2023
Dead Island 2 gets the zombie killing portion spot on. It's so much with so many different methods. Weapons, both melee and ranged, come in 4 categories, such as "frenzy" or "maiming" each one excels at a different area and gets critical hits in different ways. Then of course you have the actual weapons themselves which can feel different with their speeds, range and so on (so for example a "bulldozer" weapon could be a baseball bat or a sledgehammer).
You can further add variety via perks, including adding an element to them.
You can use environmental hazards to your advantage, though most of them time I found myself just getting shocked or set on fire when trying to take advantage of them. It's also where an area of the game that isn't really expanded upon past the first 2 maps. Like you have electricity, water, acid and fire, but the ways they can interact (setting an oil barrel on fire, drenching a zombie in water then electrocuting it etc) are all shown off very early. It doesn't help that weapons can do most of these faster and better than the environment can, so you'll find these things in the world being more obstacles to yourself rather than tools for killing zombies.
The game does provide a steady flow of other tools for you to use though. Like at the start you just have melee weapons, usually with little to no perks. Then you start unlocking perks, skill cards (perks for your character rather than your weapon), access to ranged weapons, a "special move" and finally full on beast mode.
In other words, there's a ton of ways to kill zombies, and it's a lot of fun.
The amount of enemy variety likewise keeps things fresh. You've got so many types of walking dead. They could differ by simple things like whether they shamble, walk or run (appropriately called shamblers, walkers and runners), but some zombies have elemental elements, like a shocker zombie, dressed up as an electrical engineer, can set off bolts of lightning around itself. Not just offensively, but defensive too - so those shocker zombies are immune to electric weapons, while a firefighter zombie would be immune to all elemental types. This does come with a bit of a downside where due to there being so many zombies immune to all these different types, sometimes it just feels better to make your weapon perk the pure force one with no element, so it can't be resisted by anything, except for things like riot gear zombies which are immune to any damage until you knock their armour off.
The apex zombies are the mini-bosses of the game, which also come in a wide variety. Crushers are huge brutes who slam the floor with their fists, screamers, well, scream, which prevents you getting close, slobbers will spit globs of acid at you etc. They only get better at differentiating themselves when you unlock the ability to harvest zombie parts part way through the game, as each apex will give out different parts, used for some of the better weapon perks.
My favourite aspect of the game though is the huge variety in locales. They chose a great setting for the game. I'd much rather bash zombies heads in in places like huge hotels, pier fairgrounds, beaches, and millionaire houses with pools, than dull grey ruined cities and streets with no landmarks like many games set during a zombie apocalypse. You'll still get some of those darker areas, like the sewers or metro, but they're broken up between much colourful and lively areas.
What can't be said for the variety is the missions. Pretty much all main and side-quests provide little in the way of gameplay changes. They exist purely to tell this games rather mediocre story. While I could understand that with the main missions, the side-quests should really have provided more variety to the usual gameplay loop of "head to area, kill zombies, head back to quest giver". Most of the quests just involve you going to look for someone or something, finding the person the quest-giver talked about is dead and then fighting their zombie self. Rinse and repeat. The only kind I can think of off the top of my head that truly mixed things up is a quest that has you kill off zombies in specific ways, like killing them via fire or electricity. It's such a minor thing too, and that's just how little variety there is.
It doesn't help that it's full of groan-worthy dialogue that I can't tell if it's supposed to be ironic or not. My player character was probably the worst of it, so if you didn't choose Carla maybe you had a better time there.
What also doesn't feel special thanks to not changing things up from the regular gameplay are the bosses. Every single boss in this game is just an apex zombie with a unique name and more health. Granted a lot of the times these are the first time said apex zombie comes into the game, so there's a little bit of a surprise there. But once you beat them, they'll be added to the pool of regular encounters like any other.
So one aspect I find interesting about the game is that stat increases don't come from levels - they come from beating the in-game challenges. Most of these just provide money, but you can get say, extra damage from specific weapon types by killing X amount of zombies with that type of weapon, or more resistance to acid by killing those slobbers who spit acid as mentioned before. It's a very interesting way to get power growth beyond just gaining exp, and promotes fighting as many types of zombies in as many ways as possible.
