2015
This review contains spoilers
A comic-book styled game in a steampunk era is certainly not something you see every day. The fun ideas don't stop there, as the leader of your group is Abraham Lincoln himself, and half the cast of playable units (or maybe even all of them and I just don't get some of the references) are famous literature characters, like Tom Sawyer or the cast of Wizard of Oz.
The story unfortunately isn't quite as zany as the set-up would have you think. Outside of a few instances (like escorting the Queen of England through Buckingham Palace, or using a giant mechanized Abe Lincoln robot) the game is largely just a generic alien invasion story.
I think the gameplay is generally quite fun, and each character comes with their own weapon focused on a different playstyle, like close-range, long-range, enemy distraction, healing, enemy stunning, and more. Unfortunately there's a couple of huge issues with the game that just make it a frustrating time.
Every action in the game costs steam. It costs 1 steam to move a space, and X amount to use your weapon, changing depending on said weapon. The enemies also have their own steam counter, and much like Skinner and his aurora borealis, no, you can’t see it. If you save enough steam on your turn you can perform a counter-attack (called an “overwatch”) on the enemies turn, and this likewise applies to enemies and their invisible steam. Thing is, with an enemy they’ll counter you the literal second you get into view, which based on the camera and map design, means they spot you 99.9% of the time before you spot them, and they will then proceed to do another counter every single time you so much as nudge the control stick. Your own overwatch on the other hand seems insanely inconsistent, as half the time enemies are free to just walk up to your face and slap you without your character doing anything about it. I know I’m using the right weapons with enough leftover steam (as indicated by a bright green gun icon on the character screen), so I have no idea why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Much like another Overwatch it’s something that sounds very good in theory, but was utterly ruined in implementation by the developers.
The other big issue I have is the way the camera works. It's a cramped over-the-shoulder view, meaning you have very little visual information at any one time (which is especially annoying on a small 3DS screen). This means that all the action and enemies happening outside of any characters view are impossible to see, which makes it pretty hard to plan around corners and whatnot. This combined with the above issue is what makes it truly awful. I could accept the insane enemy reaction time if the game had some kind of birds eye view so you could see what's going on at all times. I could accept this regular third person view if enemies didn't stun you the second a pixel of your character pops around a screen, before you could know they were there. But having them both together is just messy.
Speaking of keeping enemy actions blind to the player, on an enemies turn you still don't get to see them. Instead your view is solely locked on your character(s). It will generally point in a direction of the enemy movement, but that could be anywhere from right behind the wall to on the other side of the map. When an enemy attacks a character the camera will instantly switch to the attacked character...sometimes. Sometimes that just doesn't work, so you'll see someone losing health and have no idea how it happened.
I find that the game was generally better once I got long-range characters (seriously The Fox is OP) because trying to get close enough to enemies that can shoot your nipple off your tit from another continent is hell.
Also this is one of those 3DS games that you can still find for under £5 brand new and sealed, so if you're one of the 5 people who still buy 3DS games, it's a good deal.
The story unfortunately isn't quite as zany as the set-up would have you think. Outside of a few instances (like escorting the Queen of England through Buckingham Palace, or using a giant mechanized Abe Lincoln robot) the game is largely just a generic alien invasion story.
I think the gameplay is generally quite fun, and each character comes with their own weapon focused on a different playstyle, like close-range, long-range, enemy distraction, healing, enemy stunning, and more. Unfortunately there's a couple of huge issues with the game that just make it a frustrating time.
Every action in the game costs steam. It costs 1 steam to move a space, and X amount to use your weapon, changing depending on said weapon. The enemies also have their own steam counter, and much like Skinner and his aurora borealis, no, you can’t see it. If you save enough steam on your turn you can perform a counter-attack (called an “overwatch”) on the enemies turn, and this likewise applies to enemies and their invisible steam. Thing is, with an enemy they’ll counter you the literal second you get into view, which based on the camera and map design, means they spot you 99.9% of the time before you spot them, and they will then proceed to do another counter every single time you so much as nudge the control stick. Your own overwatch on the other hand seems insanely inconsistent, as half the time enemies are free to just walk up to your face and slap you without your character doing anything about it. I know I’m using the right weapons with enough leftover steam (as indicated by a bright green gun icon on the character screen), so I have no idea why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Much like another Overwatch it’s something that sounds very good in theory, but was utterly ruined in implementation by the developers.
The other big issue I have is the way the camera works. It's a cramped over-the-shoulder view, meaning you have very little visual information at any one time (which is especially annoying on a small 3DS screen). This means that all the action and enemies happening outside of any characters view are impossible to see, which makes it pretty hard to plan around corners and whatnot. This combined with the above issue is what makes it truly awful. I could accept the insane enemy reaction time if the game had some kind of birds eye view so you could see what's going on at all times. I could accept this regular third person view if enemies didn't stun you the second a pixel of your character pops around a screen, before you could know they were there. But having them both together is just messy.
Speaking of keeping enemy actions blind to the player, on an enemies turn you still don't get to see them. Instead your view is solely locked on your character(s). It will generally point in a direction of the enemy movement, but that could be anywhere from right behind the wall to on the other side of the map. When an enemy attacks a character the camera will instantly switch to the attacked character...sometimes. Sometimes that just doesn't work, so you'll see someone losing health and have no idea how it happened.
I find that the game was generally better once I got long-range characters (seriously The Fox is OP) because trying to get close enough to enemies that can shoot your nipple off your tit from another continent is hell.
Also this is one of those 3DS games that you can still find for under £5 brand new and sealed, so if you're one of the 5 people who still buy 3DS games, it's a good deal.
2021
This is really a game that just constantly has you improving every few minutes so the urge to keep playing becomes dangerously high. There's no down times or pace-breaking story, it's just pure arcadey fun but with a huge progression chain, so unlike large amounts of arcade games you still feel like you're aiming for something beyond a high score.
It's actually quite impressive how much content there is (of course I am playing a few years into the games life). It looks very empty at first, only 4 characters? Then you unlock a new one and it brings up many more. Then you unlock a secret character and it shows all the other secret characters. You're constantly unlocking new weapons and stages, the former of which is always fun to try and experiment with and see what evolves with what. While most of the stages are fairly plain, there's some fun gimmicky ones, like the newly added minecart stage, a stage based on Green Hill Zone with blocks similar to the special stages in that game which break after a certain amount of hits etc.
There's a lot of player-selected difficulty and challenges to be made by turnign on and off certain settings - no matter how much you upgrade, there's always an option to turn it all off to play as if starting a brand new game. But at the same time you can break the game in half by working out how to effectively farm golden eggs to create a character so powerful nothing can even touch you.
I found out this was supposedly made by someone using gambling psychology, except of course without the whole debt part. I'd love to see more vices be made into things that don't have their downsides, how about video games without the extreme time loss? 🤭
I guess as far as issues go, there's not many bosses that really do anything. Most of them just float around like any other enemy and try to overlap with your sprite to take you out. Towards the endgame there's definitely a sense that progression has slowed down - you're just playing to play now. While there's still stuff to unlock, you've already discovered the perfect item combos and can make a build to get you through pretty much anything, so a new item is at best worth a try or two, but lacks that excitement you get early on.
