wooden puppet from a kid that Mario played with in Rose Town. Geno was brought to life by a star, who's purpose is to repair the legendary Star Road by finding the titular seven star pieces and beating Smithy. The Star Road is a cosmic place that grants people's wishes, but it's being sabotaged by the Smithy gang. Side Note: a pretty amusing detail about the star taking over the Geno doll is how the star's name is technically ♡♪!?, but he took the doll's name because his real name is impossible for a human to pronounce. Nonetheless, after meeting Geno, the story's main goals are to collect the seven star pieces, find Peach, and explore around to help anyone else you meet. A bunch of other stuff happens along the way in the many different weird places you find, the characters you talk to, and the villains you fight, but I took long enough just to explain the first few story events so I won't divulge much more. I will say that Booster was definitely the best villain in my opinion, he is such a strange character in that he has no sense of social awareness or decency at all (he's a creep that tries to force Peach into marriage) and doesn't understand basic concepts like what crying is. He also looks like a knockoff Wario and that's pretty funny.
As far as gameplay goes, Super Mario RPG is a very standard RPG experience. You have a party of up to three characters that are unique in their own ways, whether it's through stats pushing them to fight a certain way (like how Geno's low defenses and hard hitting attacks make him a glass cannon that prefers killing enemies as fast as possible) or some other factor. As you continue the story, you get access to more characters, and you can customize your party once you get four characters since you'll have to bench one of them. Unfortunately you cannot bench Mario himself, though I suppose there's no real reason to not want Mario in your team. There is a total of five playable characters in Super Mario RPG: Bowser, Geno, Mallow, Mario, and Toadstool (AKA Peach) I spent most of the game with the basic team of Geno, Mallow, and Mario. Mallow is weak at first but can become very strong as he levels up to improve his stats and get more special moves. Mallow is basically this game's archetypal mage, so he has many specials and they hit hard, but his regular attacks can be just as good as everyone else's which is nice. Geno is a glass cannon as mentioned earlier but he can also boost his allies stats which I found to be VERY useful. Mario is kind of an all-rounder but I specialized in Attack for him so his standard attacks hit like a truck, even more than Geno does. As for combat itself, whenever you run into an enemy in the overworld, it takes you into a typical turn based RPG battle. Beat up the bad guys to get EXP and level up. In every fight, your options include the following: regular attacks, special attacks that use a resource called Flower Points (FP for short), an Extras menu that gives you the option of either running away or using your turn for pure defense, and the self-explanatory Items menu. Worth noting that, whenever you use an item, there's a seemingly random chance that it will be a Freebie. This is really good whenever it happens since it means the item gets instantly put back in your inventory after you use it. There's also a few status effects in the game; some function pretty similarly to the ones that typically show up in other RPGs, like Poison, but others are more weird like Mushroom and Scarecrow. When you're a Scarecrow, for example, the only thing you can do other than defend is using special moves. Probably worth mentioning that some enemies have different resistances, like some enemies are especially resilient to special moves but take massive damage from regular attacks and vice versa. Of course, the big thing Super Mario RPG's combat has that sets it apart from the others is a system called timed hits, which makes it to where, if you press the A button again after using a regular attack, you deal more damage. When you do it right, it's indicated by an extra animation and a sound effect. I found that all the regular attacks are easy to get timed hits with, but some of the special moves can be pretty tricky to get the timing right on. Healing specials give you more health when you get the timing right, for example, but it's easy to fudge it if you don't memorize the timing. I think this whole mechanic adds a nice bit more complexity to the combat, but it isn't really a huge game changer and it's not difficult to pull off in most cases. You can also time your defenses when an enemy attacks you, but it doesn't work against special moves unfortunately. Nintendo must have liked timed hits since both the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series have used the system at some point. As for the special moves themselves, each character has their own special moves with unique effects that can range from healing, inducing status effects, buffing your own stats, and/or dealing massive amounts of damage. Typically, special moves also have unique effects when you utilize good timing, like how Geno has the infamous Geno Whirl that will instantly kill any enemy (except for most bosses) if you can follow the very tight timing.
Sometimes I take a paragraph to praise the music of a game, and, considering how much I like this game's soundtrack, yea I'm going to do that here. Super Mario RPG's soundtrack was composed by Yoko Shimomura and I think she did a phenomenal job here. Then again, I have not heard a single song from Shimomura that I did not like. I find that the soundtrack overall has a very whimsical feeling, with only a few songs going out of their way to feel more foreboding or ominous and only when it makes sense to do so. Most of the songs have a certain sound to them that I really like, but I can't really describe what it is unfortunately. "Hello, Happy Kingdom" (the Mushroom Kingdom theme) is probably my favorite song in the game, it pretty much never fails to put me in a good mood and start humming along. So, yea, the music is great, but I do have some minor issues with how it is used in the game. For example, I really think there should have been two or more regular battle themes to cycle through instead of the same one every time; its a little grating when you're the kind of person that tries to beat every enemy you see on screen like I do. This is a general problem with many old games and I think its because of hardware limitations, but I find that many of the songs only take about a minute at most before they start to loop again, which I mostly didn't mind but got on the nerves of my brother who was in the room with me when I played the game.
Overall I think Super Mario RPG is a fun game with a lot of heart to it. Probably the game's biggest problem is that it is pretty unremarkable gameplay-wise, so I wouldn't recommend it over something like the Mario & Luigi series just based on pure gameplay. Also, when you're playing, I can't stress enough to please be wary of the flashing lights. If you hate them or have medical problems related to it, cautious. Nonetheless, this game gets a solid 4 stars from me.
With that out of the way, yea Super Mario RPG is a very basic RPG (I even get why people would call it middle of the road or mediocre) but I really do enjoy this game a lot. It's just very special to me, partly because of nostalgia and partly because it feels very unique. The other two Mario RPG series - Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi - carried the spirit of this game and I'd say that they're better in their own ways, but they just aren't the same. In the current age of Nintendo, there is no Mario RPG in sight; Paper Mario games have moved away from the RPG formula since Sticker Star and the Mario & Luigi series has been in limbo since AlphaDream had to shutdown in 2019 due to bankruptcy. In my eyes, there's no better time for a remake or even a sequel of the original Mario RPG than now, but of course Square Enix and Nintendo have no real reason to care for this game so that probably wouldn't happen (would absolutely love to be proven wrong though). I'm hoping it at least shows up on the Nintendo Switch Online SNES game service.
Alright, let's talk about the actual game now. I'll start with how the game looks. Super Mario RPG has a very distinct visual style. As far as I know, everything in this game was modeled in 3D and then converted into sprites for the SNES, kind of like the Donkey Kong Country games. You can actually find renders online of the 3D models for most of the enemies, characters, items, and even some of the weapons and armor your characters can equip in Super Mario RPG. However, this design choice does make it to where the game's visuals didn't age the best. I personally don't mind it and I even think it adds a lot of charm to the look of the game, but you will not like how this game looks if you don't like that late 1990s / early 2000s 3D style. The game is still very colorful, so it doesn't look bad, but it's obvious how much the game is trying to be 3D. There's even a few cutscenes that seem to replicate the 3D models that the sprites were based on, but they are very rare. My only real personal issue with this style is that the pseudo-3D look of everything can make it tricky to tell where exactly something is, which can really mess you up when you're trying to do precise tight platforming (which thankfully this game doesn't ask of you too much outside of certain instances). It also asks you to make semi-3D movement on a controller that was never meant to be used for that; it feels fine honestly, but expect to be holding two directions on the D-Pad very often.
Also, I figured I would take a paragraph to mention a big visual issue with this game: if you are sensitive to flashing lights, you will absolutely hate certain moments and attacks in Super Mario RPG. As far as I know, this has mostly been fixed on the Wii U and SNES Mini/Classic versions, but I was playing the original SNES version and got treated to some eye-bleeding flashing. Some special moves have a strong and unpleasant strobe effect. Bowser has a specific type of weapon - the ball and chain weapons - that causes a few irritating white flashes for a few seconds whenever you use it. For the record, that is literally every time you use a regular attack on a character that is built to pretty much only use regular attacks. I had to use a weaker weapon, lowering my overall damage output in the brief moments I had the Koopa king in my party, just because I didn't want to have to deal with that flashing. Another notably irritating example was with the Axem Rangers, who are big fans of flashing (makes sense considering they're parodies of the Power Rangers) and the fight against them in Barrel Volcano used flickering light very frequently, especially once you defeat them since it causes a big explosion with a bunch of flashing lights. This is the only game I have played in recent years where I had to look away from the screen a few times because of the annoying flashing lights, I can't imagine how bad this would be for someone that has seizures when a bunch of lights flash in their eyes. Maybe some people are cool with this but I absolutely despised that blinding lights were present, to the point where I had to find workarounds like deliberately using weaker weapons for Bowser or looking away when an unavoidable flash happens.
Something I find very noteworthy about Super Mario RPG is the quirky dialogue and characters. This game was essentially the progenitor of the trademark witty humor that it's successor series - Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi - became very well known for, and, if you've played those other games before, this is very noticeable. There's usually some kind of gag, joke, or silly thing a character says thrown in most interactions in the game. I really enjoyed that aspect of the dialogue, but it definitely feels like it isn't going to hit for everyone. The quips and jokes thrown in can feel very out of place in the Mario universe and even within this game's own strange rules, like when Mallow rhetorically questions if Mario thinks he's Bruce Lee (apparently he exists in this world) and that moment when Toad says "I forgot my bazooka at home" in response to Mallow asking him why he didn't stop Croco. One of the main recurring gags is Mario's ability to literally transform into other characters, which is something he only ever does when recapping or demonstrating something that happens to other characters. Usually it's also followed up by very overexaggerated movement and body language that he can't do by himself in any other context. Personally I like how, even though Mario doesn't speak and can barely emote in this game, he still has a personality portrayed through his behaviors, like in the scene where Mallow meets his parents and Mario puts up an umbrella because he knows Mallow is about to cry (Mallow's powers make it to where the area around him rains when he cries). All the jokes are not meant to be analyzed, but I wouldn't blame anyone for finding them too jarring, forced, or random. Nonetheless, I love this game's bizarre dialogue and characters. I've had an attachment to Mallow, Geno, and a few of the other characters ever since I was a kid and the writing played a big part in that.
The story of the game isn't really anything all that special, but it is interesting in its own way. The story is one of the first blatant subversions of the Mario formula. Super Mario RPG starts you right off at Bowser's Castle to save Peach from him like usual, but, once you defeat him, an earthquake sends Mario, Peach, and Bowser flying out of the castle. Mario lands at his Pad, going through the conveniently placed warp pipe roof entrance. Interestingly, this just might be the first instance in Mario game history where we get a good look at the place the Jumpman himself calls home, not counting the animation of Mario sleeping in his bed in SMB2 USA. The game does not say where Peach and Bowser landed at, but of course you do eventually find them and, in another interesting subversion, both of them actually join your party at some point so you can play as them (not technically new for Peach since she's playable in SMB2 USA but Super Mario RPG is the first time Bowser has been playable in the series). Anyway, after Mario gets blasted, he goes back to Bowser's Castle. At the castle, he sees that a giant sword with a face named Exor has taken over the castle in the name of the Smithy gang. Once Mario explains that to Toad, Toad tells Mario to go to the Mushroom Kingdom. Once you get to the Mushroom Kingdom, that's when the journey really starts. After explaining what happened to the Chancellor (the game just kinda treats it like the Mushroom Kingdom has always had a Chancellor), you get an introduction to the first of many wacky side characters you will meet on your journey. Mallow is a cloud boy who thinks he's a frog, which gets explained later in an honestly pretty touching cutscene with his adoptive grandpa. When Mario meets Mallow, the cloudy lad got his coin stolen by a purple crocodile man named Croco. You agree to help Mallow once Mario sees him cry, which makes rain fall because of his magic powers. I think Mallow and Croco's introductions here serve as a good way to show the player a weird new hero and a weird new villain. It also hints at the fact that every new place you go to after leaving the Mushroom Kingdom is entirely new terrain for Mario that hasn't shown up in any other spin offs as far as I know, although you do revisit the kingdom a few times in the story. So, after leaving the Mushroom Kingdom, the story focuses on exploration, expanding on the world, and helping other characters on their own quests. The wider narrative is hinted at by various characters, like Mallow's wise frog grandpa, but it isn't fully explained until you meet Geno, a wooden puppet from a kid that Mario played with in Rose Town. Geno was brought to life by a star, who's purpose is to repair the legendary Star Road by finding the titular seven star pieces and beating Smithy. The Star Road is a cosmic place that grants people's wishes, but it's being sabotaged by the Smithy gang. Side Note: a pretty amusing detail about the star taking over the Geno doll is how the star's name is technically ♡♪!?, but he took the doll's name because his real name is impossible for a human to pronounce. Nonetheless, after meeting Geno, the story's main goals are to collect the seven star pieces, find Peach, and explore around to help anyone else you meet. A bunch of other stuff happens along the way in the many different weird places you find, the characters you talk to, and the villains you fight, but I took long enough just to explain the first few story events so I won't divulge much more. I will say that Booster was definitely the best villain in my opinion, he is such a strange character in that he has no sense of social awareness or decency at all (he's a creep that tries to force Peach into marriage) and doesn't understand basic concepts like what crying is. He also looks like a knockoff Wario and that's pretty funny.
As far as gameplay goes, Super Mario RPG is a very standard RPG experience. You have a party of up to three characters that are unique in their own ways, whether it's through stats pushing them to fight a certain way (like how Geno's low defenses and hard hitting attacks make him a glass cannon that prefers killing enemies as fast as possible) or some other factor. As you continue the story, you get access to more characters, and you can customize your party once you get four characters since you'll have to bench one of them. Unfortunately you cannot bench Mario himself, though I suppose there's no real reason to not want Mario in your team. There is a total of five playable characters in Super Mario RPG: Bowser, Geno, Mallow, Mario, and Toadstool (AKA Peach) I spent most of the game with the basic team of Geno, Mallow, and Mario. Mallow is weak at first but can become very strong as he levels up to improve his stats and get more special moves. Mallow is basically this game's archetypal mage, so he has many specials and they hit hard, but his regular attacks can be just as good as everyone else's which is nice. Geno is a glass cannon as mentioned earlier but he can also boost his allies stats which I found to be VERY useful. Mario is kind of an all-rounder but I specialized in Attack for him so his standard attacks hit like a truck, even more than Geno does. As for combat itself, whenever you run into an enemy in the overworld, it takes you into a typical turn based RPG battle. Beat up the bad guys to get EXP and level up. In every fight, your options include the following: regular attacks, special attacks that use a resource called Flower Points (FP for short), an Extras menu that gives you the option of either running away or using your turn for pure defense, and the self-explanatory Items menu. Worth noting that, whenever you use an item, there's a seemingly random chance that it will be a Freebie. This is really good whenever it happens since it means the item gets instantly put back in your inventory after you use it. There's also a few status effects in the game; some function pretty similarly to the ones that typically show up in other RPGs, like Poison, but others are more weird like Mushroom and Scarecrow. When you're a Scarecrow, for example, the only thing you can do other than defend is using special moves. Probably worth mentioning that some enemies have different resistances, like some enemies are especially resilient to special moves but take massive damage from regular attacks and vice versa. Of course, the big thing Super Mario RPG's combat has that sets it apart from the others is a system called timed hits, which makes it to where, if you press the A button again after using a regular attack, you deal more damage. When you do it right, it's indicated by an extra animation and a sound effect. I found that all the regular attacks are easy to get timed hits with, but some of the special moves can be pretty tricky to get the timing right on. Healing specials give you more health when you get the timing right, for example, but it's easy to fudge it if you don't memorize the timing. I think this whole mechanic adds a nice bit more complexity to the combat, but it isn't really a huge game changer and it's not difficult to pull off in most cases. You can also time your defenses when an enemy attacks you, but it doesn't work against special moves unfortunately. Nintendo must have liked timed hits since both the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series have used the system at some point. As for the special moves themselves, each character has their own special moves with unique effects that can range from healing, inducing status effects, buffing your own stats, and/or dealing massive amounts of damage. Typically, special moves also have unique effects when you utilize good timing, like how Geno has the infamous Geno Whirl that will instantly kill any enemy (except for most bosses) if you can follow the very tight timing.
Sometimes I take a paragraph to praise the music of a game, and, considering how much I like this game's soundtrack, yea I'm going to do that here. Super Mario RPG's soundtrack was composed by Yoko Shimomura and I think she did a phenomenal job here. Then again, I have not heard a single song from Shimomura that I did not like. I find that the soundtrack overall has a very whimsical feeling, with only a few songs going out of their way to feel more foreboding or ominous and only when it makes sense to do so. Most of the songs have a certain sound to them that I really like, but I can't really describe what it is unfortunately. "Hello, Happy Kingdom" (the Mushroom Kingdom theme) is probably my favorite song in the game, it pretty much never fails to put me in a good mood and start humming along. So, yea, the music is great, but I do have some minor issues with how it is used in the game. For example, I really think there should have been two or more regular battle themes to cycle through instead of the same one every time; its a little grating when you're the kind of person that tries to beat every enemy you see on screen like I do. This is a general problem with many old games and I think its because of hardware limitations, but I find that many of the songs only take about a minute at most before they start to loop again, which I mostly didn't mind but got on the nerves of my brother who was in the room with me when I played the game.
Overall I think Super Mario RPG is a fun game with a lot of heart to it. Probably the game's biggest problem is that it is pretty unremarkable gameplay-wise, so I wouldn't recommend it over something like the Mario & Luigi series just based on pure gameplay. Also, when you're playing, I can't stress enough to please be wary of the flashing lights. If you hate them or have medical problems related to it, cautious. Nonetheless, this game gets a solid 4 stars from me.
2013
This review contains spoilers
For me, Deadpool is one of those games that isn't SUPER fun to play, but the other aspects of it really hold it together and make it worth at least checking it out. The game didn't take me too long to complete and I was enjoying most of my time with it. Unfortunately, I don't have an exact time, which seems to be a common trend among games I've been reviewing lately. Would love if more games told you how long you took to beat the game, but, alas, not all of them do that. I do know that I started my playthrough in March, but I took a long break from continuing the game since I was juggling so many other games at the time...so, now its November and I can finally say I beat the game.
Big sidenote: I'm not a big comic book guy, just recently got into reading them and my focus has not at all been on Marvel stuff. I jumped into this game without being very familiar with Deadpool as a character; I just knew he has a tendency to break reality and the fourth wall a lot. I found him to be quite entertaining in this game and pretty fun to actually play, but recall hearing some people complain that he acts out of character. That may be a valid complaint, it may not be. I can't give an opinion either for or against the stance considering just how little I know about the character. Can't help but wonder if the voices in his head that are a big part of him in this game are like that in the comics. My lack of experience with the character is the reason I'm not comparing what happens in this game to any comic books.
So, from what I've heard, people tend to dislike this game. Honestly, I'm not sure why. Sure, it's a pretty barebones mission-based hack-and-slash with light platforming elements (almost reminds me of the Ninja Gaiden reboot games but with much more simple and easy combat), but I never felt it was really trying to be anything more than that so it didn't bother me. I ultimately found the gameplay fun for what it is, it's not deep but it's fun to smack around goons with the three different weapons you get as well as blast them with all the different kinds of firepower you can grab. There's a shop system that uses Deadpool Points, or DP for short, as currency. You get DP either from finding it in the world, grabbing it from dead enemies, or as a reward for pulling off combos. You can buy new guns, explosives, and melee weapons from the shop, as well as various upgrades for those items. You can also upgrade Deadpool's personal attributes, like increasing his health, letting you get critical hits occasionally, making it to where you regenerate health after getting a combo, and more. Sometimes enemies drop powerful artillery that is very satisfying to blow other enemies to smithereens with. The guns themselves felt very fun to use for me, you can keep pressing or holding down the Right trigger to blitz your foes and there's an aim button for more precise shooting. There's a decently wide variety of guns, but the plasma guns and the shotguns are definitely the best (though I did still get plenty of use out of the pistols and SMGs). I feel like they're much stronger than the melee weapons, and I was even using the Hammers which seem to be the most powerful melee. The game also has a few small mechanics to use, like Momentum attacks, which are pretty much super moves to use when you're overwhelmed by enemies or you're fighting an enemy with a lot of health. Momentum is filled up by a bar as you fight enemies, but grabbing the taco boxes that drop from enemies also gives you some Momentum.
If there's one thing about the game I can understand being very polarizing, it's the humor. If you don't like meta humor, you will despise this game's jokes since there's a LOT of meta jokes here. Deadpool loves to both criticize and praise the developers, for instance, and he will constantly remind you of the fact that this is indeed a video game. There's certain parts of missions in the game that reference other games (usually retro games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Final Fantasy) or are meant to emulate game glitches. I found the comedy to be hit or miss; I'm not sure why, but a lot of it seems geared towards teenage perverted "memelords" that like dumb edgy humor, boobs, and retro games. Nonetheless, it was charming in it's own stupid way and I didn't hate any of the jokes (well I could do without the perverted fanservice but it didn't ruin things for me). They throw a ton of jokes at you, so the bad ones don't linger for too long. Despite its flaws, I find that the humor and the visual presentation are the main selling points of this game, they're both quite hyperactive and charming. It's primarily silly amusing things, like how Deadpool makes a joke in the beginning of the game about games giving you achievements for nothing only for you to get an achievement right after. There's a scene where you slap Wolverine to try waking him up and you can repeatedly press a button to slap him for several minutes for an achievement. It was cool how, when you meet a new plot important character, Deadpool sometimes takes you on a short montage through comic panels of that character to explain who they are. Of course, cutscenes also have some spice added to them by Deadpool's zany overexaggerated personality and the fact that he avoids exposition like the plague. Usually the game also tosses in little short quick-time-events just to add more to the game's flavor of dumb random comedy, like when Deadpool is so bored by one of Cable's explanations that a prompt shows up for you to "Press R2 to make it stop" (making Deadpool shoot himself). Sometimes you get achievements for doing the quick-time-events in a certain way, like how you get one from always choose the option to be patient while waiting in a line for a circus-like theme park ride (because that happens in this game). Something I found rather amusing about it is that, if you deliberately wait to press the button needed, you don't get punished but you do get commentary from Deadpool. Things like this are cool little features that really add a lot to a game's likeability, which I think makes up for how unremarkable the actual gameplay is. However, I will say that it will be very grating and actually make the game unlikeable if you hate how Deadpool is in this game.
The story...well, it certainly exists. It pretty much just serves as another vehicle for comedy for the most part, Deadpool is in a gritty world but his wacky antics basically bends the world around him to include weird stuff. As I mentioned earlier, Deadpool is aware of the fact that he is in a video game. In fact, the entire story starts because Deadpool gets a call from Peter Della Penna - an employee at High Noon Studios (the developer of this game) in this story - saying that they won't make a game based on him. Apparently Deadpool had a bomb planted there because he pulls out a remote bomb trigger and presses it, then immediately gets called back by Peter to have the game be made. From there, Deadpool goes on a quest to do stuff that I already forgot because it did not feel important at all. I actually like this approach to story honestly; the game doesn't pretend to have more story than it actually does, so instead it just has Deadpool chewing out the scenery and doing ridiculous things. He hates exposition, so whenever someone tries to tell him something about the story he will not be listening or doing some weird goofy thing instead. I have heard that people really don't like how anticlimactic the ending is, but honestly I was not expecting it to be anything all that crazy anyway and I found it to be very fitting. At the end of the game, Deadpool beats the tons of Mr. Sinister clones thrown his way, then the real Mr. Sinister comes out and effortlessly strikes down the X-Men. Deadpool's response is to talk to the player and gleefully reveal the surprise he's been planning all along. You, as the player, get the honor of seeing the secret through a quick-time-event: press triangle (on PS4) to make a Sentinel boot appear and crush Mr. Sinister. Roll credits.
Overall, I give the Deadpool game 3.5 stars. I think it was a fun experience with gameplay that is basic but fun and a sense of humor I found relatively appealing. I can't stress how much the presentation elevates this game above a 3 star for me.
Big sidenote: I'm not a big comic book guy, just recently got into reading them and my focus has not at all been on Marvel stuff. I jumped into this game without being very familiar with Deadpool as a character; I just knew he has a tendency to break reality and the fourth wall a lot. I found him to be quite entertaining in this game and pretty fun to actually play, but recall hearing some people complain that he acts out of character. That may be a valid complaint, it may not be. I can't give an opinion either for or against the stance considering just how little I know about the character. Can't help but wonder if the voices in his head that are a big part of him in this game are like that in the comics. My lack of experience with the character is the reason I'm not comparing what happens in this game to any comic books.
So, from what I've heard, people tend to dislike this game. Honestly, I'm not sure why. Sure, it's a pretty barebones mission-based hack-and-slash with light platforming elements (almost reminds me of the Ninja Gaiden reboot games but with much more simple and easy combat), but I never felt it was really trying to be anything more than that so it didn't bother me. I ultimately found the gameplay fun for what it is, it's not deep but it's fun to smack around goons with the three different weapons you get as well as blast them with all the different kinds of firepower you can grab. There's a shop system that uses Deadpool Points, or DP for short, as currency. You get DP either from finding it in the world, grabbing it from dead enemies, or as a reward for pulling off combos. You can buy new guns, explosives, and melee weapons from the shop, as well as various upgrades for those items. You can also upgrade Deadpool's personal attributes, like increasing his health, letting you get critical hits occasionally, making it to where you regenerate health after getting a combo, and more. Sometimes enemies drop powerful artillery that is very satisfying to blow other enemies to smithereens with. The guns themselves felt very fun to use for me, you can keep pressing or holding down the Right trigger to blitz your foes and there's an aim button for more precise shooting. There's a decently wide variety of guns, but the plasma guns and the shotguns are definitely the best (though I did still get plenty of use out of the pistols and SMGs). I feel like they're much stronger than the melee weapons, and I was even using the Hammers which seem to be the most powerful melee. The game also has a few small mechanics to use, like Momentum attacks, which are pretty much super moves to use when you're overwhelmed by enemies or you're fighting an enemy with a lot of health. Momentum is filled up by a bar as you fight enemies, but grabbing the taco boxes that drop from enemies also gives you some Momentum.