But it does raise the question of why have an exp and level system at all. There are only 2 things in the game, other than the player, that I can see using levels - the zombies and the weapons. The zombies scale with you, so no matter what level you are, the zombies will never drop below 1 level lower than that. Sometimes you'll find zombies equal, or higher than you, with the odd zombie having a "skull" as its level to indicate "very powerful and can kill you fast". My theory is that every group of zombies has a minimum level, and once you pass that, the zombies will grow with you - until you pass it they will stay at their minimum, and if you're far below it (3+ levels) it will show as a skull. That's fine and all but does it NEED a level system? It's done to gate players from trying to do things out of order, so why not just scale the enemies to player progress instead of levels?
Weapons likewise keep up with you in levels. And it doesn't matter if it's a random weapon on the ground or a special weapon gained from a long scavenger hunt - they'll all be at your level +/-1. Even worse is that these special weapons don't actually have anything special ABOUT them. They do come pre-loaded with some perks, maybe even ones you haven't unlocked yet, but otherwise they seem the same as anything else in the game. Maybe they're stronger, I can't say I compared every stat of every weapon. But the fact they always start at your level means many of them become quickly outclassed. You could use money to "level up" the weapons, but it costs a lot compared to just using material to craft new perks for higher levelled weapons.
It's such a shame too because these weapons are basically the closest thing the game has to exploring the maps. There's very little else to find. You can get materials, journal notes (some of which are pretty fun to read tbf) and weapons. There's a lot of locked boxes where the key is held by a named, and little stronger, but otherwise regular-looking zombie somewhere nearby (not unlike the bosses, but in this case it's fine for them to be regular enemies). It's a fantastic idea, but it lacks any payoff because the reward is a weapon that likely won't differ too much from your current ones, and will be outclassed very fast.
So levels don't provide any benefit in terms of being able to more easily sweep early game areas, or let you access stronger weapons faster. So what's the point? All they do is give you a blueprint for a mod, or a skill card. Those could easily have been tied with challenges like the rest of the player growth.
While I'm complaining I'll just throw in some random QoL stuff I'd have liked:
-A vehicle for backtracking through areas or a way to fast travel without having to go to a safe room.
-A way to sort weapons by most powerful, by type etc.
-Marking which keys you've already used.
The game provides such many fantastic stuff to play with. The arsenal of offense capability, the wide array of different types of things to kill, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a setting that never gets dull. But it doesn't do anything structured WITH them. It hands you some toys and says "have fun" and when you get a bit bored of mindlessly smashing zombies heads in, you ask for just a bit more to break things up, it just gives you a weak story and says "continue having fun" with no new toys. You wonder if they maybe hid some new toys in the huge sandbox you're playing in. But there isn't.
I had a lot of fun with the game I want to make it clear. I just think it could have been a bit more, and it's more annoying that this game didn't provide it than it would have been if it had been a bad game to begin with.
You can further add variety via perks, including adding an element to them.
You can use environmental hazards to your advantage, though most of them time I found myself just getting shocked or set on fire when trying to take advantage of them. It's also where an area of the game that isn't really expanded upon past the first 2 maps. Like you have electricity, water, acid and fire, but the ways they can interact (setting an oil barrel on fire, drenching a zombie in water then electrocuting it etc) are all shown off very early. It doesn't help that weapons can do most of these faster and better than the environment can, so you'll find these things in the world being more obstacles to yourself rather than tools for killing zombies.
The game does provide a steady flow of other tools for you to use though. Like at the start you just have melee weapons, usually with little to no perks. Then you start unlocking perks, skill cards (perks for your character rather than your weapon), access to ranged weapons, a "special move" and finally full on beast mode.
In other words, there's a ton of ways to kill zombies, and it's a lot of fun.
The amount of enemy variety likewise keeps things fresh. You've got so many types of walking dead. They could differ by simple things like whether they shamble, walk or run (appropriately called shamblers, walkers and runners), but some zombies have elemental elements, like a shocker zombie, dressed up as an electrical engineer, can set off bolts of lightning around itself. Not just offensively, but defensive too - so those shocker zombies are immune to electric weapons, while a firefighter zombie would be immune to all elemental types. This does come with a bit of a downside where due to there being so many zombies immune to all these different types, sometimes it just feels better to make your weapon perk the pure force one with no element, so it can't be resisted by anything, except for things like riot gear zombies which are immune to any damage until you knock their armour off.