Very fun and massive amount of content for its price. Also a pretty good soundtrack.
It's actually quite impressive how much content there is (of course I am playing a few years into the games life). It looks very empty at first, only 4 characters? Then you unlock a new one and it brings up many more. Then you unlock a secret character and it shows all the other secret characters. You're constantly unlocking new weapons and stages, the former of which is always fun to try and experiment with and see what evolves with what. While most of the stages are fairly plain, there's some fun gimmicky ones, like the newly added minecart stage, a stage based on Green Hill Zone with blocks similar to the special stages in that game which break after a certain amount of hits etc.
There's a lot of player-selected difficulty and challenges to be made by turnign on and off certain settings - no matter how much you upgrade, there's always an option to turn it all off to play as if starting a brand new game. But at the same time you can break the game in half by working out how to effectively farm golden eggs to create a character so powerful nothing can even touch you.
I found out this was supposedly made by someone using gambling psychology, except of course without the whole debt part. I'd love to see more vices be made into things that don't have their downsides, how about video games without the extreme time loss? 🤭
I guess as far as issues go, there's not many bosses that really do anything. Most of them just float around like any other enemy and try to overlap with your sprite to take you out. Towards the endgame there's definitely a sense that progression has slowed down - you're just playing to play now. While there's still stuff to unlock, you've already discovered the perfect item combos and can make a build to get you through pretty much anything, so a new item is at best worth a try or two, but lacks that excitement you get early on.
Very fun and massive amount of content for its price. Also a pretty good soundtrack.
2022
Some parts of Chocobo GP are really good. The actual racing is fun, though a bit weightless feeling, so it has the core part down. It has a ton of characters, each with their own unique vehicles which show off a ton of personality, and each racer also has their own "ultimate" move, which admittedly doesn't feel like they balanced them, but it's a kart racer so I don't care about one ability being a little better than another that much. The item system itself is great, using something that makes sense in-universe while also being a more complicated system than most kart racers. You can hold up to 3 tiers of an item to keep it boosted, so you're constantly figuring out whether the best play is to use your item now or wait and strengthen it up. Even the item boxes have some nuance to them as there's 3 types - copper is basically trash that just gives a random item, blue will give you +1 of whatever item you're currently holding, and gold will give you 2 items at once. So the best play is to get gold first then blue. But of course in the heat of the race it isn't always possible, and sometimes copper is all you can grab. It adds a whole layer to the racing and it's great.
Story mode is...fiiiine. The dialogue is super cheesy and cringey, but it also has its own little charm?
Online mode is interesting. It's a 64 person tournament where you need to play in the top 4 to move to the next round. It's fun, and adds a bit more strategy since other than the finals you might be more interested in making sure player #5 doesn't pass you than using your items to pass player #3. But it has a big problem - the lack of regular online races means this games online will be unplayable before long. Needing 64 players for one online game is not going to work well for a game that will likely struggle to hit those numbers in a couple of weeks.
But the whole game is let down by 2 big things. The first is of course the microtransactions. Literally everyone has spoke about them. The fact they exist in a paid game is just disgusting. They should have made it a free to play game if they wanted a battle pass system.
But the other big problem is the damn tracks. Now, they LOOK great (aesthetically anyway, visually they're fine but not gonna be noted for being good or bad), but there's a huge lack of them. There's 9 "themes" and then most themes have 2-3 variants. The problems with this is that most variants don't feel different enough, so it really does feel like there's only 9 tracks, but also every damn track is super short. There's one track that's just a circle, like baby park, but it sticks with the 3 laps. The variants of tracks tend to fall into (Short) and (Long). Short ones can tend to be finished in under a minute and long ones are lucky to last 2 minutes. It's such a huge disappointment because the tracks themselves are really good, but the fact there's so few of them, and the fact they're over so quick means the game looses a LOT of replayability as you go through its minimal content so many times in such a short span.
Boosting lap amounts to 4-6 depending on track length could have helped, but it'd still have felt low in variety.
Chocobo GP already had some balls to show up as an exclusive on the console with the behemoth that is Mario Kart, but it could still have at least been a niche title for Final Fantasy fans, or just kart racers who wanted something new. Instead feels like a huge waste of potential as you have so little to race on, and get so much locked behind paywalls.
Story mode is...fiiiine. The dialogue is super cheesy and cringey, but it also has its own little charm?
Online mode is interesting. It's a 64 person tournament where you need to play in the top 4 to move to the next round. It's fun, and adds a bit more strategy since other than the finals you might be more interested in making sure player #5 doesn't pass you than using your items to pass player #3. But it has a big problem - the lack of regular online races means this games online will be unplayable before long. Needing 64 players for one online game is not going to work well for a game that will likely struggle to hit those numbers in a couple of weeks.
But the whole game is let down by 2 big things. The first is of course the microtransactions. Literally everyone has spoke about them. The fact they exist in a paid game is just disgusting. They should have made it a free to play game if they wanted a battle pass system.
But the other big problem is the damn tracks. Now, they LOOK great (aesthetically anyway, visually they're fine but not gonna be noted for being good or bad), but there's a huge lack of them. There's 9 "themes" and then most themes have 2-3 variants. The problems with this is that most variants don't feel different enough, so it really does feel like there's only 9 tracks, but also every damn track is super short. There's one track that's just a circle, like baby park, but it sticks with the 3 laps. The variants of tracks tend to fall into (Short) and (Long). Short ones can tend to be finished in under a minute and long ones are lucky to last 2 minutes. It's such a huge disappointment because the tracks themselves are really good, but the fact there's so few of them, and the fact they're over so quick means the game looses a LOT of replayability as you go through its minimal content so many times in such a short span.
Boosting lap amounts to 4-6 depending on track length could have helped, but it'd still have felt low in variety.
Chocobo GP already had some balls to show up as an exclusive on the console with the behemoth that is Mario Kart, but it could still have at least been a niche title for Final Fantasy fans, or just kart racers who wanted something new. Instead feels like a huge waste of potential as you have so little to race on, and get so much locked behind paywalls.
2023
Promises a great new twist on an old genre.
Delivers low content (25 flat rides and 3 coaster types), some incredibly unintuitive and clunky building controls for even stuff like building a simple path, let alone an entire coaster, and an amount of visual and gameplay bugs that would feed Timon and Pumbaa for a decade.
Such a disappointment. Especially because the actual management part of the game seems extremely good, and even though lacking in numbers, the rides present do look great. But the building part is bordering unplayable.
Delivers low content (25 flat rides and 3 coaster types), some incredibly unintuitive and clunky building controls for even stuff like building a simple path, let alone an entire coaster, and an amount of visual and gameplay bugs that would feed Timon and Pumbaa for a decade.
Such a disappointment. Especially because the actual management part of the game seems extremely good, and even though lacking in numbers, the rides present do look great. But the building part is bordering unplayable.
