The presentation in the game is pretty fantastic. I love how all the captains have their own team names and banners. A small selection of fields, but with a lot of personality. And the character roster is pretty insane. You can play as the freaking Noki's from Mario Sunshine.
I do like how team composition matters. Different characters have chemistry with others, which will let them work better together, e.g faster throwing when fielding, and if the batter has chemistry with people currently on bases it will make them hit harder...or something. So not only is the roster great, but it even gives you a great reason to experiment with it.
Characters even have different swing styles which affect hit boxes and timing, and the effort that went in to making the large cast feel unique is kinda crazy.
The "story" mode, aka challenge mode has some good concepts. You pick a team captain, and face off against other teams, with missions throughout the match where if you pass the criteria, you recruit characters from their team. I've noticed that if you recruit their team leader before the rest of their team though that you can't challenge them again to get the rest of their teammates, which kinda sucks.
But also in challenge mode you can play mini-games. They vary in quality but provide a nice distraction. With this you earn coins to buy special types of pitches and swings for the "main" characters (basically anyone who is a captain, though they don't have to be the captain in that specific challenge mode).
But damn is this game hard to play. I couldn't figure out the batting in this game at all (which granted as someone who has never played a baseball game outside of Wii Sports may have something to do with it), but 99% of the time I hit the ball it just flies straight into the opponents hands. And the thing is the game has an "easy" option for batting where it shows you the outline of your bat hitbox, and the sweet spot for hitting the ball. But when I get a perfect hit in that sweet spot the opponent still catches it with ease? Like yeah I suck ass, but if you have a system in place specifically to help bad players like me at least make the damn thing intuitive instead of telling me I hit it perfectly when I just handed the opponent the ball tied up in a neat little bow 😭
When it comes to pitching I'm not sure if there's really any control over that. You have a few different ways to pitch but how can any of them affect gameplay? Surely the AI isn't going to be fooled by any specific throws. The best case scenario is a rock-paper-scissors type thing where the game decides "if you throw X type it'll hit, but if you throw Y type it'll get a strike". Worst case is that the game just decides whether or not the batter will hit regardless of how you throw. And the AI likes to get homeruns a lot, even on standard difficulty. I have no idea if you can prevent that at all, but having the opponent get 3 points in a row instantly makes me feel kinda hopeless.
Fielding felt very clunky. For one thing the AI has the obvious advantage of being able to control everyone at once, while a human player will be running to the ball with one character, then control will suddenly switch, so you start running the opposite direction with another. And throwing the ball to people felt very slow and would often just result in the ball landing randomly on the ground. Meanwhile the AI seemed to be able to throw the ball perfectly into the hands of the person who needed it as it flew across the whole field in milliseconds.
The funny thing is I went in to practice mode specifically for fielding, and you still have to go through he pitching part. You'd think it'd be set up so the AI always hits the ball in a way that lets you catch it or at least put it on the field for you to try and get them out. But no, you have to sit through countless strikes and home runs. I'm here in a game mode that you specifically told me was to practice fielding, why are you letting my opponents hit the ball so hard it makes it literally impossible to do anything with?
This game does almost everything right, but why is it so hard? Even some of the mini-games on easy can provide a challenge. I wanna like the game, but between being unable to figure out the batting, even with the in-game helper trying to provide tips, it always ends up gravitating towards the opponents. And pitching just feels like a waste of time where the result is determined without you doing anything.
I bet the game would be extremely fun with friends though.
I do like how team composition matters. Different characters have chemistry with others, which will let them work better together, e.g faster throwing when fielding, and if the batter has chemistry with people currently on bases it will make them hit harder...or something. So not only is the roster great, but it even gives you a great reason to experiment with it.
Characters even have different swing styles which affect hit boxes and timing, and the effort that went in to making the large cast feel unique is kinda crazy.
The "story" mode, aka challenge mode has some good concepts. You pick a team captain, and face off against other teams, with missions throughout the match where if you pass the criteria, you recruit characters from their team. I've noticed that if you recruit their team leader before the rest of their team though that you can't challenge them again to get the rest of their teammates, which kinda sucks.
But also in challenge mode you can play mini-games. They vary in quality but provide a nice distraction. With this you earn coins to buy special types of pitches and swings for the "main" characters (basically anyone who is a captain, though they don't have to be the captain in that specific challenge mode).
But damn is this game hard to play. I couldn't figure out the batting in this game at all (which granted as someone who has never played a baseball game outside of Wii Sports may have something to do with it), but 99% of the time I hit the ball it just flies straight into the opponents hands. And the thing is the game has an "easy" option for batting where it shows you the outline of your bat hitbox, and the sweet spot for hitting the ball. But when I get a perfect hit in that sweet spot the opponent still catches it with ease? Like yeah I suck ass, but if you have a system in place specifically to help bad players like me at least make the damn thing intuitive instead of telling me I hit it perfectly when I just handed the opponent the ball tied up in a neat little bow 😭
When it comes to pitching I'm not sure if there's really any control over that. You have a few different ways to pitch but how can any of them affect gameplay? Surely the AI isn't going to be fooled by any specific throws. The best case scenario is a rock-paper-scissors type thing where the game decides "if you throw X type it'll hit, but if you throw Y type it'll get a strike". Worst case is that the game just decides whether or not the batter will hit regardless of how you throw. And the AI likes to get homeruns a lot, even on standard difficulty. I have no idea if you can prevent that at all, but having the opponent get 3 points in a row instantly makes me feel kinda hopeless.
Fielding felt very clunky. For one thing the AI has the obvious advantage of being able to control everyone at once, while a human player will be running to the ball with one character, then control will suddenly switch, so you start running the opposite direction with another. And throwing the ball to people felt very slow and would often just result in the ball landing randomly on the ground. Meanwhile the AI seemed to be able to throw the ball perfectly into the hands of the person who needed it as it flew across the whole field in milliseconds.
The funny thing is I went in to practice mode specifically for fielding, and you still have to go through he pitching part. You'd think it'd be set up so the AI always hits the ball in a way that lets you catch it or at least put it on the field for you to try and get them out. But no, you have to sit through countless strikes and home runs. I'm here in a game mode that you specifically told me was to practice fielding, why are you letting my opponents hit the ball so hard it makes it literally impossible to do anything with?
This game does almost everything right, but why is it so hard? Even some of the mini-games on easy can provide a challenge. I wanna like the game, but between being unable to figure out the batting, even with the in-game helper trying to provide tips, it always ends up gravitating towards the opponents. And pitching just feels like a waste of time where the result is determined without you doing anything.
I bet the game would be extremely fun with friends though.
2000
I've never been any good at Tennis games. I don't understand all the different types of shots and when they should be used.
Mario Tennis does nothing to help with this. Not only does it not have any kind of tutorial, but the only instructions don't even cover all the different shot types, let alone the mechanics (I guess this stuff was in the manual back in the day).
I looked it all up online, but unfortunately found some info to be wrong (you do not hold down a button to charge, it happens automatically as soon as you press any button) which caused a lot of frustration. Once I managed to figure it out I did start to enjoy the game more, but I still made a lot of mistakes that I just didn't understand. Sometimes I'd hit the ball and get an "out" or it'd be too weak and hit the net, and I honestly have no idea what kind of flowchart between what the opponent does and what I'm supposed to do is supposed to be to stop all this from happening. Sometimes I'd hit the ball back with a regular "normal" (top spin) shot and it'd go to the opponents side with the marking of a lob shot, and I have no idea how or why that happens. It's all very confusing for me.
The game does run well though. It doesn't have any kind of story mode, but it does have a lot of objectives for you. The most obvious and the one with the credits involved is beating the tournaments, both singles and doubles. The credits happen after the third cup, but it's possible to unlock more.
Even the basic exhibition matches have something for completionists in it, since there's a data tracker that fills in every single time you play character A vs character B, meaning to fully fill out this section you'd need to win as every character against every other character (on the hardest difficulty for 100% since the difficultly beaten at is also recorded). So it's better than some games of this genre at the time which would basically just assume you're playing for fun (casuals am I right) and not care about your wins or your progress.
I was honestly surprised by the character roster. This isn't the basic MK64 or Mario Party rosters. You have some pretty interesting choices, especially for the time. Boo, Paratroopa (but no Koopa), Birdo and Baby Mario (and JUST Baby Mario) are all fun choices. This is also the game that introduced Waluigi, so you have to love it for that.
There's some bonus stuff that can be unlocked via the transfer pack and the GBC Mario Tennis game, but obviously this can't be done on Switch. It looks like you just unlock the human OCs from that game, and some courts. Still a bummer to lose out on content though.
The game is fun, but I think it's a bit too reliant on already knowing a lot about tennis to play properly, and having to read external material just to realise there's more than 2 types of shots in the game.
Mario Tennis does nothing to help with this. Not only does it not have any kind of tutorial, but the only instructions don't even cover all the different shot types, let alone the mechanics (I guess this stuff was in the manual back in the day).
I looked it all up online, but unfortunately found some info to be wrong (you do not hold down a button to charge, it happens automatically as soon as you press any button) which caused a lot of frustration. Once I managed to figure it out I did start to enjoy the game more, but I still made a lot of mistakes that I just didn't understand. Sometimes I'd hit the ball and get an "out" or it'd be too weak and hit the net, and I honestly have no idea what kind of flowchart between what the opponent does and what I'm supposed to do is supposed to be to stop all this from happening. Sometimes I'd hit the ball back with a regular "normal" (top spin) shot and it'd go to the opponents side with the marking of a lob shot, and I have no idea how or why that happens. It's all very confusing for me.
The game does run well though. It doesn't have any kind of story mode, but it does have a lot of objectives for you. The most obvious and the one with the credits involved is beating the tournaments, both singles and doubles. The credits happen after the third cup, but it's possible to unlock more.
Even the basic exhibition matches have something for completionists in it, since there's a data tracker that fills in every single time you play character A vs character B, meaning to fully fill out this section you'd need to win as every character against every other character (on the hardest difficulty for 100% since the difficultly beaten at is also recorded). So it's better than some games of this genre at the time which would basically just assume you're playing for fun (casuals am I right) and not care about your wins or your progress.
I was honestly surprised by the character roster. This isn't the basic MK64 or Mario Party rosters. You have some pretty interesting choices, especially for the time. Boo, Paratroopa (but no Koopa), Birdo and Baby Mario (and JUST Baby Mario) are all fun choices. This is also the game that introduced Waluigi, so you have to love it for that.
There's some bonus stuff that can be unlocked via the transfer pack and the GBC Mario Tennis game, but obviously this can't be done on Switch. It looks like you just unlock the human OCs from that game, and some courts. Still a bummer to lose out on content though.
The game is fun, but I think it's a bit too reliant on already knowing a lot about tennis to play properly, and having to read external material just to realise there's more than 2 types of shots in the game.
A prologue to the game proper. It acts like a demo, but doesn't seem to consider itself one, as on the 3DS menu it lacks the "Demo" moniker - It also has a completely unique subtitle. If judging it as its own game like this...it's kind of bad. There's little to no actual story here. It's just a bunch of back and forth to the HUB town and a few short (one room) dungeons on the map. Everything is centred around missions gathered in the town (either gather materials from defeated enemies, or go defeat a boss).
So as a demo, even if the game doesn't consider itself one, it works to introduce brand new players to the mechanics of Bravely Default. For returning players it's a nice refresher, but anyone who remembers the original game won't find much new here. There's a total of 9 classes you can get in this demo, 3 of which are new, so those 1/3rd are somewhat nice to try out (they all max out at level 4 so you won't see the full potential of any of them). One of them seemed incredibly basic though, being a single-target buffer, which seems outclassed by a previous job that would cast party-wide buffs...and that job just happens to also be in this demo. The only difference between them is that the single-target buffs by an extra 10%, but since it's only on one unit you're still ending up with far less buff overall. Maybe it'll have more unique abilities in the full game, but for demo impressions it really is the most pointless job I've seen.