The apex zombies are the mini-bosses of the game, which also come in a wide variety. Crushers are huge brutes who slam the floor with their fists, screamers, well, scream, which prevents you getting close, slobbers will spit globs of acid at you etc. They only get better at differentiating themselves when you unlock the ability to harvest zombie parts part way through the game, as each apex will give out different parts, used for some of the better weapon perks.
My favourite aspect of the game though is the huge variety in locales. They chose a great setting for the game. I'd much rather bash zombies heads in in places like huge hotels, pier fairgrounds, beaches, and millionaire houses with pools, than dull grey ruined cities and streets with no landmarks like many games set during a zombie apocalypse. You'll still get some of those darker areas, like the sewers or metro, but they're broken up between much colourful and lively areas.
What can't be said for the variety is the missions. Pretty much all main and side-quests provide little in the way of gameplay changes. They exist purely to tell this games rather mediocre story. While I could understand that with the main missions, the side-quests should really have provided more variety to the usual gameplay loop of "head to area, kill zombies, head back to quest giver". Most of the quests just involve you going to look for someone or something, finding the person the quest-giver talked about is dead and then fighting their zombie self. Rinse and repeat. The only kind I can think of off the top of my head that truly mixed things up is a quest that has you kill off zombies in specific ways, like killing them via fire or electricity. It's such a minor thing too, and that's just how little variety there is.
It doesn't help that it's full of groan-worthy dialogue that I can't tell if it's supposed to be ironic or not. My player character was probably the worst of it, so if you didn't choose Carla maybe you had a better time there.
What also doesn't feel special thanks to not changing things up from the regular gameplay are the bosses. Every single boss in this game is just an apex zombie with a unique name and more health. Granted a lot of the times these are the first time said apex zombie comes into the game, so there's a little bit of a surprise there. But once you beat them, they'll be added to the pool of regular encounters like any other.
So one aspect I find interesting about the game is that stat increases don't come from levels - they come from beating the in-game challenges. Most of these just provide money, but you can get say, extra damage from specific weapon types by killing X amount of zombies with that type of weapon, or more resistance to acid by killing those slobbers who spit acid as mentioned before. It's a very interesting way to get power growth beyond just gaining exp, and promotes fighting as many types of zombies in as many ways as possible.
But it does raise the question of why have an exp and level system at all. There are only 2 things in the game, other than the player, that I can see using levels - the zombies and the weapons. The zombies scale with you, so no matter what level you are, the zombies will never drop below 1 level lower than that. Sometimes you'll find zombies equal, or higher than you, with the odd zombie having a "skull" as its level to indicate "very powerful and can kill you fast". My theory is that every group of zombies has a minimum level, and once you pass that, the zombies will grow with you - until you pass it they will stay at their minimum, and if you're far below it (3+ levels) it will show as a skull. That's fine and all but does it NEED a level system? It's done to gate players from trying to do things out of order, so why not just scale the enemies to player progress instead of levels?
Weapons likewise keep up with you in levels. And it doesn't matter if it's a random weapon on the ground or a special weapon gained from a long scavenger hunt - they'll all be at your level +/-1. Even worse is that these special weapons don't actually have anything special ABOUT them. They do come pre-loaded with some perks, maybe even ones you haven't unlocked yet, but otherwise they seem the same as anything else in the game. Maybe they're stronger, I can't say I compared every stat of every weapon. But the fact they always start at your level means many of them become quickly outclassed. You could use money to "level up" the weapons, but it costs a lot compared to just using material to craft new perks for higher levelled weapons.
It's such a shame too because these weapons are basically the closest thing the game has to exploring the maps. There's very little else to find. You can get materials, journal notes (some of which are pretty fun to read tbf) and weapons. There's a lot of locked boxes where the key is held by a named, and little stronger, but otherwise regular-looking zombie somewhere nearby (not unlike the bosses, but in this case it's fine for them to be regular enemies). It's a fantastic idea, but it lacks any payoff because the reward is a weapon that likely won't differ too much from your current ones, and will be outclassed very fast.
So levels don't provide any benefit in terms of being able to more easily sweep early game areas, or let you access stronger weapons faster. So what's the point? All they do is give you a blueprint for a mod, or a skill card. Those could easily have been tied with challenges like the rest of the player growth.