2022
I had a lot of fun playing Tunic, with its cute artstyle and simple but addicting gameplay. Exploring in this game is done really well, with hidden paths and areas everywhere. Constant progress through new key items, or stat upgrades. It really felt like there was so many paths to take at any one time, yet I rarely seemed to meet any dead ends. I don't know exactly how linear the game is since I know some abilities are definitely required for some parts, but for a game with as much freedom as it gives, I never seemed to run into roadblocks. Instead it was a case of getting a new ability and getting excited to try it out on all the old places I've already been.
And even in the times I did get lost, it didn't feel like a complete waste of time because every enemy I killed brought me one step closer to paying for that next upgrade.
The game manual is obviously the biggest thing that gives the game its identity, and most people love it or hate it. I liked it overall, I thought it generally gave enough info to at least beat the game without having to dig deep. But some of the optional stuff is insane to expect people to work out by themselves, even just being able to get the true ending.
I think what I'd have liked was a way to get the text translated in-game. So many ways they could have done this, either by having each letter be a hidden collectable so you slowly build it up, having a translation be a prize for the final boss, so only in new game plus could non-super devoted players get to understand it, or if they really wanted to make the players do it, allow them to enter letters for each symbol that automatically turns every symbol into that letter. Never telling the player if they got the right letter, so it'd be just the same as writing them down on paper, but without the need to constantly cross-reference.
The majority of the game is just perfect. I can only really criticise some of the decisions to make some aspects near impossible without an online guide, or more time dedication than necessary.
And even in the times I did get lost, it didn't feel like a complete waste of time because every enemy I killed brought me one step closer to paying for that next upgrade.
The game manual is obviously the biggest thing that gives the game its identity, and most people love it or hate it. I liked it overall, I thought it generally gave enough info to at least beat the game without having to dig deep. But some of the optional stuff is insane to expect people to work out by themselves, even just being able to get the true ending.
I think what I'd have liked was a way to get the text translated in-game. So many ways they could have done this, either by having each letter be a hidden collectable so you slowly build it up, having a translation be a prize for the final boss, so only in new game plus could non-super devoted players get to understand it, or if they really wanted to make the players do it, allow them to enter letters for each symbol that automatically turns every symbol into that letter. Never telling the player if they got the right letter, so it'd be just the same as writing them down on paper, but without the need to constantly cross-reference.
The majority of the game is just perfect. I can only really criticise some of the decisions to make some aspects near impossible without an online guide, or more time dedication than necessary.
The ability to port Tenkaichi onto PSP in such a smooth, playable way with little compensation in gameplay beyond the loss of a few buttons is amazing. Making the gimmick being having 4 fighters on screen at once was just them being cocky at that point lol.
You do feel the cut of characters and stages though. Having said that, the character roster is still solid with many inclusions you'd assume they'd cut like Chaozu or Cui. Stages are hit a lot harder, missing many staples like the Room of Spirit and Time.
Story mode, despite the bland presentation, is really comprehensive. It tackles almost every fight from the original manga from the Saiyan Saga to the Boo saga, something even many older console games didn't (I remember Budokai 3 cut all of the Ginyu Force but Recoome and Ginyu, and skipped Dr Gero and Android 19).
It makes a lot of weird decisions though starting in the Cell saga. While some fights are kind of combined before then to make use of the tag team gimmick (which isn't locked in as the game does allow 1v1 or even 2v1), like you'll fight Nappa and Saibamen together with Piccolo and any other fighter of your choice from that section, including Yamcha who died before Nappa entered the battle. But once you enter the Cell saga you get stuff like fighting Dr Gero and Android 19 together...in the city where they appeared instead of the random wasteland where the fight took place. And then after Goku fights both the androids, Vegeta comes in to fight 19 as he does in the original...but instead of Dr Gero, 19 is now teamed up with a Cell Jr? What the fuck? Piccolo gets a teammate to fight Android 17 (any of the 3 humans who were explicitly told to NOT join the fight), and yet 17 doesn't get 18 to help him. Buff Trunks is just a straight up missing character, so his fight with Perfect Cell is regular Super Saiyan Trunks, despite all the dialogue still making references to his slow speed from his power form. And Gohan fights the Cell Jrs with Android 16 - the one character there who NEVER fought a Cell Jr lol.
The Boo saga suffers the most from character and stage losses. There's no world tournament stage, so right off the bat Goten vs Trunks takes place on a random island. No Room of Spirit and Time so Gotenks vs Boo is also down on Earth. Gohan vs Dabura takes place on the Supreme Kai planet for some reason (the location they actually fight is rarely ever in games, but they tend to use the rocky areas to best match it. This game seems to use the Kaioshin planet for any "alien" world that isn't Namek). Base Gotenks and Bootenks are straight up missing. It's weird that they made sure every fight in the first 2 arcs could be replicated faithfully, but then just kind of gave up near the end. Then they go overboard and make 3 separate Goku and Vegeta vs Kid Boo fights in a row (broken up by a single Fat Boo vs Kid Boo fight), including turning the freaking Spirit Bomb moment into a full fight.
Story mode itself has you flying around a map like Tenkaichi 2, with a bunch of weak enemies scattered about (Saibamen, Cell Jrs, Freeza Soldiers). You occasionally get a mission if you visit the 3 towns you can interact with. These are all picked from the same pool of about 5, so be prepared to have to do shit like "clear every enemy on the map" over and over - and the game will not tell you how many are left or where they are, so you'll be looking for that last one for 10+ minutes. The game is spread into levels that tackle about 1-4 fights each, and each level has its own missions that are basically just doing the little side missions in the level itself. However for stages where you can pick between multiple characters (such as the Nappa fight) there are missions to do this level with ALL the choices. This can lead you to doing the same level 5 times, and it's not even just the relevant fight you need to do. Every time you beat Nappa with Yamcha, then Tien, then Chaozu, you also have to do the follow up Goku vs Nappa fight. These missions are optional of course, but it's annoying that they made this "content" at all (and there are unlocks between competing X amount of missions).
What-ifs return here, but instead of their own dedicated levels they add a new character option in the old ones. For example, select the first level after beating the story and you get the choice to play as Bardock instead of Goku, providing a little story where Bardock arrives before Raditz and bonds with Gohan, and then fights Raditz himself. Most of these are generally just going through the same fights as the level normally would, but with a new character.
Outside of story mode we don't have the series staple Tournament mode. We do get the Battle 100 mode from Tenkaichi 3 at least - 100 fights against themed teams. Of course Tenkaichi 3 had way more characters and could make teams of 5, while this game is limited to teams of 2, so as you can imagine there's a lot of forced pair-ups ("Long white hair" for Jeice and Dr Gero). They do at least add little challenges to each fight to earn extra points. Since any character can be used it does limit the kinds of tasks they can give the player, but it's still a way to try and change up your play style a bit for each fight and make it less monotonous.
This mode also highlights the issue with the tag team format. The best case scenario in this game is when you fight one AI and your partner fights the other, essentially turning the game into two 1v1's, with only the occasional crossing paths. A 2v1 in your favour is a stomp, and a 2v1 in your opponents favour is annoying at lower levels, and downright impossible at higher levels. The harder challenges in Battle 100 will have both opponents purposefully target you over your partner, and there are NO good options for fighting 2 opponents at once. The game flat-out failed to actually make mechanics to support its main gimmick. And your partner won't help you while you're being ganged up on - I genuinely have no idea what they're doing as the information given to you is so limited, just a little radar with dots representing the characters. I occasionally saw my partner just kind of flying around in the background. Sometimes he'd just be standing still mere feet away while both opponents abused me from all sides. Literally all they're good for in the high level fights is hoping one of the enemies will use them as a punching bag so you can focus on your own opponent. That will mean your punching bag partner will use up your senzu bean though, preventing you from getting your free revive.