If there's one thing about the game I can understand being very polarizing, it's the humor. If you don't like meta humor, you will despise this game's jokes since there's a LOT of meta jokes here. Deadpool loves to both criticize and praise the developers, for instance, and he will constantly remind you of the fact that this is indeed a video game. There's certain parts of missions in the game that reference other games (usually retro games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Final Fantasy) or are meant to emulate game glitches. I found the comedy to be hit or miss; I'm not sure why, but a lot of it seems geared towards teenage perverted "memelords" that like dumb edgy humor, boobs, and retro games. Nonetheless, it was charming in it's own stupid way and I didn't hate any of the jokes (well I could do without the perverted fanservice but it didn't ruin things for me). They throw a ton of jokes at you, so the bad ones don't linger for too long. Despite its flaws, I find that the humor and the visual presentation are the main selling points of this game, they're both quite hyperactive and charming. It's primarily silly amusing things, like how Deadpool makes a joke in the beginning of the game about games giving you achievements for nothing only for you to get an achievement right after. There's a scene where you slap Wolverine to try waking him up and you can repeatedly press a button to slap him for several minutes for an achievement. It was cool how, when you meet a new plot important character, Deadpool sometimes takes you on a short montage through comic panels of that character to explain who they are. Of course, cutscenes also have some spice added to them by Deadpool's zany overexaggerated personality and the fact that he avoids exposition like the plague. Usually the game also tosses in little short quick-time-events just to add more to the game's flavor of dumb random comedy, like when Deadpool is so bored by one of Cable's explanations that a prompt shows up for you to "Press R2 to make it stop" (making Deadpool shoot himself). Sometimes you get achievements for doing the quick-time-events in a certain way, like how you get one from always choose the option to be patient while waiting in a line for a circus-like theme park ride (because that happens in this game). Something I found rather amusing about it is that, if you deliberately wait to press the button needed, you don't get punished but you do get commentary from Deadpool. Things like this are cool little features that really add a lot to a game's likeability, which I think makes up for how unremarkable the actual gameplay is. However, I will say that it will be very grating and actually make the game unlikeable if you hate how Deadpool is in this game.
The story...well, it certainly exists. It pretty much just serves as another vehicle for comedy for the most part, Deadpool is in a gritty world but his wacky antics basically bends the world around him to include weird stuff. As I mentioned earlier, Deadpool is aware of the fact that he is in a video game. In fact, the entire story starts because Deadpool gets a call from Peter Della Penna - an employee at High Noon Studios (the developer of this game) in this story - saying that they won't make a game based on him. Apparently Deadpool had a bomb planted there because he pulls out a remote bomb trigger and presses it, then immediately gets called back by Peter to have the game be made. From there, Deadpool goes on a quest to do stuff that I already forgot because it did not feel important at all. I actually like this approach to story honestly; the game doesn't pretend to have more story than it actually does, so instead it just has Deadpool chewing out the scenery and doing ridiculous things. He hates exposition, so whenever someone tries to tell him something about the story he will not be listening or doing some weird goofy thing instead. I have heard that people really don't like how anticlimactic the ending is, but honestly I was not expecting it to be anything all that crazy anyway and I found it to be very fitting. At the end of the game, Deadpool beats the tons of Mr. Sinister clones thrown his way, then the real Mr. Sinister comes out and effortlessly strikes down the X-Men. Deadpool's response is to talk to the player and gleefully reveal the surprise he's been planning all along. You, as the player, get the honor of seeing the secret through a quick-time-event: press triangle (on PS4) to make a Sentinel boot appear and crush Mr. Sinister. Roll credits.
Overall, I give the Deadpool game 3.5 stars. I think it was a fun experience with gameplay that is basic but fun and a sense of humor I found relatively appealing. I can't stress how much the presentation elevates this game above a 3 star for me.
This review contains spoilers
This remake of Donkey Kong Country 2 is a game I had not played in a long time. I honestly felt quite nostalgic revisiting it. The game took me very little time to finish since I am already very familiar with the SNES game and I'm not the 100% completionist kind of player, but nonetheless I enjoyed my time with it. I don't think there is a whole lot to say about it though.
Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy Advance is essentially exactly the same as Donkey Kong Country 2 on the SNES when it comes to overall gameplay and levels. The game controls well, although it pretty much just emulates the SNES's controls which were already amazing. I will say that the jumping took some getting used to, not sure why but Diddy and Dixie feel like they jump considerably higher in this game with little opportunity to make smaller jumps and that really threw me off. Quite frankly, it made precise platforming suck in things like the barrel hopping in Snakey Chanty. Barrel throws also felt off to me; throws that I feel like would have hit an enemy just based off my muscle memory of the SNES game completely miss opponents. I actually died more times than I'd like to admit in my process of getting used to the differences in this remake's physics as compared to the original. I can beat DKC2 SNES without dying much but I saw the game over screen of DKC2 for the first time in several years playing this. Nonetheless, everything on the gameplay front is pretty solid and you could even make a case for it being better than the SNES version in some cases. The only real differences I noticed with level design is that some bonuses are a little different and the boss fights also have minor differences. While I admire this remake's ambition to be as faithful as possible considering how the Game Boy Advance comes with some flaws the SNES didn't have (I imagine it took a lot of work to remake all of that for the GBA), this approach being applied to a remake on a weaker console unfortunately results in the game feeling like a lesser experience in some ways. The music pretty much feels like a straight downgrade to me: I adore DKC2's soundtrack on the SNES but these versions just do not hit the spot at all. It's not terrible, though, and I did find it interesting to hear this soundtrack I love so much remade for another console. Of course, it should go without saying that this GBA remake looks worse visually than the SNES version. For some reason, the visuals are also noticeably oversaturated. I don't know what the reason for that is, but I guess it does give the game some unique identity. Also, Dixie Kong looks like she's wearing purple in this game. It could just be my screen (I was playing on Game Boy Advance SP and not DS so the colors can look different), but I do think it looks nice. Another notable thing about the visuals of this game is the scale of things. I could just be seeing something that's not there considering how its been a bit since I played DKC2 SNES (not a super long time, just been a good while), but it looks like everything is smaller than the original, which noticeably gives a bit more space for the screen. This can let you see incoming enemies and hazards a little better, but there were still a lot of times where the screen did not show me an enemy that I ended up catapulting right into. The screen seems to have a bias for upwards travel as opposed to falling down, which can be great for when you want to quickly scale platforms but there were many times I fell down and just immediately died to an enemy I couldn't see coming. This quirk of the screen made stages that focus on scrolling upwards like Toxic Tower and Slime Climb much tougher for me (because falling usually means immediate death you can't see coming) when its usually a breeze for me to beat on SNES.
I do think it is worth noting that this game does have some extra bells and whistles to try and make it feel more unique or add more to the original gameplay. The biggest point is that you can save whenever you want so long as you're in the level select, which is a great quality of life change. Saving also requires no banana coins and you keep both your lives and banana coins after saving. This change much better suits the way a portable console is meant to be played and it also helps make the game feel more modern. The rest of the changes are either fairly minor, entirely related to presentation, or both. Much more sound effects are present, and all of the sound effects from the SNES game have either been changed completely or remade to fit the GBA. Generally, these tend to have a more high pitched and cartoony sound to them than the original game (not to discount how silly those could be), but I think the vibe works well with how the game's visuals are lighter and the music is higher pitched. To me, these stylistic changes give the GBA remake game a more wacky tone that sort of departs from how the original game was. Whether or not this was entirely done out of a creative vision or because of limitations is beyond my knowledge, although I do know that the game actually has dialogue and cutscenes now that add to that jovial vibe (not to insinuate that the SNES game was some kind of very dark game). There's a cutscene that plays whenever you start a new file showing how exactly Donkey Kong got kidnapped. As it turns out, Donkey Kong was relaxing on the beach one day and then K. Rool's ship appears out of nowhere to quite literally catch DK by surprise. You get some dialogue from Cranky Kong whenever you beat a boss, who usually has something amusing or clever to say whenever he slowly walks up to Diddy and Dixie after a boss fight is over. There are also some minigames that I did not bother doing any of in this playthrough, although I remember playing them pretty often as a kid and not understanding any of it. There's a minigame where you race Expressos with an Expresso that you train up using the new golden feather collectibles scattered in the levels of the core game, a minigame where you pilot Funky's ship through mazes, a minigame where you grab bugs while avoiding Klubba, and a time attack mode. The Funky minigame is now done at Funky's Flights instead of its previous function of letting you travel to previous worlds, but this is only because you can now take a plane to go to other worlds whenever you're in the overworld through the Gyrocopter option in the Start menu. Worth noting that there is an entirely new boss unique to this remake called Kerozene. Unfortunately, whoever was in charge of designing this new character seems to have made his model and animations entirely 3D, which makes him look very out of place in comparison to the bosses from the original game. Kerozene is placed at the end of K. Rool's Keep, which seems like it would be a fitting decision if it weren't for the fact that K. Rool's Keep was deliberately designed to be the only world in the original game with no boss for a reason. In the original, its done to subvert expectations in a fun way, but here they slapped this big dumb 3D fire-spewing lizard man just because. Oh well, at least it was a decently fun boss fight.
Overall, Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy Advance is a pretty middle-of-the-road remake. Despite all my gripes with various aspects of this remake, I think I'd ultimately say this is pretty good at what it does, perhaps even great considering the limitations. It is a good recreation of the original game as far as pure gameplay goes, to the point you could even say it is better than the original in some ways even if the physics felt weird to me. However, the presentation suffers despite the game's added bonuses to presentation (cutscenes and dialogue), and that's really important to me personally as someone who loves the presentation of the original. Some changes are pretty charming, others felt out of place or pointless. The side content also felt quite pointless and tacked-on to me, and I did find it frustrating how awkward this remake felt in comparison to the smoothness of the original (in my opinion). I would not recommend you play this remake over the original, but I still give it massive credit for being as close as it is. Donkey Kong Country 2 GBA was an amazing option to have back when there were no ways to play the original portably; I remember I used to dream of finally having the opportunity to play the original Donkey Kong Country games portably in all their glory and these GBA remakes served as a good supplement for scratching that itch. I really do think its important that this game and the other Donkey Kong Country GBA remakes existed, as corny as that may sound. DKC2 GBA gets a solid 3.5 stars, not quite good enough to get 4 stars from me because my problems with it add up but I don't want to downplay this remake being pretty good overall.
Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy Advance is essentially exactly the same as Donkey Kong Country 2 on the SNES when it comes to overall gameplay and levels. The game controls well, although it pretty much just emulates the SNES's controls which were already amazing. I will say that the jumping took some getting used to, not sure why but Diddy and Dixie feel like they jump considerably higher in this game with little opportunity to make smaller jumps and that really threw me off. Quite frankly, it made precise platforming suck in things like the barrel hopping in Snakey Chanty. Barrel throws also felt off to me; throws that I feel like would have hit an enemy just based off my muscle memory of the SNES game completely miss opponents. I actually died more times than I'd like to admit in my process of getting used to the differences in this remake's physics as compared to the original. I can beat DKC2 SNES without dying much but I saw the game over screen of DKC2 for the first time in several years playing this. Nonetheless, everything on the gameplay front is pretty solid and you could even make a case for it being better than the SNES version in some cases. The only real differences I noticed with level design is that some bonuses are a little different and the boss fights also have minor differences. While I admire this remake's ambition to be as faithful as possible considering how the Game Boy Advance comes with some flaws the SNES didn't have (I imagine it took a lot of work to remake all of that for the GBA), this approach being applied to a remake on a weaker console unfortunately results in the game feeling like a lesser experience in some ways. The music pretty much feels like a straight downgrade to me: I adore DKC2's soundtrack on the SNES but these versions just do not hit the spot at all. It's not terrible, though, and I did find it interesting to hear this soundtrack I love so much remade for another console. Of course, it should go without saying that this GBA remake looks worse visually than the SNES version. For some reason, the visuals are also noticeably oversaturated. I don't know what the reason for that is, but I guess it does give the game some unique identity. Also, Dixie Kong looks like she's wearing purple in this game. It could just be my screen (I was playing on Game Boy Advance SP and not DS so the colors can look different), but I do think it looks nice. Another notable thing about the visuals of this game is the scale of things. I could just be seeing something that's not there considering how its been a bit since I played DKC2 SNES (not a super long time, just been a good while), but it looks like everything is smaller than the original, which noticeably gives a bit more space for the screen. This can let you see incoming enemies and hazards a little better, but there were still a lot of times where the screen did not show me an enemy that I ended up catapulting right into. The screen seems to have a bias for upwards travel as opposed to falling down, which can be great for when you want to quickly scale platforms but there were many times I fell down and just immediately died to an enemy I couldn't see coming. This quirk of the screen made stages that focus on scrolling upwards like Toxic Tower and Slime Climb much tougher for me (because falling usually means immediate death you can't see coming) when its usually a breeze for me to beat on SNES.
I do think it is worth noting that this game does have some extra bells and whistles to try and make it feel more unique or add more to the original gameplay. The biggest point is that you can save whenever you want so long as you're in the level select, which is a great quality of life change. Saving also requires no banana coins and you keep both your lives and banana coins after saving. This change much better suits the way a portable console is meant to be played and it also helps make the game feel more modern. The rest of the changes are either fairly minor, entirely related to presentation, or both. Much more sound effects are present, and all of the sound effects from the SNES game have either been changed completely or remade to fit the GBA. Generally, these tend to have a more high pitched and cartoony sound to them than the original game (not to discount how silly those could be), but I think the vibe works well with how the game's visuals are lighter and the music is higher pitched. To me, these stylistic changes give the GBA remake game a more wacky tone that sort of departs from how the original game was. Whether or not this was entirely done out of a creative vision or because of limitations is beyond my knowledge, although I do know that the game actually has dialogue and cutscenes now that add to that jovial vibe (not to insinuate that the SNES game was some kind of very dark game). There's a cutscene that plays whenever you start a new file showing how exactly Donkey Kong got kidnapped. As it turns out, Donkey Kong was relaxing on the beach one day and then K. Rool's ship appears out of nowhere to quite literally catch DK by surprise. You get some dialogue from Cranky Kong whenever you beat a boss, who usually has something amusing or clever to say whenever he slowly walks up to Diddy and Dixie after a boss fight is over. There are also some minigames that I did not bother doing any of in this playthrough, although I remember playing them pretty often as a kid and not understanding any of it. There's a minigame where you race Expressos with an Expresso that you train up using the new golden feather collectibles scattered in the levels of the core game, a minigame where you pilot Funky's ship through mazes, a minigame where you grab bugs while avoiding Klubba, and a time attack mode. The Funky minigame is now done at Funky's Flights instead of its previous function of letting you travel to previous worlds, but this is only because you can now take a plane to go to other worlds whenever you're in the overworld through the Gyrocopter option in the Start menu. Worth noting that there is an entirely new boss unique to this remake called Kerozene. Unfortunately, whoever was in charge of designing this new character seems to have made his model and animations entirely 3D, which makes him look very out of place in comparison to the bosses from the original game. Kerozene is placed at the end of K. Rool's Keep, which seems like it would be a fitting decision if it weren't for the fact that K. Rool's Keep was deliberately designed to be the only world in the original game with no boss for a reason. In the original, its done to subvert expectations in a fun way, but here they slapped this big dumb 3D fire-spewing lizard man just because. Oh well, at least it was a decently fun boss fight.
Overall, Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy Advance is a pretty middle-of-the-road remake. Despite all my gripes with various aspects of this remake, I think I'd ultimately say this is pretty good at what it does, perhaps even great considering the limitations. It is a good recreation of the original game as far as pure gameplay goes, to the point you could even say it is better than the original in some ways even if the physics felt weird to me. However, the presentation suffers despite the game's added bonuses to presentation (cutscenes and dialogue), and that's really important to me personally as someone who loves the presentation of the original. Some changes are pretty charming, others felt out of place or pointless. The side content also felt quite pointless and tacked-on to me, and I did find it frustrating how awkward this remake felt in comparison to the smoothness of the original (in my opinion). I would not recommend you play this remake over the original, but I still give it massive credit for being as close as it is. Donkey Kong Country 2 GBA was an amazing option to have back when there were no ways to play the original portably; I remember I used to dream of finally having the opportunity to play the original Donkey Kong Country games portably in all their glory and these GBA remakes served as a good supplement for scratching that itch. I really do think its important that this game and the other Donkey Kong Country GBA remakes existed, as corny as that may sound. DKC2 GBA gets a solid 3.5 stars, not quite good enough to get 4 stars from me because my problems with it add up but I don't want to downplay this remake being pretty good overall.
2022
This review contains spoilers
So, Pokémon Scarlet/Violet...Generation 9 of Pokémon is here, in the same year as Legends Arceus too. For a long time, I was cautiously optimistic of the game. It looked promising to me, but after Sword/Shield disappointed me so much I wasn't sure if I could trust this would be good in my opinion. Mind you, Pokémon is a series I've always loved, so I didn't want to expect this game to not be good. The more info that came out about it, though, the more optimistic I became. The day after release, I got both versions physically as an early Christmas present. I decided to play through just Violet version for now, I will perhaps play through Scarlet at a later date. Now that I've beaten the game to see the credits roll (as far as I know there is no important story stuff in the post game), I'm honestly happy to say that I enjoyed my time with it. I genuinely think it is so much better than Sword/Shield and on par with Legends Arceus. I am prepared to type up another huge review. Be warned, there be spoilers in these here waters...not only for Scarlet/Violet, but also a brief spoiler for Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield.
I am going to start off this review by talking about visuals and performance, since its the main thing I've seen people buzzing about with Scarlet/Violet. I'll just begin with mentioning that I really like the new Pokemon designs in this generation. There genuinely isn't a single one I dislike, but there's also very few Pokémon I dislike in general so take that with a grain of salt. Similarly, I like the designs of all the important story characters in this game, and even all the teachers at the school (more on that in its own dedicated section) have nice designs. My only real gripe with the designs of Pokémon in this game is that, for some reason, a lot of shinies suck. They barely look any different from the original, which is a big problem since this game made it to where any shinies that appear in the overworld don't make the sparkling sound effect they do in Legends Arceus. Okay, design talk aside, let's talk graphics and performance. This subject is going to take up the bulk of this long-winded paragraph. I'm not knowledgeable on graphics myself, but even I can plainly see how rough around the edges this game looks. Certain areas like Cassowary Lake cause constant slowdown and frame drops just trying to get through the area, at some points the game lagged so much that I was worried it might crash on me like how LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga sometimes experienced such intense slowdown that the game crashed (somewhat unrelated but felt it was relevant to mention here). I was surprised by just how much weirdness the visuals of this game has, like how pretty much any NPC walking in the background moves at a much slower frame rate than you or anything else in the world. Whenever I successfully caught a Pokémon, the game's camera had a tendency to clip through the ground, showing me a blue void of nothingness. In one of the gym battles, my Pokémon's model was slightly sunk into the ground. I noticed the game's shadows would appear and disappear seemingly at random. The pop-in sticks out like a sore thumb, worse than any game I played recently. The textures of the world also look awful, but I will say the textures on the Pokémon themselves look pretty good to me. These visual issues didn't ruin my experience, of course, but it is embarrassing that one of (if not the) best selling game series in the world has released a game with such little visual polish. Thankfully I haven't encountered much of the more goofy bugs that other people have found, but the fact that they exist at all is baffling to me. There's an infamous clip of a glitch in multiplayer mode where the player model transforms into this freakish glitch person with wacky proportions whenever both players hop on a bicycle. I can't claim to know why that happens or that it happened in my game. Glitches aside, there's also other oddities that are present in the game's processing. For some reason, the game seems to take a while to process the effects of moves happening; for instance, if you use a move that raises multiple stats, there is a noticeable delay of the game needing to stop to recognize that each stat was raised and relay that to the player. Using multi-hit moves have a similar result. It didn't bother me too much, but it does make things very sluggish for seemingly no reason. Its weird that certain things in the game move so slowly considering how other things, like saving the game, are very quick. I don't think this slow processing issue was present in other Switch era games so why is it a problem here? I think that statement sort of sums up this whole rant on the visual fiasco that Scarlet/Violet is. Why did the developers seem to have so many problems making this game function properly as far as visuals go? I'm not trying to throw blame on them; perhaps its just poor management or time crunches, I don't know, but its just so odd to me how all of these issues are present in a game release as comically large as Scarlet/Violet.
So, the visuals and performance are out of whack. How about the gameplay? Well...it's pretty standard Pokémon stuff. I quite enjoy it, but you're not going to get an insanely different experience here from other recent Pokémon titles as far as the core gameplay goes. It's pretty much the exact same core system its always been, but I guess its as they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At this point, the only things new Pokémon games can really add to shake up the core formula are gimmicks. Terastalization is the new kid on the block for the obligatory battle gimmick shoved into every new game since X/Y. The idea behind it is that you can either add an extra type to your Pokémon or power up their current type. I have to admit that I think it is pretty cool, I love the visual design behind Terastalization since each type gets a special Tera jewel that your Terastalized Pokémon wears as a crown and it makes every Pokémon look crystallized. For as long as I've been playing this damn series, I'm still no competitive player, so I don't often think about what these battle gimmicks mean for competitive play and can't really tell you how good it is in that sense. As far as regular battles do, yea I didn't really use it a ton personally but it did serve a good purpose in letting me plow through trainers easier. I think it has potential to be used in very creative ways, it pretty much feels like a weird way of letting just about any Pokémon get a third type. Your Pokémon's Tera type is determined when you catch it (when a Pokémon has a special Tera Type you'll know because it always either comes from a raid or the overworld where it would have been glowing a bright yellow for everyone to see) but you can also change it at the Treasure Eatery in Medali. I never tried it but the game was sure to let me know about that. Speaking of eateries, yea the whole curry thing in Sword/Shield that I didn't bother with even once is replaced with picnics and sandwiches in this game. I guess the idea behind it is cool and it seems like the sandwiches offer you nice benefits (they give you special abilities like making Pokémon eggs hatch faster), but this system also replaces breeding which I don't really understand why they did considering that breeding has been the same ever since it was introduced. I don't think anyone complained that you had to put your Pokémon in a Day Care and wait for them to breed, but I guess if you really wanted that to change you may be glad to hear that you can only get eggs from picnics now. One last thing I'll mention in this paragraph is difficulty. Everyone whines about how Pokémon games aren't hard, and yea I've always thought that's kind of the whole point. Play Red/Blue and you'll see for yourself that the originals aren't hard either. Nonetheless, Scarlet/Violet did manage to at least get me to lose sometimes; the final boss is actually quite tough and took me a few tries to beat, which even the champion fights were unable to do. I also lost to the Water gym leader once, but that's only because I made a goof and forgot what type Crabominable is (I did not lose to a single gym leader after him).
The choice to set the game in a school and have the player take classes is just strange to me. Yes, I am dedicating a whole paragraph to this. To me, it kind of just felt like another objective to throw at you. For the uninitiated, basically the game starts with introducing you to Uve Academy (it has a different name in Scarlet but its exactly the same as Violet's academy otherwise) and having you enroll in it. From there, the game has like one or two mandatory cutscenes of your character doing schoolwork, then a time-skip happens and you get the freedom to do what you want because the school is having a treasure hunt event. The treasure hunt isn't for treasure in the physical sense, but rather a metaphorical sense; you go out into the world to experience new things and gain knowledge, which I guess is sort of like unearthing treasure. Its like the excuse the game gives to open up after about a few minutes to an hour of bombarding you with cutscenes and scripted encounters for plot progression. The thing is, once the treasure hunt begins, you're encouraged to go take classes by talking to the lady at the counter. More classes even open up as you start taking on gym leaders. I think this is meant to be something to help new players, but admittedly some questions actually stumped me as someone who's been a fan of this series for as long as I've been on this earth. I suppose its a neat side activity, but it felt way longer than it needed to be. There's seven different classes and six...uh I'll just call them "parts" for now since I'm not sure what else to call it. Whenever you take a class, a cutscene begins and you listen to the teachers give a spiel. The game will give you an opportunity to shout out answers to a question they bring up, which you can do. There's no punishment for choosing the wrong answer (even in Pokémon I'm god awful at math so naturally I got some answers wrong there), though you'll want to remember the answers or just look them up online since you get a Midterm exam and a Finals exam for each course. Really makes this feel like a school experience, eh? There's one extra side thing related to the academy involving what are basically extremely dumbed down Persona social links with all the teachers. I know everyone makes this corny joke, but, as the guy that literally calls himself Bob on the Cob, I'm no stranger to corniness...and that's also pretty much what it feels like. You can go to different rooms of the academy, which sometimes have neat stuff to interact with like the lore books in the big entrance hall and the lunch ladies in the cafeteria (you can buy sandwiches from them), but I found myself mainly going there to do these diet Coca-Cola social links. As you go through the classes of a certain teacher, you can talk to the teachers to bond with them. I mostly just did it as a fun flavor thing and found myself surprised with how much I liked the characters of all the teachers. They're not super deep or anything, but they all have at least something going on in their backstories which you learn through bonding with them and they all had pretty fun personalities. Nonetheless, the rewards for going through the tedium of doing all these classes and moving around through many different areas of the academy to keep talking to them...man it really did not feel all that worth it. I will say that the tons of EXP Candies you get showered with for passing all the exams was nice, but for bothering with the social link stuff you don't get much. The most useful reward is from Ms. Raifort, the history teacher, who marks those little stakes on the map you have to interact with to get the legendary Pokémon for you. Mr. Salvatore, the language teacher, does give you an Galarian Meowth, which I think is the only way to get it in this game. All in all, they try to make doing all the classes and getting good diet cola social links with all the teachers feel worthwhile, but I ultimately feel like this whole system could have been axed and no one would have complained. Tying legendaries to all this filler was lame, although I do hear it is still possible to find all the stakes needed to activate the caves the legendaries are hiding in without getting it all marked on your map by the history teacher.