While I'm complaining I'll just throw in some random QoL stuff I'd have liked:
-A vehicle for backtracking through areas or a way to fast travel without having to go to a safe room.
-A way to sort weapons by most powerful, by type etc.
-Marking which keys you've already used.
The game provides such many fantastic stuff to play with. The arsenal of offense capability, the wide array of different types of things to kill, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a setting that never gets dull. But it doesn't do anything structured WITH them. It hands you some toys and says "have fun" and when you get a bit bored of mindlessly smashing zombies heads in, you ask for just a bit more to break things up, it just gives you a weak story and says "continue having fun" with no new toys. You wonder if they maybe hid some new toys in the huge sandbox you're playing in. But there isn't.
I had a lot of fun with the game I want to make it clear. I just think it could have been a bit more, and it's more annoying that this game didn't provide it than it would have been if it had been a bad game to begin with.
Pandora's Box (or Diabolical Box if you wanna be all American about this) is a very familiar feeling to Curious Village (or Curious Village if you wanna be all American about this). But it's definitely got improvements. Most notable, to me at least, is the introduction of a memo pad. In the last game only certain puzzles let you use the touch screen to take notes, but now every puzzle has a dedicated memo pad function. I would say the screen to write on is a bit small, but still (might be worth noting that I played on a 2DS XL so maybe the OG DS with the OG stylus was better?).
It also has more varied and interesting locations. I loved the first town you visit in the game, so it's a shame you don't get to go back there, but I still like Folsense too. The only real downside to this, if you wanna count it, is that it means certain hint coins are permanently missable from these starting locations. Luckily no puzzle is ever missable, as like the last game there's a dedicated spot to house any puzzle that is tied to a specific chapter that you didn't run in to.
As weird as it sounds for a visual novel, I don't play these games for the story (I just like brain teasers), so I won't say if the plot is any better or worse than before. It's got the same charm, yet weirdly feels like it's aimed at very young kids despite tackling themes like murder, and puzzles that I wouldn't expect the 5 year old certain dialogue and tone seems to market to, to be able to solve.
Speaking of the puzzles, I guess that's where this game hits its biggest snag. Might have been less noticeable on release with a year between them (in Japan they came out in the same year???), but playing the games close to each other you notice how many puzzles are just reworded or otherwise retooled versions of the last games puzzles. Like last game would have you divide a 5x5 square with images on it into 4 sections, so that every section contained the same images of equal amounts. You can find a couple of that exact puzzle here, just with new images so a new set-up can be tied to the explanation. And there's still a ton of block puzzles. I'm not a fan of those... If you are then you're in for a treat.
But no matter what type of puzzles you are a fan of, there's a lot of variety. I'm personally drawn to those ones that give you 5 or so suspects and you get a certain amount of detail of each one, so you have to work out who is lying. I'm really bad at anything involving shapes and trying to imagine flattened cubes as 3D ones. If you only care about completing the story you can skip many. I think you need to complete 80/138 story puzzles to complete the game? At the very least that was the last gated checkpoint I remember seeing. If you're like me you'll just use a guide for the ones that stump you... Don't worry, I didn't set it to mastered!
But I do wanna give the puzzles some credit in this game too. Many of them are much better tied in to what's going on in the story. There's still a lot of "I have no information to give you, but how about a random puzzle!" or "I'm not sure about that, but it reminds me of a puzzle about a similar thing" (so expect a lot of box-based puzzles), but now many puzzles seem like the characters are actually solving them in-universe to work through their quest.
There are also a small amount of those game-wide puzzles that are housed in your briefcase. They're a bit more involved this time too. The most complex has you getting camera parts as rewards from specific puzzles, then finding specific spots on the map to take a picture, then playing a spot the difference game, then finding the secret puzzle from the finished picture. It's puzzles on top of puzzles!
The cutscenes still amaze me for what they pulled off on the DS, and there's even more of them now!
Certain minor things that bugged me from the original are still present too. Like when searching for hint coins you can too often hit random objects that have Layton or Luke say something in a pop-up box, which sounds small (and it is), but given how hint coins could be literally anything, it's annoying to be spam tapping the screen and getting the same box over and over. Traversing long distances is also a pain as you have to keep pressing the movement button in the bottom right to open up the arrows for the next screen.
If you've played the first game you won't need selling on this one. You'll know if you'll love it or hate it.