The last job you unlock here is probably the one that will involve the most forward thinking, as it lets you reset someones health, MP or even BP to what it was at the beginning of the previous turn. So you could "brave" 4 times with a character, then next turn reset their BP back to 0. They'd still miss out on one turn, but in usual cases braving 4 times would mean missing out on 3-4 turns. Definitely something I can see a lot of interesting combos with.
As far as new mechanics go, this little experience showcases the answer to "all non-boss battles can be easily beaten by just braving 4 times with everyone, getting 12 attacks in before the enemy can get one". If you finish a battle in 1 turn, you have the chance to start a new battle, with the bonus of a multiplier being added to the exp and cash at the end, which increases the more battles you take on in a row. This makes braving on everyone a bit of a risk since if you get everyone to -4, then start a new battle, your enemy will have 4 turns to act before you can do anything. And sometimes the game doesn't even give you the option to for this, and just throws the additional battle at you right away.
This mechanic is great for grinding, and just generally good for balancing what was an overpowered 'strategy'.
So as a demo, even if the game doesn't consider itself one, it works to introduce brand new players to the mechanics of Bravely Default. For returning players it's a nice refresher, but anyone who remembers the original game won't find much new here. There's a total of 9 classes you can get in this demo, 3 of which are new, so those 1/3rd are somewhat nice to try out (they all max out at level 4 so you won't see the full potential of any of them). One of them seemed incredibly basic though, being a single-target buffer, which seems outclassed by a previous job that would cast party-wide buffs...and that job just happens to also be in this demo. The only difference between them is that the single-target buffs by an extra 10%, but since it's only on one unit you're still ending up with far less buff overall. Maybe it'll have more unique abilities in the full game, but for demo impressions it really is the most pointless job I've seen.
The last job you unlock here is probably the one that will involve the most forward thinking, as it lets you reset someones health, MP or even BP to what it was at the beginning of the previous turn. So you could "brave" 4 times with a character, then next turn reset their BP back to 0. They'd still miss out on one turn, but in usual cases braving 4 times would mean missing out on 3-4 turns. Definitely something I can see a lot of interesting combos with.
As far as new mechanics go, this little experience showcases the answer to "all non-boss battles can be easily beaten by just braving 4 times with everyone, getting 12 attacks in before the enemy can get one". If you finish a battle in 1 turn, you have the chance to start a new battle, with the bonus of a multiplier being added to the exp and cash at the end, which increases the more battles you take on in a row. This makes braving on everyone a bit of a risk since if you get everyone to -4, then start a new battle, your enemy will have 4 turns to act before you can do anything. And sometimes the game doesn't even give you the option to for this, and just throws the additional battle at you right away.
This mechanic is great for grinding, and just generally good for balancing what was an overpowered 'strategy'.
2017
This review contains spoilers
You enter the Nexomon version of a Pokécenter and really see just how much of a blatant copy and paste of Pokémon this is. Or is it? I mean sure the inspiration is so obvious it's undeniable, but the game takes a surprisingly different turn in how they execute everything. What looks like the obvious stand-in for gym leaders and elite 4 get used in much different ways (especially the latter). It ends up with the story of this game being surprisingly decent, much better than I was expecting anything. It does kind of give thoughts of edgy Pokémon rom hacks, but that's not really this games fault in particular.
Unfortunately its genes as a mobile game do make the game look cheap, even if I think the environments, and especially creature designs are pretty great.
There's 310 Nexomon in this game, which was easily the biggest draw for me. All these new creatures to discover, to catch and evolve. Every one a surprise. That by far kept me going in what could have otherwise been an easily disappointing game. You might also be surprised to learn there's only 2 types of "Pokéballs" (nexotraps) here. There's a regular one, and a golden one, which is just a master ball. The former can be bought infinitely, but the latter is still surprisingly abundant in this type of game. Albeit a ton of them can only be found post-game, but if you go out of your way to get them all, I'd say you can catch a good 25% of the roster with these 100% auto-wins. Don't worry about using the regular ones though, just get the enemy in to red health and get a status effect on it and it feels like you have a good chance of catching it no matter what its rarity is.
Why disappointing? Because the battle system in this game is simplified relative to Pokémon to the point it's a joke.
There's only 7 types in this game. There's 6 elemental types, and then normal/neutral, which in this game truly is neutral - It is not weak to, or strong against anything. Every other type is strong to exactly 2 other types (both in offense and defense), and weak to 2 other types. So they really balanced the few types they have very well in fairness. There isn't even a stronger type just in terms of ones being more common, as when you look at the database (this games version of the Pokédex) you realise it's set up so that it divides the creatures perfectly, #1 will be neutral, #2-#7 will be different types, and then #8 will be neutral again, repeat until the end.
There are also no dual type Nexomon. This also means if you have a team of every type (minus neutral) you're guaranteed 2 counters to everything, except neutral itself. Even if you take a neutral mon, as I did, you still have at least 1 counter to every element. On the flip side, I imagine mono-type runs would be much harder in this game.
This makes the rock-paper-scissors aspect not only much more unga-bunga than Pokémon, but the type diversity is pitiful. I didn't test out every Nexomon obviously, but from my experience there are no unique moves. If you took every types total move count, you could probably distribute it among only 2 creatures of that type. And the actual moves a monster will learn is almost entirely limited to moves of their type, and neutral moves. If you're lucky they might learn 1 move of another type (I had an electric type bird that learned a single wind move). When you consider that having 2 different types covers 4/7 types - assuming no repeat super effectiveness - this really is way too powerful. Which is a problem because having just the smallest diverse movesets shouldn't basically make matchups almost impossible to lose.
Other issues with movesets is how bland the moves are. They all fall into almost 5 categories:
-Moves that do damage and nothing else
-Moves that do status effects/change stats and nothing else
-Moves that do damage and have a chance of doing a status effect/changing stats
-Moves that heal and nothing else
-Moves that will give you "invulnerability" meaning your opponents next move will do only 1 damage. You can kind of think of this as Protect in Pokémon. It's mostly useful for setting up when you have your opponent locked in a status effect so they can't break it.
Speaking of status effects, they might be the most overpowered part of the game. Let's look at the variety:
Poison and burn - They both just cause the inflicted to take damage every turn.
Sleep - The mon will miss 2-3 turns, but wake up immediately if attacked.
Bind - The mon will miss 2-3 turns.
Paralyzed - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Freeze - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Confused - The mon will miss 2-3 turns AND damage itself.
You can see the issue here right? Not only is nearly every effect the exactly same, but sleep is just objectively worse because of the fact they wake up as soon as they take damage, but confuse is just so baffling more powerful than the rest it's crazy they made it work like this. It's not like confusing is any harder than any other status effect.
They're the most broken part in terms of being overpowered anyway. If we're looking at the truly broken aspects of the battle system, look no further than moves that try to change defense and "elemental power". Any single time a Nexomon uses a move that tries to raise/lower defense or "elemental power" it does nothing. They literally didn't program anything into the game there. No one even seems to know what elemental power is, because it's not an actual stat in the Nexomon's stat screen - there's no "special" and "physical" attack, just "attack". Some have theorised that it was supposed to affect super effective damage, but as it doesn't work, no one can confirm. This means anytime the enemy uses a move to change these stats, it's basically a free turn. The worst part is, even if the AI knew these moves were broke, I doubt they'd avoid them. Enemy AI in this game is...odd. I've seen them use healing moves at full health.
There's also the speed stat which is pointless. You're guaranteed to go first in 100% of battles, and every turn after just switches back and forth. Even if a Nexomon is knocked out, the turn will still go to the next person in the queue, which makes revenge killing super easy by the way. Apparently speed DID decide who went first in the mobile version and PvP on the console versions (the PvP feature no longer exists) so it's a nothing stat now. Oddly, any move that increases/decreases evasion is shown as a shoe icon in battle, which is also the icon for speed in the stat screen. Is that implying speed is tied to accuracy? But every move has its own accuracy, so how does that work? Is it some calculation between a moves accuracy and the mons speeds? I doubt it because I've missed an 80% accurate move on a level 100+ Nexomon fighting a level 5, 3 times in a row.
Accuracy is yet another thing this game just doesn't seem to get right. For moves with no secondary effect, their accuracy is just the accuracy of the move - great. For moves with a secondary effect, it seems they list the chance of the secondary effect occurring. So you'll have a 90% move if it's pure damage, but a 30% if it has a chance to poison. But what does that mean?! Does it mean the move has a 100% chance to hit? Or is there a hidden hit-accuracy along with the chance of a status effect? Why did they put move accuracy and status chance as the exact same thing so they can't both be shown on moves??
Outside of battles, the way the rarity system works is kinda funny. Evolutions are entirely dictated by rarity. Common has no evolutions (even when many of them look like they clearly should). Uncommon have 1 evolution. Rare, Mega Rare and Special (aka starters) have 2. Legendary has none. The funny part is, I learned when the game came out on mobile evolutions didn't actually increase stats at all - it was entirely for show. This meant that while higher rarities did tend to have somewhat better stats, they weren't massively overpowered. But I guess people complained or something and so the developers made an evolution give a flat bonus (I believe 15%) to all stats. This means that mega rare was already better than common, but they altered it so anything that could evolve just shot so far past unevolving Nexomon that you have no reason to use anything lower than a rare unless you want to purposefully handicap yourself. I get that rarity should equal power to some extent, but I feel labelling them in such a blatant way takes any fun out of discovering for yourself what's good or not. Just find the thing with the right label and you know exactly how many times it will evolve and that it will at least be stronger than anything lower than it.
OK one last oddity - the games trainers throw evolutions at you WAY too fast. Like literally the first trainers you fight will be using Nexomon that don't evolve until level 20 or so, but they'll be level 5. It's like if in Pokémon the first route trainers were sending out PIdgeotto's and Golbat's. I have no idea why they do that. When it comes to third evolutions they even put them at a much more appropriate point in the game, though some of them can be a bit under levelled too.
This game is so weird. Like if you get past the deceptively cheap, Facebook-ad looking graphics, there's a surprisingly well designed world, story and group of monsters to collect. But actually fighting with them is just done in the most undercooked, non-functioning revenge killing simulator I've ever seen.
One last thing I do like is how this game uses legendary Nexomon as TRUE boss battles. Until the post-game when you can catch them, every battle against a legendary will have them with a massively bloated HP bar, effectively making it a battle of attrition. Especially with the way this game works as moves deal a lot of damage, meaning unless the AI chooses its moves very badly (and to be honest, it often will), each of yours will get 1 or 2 moves off at most before going down unless you're super over levelled. Unfortunately these can be cheesed super easily if you get a status effect off, especially confusion. At least trainer battles, especially those with a full team, can't be utterly disabled with a single status move.
Unfortunately its genes as a mobile game do make the game look cheap, even if I think the environments, and especially creature designs are pretty great.
There's 310 Nexomon in this game, which was easily the biggest draw for me. All these new creatures to discover, to catch and evolve. Every one a surprise. That by far kept me going in what could have otherwise been an easily disappointing game. You might also be surprised to learn there's only 2 types of "Pokéballs" (nexotraps) here. There's a regular one, and a golden one, which is just a master ball. The former can be bought infinitely, but the latter is still surprisingly abundant in this type of game. Albeit a ton of them can only be found post-game, but if you go out of your way to get them all, I'd say you can catch a good 25% of the roster with these 100% auto-wins. Don't worry about using the regular ones though, just get the enemy in to red health and get a status effect on it and it feels like you have a good chance of catching it no matter what its rarity is.
Why disappointing? Because the battle system in this game is simplified relative to Pokémon to the point it's a joke.