Okay, enough ranting about the classes. What about the story? I think it was pretty alright. I'm not a big story buff myself and I don't expect my Pokémon games to have groundbreaking narratives, but I appreciate that this game at least tried to do something cool. The big unique thing with this game's story is the three divulging paths you can choose to go on: Starfall Street, Path of Legends, and Victory Road. In Victory Road, its just the basic Pokémon story of taking down every Gym Leader and then fighting the Elite Four. Path of Legends is a bit different, involving you taking down some big Pokémon (not Dynamax lol) known as Titan Pokémon to get mystical herbs for Arven so he can use them to save his Pokemon from a fatal illness (honestly a pretty touching little story). Finally, there's Starfall Street, which focuses exclusively on taking down the evil team of this game, Team Star...except they're not necessarily an evil team, but that's something I'll detail when I start talking specifically about characters. I really like the idea behind this system, but I think it falls short in a few ways. In my opinion, the main problem here is that you're highly encouraged to do all three paths anyway. You'd think you should have a choice in the matter, but honestly you kind of don't. If you try to skip Victory Road completely, it won't be long until you get railroaded into your Pokémon not listening to you because that still relies on gym badges, so its pretty much mandatory unless you really like your Pokémon refusing to do anything in battle. When I finished up the objectives in Path of Legends and Victory Road so that I could focus more on doing Starlight Street, I still ended up being right at the same level as the last Team Star boss. There is no level scaling, so there seems to be a set intended order to which Team Star bosses, Titan Pokémon, and Gym Leaders you're meant to fight at which time. This intended path includes the objectives of all three story paths, which I just think is odd considering how much the game seemed to emphasize the importance of choosing which path you want to do. You can finish the final objective for all three stories so you don't have to choose just one, but you also have to finish all three story paths to truly see what the story has to offer since they don't give you endings in a traditional sense. Once you beat Arven in Path of Legends, Penny in Starlight Street, and Nemona in Victory Road, then Arven calls you to let you know he's ready for exploring Area Zero with you. This starts a new fourth story path that didn't exist before called "The Way Home" and the credits only roll once you finish that path. All of this is to say that the story really seems built as if it was all one big story instead of three different story paths. Ultimately this wasn't a big problem for me since I wouldn't want to miss out on what the other paths offer, but the game definitely seems balanced for people like me when I really think there should've been the option to feasibly focus on only one story path. What if someone wanted to only do Starlight Street and finish the game that way, you know? It really undermines the game's sense of freedom.
The characters of this game are pretty neat. I've already mentioned how I like the visual designs of all of them; I'm not sure why but Game Freak has really been making some excellent charming character designs lately. I think the motivations for the main important characters of the narrative are interesting in their own ways. Nemona is your rival who seems to think of literally nothing but battling, she is obsessed with it and mentions it every time she sees you. She is also the champion, but not in the Blue/Green way where he becomes champion because of your rivalry. Nemona was the champion the whole time and was merely adjusting her teams to fit each fight with you because she loves battling with you that much, and I think that has a certain charm to it. People find her annoying, and I can definitely understand why, but personally I like to headcanon her as an autistic person like I am, so I found myself relating to her looking at her with that lens. I'm probably a little biased in liking her since she reminded me a lot of Barry, the rival in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum. Nonetheless, I find her to be a neat character, plus I like the idea of a champion that got so bored looking for worthy challengers that she decided to cling to you as soon as she saw your potential. Arven is a character I was very unsure of if I was going to like when I first saw him, but I ended up enjoying his character. Arven seems to be the emotional core of this game honestly when it comes to characters. Professor Turo - Arven's father and the professor of Pokémon Violet - was so focused on his work that he never came home, so Arven hates his father because of that. From what I hear, this plot point is exactly the same in Scarlet except Sada is Arven's mother instead of Turo being Arven's father (I would have liked if Sada's existence was at least mentioned in Violet since it just sounds weird to me to see her suddenly be in that role). Arven even says that he doesn't have a single memory of Turo playing with him. Arven's main Pokémon, Mabosstiff, was his only companion, but Mabosstiff is also the Pokémon that happened to get struck with an illness that couldn't be cured by anything except the Herba Mystica. That happened because Arven went down to Area Zero. Of course, this started Arven's whole journey with you to take down the Titan Pokémon. The last character that takes center stage in one of the story paths is Penny. She is a shy nerdy hacker classmate. I'm just going to say it, the twist of Penny being the secret leader of Team Star is so obvious. Professor Clavell threw a fast one at me claiming he was the boss - I almost believed it honestly - but Penny is the leader like basically everyone thought. Speaking of Clavell, he shows up to help you take down Team Star as "Clive", who is very obviously Clavell in a wig. I found him to be a pretty entertaining character, although I think the joke of him being an out-of-touch overly professional old guy is used a little too much. The last thing I found rather notable about the characters in this game is their interactions with each other. In the last story path - The Way Home - you get to see Penny, Nemona, and Arven talk and get to know each other better as you explore through Area Zero with them. You get neat little background details to the characters through this that I really enjoyed seeing. It's the kind of thing that they didn't have to put in, but is a great addition nonetheless. The characters have pretty charming interactions in general, like how Penny and Arven like to poke fun at each other in an almost rival type way. I found it funny how Penny would often comment on how annoying and ditzy Nemona can be, but Penny also seems to admire her bravery. We also learn how Nemona seems to not understand emotional cues: there's a scene where your Miraidon meets another Miraidon and is clearly afraid, but after the encounter, Nemona does not understand why your Miraidon is acting the way it does until Penny chastises her for it. Another point for the autism headcanon? Perhaps. We also learn a little bit about the families of Nemona and Penny through these conversations. Nemona's father is on the board of a Rotom Phone company, but that's all we get to learn about him. Penny finds her dad to be overbearing and she hates how he calls her by cutesy nicknames. Arven kind of comes out of his shell when interacting with the player, Nemona, and Penny in a few ways. He has an amusing character quirk of being attention seeking, since he often looks to either one-up their stories or grab their interest, only to be shut down immediately. Honestly Penny is kind of an ass to him at times, but she softens up once she realizes everything he's gone through. Arven also reveals why he's always seemed to harbor a grudge against Miraidon: its because he felt jealous of Miraidon. In his own words, he felt Miraidon was stealing Turo's attention away, which really just made me sympathize with Arven even more. Overall, I just wanted to give a shoutout to this whole portion of the story since it adds a lot more likeability to the characters and makes them seem more realistic. The conversations really feel like something teenagers would just casually talk about amongst each other.
I'm going to dedicate a paragraph for Team Star themselves that was meant to be included in the previous paragraph but just got TOO in-depth to be mashed in there. The Team Star bosses are all technically pretty important to the story considering that the majority of Starlight Street is focused on them. I'm really not sure how to feel about Team Star as a whole, although I will say it's pretty interesting how they're not really an evil team. I like subversions of the usual Pokémon tropes - I love Team Skull and they're basically a walking parody of evil Pokémon teams - and Team Star really subvert expectations even further by being seen as bad guys even though they pretty much did nothing wrong. The gist of Team Star is that they were all bullied and eventually tried to stand up for themselves because the school failed to stop the bullies. The story seems to be making a critique of the school system itself and how it ostracizes people that were bullied instead of taking action to stop bullying, since the old figureheads of the school were the ones that did nothing to help Team Star with bullying. Professor Clavell initially almost fell for the narrative of them being troublemakers, too, but, when he joined you in your invasion of Team Star bases (of course under the Clive persona), he took the opportunity to learn more about them and their situation. Penny and the Team Star bosses were in danger of being expelled because of the bad reputation the team was getting, so Penny decided that they must be stopped to prevent that from happening. The reason she had the player go invade their bases and defeat the bosses one by one was because she had tried several times to get the team to disband and they wouldn't listen (the team has a code where they must step down if they are defeated and the bosses are all very loyal to this code). The bosses and Penny have this big emotional reconciliation at the end of Starfall Street's story, where Penny reveals who she is to you and tries to disband the team once you defeat her, but Clavell gets the bosses together with Penny to reveal to them that the team will stay together as the staff of a new facility based off the team. He also mentions that he will make up for the school's failure to stop bullies. My opinion has kind of flipped on Team Star, I went in expecting to not like this "Actually they were right all along" narrative with them but I think it was handled well. Nonetheless, I do think its weird how there's no real villains in this game. Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield had a bunch of clowns as the "evil team" you see for most of the game, but there was still a real evil team at the end (Macro Cosmos in Sword/Shield and the Aether Foundation in Sun/Moon). Also, if I remember correctly, we don't even learn what the team did to stop bullies after the team was formed. They just have bases of operation around the map where they do...stuff, I guess?
This paragraph is probably going to be comparatively brief to the others, but I feel its important to discuss the twist behind Professor Turo revealed at the very end of The Way Home (and, in turn, the end of the game). The Professor Turo you've been talking to all game actually an AI clone of the real one, created to help him make the time machine that brought the Paradox Pokémon to this world. I can give this twist credit for being unexpected and making for an interesting ending, but it just feels indescribably silly to me and I'm not sure why it makes me feel that way. It's not even like weird sci-fi stuff like this doesn't have a place in the series - Mewtwo, the Ultra Beasts, and Deoxys exist - but its just kind of off-putting to me nonetheless. Basically the story behind this is Professor Turo created a time machine with the help of his AI clone, ended up dying for his research, then the AI has been helping you for the sake of having you come to Area Zero to destroy the time machine they built (and you were chosen specifically because the AI is programmed to attack when the time machine is tampered with and it knew you were strong enough to stop it). From what I hear, there is also an AI clone of Sada in Pokemon Scarlet, and I can only imagine how odd that is. One thing I will praise about this is how this is sort of a reversal of how the trope of AI clones usually goes: Turo is pretty much the only person in this game you can call a bad guy and his AI clone knows that. The AI wants to be a better person than the man it was based on, to the point where it even tells Arven that it loves him and knows his real father still would have loved Arven. I think the end of the AI is a bit lame, I was thinking it would go for a heroic sacrifice or something but instead it goes through the time machine right before you destroy it, saying it hopes to go on an adventure too. Despite my gripes with this ending, I really think it elevated the whole story by a considerable margin. I genuinely believe it is one of the most heartfelt endings in Pokémon and it is the main reason I said Arven is the emotional core of this story. It really makes you want to give Arven a hug or something after all he's had to go through, but thankfully it ends on a happy note since everyone escaped and got to return back to normal life. Shaking off the trauma of your real dad having been dead for years, which you didn't even know until it was thrown onto to you by an AI version of your dad that also ended up having to leave you, is no easy feat, that's for sure.
I think this is probably the longest review I've written on this website. If you've read all of it, that really does mean so much to me and I appreciate you taking interest in my rambling. All things considered, the game gets a solid 4 stars from me. It has some very noticeable issues - mainly in presentation and graphics - but I think it is easily one of the best Pokémon games out there when you can look past all of that and just appreciate its gameplay and the kind of story its telling (nothing super deep but still pretty interesting and heartwarming).
I am going to start off this review by talking about visuals and performance, since its the main thing I've seen people buzzing about with Scarlet/Violet. I'll just begin with mentioning that I really like the new Pokemon designs in this generation. There genuinely isn't a single one I dislike, but there's also very few Pokémon I dislike in general so take that with a grain of salt. Similarly, I like the designs of all the important story characters in this game, and even all the teachers at the school (more on that in its own dedicated section) have nice designs. My only real gripe with the designs of Pokémon in this game is that, for some reason, a lot of shinies suck. They barely look any different from the original, which is a big problem since this game made it to where any shinies that appear in the overworld don't make the sparkling sound effect they do in Legends Arceus. Okay, design talk aside, let's talk graphics and performance. This subject is going to take up the bulk of this long-winded paragraph. I'm not knowledgeable on graphics myself, but even I can plainly see how rough around the edges this game looks. Certain areas like Cassowary Lake cause constant slowdown and frame drops just trying to get through the area, at some points the game lagged so much that I was worried it might crash on me like how LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga sometimes experienced such intense slowdown that the game crashed (somewhat unrelated but felt it was relevant to mention here). I was surprised by just how much weirdness the visuals of this game has, like how pretty much any NPC walking in the background moves at a much slower frame rate than you or anything else in the world. Whenever I successfully caught a Pokémon, the game's camera had a tendency to clip through the ground, showing me a blue void of nothingness. In one of the gym battles, my Pokémon's model was slightly sunk into the ground. I noticed the game's shadows would appear and disappear seemingly at random. The pop-in sticks out like a sore thumb, worse than any game I played recently. The textures of the world also look awful, but I will say the textures on the Pokémon themselves look pretty good to me. These visual issues didn't ruin my experience, of course, but it is embarrassing that one of (if not the) best selling game series in the world has released a game with such little visual polish. Thankfully I haven't encountered much of the more goofy bugs that other people have found, but the fact that they exist at all is baffling to me. There's an infamous clip of a glitch in multiplayer mode where the player model transforms into this freakish glitch person with wacky proportions whenever both players hop on a bicycle. I can't claim to know why that happens or that it happened in my game. Glitches aside, there's also other oddities that are present in the game's processing. For some reason, the game seems to take a while to process the effects of moves happening; for instance, if you use a move that raises multiple stats, there is a noticeable delay of the game needing to stop to recognize that each stat was raised and relay that to the player. Using multi-hit moves have a similar result. It didn't bother me too much, but it does make things very sluggish for seemingly no reason. Its weird that certain things in the game move so slowly considering how other things, like saving the game, are very quick. I don't think this slow processing issue was present in other Switch era games so why is it a problem here? I think that statement sort of sums up this whole rant on the visual fiasco that Scarlet/Violet is. Why did the developers seem to have so many problems making this game function properly as far as visuals go? I'm not trying to throw blame on them; perhaps its just poor management or time crunches, I don't know, but its just so odd to me how all of these issues are present in a game release as comically large as Scarlet/Violet.
So, the visuals and performance are out of whack. How about the gameplay? Well...it's pretty standard Pokémon stuff. I quite enjoy it, but you're not going to get an insanely different experience here from other recent Pokémon titles as far as the core gameplay goes. It's pretty much the exact same core system its always been, but I guess its as they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At this point, the only things new Pokémon games can really add to shake up the core formula are gimmicks. Terastalization is the new kid on the block for the obligatory battle gimmick shoved into every new game since X/Y. The idea behind it is that you can either add an extra type to your Pokémon or power up their current type. I have to admit that I think it is pretty cool, I love the visual design behind Terastalization since each type gets a special Tera jewel that your Terastalized Pokémon wears as a crown and it makes every Pokémon look crystallized. For as long as I've been playing this damn series, I'm still no competitive player, so I don't often think about what these battle gimmicks mean for competitive play and can't really tell you how good it is in that sense. As far as regular battles do, yea I didn't really use it a ton personally but it did serve a good purpose in letting me plow through trainers easier. I think it has potential to be used in very creative ways, it pretty much feels like a weird way of letting just about any Pokémon get a third type. Your Pokémon's Tera type is determined when you catch it (when a Pokémon has a special Tera Type you'll know because it always either comes from a raid or the overworld where it would have been glowing a bright yellow for everyone to see) but you can also change it at the Treasure Eatery in Medali. I never tried it but the game was sure to let me know about that. Speaking of eateries, yea the whole curry thing in Sword/Shield that I didn't bother with even once is replaced with picnics and sandwiches in this game. I guess the idea behind it is cool and it seems like the sandwiches offer you nice benefits (they give you special abilities like making Pokémon eggs hatch faster), but this system also replaces breeding which I don't really understand why they did considering that breeding has been the same ever since it was introduced. I don't think anyone complained that you had to put your Pokémon in a Day Care and wait for them to breed, but I guess if you really wanted that to change you may be glad to hear that you can only get eggs from picnics now. One last thing I'll mention in this paragraph is difficulty. Everyone whines about how Pokémon games aren't hard, and yea I've always thought that's kind of the whole point. Play Red/Blue and you'll see for yourself that the originals aren't hard either. Nonetheless, Scarlet/Violet did manage to at least get me to lose sometimes; the final boss is actually quite tough and took me a few tries to beat, which even the champion fights were unable to do. I also lost to the Water gym leader once, but that's only because I made a goof and forgot what type Crabominable is (I did not lose to a single gym leader after him).
The choice to set the game in a school and have the player take classes is just strange to me. Yes, I am dedicating a whole paragraph to this. To me, it kind of just felt like another objective to throw at you. For the uninitiated, basically the game starts with introducing you to Uve Academy (it has a different name in Scarlet but its exactly the same as Violet's academy otherwise) and having you enroll in it. From there, the game has like one or two mandatory cutscenes of your character doing schoolwork, then a time-skip happens and you get the freedom to do what you want because the school is having a treasure hunt event. The treasure hunt isn't for treasure in the physical sense, but rather a metaphorical sense; you go out into the world to experience new things and gain knowledge, which I guess is sort of like unearthing treasure. Its like the excuse the game gives to open up after about a few minutes to an hour of bombarding you with cutscenes and scripted encounters for plot progression. The thing is, once the treasure hunt begins, you're encouraged to go take classes by talking to the lady at the counter. More classes even open up as you start taking on gym leaders. I think this is meant to be something to help new players, but admittedly some questions actually stumped me as someone who's been a fan of this series for as long as I've been on this earth. I suppose its a neat side activity, but it felt way longer than it needed to be. There's seven different classes and six...uh I'll just call them "parts" for now since I'm not sure what else to call it. Whenever you take a class, a cutscene begins and you listen to the teachers give a spiel. The game will give you an opportunity to shout out answers to a question they bring up, which you can do. There's no punishment for choosing the wrong answer (even in Pokémon I'm god awful at math so naturally I got some answers wrong there), though you'll want to remember the answers or just look them up online since you get a Midterm exam and a Finals exam for each course. Really makes this feel like a school experience, eh? There's one extra side thing related to the academy involving what are basically extremely dumbed down Persona social links with all the teachers. I know everyone makes this corny joke, but, as the guy that literally calls himself Bob on the Cob, I'm no stranger to corniness...and that's also pretty much what it feels like. You can go to different rooms of the academy, which sometimes have neat stuff to interact with like the lore books in the big entrance hall and the lunch ladies in the cafeteria (you can buy sandwiches from them), but I found myself mainly going there to do these diet Coca-Cola social links. As you go through the classes of a certain teacher, you can talk to the teachers to bond with them. I mostly just did it as a fun flavor thing and found myself surprised with how much I liked the characters of all the teachers. They're not super deep or anything, but they all have at least something going on in their backstories which you learn through bonding with them and they all had pretty fun personalities. Nonetheless, the rewards for going through the tedium of doing all these classes and moving around through many different areas of the academy to keep talking to them...man it really did not feel all that worth it. I will say that the tons of EXP Candies you get showered with for passing all the exams was nice, but for bothering with the social link stuff you don't get much. The most useful reward is from Ms. Raifort, the history teacher, who marks those little stakes on the map you have to interact with to get the legendary Pokémon for you. Mr. Salvatore, the language teacher, does give you an Galarian Meowth, which I think is the only way to get it in this game. All in all, they try to make doing all the classes and getting good diet cola social links with all the teachers feel worthwhile, but I ultimately feel like this whole system could have been axed and no one would have complained. Tying legendaries to all this filler was lame, although I do hear it is still possible to find all the stakes needed to activate the caves the legendaries are hiding in without getting it all marked on your map by the history teacher.
Okay, enough ranting about the classes. What about the story? I think it was pretty alright. I'm not a big story buff myself and I don't expect my Pokémon games to have groundbreaking narratives, but I appreciate that this game at least tried to do something cool. The big unique thing with this game's story is the three divulging paths you can choose to go on: Starfall Street, Path of Legends, and Victory Road. In Victory Road, its just the basic Pokémon story of taking down every Gym Leader and then fighting the Elite Four. Path of Legends is a bit different, involving you taking down some big Pokémon (not Dynamax lol) known as Titan Pokémon to get mystical herbs for Arven so he can use them to save his Pokemon from a fatal illness (honestly a pretty touching little story). Finally, there's Starfall Street, which focuses exclusively on taking down the evil team of this game, Team Star...except they're not necessarily an evil team, but that's something I'll detail when I start talking specifically about characters. I really like the idea behind this system, but I think it falls short in a few ways. In my opinion, the main problem here is that you're highly encouraged to do all three paths anyway. You'd think you should have a choice in the matter, but honestly you kind of don't. If you try to skip Victory Road completely, it won't be long until you get railroaded into your Pokémon not listening to you because that still relies on gym badges, so its pretty much mandatory unless you really like your Pokémon refusing to do anything in battle. When I finished up the objectives in Path of Legends and Victory Road so that I could focus more on doing Starlight Street, I still ended up being right at the same level as the last Team Star boss. There is no level scaling, so there seems to be a set intended order to which Team Star bosses, Titan Pokémon, and Gym Leaders you're meant to fight at which time. This intended path includes the objectives of all three story paths, which I just think is odd considering how much the game seemed to emphasize the importance of choosing which path you want to do. You can finish the final objective for all three stories so you don't have to choose just one, but you also have to finish all three story paths to truly see what the story has to offer since they don't give you endings in a traditional sense. Once you beat Arven in Path of Legends, Penny in Starlight Street, and Nemona in Victory Road, then Arven calls you to let you know he's ready for exploring Area Zero with you. This starts a new fourth story path that didn't exist before called "The Way Home" and the credits only roll once you finish that path. All of this is to say that the story really seems built as if it was all one big story instead of three different story paths. Ultimately this wasn't a big problem for me since I wouldn't want to miss out on what the other paths offer, but the game definitely seems balanced for people like me when I really think there should've been the option to feasibly focus on only one story path. What if someone wanted to only do Starlight Street and finish the game that way, you know? It really undermines the game's sense of freedom.
The characters of this game are pretty neat. I've already mentioned how I like the visual designs of all of them; I'm not sure why but Game Freak has really been making some excellent charming character designs lately. I think the motivations for the main important characters of the narrative are interesting in their own ways. Nemona is your rival who seems to think of literally nothing but battling, she is obsessed with it and mentions it every time she sees you. She is also the champion, but not in the Blue/Green way where he becomes champion because of your rivalry. Nemona was the champion the whole time and was merely adjusting her teams to fit each fight with you because she loves battling with you that much, and I think that has a certain charm to it. People find her annoying, and I can definitely understand why, but personally I like to headcanon her as an autistic person like I am, so I found myself relating to her looking at her with that lens. I'm probably a little biased in liking her since she reminded me a lot of Barry, the rival in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum. Nonetheless, I find her to be a neat character, plus I like the idea of a champion that got so bored looking for worthy challengers that she decided to cling to you as soon as she saw your potential. Arven is a character I was very unsure of if I was going to like when I first saw him, but I ended up enjoying his character. Arven seems to be the emotional core of this game honestly when it comes to characters. Professor Turo - Arven's father and the professor of Pokémon Violet - was so focused on his work that he never came home, so Arven hates his father because of that. From what I hear, this plot point is exactly the same in Scarlet except Sada is Arven's mother instead of Turo being Arven's father (I would have liked if Sada's existence was at least mentioned in Violet since it just sounds weird to me to see her suddenly be in that role). Arven even says that he doesn't have a single memory of Turo playing with him. Arven's main Pokémon, Mabosstiff, was his only companion, but Mabosstiff is also the Pokémon that happened to get struck with an illness that couldn't be cured by anything except the Herba Mystica. That happened because Arven went down to Area Zero. Of course, this started Arven's whole journey with you to take down the Titan Pokémon. The last character that takes center stage in one of the story paths is Penny. She is a shy nerdy hacker classmate. I'm just going to say it, the twist of Penny being the secret leader of Team Star is so obvious. Professor Clavell threw a fast one at me claiming he was the boss - I almost believed it honestly - but Penny is the leader like basically everyone thought. Speaking of Clavell, he shows up to help you take down Team Star as "Clive", who is very obviously Clavell in a wig. I found him to be a pretty entertaining character, although I think the joke of him being an out-of-touch overly professional old guy is used a little too much. The last thing I found rather notable about the characters in this game is their interactions with each other. In the last story path - The Way Home - you get to see Penny, Nemona, and Arven talk and get to know each other better as you explore through Area Zero with them. You get neat little background details to the characters through this that I really enjoyed seeing. It's the kind of thing that they didn't have to put in, but is a great addition nonetheless. The characters have pretty charming interactions in general, like how Penny and Arven like to poke fun at each other in an almost rival type way. I found it funny how Penny would often comment on how annoying and ditzy Nemona can be, but Penny also seems to admire her bravery. We also learn how Nemona seems to not understand emotional cues: there's a scene where your Miraidon meets another Miraidon and is clearly afraid, but after the encounter, Nemona does not understand why your Miraidon is acting the way it does until Penny chastises her for it. Another point for the autism headcanon? Perhaps. We also learn a little bit about the families of Nemona and Penny through these conversations. Nemona's father is on the board of a Rotom Phone company, but that's all we get to learn about him. Penny finds her dad to be overbearing and she hates how he calls her by cutesy nicknames. Arven kind of comes out of his shell when interacting with the player, Nemona, and Penny in a few ways. He has an amusing character quirk of being attention seeking, since he often looks to either one-up their stories or grab their interest, only to be shut down immediately. Honestly Penny is kind of an ass to him at times, but she softens up once she realizes everything he's gone through. Arven also reveals why he's always seemed to harbor a grudge against Miraidon: its because he felt jealous of Miraidon. In his own words, he felt Miraidon was stealing Turo's attention away, which really just made me sympathize with Arven even more. Overall, I just wanted to give a shoutout to this whole portion of the story since it adds a lot more likeability to the characters and makes them seem more realistic. The conversations really feel like something teenagers would just casually talk about amongst each other.
I'm going to dedicate a paragraph for Team Star themselves that was meant to be included in the previous paragraph but just got TOO in-depth to be mashed in there. The Team Star bosses are all technically pretty important to the story considering that the majority of Starlight Street is focused on them. I'm really not sure how to feel about Team Star as a whole, although I will say it's pretty interesting how they're not really an evil team. I like subversions of the usual Pokémon tropes - I love Team Skull and they're basically a walking parody of evil Pokémon teams - and Team Star really subvert expectations even further by being seen as bad guys even though they pretty much did nothing wrong. The gist of Team Star is that they were all bullied and eventually tried to stand up for themselves because the school failed to stop the bullies. The story seems to be making a critique of the school system itself and how it ostracizes people that were bullied instead of taking action to stop bullying, since the old figureheads of the school were the ones that did nothing to help Team Star with bullying. Professor Clavell initially almost fell for the narrative of them being troublemakers, too, but, when he joined you in your invasion of Team Star bases (of course under the Clive persona), he took the opportunity to learn more about them and their situation. Penny and the Team Star bosses were in danger of being expelled because of the bad reputation the team was getting, so Penny decided that they must be stopped to prevent that from happening. The reason she had the player go invade their bases and defeat the bosses one by one was because she had tried several times to get the team to disband and they wouldn't listen (the team has a code where they must step down if they are defeated and the bosses are all very loyal to this code). The bosses and Penny have this big emotional reconciliation at the end of Starfall Street's story, where Penny reveals who she is to you and tries to disband the team once you defeat her, but Clavell gets the bosses together with Penny to reveal to them that the team will stay together as the staff of a new facility based off the team. He also mentions that he will make up for the school's failure to stop bullies. My opinion has kind of flipped on Team Star, I went in expecting to not like this "Actually they were right all along" narrative with them but I think it was handled well. Nonetheless, I do think its weird how there's no real villains in this game. Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield had a bunch of clowns as the "evil team" you see for most of the game, but there was still a real evil team at the end (Macro Cosmos in Sword/Shield and the Aether Foundation in Sun/Moon). Also, if I remember correctly, we don't even learn what the team did to stop bullies after the team was formed. They just have bases of operation around the map where they do...stuff, I guess?