It also has more varied and interesting locations. I loved the first town you visit in the game, so it's a shame you don't get to go back there, but I still like Folsense too. The only real downside to this, if you wanna count it, is that it means certain hint coins are permanently missable from these starting locations. Luckily no puzzle is ever missable, as like the last game there's a dedicated spot to house any puzzle that is tied to a specific chapter that you didn't run in to.
As weird as it sounds for a visual novel, I don't play these games for the story (I just like brain teasers), so I won't say if the plot is any better or worse than before. It's got the same charm, yet weirdly feels like it's aimed at very young kids despite tackling themes like murder, and puzzles that I wouldn't expect the 5 year old certain dialogue and tone seems to market to, to be able to solve.
Speaking of the puzzles, I guess that's where this game hits its biggest snag. Might have been less noticeable on release with a year between them (in Japan they came out in the same year???), but playing the games close to each other you notice how many puzzles are just reworded or otherwise retooled versions of the last games puzzles. Like last game would have you divide a 5x5 square with images on it into 4 sections, so that every section contained the same images of equal amounts. You can find a couple of that exact puzzle here, just with new images so a new set-up can be tied to the explanation. And there's still a ton of block puzzles. I'm not a fan of those... If you are then you're in for a treat.
But no matter what type of puzzles you are a fan of, there's a lot of variety. I'm personally drawn to those ones that give you 5 or so suspects and you get a certain amount of detail of each one, so you have to work out who is lying. I'm really bad at anything involving shapes and trying to imagine flattened cubes as 3D ones. If you only care about completing the story you can skip many. I think you need to complete 80/138 story puzzles to complete the game? At the very least that was the last gated checkpoint I remember seeing. If you're like me you'll just use a guide for the ones that stump you... Don't worry, I didn't set it to mastered!
But I do wanna give the puzzles some credit in this game too. Many of them are much better tied in to what's going on in the story. There's still a lot of "I have no information to give you, but how about a random puzzle!" or "I'm not sure about that, but it reminds me of a puzzle about a similar thing" (so expect a lot of box-based puzzles), but now many puzzles seem like the characters are actually solving them in-universe to work through their quest.
There are also a small amount of those game-wide puzzles that are housed in your briefcase. They're a bit more involved this time too. The most complex has you getting camera parts as rewards from specific puzzles, then finding specific spots on the map to take a picture, then playing a spot the difference game, then finding the secret puzzle from the finished picture. It's puzzles on top of puzzles!
The cutscenes still amaze me for what they pulled off on the DS, and there's even more of them now!
Certain minor things that bugged me from the original are still present too. Like when searching for hint coins you can too often hit random objects that have Layton or Luke say something in a pop-up box, which sounds small (and it is), but given how hint coins could be literally anything, it's annoying to be spam tapping the screen and getting the same box over and over. Traversing long distances is also a pain as you have to keep pressing the movement button in the bottom right to open up the arrows for the next screen.
If you've played the first game you won't need selling on this one. You'll know if you'll love it or hate it.
This is pretty much pure, basic, unfiltered Kirby. There's little bells and whistles to the formula. It won't bring in anyone not a fan of Kirby and won't turn anyone away who is a fan.
There are the ultra powers, or whatever they're called. Supped up copy abilities that can be found in specific stages and essentially exist just to smash everything on screen for 3 minutes and unlock a secret portal to an auto-scrolling platform challenge, followed by a fight with a mini-boss for two of this games obligatory collectibles.
These power moments provide some brief fun, but like the mega mushrooms in New Super Mario Bros. there's only so much you can do with a gimmick whose entire thing is hulk smashing everything.
The mini-game compilation is pretty fun. Of course the real draw of the mode is multiplayer, but they provide lots of encouragement for solo players to try it out, with a challenge list and unlockable cosmetics + items to use in the main game.
What I didn't quite get was why the entire mini-game catalogue opened up straight after beating level 2, then one of the bonuses for collecting the previously mentioned collectibles was unlocking mini-games in the games hub area. I can only assume this was a leftover from the original game where mini-games had to be slowly unlocked?
As a Kirby game you can expect it to be short and easy, but as usual post-game provides both a little longevity and a lot of challenge for 100%. There's "extra" mode, which is literally just the whole game again but basically hard mode. I'm not a big fan of difficulty options that are disguised as unlockables, especially when there's no option to select default difficulty in the first place.