There's only 7 types in this game. There's 6 elemental types, and then normal/neutral, which in this game truly is neutral - It is not weak to, or strong against anything. Every other type is strong to exactly 2 other types (both in offense and defense), and weak to 2 other types. So they really balanced the few types they have very well in fairness. There isn't even a stronger type just in terms of ones being more common, as when you look at the database (this games version of the Pokédex) you realise it's set up so that it divides the creatures perfectly, #1 will be neutral, #2-#7 will be different types, and then #8 will be neutral again, repeat until the end.
There are also no dual type Nexomon. This also means if you have a team of every type (minus neutral) you're guaranteed 2 counters to everything, except neutral itself. Even if you take a neutral mon, as I did, you still have at least 1 counter to every element. On the flip side, I imagine mono-type runs would be much harder in this game.
This makes the rock-paper-scissors aspect not only much more unga-bunga than Pokémon, but the type diversity is pitiful. I didn't test out every Nexomon obviously, but from my experience there are no unique moves. If you took every types total move count, you could probably distribute it among only 2 creatures of that type. And the actual moves a monster will learn is almost entirely limited to moves of their type, and neutral moves. If you're lucky they might learn 1 move of another type (I had an electric type bird that learned a single wind move). When you consider that having 2 different types covers 4/7 types - assuming no repeat super effectiveness - this really is way too powerful. Which is a problem because having just the smallest diverse movesets shouldn't basically make matchups almost impossible to lose.
Other issues with movesets is how bland the moves are. They all fall into almost 5 categories:
-Moves that do damage and nothing else
-Moves that do status effects/change stats and nothing else
-Moves that do damage and have a chance of doing a status effect/changing stats
-Moves that heal and nothing else
-Moves that will give you "invulnerability" meaning your opponents next move will do only 1 damage. You can kind of think of this as Protect in Pokémon. It's mostly useful for setting up when you have your opponent locked in a status effect so they can't break it.
Speaking of status effects, they might be the most overpowered part of the game. Let's look at the variety:
Poison and burn - They both just cause the inflicted to take damage every turn.
Sleep - The mon will miss 2-3 turns, but wake up immediately if attacked.
Bind - The mon will miss 2-3 turns.
Paralyzed - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Freeze - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Confused - The mon will miss 2-3 turns AND damage itself.
You can see the issue here right? Not only is nearly every effect the exactly same, but sleep is just objectively worse because of the fact they wake up as soon as they take damage, but confuse is just so baffling more powerful than the rest it's crazy they made it work like this. It's not like confusing is any harder than any other status effect.
They're the most broken part in terms of being overpowered anyway. If we're looking at the truly broken aspects of the battle system, look no further than moves that try to change defense and "elemental power". Any single time a Nexomon uses a move that tries to raise/lower defense or "elemental power" it does nothing. They literally didn't program anything into the game there. No one even seems to know what elemental power is, because it's not an actual stat in the Nexomon's stat screen - there's no "special" and "physical" attack, just "attack". Some have theorised that it was supposed to affect super effective damage, but as it doesn't work, no one can confirm. This means anytime the enemy uses a move to change these stats, it's basically a free turn. The worst part is, even if the AI knew these moves were broke, I doubt they'd avoid them. Enemy AI in this game is...odd. I've seen them use healing moves at full health.
There's also the speed stat which is pointless. You're guaranteed to go first in 100% of battles, and every turn after just switches back and forth. Even if a Nexomon is knocked out, the turn will still go to the next person in the queue, which makes revenge killing super easy by the way. Apparently speed DID decide who went first in the mobile version and PvP on the console versions (the PvP feature no longer exists) so it's a nothing stat now. Oddly, any move that increases/decreases evasion is shown as a shoe icon in battle, which is also the icon for speed in the stat screen. Is that implying speed is tied to accuracy? But every move has its own accuracy, so how does that work? Is it some calculation between a moves accuracy and the mons speeds? I doubt it because I've missed an 80% accurate move on a level 100+ Nexomon fighting a level 5, 3 times in a row.
Accuracy is yet another thing this game just doesn't seem to get right. For moves with no secondary effect, their accuracy is just the accuracy of the move - great. For moves with a secondary effect, it seems they list the chance of the secondary effect occurring. So you'll have a 90% move if it's pure damage, but a 30% if it has a chance to poison. But what does that mean?! Does it mean the move has a 100% chance to hit? Or is there a hidden hit-accuracy along with the chance of a status effect? Why did they put move accuracy and status chance as the exact same thing so they can't both be shown on moves??
Outside of battles, the way the rarity system works is kinda funny. Evolutions are entirely dictated by rarity. Common has no evolutions (even when many of them look like they clearly should). Uncommon have 1 evolution. Rare, Mega Rare and Special (aka starters) have 2. Legendary has none. The funny part is, I learned when the game came out on mobile evolutions didn't actually increase stats at all - it was entirely for show. This meant that while higher rarities did tend to have somewhat better stats, they weren't massively overpowered. But I guess people complained or something and so the developers made an evolution give a flat bonus (I believe 15%) to all stats. This means that mega rare was already better than common, but they altered it so anything that could evolve just shot so far past unevolving Nexomon that you have no reason to use anything lower than a rare unless you want to purposefully handicap yourself. I get that rarity should equal power to some extent, but I feel labelling them in such a blatant way takes any fun out of discovering for yourself what's good or not. Just find the thing with the right label and you know exactly how many times it will evolve and that it will at least be stronger than anything lower than it.
OK one last oddity - the games trainers throw evolutions at you WAY too fast. Like literally the first trainers you fight will be using Nexomon that don't evolve until level 20 or so, but they'll be level 5. It's like if in Pokémon the first route trainers were sending out PIdgeotto's and Golbat's. I have no idea why they do that. When it comes to third evolutions they even put them at a much more appropriate point in the game, though some of them can be a bit under levelled too.
This game is so weird. Like if you get past the deceptively cheap, Facebook-ad looking graphics, there's a surprisingly well designed world, story and group of monsters to collect. But actually fighting with them is just done in the most undercooked, non-functioning revenge killing simulator I've ever seen.
One last thing I do like is how this game uses legendary Nexomon as TRUE boss battles. Until the post-game when you can catch them, every battle against a legendary will have them with a massively bloated HP bar, effectively making it a battle of attrition. Especially with the way this game works as moves deal a lot of damage, meaning unless the AI chooses its moves very badly (and to be honest, it often will), each of yours will get 1 or 2 moves off at most before going down unless you're super over levelled. Unfortunately these can be cheesed super easily if you get a status effect off, especially confusion. At least trainer battles, especially those with a full team, can't be utterly disabled with a single status move.
This review contains spoilers
I finally got a chance to play this legendary spin-off. What makes it so good? Honestly, not sure. The only other PMD I've played (and only MD I've played period) is Rescue Team DX. That's a much newer remake of an older game than this, so it's hard to say how much this game improved and whatnot since my baseline is essentially 2020 game design put onto a 2005 game. But generally speaking the gameplay in both feels extremely similar. Which, yeah, I guess it makes sense, it's the same series, but this one is a cult classic which I hear about none of the others, including Rescue Team DX.
I think it's the story that everyone loves here. It's definitely higher standard than you might expect from Pokémon, with some great characters, emotional moments and straight up suicide being suggested in the post-game story (toned down to "should we really disappear?"). My only real issue with the story is, because it is Pokémon, things are over explained to hell, so much dialogue is drawn out way beyond the point of necessity. Things are repeated, objectives are reiterated, two cents are thrown in when not needed. Every side character needs a catch phrase to pad out an extra dialogue box with the annoying beeping sound every time you progress through them. It's a good story, and I like many of the characters, but the cutscenes just started getting on my nerves with how redundant most of it is. I don't need a flashback to something that happened 5 minutes ago, c'moooon.
That is a relatively minor issue I have though, since at least it's just "this thing that is great is made less great". Most of my issues revolve around gameplay stuff.
What made me put this game down for months is the absolute monotony that is thrown at you after every day. When you complete a mission (optional or story), you'll be brought back to the base so you can watch a pointless cutscene of everyone eating, followed by a cutscene of your character falling to sleep, then being woken up. It's only like 2 minutes total, but it adds up. However it's the preparation stage that truly made this drag. Every time you wake up there's likely to be the following things you want to do:
-Check Croagunk's shop for exclusive Pokémon-specific items that fit you or your partner.
-Check mission board for good missions.
-Go to Xatu's place to open up any boxes you picked up.
-Go to Wigglytuff's place to deposit the excess shit you picked up in the last mission, while restocking your essentials such as apples and reviver seeds.
-Check Kecleon's shop (usually for gummis).
-Deposit leftover money so you don't lose it if you die.
-Go to Spinda's Cafe and eat all your gummis. It's better to do it here because you're guaranteed a stat boost, and have a chance to get extra IQ points/more stat boosts just based on RNG. But every single time you pick an item to drink, you get a cutscene of Spinda preparing it. And you can't just drink multiple at once.
-Avoid playing Wobbufet's lottery because you might accidently win and be forced to watch another unskippable Ludicolo dance.
And now after 10 minutes of micromanaging you're finally ready to play a dungeon.
Why subject us to that EVERY TIME? Give me a damn way to set my dungeon items so that when I go to one it automatically deposits everything else, and withdraws my list, then I only have to manage the inventory when I want something specific that isn't part of the exact same thing I take into every single mission.
This is the kind of game that should make you feel addicted to play the next mission, it shouldn't give you that feeling of getting ready for work every morning. Between this AND the long-winded dialogue it makes the game feel way longer than it should.
At least the actual gameplay is fun enough. If you can annoy all the dumb issues that come up there... You can only recruit a defeated Pokémon if both you are exactly 1 space away from it, and if you yourself deliver the final blow. So no using ranged attacks, and definitely no letting your allies fight if you're set on recruiting a specific thing (which is a very rare chance until post-game when you can get items to boost it).
Traps in post-game dungeons are all over the damn place. I think there's IQ skills to see traps(?) but my dumbass starter didn't have that skill in his IQ group, so I never got to use it.
Speaking of traps, you just activated one? Well walk out of the way of it and watch your partner literally walk right in to it. The worst part is this isn't even some programming thing - there's an IQ skill that lets allies avoid visible traps. But it's only available to like 2 IQ groups out of more than 10, and it takes a fair amount of investment to even learn that skill. Why is not having actual braindead AI not only something that requires a lot of investment, but something you can only get from less than 20% of the Pokémon in the game? This applies to many things really, like want a partner that won't try to use sleep powder on an already sleeping enemy? That's literally a skill. Granted that one is something all Pokémon can learn, and relatively early. In fact trying to get your teammates to do anything not-stupid requires giving them gummis to raise their IQ, but at least some of them (like letting them realise using Sleep Powder on a sleeping enemy is a dipshit move) are learnable by everyone and fairly early.
This actively made me want to not use anyone but myself, and begrudgingly my partner who I couldn't remove until the post-game. Even having them as bodies and extra fire-power until they inevitably die doesn't work, because any death from your team will automatically use your precious revival seeds, with no option to set them to only be used on you/your partner (aka the only 2 deaths that would actually matter). Your best bet is to pick one or two specific teammates and buff them up, but even that feels inferior to just using all those gummis on yourself.
Thank God they're optional. Unless they're forced onto you for mission requests (which to be fair I guess is also technically optional). I stopped taking those ones when the game tried to make me drag a level 15 Metapod through at least 15 floors (I never got to where he wanted to go) while keeping him alive through rooms of enemies that can use moves that hit everything in the room, giving you no way to protect him, most of the time before you even realise there's an enemy IN this room let alone what it is, because it's on the other side way out of view. I'm not wasting all my reviver seeds to keep this Metapod alive for like 500 Pokédollars.
At least once you get past THAT the game is fun-oh wait no I remembered another thing that makes partners annoying. If one ever gets split up from you for any reason, or if you have a bigger party and one at the back gets attacked, be prepared for the worst few seconds of your life. Every single step you take is a "turn" and so in that turn both your ally and their enemy get to move. You'll be forced to painfully slowly watch them fight their stupid little heart out after every step you make, cutting the camera back and forth.