This paragraph is probably going to be comparatively brief to the others, but I feel its important to discuss the twist behind Professor Turo revealed at the very end of The Way Home (and, in turn, the end of the game). The Professor Turo you've been talking to all game actually an AI clone of the real one, created to help him make the time machine that brought the Paradox Pokémon to this world. I can give this twist credit for being unexpected and making for an interesting ending, but it just feels indescribably silly to me and I'm not sure why it makes me feel that way. It's not even like weird sci-fi stuff like this doesn't have a place in the series - Mewtwo, the Ultra Beasts, and Deoxys exist - but its just kind of off-putting to me nonetheless. Basically the story behind this is Professor Turo created a time machine with the help of his AI clone, ended up dying for his research, then the AI has been helping you for the sake of having you come to Area Zero to destroy the time machine they built (and you were chosen specifically because the AI is programmed to attack when the time machine is tampered with and it knew you were strong enough to stop it). From what I hear, there is also an AI clone of Sada in Pokemon Scarlet, and I can only imagine how odd that is. One thing I will praise about this is how this is sort of a reversal of how the trope of AI clones usually goes: Turo is pretty much the only person in this game you can call a bad guy and his AI clone knows that. The AI wants to be a better person than the man it was based on, to the point where it even tells Arven that it loves him and knows his real father still would have loved Arven. I think the end of the AI is a bit lame, I was thinking it would go for a heroic sacrifice or something but instead it goes through the time machine right before you destroy it, saying it hopes to go on an adventure too. Despite my gripes with this ending, I really think it elevated the whole story by a considerable margin. I genuinely believe it is one of the most heartfelt endings in Pokémon and it is the main reason I said Arven is the emotional core of this story. It really makes you want to give Arven a hug or something after all he's had to go through, but thankfully it ends on a happy note since everyone escaped and got to return back to normal life. Shaking off the trauma of your real dad having been dead for years, which you didn't even know until it was thrown onto to you by an AI version of your dad that also ended up having to leave you, is no easy feat, that's for sure.
I think this is probably the longest review I've written on this website. If you've read all of it, that really does mean so much to me and I appreciate you taking interest in my rambling. All things considered, the game gets a solid 4 stars from me. It has some very noticeable issues - mainly in presentation and graphics - but I think it is easily one of the best Pokémon games out there when you can look past all of that and just appreciate its gameplay and the kind of story its telling (nothing super deep but still pretty interesting and heartwarming).
2009
League of Legends is a game I've been playing for a good while; 2015 is the farthest I can trace my account through official means. Its certainly been an interesting ride, to say the least. I vividly remember the days I watched my brother play the game. I always thought it looked too complicated and wasn't interested in playing it myself, but I enjoyed watching him play match after match. If I recall correctly, he began playing around 2012. The earliest champion release I recall seeing is Zyra, who released in 2012, so I'm just going with that as the date he started. Of course, I eventually decided to try the game out myself. In my first few months or so of playing, I only ever played matches vs the bots because I was scared of playing against real people, having heard so many horror stories of how toxic League of Legends players can be. I went in with no knowledge of what a meta is, what items to build, which roles the champions are supposed to go in...I remember I played champions built for mid lane into the bot lane because I thought there was virtually no difference with which lane you start at. For a long time I didn't see the appeal of the game, but before I knew it I got sucked in and it became one of my go-to games. Whether I played solo queue or with friends, I was firing up League of Legends all the time from around late 2015 to early 2019. I experienced a decline in interest with the game in 2019 and I ended up having a falling out period in late 2019 throughout the entirety of 2020, but I returned to the game in 2021 to play the game in more sporadic bursts. I've kept that same relationship with League of Legends even now that 2022 is nearing its end.
The thing about League of Legends that makes it so widely hated (other than toxic players) - especially by its own player base - is that it has a way of sucking players in and keeping them playing, but it also makes players very angry very often. Whether its because you met some toxic asshole that decides he's going to do absolutely nothing useful for the team because you looked at him funny, you got effortlessly stomped by the enemy team, your own team was so foolish that they lost even with a huge lead, or even just Riot's balance team taking the game's meta in a direction you don't like, there are plenty of things present in League of Legends to tick off the average player. I've had to take breaks several times throughout my years playing this game because sometimes the stress just gets too much and you stop having fun. It doesn't help that it takes a good while to learn how the game works if you aren't already familiar with MOBAs, made even worse by how Riot often likes to change the meta (Jungle mains definitely get the short end of the stick there). For those who don't know, the meta essentially refers to an invisible common consensus that shows how players expect everyone to play the game, such as the whole idea of a Champion tier list of viability. Another easy example of a meta in League of Legends is how players are expected by other players to follow guides containing an organized list of all the specific items you need to get at specific points of the game, what order you should upgrade your abilities in, and what your Runes should be to best fit your Champions strengths. I recall really struggling to grasp some of the game's concepts, like how to build correctly, how to shift between playing safe and going aggressive, the whole idea behind kiting (basically attacking an enemy from range in a rhythm that lets you keep hitting them while they can't hit you back), learning the best paths for getting through the jungle, figuring out how to manipulate minion waves into your favor, or finding out what champions counter other champions. Sometimes the base move set of a Champion is hard to wrap your head around, but of course that depends on what Champion you're playing. Some are much easier than others, but generally every Champion has a specific role they play and a certain way you're supposed to play them. Also, if you really care about the Ranked mode, I have to say I genuinely feel bad for you because that shit is stressful enough to make you grow grey hairs. Playing Normal matches isn't too bad, though, and that's always been my mode of choice. Sometimes I play one of the limited time silly game modes or ARAM (stands for All Random All Middle, basically its a free-for-all mode with only one lane).
Despite my personal history with this game, I find I don't have quite as much to say about it here as I've done with my other recent reviews that are several paragraphs long. I will say that I've always really loved the character designs of League of Legends and the music often made to accompany the game (R.I.P. login screen music), but I didn't feel this warranted its own paragraph so it just gets a mention from me here. The other miscellaneous material created for League of Legends, such as the spin-off games and the critically acclaimed Arcane series, are also neat to have. The game overall gets a two and a half stars, its not a great game for many reasons and it can be downright stressful to play (and not in a good way) but the game's impact is undeniable and I do have strong personal history with the game. I think there's still stuff to like about the game, but it's one of those games I genuinely would not recommend new players even try to get into.
The thing about League of Legends that makes it so widely hated (other than toxic players) - especially by its own player base - is that it has a way of sucking players in and keeping them playing, but it also makes players very angry very often. Whether its because you met some toxic asshole that decides he's going to do absolutely nothing useful for the team because you looked at him funny, you got effortlessly stomped by the enemy team, your own team was so foolish that they lost even with a huge lead, or even just Riot's balance team taking the game's meta in a direction you don't like, there are plenty of things present in League of Legends to tick off the average player. I've had to take breaks several times throughout my years playing this game because sometimes the stress just gets too much and you stop having fun. It doesn't help that it takes a good while to learn how the game works if you aren't already familiar with MOBAs, made even worse by how Riot often likes to change the meta (Jungle mains definitely get the short end of the stick there). For those who don't know, the meta essentially refers to an invisible common consensus that shows how players expect everyone to play the game, such as the whole idea of a Champion tier list of viability. Another easy example of a meta in League of Legends is how players are expected by other players to follow guides containing an organized list of all the specific items you need to get at specific points of the game, what order you should upgrade your abilities in, and what your Runes should be to best fit your Champions strengths. I recall really struggling to grasp some of the game's concepts, like how to build correctly, how to shift between playing safe and going aggressive, the whole idea behind kiting (basically attacking an enemy from range in a rhythm that lets you keep hitting them while they can't hit you back), learning the best paths for getting through the jungle, figuring out how to manipulate minion waves into your favor, or finding out what champions counter other champions. Sometimes the base move set of a Champion is hard to wrap your head around, but of course that depends on what Champion you're playing. Some are much easier than others, but generally every Champion has a specific role they play and a certain way you're supposed to play them. Also, if you really care about the Ranked mode, I have to say I genuinely feel bad for you because that shit is stressful enough to make you grow grey hairs. Playing Normal matches isn't too bad, though, and that's always been my mode of choice. Sometimes I play one of the limited time silly game modes or ARAM (stands for All Random All Middle, basically its a free-for-all mode with only one lane).
Despite my personal history with this game, I find I don't have quite as much to say about it here as I've done with my other recent reviews that are several paragraphs long. I will say that I've always really loved the character designs of League of Legends and the music often made to accompany the game (R.I.P. login screen music), but I didn't feel this warranted its own paragraph so it just gets a mention from me here. The other miscellaneous material created for League of Legends, such as the spin-off games and the critically acclaimed Arcane series, are also neat to have. The game overall gets a two and a half stars, its not a great game for many reasons and it can be downright stressful to play (and not in a good way) but the game's impact is undeniable and I do have strong personal history with the game. I think there's still stuff to like about the game, but it's one of those games I genuinely would not recommend new players even try to get into.
2004
This review contains spoilers
So, not terribly long after beating Half-Life, I decided to play through its sequel. Half-Life 2 was a pretty interesting game, if I do say so myself. I love how it expands the universe of this series more and it has some awesome concepts. I think Vortigaunts are probably among my favorite fictional alien races now. Great designs and funny voices...I'd buy a plushie or figure of one!
Something I found interesting about the shift from Half-Life to Half-Life 2 is the general change in atmosphere. In the first Half-Life, I felt most of its levels had you going through dark abandoned areas as you traverse through worn down laboratories, military bases, and eventually the strange alien planet of Xen. There were a few levels that had some actual sunlight and let you see the outside world (honestly some levels felt brighter than they probably should have been in my opinion), but I feel that the essence of Half-Life is defined by all its dreary and dirty environments whereas Half-Life 2 generally feels more bright and clean in comparison. There are definitely areas in Half-Life 2 that carry that same dark ugly vibe as the levels in Half-Life, but not quite as much in my opinion. In Half-Life, you rarely saw friendly NPCs around, and when they do pop up they tend to either die or just be used to progress and move on (plus they often commented on the dire situation adding to some suspense and dread). In Half-Life 2, there are more friends around this time to help you out, like the Resistance members you meet along the way that tell you where to go or give you goodies (supplies, the airboat for Chapter 4, the firearm upgrade to that airboat, the scout car, etc.). Alyx, Dr. Kleiner, Eli, and Barney are all companions of yours that are present at various parts of Half-Life 2, while Half-Life did not have any consistent companions. The Vortigaunts that you slaughtered in droves in Half-Life are friendly to you in this game, too, although you may have gathered from my introduction paragraph that I love the change (and it makes sense in the lore). Also, this is a minor detail, but I don't think you can kill any of the friendly NPCs in Half-Life 2, whereas in the first Half-Life you could kill all your allies if you really wanted to. Even in Ravenholm, which is probably the creepiest place in the game, you have Father Grigori helping you out at certain parts of the chapter. It kind of destroys that feeling of lonely dread I felt the first game pulled off so well, but I will say I still like what Half-Life 2 does with its atmosphere. The world you live in is an Orwellian dystopia from the beginning of the game to the end. You are chased down by the Combine sort of like how the Marines were a constant threat in Half-Life. The story often shows just how fascist the Combine are through showing you the propaganda they use and the way they brutalize and interrogate anyone they perceive as being against them. Their leader, Dr. Breen, often shows his nefarious face on screens to spout out anti-freedom or anti-intellectual propaganda. He was a pretty interesting villain honestly, you get to hear a few different speeches from him in the game. I think this game really nails that feeling of enemies being around every corner; Gordon is basically an enemy of the state and you really feel that after Chapter 1. There's a full on war going on in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 which was really cool to fight your way through. All of this is to say that, although Half-Life 2's atmosphere feels quite different from Half-Life, I think it still does a great job with what it is going for. For instance, striving for a grander narrative with this game in comparison to Half-Life made a lot of sense in my opinion.
The story and characters of Half-Life 2 seem to be given much more focus than in Half-Life. The most you got in the previous game was hints at the wider world of this series through talking with the few NPCs you find and there were no real characters to speak of. There are interesting theories crafted using the cool bits of lore given in Half-Life, like how the strange dialogue of the Nihilanth is still being dissected by fans to this day, but I never got the sense of a big story to connect everything together. That kinda shows with how this game retcons some things, but they are pretty minor at the end of the day. It's just details like Eli and Barney acting all chummy with you, talking about their personal history with Gordon even though they weren't even there in Half-Life. I do hear that was expanded upon a little with Barney being playable in one of the Half-Life expansions, but I didn't play those so I don't know what their stories were. I find that Half-Life 2 has more explicit exposition, with a narrative that has actual characters with names that you get to see talk a lot and do things in the story. Gordon Freeman is still very obviously the most important guy in the room despite not saying a word - don't worry, you'll hear nothing but praise from every character in the game that isn't a villain - but he is no longer the only person that matters. As for the general story itself, I thought it was pretty good. Basically, when you first start the game, your goal is to get off the train into City 17, where you then leave to begin your journey to take down the Combine. You go on a trek to various Resistance bases, then through the Combine's strongholds like Nova Prospekt, then you go back to City 17 to fight an intense battle with your comrades to get to the Capital, and finally the game ends with you getting into the Capital through an underground passageway to confront Dr. Wallace Breen. You meet Eli Vance, Alyx Vance, Dr. Isaac Kleiner, and Judith Mossman - four important figureheads of the Resistance that help you out - in Chapter 5, which is a short Chapter that is almost entirely focused on exposition. Alyx is the most important character outside of Gordon and a good amount of the story focuses on her whenever Gordon isn't the (Free)man of the hour. Alyx saves Gordon in Chapter 5 when the Resistance base gets wrecked, Gordon and Alyx work together to invade Nova Prospekt in Chapter 9a, Alyx is there to learn the truth of Judith actually working with the Combine (honestly wasn't really expecting that twist myself) in Chapter 9a as well as being the one to interrogate Judith (in that same chapter Alyx is also the one to get the teleporter working to take her and Gordon to Dr. Kleiner), Alyx and Gordon get through parts of the hectic warzone at City 17 with the help of Resistance soldiers and she goes off on her own while Gordon goes to fight with Barney and his troops, and Alyx is used as a bargaining chip by Dr. Breen in the final Chapter in his attempt to convince Eli to make the Resistance surrender. Speaking of which, that part was really good; having a direct confrontation with the man himself after only having seen him on TV screens prattling on with constant platitudes was cool. Dr. Breen is a compelling villain: his goals are somewhat understandable when taken at face value, since he works with the Combine to prevent them from destroying the planet, but he is still clearly a villain. Dr. Breen wants to silence differing opinions so that he can continue to prosper in his position as a frontman of a totalitarian faction of aliens. The only reason he is the leader of the Combine is because he sucks up to the alien forces. He is a very "the ends justify the means" kind of villain, except he also has no good intentions. Overall I think both the story and characters of Half-Life 2 are good, although some are obviously better and more important than others. Eli had little to no screen-time, but he also got kidnapped for the whole game after Chapter 5 so I can excuse that. Dr. Kleiner only appeared two times, but he was also only ever needed those two times so I can understand it. Barney is another character you meet in Chapter 5 and don't see again until way later in the game. The focal characters of this story are Gordon, Alyx, and Dr. Breen, and that's fine. The last thing I want to say about this game's story and characters is...pretty much everything about the G-Man. I feel like he's only present in these games to Deus Ex Machina us out of a bind and be blatant sequel bait. For context, this game ends with G-Man stopping time right when an explosion happens after Gordon destroys the machine Dr. Breen is using to teleport to another universe. The G-Man transports you to a universe of nothingness, monologues about having plans in store for you, then a white space in the dimension of darkness opens and he leaves. This isn't too much different from Half-Life's ending, where the G-Man transports you all throughout Xen to explain to you his plan and offer you a job with his "employers" (whoever they may be). Hopefully Episode One and Episode Two reveals more about The G-Man and who exactly the "Benefactors" that Dr. Breen referred to are; in this game's ending he mentions something about being used as a host, so that'll be interesting to see.
The core gameplay of Half-Life 2 is very similar to Half-Life, which was already solid to begin with so I have no complaints there. Go through some pretty well-designed linear chapters, each with their own dedicated level areas, and figure out the ways to progress. Sometimes you gotta use your brain to think of how to get past some kind of obstacle to progress, sometimes you have a bunch of enemies to obliterate, sometimes you just have to follow NPCs and listen to them talk in scripted sequences. There's also some very minor platforming you can do in some chapters, typically just to find some extra goodies. As you progress, you naturally find new weapons to add to your arsenal of artillery. Most of your weapons in Half-Life 2 return from the first Half-Life: you got your standard crowbar, pistol, SMG, Magnum, shotgun, crossbow, and RPG. The weapons from Half-Life that don't return in Half-Life 2 are the Gluon Gun, Hivehand, Snarks, satchel bombs, and claymores. The Tau Cannon is technically still in the game but it is not usable as a solo weapon anymore since it's attached to a vehicle instead. There's a decent amount of weapons that were taken away, but this sequel helps make up for it by giving you some new tools to play around with. Perhaps the most notable one is the Gravity Gun, which has become one of the most iconic weapons of the series and is quite fun to mess around with. The Gravity Gun makes it to where you can use the debris and objects in your area to your advantage, which is very useful for conserving ammo. It isn't exactly the most reliable weapon in my opinion, since I find that its pretty easy to run out of items to toss at enemies or make the mistake of overshooting which would force you to go run past enemies to pick the object up again. The Gravity Gun can make for some amusing kills since you can kill Combine officers and zombies with some random cardboard boxes you found lying around. It's a creative weapon for sure and I'm glad its here, even if I tend to prefer just blasting away my foes the old fashioned way. Aside from the Gravity Gun, Half-Life 2 also introduces the Plasma Rifle and Bugbait. The Bugbait in particular is a pretty fun new tool you get that lets you have a personal army of infinitely respawning Antlions (basically human-sized insect monsters) to kill enemies for you, but you only get to use it in Chapter 8 and Chapter 9. Suffice to say, all of this artillery is pretty nice to have, and the game is fair with ammo so you won't need to worry about running out of firepower. Also, the feeling of shooting and gunplay itself is amazing, with my only real complaint being how awkward it can be to control the RPG rockets. When you fight gunships and Striders, you have to use the RPG rockets, and, although the battles against these vehicle bosses are cool, the awkwardness of having to move the rockets in a way where the ships don't shoot it down while still having enough precision to actually land the shot is unfortunately a big blemish on the experience for me. Also, the vehicle controls in this game felt pretty off to me, but I've never been good at driving in video games anyway so that's probably the reason why. As for the level design itself, I think its great. I already admitted to using guides a lot in a previous paragraph, but I don't think that's a point against this game; its more so just me not being good at figuring out how to progress (and I've stated this before in a few other reviews I made). At the end of the day, Half-Life 2's gameplay isn't the greatest of its craft in my opinion, but it is solid and I think its the best aspect of the game.
Overall, I think Half-Life 2 is a good game and a good step-up from the first game as far as presentation and story goes. I think that both games have plenty of merit and its definitely worthwhile to play both of them, but if I had to pick which one I think is better, I'd go with Half-Life 2. It gets a solid 4 stars from me. Here's hoping I like Episode One and Episode Two once I get to them. As far as I know, Lost Coast isn't necessary, so I'm skipping that.
Something I found interesting about the shift from Half-Life to Half-Life 2 is the general change in atmosphere. In the first Half-Life, I felt most of its levels had you going through dark abandoned areas as you traverse through worn down laboratories, military bases, and eventually the strange alien planet of Xen. There were a few levels that had some actual sunlight and let you see the outside world (honestly some levels felt brighter than they probably should have been in my opinion), but I feel that the essence of Half-Life is defined by all its dreary and dirty environments whereas Half-Life 2 generally feels more bright and clean in comparison. There are definitely areas in Half-Life 2 that carry that same dark ugly vibe as the levels in Half-Life, but not quite as much in my opinion. In Half-Life, you rarely saw friendly NPCs around, and when they do pop up they tend to either die or just be used to progress and move on (plus they often commented on the dire situation adding to some suspense and dread). In Half-Life 2, there are more friends around this time to help you out, like the Resistance members you meet along the way that tell you where to go or give you goodies (supplies, the airboat for Chapter 4, the firearm upgrade to that airboat, the scout car, etc.). Alyx, Dr. Kleiner, Eli, and Barney are all companions of yours that are present at various parts of Half-Life 2, while Half-Life did not have any consistent companions. The Vortigaunts that you slaughtered in droves in Half-Life are friendly to you in this game, too, although you may have gathered from my introduction paragraph that I love the change (and it makes sense in the lore). Also, this is a minor detail, but I don't think you can kill any of the friendly NPCs in Half-Life 2, whereas in the first Half-Life you could kill all your allies if you really wanted to. Even in Ravenholm, which is probably the creepiest place in the game, you have Father Grigori helping you out at certain parts of the chapter. It kind of destroys that feeling of lonely dread I felt the first game pulled off so well, but I will say I still like what Half-Life 2 does with its atmosphere. The world you live in is an Orwellian dystopia from the beginning of the game to the end. You are chased down by the Combine sort of like how the Marines were a constant threat in Half-Life. The story often shows just how fascist the Combine are through showing you the propaganda they use and the way they brutalize and interrogate anyone they perceive as being against them. Their leader, Dr. Breen, often shows his nefarious face on screens to spout out anti-freedom or anti-intellectual propaganda. He was a pretty interesting villain honestly, you get to hear a few different speeches from him in the game. I think this game really nails that feeling of enemies being around every corner; Gordon is basically an enemy of the state and you really feel that after Chapter 1. There's a full on war going on in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 which was really cool to fight your way through. All of this is to say that, although Half-Life 2's atmosphere feels quite different from Half-Life, I think it still does a great job with what it is going for. For instance, striving for a grander narrative with this game in comparison to Half-Life made a lot of sense in my opinion.
The story and characters of Half-Life 2 seem to be given much more focus than in Half-Life. The most you got in the previous game was hints at the wider world of this series through talking with the few NPCs you find and there were no real characters to speak of. There are interesting theories crafted using the cool bits of lore given in Half-Life, like how the strange dialogue of the Nihilanth is still being dissected by fans to this day, but I never got the sense of a big story to connect everything together. That kinda shows with how this game retcons some things, but they are pretty minor at the end of the day. It's just details like Eli and Barney acting all chummy with you, talking about their personal history with Gordon even though they weren't even there in Half-Life. I do hear that was expanded upon a little with Barney being playable in one of the Half-Life expansions, but I didn't play those so I don't know what their stories were. I find that Half-Life 2 has more explicit exposition, with a narrative that has actual characters with names that you get to see talk a lot and do things in the story. Gordon Freeman is still very obviously the most important guy in the room despite not saying a word - don't worry, you'll hear nothing but praise from every character in the game that isn't a villain - but he is no longer the only person that matters. As for the general story itself, I thought it was pretty good. Basically, when you first start the game, your goal is to get off the train into City 17, where you then leave to begin your journey to take down the Combine. You go on a trek to various Resistance bases, then through the Combine's strongholds like Nova Prospekt, then you go back to City 17 to fight an intense battle with your comrades to get to the Capital, and finally the game ends with you getting into the Capital through an underground passageway to confront Dr. Wallace Breen. You meet Eli Vance, Alyx Vance, Dr. Isaac Kleiner, and Judith Mossman - four important figureheads of the Resistance that help you out - in Chapter 5, which is a short Chapter that is almost entirely focused on exposition. Alyx is the most important character outside of Gordon and a good amount of the story focuses on her whenever Gordon isn't the (Free)man of the hour. Alyx saves Gordon in Chapter 5 when the Resistance base gets wrecked, Gordon and Alyx work together to invade Nova Prospekt in Chapter 9a, Alyx is there to learn the truth of Judith actually working with the Combine (honestly wasn't really expecting that twist myself) in Chapter 9a as well as being the one to interrogate Judith (in that same chapter Alyx is also the one to get the teleporter working to take her and Gordon to Dr. Kleiner), Alyx and Gordon get through parts of the hectic warzone at City 17 with the help of Resistance soldiers and she goes off on her own while Gordon goes to fight with Barney and his troops, and Alyx is used as a bargaining chip by Dr. Breen in the final Chapter in his attempt to convince Eli to make the Resistance surrender. Speaking of which, that part was really good; having a direct confrontation with the man himself after only having seen him on TV screens prattling on with constant platitudes was cool. Dr. Breen is a compelling villain: his goals are somewhat understandable when taken at face value, since he works with the Combine to prevent them from destroying the planet, but he is still clearly a villain. Dr. Breen wants to silence differing opinions so that he can continue to prosper in his position as a frontman of a totalitarian faction of aliens. The only reason he is the leader of the Combine is because he sucks up to the alien forces. He is a very "the ends justify the means" kind of villain, except he also has no good intentions. Overall I think both the story and characters of Half-Life 2 are good, although some are obviously better and more important than others. Eli had little to no screen-time, but he also got kidnapped for the whole game after Chapter 5 so I can excuse that. Dr. Kleiner only appeared two times, but he was also only ever needed those two times so I can understand it. Barney is another character you meet in Chapter 5 and don't see again until way later in the game. The focal characters of this story are Gordon, Alyx, and Dr. Breen, and that's fine. The last thing I want to say about this game's story and characters is...pretty much everything about the G-Man. I feel like he's only present in these games to Deus Ex Machina us out of a bind and be blatant sequel bait. For context, this game ends with G-Man stopping time right when an explosion happens after Gordon destroys the machine Dr. Breen is using to teleport to another universe. The G-Man transports you to a universe of nothingness, monologues about having plans in store for you, then a white space in the dimension of darkness opens and he leaves. This isn't too much different from Half-Life's ending, where the G-Man transports you all throughout Xen to explain to you his plan and offer you a job with his "employers" (whoever they may be). Hopefully Episode One and Episode Two reveals more about The G-Man and who exactly the "Benefactors" that Dr. Breen referred to are; in this game's ending he mentions something about being used as a host, so that'll be interesting to see.