You and your special needs partner also share a union stock (I can't remember what it was called in older games, but it's the stuff you spend to use buffs, or things like Solar Flare). So maybe you want to use a technique, or go into burst mode, but nope, your teammate keeps eating the stock points.
Survival mode is another mode, which is what it sounds like. Weirdly, I noticed that at the start of this mode when enemies are dumb and weak, my teammate was actually...good? They were very aggressive and able to dodge ultimates. Then as the enemies got harder, he got more sluggish and dumber. The game literally makes your teammate stupid to increase difficulty. That's pretty much the opposite of how it should work. When enemies are simple I can take on 2 of them at once and don't need a teammate. When they're challenging it becomes impossible to fight them alone, so I need at least a semi-competent teammate who can keep one of them away from me for a bit.
Going back to the limited information on screen thing, there's not much you get to see about your enemies in the game. Their health bars only appear over their heads rather than permanently on screen (which makes it impossible to know how your partner is doing vs their opponent), and you can't even see their ki or union stock.
As impressive as this game is to run on the PSP, it is basically just a watered down version of the console games, with a new gimmick that straight up wouldn't work on those better games without huge tweaks, let alone a more limited version. There's no shortage of content, even if a lot of 100%'ing the story mode is straight up padding. Extra modes provide the challenge, but for the wrong reasons. I know it's supposed to be "Tenkaichi on the go", but I didn't play it like that, so I guess I'm missing the point.
You do feel the cut of characters and stages though. Having said that, the character roster is still solid with many inclusions you'd assume they'd cut like Chaozu or Cui. Stages are hit a lot harder, missing many staples like the Room of Spirit and Time.
Story mode, despite the bland presentation, is really comprehensive. It tackles almost every fight from the original manga from the Saiyan Saga to the Boo saga, something even many older console games didn't (I remember Budokai 3 cut all of the Ginyu Force but Recoome and Ginyu, and skipped Dr Gero and Android 19).
It makes a lot of weird decisions though starting in the Cell saga. While some fights are kind of combined before then to make use of the tag team gimmick (which isn't locked in as the game does allow 1v1 or even 2v1), like you'll fight Nappa and Saibamen together with Piccolo and any other fighter of your choice from that section, including Yamcha who died before Nappa entered the battle. But once you enter the Cell saga you get stuff like fighting Dr Gero and Android 19 together...in the city where they appeared instead of the random wasteland where the fight took place. And then after Goku fights both the androids, Vegeta comes in to fight 19 as he does in the original...but instead of Dr Gero, 19 is now teamed up with a Cell Jr? What the fuck? Piccolo gets a teammate to fight Android 17 (any of the 3 humans who were explicitly told to NOT join the fight), and yet 17 doesn't get 18 to help him. Buff Trunks is just a straight up missing character, so his fight with Perfect Cell is regular Super Saiyan Trunks, despite all the dialogue still making references to his slow speed from his power form. And Gohan fights the Cell Jrs with Android 16 - the one character there who NEVER fought a Cell Jr lol.
The Boo saga suffers the most from character and stage losses. There's no world tournament stage, so right off the bat Goten vs Trunks takes place on a random island. No Room of Spirit and Time so Gotenks vs Boo is also down on Earth. Gohan vs Dabura takes place on the Supreme Kai planet for some reason (the location they actually fight is rarely ever in games, but they tend to use the rocky areas to best match it. This game seems to use the Kaioshin planet for any "alien" world that isn't Namek). Base Gotenks and Bootenks are straight up missing. It's weird that they made sure every fight in the first 2 arcs could be replicated faithfully, but then just kind of gave up near the end. Then they go overboard and make 3 separate Goku and Vegeta vs Kid Boo fights in a row (broken up by a single Fat Boo vs Kid Boo fight), including turning the freaking Spirit Bomb moment into a full fight.
Story mode itself has you flying around a map like Tenkaichi 2, with a bunch of weak enemies scattered about (Saibamen, Cell Jrs, Freeza Soldiers). You occasionally get a mission if you visit the 3 towns you can interact with. These are all picked from the same pool of about 5, so be prepared to have to do shit like "clear every enemy on the map" over and over - and the game will not tell you how many are left or where they are, so you'll be looking for that last one for 10+ minutes. The game is spread into levels that tackle about 1-4 fights each, and each level has its own missions that are basically just doing the little side missions in the level itself. However for stages where you can pick between multiple characters (such as the Nappa fight) there are missions to do this level with ALL the choices. This can lead you to doing the same level 5 times, and it's not even just the relevant fight you need to do. Every time you beat Nappa with Yamcha, then Tien, then Chaozu, you also have to do the follow up Goku vs Nappa fight. These missions are optional of course, but it's annoying that they made this "content" at all (and there are unlocks between competing X amount of missions).
What-ifs return here, but instead of their own dedicated levels they add a new character option in the old ones. For example, select the first level after beating the story and you get the choice to play as Bardock instead of Goku, providing a little story where Bardock arrives before Raditz and bonds with Gohan, and then fights Raditz himself. Most of these are generally just going through the same fights as the level normally would, but with a new character.
Outside of story mode we don't have the series staple Tournament mode. We do get the Battle 100 mode from Tenkaichi 3 at least - 100 fights against themed teams. Of course Tenkaichi 3 had way more characters and could make teams of 5, while this game is limited to teams of 2, so as you can imagine there's a lot of forced pair-ups ("Long white hair" for Jeice and Dr Gero). They do at least add little challenges to each fight to earn extra points. Since any character can be used it does limit the kinds of tasks they can give the player, but it's still a way to try and change up your play style a bit for each fight and make it less monotonous.
This mode also highlights the issue with the tag team format. The best case scenario in this game is when you fight one AI and your partner fights the other, essentially turning the game into two 1v1's, with only the occasional crossing paths. A 2v1 in your favour is a stomp, and a 2v1 in your opponents favour is annoying at lower levels, and downright impossible at higher levels. The harder challenges in Battle 100 will have both opponents purposefully target you over your partner, and there are NO good options for fighting 2 opponents at once. The game flat-out failed to actually make mechanics to support its main gimmick. And your partner won't help you while you're being ganged up on - I genuinely have no idea what they're doing as the information given to you is so limited, just a little radar with dots representing the characters. I occasionally saw my partner just kind of flying around in the background. Sometimes he'd just be standing still mere feet away while both opponents abused me from all sides. Literally all they're good for in the high level fights is hoping one of the enemies will use them as a punching bag so you can focus on your own opponent. That will mean your punching bag partner will use up your senzu bean though, preventing you from getting your free revive.
You and your special needs partner also share a union stock (I can't remember what it was called in older games, but it's the stuff you spend to use buffs, or things like Solar Flare). So maybe you want to use a technique, or go into burst mode, but nope, your teammate keeps eating the stock points.