OK once you ignore that the game is pretty fun.
I do like the idea of each Pokémon having its own IQ skill path, I just don't want things that are made specifically to un-dumb the AI to be part of these. Getting to see how certain moves translate into this new style is pretty neat, even though there's a huge imbalance. The fact the post-game story is basically just an entire second part of the story is a huge bonus, and that's not even counting the massive amount of optional stuff in the post-game. This game has so much to do.
In short? Great game, but annoys the fuck out of me with every decision it makes. Like why can you set only one move to a shortcut? The shortcut is L+A. But there's 4 moves, and 4 face buttons, and L+Anything else does nothing. Let me put each move as a shortcut to each face button?
I think it's the story that everyone loves here. It's definitely higher standard than you might expect from Pokémon, with some great characters, emotional moments and straight up suicide being suggested in the post-game story (toned down to "should we really disappear?"). My only real issue with the story is, because it is Pokémon, things are over explained to hell, so much dialogue is drawn out way beyond the point of necessity. Things are repeated, objectives are reiterated, two cents are thrown in when not needed. Every side character needs a catch phrase to pad out an extra dialogue box with the annoying beeping sound every time you progress through them. It's a good story, and I like many of the characters, but the cutscenes just started getting on my nerves with how redundant most of it is. I don't need a flashback to something that happened 5 minutes ago, c'moooon.
That is a relatively minor issue I have though, since at least it's just "this thing that is great is made less great". Most of my issues revolve around gameplay stuff.
What made me put this game down for months is the absolute monotony that is thrown at you after every day. When you complete a mission (optional or story), you'll be brought back to the base so you can watch a pointless cutscene of everyone eating, followed by a cutscene of your character falling to sleep, then being woken up. It's only like 2 minutes total, but it adds up. However it's the preparation stage that truly made this drag. Every time you wake up there's likely to be the following things you want to do:
-Check Croagunk's shop for exclusive Pokémon-specific items that fit you or your partner.
-Check mission board for good missions.
-Go to Xatu's place to open up any boxes you picked up.
-Go to Wigglytuff's place to deposit the excess shit you picked up in the last mission, while restocking your essentials such as apples and reviver seeds.
-Check Kecleon's shop (usually for gummis).
-Deposit leftover money so you don't lose it if you die.
-Go to Spinda's Cafe and eat all your gummis. It's better to do it here because you're guaranteed a stat boost, and have a chance to get extra IQ points/more stat boosts just based on RNG. But every single time you pick an item to drink, you get a cutscene of Spinda preparing it. And you can't just drink multiple at once.
-Avoid playing Wobbufet's lottery because you might accidently win and be forced to watch another unskippable Ludicolo dance.
And now after 10 minutes of micromanaging you're finally ready to play a dungeon.
Why subject us to that EVERY TIME? Give me a damn way to set my dungeon items so that when I go to one it automatically deposits everything else, and withdraws my list, then I only have to manage the inventory when I want something specific that isn't part of the exact same thing I take into every single mission.
This is the kind of game that should make you feel addicted to play the next mission, it shouldn't give you that feeling of getting ready for work every morning. Between this AND the long-winded dialogue it makes the game feel way longer than it should.
At least the actual gameplay is fun enough. If you can annoy all the dumb issues that come up there... You can only recruit a defeated Pokémon if both you are exactly 1 space away from it, and if you yourself deliver the final blow. So no using ranged attacks, and definitely no letting your allies fight if you're set on recruiting a specific thing (which is a very rare chance until post-game when you can get items to boost it).
Traps in post-game dungeons are all over the damn place. I think there's IQ skills to see traps(?) but my dumbass starter didn't have that skill in his IQ group, so I never got to use it.
Speaking of traps, you just activated one? Well walk out of the way of it and watch your partner literally walk right in to it. The worst part is this isn't even some programming thing - there's an IQ skill that lets allies avoid visible traps. But it's only available to like 2 IQ groups out of more than 10, and it takes a fair amount of investment to even learn that skill. Why is not having actual braindead AI not only something that requires a lot of investment, but something you can only get from less than 20% of the Pokémon in the game? This applies to many things really, like want a partner that won't try to use sleep powder on an already sleeping enemy? That's literally a skill. Granted that one is something all Pokémon can learn, and relatively early. In fact trying to get your teammates to do anything not-stupid requires giving them gummis to raise their IQ, but at least some of them (like letting them realise using Sleep Powder on a sleeping enemy is a dipshit move) are learnable by everyone and fairly early.
This actively made me want to not use anyone but myself, and begrudgingly my partner who I couldn't remove until the post-game. Even having them as bodies and extra fire-power until they inevitably die doesn't work, because any death from your team will automatically use your precious revival seeds, with no option to set them to only be used on you/your partner (aka the only 2 deaths that would actually matter). Your best bet is to pick one or two specific teammates and buff them up, but even that feels inferior to just using all those gummis on yourself.
Thank God they're optional. Unless they're forced onto you for mission requests (which to be fair I guess is also technically optional). I stopped taking those ones when the game tried to make me drag a level 15 Metapod through at least 15 floors (I never got to where he wanted to go) while keeping him alive through rooms of enemies that can use moves that hit everything in the room, giving you no way to protect him, most of the time before you even realise there's an enemy IN this room let alone what it is, because it's on the other side way out of view. I'm not wasting all my reviver seeds to keep this Metapod alive for like 500 Pokédollars.
At least once you get past THAT the game is fun-oh wait no I remembered another thing that makes partners annoying. If one ever gets split up from you for any reason, or if you have a bigger party and one at the back gets attacked, be prepared for the worst few seconds of your life. Every single step you take is a "turn" and so in that turn both your ally and their enemy get to move. You'll be forced to painfully slowly watch them fight their stupid little heart out after every step you make, cutting the camera back and forth.
OK once you ignore that the game is pretty fun.
I do like the idea of each Pokémon having its own IQ skill path, I just don't want things that are made specifically to un-dumb the AI to be part of these. Getting to see how certain moves translate into this new style is pretty neat, even though there's a huge imbalance. The fact the post-game story is basically just an entire second part of the story is a huge bonus, and that's not even counting the massive amount of optional stuff in the post-game. This game has so much to do.
In short? Great game, but annoys the fuck out of me with every decision it makes. Like why can you set only one move to a shortcut? The shortcut is L+A. But there's 4 moves, and 4 face buttons, and L+Anything else does nothing. Let me put each move as a shortcut to each face button?
Having access to all the expansions is nice, but a bit overwhelming at first. Right off the bat the Makin' Magic expansion means a guy shows up at your doorstep as soon as you move in to drop off some magic stuff before you've even managed to buy a sofa. Some of the expansions were just obviously made for players who had been playing the game for a long time already, so starting a file with everything is a bit conflicting. The Superstar expansion has its whole basis on getting an agent and building your sims fame. But you can't do this while also having a regular job. It seems pretty obvious this was made for people who had maybe burned out on the normal jobs that were the only option prior to Superstar. For a brand new player with both options out the gate, I feel the Superstar one is just overly complex and feels like something you do when you have your sims life sorted.
One thing I don't really like about this is the whole travelling mechanic. When you go to any area (downtown, old town, the superstar areas, the magic areas etc), the game creates a save of your house exactly as it was - including the time so you don't have to miss work. My problem is that the sims needs don't really adjust for a setting that isn't tailor made for them. Bladder is fine since all places tend to have toilets. But hygiene? Very few places have showers. Energy? Even fewer places have beds. Freaking comfort? You'd be surprised at how little sitting on a public bench does to help this. Even hunger is hard to keep up, since the food you can buy while out and about is good for maybe 2 minutes worth of game time before it drops back to where it was. This means you're pretty much on a very strict time limit whenever you leave the house.
The main problem with that is the above mentioned save state thing. If you went out with all your needs met, chances are you've just slept, eaten, watched TV or did whatever else you do for fun, and because the time was saved, it means its close to work time. Except your sim is now exhausted, needs to eat, needs to shower and who knows what else. To be fair you can miss a day of work in the game with no real consequence except lack of money, but do it too many times and it becomes an issue.
It also just generally runs in to many of the issues that were there from the base game. Money is too hard to obtain in notable amounts without cheats (to be fair the Superstar path may solve that issue, I never went too deep in to it). The sims needs drop way too fast, making it a big juggling act that just turns into repetitive tasks every single day. The friendship mechanic still sucks to try and keep and maintain multiple close friends at once which is needed for job promotions - but at least now you can just "talk" over the phone so doing that daily is much easier...though it runs the risk of a negative interaction through no fault of your own.
One thing I think came from one of the specific expansions, since I didn't notice it in the base game, is the fact you can get flies that just appear out of nowhere. Usually they're tied to filth and disappear when the filth is gone, but these flies just fly around as they want even when the house is spotless. You can't interact with them at all, so the only way to get rid of them, according to the research I did online, was to turn on a cheat. That's pretty wild.
So ultimately my feelings on Sims 1 is that despite being great nostalgia, it has a lot of issues in regards to giving the player enough time to do stuff outside just balancing all the needs and social stats.
Having all the expansion content is of course great, even if a lot of it feels like it clashes against each other since they all have different themes and purposes. It's hard to just have a "try to live like a normal person" file when the first thing it does is hand you a bunch of magic stuff.
As weird as it is to say, this is probably best played with cheats so you don't have to worry about work. Then you can just use all your free time to experience all the different stuff the game offers. Because I found when trying to build a career I wasn't able to focus on anything else. It's clear that some of these things were made for players who had been playing the base game and expansions in order, and thus had maxed out stats and enough money to do whatever they wanted.
One thing I don't really like about this is the whole travelling mechanic. When you go to any area (downtown, old town, the superstar areas, the magic areas etc), the game creates a save of your house exactly as it was - including the time so you don't have to miss work. My problem is that the sims needs don't really adjust for a setting that isn't tailor made for them. Bladder is fine since all places tend to have toilets. But hygiene? Very few places have showers. Energy? Even fewer places have beds. Freaking comfort? You'd be surprised at how little sitting on a public bench does to help this. Even hunger is hard to keep up, since the food you can buy while out and about is good for maybe 2 minutes worth of game time before it drops back to where it was. This means you're pretty much on a very strict time limit whenever you leave the house.
The main problem with that is the above mentioned save state thing. If you went out with all your needs met, chances are you've just slept, eaten, watched TV or did whatever else you do for fun, and because the time was saved, it means its close to work time. Except your sim is now exhausted, needs to eat, needs to shower and who knows what else. To be fair you can miss a day of work in the game with no real consequence except lack of money, but do it too many times and it becomes an issue.
It also just generally runs in to many of the issues that were there from the base game. Money is too hard to obtain in notable amounts without cheats (to be fair the Superstar path may solve that issue, I never went too deep in to it). The sims needs drop way too fast, making it a big juggling act that just turns into repetitive tasks every single day. The friendship mechanic still sucks to try and keep and maintain multiple close friends at once which is needed for job promotions - but at least now you can just "talk" over the phone so doing that daily is much easier...though it runs the risk of a negative interaction through no fault of your own.
One thing I think came from one of the specific expansions, since I didn't notice it in the base game, is the fact you can get flies that just appear out of nowhere. Usually they're tied to filth and disappear when the filth is gone, but these flies just fly around as they want even when the house is spotless. You can't interact with them at all, so the only way to get rid of them, according to the research I did online, was to turn on a cheat. That's pretty wild.
So ultimately my feelings on Sims 1 is that despite being great nostalgia, it has a lot of issues in regards to giving the player enough time to do stuff outside just balancing all the needs and social stats.
Having all the expansion content is of course great, even if a lot of it feels like it clashes against each other since they all have different themes and purposes. It's hard to just have a "try to live like a normal person" file when the first thing it does is hand you a bunch of magic stuff.