Magolor's Epilogue provides a pretty cool alternate-gameplay journey. Being very combo and upgrade focused as opposed to Kirby's switch-and-swap abilities
And of course you've got your boss rush mode.
All in all, it's Kirby.
There are the ultra powers, or whatever they're called. Supped up copy abilities that can be found in specific stages and essentially exist just to smash everything on screen for 3 minutes and unlock a secret portal to an auto-scrolling platform challenge, followed by a fight with a mini-boss for two of this games obligatory collectibles.
These power moments provide some brief fun, but like the mega mushrooms in New Super Mario Bros. there's only so much you can do with a gimmick whose entire thing is hulk smashing everything.
The mini-game compilation is pretty fun. Of course the real draw of the mode is multiplayer, but they provide lots of encouragement for solo players to try it out, with a challenge list and unlockable cosmetics + items to use in the main game.
What I didn't quite get was why the entire mini-game catalogue opened up straight after beating level 2, then one of the bonuses for collecting the previously mentioned collectibles was unlocking mini-games in the games hub area. I can only assume this was a leftover from the original game where mini-games had to be slowly unlocked?
As a Kirby game you can expect it to be short and easy, but as usual post-game provides both a little longevity and a lot of challenge for 100%. There's "extra" mode, which is literally just the whole game again but basically hard mode. I'm not a big fan of difficulty options that are disguised as unlockables, especially when there's no option to select default difficulty in the first place.
Magolor's Epilogue provides a pretty cool alternate-gameplay journey. Being very combo and upgrade focused as opposed to Kirby's switch-and-swap abilities
And of course you've got your boss rush mode.
All in all, it's Kirby.
This review contains spoilers
This turn-based RPG for my favourite franchise has always interested me, but somehow I never played it until now.
The story timing of the game was confusing. How do you make an RPG out of a saga that consists of one battle, a training period, and then another couple of battles? Well the answer is of course to fill that training period with a lot of filler. But first, the game actually starts at...the beginning of the 23rd Budokai arc? You actually start BEFORE the 3 year time skip too, during which you get to spend some time with Krillin, Yamcha and Tenshinhan on some game-exclusive training missions, both together and alone.
Once into the canon part of the martial arts tournament the game sets a weirdly misleading idea of how the pacing will go. Most of this arc is skipped. Plot points are only briefly brought up in dialogue (my favourite part is when they talk about how Piccolo "ate" Kami after he sealed him, only for Kami to appear in a later cutscene with no explanation), and every fight except Goku vs Piccolo is skipped entirely, shown only as static images.
So after we get 1 fight for this entire ass tournament, we move on to the main event, right? Well actually no, first we get the wedding dress filler arc! Which gets way more attention and time than the actual canon fighting arc. I guess it is more adventure-focused, so whatever.
By the time we get to Z and finally get Gohan as a character, he starts at level 1, while everyone else has the benefits of their training in previous chapters. Accurate to the story? Kinda (not accounting for Gohan's hidden powers). Balanced for gameplay? I mean... also kinda, they don't put Gohan in high level areas. But it's annoying to have done all that training just to start fresh with a new character.
Anywho from here canon plot points are given major focus, unlike the 23rd Budokai. Cutscenes go on for a very long time, pretty much explaining everything in detail. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just...weird. Why start the game with this kind of rushed storytelling, as if you're acknowledging players should be familiar with the story, then afterwards make sure the player understands every story beat to the letter?
From here we kind of alternate between canon, anime filler and game-exclusive. The biggest chapter of the game, and the one that really tells you "we're a video game, we need more content that our separated cast can't bring!" being when you have to find the dragon balls, at which point Piccolo, with Gohan in tow, teams up with the Earthlings to look for them. Oh and Goku gets brought back by Baba to help them look! Can you imagine how insane that'd be in the real story? Goku being brought back mid-way through their training, to team up with still-evil Piccolo and the good guys? It's funny. And to get a lot of locations for this DB hunt, the game goes back to the original. You visit places like Muscle Tower, the pirate cave and Pilaf Castle.
So that's how you make an RPG about a very simple, small-scoped saga. You essentially shoehorn in everywhere from the series that doesn't appear in this era. And that's not even getting in to the game-exclusive areas.