The core gameplay of Half-Life 2 is very similar to Half-Life, which was already solid to begin with so I have no complaints there. Go through some pretty well-designed linear chapters, each with their own dedicated level areas, and figure out the ways to progress. Sometimes you gotta use your brain to think of how to get past some kind of obstacle to progress, sometimes you have a bunch of enemies to obliterate, sometimes you just have to follow NPCs and listen to them talk in scripted sequences. There's also some very minor platforming you can do in some chapters, typically just to find some extra goodies. As you progress, you naturally find new weapons to add to your arsenal of artillery. Most of your weapons in Half-Life 2 return from the first Half-Life: you got your standard crowbar, pistol, SMG, Magnum, shotgun, crossbow, and RPG. The weapons from Half-Life that don't return in Half-Life 2 are the Gluon Gun, Hivehand, Snarks, satchel bombs, and claymores. The Tau Cannon is technically still in the game but it is not usable as a solo weapon anymore since it's attached to a vehicle instead. There's a decent amount of weapons that were taken away, but this sequel helps make up for it by giving you some new tools to play around with. Perhaps the most notable one is the Gravity Gun, which has become one of the most iconic weapons of the series and is quite fun to mess around with. The Gravity Gun makes it to where you can use the debris and objects in your area to your advantage, which is very useful for conserving ammo. It isn't exactly the most reliable weapon in my opinion, since I find that its pretty easy to run out of items to toss at enemies or make the mistake of overshooting which would force you to go run past enemies to pick the object up again. The Gravity Gun can make for some amusing kills since you can kill Combine officers and zombies with some random cardboard boxes you found lying around. It's a creative weapon for sure and I'm glad its here, even if I tend to prefer just blasting away my foes the old fashioned way. Aside from the Gravity Gun, Half-Life 2 also introduces the Plasma Rifle and Bugbait. The Bugbait in particular is a pretty fun new tool you get that lets you have a personal army of infinitely respawning Antlions (basically human-sized insect monsters) to kill enemies for you, but you only get to use it in Chapter 8 and Chapter 9. Suffice to say, all of this artillery is pretty nice to have, and the game is fair with ammo so you won't need to worry about running out of firepower. Also, the feeling of shooting and gunplay itself is amazing, with my only real complaint being how awkward it can be to control the RPG rockets. When you fight gunships and Striders, you have to use the RPG rockets, and, although the battles against these vehicle bosses are cool, the awkwardness of having to move the rockets in a way where the ships don't shoot it down while still having enough precision to actually land the shot is unfortunately a big blemish on the experience for me. Also, the vehicle controls in this game felt pretty off to me, but I've never been good at driving in video games anyway so that's probably the reason why. As for the level design itself, I think its great. I already admitted to using guides a lot in a previous paragraph, but I don't think that's a point against this game; its more so just me not being good at figuring out how to progress (and I've stated this before in a few other reviews I made). At the end of the day, Half-Life 2's gameplay isn't the greatest of its craft in my opinion, but it is solid and I think its the best aspect of the game.
Overall, I think Half-Life 2 is a good game and a good step-up from the first game as far as presentation and story goes. I think that both games have plenty of merit and its definitely worthwhile to play both of them, but if I had to pick which one I think is better, I'd go with Half-Life 2. It gets a solid 4 stars from me. Here's hoping I like Episode One and Episode Two once I get to them. As far as I know, Lost Coast isn't necessary, so I'm skipping that.
This review contains spoilers
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 is pretty much just more Half-Life 2, so I won't have as much to say about it than other games I've been reviewing recently. It was a solid time, though, and I'm kinda glad it was on the short side.
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 takes place right after Half-Life 2 ended. Gordon and Alyx are saved by some form of mysterious miracle; you see a bunch of purple Vortigaunts appear as well as the G-Man, then next thing you know you wake up covered in rubble and debris. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, the duo focus on getting back into the Citadel to contain the huge energy core. When they try to escape via Combine train, an accident happens that makes the train crash. Once he saves Alyx and continues on, this starts Chapter 3, which sees them going through a very dark subway area to reach City 17. In Chapter 4, they leave the subway and make their way through City 17 (which is a very big place honestly), which then leads into Chapter 5 where Gordon, Alyx, and Barney work together to escort the remaining Resistance troops to a train that the group plans on escaping in. Chapter 5 ends with the Citadel making a massive explosion as you drive on the train and you get caught up in a mysterious blue light...roll credits. The way I describe it makes the story seem very boring, but it is still pretty engaging. I liked that there were some entertaining character moments here, they had good opportunities to talk and show their personality a little more. Alyx is present with you throughout almost the entire game with only a few sections where she isn't there, so naturally she gets a spotlight. Dr. Kleiner has a big speech that plays all throughout City 17 during Chapter 4 and you get to see more of how much of a socially awkward silly guy he is. Barney's as much of a wisecrack as ever. D0G is a cute little robot that almost seems sentient, though unfortunately Alyx had to leave him behind in Chapter 1 and he isn't seen again even at the end of the game. Overall, I don't think the story of Half-Life 2 Episode One is all that special, but it serves as a good companion piece to Half-Life 2 despite being so short. I would prefer if it didn't get yet another sequel bait ending, but I suppose that's par for the course with this series. I'm curious to see if they do that yet again with Episode Two when I get to it considering how many people have been clamoring for Half-Life 3.
Gameplay wise, Episode One is exactly the same as Half-Life 2. Hey, no need to reinvent the wheel, I'm completely fine with that. However, this game does still manage to stand out through a few ways. For one, the way the game is structured feels more contained, with little room for exploration and a whole bunch of scripted sequences. The Chapters generally feel more streamlined and linear, but in my opinion this is actually pretty nice since it makes for a brisk game flow. The fact that I barely had to use guides here in comparison to my Half-Life and Half-Life 2 playthroughs should go to show how straightforward Episode One is in comparison. The game does introduce you to one new enemy type - the Zombine, as Alyx jokingly calls it - which is a nice little touch to give it some more individuality.
I think this game is pretty alright overall, but doesn't add or improve on enough for me to rank it any higher than Half-Life 2. Gets a solid 4 stars from me.
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 takes place right after Half-Life 2 ended. Gordon and Alyx are saved by some form of mysterious miracle; you see a bunch of purple Vortigaunts appear as well as the G-Man, then next thing you know you wake up covered in rubble and debris. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, the duo focus on getting back into the Citadel to contain the huge energy core. When they try to escape via Combine train, an accident happens that makes the train crash. Once he saves Alyx and continues on, this starts Chapter 3, which sees them going through a very dark subway area to reach City 17. In Chapter 4, they leave the subway and make their way through City 17 (which is a very big place honestly), which then leads into Chapter 5 where Gordon, Alyx, and Barney work together to escort the remaining Resistance troops to a train that the group plans on escaping in. Chapter 5 ends with the Citadel making a massive explosion as you drive on the train and you get caught up in a mysterious blue light...roll credits. The way I describe it makes the story seem very boring, but it is still pretty engaging. I liked that there were some entertaining character moments here, they had good opportunities to talk and show their personality a little more. Alyx is present with you throughout almost the entire game with only a few sections where she isn't there, so naturally she gets a spotlight. Dr. Kleiner has a big speech that plays all throughout City 17 during Chapter 4 and you get to see more of how much of a socially awkward silly guy he is. Barney's as much of a wisecrack as ever. D0G is a cute little robot that almost seems sentient, though unfortunately Alyx had to leave him behind in Chapter 1 and he isn't seen again even at the end of the game. Overall, I don't think the story of Half-Life 2 Episode One is all that special, but it serves as a good companion piece to Half-Life 2 despite being so short. I would prefer if it didn't get yet another sequel bait ending, but I suppose that's par for the course with this series. I'm curious to see if they do that yet again with Episode Two when I get to it considering how many people have been clamoring for Half-Life 3.
Gameplay wise, Episode One is exactly the same as Half-Life 2. Hey, no need to reinvent the wheel, I'm completely fine with that. However, this game does still manage to stand out through a few ways. For one, the way the game is structured feels more contained, with little room for exploration and a whole bunch of scripted sequences. The Chapters generally feel more streamlined and linear, but in my opinion this is actually pretty nice since it makes for a brisk game flow. The fact that I barely had to use guides here in comparison to my Half-Life and Half-Life 2 playthroughs should go to show how straightforward Episode One is in comparison. The game does introduce you to one new enemy type - the Zombine, as Alyx jokingly calls it - which is a nice little touch to give it some more individuality.
I think this game is pretty alright overall, but doesn't add or improve on enough for me to rank it any higher than Half-Life 2. Gets a solid 4 stars from me.
So, Donkey Kong Country Returns has always been the one game in the series I never beat, whether it be the initial release on the Wii or the 3DS version. I'm not entirely sure why, I think I just never really felt compelled to. It doesn't help that Donkey Kong Country Returns suffers from "Wii-itis" by having forced motion control gimmicks, which is actually a big reason why I chose this 3DS version to play instead of the original. Despite loving all the Donkey Kong Country games - even Tropical Freeze - something about Returns just doesn't grip me in quite the same way. Nonetheless, I'm glad I went to beat this game. It was a good time overall and a Donkey Kong Country game is pretty much always going to be a good game. If you ever feel the itch to play Donkey Kong Country Returns, I highly recommend picking up this 3DS version instead while its still available if you're alright with a graphical downgrade. It's only $20 and its more than worth picking up in my opinion.
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D's gameplay has a certain frantic, fast-paced sense of flow to it, which makes the whole experience feel excellent. That feeling of high energy is most present in the Rocket Barrel and Mine Cart levels, which are frustrating but also very exhilarating for their breakneck pace and relatively limited control that requires quick precise reflexes. For the most part, Returns carries the spirit of the original trilogy's design, but it feels a lot different due to some key differences. I feel that the most noticeable change is how the physics are handled. There's a very apparent weight to Donkey Kong's jumps and fall speed that aren't present in the originals, which I think was an interesting decision to make. It makes sense considering how DK is supposed to be a big dude and it does feel nice once you get used to it, but it takes a bit to get accustomed to if you're expecting this to feel the same as the originals. Speaking of Donkey Kong, in this game you control only him and not Diddy or Dixie. Dixie unfortunately got ditched entirely in this game and Diddy is only here as a glorified jetpack unless you're playing multiplayer. In some ways, I get why this decision was made; its meant to mirror how the first game was, where there's only Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, plus they wanted to place more emphasis on Donkey Kong. I'll give them that, it is pretty silly that the series named DONKEY KONG Country only has one game out of the classic trilogy where he is playable. I can see why they may have wanted to avoid this happening again, but is there really no way we couldn't have had the classic tag team style in the game somewhere without needing a buddy to play with? I think this is unfortunate, but I can still understand why they did this. Probably the third biggest change is the heart system. In the original trilogy, when you got hit, you just immediately die unless your partner was alive. In Returns, you start with two hearts that deplete one by one whenever you get hit (unless you fall into a pit or touch lava, which is always instant death). You also get a few extra hearts whenever you pop open a DK Barrel. Some other notable changes include the fact that multiplayer now has players control both Kongs independently, the addition of an Item Shop, unlockable stages opened through buying a key from the Item Shop, special "K Levels" earned by finding all the K-O-N-G letters in every level of a world, a gimmicky blow move that interacts with certain objects or enemies in the environment of a level (I will say they did find some cool uses for it but its generally just not all that fun to use), and letting you beat the shit out of a boss after fighting it. That last feature in particular is fun to do, especially if its a boss that frustrated you.
As far as difficulty goes, WOW this game kicked my ass so much. I say this as someone who can get through all the SNES Donkey Kong Country games without dying much. As annoying as it is that this game has the whole Super Kong thing, where essentially an AI comes in to beat the game for you if you accept the prompt (and the game loves to remind you of Super Kong if you die too many times), I can sorta see why they did this considering just how tough this game gets. Some of these levels and bosses are so much harder than anything from the SNES games and Tropical Freeze. However, it still felt very doable and none of the difficulty felt cheaply done. Whenever you're really struggling, you've likely grabbed enough Banana Coins to buy a bunch of lives from Cranky Kong anyway, so you'll pretty much never get a game over. I was just really surprised coming into this game and getting whooped. I thought it'd be easy considering I can beat Tropical Freeze and the original trilogy with little difficulty.
Everything about the design of Donkey Kong Country Returns is excellent, but, unfortunately, I find it doesn't really match the highs of the original trilogy or Tropical Freeze. That's not to discount its many positives, though. The music is a little disappointing in that it features too many remixes for my liking, but its still a stellar addition. For instance, the two different themes for the Rocket Barrel levels are easily some of my favorite songs in the entire series. Visually, Donkey Kong Country Returns goes for a much more expressly cartoony style, which I think suits it well. This decision helps it stand out from the original trilogy, which was still cartoony but focused a lot on blending that whimsical feeling with the realism (at the time) of pre-rendered 3D graphics. That worked great for those games, but Donkey Kong Country Returns needed to do something different visually to stand out. The style also helps prevent it from looking like garbage on the notably underpowered Wii, which also applies to this 3DS version I chose to play. Everything about this game's visuals, sounds, and overall design works well. Clearly, Nintendo and Retro Studios liked this new style for Donkey Kong Country Returns, since the sequel of Returns - Tropical Freeze - takes this style and improves on it even further.
Overall, Donkey Kong Country Returns is a great game with a lot of positives to it. I have my gripes with it and I just can't help but find it less interesting than the other games of the Donkey Kong Country series for one reason or the other, but that's not to discount its quality. Retro Studios knew what they were doing here and I'm so glad they made an amazing reboot for this series I hold near and dear to my heart. Donkey Kong Country Returns gets a solid 4 and a half stars from me.
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D's gameplay has a certain frantic, fast-paced sense of flow to it, which makes the whole experience feel excellent. That feeling of high energy is most present in the Rocket Barrel and Mine Cart levels, which are frustrating but also very exhilarating for their breakneck pace and relatively limited control that requires quick precise reflexes. For the most part, Returns carries the spirit of the original trilogy's design, but it feels a lot different due to some key differences. I feel that the most noticeable change is how the physics are handled. There's a very apparent weight to Donkey Kong's jumps and fall speed that aren't present in the originals, which I think was an interesting decision to make. It makes sense considering how DK is supposed to be a big dude and it does feel nice once you get used to it, but it takes a bit to get accustomed to if you're expecting this to feel the same as the originals. Speaking of Donkey Kong, in this game you control only him and not Diddy or Dixie. Dixie unfortunately got ditched entirely in this game and Diddy is only here as a glorified jetpack unless you're playing multiplayer. In some ways, I get why this decision was made; its meant to mirror how the first game was, where there's only Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, plus they wanted to place more emphasis on Donkey Kong. I'll give them that, it is pretty silly that the series named DONKEY KONG Country only has one game out of the classic trilogy where he is playable. I can see why they may have wanted to avoid this happening again, but is there really no way we couldn't have had the classic tag team style in the game somewhere without needing a buddy to play with? I think this is unfortunate, but I can still understand why they did this. Probably the third biggest change is the heart system. In the original trilogy, when you got hit, you just immediately die unless your partner was alive. In Returns, you start with two hearts that deplete one by one whenever you get hit (unless you fall into a pit or touch lava, which is always instant death). You also get a few extra hearts whenever you pop open a DK Barrel. Some other notable changes include the fact that multiplayer now has players control both Kongs independently, the addition of an Item Shop, unlockable stages opened through buying a key from the Item Shop, special "K Levels" earned by finding all the K-O-N-G letters in every level of a world, a gimmicky blow move that interacts with certain objects or enemies in the environment of a level (I will say they did find some cool uses for it but its generally just not all that fun to use), and letting you beat the shit out of a boss after fighting it. That last feature in particular is fun to do, especially if its a boss that frustrated you.
As far as difficulty goes, WOW this game kicked my ass so much. I say this as someone who can get through all the SNES Donkey Kong Country games without dying much. As annoying as it is that this game has the whole Super Kong thing, where essentially an AI comes in to beat the game for you if you accept the prompt (and the game loves to remind you of Super Kong if you die too many times), I can sorta see why they did this considering just how tough this game gets. Some of these levels and bosses are so much harder than anything from the SNES games and Tropical Freeze. However, it still felt very doable and none of the difficulty felt cheaply done. Whenever you're really struggling, you've likely grabbed enough Banana Coins to buy a bunch of lives from Cranky Kong anyway, so you'll pretty much never get a game over. I was just really surprised coming into this game and getting whooped. I thought it'd be easy considering I can beat Tropical Freeze and the original trilogy with little difficulty.
Everything about the design of Donkey Kong Country Returns is excellent, but, unfortunately, I find it doesn't really match the highs of the original trilogy or Tropical Freeze. That's not to discount its many positives, though. The music is a little disappointing in that it features too many remixes for my liking, but its still a stellar addition. For instance, the two different themes for the Rocket Barrel levels are easily some of my favorite songs in the entire series. Visually, Donkey Kong Country Returns goes for a much more expressly cartoony style, which I think suits it well. This decision helps it stand out from the original trilogy, which was still cartoony but focused a lot on blending that whimsical feeling with the realism (at the time) of pre-rendered 3D graphics. That worked great for those games, but Donkey Kong Country Returns needed to do something different visually to stand out. The style also helps prevent it from looking like garbage on the notably underpowered Wii, which also applies to this 3DS version I chose to play. Everything about this game's visuals, sounds, and overall design works well. Clearly, Nintendo and Retro Studios liked this new style for Donkey Kong Country Returns, since the sequel of Returns - Tropical Freeze - takes this style and improves on it even further.
Overall, Donkey Kong Country Returns is a great game with a lot of positives to it. I have my gripes with it and I just can't help but find it less interesting than the other games of the Donkey Kong Country series for one reason or the other, but that's not to discount its quality. Retro Studios knew what they were doing here and I'm so glad they made an amazing reboot for this series I hold near and dear to my heart. Donkey Kong Country Returns gets a solid 4 and a half stars from me.
This review contains spoilers
So, I've finally finished what we currently have of the Half-Life saga (except for Half-Life Alyx but I've never been a VR guy so I probably won't play that). It's been a great journey overall, I find these games aren't THAT special looking at it from a modern eye but they're still very solid games and I can see how they've become so revolutionary to the gaming industry. Half-Life 2 Episode 2 makes for an interesting conclusion to the series that's almost very satisfactory...well, until they just had to throw in yet ANOTHER sequel bait ending. I've complained about this in pretty much all my Half-Life reviews but I really hate that they keep doing that, especially since this game came out in 2007 and there's no follow-up in sight.
The story of Half-Life 2 Episode 2 is the main point of its existence in my opinion. This game serves as a culmination of everything in the series so far. You start out pretty much right where Episode 1 left off, since you're in the train that got wrecked during the very end of that episode. Presumably this was another case where you survived because of G-Man's mysterious plans. From there, your mission is to get to the Resistance's main base in one piece so Alyx can hand over the USB with a recording of Dr. Mossman to the good folks at the Resistance. Plenty of diversions and setbacks happen in your long trek to the base. I prattle on long enough in these reviews so I might as well keep the story synopsis short; basically, once you actually get to the base in the beginning of Chapter 6, the Resistance has one last plan up their sleeves to send the Combine packing. Dr. Kleiner and Dr. Magnusson (he's new to this game) have a rocket they're building that the Resistance plans to shoot straight into the massive field of energy the Citadel's dark energy generator created that has been active since Episode 1 and was activated at the very end of Half-Life 2. Huzzah, it works out. Some details I really like about this story is that we finally get to learn more about the G-Man rather than him just being the guy that always shows up at the end to tease sequels. It was cool seeing that cutscene where you can actually get a view of his office, for example, rather than the empty void dimension he always seems to take the player into. He seems to have direct control of Alyx and Gordon, which is finally shown in a clear cut way in this game that shows it is unmistakably true (in the previous games they treat it with a lot of mystique and vagueness but here its for sure his influence) when he shows up on a screen in Chapter 6 to make Alyx say "Prepare for unforeseen circumstances." Of course, this is a classic phrase to the Half-Life series that Eli elaborates more on the significance of to Gordon. Its rather interesting how Eli is the only one that seems to be aware of G-Man's true power - that same moment in Chapter 6 shows the extent of his knowledge - and he's also the only character to die. I believe its meant to be assumed that its on purpose that he got killed since he knows too much; he says to Gordon that he thinks the G-Man has something to do with the Borealis (although we don't get to see evidence of that in this game, it also doesn't really offer a counter explanation). Unfortunately the game's ending is incredibly lame, and now that I've seen it I can see why so many people clamor for an Episode 3 or a straight up Half-Life 3. Everything seems all well and good, you're about to take off on a chopper...then aliens come out of nowhere to kill Eli. Alyx and Gordon get knocked away, he's too stunned to move, and Alyx has to watch her dad die. Then the game literally just ends right at that moment. At this point, sequel bait endings are just to be expected for every Half-Life game, but man this one especially sucks. I was almost tempted to rate the game 3.5 stars instead of the usual 4 stars just because of this, but I don't think that's fair to how solid this is overall.
Some other more minor stuff I liked about the story include the fact that the Vortigaunt lore is expanded upon further. We get to see more of the Vortessence and see more of how the alien species functions. Of course, I already established before how much I really like the Vortigaunts, so I was glad to see that. Gordon and Alyx even get their life essence tied together with the help of the Vortigaunts to save Alyx's life (of course no one believed for a second that she was actually dead when the game had only just begun). Also, Uriah is a Vortigaunt with a lab coat, and I love that. Probably the final thing of note about this game's story to me is that there's one new character called Dr. Magnusson, who I mentioned before. He's an uptight cranky scientist working with Dr. Kleiner who spends most of the game being stressed out of his mind. I could be wrong but I don't recall him being in Half-Life, Half Life 2, or Episode 1. He's a nice new addition, being the typical "stern old man" type of character that I can get some amusement out of. Dr. Magnusson and Dr. Kleiner make for a fun duo since they're both so different in personality, which seems to have been part of the intention. His cynical edge helps round out the more positive attitudes every other major character of the game has and he's the one character that doesn't worship the ground you stand on. Also, there's a part of this game where Aperture Science from the Portal series is directly talked about...it kinda came out of nowhere, to be honest. I didn't know Portal is canon to Half-Life so I might have missed out by skipping playing those games first, I had no idea what the Borealis even was so I didn't know its importance when it was brought up.
Oh yea, I should mention the gameplay. This paragraph isn't going to be very long because I don't want to just be repeating my previous reviews. Half-Life 2 Episode 2's gameplay is really good, but it changed basically nothing from Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2 Episode 1. The only core gameplay thing I can think of that it changed is the fact that the flashlight now drains its own dedicated power source rather than using up your regular energy source (used for things like sprinting and breathing underwater), which is nice but makes me wonder why that wasn't a thing in the previous games. There is also one more new enemy, the Hunter, which is a Combine machine that kinda looks like a mini Strider made up of the same kind of tech the regular Combine troops are made of. It's a tough enemy to take down for sure and makes for a good addition to the Half-Life "rogue's gallery", if you will.
Overall, this game's ending was a rather disappointing end to the Half-Life saga, but I think its just as solid as Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Half-Life 2 Episode 1. We'll see if I end up playing Half-Life Alyx, although I really don't think I will. This game gets 4 stars from me, which is the same score I gave the other Half-Life games.
The story of Half-Life 2 Episode 2 is the main point of its existence in my opinion. This game serves as a culmination of everything in the series so far. You start out pretty much right where Episode 1 left off, since you're in the train that got wrecked during the very end of that episode. Presumably this was another case where you survived because of G-Man's mysterious plans. From there, your mission is to get to the Resistance's main base in one piece so Alyx can hand over the USB with a recording of Dr. Mossman to the good folks at the Resistance. Plenty of diversions and setbacks happen in your long trek to the base. I prattle on long enough in these reviews so I might as well keep the story synopsis short; basically, once you actually get to the base in the beginning of Chapter 6, the Resistance has one last plan up their sleeves to send the Combine packing. Dr. Kleiner and Dr. Magnusson (he's new to this game) have a rocket they're building that the Resistance plans to shoot straight into the massive field of energy the Citadel's dark energy generator created that has been active since Episode 1 and was activated at the very end of Half-Life 2. Huzzah, it works out. Some details I really like about this story is that we finally get to learn more about the G-Man rather than him just being the guy that always shows up at the end to tease sequels. It was cool seeing that cutscene where you can actually get a view of his office, for example, rather than the empty void dimension he always seems to take the player into. He seems to have direct control of Alyx and Gordon, which is finally shown in a clear cut way in this game that shows it is unmistakably true (in the previous games they treat it with a lot of mystique and vagueness but here its for sure his influence) when he shows up on a screen in Chapter 6 to make Alyx say "Prepare for unforeseen circumstances." Of course, this is a classic phrase to the Half-Life series that Eli elaborates more on the significance of to Gordon. Its rather interesting how Eli is the only one that seems to be aware of G-Man's true power - that same moment in Chapter 6 shows the extent of his knowledge - and he's also the only character to die. I believe its meant to be assumed that its on purpose that he got killed since he knows too much; he says to Gordon that he thinks the G-Man has something to do with the Borealis (although we don't get to see evidence of that in this game, it also doesn't really offer a counter explanation). Unfortunately the game's ending is incredibly lame, and now that I've seen it I can see why so many people clamor for an Episode 3 or a straight up Half-Life 3. Everything seems all well and good, you're about to take off on a chopper...then aliens come out of nowhere to kill Eli. Alyx and Gordon get knocked away, he's too stunned to move, and Alyx has to watch her dad die. Then the game literally just ends right at that moment. At this point, sequel bait endings are just to be expected for every Half-Life game, but man this one especially sucks. I was almost tempted to rate the game 3.5 stars instead of the usual 4 stars just because of this, but I don't think that's fair to how solid this is overall.
Some other more minor stuff I liked about the story include the fact that the Vortigaunt lore is expanded upon further. We get to see more of the Vortessence and see more of how the alien species functions. Of course, I already established before how much I really like the Vortigaunts, so I was glad to see that. Gordon and Alyx even get their life essence tied together with the help of the Vortigaunts to save Alyx's life (of course no one believed for a second that she was actually dead when the game had only just begun). Also, Uriah is a Vortigaunt with a lab coat, and I love that. Probably the final thing of note about this game's story to me is that there's one new character called Dr. Magnusson, who I mentioned before. He's an uptight cranky scientist working with Dr. Kleiner who spends most of the game being stressed out of his mind. I could be wrong but I don't recall him being in Half-Life, Half Life 2, or Episode 1. He's a nice new addition, being the typical "stern old man" type of character that I can get some amusement out of. Dr. Magnusson and Dr. Kleiner make for a fun duo since they're both so different in personality, which seems to have been part of the intention. His cynical edge helps round out the more positive attitudes every other major character of the game has and he's the one character that doesn't worship the ground you stand on. Also, there's a part of this game where Aperture Science from the Portal series is directly talked about...it kinda came out of nowhere, to be honest. I didn't know Portal is canon to Half-Life so I might have missed out by skipping playing those games first, I had no idea what the Borealis even was so I didn't know its importance when it was brought up.