As weird as it is to say, this is probably best played with cheats so you don't have to worry about work. Then you can just use all your free time to experience all the different stuff the game offers. Because I found when trying to build a career I wasn't able to focus on anything else. It's clear that some of these things were made for players who had been playing the base game and expansions in order, and thus had maxed out stats and enough money to do whatever they wanted.
2000
I had some quick re-experience sessions with the old Sims 1, both as the base game and with the complete collection.
This review is just for the base game.
The bells and whistle-free original Sims is charming in how down-to-earth it is compared to even the very first expansion, which added a wish-granting genie. It really is the most basic live-a-life simulation you can get. Of course the lack of options does ultimately hurt in the long run. This is before they added any extra areas like downtown, so your house is all you've got. Upgrading and expanding it is a neat idea, but once you've got all the most expensive items, you're not left with anything else to do but experiment different layouts.
But also, getting money in this game is a chore. As far as I could tell, the only way outside random prizes from answering the phone, which has a very limited window, is your daily job. Getting promotions at your job is naturally the way to get more money faster, but these promotions are locked behind a very annoying mechanic. Not the skills/traits like charisma, body and mechanical - those are fine. It's the freaking friendship mechanic. Jobs will start locking promotions behind having X amount of close friends, the problem is getting friends is hard enough since it involves having to invite the sim over (there's no option to even just "talk on the phone" yet) and then go through some interaction choices, praying you don't accidently pick one that decreases the friendship. If friends stayed friends it wouldn't even be that bad, but the fact the friendship bar decreases, at a pretty rapid pace, when not interacting with them just makes it a horrible juggling act the more friends you need for a promotion. You need 5 people to be close friends? You have to spend all your time making sure each one stays above the threshold, and if they get close to it, you can risk accidently pushing them over with a bad interaction. This is all while trying to balance your own sims needs, and their job. The NPCs also run on their own schedule, so they will be at work at certain times, and of course get mad if you call them at midnight, so you better hope your own job has a healthy social time for its shift.
Even ignoring the fact that the relationship mechanic makes the game too much of a frantic exercise in trying to keep stats over a specific line, there's just a big repetitive element to it. Your sims needs drop at a very fast rate, and you generally find the system that works, like going to bed to get well rested, then watching TV to get the fun meter up, then food, then toilet and shower, then work, then come back home and try and keep your relationships steady or get some traits up, then eat again, then sleep and repeat the same thing every single day. I get it's kind of the point, but after you do 7 days of this, what else can you really do? Even if the game had options to deviate off this path, their needs are way too picky to let you do it.
This review is just for the base game.
The bells and whistle-free original Sims is charming in how down-to-earth it is compared to even the very first expansion, which added a wish-granting genie. It really is the most basic live-a-life simulation you can get. Of course the lack of options does ultimately hurt in the long run. This is before they added any extra areas like downtown, so your house is all you've got. Upgrading and expanding it is a neat idea, but once you've got all the most expensive items, you're not left with anything else to do but experiment different layouts.
But also, getting money in this game is a chore. As far as I could tell, the only way outside random prizes from answering the phone, which has a very limited window, is your daily job. Getting promotions at your job is naturally the way to get more money faster, but these promotions are locked behind a very annoying mechanic. Not the skills/traits like charisma, body and mechanical - those are fine. It's the freaking friendship mechanic. Jobs will start locking promotions behind having X amount of close friends, the problem is getting friends is hard enough since it involves having to invite the sim over (there's no option to even just "talk on the phone" yet) and then go through some interaction choices, praying you don't accidently pick one that decreases the friendship. If friends stayed friends it wouldn't even be that bad, but the fact the friendship bar decreases, at a pretty rapid pace, when not interacting with them just makes it a horrible juggling act the more friends you need for a promotion. You need 5 people to be close friends? You have to spend all your time making sure each one stays above the threshold, and if they get close to it, you can risk accidently pushing them over with a bad interaction. This is all while trying to balance your own sims needs, and their job. The NPCs also run on their own schedule, so they will be at work at certain times, and of course get mad if you call them at midnight, so you better hope your own job has a healthy social time for its shift.
Even ignoring the fact that the relationship mechanic makes the game too much of a frantic exercise in trying to keep stats over a specific line, there's just a big repetitive element to it. Your sims needs drop at a very fast rate, and you generally find the system that works, like going to bed to get well rested, then watching TV to get the fun meter up, then food, then toilet and shower, then work, then come back home and try and keep your relationships steady or get some traits up, then eat again, then sleep and repeat the same thing every single day. I get it's kind of the point, but after you do 7 days of this, what else can you really do? Even if the game had options to deviate off this path, their needs are way too picky to let you do it.
2023
This review contains spoilers
(I haven't played the original so this is more a review of the game itself than as a remake)
Like the Mario & Luigi games I've played, this ones biggest strength is its charm. Character movesets are very simple - Mario pretty much only learns 2 special moves, with only upgraded versions as he levels up. The classic action commands for bonus attacks and defending started here (in Mario games I mean, I don't know about RPGs in general) so that adds one extra layer to the game over many early RPGs where you just watched as your characters did what you told them to, and had to wait helplessly as the enemies attacked you. The timing of these commands seem much stricter in this game than the other ones I've played though. I do like that you get rewarded for getting a chain of good timing though, depending on who you have in your party everyone gives an increasing boost to a different stat if you can get a chain of 2, 3 and 5 and then keep it.
Admittedly the battle system did start feeling hollow at the endgame when you unlock everyone's best moves as low as level 18, with the level cap being at 30.
The battling is broken up at points by some decently fun mini-games. None of them really kept me coming back for more, but as one-off things they work great.
One thing I found didn't age badly was the world the game is set in. To say that this was a Mario game from the 90's I would have expected way more game-standard settings and locales, like generic ice world, generic fire world etc. But there's a ton of cool set pieces and places to explore. You get areas like a sunken ship and a boss battle in a wedding hall. Even the final area isn't just a Bowser's Castle (that's the penultimate area) but a giant weapons factory, complete with metallic copies of previous bosses.
I was also expecting things to be kept fairly simple in terms of secrets with the Mario branding, but Square Enix didn't hold back. There are so many optional things that require backtracking, speaking to every NPC, sometimes at different points in the story and/or doing obscure tasks to get secret items. Sometimes these can feel a bit underwhelming though, like getting access to the Casino involves backtracking to an old area, beating a specific mini-game 12 times in a row (with no indication that there's any good reward in it) and then going to another old area and jumping in a specific spot 3 times - all this to get access to a Casino with 3 pretty mini-games with rewards that are just common items.
One thing I do know is new to the remake is the post-game bosses, and these are definitely the only time the game challenged me. In particular it was the only time I had to adjust my equipment to not just focus on pure power, because unblockable, team-wide sleep moves that can be spammed are almost impossible to beat without sleep-preventing equipment. In fact most of the post-game bosses seem to have some kind of gimmick or strategy, one of them involves hitting Bob-ombs until they turn their back on the boss, so they explode on him instead of you. One is a one-on-one duel with no items allowed, so you pretty much have to keep perfect guarding to survive. It's all a level of thought beyond just "Use strong attacks and win" that clearly come from a different area. As a side note though I think even most of these post-game bosses could be easily beaten by using Peach with the red shell equipped - that's the strategy I used to beat the secret boss and didn't have the red shell equipment before then.
Another thing that doesn't really seem as big a deal anymore is the party. 2 brand new characters which is still nice to anyone who didn't play the original since Mallow and Geno have never reappeared anywhere outside small cameos. But Peach and Bowser as playable must have been a big deal in 1996, while now it's...still kind of neat, but we've had many chances to play as them. In terms of their actual characters, Bowser being a more sympathetic villain who wants his castle back is charming, but I love that he still gets moments that show him as a feared enemy of the world. Peach even has a moment where she goes out of her way to escape the castle to join the adventure, which must have been a big character moment for her after playing the series till then as damsel in distress. Mallow and Geno are fun, though it's funny how their roles feel opposite. Mallow's story has no real bearing on the overall plot, but gets a lot of attention, and has whole arcs dedicated to it. Geno's backstory involves the entire set-up of the game, with him having a personal vendetta against the main enemy, and the collectables being directly tied to his home world. But we never really get to see his world, so while Mallow is unimportant for the plot, he gets all the story attention, while Geno is just kind of an exposition guy.
I can easily see this being an extremely fun and even innovative RPG at the time, even if not a difficult one. These days if you didn't play the original Mario RPG but did play any of the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi games it's kind of just that. You can still enjoy the story despite the battle systems simplicity, just don't go in expecting it to have been overhauled to 2023 game standards. Also the music is fantastic too.
Like the Mario & Luigi games I've played, this ones biggest strength is its charm. Character movesets are very simple - Mario pretty much only learns 2 special moves, with only upgraded versions as he levels up. The classic action commands for bonus attacks and defending started here (in Mario games I mean, I don't know about RPGs in general) so that adds one extra layer to the game over many early RPGs where you just watched as your characters did what you told them to, and had to wait helplessly as the enemies attacked you. The timing of these commands seem much stricter in this game than the other ones I've played though. I do like that you get rewarded for getting a chain of good timing though, depending on who you have in your party everyone gives an increasing boost to a different stat if you can get a chain of 2, 3 and 5 and then keep it.
Admittedly the battle system did start feeling hollow at the endgame when you unlock everyone's best moves as low as level 18, with the level cap being at 30.
The battling is broken up at points by some decently fun mini-games. None of them really kept me coming back for more, but as one-off things they work great.
One thing I found didn't age badly was the world the game is set in. To say that this was a Mario game from the 90's I would have expected way more game-standard settings and locales, like generic ice world, generic fire world etc. But there's a ton of cool set pieces and places to explore. You get areas like a sunken ship and a boss battle in a wedding hall. Even the final area isn't just a Bowser's Castle (that's the penultimate area) but a giant weapons factory, complete with metallic copies of previous bosses.
I was also expecting things to be kept fairly simple in terms of secrets with the Mario branding, but Square Enix didn't hold back. There are so many optional things that require backtracking, speaking to every NPC, sometimes at different points in the story and/or doing obscure tasks to get secret items. Sometimes these can feel a bit underwhelming though, like getting access to the Casino involves backtracking to an old area, beating a specific mini-game 12 times in a row (with no indication that there's any good reward in it) and then going to another old area and jumping in a specific spot 3 times - all this to get access to a Casino with 3 pretty mini-games with rewards that are just common items.
One thing I do know is new to the remake is the post-game bosses, and these are definitely the only time the game challenged me. In particular it was the only time I had to adjust my equipment to not just focus on pure power, because unblockable, team-wide sleep moves that can be spammed are almost impossible to beat without sleep-preventing equipment. In fact most of the post-game bosses seem to have some kind of gimmick or strategy, one of them involves hitting Bob-ombs until they turn their back on the boss, so they explode on him instead of you. One is a one-on-one duel with no items allowed, so you pretty much have to keep perfect guarding to survive. It's all a level of thought beyond just "Use strong attacks and win" that clearly come from a different area. As a side note though I think even most of these post-game bosses could be easily beaten by using Peach with the red shell equipped - that's the strategy I used to beat the secret boss and didn't have the red shell equipment before then.
Another thing that doesn't really seem as big a deal anymore is the party. 2 brand new characters which is still nice to anyone who didn't play the original since Mallow and Geno have never reappeared anywhere outside small cameos. But Peach and Bowser as playable must have been a big deal in 1996, while now it's...still kind of neat, but we've had many chances to play as them. In terms of their actual characters, Bowser being a more sympathetic villain who wants his castle back is charming, but I love that he still gets moments that show him as a feared enemy of the world. Peach even has a moment where she goes out of her way to escape the castle to join the adventure, which must have been a big character moment for her after playing the series till then as damsel in distress. Mallow and Geno are fun, though it's funny how their roles feel opposite. Mallow's story has no real bearing on the overall plot, but gets a lot of attention, and has whole arcs dedicated to it. Geno's backstory involves the entire set-up of the game, with him having a personal vendetta against the main enemy, and the collectables being directly tied to his home world. But we never really get to see his world, so while Mallow is unimportant for the plot, he gets all the story attention, while Geno is just kind of an exposition guy.