Survival mode is another mode, which is what it sounds like. Weirdly, I noticed that at the start of this mode when enemies are dumb and weak, my teammate was actually...good? They were very aggressive and able to dodge ultimates. Then as the enemies got harder, he got more sluggish and dumber. The game literally makes your teammate stupid to increase difficulty. That's pretty much the opposite of how it should work. When enemies are simple I can take on 2 of them at once and don't need a teammate. When they're challenging it becomes impossible to fight them alone, so I need at least a semi-competent teammate who can keep one of them away from me for a bit.
Going back to the limited information on screen thing, there's not much you get to see about your enemies in the game. Their health bars only appear over their heads rather than permanently on screen (which makes it impossible to know how your partner is doing vs their opponent), and you can't even see their ki or union stock.
As impressive as this game is to run on the PSP, it is basically just a watered down version of the console games, with a new gimmick that straight up wouldn't work on those better games without huge tweaks, let alone a more limited version. There's no shortage of content, even if a lot of 100%'ing the story mode is straight up padding. Extra modes provide the challenge, but for the wrong reasons. I know it's supposed to be "Tenkaichi on the go", but I didn't play it like that, so I guess I'm missing the point.
1992
One of my favourite franchises of all time, but I really don’t like its debut game.
Thanks to the flat tracks, and extreme lack of track variety (every single theme except Rainbow Road shows up multiple times) The levels have no identity. They all just kind of blend together into one big, boring track.
The lack of interesting tracks has gone on to pollute the newer games too thanks to retro tracks. Even Mario Kart 8 with its extra effort into updating retro tracks can’t save generic Mario Circuit track #50
The AI blatantly cheat too. I don't just mean typical rubber banding; I've seen AI just straight up drive through a wall of Whomps like they weren't even there. They will magically jump over any items in their path, almost as if using a feather, however they're definitely not using a feather, and I know that for two reasons: One is that I've seen them do it while holding another item at the time, but also because each AI can only use 1 item each.
Speaking of which, the item system is super wack in this game. AI don't need item boxes, they can just spawn items randomly, but as I said they are limited to one per character. Some of them have unique items, like Toad has poison mushrooms, Bowser has fire balls and Yoshi has a Yoshi Egg, but then some of them just get generic items, like Donkey Kong gets a banana. The inconsistency is just weird, but regardless, having the characters spam items at you, or get infinite star power is annoying.
A huge part of the screen is taken up by a map of the track, or a rear view mirror depending on your choice. It's like someone in Nintendo went back in time and thought they were working on a DS game. It makes the actual racing screen look squashed and it's just distracting.
Controls are too slippery. I found drifting is next to useless except on super wide turns with a lot of space thanks to how they handle.
The game sucks. Boring tracks, terrible physics, cheating AI, weird item balance... It looks kind of nice, but that's about it.
Thanks to the flat tracks, and extreme lack of track variety (every single theme except Rainbow Road shows up multiple times) The levels have no identity. They all just kind of blend together into one big, boring track.
The lack of interesting tracks has gone on to pollute the newer games too thanks to retro tracks. Even Mario Kart 8 with its extra effort into updating retro tracks can’t save generic Mario Circuit track #50
The AI blatantly cheat too. I don't just mean typical rubber banding; I've seen AI just straight up drive through a wall of Whomps like they weren't even there. They will magically jump over any items in their path, almost as if using a feather, however they're definitely not using a feather, and I know that for two reasons: One is that I've seen them do it while holding another item at the time, but also because each AI can only use 1 item each.
Speaking of which, the item system is super wack in this game. AI don't need item boxes, they can just spawn items randomly, but as I said they are limited to one per character. Some of them have unique items, like Toad has poison mushrooms, Bowser has fire balls and Yoshi has a Yoshi Egg, but then some of them just get generic items, like Donkey Kong gets a banana. The inconsistency is just weird, but regardless, having the characters spam items at you, or get infinite star power is annoying.
A huge part of the screen is taken up by a map of the track, or a rear view mirror depending on your choice. It's like someone in Nintendo went back in time and thought they were working on a DS game. It makes the actual racing screen look squashed and it's just distracting.
Controls are too slippery. I found drifting is next to useless except on super wide turns with a lot of space thanks to how they handle.
The game sucks. Boring tracks, terrible physics, cheating AI, weird item balance... It looks kind of nice, but that's about it.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Sonic Frontiers came out and everyone was like "It's a bit flawed, but really good!". To me it was kinda "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid".
Sonic Superstars came out and everyone was like "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid". To me it's more "It's a bit flawed, but really good!"
For real, the things I heard the most complaints about were the physics and the bosses. The physics were actually completely fine to me, with one minor exception I'll get to later. Bosses were hit or miss. Some of them I really liked, others were a pain in the ass. The biggest issue with bosses was that they had large periods of being invulnerable, which I suppose was to make the avatar emerald power not able to insta-win boss fights. But what that means is the more you have to replay a boss, the more frustrating it becomes. I think as long as you can do a boss in one or two attempts, they were mostly engaging and way more creative than the Genesis-era bosses.
I've always thought Sonic was much more interesting with its level themes than say Mario. So many great selection of brand new levels, some of which take inspiration from some classic Sonic staples like casinos, but many felt completely original.
The fact you unlock a new power with each emerald unlocked is a great way to make collecting them more fun, and gives purpose to each individual one whereas before they were an all or nothing kind of thing. The powers aren't all equal, like there's one that only works in water which is fantastic for one stage, but pretty useless on any other stage. I never found much use for the vine power. But the avatar power, and the rocket powers were incredibly good for the boss fights and general platforming respectively.
Once you beat the game you unlock a new character, which always a nice reward. Trip has her own unique super form too. It's not just a faster, invincible version of herself; Trip turns into a golden dragon that can fly freely through the stage. That sounds absolutely incredible, the problem is this dragon controls like utter shit. I swear to God it is so unresponsive, and it just gets stuck on the floor sometimes so you have to jump to get her off it. She can breath fire but it's range is so pathetic that you're better off just slamming your invincible body into everything instead. I can't believe they gave you a post-game super form that can fly and breath fire and it's literally worse than using the basic characters.
Unlocking Trip also unlocks "Trip's Story", which is just the whole game again except the levels are slightly altered to be harder with sections designed around her wall-sticking abilities, and bosses take a few more hits. There's also a brand new final boss for her which is utter bullshit, takes 5+ minutes to complete and has multiple OHKO attacks no matter how many rings you have.
I wouldn't mind Trip's story too much, but she's also playable in the basic main game after beating the story, so it's like "Here's a brand new mode! Levels are a bit harder, and you're limited to only one character that you can already use in the main game anyway". If you wanted a hard mode that's fine, but I feel like you could have either made Trip exclusive to this mode, or made all characters playable in hard mode, doing it this way just feels messy to me.