Oh yea, I should mention the gameplay. This paragraph isn't going to be very long because I don't want to just be repeating my previous reviews. Half-Life 2 Episode 2's gameplay is really good, but it changed basically nothing from Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2 Episode 1. The only core gameplay thing I can think of that it changed is the fact that the flashlight now drains its own dedicated power source rather than using up your regular energy source (used for things like sprinting and breathing underwater), which is nice but makes me wonder why that wasn't a thing in the previous games. There is also one more new enemy, the Hunter, which is a Combine machine that kinda looks like a mini Strider made up of the same kind of tech the regular Combine troops are made of. It's a tough enemy to take down for sure and makes for a good addition to the Half-Life "rogue's gallery", if you will.
Overall, this game's ending was a rather disappointing end to the Half-Life saga, but I think its just as solid as Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Half-Life 2 Episode 1. We'll see if I end up playing Half-Life Alyx, although I really don't think I will. This game gets 4 stars from me, which is the same score I gave the other Half-Life games.
2022
This review contains spoilers
So...Sonic Frontiers was quite the interesting experience. I'm someone that has always had a passing interest in Sonic, but haven't really took the time to sit down and play through the games to completion. Nonetheless, I do know a lot about this series through the fact that I used to be obsessed with it as a kid (can't count how many wiki articles I've read through and fan discussion I've seen of stuff like the IDW comics which I've been meaning to read through). I've always loved the Adventure games and I have at least tried many Sonic games. The Genesis era games, Heroes, Sonic 06, Shadow the Hedgehog, Generations, even Sonic Chronicles...these are all games I've played over the years from my childhood love of the blue blur, but none have interested me enough to go through the effort of beating them. That wasn't the case with Frontiers, which interested me enough to take the time to fully complete. From what I can tell, this game is supposed to be a "return to form" from the strangely comedy focused and watered down direction that Colors and Boom took the series in. Personally, I think this one tries a little too hard and overcorrects at times, but that's a complaint I'll detail later in this review.
When I played through Sonic Frontiers, I sought to do everything I could. There's no shortage of activities to do in this game, so I figured: "Why not do it all?" Thankfully the Platinum trophy was pretty easy to get, it will be yours so long as you do most of the stuff the game throws your way (aside from one specific trophy that's annoying to get unless you exploit an enemy's design). I wanted to fully complete everything I possibly could in the game, so I went through the trouble of doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually count towards the Platinum. Needless to say, I saw everything the game has to offer...except for the secret final boss only accessible through playing Hard difficulty, but honestly its just one extra boss fight and doesn't change the ending at all so I'm still counting my playthrough as 100%. I found that Sonic Frontiers is a game with some great stuff I love and some weird stuff that made me scratch my head at best or actively annoyed me at worst. I will detail all my thoughts in the later paragraphs of this review; you know, organization and all that jazz. I'm fairly confident in saying that I did overall enjoy my time with the game, though.
The story...eh, it has it's ups and downs. I didn't find it all that remarkable in total, but I appreciated the more serious tone it has in comparison to other more recent Sonic games and it does have interesting additions to the lore for the whole series assuming this game is canon. Essentially, the story's premise is that Sonic's friends get trapped in the same dimension Cyber Space is in and Sonic is sent to a strange new world. Sonic has to explore through the four islands of this world to find his friends and help them. Whenever he finds them, they're trapped in cages that he must get rid of, but this causes corruption to his body every time he does it. This becomes important later as Sonic gets more and more corrupted, but strangely this doesn't impact gameplay at all which I feel was a bit of a missed opportunity. He also must find the Chaos Emeralds in each island so he can turn into Super Sonic to defeat the four Titans; one Titan per island. Sonic Frontiers introduces the Ancients, a new species that is very important to the plot. The Ancients are the big new super important historical civilization that built a ton of the stuff Sonic interacts with on the islands. Specifically, they are aliens with highly advanced tech that moved to the world that this game takes place in after their home world was destroyed. The Ancients share some key similarities to the Echidnas: both are closely tied to the Chaos Emeralds and nearly got completely wiped out. Even Knuckles notices the similarities. Also, as a somewhat interesting side detail, the Ancients bare a noticeable resemblance to Chaos from Sonic Adventure, which I doubt was merely coincidental considering that Chaos also has a close connection to the Chaos Emeralds (and the Echidnas). All of these connections admittedly makes me hope and pray they haven't forgotten about the Chao since I love them and I desperately want a new Chao Garden feature in a game, but I digress. As the story progresses, Sonic learns more about who the Ancients are and what the purpose behind their elaborate machinery is. You'll find things like cranes, cannons, towers, large obelisk-like structures, and more, all identified by a distinct style of architecture almost similar to something you'd see in Breath of the Wild. The Challenges, Guardians, Titans, and Cyber Space are also all invented by them...yea, they built both the enemies and things that help you. The lore reason for this is because the Titans were built to take down a big bad that you only see at the very end of the game. So, naturally, the Ancients are a huge deal to Sonic lore; SEGA went as far as to make a canonical origin story to the Chaos Emeralds (as far as I know that hasn't been done before) tied directly to the Ancients. Apparently, their old home world is now where the Chaos Emeralds were originally native to before finding their way in Sonic's world. I'm not sure if I think that was a good addition or not, but it sure is something that happened. You know what was also something that happened? The ending. Everyone talks about how disappointing it was and unfortunately I have to echo that sentiment. Overall, this game definitely focuses on story quite a lot, but things still feel a bit half-baked and that ending just reeks of disappointment.
Alright, let's talk characters and writing. The main new character introduced in this game is Sage, some kind of cyber girl that was created to serve Eggman. She is a case of being intentionally meant to leave a bad first impression since she starts out pretty unlikeable and strange, being antagonistic to Sonic and utterly refusing to explain anything about where he is. She slowly opens up to him more and her reasons are revealed later (her data says Sonic will die and she's already programmed by Eggman so she's naturally antagonistic to him at first). I think she blossomed into a neat character and I can see why the fandom seems to like her so much. Not a fan of the fake out death they did with her, felt it was just done for a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation especially since we learn in this game that Eggman is going to bring her back anyway. Nonetheless, I would like to see her show up again sometime, maybe even become a staple character as one of Eggman's assistants alongside Cubot and Orbot. As far as the characters in general are, I think they were all handled pretty decently. With the way the story is put together, each major character essentially has their own island to themselves with a bunch of conversations to unlock. I liked most of the characterization and moments of interaction, like how Sonic helps Tails through his insecurities and that moment when Sage starts to cry after she realizes just how strong Tails and Sonic's bond is. However, I do have some gripes with the writing itself. There's two major things this game's writing does that I don't like: parts that feel like very on the nose responses to criticism - like the infamous scene where Tails calls himself inconsistent (which seems to be a direct nod from the writers on how much fans hate that one scene of Tails cowering in Forces) - and parts that reference facets of Sonic lore or obscure Sonic facts seemingly just to flex the fact that the writers do indeed know that. I know the latter point is criticized a lot, which I think has become way overblown since its not like it ruins the game's storytelling, but nonetheless I did find it odd when the characters randomly bring up something from the past that hasn't been relevant in several years. At one point, Tails says that the big bad must be way stronger than Dark Gaia. You know, the main boss from Sonic Unleashed, a game that came out 14 years ago and has never been directly ported to modern consoles (aside from Xbox backwards compatibility)? I don't think Dark Gaia has even shown up in anything since Unleashed. In one part of the story, Sonic tells Amy he'll be back "before she can even do a Tarot card reading"...for those who were understandably confused by that line, Amy is sometimes associated with tarot cards and I'm pretty sure it's not something she has done in the actual games in decades (and it's not like she does anything with it in Frontiers either so it's just here for a giga brain reference). Don't get me wrong, I like me some deep cut references every now and then, but these feel like such random inclusions whenever they show up and they're shoved in a little too much for my liking. Also, the game has two instances of random flashbacks to previous games through a screenshot ripped from the games and slapped on the screen for a few seconds. One of these moments didn't even really make sense in the context of what was happening and I just thought this was weird and unnecessary. At the very least, they clearly had fun here with the tons of references and I can see the merit in it. I just think it's too prevalent in this game.
Okay, with all that story stuff out of the way, time to finally actually talk about the gameplay. I felt it was pretty fun and satisfying overall, but it has some weird jankiness at times that makes precision difficult. In the open world, the game has segments of 2D platforming indicated by a spring, boost pad, or something of the like just sitting out there for you to interact with. I've seen a lot of people complain about it and I can definitely see why, its the jankiest part of the game in my opinion. Most of the time, it works fine, but the 2D perspective will shift back to a 3D one whenever you fall or when you accidentally leave the scripted 2D area. If you're just running through the world and accidentally touch a spring or something, the game is going to instantly snap into 2D mode and make you go through the area. These segments also have dedicated walls for you to climb, and I swear these are absolutely the jankiest part of the game bar none. You'd think the slow climb would give you more precision, but Sonic would move straight down or up when I was clearly holding a different direction. The wall-run sometimes just refuses to work and has you zoom away from the wall. This was very annoying and made the 2D parts of the game's open world irritating. On the plus side, things feel pretty solid overall in the open world. Once you get the massive speed boost from filling up your ring counter to 400 (or increasing your speed stat to Level 99), it feels exhilarating just darting through the world. Open world games are so much more fun when you have a crazy method of travel, like how Spider-Man has his web-swinging, and Sonic's high speed works great with that, although you'll need to max out your Speed stat if you want to stay super quick indefinitely. Speaking of which, not really a fan of this game's stat system. I think it was done to try and inspire a curve of progression, but it doesn't really feel all that natural. There are so many levels for your Attack, Defense, Speed, and Ring stats that it just feels excessive.
So, the combat. Sonic Frontiers definitely puts more of a focus on it here than I think any other mainline Sonic game has done before. I feel that it had a lot of potential, but ended up pretty middling. You get some new moves from the skill tree (since I guess every game needs to have that nowadays) and they are decently fun to use, but realistically you'll only be using a few of them. The Sonic Boom is probably the most fun one to use in my opinion since its a speedy barrage of projectiles that keep shooting out the longer you hold down the button. Combat is unfortunately another area of Sonic Frontiers that is affected by jank. A big example is how the game is supposed to automatically target enemies, but sometimes it just doesn't work as intended. Moves like the Sonic Boom and Cross Slash (no not the FFVII kind) suffer majorly from this issue since a dynamic camera angle happens every time you use those moves, which can really screw up the auto-targeting. Also, sometimes the game just doesn't recognize that you did a combo move. Some combo moves require you to press two buttons together, but those buttons are also tied to other features, so the game may prioritize the regular move over the combo move. The Boost button (R2 on PS4) has a few combo moves, and these were especially janky since the game tends to prioritize Boosting over the combo moves. It is very irritating, but, when the combat isn't refusing to work, its a lot of fun. One thing I will praise about the combat is the awesome Titan fights, those were always a blast even if they weren't all that challenging. The only problem with them is that there's so much happening in them and Sonic moves so fast that its very easy to just break the camera. The Titan fights also tend to suffer from the problems with auto-targeting perhaps the most out of any other fights.
One thing I will say about this game's structure is that I think it feels a little bloated. There are a ton of collectibles, each with their own intended purposes, and it does feel like a bit much. The Seeds of Power and Seeds of Defense raise those stats, the Kocos are collected to be used for increasing your Speed and Ring stats, the Vault Keys open the Chaos Emerald Vaults, the Gears are used to open up Cyber Space levels, purple coins let you go fishing with Big the Cat, fishing tokens are used to buy stuff from Big, gold cards are also used to buy stuff from Big, the Memory Tokens are different for each island and are used to gatekeep story progress (as well as let you talk to the characters for Side Stories)...it's just a whole lot of stuff and I can't help but feel like half of it could've been trimmed out. Also, the game likes to just insert random mini games you have to play through. It's not a bad idea to break things up a little so it doesn't get monotonous, but I really don't think this game needed several Koco herding mini games, three Space Invaders style mini games (four if you count the secret final boss that uses this style of play for some reason), and a single pinball area just shoved in there. As much as I love the fishing, it also felt pretty unnecessary and honestly kind of breaks the progression balance since you can just buy nearly everything you need from Big if you're good at fishing...and the Purple Coins aren't hard to come by at all if you got lucky like I did with the Starfall. Whenever that event happens, it brings back the enemies you took down, but it also activates a limited time slot roulette that can give you a shit ton of purple coins if you know how to play it. I got the Starfall at least once on every island and it made it to where I was at 999 purple coins for a long time, so naturally I had plenty of money to fish with Big and buy just about anything I needed. Once I was on the last island, I was rolling in fishing tokens, so I could just buy all the Koco and Seeds I needed to max out those stats with a ton of tokens still left over. It's kind of busted and makes me feel like all of these collectibles and extra systems weren't needed at the end of the day.
I'll dedicate this paragraph to some nitpicks I have with Sonic Frontiers. I previously discussed my major grievances with the game, so I will just talk about minor problems here. Biggest one of these nitpicks for me is that it's VERY tedious to level up your Speed and Ring stats; for whatever reason, you have to manually level it up one by one until you run out of Kocos or you reach Level 99. They literally already have leveling in bulk with Hermit Koco, since he just takes every seed you have on your person to instantly increase your Power and Defense to the appropriate levels, why is there no option to buy Speed and Ring upgrades in bulk? If they're worried about players regretting the choice of one over the other, there already is a way to swap Speed stat gains with Ring stat and vice versa (which you also can't do in bulk for some reason). The game just expects you to patiently spam to get through Elder Koco's dialogue each time as you sluggishly level up and it makes no sense to me. Another notable nitpick of mine is that there's no way to change the in-game time of day...which is a problem when every island has some Challenges that can only be attempted when it's night time. You either have to go do something else while you wait on it to be night time or do some other activity in the game and remember to come back once the moon comes up. I'm no developer, but I don't see any reason why there is no option to immediately skip time unless it's meant to be some kind of immersion thing (which would be silly imo considering this world has random springs, speed bumps, rails, walls, and loop-de-loops that just unnaturally lead to each other when Sonic does platforming there). Probably my least significant nitpick is that I don't like how you can continue to get collectibles even if you've long since used them for what they're meant to be used for. It's just a personal gripe that bothers me, I don't like to keep getting useless things and have it tally up in the map. For example, I finished the skill tree pretty early in the game and it drove me mad that my skill points just kept building up to nearly 200 by the end of the game when I had no use for it anymore.
The last topic I'll talk about here is the visual design. I think everything looks pretty good graphically aside from the distractingly common pop-in and the fact that the fishing area's water is buggy as all hell for some reason. However, my big problem is that the islands themselves aren't that interesting. Kronos Island is pretty much just a big grassland, same with Rhea Island and Ouranos Island (those areas also noticeably reuse a lot of stuff from Kronos Island). Ares Island is the most generic desert area you'll ever see. Chaos Island is a big volcanic wasteland. The Cyber Space levels are somehow even more generic since all of them just repackage the same aesthetics of previous stages in the Sonic series. I got tired of seeing the same Chemical Plant Zone, Green Hill Zone, and City Escape aesthetic that a ton of the Cyber Space levels share. I know this is done for a lore reason - they're built on Sonic's memories - but I really feel these could have been so much more creative than they actually were.
Phew, that review was ludicrously long, wouldn't you say? I have a bad tendency of rambling. I'll just end this with a short conclusion. Sonic Frontiers gets a decent 3.5 stars from me; it had potential to be truly amazing, but all the little problems really add up. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed my time with it, and I look forward to seeing what SEGA does with the extended campaign coming out as free DLC later.
When I played through Sonic Frontiers, I sought to do everything I could. There's no shortage of activities to do in this game, so I figured: "Why not do it all?" Thankfully the Platinum trophy was pretty easy to get, it will be yours so long as you do most of the stuff the game throws your way (aside from one specific trophy that's annoying to get unless you exploit an enemy's design). I wanted to fully complete everything I possibly could in the game, so I went through the trouble of doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually count towards the Platinum. Needless to say, I saw everything the game has to offer...except for the secret final boss only accessible through playing Hard difficulty, but honestly its just one extra boss fight and doesn't change the ending at all so I'm still counting my playthrough as 100%. I found that Sonic Frontiers is a game with some great stuff I love and some weird stuff that made me scratch my head at best or actively annoyed me at worst. I will detail all my thoughts in the later paragraphs of this review; you know, organization and all that jazz. I'm fairly confident in saying that I did overall enjoy my time with the game, though.
The story...eh, it has it's ups and downs. I didn't find it all that remarkable in total, but I appreciated the more serious tone it has in comparison to other more recent Sonic games and it does have interesting additions to the lore for the whole series assuming this game is canon. Essentially, the story's premise is that Sonic's friends get trapped in the same dimension Cyber Space is in and Sonic is sent to a strange new world. Sonic has to explore through the four islands of this world to find his friends and help them. Whenever he finds them, they're trapped in cages that he must get rid of, but this causes corruption to his body every time he does it. This becomes important later as Sonic gets more and more corrupted, but strangely this doesn't impact gameplay at all which I feel was a bit of a missed opportunity. He also must find the Chaos Emeralds in each island so he can turn into Super Sonic to defeat the four Titans; one Titan per island. Sonic Frontiers introduces the Ancients, a new species that is very important to the plot. The Ancients are the big new super important historical civilization that built a ton of the stuff Sonic interacts with on the islands. Specifically, they are aliens with highly advanced tech that moved to the world that this game takes place in after their home world was destroyed. The Ancients share some key similarities to the Echidnas: both are closely tied to the Chaos Emeralds and nearly got completely wiped out. Even Knuckles notices the similarities. Also, as a somewhat interesting side detail, the Ancients bare a noticeable resemblance to Chaos from Sonic Adventure, which I doubt was merely coincidental considering that Chaos also has a close connection to the Chaos Emeralds (and the Echidnas). All of these connections admittedly makes me hope and pray they haven't forgotten about the Chao since I love them and I desperately want a new Chao Garden feature in a game, but I digress. As the story progresses, Sonic learns more about who the Ancients are and what the purpose behind their elaborate machinery is. You'll find things like cranes, cannons, towers, large obelisk-like structures, and more, all identified by a distinct style of architecture almost similar to something you'd see in Breath of the Wild. The Challenges, Guardians, Titans, and Cyber Space are also all invented by them...yea, they built both the enemies and things that help you. The lore reason for this is because the Titans were built to take down a big bad that you only see at the very end of the game. So, naturally, the Ancients are a huge deal to Sonic lore; SEGA went as far as to make a canonical origin story to the Chaos Emeralds (as far as I know that hasn't been done before) tied directly to the Ancients. Apparently, their old home world is now where the Chaos Emeralds were originally native to before finding their way in Sonic's world. I'm not sure if I think that was a good addition or not, but it sure is something that happened. You know what was also something that happened? The ending. Everyone talks about how disappointing it was and unfortunately I have to echo that sentiment. Overall, this game definitely focuses on story quite a lot, but things still feel a bit half-baked and that ending just reeks of disappointment.
Alright, let's talk characters and writing. The main new character introduced in this game is Sage, some kind of cyber girl that was created to serve Eggman. She is a case of being intentionally meant to leave a bad first impression since she starts out pretty unlikeable and strange, being antagonistic to Sonic and utterly refusing to explain anything about where he is. She slowly opens up to him more and her reasons are revealed later (her data says Sonic will die and she's already programmed by Eggman so she's naturally antagonistic to him at first). I think she blossomed into a neat character and I can see why the fandom seems to like her so much. Not a fan of the fake out death they did with her, felt it was just done for a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation especially since we learn in this game that Eggman is going to bring her back anyway. Nonetheless, I would like to see her show up again sometime, maybe even become a staple character as one of Eggman's assistants alongside Cubot and Orbot. As far as the characters in general are, I think they were all handled pretty decently. With the way the story is put together, each major character essentially has their own island to themselves with a bunch of conversations to unlock. I liked most of the characterization and moments of interaction, like how Sonic helps Tails through his insecurities and that moment when Sage starts to cry after she realizes just how strong Tails and Sonic's bond is. However, I do have some gripes with the writing itself. There's two major things this game's writing does that I don't like: parts that feel like very on the nose responses to criticism - like the infamous scene where Tails calls himself inconsistent (which seems to be a direct nod from the writers on how much fans hate that one scene of Tails cowering in Forces) - and parts that reference facets of Sonic lore or obscure Sonic facts seemingly just to flex the fact that the writers do indeed know that. I know the latter point is criticized a lot, which I think has become way overblown since its not like it ruins the game's storytelling, but nonetheless I did find it odd when the characters randomly bring up something from the past that hasn't been relevant in several years. At one point, Tails says that the big bad must be way stronger than Dark Gaia. You know, the main boss from Sonic Unleashed, a game that came out 14 years ago and has never been directly ported to modern consoles (aside from Xbox backwards compatibility)? I don't think Dark Gaia has even shown up in anything since Unleashed. In one part of the story, Sonic tells Amy he'll be back "before she can even do a Tarot card reading"...for those who were understandably confused by that line, Amy is sometimes associated with tarot cards and I'm pretty sure it's not something she has done in the actual games in decades (and it's not like she does anything with it in Frontiers either so it's just here for a giga brain reference). Don't get me wrong, I like me some deep cut references every now and then, but these feel like such random inclusions whenever they show up and they're shoved in a little too much for my liking. Also, the game has two instances of random flashbacks to previous games through a screenshot ripped from the games and slapped on the screen for a few seconds. One of these moments didn't even really make sense in the context of what was happening and I just thought this was weird and unnecessary. At the very least, they clearly had fun here with the tons of references and I can see the merit in it. I just think it's too prevalent in this game.
Okay, with all that story stuff out of the way, time to finally actually talk about the gameplay. I felt it was pretty fun and satisfying overall, but it has some weird jankiness at times that makes precision difficult. In the open world, the game has segments of 2D platforming indicated by a spring, boost pad, or something of the like just sitting out there for you to interact with. I've seen a lot of people complain about it and I can definitely see why, its the jankiest part of the game in my opinion. Most of the time, it works fine, but the 2D perspective will shift back to a 3D one whenever you fall or when you accidentally leave the scripted 2D area. If you're just running through the world and accidentally touch a spring or something, the game is going to instantly snap into 2D mode and make you go through the area. These segments also have dedicated walls for you to climb, and I swear these are absolutely the jankiest part of the game bar none. You'd think the slow climb would give you more precision, but Sonic would move straight down or up when I was clearly holding a different direction. The wall-run sometimes just refuses to work and has you zoom away from the wall. This was very annoying and made the 2D parts of the game's open world irritating. On the plus side, things feel pretty solid overall in the open world. Once you get the massive speed boost from filling up your ring counter to 400 (or increasing your speed stat to Level 99), it feels exhilarating just darting through the world. Open world games are so much more fun when you have a crazy method of travel, like how Spider-Man has his web-swinging, and Sonic's high speed works great with that, although you'll need to max out your Speed stat if you want to stay super quick indefinitely. Speaking of which, not really a fan of this game's stat system. I think it was done to try and inspire a curve of progression, but it doesn't really feel all that natural. There are so many levels for your Attack, Defense, Speed, and Ring stats that it just feels excessive.
So, the combat. Sonic Frontiers definitely puts more of a focus on it here than I think any other mainline Sonic game has done before. I feel that it had a lot of potential, but ended up pretty middling. You get some new moves from the skill tree (since I guess every game needs to have that nowadays) and they are decently fun to use, but realistically you'll only be using a few of them. The Sonic Boom is probably the most fun one to use in my opinion since its a speedy barrage of projectiles that keep shooting out the longer you hold down the button. Combat is unfortunately another area of Sonic Frontiers that is affected by jank. A big example is how the game is supposed to automatically target enemies, but sometimes it just doesn't work as intended. Moves like the Sonic Boom and Cross Slash (no not the FFVII kind) suffer majorly from this issue since a dynamic camera angle happens every time you use those moves, which can really screw up the auto-targeting. Also, sometimes the game just doesn't recognize that you did a combo move. Some combo moves require you to press two buttons together, but those buttons are also tied to other features, so the game may prioritize the regular move over the combo move. The Boost button (R2 on PS4) has a few combo moves, and these were especially janky since the game tends to prioritize Boosting over the combo moves. It is very irritating, but, when the combat isn't refusing to work, its a lot of fun. One thing I will praise about the combat is the awesome Titan fights, those were always a blast even if they weren't all that challenging. The only problem with them is that there's so much happening in them and Sonic moves so fast that its very easy to just break the camera. The Titan fights also tend to suffer from the problems with auto-targeting perhaps the most out of any other fights.
One thing I will say about this game's structure is that I think it feels a little bloated. There are a ton of collectibles, each with their own intended purposes, and it does feel like a bit much. The Seeds of Power and Seeds of Defense raise those stats, the Kocos are collected to be used for increasing your Speed and Ring stats, the Vault Keys open the Chaos Emerald Vaults, the Gears are used to open up Cyber Space levels, purple coins let you go fishing with Big the Cat, fishing tokens are used to buy stuff from Big, gold cards are also used to buy stuff from Big, the Memory Tokens are different for each island and are used to gatekeep story progress (as well as let you talk to the characters for Side Stories)...it's just a whole lot of stuff and I can't help but feel like half of it could've been trimmed out. Also, the game likes to just insert random mini games you have to play through. It's not a bad idea to break things up a little so it doesn't get monotonous, but I really don't think this game needed several Koco herding mini games, three Space Invaders style mini games (four if you count the secret final boss that uses this style of play for some reason), and a single pinball area just shoved in there. As much as I love the fishing, it also felt pretty unnecessary and honestly kind of breaks the progression balance since you can just buy nearly everything you need from Big if you're good at fishing...and the Purple Coins aren't hard to come by at all if you got lucky like I did with the Starfall. Whenever that event happens, it brings back the enemies you took down, but it also activates a limited time slot roulette that can give you a shit ton of purple coins if you know how to play it. I got the Starfall at least once on every island and it made it to where I was at 999 purple coins for a long time, so naturally I had plenty of money to fish with Big and buy just about anything I needed. Once I was on the last island, I was rolling in fishing tokens, so I could just buy all the Koco and Seeds I needed to max out those stats with a ton of tokens still left over. It's kind of busted and makes me feel like all of these collectibles and extra systems weren't needed at the end of the day.