I can easily see this being an extremely fun and even innovative RPG at the time, even if not a difficult one. These days if you didn't play the original Mario RPG but did play any of the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi games it's kind of just that. You can still enjoy the story despite the battle systems simplicity, just don't go in expecting it to have been overhauled to 2023 game standards. Also the music is fantastic too.
2023
The cast of Persona 5 continues to trek into new genres, and does competently in them. In this case it doesn't go much further than competent though.
Maybe it's just that I'm not a fan of the genre (I've played very few of them) but this game felt very bare bones compared to the main Persona 5, or even Strikers. When you're not playing the levels you're either watching cutscenes (and I'll talk about that soon), fusing personas or exploring the skill trees. The only real break from the main campaign comes from the handful of side-quests you get. There's only about 10-15 of them in the whole game, but they have much tighter restrictions than the main game. However they very rarely actually deviate from the basic formula of "kill all enemies" or "get to the end of the level". The ones that make you kill everyone in 1 turn are more like puzzles though, so I guess it's technically different. The one standout was when you had to push a box to the end goal (by characters hitting it). It was a fun change of pace, but it also stands out just because of how incredibly rare a change in the 2 basic mission types are.
Even when it comes to unique enemies, I can think of only 1 level that had a one-off enemy that wasn't a boss, which was the one in the 2nd Kingdom that created clones of itself and you had to find the right copy. I don't understand why they didn't base more levels on gimmick enemies like that, it was easily a highlight.
Enemy variety itself only really stopped at being acceptable. They get introduced at a weirdly paced rate, it feels like a very slow drip feed in the first 2 Kingdom's, then suddenly we get a lot at the end of the second and through the third, before the fourth Kingdom generally acts as a "here's everything you've fought before, but harder. Including bosses". I don't think it introduced any new ones, but I may be wrong.
The level design was usually just some pocket dimension made of lego bricks to make use of whatever abilities the Phantom Thieves had, it was rare that it felt like it actually took place in any kind of natural location. Those were some of my favourite levels though, like the wedding hall where you had to weave between tables to make it to the end.
Anyway what really made the game drag was just how much dialogue there was. And I get it's a Persona game so it's going to have dialogue, but at least the other genres allowed for long play sessions between the long cutscenes, here it's a 20 minute cutscene followed by 5 minutes of gameplay followed by another 20 minute cutscene. So much of the dialogue is so superfluous too, and many points are repeated ad nauseum. They also keep the option to let the player pick between 3 dialogue options when Joker needs to respond, except with no confidants to increase these are all completely redundant with maybe the following line being a tiny bit different. There's only 2 times I think it had a more notable change - the one with the wedding fantasies of course, and the biggest one when you decide which group to go with in the second Kingdom, which of course determines which scene you see.
On the plus side, when the game isn't doing it's dialogue through cardboard cutouts with speech bubbles, some of the cutscenes are pretty cool to watch. The music of course is up to classic Persona 5 standards. The characters are the ones you (presumably) know and love - seriously if you didn't already play Persona 5, don't play this because they do nothing to catch you up.
So yeah, the game itself is fine. But it's also very bare minimum with only the odd idea that feels fresh in the repetitive locations and enemy types. But it's dragged down further by overly padded writing.
Maybe it's just that I'm not a fan of the genre (I've played very few of them) but this game felt very bare bones compared to the main Persona 5, or even Strikers. When you're not playing the levels you're either watching cutscenes (and I'll talk about that soon), fusing personas or exploring the skill trees. The only real break from the main campaign comes from the handful of side-quests you get. There's only about 10-15 of them in the whole game, but they have much tighter restrictions than the main game. However they very rarely actually deviate from the basic formula of "kill all enemies" or "get to the end of the level". The ones that make you kill everyone in 1 turn are more like puzzles though, so I guess it's technically different. The one standout was when you had to push a box to the end goal (by characters hitting it). It was a fun change of pace, but it also stands out just because of how incredibly rare a change in the 2 basic mission types are.
Even when it comes to unique enemies, I can think of only 1 level that had a one-off enemy that wasn't a boss, which was the one in the 2nd Kingdom that created clones of itself and you had to find the right copy. I don't understand why they didn't base more levels on gimmick enemies like that, it was easily a highlight.
Enemy variety itself only really stopped at being acceptable. They get introduced at a weirdly paced rate, it feels like a very slow drip feed in the first 2 Kingdom's, then suddenly we get a lot at the end of the second and through the third, before the fourth Kingdom generally acts as a "here's everything you've fought before, but harder. Including bosses". I don't think it introduced any new ones, but I may be wrong.
The level design was usually just some pocket dimension made of lego bricks to make use of whatever abilities the Phantom Thieves had, it was rare that it felt like it actually took place in any kind of natural location. Those were some of my favourite levels though, like the wedding hall where you had to weave between tables to make it to the end.
Anyway what really made the game drag was just how much dialogue there was. And I get it's a Persona game so it's going to have dialogue, but at least the other genres allowed for long play sessions between the long cutscenes, here it's a 20 minute cutscene followed by 5 minutes of gameplay followed by another 20 minute cutscene. So much of the dialogue is so superfluous too, and many points are repeated ad nauseum. They also keep the option to let the player pick between 3 dialogue options when Joker needs to respond, except with no confidants to increase these are all completely redundant with maybe the following line being a tiny bit different. There's only 2 times I think it had a more notable change - the one with the wedding fantasies of course, and the biggest one when you decide which group to go with in the second Kingdom, which of course determines which scene you see.
On the plus side, when the game isn't doing it's dialogue through cardboard cutouts with speech bubbles, some of the cutscenes are pretty cool to watch. The music of course is up to classic Persona 5 standards. The characters are the ones you (presumably) know and love - seriously if you didn't already play Persona 5, don't play this because they do nothing to catch you up.
So yeah, the game itself is fine. But it's also very bare minimum with only the odd idea that feels fresh in the repetitive locations and enemy types. But it's dragged down further by overly padded writing.
2002
Despite being the first Gamecube Mario Party this one feels more like an N64 version, and in many ways is even worse than 2 and 3.
For one thing the boards are still flat, but they don't even feel like they're integrated into their settings anymore. Every board just takes place on a metal walkway, with all the fun stuff being put as decoration, only interacting with any of it when an event space triggers. Even the N64 games despite their limitations managed to make most boards feel like you were walking around their actual locations, not just having a generic board with stickers slapped on it to make it feel like it fits a theme.
It has a pretty forgettable selection of minigames. And yet, some of the best in the series, like Booksquirm and Dungeon Duos, but the majority are very plain, if not annoying. Plus in terms of the big 3 (4 player, 3v1 and 2v2) it actually has less in each category than the previous 3 games, except 2v2 which it has Mario Party 1 beat. It's not by a huge amount (this game has 9 2v2 and 3v1 while I think MP3 and/or 2 has 10 each in those) but with the amount of lacklustre games, it makes them stand out more.
Maybe the worst thing about the game is the mega and mini mushroom gimmick. It's pushed hard, and while on their own they're not bad. Mega mushrooms give 2 dice rolls, can crush opponents you pass to steal 10 coins, but at the cost of skipping any optional spaces, including stars, while mini mushrooms offer unique paths, access to mini-only events and make your dice roll 1-5, which itself is a useful thing in Mario Party even without the mini aspect. The main problem is to make them feel more important than they are, there are multiple "Mushroom" spaces on every board, which will give you one of the two. This is not optional, and you cannot drop or trade items, so if you happen to find yourself unluckily getting 3 mini mushrooms with no way to strategically use them, you're SOL if you wanted to buy that magic lamp. Plus it feels like almost every board event (the ones that have arrows to "enter", not the green ? spaces) other than lotteries are locked behind mini mushrooms now, making the boards feel more empty as a result when you're not using mini-mushrooms, which is most of the time.
For one thing the boards are still flat, but they don't even feel like they're integrated into their settings anymore. Every board just takes place on a metal walkway, with all the fun stuff being put as decoration, only interacting with any of it when an event space triggers. Even the N64 games despite their limitations managed to make most boards feel like you were walking around their actual locations, not just having a generic board with stickers slapped on it to make it feel like it fits a theme.
It has a pretty forgettable selection of minigames. And yet, some of the best in the series, like Booksquirm and Dungeon Duos, but the majority are very plain, if not annoying. Plus in terms of the big 3 (4 player, 3v1 and 2v2) it actually has less in each category than the previous 3 games, except 2v2 which it has Mario Party 1 beat. It's not by a huge amount (this game has 9 2v2 and 3v1 while I think MP3 and/or 2 has 10 each in those) but with the amount of lacklustre games, it makes them stand out more.
Maybe the worst thing about the game is the mega and mini mushroom gimmick. It's pushed hard, and while on their own they're not bad. Mega mushrooms give 2 dice rolls, can crush opponents you pass to steal 10 coins, but at the cost of skipping any optional spaces, including stars, while mini mushrooms offer unique paths, access to mini-only events and make your dice roll 1-5, which itself is a useful thing in Mario Party even without the mini aspect. The main problem is to make them feel more important than they are, there are multiple "Mushroom" spaces on every board, which will give you one of the two. This is not optional, and you cannot drop or trade items, so if you happen to find yourself unluckily getting 3 mini mushrooms with no way to strategically use them, you're SOL if you wanted to buy that magic lamp. Plus it feels like almost every board event (the ones that have arrows to "enter", not the green ? spaces) other than lotteries are locked behind mini mushrooms now, making the boards feel more empty as a result when you're not using mini-mushrooms, which is most of the time.
The first thing I noticed about this game is that it kinda runs like shit compared to 2008. Everything seems to run at half the FPS. But then it gets really bad when a field starts getting more full, and if you play with/against a stall deck and the field gets full, you can expect very choppy gameplay and the opponent stuck in "thinking" mode for what feels like forever.
I guess it's lucky that this is the type of game where frames per second doesn't matter that much, but it's still a noticeable downgrade even when the field is relatively empty.
Another downgrade is the change of the top screen - what used to be a close look at the duel field, complete with the models of the monsters, has been turned into a generic screen that just displays the info of whatever card is being hovered over/activated. The only time it gets "interesting" is when a battle is made and high definition versions (for the DS) of the cards artwork shows up. It sounds dumb, and compared to being able to see close-ups of the holograms it is, but the quality of the art in these scenes is much better than anywhere else the card art exists, so you get to see some pretty nice shots of monsters that are otherwise just a clump of pixels at any other time.
The holograms do remain, but they're limited to the bottom screen, which shows a semi-birds eye view of the whole field, so the monsters are shrunken down so much you can barely make out any details. Basically it's the exact same as it was on the bottom screen in past games.
I can only assume they changed the top screen to improve performance, but since it's still crappy, why not also remove the little holograms. I really don't get any satisfaction seeing them in their shrunken form like I did with the top screen in past games.
Moving on from the actual duels, the story I think takes a portion of 5D's story - I'm not sure I've never watched it. But it really feels more like a story than any other DS Yu-Gi-Oh game I've played. World Championship 2008 had no real story and was more just a map with opponents to click on and duel to move on to the next area. Even Spirit Caller which followed the first part of GX was largely just clicking an area to find opponents until eventually you meet some vague criteria to move on to the next story event. But this game has you fully control your player character, walking around the city, finding treasure chests for loot, and even doing freaking moving block puzzles. It's crazy how hard it goes. And yet it still keeps the formula from 2008 - you can get through the story dueling only every story-related duelist once, but to unlock packs and characters to duel in "World Championship" mode - which itself will unlock more packs - you have to duel the non-important NPCs 5 times each. So it's as grindy or non-grindy as you want, but expect to use way less cards without grinding.