Beating Trip's story unlocks the true ultra final boss. The obligatory Super Sonic boss. It has probably the tighest ring limit of any Super Sonic boss in the series. There are entire phases of this boss fight where the boss can't be hit, but it still tries to attack you...but you are invincible because you are Super Sonic. So you literally have zero reason to ever dodge anything in these phases. It's very weirdly designed. It's full of RNG since you have to collect rings that fall from the sky, and sometimes Sonic's friends will show up to offer more rings, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they show up, and sometimes they pop up just as the boss enters a new attack phase which shifts the camera, and when that happens Sonic's friend will just disappear...
So a few BS post-game stuff aside, I think it's a really great Sonic adventure. I feel like if this came out before Sonic 4 it would have been seen as absolutely incredible and a true successor to S3&K. Coming out after 4 and before Mania would have probably made it look like "Finally a good return to form for 2D Sonic after the mess of Sonic 4". But coming out after Mania, not to mention other iterations of classic Sonic in games like Generations, it's just, yeah it's a good game, but 2D Sonic has already had a few good games in not-too-distance past so it doesn't stand out as much.
The multiplayer mode seemed like short bursts of fun I wouldn't spend long on, but the game didn't even let me try since matchmaking is literally dead. I went into 3 games and each one was just full of bots. This makes not only multiplayer pointless, but even some elements of single player since the medals you can collect in bonus stages, or in hidden areas, serve only to buy customisation for your multiplayer avatar. There is one boss fight that uses your multiplayer avatar though, so I gotta admit that as a really cool surprise - you can pretty much customisation the appearance of an entire boss.
Sonic Superstars came out and everyone was like "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid". To me it's more "It's a bit flawed, but really good!"
For real, the things I heard the most complaints about were the physics and the bosses. The physics were actually completely fine to me, with one minor exception I'll get to later. Bosses were hit or miss. Some of them I really liked, others were a pain in the ass. The biggest issue with bosses was that they had large periods of being invulnerable, which I suppose was to make the avatar emerald power not able to insta-win boss fights. But what that means is the more you have to replay a boss, the more frustrating it becomes. I think as long as you can do a boss in one or two attempts, they were mostly engaging and way more creative than the Genesis-era bosses.
I've always thought Sonic was much more interesting with its level themes than say Mario. So many great selection of brand new levels, some of which take inspiration from some classic Sonic staples like casinos, but many felt completely original.
The fact you unlock a new power with each emerald unlocked is a great way to make collecting them more fun, and gives purpose to each individual one whereas before they were an all or nothing kind of thing. The powers aren't all equal, like there's one that only works in water which is fantastic for one stage, but pretty useless on any other stage. I never found much use for the vine power. But the avatar power, and the rocket powers were incredibly good for the boss fights and general platforming respectively.
Once you beat the game you unlock a new character, which always a nice reward. Trip has her own unique super form too. It's not just a faster, invincible version of herself; Trip turns into a golden dragon that can fly freely through the stage. That sounds absolutely incredible, the problem is this dragon controls like utter shit. I swear to God it is so unresponsive, and it just gets stuck on the floor sometimes so you have to jump to get her off it. She can breath fire but it's range is so pathetic that you're better off just slamming your invincible body into everything instead. I can't believe they gave you a post-game super form that can fly and breath fire and it's literally worse than using the basic characters.
Unlocking Trip also unlocks "Trip's Story", which is just the whole game again except the levels are slightly altered to be harder with sections designed around her wall-sticking abilities, and bosses take a few more hits. There's also a brand new final boss for her which is utter bullshit, takes 5+ minutes to complete and has multiple OHKO attacks no matter how many rings you have.
I wouldn't mind Trip's story too much, but she's also playable in the basic main game after beating the story, so it's like "Here's a brand new mode! Levels are a bit harder, and you're limited to only one character that you can already use in the main game anyway". If you wanted a hard mode that's fine, but I feel like you could have either made Trip exclusive to this mode, or made all characters playable in hard mode, doing it this way just feels messy to me.
Beating Trip's story unlocks the true ultra final boss. The obligatory Super Sonic boss. It has probably the tighest ring limit of any Super Sonic boss in the series. There are entire phases of this boss fight where the boss can't be hit, but it still tries to attack you...but you are invincible because you are Super Sonic. So you literally have zero reason to ever dodge anything in these phases. It's very weirdly designed. It's full of RNG since you have to collect rings that fall from the sky, and sometimes Sonic's friends will show up to offer more rings, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they show up, and sometimes they pop up just as the boss enters a new attack phase which shifts the camera, and when that happens Sonic's friend will just disappear...
So a few BS post-game stuff aside, I think it's a really great Sonic adventure. I feel like if this came out before Sonic 4 it would have been seen as absolutely incredible and a true successor to S3&K. Coming out after 4 and before Mania would have probably made it look like "Finally a good return to form for 2D Sonic after the mess of Sonic 4". But coming out after Mania, not to mention other iterations of classic Sonic in games like Generations, it's just, yeah it's a good game, but 2D Sonic has already had a few good games in not-too-distance past so it doesn't stand out as much.
The multiplayer mode seemed like short bursts of fun I wouldn't spend long on, but the game didn't even let me try since matchmaking is literally dead. I went into 3 games and each one was just full of bots. This makes not only multiplayer pointless, but even some elements of single player since the medals you can collect in bonus stages, or in hidden areas, serve only to buy customisation for your multiplayer avatar. There is one boss fight that uses your multiplayer avatar though, so I gotta admit that as a really cool surprise - you can pretty much customisation the appearance of an entire boss.
2021
I love the combat in this game, it has a lot going for it that avoids it falling into the cycle a lot of turn based RPG's go, where you only pick the strongest/super effective move every time. Not that some battles can't turn in to that, but generally I had to think a little more about the best option for each turn.
I did find that the starting magatsuhi skill is basically the best one. Guaranteeing crits every single turn means you're getting a guaranteed 8 action turn with boosted damage. I almost never used any of the other skills I unlocked from completing side quests and whatnot.
Unfortunately the game failed to sell me on anything except the combat. All the environments are insanely barren and boring. And I know that there's an in-game reason for that, but like...if you're designing a 50 hour RPG, maybe don't make an in-universe reason for all the environments to be boring as fuck?
The story feels like it had a bunch of other JRPG stories fed to a computer and this was the result from machine learning. It's just so boring. It's also paced horribly, trying to shove long story info between jarring halts in the otherwise unbroken gameplay sections.
I know comparing this with a certain other monster RPG whose name starts with P is always too easy and an obvious go-to, but this really does feel like Pokémon without the heart.
I did find that the starting magatsuhi skill is basically the best one. Guaranteeing crits every single turn means you're getting a guaranteed 8 action turn with boosted damage. I almost never used any of the other skills I unlocked from completing side quests and whatnot.
Unfortunately the game failed to sell me on anything except the combat. All the environments are insanely barren and boring. And I know that there's an in-game reason for that, but like...if you're designing a 50 hour RPG, maybe don't make an in-universe reason for all the environments to be boring as fuck?
The story feels like it had a bunch of other JRPG stories fed to a computer and this was the result from machine learning. It's just so boring. It's also paced horribly, trying to shove long story info between jarring halts in the otherwise unbroken gameplay sections.
I know comparing this with a certain other monster RPG whose name starts with P is always too easy and an obvious go-to, but this really does feel like Pokémon without the heart.