I'll dedicate this paragraph to some nitpicks I have with Sonic Frontiers. I previously discussed my major grievances with the game, so I will just talk about minor problems here. Biggest one of these nitpicks for me is that it's VERY tedious to level up your Speed and Ring stats; for whatever reason, you have to manually level it up one by one until you run out of Kocos or you reach Level 99. They literally already have leveling in bulk with Hermit Koco, since he just takes every seed you have on your person to instantly increase your Power and Defense to the appropriate levels, why is there no option to buy Speed and Ring upgrades in bulk? If they're worried about players regretting the choice of one over the other, there already is a way to swap Speed stat gains with Ring stat and vice versa (which you also can't do in bulk for some reason). The game just expects you to patiently spam to get through Elder Koco's dialogue each time as you sluggishly level up and it makes no sense to me. Another notable nitpick of mine is that there's no way to change the in-game time of day...which is a problem when every island has some Challenges that can only be attempted when it's night time. You either have to go do something else while you wait on it to be night time or do some other activity in the game and remember to come back once the moon comes up. I'm no developer, but I don't see any reason why there is no option to immediately skip time unless it's meant to be some kind of immersion thing (which would be silly imo considering this world has random springs, speed bumps, rails, walls, and loop-de-loops that just unnaturally lead to each other when Sonic does platforming there). Probably my least significant nitpick is that I don't like how you can continue to get collectibles even if you've long since used them for what they're meant to be used for. It's just a personal gripe that bothers me, I don't like to keep getting useless things and have it tally up in the map. For example, I finished the skill tree pretty early in the game and it drove me mad that my skill points just kept building up to nearly 200 by the end of the game when I had no use for it anymore.
The last topic I'll talk about here is the visual design. I think everything looks pretty good graphically aside from the distractingly common pop-in and the fact that the fishing area's water is buggy as all hell for some reason. However, my big problem is that the islands themselves aren't that interesting. Kronos Island is pretty much just a big grassland, same with Rhea Island and Ouranos Island (those areas also noticeably reuse a lot of stuff from Kronos Island). Ares Island is the most generic desert area you'll ever see. Chaos Island is a big volcanic wasteland. The Cyber Space levels are somehow even more generic since all of them just repackage the same aesthetics of previous stages in the Sonic series. I got tired of seeing the same Chemical Plant Zone, Green Hill Zone, and City Escape aesthetic that a ton of the Cyber Space levels share. I know this is done for a lore reason - they're built on Sonic's memories - but I really feel these could have been so much more creative than they actually were.
Phew, that review was ludicrously long, wouldn't you say? I have a bad tendency of rambling. I'll just end this with a short conclusion. Sonic Frontiers gets a decent 3.5 stars from me; it had potential to be truly amazing, but all the little problems really add up. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed my time with it, and I look forward to seeing what SEGA does with the extended campaign coming out as free DLC later.
2020
This review contains spoilers
So I'm not the biggest DOOM fan out there, but I do really enjoy what I've played of the series. Never beat DOOM (1993) and DOOM 2, but I highly respect them and have played through most of the levels in those games. I find the core formula a lot of fun, but certain annoying parts of DOOM 2 and DOOM (1993) prevented me from taking the time to beat them. DOOM 64 is one game I have been curious about for a while, so over the past few days I went ahead and actually beat it. I have been playing through the whole series after finishing DOOM (2016) a while back before I had a Backloggd account, but now 64 is the only classic DOOM I have actually beat. I may revisit the other two to finally finish them, but I imagine I will not review them here when I do since I feel like I would have nothing of real interest to say about them.
When I was playing through this game, one of the first things I noticed was that the tone is quite different from DOOM and DOOM 2. Visually, it carries a lot of that similar energy to the original duology, with the sprites having been recreated to fit the N64 while still being very faithful to the original designs. I really enjoy how everything looks, it feels like a natural evolution aside from how ludicrously dark it can get (good thing this version of the game has a brightness scroller). However, this time around, the atmosphere feels more horror focused. Not to imply DOOM (1993) and DOOM 2 didn't have horror elements, of course, but 64 seems to lean in a lot more on those elements with specific parts of the game, mainly the music. DOOM and DOOM 2 had a wide variety of music with a good variety of feelings they're meant to convey, from the catchy metal tunes of "At Doom's Gate" (E1M1) and "Kitchen Ace & Takin' Names" (E1M4), the almost orchestral sound of "Suspense" (E1M5), the atmospheric electronic vibe of "Demons on the Prey" (E1M7) and "Dark Halls" (E1M3), the masterful combination of hopelessness and disappointment found in "Sign of Evil" (ending theme of E1)...all of those were purely in the first episode of the first DOOM, its not even counting the more strange music DOOM 2 had in store, like the almost groovy sound of "The Healer Stalks" and the borderline silly vibe of "Between Levels". 64's music is overwhelmingly focused on a dark ambience intended to carry a persistent feeling of dread, with every single song in the OST being designed to carry this feeling. Spooky low-tone instruments playing in the background and a whole lot of distracting sound effects are what you'll hear if you have the music turned on in your playthrough. I respect that this game wanted to do something different, but I can't help but feel the soundtrack sucks away the personality this one could have had if it just kept doing what DOOM and DOOM 2 were already doing so well. Honestly a lot of it just blends in with each other.
The gameplay of DOOM 64 is pretty much the same as its predecessors. You don't need to reinvent the wheel when DOOM was the game that popularized the genre to begin with, so I got no complaints about that. All the same weapons from DOOM and DOOM 2 return: Pistol, Shotgun, Chainsaw, Super Shotgun, Chaingun, Plasma Gun, Rocket Launcher, and the always iconic BFG9000. This game does introduce one new weapon, though, and that's the Unmaker. Amusingly, the Unmaker didn't get an actual name until Eternal. When you get it in DOOM 64, you get some flavor text that reads: "What the !@#%* is this!" The Unmaker makes for a cool addition to the classic DOOM arsenal, but I didn't really use it a ton. One interesting thing about it is that it can actually be upgraded to be stronger. As far as core level design goes, it does feel like more of the same classic DOOM stuff with big rooms and exploration to do. I did notice some differences, though. For some reason this game absolutely loves Hell Knights and Barons of Hell, it throws them at you all the time and its a bit odd since I remember them not being all that common in DOOM's episodes (aside from Thy Flesh Consumed which I never beat) and most of what I played of DOOM 2 (never beat that game either tbh). I guess it's to make up for the game lacking three of the enemies from DOOM and DOOM 2: the Archvile, Chaingunner, and Revenant. Also, some enemies seem to be a bit stronger here than they were in the classic DOOM games. Biggest example is the Lost Souls, which were more of a minor annoyance before but are an absolute pain in the ass here. I could just be seeing differences where there are none but I do know that Lost Souls are much more irritating in DOOM 64. The change makes Pain Elementals one of the most annoying DOOM enemies I've ever encountered, and fighting a room full of them is a nightmare. This game does have one new regular enemy and a new boss. The Nightmare Imp is just an indigo imp visually but it attacks faster and runs quicker, and the Mother Demon is the final boss of the game. There's nothing really nightmarish about the Nightmare Imp and the Mother Demon is a tough boss fight. Another thing I noticed that's different here is that DOOM 64 is quite fond of just spawning enemies in once you interact with something, which can be irritating. They fade into the world out of nowhere. If you don't know where and when they spawn ahead of time, you can easily accidentally end up in arm's distance of a demon or just get destroyed. On the plus side, I noticed I actually used the Chainsaw this time around. I hardly ever used it in the first two games, but here it was a great tool for taking out Mancubus so long as there aren't too many ranged enemies around for you to mow 'em down. That's still a pretty niche use case, though. Unfortunately other enemies with a melee attack make it very tricky to use the Chainsaw without getting smacked for a chunk of your health in return. It's possible to kill plenty of stuff with the chainsaw, especially since it seems to have been given a damage boost, but its too difficult to be worth doing over just blasting demons unless you're out of ammo. Also, another quirk about the game is that sometimes enemies can just shoot you through the walls, which I noticed mostly in a specific segment of Spawned Fear (Map 18). Not a big deal, but its weird. You know what is a big deal? That final level. Apparently the only way to make it not insanely hard is to find all the secret levels, since you need keys from those levels to be able to shut down the portals. The secret levels are also the only way you can upgrade your Unmaker, which helps a lot in the fight. Honestly, that's just not fair to players like me that don't want to go out of their way to search every nook and cranny of a level and I've never had to find secrets in an FPS to make the levels not torture to play through, but hey it is still possible without the keys. I actually didn't die quite as much as I thought I would but it still sucked. I felt no guilt taking advantage of an exploit on Mother Demon because that fight is so dumb.
Overall, I feel like DOOM 64 is just "more DOOM", but the core formula of the series is so good that I see no real issue in that. I have a bunch of nitpicks about this game - nearly all of which I already mentioned here - and only a few genuine problems with it, but I feel it is great nonetheless and I did have fun with it. DOOM 64 gets a rock solid four stars from me.
When I was playing through this game, one of the first things I noticed was that the tone is quite different from DOOM and DOOM 2. Visually, it carries a lot of that similar energy to the original duology, with the sprites having been recreated to fit the N64 while still being very faithful to the original designs. I really enjoy how everything looks, it feels like a natural evolution aside from how ludicrously dark it can get (good thing this version of the game has a brightness scroller). However, this time around, the atmosphere feels more horror focused. Not to imply DOOM (1993) and DOOM 2 didn't have horror elements, of course, but 64 seems to lean in a lot more on those elements with specific parts of the game, mainly the music. DOOM and DOOM 2 had a wide variety of music with a good variety of feelings they're meant to convey, from the catchy metal tunes of "At Doom's Gate" (E1M1) and "Kitchen Ace & Takin' Names" (E1M4), the almost orchestral sound of "Suspense" (E1M5), the atmospheric electronic vibe of "Demons on the Prey" (E1M7) and "Dark Halls" (E1M3), the masterful combination of hopelessness and disappointment found in "Sign of Evil" (ending theme of E1)...all of those were purely in the first episode of the first DOOM, its not even counting the more strange music DOOM 2 had in store, like the almost groovy sound of "The Healer Stalks" and the borderline silly vibe of "Between Levels". 64's music is overwhelmingly focused on a dark ambience intended to carry a persistent feeling of dread, with every single song in the OST being designed to carry this feeling. Spooky low-tone instruments playing in the background and a whole lot of distracting sound effects are what you'll hear if you have the music turned on in your playthrough. I respect that this game wanted to do something different, but I can't help but feel the soundtrack sucks away the personality this one could have had if it just kept doing what DOOM and DOOM 2 were already doing so well. Honestly a lot of it just blends in with each other.
The gameplay of DOOM 64 is pretty much the same as its predecessors. You don't need to reinvent the wheel when DOOM was the game that popularized the genre to begin with, so I got no complaints about that. All the same weapons from DOOM and DOOM 2 return: Pistol, Shotgun, Chainsaw, Super Shotgun, Chaingun, Plasma Gun, Rocket Launcher, and the always iconic BFG9000. This game does introduce one new weapon, though, and that's the Unmaker. Amusingly, the Unmaker didn't get an actual name until Eternal. When you get it in DOOM 64, you get some flavor text that reads: "What the !@#%* is this!" The Unmaker makes for a cool addition to the classic DOOM arsenal, but I didn't really use it a ton. One interesting thing about it is that it can actually be upgraded to be stronger. As far as core level design goes, it does feel like more of the same classic DOOM stuff with big rooms and exploration to do. I did notice some differences, though. For some reason this game absolutely loves Hell Knights and Barons of Hell, it throws them at you all the time and its a bit odd since I remember them not being all that common in DOOM's episodes (aside from Thy Flesh Consumed which I never beat) and most of what I played of DOOM 2 (never beat that game either tbh). I guess it's to make up for the game lacking three of the enemies from DOOM and DOOM 2: the Archvile, Chaingunner, and Revenant. Also, some enemies seem to be a bit stronger here than they were in the classic DOOM games. Biggest example is the Lost Souls, which were more of a minor annoyance before but are an absolute pain in the ass here. I could just be seeing differences where there are none but I do know that Lost Souls are much more irritating in DOOM 64. The change makes Pain Elementals one of the most annoying DOOM enemies I've ever encountered, and fighting a room full of them is a nightmare. This game does have one new regular enemy and a new boss. The Nightmare Imp is just an indigo imp visually but it attacks faster and runs quicker, and the Mother Demon is the final boss of the game. There's nothing really nightmarish about the Nightmare Imp and the Mother Demon is a tough boss fight. Another thing I noticed that's different here is that DOOM 64 is quite fond of just spawning enemies in once you interact with something, which can be irritating. They fade into the world out of nowhere. If you don't know where and when they spawn ahead of time, you can easily accidentally end up in arm's distance of a demon or just get destroyed. On the plus side, I noticed I actually used the Chainsaw this time around. I hardly ever used it in the first two games, but here it was a great tool for taking out Mancubus so long as there aren't too many ranged enemies around for you to mow 'em down. That's still a pretty niche use case, though. Unfortunately other enemies with a melee attack make it very tricky to use the Chainsaw without getting smacked for a chunk of your health in return. It's possible to kill plenty of stuff with the chainsaw, especially since it seems to have been given a damage boost, but its too difficult to be worth doing over just blasting demons unless you're out of ammo. Also, another quirk about the game is that sometimes enemies can just shoot you through the walls, which I noticed mostly in a specific segment of Spawned Fear (Map 18). Not a big deal, but its weird. You know what is a big deal? That final level. Apparently the only way to make it not insanely hard is to find all the secret levels, since you need keys from those levels to be able to shut down the portals. The secret levels are also the only way you can upgrade your Unmaker, which helps a lot in the fight. Honestly, that's just not fair to players like me that don't want to go out of their way to search every nook and cranny of a level and I've never had to find secrets in an FPS to make the levels not torture to play through, but hey it is still possible without the keys. I actually didn't die quite as much as I thought I would but it still sucked. I felt no guilt taking advantage of an exploit on Mother Demon because that fight is so dumb.
Overall, I feel like DOOM 64 is just "more DOOM", but the core formula of the series is so good that I see no real issue in that. I have a bunch of nitpicks about this game - nearly all of which I already mentioned here - and only a few genuine problems with it, but I feel it is great nonetheless and I did have fun with it. DOOM 64 gets a rock solid four stars from me.
2022
This review contains spoilers
So, Stray is pretty different from the kind of game I usually play. Typically, my preferences are for games that focus almost entirely on fun gameplay loops, whether that be the fun and simple (simple doesn't mean easy) style of platformers, the satisfaction of making clever decisions in turn based RPGs, the adrenaline-fueled combat of hack-'n-slash and certain first person shooter games, or the competitive spirit of constantly improving in fighting games. Of course, there are plenty more examples, like the sheer sense of fulfillment in finding secrets and filling up the entire map in a Metroidvania. However, Stray is different from these games; by all means, the gameplay is pretty uninteresting. You spend most of your time walking, running, and jumping through a dark torn-up dystopian city, sometimes needing to solve puzzles or go through a scripted sequence along the way. Rinse and repeat for 12 chapters. Normally I would say that the gameplay being uninteresting is a detriment to any game, but I feel it works for what Stray is going for. The mundane nature of the gameplay is meant to really immerse you into the setting and role you're playing. Everything about the way your cat moves and interacts with the world feels so accurate to how a cat is that it got a grin out of me a few times just seeing the little guy in action. Sometimes you just get to do silly little cat things, like walking all over a keyboard to type complete nonsense or knocking down paint cans purely because you felt like it. It's adorable. I often don't really care about immersion in stories but, as someone with a huge bias for cats, I truly do love everything about this setup even if the gameplay itself ends up not being the most fun thing ever. The fact that there is a dedicated meow button is amusing to me, but the best part about it is that they found some actual uses for meowing so it isn't just a quirky addition. Unfortunately I have to admit that, near the end of this game, I just kept playing because I wanted to beat it and not because I found it all that engaging. The last few chapters really up the stakes of the story, but, by the point I got to it, I felt pretty tapped out mentally and I was tired of the snoozefest gameplay.
The story of the game starts simple but gets more involved as you progress. You start the game out with your cat buddies living together. You get to interact with them a little before they all go to sleep. You wake up with your cat colony and start exploring the world, following them around. This serves as the tutorial of the game and it works as a pretty natural one in my opinion. After a bit of venturing with your fuzzy compadres, something goes horribly wrong; the pipe your cat jumps on breaks, and unfortunately the cat can't hold on. It ends up falling into the deep abyss. Next thing it knows, the cat lands on puddles of water, left in the middle of a dark lonely tunnel with trash littered everywhere. It tries to move, but falls down and goes to sleep. Once it wakes up, it's about time to start exploring, finding out where it is, and hopefully reuniting with its friends (spoiler: that doesn't happen sadly). From here, this is where the game really starts. You get a bunch of mysterious hints from the technology of the city, such as the lights and television screens you find in abandoned buildings, telling you to go somewhere, which you then follow. There's a part where you get chased by a bunch of weird little headcrab-like critters that try to gang up on you which sets up some stuff that's elaborated on later in the story (these are called Zurks and the robots are afraid of them). Once you finally follow the hints all the way, you enter a cozy old home with a computer room that has a bunch of technology. After some light puzzle solving, you awaken a drone that speaks to you and thanks you. The drone was the reason behind all those hints you saw; it was shocked to see a cat roaming the area, since its connected to the electronic network of the city. The drone has little memory of who it is or what its purpose is, but it does remember that it was the creation of a scientist. The drone tells you to just call it B/12, like the symbol engraved on its body. Also, this is where you first find out the city is called Dead City...fittingly grim name. B/12 has you put on a sort of futuristic looking backpack, where the drone can recharge itself. This leads to a pretty funny scene where the cat falls over since its not used to wearing something like this and you have to keep moving forward. Small disclaimer, I didn't bother collecting the majority of the B/12 memories so I'm going to skip over describing what those add to the story or lore. After meeting B/12, he tells you to go further into the city; this is when Chapter 4: The Slums starts. After another encounter with those strange headcrab looking creatures, you get to meet the robots of this city. They are absolutely terrified of you, running into their homes while you roam the streets. Thankfully you meet a bot in robes and a hat that accepts you "so long as you don't try to eat anyone". Turns out he's the village guardian and he opens up the city again after you meet him. B/12 serves as your negotiator and translator for dealing with the robots and there's a good amount of them to talk to. Once you're done screwing around for a bit now that the linearity starts to open up a little, you can continue the story by finding Momo. He is a robot that had a deep connection with humans and pines for leaving Dead City, but lost all hope due to his friends failing to make it out alive. Once you meet him, he tells you he gave up on trying to leave, and says if you really want to go you can take the first of four notebooks he wrote. The book reveals that four different people signed an agreement that they were going to get to the Outside no matter what: Clementine, Zbaltazar, Doc, and Momo. To continue the story you need to find three notebooks - Clementine 4/4, Zbaltazar 2/4, and Doc 3/4. After finding them all, Momo has renewed hope and makes a plan to restore the transreceiver. He has you jump out the window, which starts Chapter 5. Okay I know I already got this far into the synopsis, but I really don't want to just explain the whole story, so I'll give a rundown of what happens from here: you go to Zurk territory to stick the transreceiver into the slot that lets Momo get his message out to Zbaltazar, you go back to the Slums so you can talk to the son of one of the Outsiders you're looking for, find clues in that guy's house with him to figure out the riddle Doc left for him so you can progress, then you go on a trek with Momo to the sewers, from there it takes you to Antvillage which then takes you to Midtown, in Midtown you do a bunch of stuff to get to Clementine, she has you go find this spy cohort so you can sneak into the Neco Corporation facility to get a battery, once you leave the whole city goes on lockdown, Clementine was kidnapped so you have to go find her, you go back to the home she was hiding at which gives you hints that tell you you need to go to the Nightclub, when you go to the Nightclub you find her but you also find the spy guy who turns out to be a double agent that sells you out, you and Clementine get put in jail, cue a big jail breakout mission, Clementine distracts the Sentinels for you so you can get to the bottom of all this, you find a subway train that takes you to a station, in the station you find the Control Room, in the Control Room B/12 sacrifices himself to turn the security system off, this also opens up the entire city which you get to watch happen after the cat mourns the loss of its drone buddy, then you go to the big red doors...it opens, and bam that's the end of the game. Enjoy a short cutscene of the cat touching grass after having been stuck in this desolate city for so long, and then the game just ends. The story wasn't all that interesting to me, but it served its purpose well and I'm not ashamed to admit that the drone's sacrifice had me feeling emotional. The cat is back to being all alone at the end of the game, still having not found its family. Maybe we will get a family reunion if we get a Stray sequel. "Stray 2: Clawed Encounters of the Furred Kind" or some shit, lol. The ending isn't too much of a downer, though, since you did ultimately escape the city (or at least that's what I think the ending implied but it was vague on whether you actually left Dead City or just found yourself back in it) and you just opened up the top of the big metal dome encasing the entirety of Dead City. These robots get to see sunlight for the first time in an eternity.
The visuals and setting of this game seem to be a major focus, which helps add to the immersive nature of Stray. I really dig how cold and desolate the place looks, you get a good sense of how uncaring the vibe is from all the trash strewn about and random objects like wooden planks just kinda being placed wherever. There are only remnants of the touch of humans present within the scenery, with things like postcards that you sometimes find and corporate billboards. It appears to always be night time (but its actually because the entire city is encased and walled in by a huge dome), which, combined with the fact that you'll be seeing a whole lot of drab blue, green, grey, and brown everywhere you go, gives things a very dreary feeling. It's a dystopian world with no living organism in sight except for the orange cat you control. Even the plants are synthetic, as hinted at through some dialogue and a company billboard you can find. Humans are gone and robots inherited this place that the humans used to call home. The robots have personalities of their own, though, and they've inhabited behaviors of humans like drinking alcohol or dancing at clubs. Despite the sad circumstances of this city, it doesn't look all bad, though. The parts that the robots call home are illuminated by neon lights that light up the streets. There are a few other locations you go to in the game, too; the sewers, the Antvillage, the jail, and Midtown. Midtown is more of the same sort of aesthetic you saw in Dead City, but its generally cleaner looking and its home to the upper crust robots so you see more extravagant buildings. There's also a whole authoritarian police city vibe with how, once you enter Midtown, they're searching for a certain suspect for the crime of wanting to get to the Outside. You even get to do some spy stuff, gleefully breaking the rules of this totalitarian state. What a cat thing to do, am I right? The sewers is basically the home of the Zurks, its full of the alien biological tech stuff that you saw them crowding around in Dead City. The heart of the sewers feels almost alive with all the eyes in the fleshy walls watching you, pretty strange visuals that I honestly wasn't expecting to see in the game. In contrast, the Antvillage was a pretty nice looking area...well, as nice looking as this dystopian world can get. It's pretty much one big spiraling building made of wood and piping placed next to a tree. So, overall, the way the world looks is great. However, the cats themselves look off unfortunately. It's mainly the face for me, which feels close to how a real cat looks but is just odd enough to annoy me. If you don't want to see footage of the game yourself, you can just look at the official artwork, which really showcases how strange the cats look in the face. I'm not sure if its a stylization thing or a graphical limitation. It certainly doesn't ruin the game's interesting visuals, though, since I'm not a stickler for realistic graphics and I know this is an indie game. The only thing about the visuals that I can say was pretty distracting for me is the seemingly random lag and frame drops. The sewer especially was full of slowdown, and there was one puzzle that made the game chug like a train once you complete it for some reason which had me worried my game was gonna crash or something. My PC is a good gaming PC so I don't think it was that, and considering the fact that this game has AI that sometimes just doesn't do what it's supposed to do makes me think this is more on the game. Again these aren't major issues, but they are pretty odd and worth pointing out in my opinion.
Overall I think Stray was great for what it was going for, but I felt a little bored near the end of it. I really appreciate what it was going for, though. I'll always be an advocate for games where you get to play as a funny little critter; Stray embraces this aspect of being "the silly cat game" while still having a decent story and an honestly great sense of atmosphere. Gameplay is very mid but everything else about it really made it worth seeing through to the end, I enjoyed it. Gets a solid 3.5 stars out of me.
The story of the game starts simple but gets more involved as you progress. You start the game out with your cat buddies living together. You get to interact with them a little before they all go to sleep. You wake up with your cat colony and start exploring the world, following them around. This serves as the tutorial of the game and it works as a pretty natural one in my opinion. After a bit of venturing with your fuzzy compadres, something goes horribly wrong; the pipe your cat jumps on breaks, and unfortunately the cat can't hold on. It ends up falling into the deep abyss. Next thing it knows, the cat lands on puddles of water, left in the middle of a dark lonely tunnel with trash littered everywhere. It tries to move, but falls down and goes to sleep. Once it wakes up, it's about time to start exploring, finding out where it is, and hopefully reuniting with its friends (spoiler: that doesn't happen sadly). From here, this is where the game really starts. You get a bunch of mysterious hints from the technology of the city, such as the lights and television screens you find in abandoned buildings, telling you to go somewhere, which you then follow. There's a part where you get chased by a bunch of weird little headcrab-like critters that try to gang up on you which sets up some stuff that's elaborated on later in the story (these are called Zurks and the robots are afraid of them). Once you finally follow the hints all the way, you enter a cozy old home with a computer room that has a bunch of technology. After some light puzzle solving, you awaken a drone that speaks to you and thanks you. The drone was the reason behind all those hints you saw; it was shocked to see a cat roaming the area, since its connected to the electronic network of the city. The drone has little memory of who it is or what its purpose is, but it does remember that it was the creation of a scientist. The drone tells you to just call it B/12, like the symbol engraved on its body. Also, this is where you first find out the city is called Dead City...fittingly grim name. B/12 has you put on a sort of futuristic looking backpack, where the drone can recharge itself. This leads to a pretty funny scene where the cat falls over since its not used to wearing something like this and you have to keep moving forward. Small disclaimer, I didn't bother collecting the majority of the B/12 memories so I'm going to skip over describing what those add to the story or lore. After meeting B/12, he tells you to go further into the city; this is when Chapter 4: The Slums starts. After another encounter with those strange headcrab looking creatures, you get to meet the robots of this city. They are absolutely terrified of you, running into their homes while you roam the streets. Thankfully you meet a bot in robes and a hat that accepts you "so long as you don't try to eat anyone". Turns out he's the village guardian and he opens up the city again after you meet him. B/12 serves as your negotiator and translator for dealing with the robots and there's a good amount of them to talk to. Once you're done screwing around for a bit now that the linearity starts to open up a little, you can continue the story by finding Momo. He is a robot that had a deep connection with humans and pines for leaving Dead City, but lost all hope due to his friends failing to make it out alive. Once you meet him, he tells you he gave up on trying to leave, and says if you really want to go you can take the first of four notebooks he wrote. The book reveals that four different people signed an agreement that they were going to get to the Outside no matter what: Clementine, Zbaltazar, Doc, and Momo. To continue the story you need to find three notebooks - Clementine 4/4, Zbaltazar 2/4, and Doc 3/4. After finding them all, Momo has renewed hope and makes a plan to restore the transreceiver. He has you jump out the window, which starts Chapter 5. Okay I know I already got this far into the synopsis, but I really don't want to just explain the whole story, so I'll give a rundown of what happens from here: you go to Zurk territory to stick the transreceiver into the slot that lets Momo get his message out to Zbaltazar, you go back to the Slums so you can talk to the son of one of the Outsiders you're looking for, find clues in that guy's house with him to figure out the riddle Doc left for him so you can progress, then you go on a trek with Momo to the sewers, from there it takes you to Antvillage which then takes you to Midtown, in Midtown you do a bunch of stuff to get to Clementine, she has you go find this spy cohort so you can sneak into the Neco Corporation facility to get a battery, once you leave the whole city goes on lockdown, Clementine was kidnapped so you have to go find her, you go back to the home she was hiding at which gives you hints that tell you you need to go to the Nightclub, when you go to the Nightclub you find her but you also find the spy guy who turns out to be a double agent that sells you out, you and Clementine get put in jail, cue a big jail breakout mission, Clementine distracts the Sentinels for you so you can get to the bottom of all this, you find a subway train that takes you to a station, in the station you find the Control Room, in the Control Room B/12 sacrifices himself to turn the security system off, this also opens up the entire city which you get to watch happen after the cat mourns the loss of its drone buddy, then you go to the big red doors...it opens, and bam that's the end of the game. Enjoy a short cutscene of the cat touching grass after having been stuck in this desolate city for so long, and then the game just ends. The story wasn't all that interesting to me, but it served its purpose well and I'm not ashamed to admit that the drone's sacrifice had me feeling emotional. The cat is back to being all alone at the end of the game, still having not found its family. Maybe we will get a family reunion if we get a Stray sequel. "Stray 2: Clawed Encounters of the Furred Kind" or some shit, lol. The ending isn't too much of a downer, though, since you did ultimately escape the city (or at least that's what I think the ending implied but it was vague on whether you actually left Dead City or just found yourself back in it) and you just opened up the top of the big metal dome encasing the entirety of Dead City. These robots get to see sunlight for the first time in an eternity.