And speaking of packs, the distribution in this game is so dogshit holy hell. So many archtypes are spread across multiple packs that are locked to very different stages of the game. Oh and for some reason the first 4 packs you start with have 200+ cards in them, so getting a card you actually want out of them is much harder, and even getting to 80% pack completion (so you can use passwords to get the cards you want) takes longer and more money. Even the new synchro mechanic is massively underrepresented. Other than the 2 or 3 synchro monsters you start with, the packs to unlock more are pretty much all hidden between requirements you can't get until late or even post-game.
It just takes way too long to make any good decks in this game.
Back to story mode, since this is 5D's you have actual motorcycle mini-games too. Pretty much entirely "beat the time" ones. They're...fine? I mean I doubt anyone is playing Yu-Gi-Oh for them, but they're so novel for the series I couldn't help but be amused. What I'm not amused by is the fact motorcycle parts use the exact same currency as card packs. So as if it wasn't already hard enough to get a good deck, this game has you splitting your spendings between that and a what is essentially a non-optional freaking mini-game.
Oh speaking of the currency, they heavily nerfed the "wins in a row" bonus from the last game to cap out at 10 extra DP per duel. This means no more save scumming to keep a streak and get hundreds of extra points every duel. Now the grind is even worse.
Also it's not the games fault since I assume it comes from the anime, but what is up with speed duels? They're literally normal duels, except all spell cards are replaced by speed duel versions which use what is basically a mana system that you might find in other card games (a spell costs X speed points to use, you get a speed point every turn and for every 1000 damage you take you lose 1, if you hit an opponent when they have 0 left you get an extra one instead).
Why does this apply exclusively to spell cards? It's such a weirdly implemented system that turns 1/3rd of Yu-Gi-Oh into this system while keeping the rest exactly the same? Monster Reborn now costs 10 whole points to use, but trap cards like Mirror Force can still be used completely for free? The hell is the point? Even monsters would easily fit into this, by using their stars as their costs - it'd lead to a lot more 1 stars being ran so you can play monsters on turn 1, while the ever-present 4 stars wouldn't be nearly as dominating.
What this system also means is many decks become nearly unusable because speed spells are almost all generic ones that can fit into any deck. Any archtypes that rely heavily on a key spell, or more, are now unusable. There isn't even a Polymerization one, so that's an entire card type that is unusable.
So yeah, not the games fault, but it's just weird. Oh and you also have to buy every single speed spell separately. You don't get "Speed Spell - Book of Moon" just by having the original. So even MORE shit you have to waste your harder-to-earn currency on.
Also kind of worth noting that World Championship 2008 had its "story" mode fighting duel spirits, which unlocked more duel spirits and sometimes even anime characters for World Championship mode. This game of course has the Anime characters as a core part of the story, and you ONLY unlock duel spirits in WC mode. There's no GX or Duel Monsters characters to unlock unfortunately, which would have made perfect bonuses.
So this game is weird. The increased card pool from 2008 is nice, the story mode improvement is huge, but the increased grind and horrible card-to-pack distribution make the actual story mode a bit disappointing. I imagine if you played this a lot post-story, unlocked everything, you'd have a lot of fun using every deck possible, especially if you played it back in its time with WiFi. That's assuming you can tolerate the poor performance though.
I guess it's lucky that this is the type of game where frames per second doesn't matter that much, but it's still a noticeable downgrade even when the field is relatively empty.
Another downgrade is the change of the top screen - what used to be a close look at the duel field, complete with the models of the monsters, has been turned into a generic screen that just displays the info of whatever card is being hovered over/activated. The only time it gets "interesting" is when a battle is made and high definition versions (for the DS) of the cards artwork shows up. It sounds dumb, and compared to being able to see close-ups of the holograms it is, but the quality of the art in these scenes is much better than anywhere else the card art exists, so you get to see some pretty nice shots of monsters that are otherwise just a clump of pixels at any other time.
The holograms do remain, but they're limited to the bottom screen, which shows a semi-birds eye view of the whole field, so the monsters are shrunken down so much you can barely make out any details. Basically it's the exact same as it was on the bottom screen in past games.
I can only assume they changed the top screen to improve performance, but since it's still crappy, why not also remove the little holograms. I really don't get any satisfaction seeing them in their shrunken form like I did with the top screen in past games.
Moving on from the actual duels, the story I think takes a portion of 5D's story - I'm not sure I've never watched it. But it really feels more like a story than any other DS Yu-Gi-Oh game I've played. World Championship 2008 had no real story and was more just a map with opponents to click on and duel to move on to the next area. Even Spirit Caller which followed the first part of GX was largely just clicking an area to find opponents until eventually you meet some vague criteria to move on to the next story event. But this game has you fully control your player character, walking around the city, finding treasure chests for loot, and even doing freaking moving block puzzles. It's crazy how hard it goes. And yet it still keeps the formula from 2008 - you can get through the story dueling only every story-related duelist once, but to unlock packs and characters to duel in "World Championship" mode - which itself will unlock more packs - you have to duel the non-important NPCs 5 times each. So it's as grindy or non-grindy as you want, but expect to use way less cards without grinding.
And speaking of packs, the distribution in this game is so dogshit holy hell. So many archtypes are spread across multiple packs that are locked to very different stages of the game. Oh and for some reason the first 4 packs you start with have 200+ cards in them, so getting a card you actually want out of them is much harder, and even getting to 80% pack completion (so you can use passwords to get the cards you want) takes longer and more money. Even the new synchro mechanic is massively underrepresented. Other than the 2 or 3 synchro monsters you start with, the packs to unlock more are pretty much all hidden between requirements you can't get until late or even post-game.
It just takes way too long to make any good decks in this game.
Back to story mode, since this is 5D's you have actual motorcycle mini-games too. Pretty much entirely "beat the time" ones. They're...fine? I mean I doubt anyone is playing Yu-Gi-Oh for them, but they're so novel for the series I couldn't help but be amused. What I'm not amused by is the fact motorcycle parts use the exact same currency as card packs. So as if it wasn't already hard enough to get a good deck, this game has you splitting your spendings between that and a what is essentially a non-optional freaking mini-game.
Oh speaking of the currency, they heavily nerfed the "wins in a row" bonus from the last game to cap out at 10 extra DP per duel. This means no more save scumming to keep a streak and get hundreds of extra points every duel. Now the grind is even worse.
Also it's not the games fault since I assume it comes from the anime, but what is up with speed duels? They're literally normal duels, except all spell cards are replaced by speed duel versions which use what is basically a mana system that you might find in other card games (a spell costs X speed points to use, you get a speed point every turn and for every 1000 damage you take you lose 1, if you hit an opponent when they have 0 left you get an extra one instead).
Why does this apply exclusively to spell cards? It's such a weirdly implemented system that turns 1/3rd of Yu-Gi-Oh into this system while keeping the rest exactly the same? Monster Reborn now costs 10 whole points to use, but trap cards like Mirror Force can still be used completely for free? The hell is the point? Even monsters would easily fit into this, by using their stars as their costs - it'd lead to a lot more 1 stars being ran so you can play monsters on turn 1, while the ever-present 4 stars wouldn't be nearly as dominating.
What this system also means is many decks become nearly unusable because speed spells are almost all generic ones that can fit into any deck. Any archtypes that rely heavily on a key spell, or more, are now unusable. There isn't even a Polymerization one, so that's an entire card type that is unusable.
So yeah, not the games fault, but it's just weird. Oh and you also have to buy every single speed spell separately. You don't get "Speed Spell - Book of Moon" just by having the original. So even MORE shit you have to waste your harder-to-earn currency on.
Also kind of worth noting that World Championship 2008 had its "story" mode fighting duel spirits, which unlocked more duel spirits and sometimes even anime characters for World Championship mode. This game of course has the Anime characters as a core part of the story, and you ONLY unlock duel spirits in WC mode. There's no GX or Duel Monsters characters to unlock unfortunately, which would have made perfect bonuses.
So this game is weird. The increased card pool from 2008 is nice, the story mode improvement is huge, but the increased grind and horrible card-to-pack distribution make the actual story mode a bit disappointing. I imagine if you played this a lot post-story, unlocked everything, you'd have a lot of fun using every deck possible, especially if you played it back in its time with WiFi. That's assuming you can tolerate the poor performance though.
2021
This review contains spoilers
Easily the best use of the miniature player character concept I've ever seen. So many memorable and fun set pieces. A whole bunch of ideas just packed into this game, with the gameplay style itself changing from time to time. Few chapters feel the same as any before it.
The teamwork mechanic is obviously the main draw here, since it doesn't allow any single player mode (for better or worse) it means every single part of the game was designed to be beaten with 2 people. It's pretty crazy how they implemented some of them. It also means your enjoyment of the game will largely depend on who you're playing with. If you played with a partner in couch co-op it'll probably be an amazing experience. Playing with an online friend is a fun one, though I do wish there were some kind of speech bubble commands for those not using voice chat. But playing with strangers would be a nightmare, especially as the game is pretty long for the kind of game it is, meaning you have to dedicate a lot of sessions multiple hours long with a person to get through it. So in a way I think the biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. It's not a game that you can play at your own pace, it's a game that you have to actually plan around playing, and you have some pressure to always be doing things faster than you otherwise might to not slow down someone else.
I'm not a big fan of the story either, the conclusion is obvious enough at the start, but the characters go back and forth on the "I hate you so much" "Hey well done! We work so well together!" routine way too much.
Would totally like to see a single player game with this level of creativity.
The teamwork mechanic is obviously the main draw here, since it doesn't allow any single player mode (for better or worse) it means every single part of the game was designed to be beaten with 2 people. It's pretty crazy how they implemented some of them. It also means your enjoyment of the game will largely depend on who you're playing with. If you played with a partner in couch co-op it'll probably be an amazing experience. Playing with an online friend is a fun one, though I do wish there were some kind of speech bubble commands for those not using voice chat. But playing with strangers would be a nightmare, especially as the game is pretty long for the kind of game it is, meaning you have to dedicate a lot of sessions multiple hours long with a person to get through it. So in a way I think the biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. It's not a game that you can play at your own pace, it's a game that you have to actually plan around playing, and you have some pressure to always be doing things faster than you otherwise might to not slow down someone else.
I'm not a big fan of the story either, the conclusion is obvious enough at the start, but the characters go back and forth on the "I hate you so much" "Hey well done! We work so well together!" routine way too much.
Would totally like to see a single player game with this level of creativity.
48 extra tracks was very nice, even though it is obviously an excuse to just put all the Tour tracks onto the main console game (except for exactly 1 track. C'mon Nintendo you really couldn't find room for that single last track??).
It started off kind of shaky with wave 1 having infamously bad graphics, but they really saved themselves later, by not only starting to make the visuals much closer to the base game, but adding extra stuff beyond tracks. At first it was small stuff, like an item selection menu for versus battles, and updating kart stats for the first time in years (maybe since the games release?) in order to finally dethrone the online lobbies of nothing but Waluigi Wiggler's. Then we got brand new characters. In some cases we even got non-city Tour tracks before Tour itself got them.
Unfortunately we did miss out on new karts from tour, which is a shame because Tour has some very great looking karts, while we've been stuck with the same ones in 8 Deluxe since release. And while 8 does have its fair share of "fun" karts, it also has a large portion of ones that just feel very plain, while Tour had so much potential with things like a double decker bus, and a penguin kart.
I'm not sure if this did for me what Nintendo wanted it to do though. It brought me back to the game for 1-3 days every time a new wave dropped, but that's it. It didn't keep the game alive for me, it just made me dig up its corpse every now and then to inspect it and throw it back in. The main problem with MK8 isn't that it lacked courses, it's that after nearly 10 years I want new mechanics, new items, new physics, new gimmicks.
What we got was fine, and ultimately ended up making 8 Deluxe easily the definitive Mario Kart (which makes me worried how they'll top it), it's just that the timing of this DLC never made it feel like you could get the full experience of that definitive edition unless you play extensively even to this day. For me it wasn't "Huge Mario Kart game with 96 courses!" it was more like "8 new courses to try now. And then again in a few months. Repeat until wave 6."