2021
This review contains spoilers
This was my first Tales game, and I went in with zero expectations or anything to compare it to (just for context on the review).
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
So the game plays perfectly fine. But it feels like it tried to take a different approach to Smash and thus ends up lacking some mechanics that I feel it needs. There's no ground dodging, you can only block.
There's no charge up moves, but you get "fast" and "strong" attacks, which I guess is an okay trade.
The special moves feel kind of underwhelming to me, and in many cases were indistinguishable from strong moves. There's also no side special for whatever reason.
Played this after voice acting was added, so one of the main complaints didn't apply to me. I did find some characters to actually be annoying to fight BECAUSE of voice acting though lol, mostly Garfield.
Actual character roster I like. It doesn't focus too much on a specific decade or franchise (though TMNT currently has 4 slots while even Spongebob only has 3). Moveset references are 100% on point.
I think the strongest thing in this game is the stages. I'm so glad they didn't do that thing a lot of non-Smash platform fighters do where they make all stages "competitively viable" and thus boring as shit 1-3 stationary platforms. They DO exist, about 6 of them which are selectable for ranked mode, but otherwise you have a ton of stage layouts and a few gimmicks. Very fun to fight on some of the stages.
Lack of content is another thing most people complain about, and yeah. Single player is just local battles and arcade mode. Arcade mode is just...7 generic fights in a row. Those 7 fights alternate between a forced battle and a "choose between 2" style battle, though I never really cared for which of the 2 punching bags I was gonna fight next. I guess in the highest level difficulty your matchups matter way more, so it could be important then.
Online is just online. It has ranked and unranked, which already makes it better than Smash's online. Oh and just recently, unranked with items. Item variety is okay, but I feel like they have them set to appear way too frequently. I did find there to be a lack of activity online, constantly getting matched with the same opponent multiple times in a row.
In the end if you're desperate for a platform fighter and don't have a Switch, I guess it's fine. But unless you're a die hard Nickelodeon fan, I couldn't recommend it for anything beyond just playing a few matches to see how they implemented the various characters into a fighting game.
There's no charge up moves, but you get "fast" and "strong" attacks, which I guess is an okay trade.
The special moves feel kind of underwhelming to me, and in many cases were indistinguishable from strong moves. There's also no side special for whatever reason.
Played this after voice acting was added, so one of the main complaints didn't apply to me. I did find some characters to actually be annoying to fight BECAUSE of voice acting though lol, mostly Garfield.
Actual character roster I like. It doesn't focus too much on a specific decade or franchise (though TMNT currently has 4 slots while even Spongebob only has 3). Moveset references are 100% on point.
I think the strongest thing in this game is the stages. I'm so glad they didn't do that thing a lot of non-Smash platform fighters do where they make all stages "competitively viable" and thus boring as shit 1-3 stationary platforms. They DO exist, about 6 of them which are selectable for ranked mode, but otherwise you have a ton of stage layouts and a few gimmicks. Very fun to fight on some of the stages.
Lack of content is another thing most people complain about, and yeah. Single player is just local battles and arcade mode. Arcade mode is just...7 generic fights in a row. Those 7 fights alternate between a forced battle and a "choose between 2" style battle, though I never really cared for which of the 2 punching bags I was gonna fight next. I guess in the highest level difficulty your matchups matter way more, so it could be important then.
Online is just online. It has ranked and unranked, which already makes it better than Smash's online. Oh and just recently, unranked with items. Item variety is okay, but I feel like they have them set to appear way too frequently. I did find there to be a lack of activity online, constantly getting matched with the same opponent multiple times in a row.
In the end if you're desperate for a platform fighter and don't have a Switch, I guess it's fine. But unless you're a die hard Nickelodeon fan, I couldn't recommend it for anything beyond just playing a few matches to see how they implemented the various characters into a fighting game.
Oddworld Abe's Oddysee is one of the earliest games I remember playing. This game is super nostalgic to me. The atmosphere in this game is just Godly. The early levels of Rupture Farms especially, which I'd play through over and over as a kid, are just iconic to me. The huge factory with barrels in the background and blood all over the place. It really is unmatched in setting the tone of the horrible world this takes place in, and then you get beautiful locations like the stockyard at night, and the areas with all the giant statues of the unique creatures that inhabit Oddworld.
The game controls very well thanks to the consistency and tightness of controls, like a jump will always move you 2 spaces and a running jump will move you 3.
Gameplay varies between slow stealth sections that involve a lot of waiting, some puzzles which will have you feeling satisfied once you figure out how all the pieces come together and some intense chase sequences with split second decision making to add some faster paced gameplay into the mix. The faster paced parts are a nice break from the majority that require a lot of patience. I don't mind that, but what I do mind is the times when you need to throw a rock/grenade perfectly, and if you miss you need to waste time going back to get more.
It's not perfect, and there's some inclusions in the sequel that this game desperately needed, such a quick save to help with those stingy checkpoints - especially if you're trying to save all the Mudokon's. Also the fact you can only ever have 1 person following you at a time becomes a real time waster in some parts.
I'm also not a big fan of the Elum sections as he tends to be very slippery which makes those jumping sections that require perfect timing harder than it is with Abe who controls so smoothly.
Basically the game is unmatched in its aesthetics, while gameplay is generally very fun and unique, but can become a bit too slow, or even trial-and-error'ry at times.
Anyway I saved 98/99 Mudokon's and now I'm kicking myself for missing 1 and being unable to set the game to mastered :')
The game controls very well thanks to the consistency and tightness of controls, like a jump will always move you 2 spaces and a running jump will move you 3.
Gameplay varies between slow stealth sections that involve a lot of waiting, some puzzles which will have you feeling satisfied once you figure out how all the pieces come together and some intense chase sequences with split second decision making to add some faster paced gameplay into the mix. The faster paced parts are a nice break from the majority that require a lot of patience. I don't mind that, but what I do mind is the times when you need to throw a rock/grenade perfectly, and if you miss you need to waste time going back to get more.
It's not perfect, and there's some inclusions in the sequel that this game desperately needed, such a quick save to help with those stingy checkpoints - especially if you're trying to save all the Mudokon's. Also the fact you can only ever have 1 person following you at a time becomes a real time waster in some parts.
I'm also not a big fan of the Elum sections as he tends to be very slippery which makes those jumping sections that require perfect timing harder than it is with Abe who controls so smoothly.
Basically the game is unmatched in its aesthetics, while gameplay is generally very fun and unique, but can become a bit too slow, or even trial-and-error'ry at times.
Anyway I saved 98/99 Mudokon's and now I'm kicking myself for missing 1 and being unable to set the game to mastered :')
2017
This review contains spoilers
3D collectathon platformers are one of my favourite genres, and A Hat in Time is a really fun one. It definitely goes for quality over quantity, as there's only 4 worlds, but each of them tries something different instead of generic grass/ice/fire/sand world. Well, kinda. The last and 5th "world" for the last boss is just a Bowser's Castle rip off, even the soundtrack sounds like it came from Bowser's own OST.