The visuals and setting of this game seem to be a major focus, which helps add to the immersive nature of Stray. I really dig how cold and desolate the place looks, you get a good sense of how uncaring the vibe is from all the trash strewn about and random objects like wooden planks just kinda being placed wherever. There are only remnants of the touch of humans present within the scenery, with things like postcards that you sometimes find and corporate billboards. It appears to always be night time (but its actually because the entire city is encased and walled in by a huge dome), which, combined with the fact that you'll be seeing a whole lot of drab blue, green, grey, and brown everywhere you go, gives things a very dreary feeling. It's a dystopian world with no living organism in sight except for the orange cat you control. Even the plants are synthetic, as hinted at through some dialogue and a company billboard you can find. Humans are gone and robots inherited this place that the humans used to call home. The robots have personalities of their own, though, and they've inhabited behaviors of humans like drinking alcohol or dancing at clubs. Despite the sad circumstances of this city, it doesn't look all bad, though. The parts that the robots call home are illuminated by neon lights that light up the streets. There are a few other locations you go to in the game, too; the sewers, the Antvillage, the jail, and Midtown. Midtown is more of the same sort of aesthetic you saw in Dead City, but its generally cleaner looking and its home to the upper crust robots so you see more extravagant buildings. There's also a whole authoritarian police city vibe with how, once you enter Midtown, they're searching for a certain suspect for the crime of wanting to get to the Outside. You even get to do some spy stuff, gleefully breaking the rules of this totalitarian state. What a cat thing to do, am I right? The sewers is basically the home of the Zurks, its full of the alien biological tech stuff that you saw them crowding around in Dead City. The heart of the sewers feels almost alive with all the eyes in the fleshy walls watching you, pretty strange visuals that I honestly wasn't expecting to see in the game. In contrast, the Antvillage was a pretty nice looking area...well, as nice looking as this dystopian world can get. It's pretty much one big spiraling building made of wood and piping placed next to a tree. So, overall, the way the world looks is great. However, the cats themselves look off unfortunately. It's mainly the face for me, which feels close to how a real cat looks but is just odd enough to annoy me. If you don't want to see footage of the game yourself, you can just look at the official artwork, which really showcases how strange the cats look in the face. I'm not sure if its a stylization thing or a graphical limitation. It certainly doesn't ruin the game's interesting visuals, though, since I'm not a stickler for realistic graphics and I know this is an indie game. The only thing about the visuals that I can say was pretty distracting for me is the seemingly random lag and frame drops. The sewer especially was full of slowdown, and there was one puzzle that made the game chug like a train once you complete it for some reason which had me worried my game was gonna crash or something. My PC is a good gaming PC so I don't think it was that, and considering the fact that this game has AI that sometimes just doesn't do what it's supposed to do makes me think this is more on the game. Again these aren't major issues, but they are pretty odd and worth pointing out in my opinion.
Overall I think Stray was great for what it was going for, but I felt a little bored near the end of it. I really appreciate what it was going for, though. I'll always be an advocate for games where you get to play as a funny little critter; Stray embraces this aspect of being "the silly cat game" while still having a decent story and an honestly great sense of atmosphere. Gameplay is very mid but everything else about it really made it worth seeing through to the end, I enjoyed it. Gets a solid 3.5 stars out of me.
2018
This review contains spoilers
So, Hades...this is the game that got hyped up to holy hell (heh) by everyone who played it. I've seen people that call it the best indie game, some even call it the best GAME ever. I wouldn't go anywhere near that far, but, after playing through the game, I can see why it got praised so much. It's far from my favorite games list, although its solid overall and I thought it had a lot of cool stuff about it. For context, this is the first roguelike (or is it a roguelite?) that I've played and actually tried to get through. I never liked the idea behind the genre; a gauntlet of randomly generated rooms that makes you go lose everything and start from square one every time you die sounded like torture to play through for me. Before this, I had only played through a bit of Enter the Gungeon with a friend and thought it was very "meh" (not to insinuate that game is bad or anything). Hades was much more interesting to me. Admittedly, I died a LOT in this game. It was frustrating when it was the same enemy or boss over and over (I died a lot to Megaera and the Asterius-Theseus tag team boss), but the way the game is structured makes it to where death isn't quite as frustrating as I thought it would be without losing out on that sense of brutal challenge the genre seems to be known for. I ended the game with only one successful escape attempt; I know its intended for you to keep going, and part of me is curious to see where the story goes from here, but quite frankly I didn't feel like playing through the same levels again no matter how randomly generated they were. Not sure if labeling this as a "Completed" playthrough is entirely accurate because of this endless aspect of the game, so I'm not going to do that. This game is going to get a specialized Note in my 2023 List stating that I didn't technically finish it but I also feel I've seen what it has to offer.
Alright, I'll start with the visuals. Normally not the first thing I talk about, but this game surprised me with how much of a distinct and cool style it has. When you look closely, you can still see the cracks (the models of the characters that aren't the enemies or bosses look a bit weird to me), but this is easy to ignore when there's such a neat art style to the whole game. The colors are very vibrant yet suitably dark when it needs to be. Each character you can talk to has a portrait that's drawn in this cool style that I'm not really sure how to even describe. It's just great, but not much else to say about it there.
The gameplay is definitely the main attraction of Hades. The combat has a frantic high speed energy to it that just feels excellent to play through. Everything goes so quick, but never so speedy that you can't tell what the hell is going on. Things do get pretty crazy once you get to rooms chockful of enemies to take down, but this is balanced out by the enemies all spawning in waves (new enemies will mostly only spawn after taking out the wave you're currently fighting with a few exceptions). Whenever you're in trouble, you can always dash up to 2 times by default, which gives you invincibility frames and can be upgraded with Boons (more on Boons later). The dash is probably one of the most important tools in your arsenal because of that, but it never feels like it cheapens the game's difficulty and instead feels like it enhances the sense of speed in it. There's a pretty good variety of enemies to fight, so it doesn't feel like you're always fighting the same guys. I imagine that's very important if you're a Roguelike fiend that tries to play all these games several times over, but I'm not that kinda guy. Rooms tend to have traps that you can use to your advantage if you're clever enough, like spike traps and pressure plates that make statues shoot out projectiles. I just wanted to keep pumping out damage and dashing around, so it was more convenient to just ignore the traps for me. I found that the boss fights are particularly amazing. They are hard and can be especially frustrating if you don't know what you're doing, but once you figure it out they're a lot of fun. The only one I hated was the Asterius + Theseus tag team, but by the time I got to Styx for the first time I was able to eliminate Asterius + Theseus much easier after having understood the pattern. The final boss fight against Hades himself was easily the most pressure I felt in a fight in a while, frantically trying to avoid all his attacks while still pumping enough damage to get him before he got me. I didn't end up dying to him once, but that was a stressful final boss and I felt so accomplished when I beat him while I was just barely at death's door.
One aspect of the game's combat that I feel makes it so interesting is the sense of customizability it has. Took me a bit to wrap my head around, but it was neat to experiment with. There are a bunch of weapons - or Infernal Arms, as they're called in game - that you can choose between once you unlock them all. You start with Stygius, but, once you get enough Chthonic Keys, you can unlock the other five weapons: Coronacht, Varatha, Aegis, Twin Fists of Malphon, and Exagryph. These weapons are a bow, forked spear, shield, gauntlets, and a railgun respectively. Each have some attributes unique to them, like Aegis has a charge move that also blocks any attacks thrown in its way or the spin attack that Varatha has that feels ripped straight out of The Legend of Zelda. Every weapon has a basic attack on X (I was using Xbox inputs so these buttons might not apply to your controller) and a special attack unique to that weapon on Y, which will make up the wide majority of your attack options aside from the occasional Cast (which is like a ranged projectile shot by pressing B that all weapons have). I found that all the weapons were pretty fun to use and none of them felt useless to me, although Stygius was the only one I genuinely didn't like using. I'd say the Twin Fists were the most fun to use, but Coronacht ended up being my best weapon so I kept using that instead. You can upgrade your weapons once you unlock them all, which lets you use that Titan's Blood that was likely sitting in your inventory from beating the first boss (unless you're unfortunate enough to have never beat her before you got all the weapons). Since I experimented with all the weapons enough to at least beat the first boss with them, I got a Titan's Blood from each one, which was enough to upgrade one weapon a few times. I made the mistake of using my first Titan's Blood on upgrading Varatha, since I thought I would like that weapon the most, but I ended up liking Coronacht more and felt like I wasted the blood. You can get pretty in-depth with builds in this game, honestly; each weapon has four different aspects that each add different perks or effects to the weapon, but unfortunately you don't get anywhere near enough Titan's Blood to efficiently try them out when you're on the way to finish your first escape run. On my playthrough, I just looked up a guide for Coronacht builds online and found that people say the Aspect of Chiron path for upgrades is really good, so I went with that and it worked well for me. Upgrading weapons is cool, but there's also the perks you get from the mirror in your room. You exchange your Darkness (the little purple orbs you get from clearing certain rooms or killing bosses you already killed before) for these permanent perks. One of these - Death Defiance - is pretty expensive, especially if you want to get all three upgrades for it, but its basically a necessity because it essentially gives you an extra life that you wouldn't normally have. Unless you're some kind of pro gamer that never dies to anything, you're gonna need Death Defiance, and if you're like me you'll need to have two of those to get your first escape attempt. A big feature of customizability for the combat is Boons, which are specific buffs you get from the Olympian Gods that last as long as you can last in a particular run. So, if you get the lightning bolt, Zeus shows up and gives you some options for buffing yourself up that last until the whole run. You're not stuck with the same Boon for the whole thing, since you can sell them in some rooms or replace it with a different Boon if you see one you like better from another god. However, the kind of gods you get on your run is randomized unless you have a Keepsake (equipped items that grant special effects for a run) that increases your chances of coming across a specific god. I found that it was very crucial to familiarize yourself with the kinds of Boons you'll usually get from the different gods. They tend to have specific gimmicks to most of their Boons that fit the kind of thing that god is known for, like how a lot of Ares's Boons focus on a status effect called Doom that deals damage after a small delay, and he has some other great Boons like Urge to Kill (increases your damage with all your attacks) and Battle Rage (makes you deal more damage after you have just killed an enemy). Dionysus has a similar status effect gimmick with his Boons, except his is called Hangover, which is kinda like the typical JRPG poison effect but it builds up to stacks of 5. Every god has a Boon that will buff either your regular attack, special attack, cast, or dash, as well as some more specialized stuff unique to each god like the ones I mentioned for Ares when I used him as an example. You have a bunch of slots for miscellaneous Boons, but the ones that buff your attack, special, cast, or dash occupy a specific slot that will have to be removed or replaced if you want to change it. As far as I know, the Boons from Hermes and Daedalic Hammers (basically Hephaestus although you unfortunately never get to see him in the game) are the only exceptions, since all of their Boons count as miscellaneous ones. Athena has some really nice defensive options, like Last Stand (increases the health you get after Death Defiance) and a useful deflection ability that most of her Boons come prepackaged with. Dionysus also has great defensive Boons, mainly Positive Outlook which reduces damage taken when you reach 40% health or below, and some Boons that boost health restoration. Apparently there are also some Boons that you get from comboing Boons from specific gods together but I never got any of these in my playthrough. I found that finding a good loadout of Boons that work best for your play style was very important.
Something I love about this game is how death almost seems encouraged. Of course, you never want to die since you'll have to start your run from the beginning again, but whenever you die there's always something you can do back in the home world to make it not feel like a wasted effort. You can spend that Darkness you got to upgrade your abilities. Later in the game, you get Contracts, which gives you a use for your gems to do stuff like make minor cosmetic changes, build a small pot of water in your bedchambers that reveals how many times you died or how many enemies you've slain, and upgrades that change the layout of the Underworld for your benefit (like adding urns that drop gold when destroyed or fountain rooms you may come across that give you the option to restore health). There's this weird social system that seemed rather pointless to me, but was kind of a cool addition, especially since Zagreus is thankfully not a silent protagonist. He's a pretty chill guy with a heart of gold and a bit of a mouth on him; he has some entertaining dialogue I enjoyed. When you interact with some items in the environment - indicated by a glowing yellow dot - there's a narrator that explains stuff to you, and, amusingly enough, Zagreus breaks the fourth wall and knows he exists. The thing about the social system that I thought was weird is that, the more you talk to characters, the more it fills up a codec that Achilles gives you that has some lore and background information about the characters written in there. Don't get me wrong, I think this is cool. I'm no Greek mythology expert, so it was nice to see some information written about all these gods, demigods, and other mythological figures you meet along the way, but I really don't know why it's all locked behind having to interact with the characters enough times. Strangest of all to me, there's also the option to date specific characters, which I genuinely had no idea was even a thing and it can only be done for three characters. There's Thanatos for a gay romance option, Megaera for a straight romance, and honestly Dusa barely even counts since Zagreus admits he has feelings for her but they both calmly settle for just being friends since Dusa tells him she isn't ready for a relationship. From what I watched in a YouTube video, the Dusa "romance" was handled surprisingly maturely and I was glad to see it wasn't super cheesy. I never really saw the point in this whole system, much less the shipping, but hey maybe some people really like that and it'd be wrong of me to stomp on their fun.
Okay I usually don't take THIS long in the review to get to the story, but part of this is because...well, I can't definitively say how it ends since I really don't want to have to play through the same few worlds however many times it takes to see it all. As far as I understood, the story is that Zagreus wants to leave the Underworld, no matter how much of a brutal struggle it will be. His adoptive mother, Nyx, helps him out with that (she's the one that put the darkness mirror in his room). Eventually after you die enough times, you get a big story reveal scene where Zagreus sneaks up on Hades' desk to read the scrolls there. Little Zaggy boy finds out he's actually the son of Persephone, not Nyx. That only fuels him even more on his journey to escape the Underworld, which he eventually manages to do after defeating Hades in the snowy Greek mountains. Once his dad's out of the picture, Zagreus makes it to Persephone, making for a pretty emotional reunion. It doesn't last long, however, since eventually Zagreus finds out he truly is doomed by fate to be stuck in the Underworld forever. He gets pulled back down there, and decides to trek back up there again even if he only has a few more minutes to see Persephone again. I'm thinking its structured like this to make the whole endless roguelike aspect of this game make sense in the story, I have no idea what happens if you go back up there again unfortunately.
So, my overall thoughts...I don't think Hades is going to make me a roguelike fiend, but I do think it was a great time with plenty of positive aspects to it. I can see why people love the game so much, even if I don't think it was necessarily 5 star worthy or something I'd want to play again and again.
Alright, I'll start with the visuals. Normally not the first thing I talk about, but this game surprised me with how much of a distinct and cool style it has. When you look closely, you can still see the cracks (the models of the characters that aren't the enemies or bosses look a bit weird to me), but this is easy to ignore when there's such a neat art style to the whole game. The colors are very vibrant yet suitably dark when it needs to be. Each character you can talk to has a portrait that's drawn in this cool style that I'm not really sure how to even describe. It's just great, but not much else to say about it there.
The gameplay is definitely the main attraction of Hades. The combat has a frantic high speed energy to it that just feels excellent to play through. Everything goes so quick, but never so speedy that you can't tell what the hell is going on. Things do get pretty crazy once you get to rooms chockful of enemies to take down, but this is balanced out by the enemies all spawning in waves (new enemies will mostly only spawn after taking out the wave you're currently fighting with a few exceptions). Whenever you're in trouble, you can always dash up to 2 times by default, which gives you invincibility frames and can be upgraded with Boons (more on Boons later). The dash is probably one of the most important tools in your arsenal because of that, but it never feels like it cheapens the game's difficulty and instead feels like it enhances the sense of speed in it. There's a pretty good variety of enemies to fight, so it doesn't feel like you're always fighting the same guys. I imagine that's very important if you're a Roguelike fiend that tries to play all these games several times over, but I'm not that kinda guy. Rooms tend to have traps that you can use to your advantage if you're clever enough, like spike traps and pressure plates that make statues shoot out projectiles. I just wanted to keep pumping out damage and dashing around, so it was more convenient to just ignore the traps for me. I found that the boss fights are particularly amazing. They are hard and can be especially frustrating if you don't know what you're doing, but once you figure it out they're a lot of fun. The only one I hated was the Asterius + Theseus tag team, but by the time I got to Styx for the first time I was able to eliminate Asterius + Theseus much easier after having understood the pattern. The final boss fight against Hades himself was easily the most pressure I felt in a fight in a while, frantically trying to avoid all his attacks while still pumping enough damage to get him before he got me. I didn't end up dying to him once, but that was a stressful final boss and I felt so accomplished when I beat him while I was just barely at death's door.
One aspect of the game's combat that I feel makes it so interesting is the sense of customizability it has. Took me a bit to wrap my head around, but it was neat to experiment with. There are a bunch of weapons - or Infernal Arms, as they're called in game - that you can choose between once you unlock them all. You start with Stygius, but, once you get enough Chthonic Keys, you can unlock the other five weapons: Coronacht, Varatha, Aegis, Twin Fists of Malphon, and Exagryph. These weapons are a bow, forked spear, shield, gauntlets, and a railgun respectively. Each have some attributes unique to them, like Aegis has a charge move that also blocks any attacks thrown in its way or the spin attack that Varatha has that feels ripped straight out of The Legend of Zelda. Every weapon has a basic attack on X (I was using Xbox inputs so these buttons might not apply to your controller) and a special attack unique to that weapon on Y, which will make up the wide majority of your attack options aside from the occasional Cast (which is like a ranged projectile shot by pressing B that all weapons have). I found that all the weapons were pretty fun to use and none of them felt useless to me, although Stygius was the only one I genuinely didn't like using. I'd say the Twin Fists were the most fun to use, but Coronacht ended up being my best weapon so I kept using that instead. You can upgrade your weapons once you unlock them all, which lets you use that Titan's Blood that was likely sitting in your inventory from beating the first boss (unless you're unfortunate enough to have never beat her before you got all the weapons). Since I experimented with all the weapons enough to at least beat the first boss with them, I got a Titan's Blood from each one, which was enough to upgrade one weapon a few times. I made the mistake of using my first Titan's Blood on upgrading Varatha, since I thought I would like that weapon the most, but I ended up liking Coronacht more and felt like I wasted the blood. You can get pretty in-depth with builds in this game, honestly; each weapon has four different aspects that each add different perks or effects to the weapon, but unfortunately you don't get anywhere near enough Titan's Blood to efficiently try them out when you're on the way to finish your first escape run. On my playthrough, I just looked up a guide for Coronacht builds online and found that people say the Aspect of Chiron path for upgrades is really good, so I went with that and it worked well for me. Upgrading weapons is cool, but there's also the perks you get from the mirror in your room. You exchange your Darkness (the little purple orbs you get from clearing certain rooms or killing bosses you already killed before) for these permanent perks. One of these - Death Defiance - is pretty expensive, especially if you want to get all three upgrades for it, but its basically a necessity because it essentially gives you an extra life that you wouldn't normally have. Unless you're some kind of pro gamer that never dies to anything, you're gonna need Death Defiance, and if you're like me you'll need to have two of those to get your first escape attempt. A big feature of customizability for the combat is Boons, which are specific buffs you get from the Olympian Gods that last as long as you can last in a particular run. So, if you get the lightning bolt, Zeus shows up and gives you some options for buffing yourself up that last until the whole run. You're not stuck with the same Boon for the whole thing, since you can sell them in some rooms or replace it with a different Boon if you see one you like better from another god. However, the kind of gods you get on your run is randomized unless you have a Keepsake (equipped items that grant special effects for a run) that increases your chances of coming across a specific god. I found that it was very crucial to familiarize yourself with the kinds of Boons you'll usually get from the different gods. They tend to have specific gimmicks to most of their Boons that fit the kind of thing that god is known for, like how a lot of Ares's Boons focus on a status effect called Doom that deals damage after a small delay, and he has some other great Boons like Urge to Kill (increases your damage with all your attacks) and Battle Rage (makes you deal more damage after you have just killed an enemy). Dionysus has a similar status effect gimmick with his Boons, except his is called Hangover, which is kinda like the typical JRPG poison effect but it builds up to stacks of 5. Every god has a Boon that will buff either your regular attack, special attack, cast, or dash, as well as some more specialized stuff unique to each god like the ones I mentioned for Ares when I used him as an example. You have a bunch of slots for miscellaneous Boons, but the ones that buff your attack, special, cast, or dash occupy a specific slot that will have to be removed or replaced if you want to change it. As far as I know, the Boons from Hermes and Daedalic Hammers (basically Hephaestus although you unfortunately never get to see him in the game) are the only exceptions, since all of their Boons count as miscellaneous ones. Athena has some really nice defensive options, like Last Stand (increases the health you get after Death Defiance) and a useful deflection ability that most of her Boons come prepackaged with. Dionysus also has great defensive Boons, mainly Positive Outlook which reduces damage taken when you reach 40% health or below, and some Boons that boost health restoration. Apparently there are also some Boons that you get from comboing Boons from specific gods together but I never got any of these in my playthrough. I found that finding a good loadout of Boons that work best for your play style was very important.
Something I love about this game is how death almost seems encouraged. Of course, you never want to die since you'll have to start your run from the beginning again, but whenever you die there's always something you can do back in the home world to make it not feel like a wasted effort. You can spend that Darkness you got to upgrade your abilities. Later in the game, you get Contracts, which gives you a use for your gems to do stuff like make minor cosmetic changes, build a small pot of water in your bedchambers that reveals how many times you died or how many enemies you've slain, and upgrades that change the layout of the Underworld for your benefit (like adding urns that drop gold when destroyed or fountain rooms you may come across that give you the option to restore health). There's this weird social system that seemed rather pointless to me, but was kind of a cool addition, especially since Zagreus is thankfully not a silent protagonist. He's a pretty chill guy with a heart of gold and a bit of a mouth on him; he has some entertaining dialogue I enjoyed. When you interact with some items in the environment - indicated by a glowing yellow dot - there's a narrator that explains stuff to you, and, amusingly enough, Zagreus breaks the fourth wall and knows he exists. The thing about the social system that I thought was weird is that, the more you talk to characters, the more it fills up a codec that Achilles gives you that has some lore and background information about the characters written in there. Don't get me wrong, I think this is cool. I'm no Greek mythology expert, so it was nice to see some information written about all these gods, demigods, and other mythological figures you meet along the way, but I really don't know why it's all locked behind having to interact with the characters enough times. Strangest of all to me, there's also the option to date specific characters, which I genuinely had no idea was even a thing and it can only be done for three characters. There's Thanatos for a gay romance option, Megaera for a straight romance, and honestly Dusa barely even counts since Zagreus admits he has feelings for her but they both calmly settle for just being friends since Dusa tells him she isn't ready for a relationship. From what I watched in a YouTube video, the Dusa "romance" was handled surprisingly maturely and I was glad to see it wasn't super cheesy. I never really saw the point in this whole system, much less the shipping, but hey maybe some people really like that and it'd be wrong of me to stomp on their fun.
Okay I usually don't take THIS long in the review to get to the story, but part of this is because...well, I can't definitively say how it ends since I really don't want to have to play through the same few worlds however many times it takes to see it all. As far as I understood, the story is that Zagreus wants to leave the Underworld, no matter how much of a brutal struggle it will be. His adoptive mother, Nyx, helps him out with that (she's the one that put the darkness mirror in his room). Eventually after you die enough times, you get a big story reveal scene where Zagreus sneaks up on Hades' desk to read the scrolls there. Little Zaggy boy finds out he's actually the son of Persephone, not Nyx. That only fuels him even more on his journey to escape the Underworld, which he eventually manages to do after defeating Hades in the snowy Greek mountains. Once his dad's out of the picture, Zagreus makes it to Persephone, making for a pretty emotional reunion. It doesn't last long, however, since eventually Zagreus finds out he truly is doomed by fate to be stuck in the Underworld forever. He gets pulled back down there, and decides to trek back up there again even if he only has a few more minutes to see Persephone again. I'm thinking its structured like this to make the whole endless roguelike aspect of this game make sense in the story, I have no idea what happens if you go back up there again unfortunately.
So, my overall thoughts...I don't think Hades is going to make me a roguelike fiend, but I do think it was a great time with plenty of positive aspects to it. I can see why people love the game so much, even if I don't think it was necessarily 5 star worthy or something I'd want to play again and again.