Still, if the choice was this or nothing, I'm glad we got this.
But now stop stalling and actually make the next Mario Kart you dairy farmers.
It started off kind of shaky with wave 1 having infamously bad graphics, but they really saved themselves later, by not only starting to make the visuals much closer to the base game, but adding extra stuff beyond tracks. At first it was small stuff, like an item selection menu for versus battles, and updating kart stats for the first time in years (maybe since the games release?) in order to finally dethrone the online lobbies of nothing but Waluigi Wiggler's. Then we got brand new characters. In some cases we even got non-city Tour tracks before Tour itself got them.
Unfortunately we did miss out on new karts from tour, which is a shame because Tour has some very great looking karts, while we've been stuck with the same ones in 8 Deluxe since release. And while 8 does have its fair share of "fun" karts, it also has a large portion of ones that just feel very plain, while Tour had so much potential with things like a double decker bus, and a penguin kart.
I'm not sure if this did for me what Nintendo wanted it to do though. It brought me back to the game for 1-3 days every time a new wave dropped, but that's it. It didn't keep the game alive for me, it just made me dig up its corpse every now and then to inspect it and throw it back in. The main problem with MK8 isn't that it lacked courses, it's that after nearly 10 years I want new mechanics, new items, new physics, new gimmicks.
What we got was fine, and ultimately ended up making 8 Deluxe easily the definitive Mario Kart (which makes me worried how they'll top it), it's just that the timing of this DLC never made it feel like you could get the full experience of that definitive edition unless you play extensively even to this day. For me it wasn't "Huge Mario Kart game with 96 courses!" it was more like "8 new courses to try now. And then again in a few months. Repeat until wave 6."
Still, if the choice was this or nothing, I'm glad we got this.
But now stop stalling and actually make the next Mario Kart you dairy farmers.
Rome Avanti: Looks good, and stands out a little from the general city tracks thanks to the Colosseum set pieces. 8/10
DK Mountain: DK Mountain is easily a top 2 Double Dash track (I have trouble deciding between this or Dino Dino Jungle). So glad it got in over something like Mushroom Bridge. 9.5/10.
Daisy Circuit: I really don't care for this one. The statues are nice, but the track itself is just so plain. Coming from the final wave especially, it's disappointing. 5/10.
Piranha Plant Cove: Honestly I was so looking forward to Piranha Plant Pipeline, so I'm a little salty this pretty much made it impossible for that to get in. The course itself is pretty nice, definitely a high tier water track. 8/10
Madrid Drive: This is a weird one because half the track is full of really cool set pieces like the football stadium, or the art gallery where there's 2 paintings of Piranha Plants with a real one in the middle painting. But the other half is just full of driving through generic looking streets that are indistinguishable from the dozen other city tracks. In that sense it heavily suffers from being the final city track in the DLC since its flaw is much more apparent after playing every other one before it. They needed to end on an amazing city track, and instead I'd probably place this one somewhere in the middle. 6.5/10
Rosalina's Ice World: I actually feel this track is kind of underrated. Still it isn't amazing, and like Daisy Circuit it also suffers from being a somewhat anti-climatic for the final wave (I said something similar about Madrid Drive too, but since that was a Tour track it had to make it in, so the complaint there was they just happened to not make that last track special, while in this case they had a choice to pick ANY past track and chose relatively weak ones). It looks very nice, and I like the slide at the beginning that leads to the little ice village, which cracks on future laps. But the second half of the course is very dull. 7/10.
Bowser's Castle 3: Holy shit what a glow up! Between the past 2D entries (SNES & GBA) it felt like Nintendo's approach was to completely re-do the GBA tracks and keep the SNES tracks very simple with just updated graphics. This one gets the full on GBA treatment, with multiple new elements, varying elevations all over the place, and just generally feels like a brand new track. A very fitting "Bowser's Castle" acting as the penultimate to the booster course pass. 9.5/10.
Rainbow Road: What else could they end on? It's not my favourite Rainbow Road (that'd be 3DS), but this is like the poster child for Mario Kart Rainbow Roads. It's the one everyone knows and remembers. 9/10.
Other than that it's nice to get 4 characters when we were only expecting 2, but in truth I don't care much for these ones. I much preferred the last waves characters, and my boy Wiggler is staying as my main. The Mii costumes were a nice addition too, giving something for people without amiibos.
DK Mountain: DK Mountain is easily a top 2 Double Dash track (I have trouble deciding between this or Dino Dino Jungle). So glad it got in over something like Mushroom Bridge. 9.5/10.
Daisy Circuit: I really don't care for this one. The statues are nice, but the track itself is just so plain. Coming from the final wave especially, it's disappointing. 5/10.
Piranha Plant Cove: Honestly I was so looking forward to Piranha Plant Pipeline, so I'm a little salty this pretty much made it impossible for that to get in. The course itself is pretty nice, definitely a high tier water track. 8/10
Madrid Drive: This is a weird one because half the track is full of really cool set pieces like the football stadium, or the art gallery where there's 2 paintings of Piranha Plants with a real one in the middle painting. But the other half is just full of driving through generic looking streets that are indistinguishable from the dozen other city tracks. In that sense it heavily suffers from being the final city track in the DLC since its flaw is much more apparent after playing every other one before it. They needed to end on an amazing city track, and instead I'd probably place this one somewhere in the middle. 6.5/10
Rosalina's Ice World: I actually feel this track is kind of underrated. Still it isn't amazing, and like Daisy Circuit it also suffers from being a somewhat anti-climatic for the final wave (I said something similar about Madrid Drive too, but since that was a Tour track it had to make it in, so the complaint there was they just happened to not make that last track special, while in this case they had a choice to pick ANY past track and chose relatively weak ones). It looks very nice, and I like the slide at the beginning that leads to the little ice village, which cracks on future laps. But the second half of the course is very dull. 7/10.
Bowser's Castle 3: Holy shit what a glow up! Between the past 2D entries (SNES & GBA) it felt like Nintendo's approach was to completely re-do the GBA tracks and keep the SNES tracks very simple with just updated graphics. This one gets the full on GBA treatment, with multiple new elements, varying elevations all over the place, and just generally feels like a brand new track. A very fitting "Bowser's Castle" acting as the penultimate to the booster course pass. 9.5/10.
Rainbow Road: What else could they end on? It's not my favourite Rainbow Road (that'd be 3DS), but this is like the poster child for Mario Kart Rainbow Roads. It's the one everyone knows and remembers. 9/10.
Other than that it's nice to get 4 characters when we were only expecting 2, but in truth I don't care much for these ones. I much preferred the last waves characters, and my boy Wiggler is staying as my main. The Mii costumes were a nice addition too, giving something for people without amiibos.
This game is similar to Tag Force 2 to a fault. Almost everything is just a direct port of that game, from the locations (which technically came from 1), the generic NPCs, the minigames (1 new one), the class game-thingy. It doesn't even fix any of the things I've wanted fixing since game one, like not being able to customise duel animations so that you can keep certain ones, but not have to sit through a million pointless ones at the start and end of every turn. You can set cards to be "labelled" for a quick search of your staple spells and traps, but for some reason despite every other filter option having a quick reset, this one option has failed to have it the entire time. It's minor, but why do I have to keep manually turning the labelled card search on and off when every other kind of option for filtering cards is done via 2 button presses? Another problem I have is that in tag duels your partner goes first 100% of the time. After playing World Championship 2008 I much prefer that system (if your team goes first, you play first, if your team goes second the AI will go first, then your partner second).
One of the funnier copy/paste jobs comes from the challenge list. You can manually select one challenge that you can try to meet per duels, e.g win in X turns or less, deal X amount of effect damage. There's a challenge for every "Win with nothing but X type of monsters in your deck". This game introduces the new-at-the-time psychic types, but they forgot to add a challenge for using a psychic deck.
Speaking of new things at the time, despite this being a GX game there's some early Synchro cards. But because it is GX it means none of the AI use them. Like it's nice that they give the player an option, but it's kind of weird that not a single opponent uses them (that I saw anyway), making it feel like an unfair advantage if anything.
Like technically speaking I guess it's a "better" game than Tag Force 2 because it's the exact same game but with more cards. But it feels so lazy.
The story modes for characters are halved, so there's now only 4 heart events instead of 8. This encourages playing more times while experimenting with multiple tag partners rather than burning out on only a single one. I don't hate or love this really, it's nice to be able to try out so many different ones, but it also makes them feel too fast. Tag Force 2 had you with your partner so long that it felt more like a journey, while this is just a "Play 20-30 duels with this partner then move on to the next", like a checklist.
Stories remain pretty lackluster themselves. They're mildly entertaining at best. And anyone who isn't a page 1 character (of which there are about 9 I think) shares the exact same story. This sucks because imo most of the more interesting characters are on page 2, but if you use them you'll end up facing the exact same 4 tag duellists every single time as part of their story duels.
Also not unique to this game, but story duels are so dull. Literally any duelist in this game can be found in the map (in my 6 runs of the game I only saw one duelist in a story duel that I never dueled before), so everytime they show up it's just like "Hey here's these opponents you've probably beaten dozens of times already!" with the only difference being now if you lose you have to retry. I feel like these games should have saved the real anime characters for story duels, while gaining hearts could have just been exclusive to the game NPCs, it'd just make them a little more special. Plus you can do free duel from the menu at any time so it's not like people would miss being able to duel Jaden whenever they wanted.
For all the complaints the game is good as a Yu-Gi-Oh! game for the time. It's just not really a jump from 2 to 3, you only play this as a way to get access to a years worth more cards. In modern days this'd just be new packs getting added to Tag Force 2's store, basically.
One of the funnier copy/paste jobs comes from the challenge list. You can manually select one challenge that you can try to meet per duels, e.g win in X turns or less, deal X amount of effect damage. There's a challenge for every "Win with nothing but X type of monsters in your deck". This game introduces the new-at-the-time psychic types, but they forgot to add a challenge for using a psychic deck.
Speaking of new things at the time, despite this being a GX game there's some early Synchro cards. But because it is GX it means none of the AI use them. Like it's nice that they give the player an option, but it's kind of weird that not a single opponent uses them (that I saw anyway), making it feel like an unfair advantage if anything.
Like technically speaking I guess it's a "better" game than Tag Force 2 because it's the exact same game but with more cards. But it feels so lazy.
The story modes for characters are halved, so there's now only 4 heart events instead of 8. This encourages playing more times while experimenting with multiple tag partners rather than burning out on only a single one. I don't hate or love this really, it's nice to be able to try out so many different ones, but it also makes them feel too fast. Tag Force 2 had you with your partner so long that it felt more like a journey, while this is just a "Play 20-30 duels with this partner then move on to the next", like a checklist.
Stories remain pretty lackluster themselves. They're mildly entertaining at best. And anyone who isn't a page 1 character (of which there are about 9 I think) shares the exact same story. This sucks because imo most of the more interesting characters are on page 2, but if you use them you'll end up facing the exact same 4 tag duellists every single time as part of their story duels.
Also not unique to this game, but story duels are so dull. Literally any duelist in this game can be found in the map (in my 6 runs of the game I only saw one duelist in a story duel that I never dueled before), so everytime they show up it's just like "Hey here's these opponents you've probably beaten dozens of times already!" with the only difference being now if you lose you have to retry. I feel like these games should have saved the real anime characters for story duels, while gaining hearts could have just been exclusive to the game NPCs, it'd just make them a little more special. Plus you can do free duel from the menu at any time so it's not like people would miss being able to duel Jaden whenever they wanted.
For all the complaints the game is good as a Yu-Gi-Oh! game for the time. It's just not really a jump from 2 to 3, you only play this as a way to get access to a years worth more cards. In modern days this'd just be new packs getting added to Tag Force 2's store, basically.