I do like some of the little stories they added to the game. Plus there's one moment in said chapter where everyone teams up to search for the dragon balls, at the end of it they of course need to go their separate ways so they're in position to be in their canon spots when we get back to that part, well since Gohan is supposed to be kidnapped, but has been hanging out with everyone just fine, the game addresses this by actually having Piccolo offer Gohan to stay behind with the heroes, only for Gohan to say he wants to keep training. A surprisingly great character development moment.
This all gets even weirder when you realise that in Japan this was branded as a "Kai" game (it came out around the same time Kai started airing). But that just raises so many more questions! OK, it does help explain why they picked this specific period since that's where Kai starts, but why would it then add 23rd Budokai stuff that doesn't exist in Kai? Why does it add filler that only exists in Dragon Ball Z, that Kai specifically removed to make a more accurate retelling of the manga? If you were a kid who just started watching Kai, and then picked this game up, you'd be so confused, but even more confused when you learned many parts of this game aren't actually made up for the game, but came from the old anime. Why brand it a damn Kai game when it's clearly based on Z?!
So in summary the way this game handles story is an absolute mess. Oh and I figured the reason they didn't do a sequel is because the Namek saga would be awful for this type of game. You'd only really be able to play as Gohan, Krillin and Vegeta for most of it, and there's hardly any interesting landmarks on Namek to visit. And yet, the game STILL teases that a sequel was being worked on! It ends with them talking about the DB's on Namek (as in the manga) and then says "to be continued" before ending with a post credits screen of a silhouetted Freeza. What the heck was going on with this game? Let's not even get in to what the game would do if it ever got to the Boo arc, now that it used up Baba's 24-hour revival magic here.
I've already typed this much and I haven't even gotten to the gameplay yet. The story is easily the least important part of this whole thing, and yet the way it was done just fascinates the hell out of me.
Gameplay is fine. It's a pretty basic turn-based RPG honestly. There's a few things that stand out, like I don't know how many games have a dedicated "recovery" attribute where you auto-gain a bit of HP every turn. You've got a few special moves per character, but since Dragon Ball isn't known as being a very strategic RPG, you're mostly relying on brute strength with these. There's a few buff or healing movies, but I think only Tenshinhan's solar flare can cause a status effect. For the rest, you rely on items.
I don't think it's a bad battle system. It's simple, but it's flashy and fast enough. Basic attacks are a multi-hit combo rather than just a standard sword slash or something, and you even have the chance to get a lucky combo extender for extra damage. You've got a "sparking" meter which essentially acts as a limit bar. When full you can fire off a super move, or if multiple characters have a full one you can chain specific moves together to form an S-Combo. What is an S-Combo? Well it seems to just be literally watching the characters perform the moves as they would have anyway with zero difference, but now it has a unique name! I guess it might do more damage than using the moves alone? I basically never used these, just preferring to fire off the ultimate attacks.
There's a lack of polish in the translation that can be best seen by how the stats call one stat "Tc" which you'd assume stands for "Technique", especially since it's the stat that buffs your Ki moves. So what does every item that interacts with this stat call it? "Skill". Use an item that raises a characters "skill" stat and watch their "Tc" raise. Weird.
The speed stat also felt horribly broken. It's pretty simple how it's supposed to work - order in battle goes by biggest speed number to smallest. The first turn almost always goes like that, but why then does every turn after seem to shit the bed? Why is my Krillin going first on turn 1, but then 2nd on turn 2? There were no stat changes or status moves between. Why is the enemy attacking before or after me seemingly RNG? Why does the enemy sometimes straight up miss a turn? It's like the speed stat in this game is more a suggestion than hard numbers.
The game doesn't take much advantage of being an RPG by adding side quests. There's only 2 in the whole game, and both are long grindy ones rather than small self-contained stories. The first one has you give one NPC 1000 carrots. To get a carrot you need to equip a specific field item and defeat enemies, turning them into carrots. When using this item you do not get money or any regular item drops. So essentially you need to defeat 1000 enemies while forgoing the ability to gain cash or items, and you need to waste an item slot on it. Not very fun.