But each world also benefits from the amount of life thrown into them. Between their own colourful citizens, to how missions play out (e.g in one world you're working for 2 different movie directors, and in another you're filling contracts for a Satan expy in order to get your soul back). These worlds aren't just an excuse to do the same things in a new coat of paint, each one really felt like it had its own identity.
And while there's only 1/3rd of the collectable mcguffins compared to Mario's adventures, they don't put in a ton of filler ones like collect 100 coins on every star, or collect 300 blue coins, or fight the same boss again but harder this time. Each mission is its own little adventure.
Movement is also really fun. Nothing super innovative, but it controls well and is a joy to leap around. The only thing I ever had a problem with here was the leaping homing attack. It felt very unresponsive at times.
The badges and hats were a little underutilised. Only a couple of badges ever got used, and only one or two hats felt like they actually played into the platforming, as opposed to just being an excuse to lock things behind a progress wall (such as all the ice hat squares). Obviously I'm talking about the rift hat, which in the late game makes up about 80% of the platforming challenges. The time stop hat is used maybe twice for actual mandatory challenges as opposed to just using it for the sake of an easier challenge. Weirdly the potion/brew hat, despite being one of the first you unlock, I don't think was used at all for actual mandatory progress until one part of the last world, other than that it seemed to exist just to get some extra orbs and maybe a secret or two.
But it's a charming, cute game and definitely feels like it was made by people who know and love the genre.
But each world also benefits from the amount of life thrown into them. Between their own colourful citizens, to how missions play out (e.g in one world you're working for 2 different movie directors, and in another you're filling contracts for a Satan expy in order to get your soul back). These worlds aren't just an excuse to do the same things in a new coat of paint, each one really felt like it had its own identity.
And while there's only 1/3rd of the collectable mcguffins compared to Mario's adventures, they don't put in a ton of filler ones like collect 100 coins on every star, or collect 300 blue coins, or fight the same boss again but harder this time. Each mission is its own little adventure.
Movement is also really fun. Nothing super innovative, but it controls well and is a joy to leap around. The only thing I ever had a problem with here was the leaping homing attack. It felt very unresponsive at times.
The badges and hats were a little underutilised. Only a couple of badges ever got used, and only one or two hats felt like they actually played into the platforming, as opposed to just being an excuse to lock things behind a progress wall (such as all the ice hat squares). Obviously I'm talking about the rift hat, which in the late game makes up about 80% of the platforming challenges. The time stop hat is used maybe twice for actual mandatory challenges as opposed to just using it for the sake of an easier challenge. Weirdly the potion/brew hat, despite being one of the first you unlock, I don't think was used at all for actual mandatory progress until one part of the last world, other than that it seemed to exist just to get some extra orbs and maybe a secret or two.
But it's a charming, cute game and definitely feels like it was made by people who know and love the genre.
2018
Luigi's Mansion has a bit of a weird history. Started as a console game, sequel was on handheld, then third game went back to console, but not before the original game was re-released on handheld. The decision to put this game on 3DS is quite strange given that the Switch was already a year strong. I can only assume it was due to the short length of the game.
But having a game that relied so heavily on the Gamecube's C-stick and putting it on a console that has either, depending on your model, a weird little nub no one likes, or a separate purchase entirely to get a 2nd C-Stick...well it's just weird. I used a new 2DS XL so I had the nub, and while it wasn't great, I don't think it was as bad as some people say. The controls do feel a bit janky with it, but I find that it's not even the C-stick's fault. You can point up and down with the D-pad too and it has the same weird jerky movement. You can also use gyro controls to look up and down if you want, which I find lacked the weird movement, but of course that means relying on gyro controls... So yeah, this game has like 4 methods to control your flashlight and vacuum, and they're all worse than the Gamecube's sole version lol.
Not much was even added to the remake. The main game is beat for beat the same. The hidden mansion was added to the NA version, but we in Europe already had that. Hell, they actually made it worse for us because it's no longer mirrored.
There's some in-game achievements to get now, which does add a bit of extra replayability if that's your thing, otherwise it's just a thing that exists in the menu that will never affect your experience.
You can also re-battle any portrait ghost from the gallery if you feel like it.
The bottom screen is used as a map. Which is nice and all, but it's not really the kind of game that needs a permanent map. You can also switch it to a view of the portrait ghosts you've captured, or your inventory (which is just the gold you've sucked up, and what very few plot items exist).
That pretty much sums up this "remake".
Still a high score because Luigi's Mansion itself is a banger of a game. I love the amount of life in all the rooms and portrait ghosts. And the music is famously catchy.
I played this as a kid, and this re-experience was full of nostalgia and things I'd straight up forgotten.
Love the game, but I can't see a reason to recommend the 3DS version over the Gamecube one, even if it's just for a reason as minor as the C-stick doesn't feel as good. Though if you like in NA you might wanna play this just to get the Hidden Mansion experience.
But having a game that relied so heavily on the Gamecube's C-stick and putting it on a console that has either, depending on your model, a weird little nub no one likes, or a separate purchase entirely to get a 2nd C-Stick...well it's just weird. I used a new 2DS XL so I had the nub, and while it wasn't great, I don't think it was as bad as some people say. The controls do feel a bit janky with it, but I find that it's not even the C-stick's fault. You can point up and down with the D-pad too and it has the same weird jerky movement. You can also use gyro controls to look up and down if you want, which I find lacked the weird movement, but of course that means relying on gyro controls... So yeah, this game has like 4 methods to control your flashlight and vacuum, and they're all worse than the Gamecube's sole version lol.
Not much was even added to the remake. The main game is beat for beat the same. The hidden mansion was added to the NA version, but we in Europe already had that. Hell, they actually made it worse for us because it's no longer mirrored.
There's some in-game achievements to get now, which does add a bit of extra replayability if that's your thing, otherwise it's just a thing that exists in the menu that will never affect your experience.
You can also re-battle any portrait ghost from the gallery if you feel like it.
The bottom screen is used as a map. Which is nice and all, but it's not really the kind of game that needs a permanent map. You can also switch it to a view of the portrait ghosts you've captured, or your inventory (which is just the gold you've sucked up, and what very few plot items exist).
That pretty much sums up this "remake".
Still a high score because Luigi's Mansion itself is a banger of a game. I love the amount of life in all the rooms and portrait ghosts. And the music is famously catchy.
I played this as a kid, and this re-experience was full of nostalgia and things I'd straight up forgotten.
Love the game, but I can't see a reason to recommend the 3DS version over the Gamecube one, even if it's just for a reason as minor as the C-stick doesn't feel as good. Though if you like in NA you might wanna play this just to get the Hidden Mansion experience.
2022
Nice game, but survives almost entirely on the vibe because gameplay is largely just walking from point A to point B and interacting with the next NPC. This is broken up by the occasional chase sequence or very simple puzzles, and then a few stealth sections towards the end.
It's nothing overly special, but it doesn't need to be since it's just a short game where you spend a few hours in a fairly interesting world, talking to not-so-fairly interesting characters (I mean they are all literally robots).
The last chapter is really powerful though.
It's nothing overly special, but it doesn't need to be since it's just a short game where you spend a few hours in a fairly interesting world, talking to not-so-fairly interesting characters (I mean they are all literally robots).
The last chapter is really powerful though.