The other side-quest is pretty great though. Use Tenshinhan's mafuba to capture all non-boss enemies in the game. Whether the move will work isn't guaranteed, but you can raise the chances by lowering enemy health and giving them status effects, or getting new field-items (each is just an upgraded rice cooker). Sounds familiar right? Catching things by weakening them, into containers that have various tiers? To drive this point home even more, there are exactly 150 enemies in the game to capture. It's a very creative side quest. Albeit a grindy one, and the game lacks any info in-battle to say if you've already successfully used the technique on that specific enemy.
The games movement speed was a bit low, but it annoys me more because it has 2 different levels of unlockable speeds. Both are field items, meaning you have to use your slot on them if you wanna go faster than a snails pace. The first is gotten mid-way through the game (in a missable, albeit not easily, chest) and the second is the final reward for that capturing every enemy in the game mission. So yeah you'll likely have almost finished the game by the time you can get it.
Being slow is one thing, but I hate when a game offers what should be a run button as a damn unlockable.
The game has a secret boss, and it's no secret anymore that it's Broly. I guess fitting for the title, but surely Turles would fit both the title AND era? I'm not surprised at all they went with the more popular of the two though.
One other thing I wanna talk about is how in a couple of the chapters where Goku is in otherworld, Kaio sends him on a quest to a game-specific location (I think so anyway, maybe it was from a filler ep). For some reason in these 2 visits to this location, Goku is joined by a fully AI controlled Bubbles and Gregory. This assist party member thing NEVER happens outside of these chapters! Why are freaking Bubbles and Gregory implemented in this way but actual fighters like Chaozu and Yajirobe never get to see the battle screen? Lmao. It's not like it's a case of wanting to make sure Goku wasn't alone in his fights, because many chapters have characters fighting solo, including other chapters with Goku in Other World (like the Princess Snake segment). They're not even that helpful. They're mildly decent the first time, more as damage sponges than anything. But the second time they don't get any stronger despite the fact the enemies do, so their best use is to take a hit or two before they "run away" for that battle. I'd rather have just played Goku alone than have to sit through their animations every turn.
I feel like I've mostly complained about this game despite giving it 4 stars! But that's because it's only really the more minor complaints that are easy to hone in on. I can only really say that I loved playing the game in so many ways. I loved going through all these Dragon Ball locales with gorgeously designed backgrounds. The graphics truly can't be faulted. I liked the additional story stuff, I liked the music and little easter eggs. It's fun to fight well-known characters in a different way than the usual methods for Dragon Ball (fighting games or beat-em-ups).
It's an RPG for Dragon Ball fans, and the love of the franchise kinda just makes the game work in a way it would probably fail as a unique IP.
The story timing of the game was confusing. How do you make an RPG out of a saga that consists of one battle, a training period, and then another couple of battles? Well the answer is of course to fill that training period with a lot of filler. But first, the game actually starts at...the beginning of the 23rd Budokai arc? You actually start BEFORE the 3 year time skip too, during which you get to spend some time with Krillin, Yamcha and Tenshinhan on some game-exclusive training missions, both together and alone.
Once into the canon part of the martial arts tournament the game sets a weirdly misleading idea of how the pacing will go. Most of this arc is skipped. Plot points are only briefly brought up in dialogue (my favourite part is when they talk about how Piccolo "ate" Kami after he sealed him, only for Kami to appear in a later cutscene with no explanation), and every fight except Goku vs Piccolo is skipped entirely, shown only as static images.
So after we get 1 fight for this entire ass tournament, we move on to the main event, right? Well actually no, first we get the wedding dress filler arc! Which gets way more attention and time than the actual canon fighting arc. I guess it is more adventure-focused, so whatever.
By the time we get to Z and finally get Gohan as a character, he starts at level 1, while everyone else has the benefits of their training in previous chapters. Accurate to the story? Kinda (not accounting for Gohan's hidden powers). Balanced for gameplay? I mean... also kinda, they don't put Gohan in high level areas. But it's annoying to have done all that training just to start fresh with a new character.
Anywho from here canon plot points are given major focus, unlike the 23rd Budokai. Cutscenes go on for a very long time, pretty much explaining everything in detail. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just...weird. Why start the game with this kind of rushed storytelling, as if you're acknowledging players should be familiar with the story, then afterwards make sure the player understands every story beat to the letter?
From here we kind of alternate between canon, anime filler and game-exclusive. The biggest chapter of the game, and the one that really tells you "we're a video game, we need more content that our separated cast can't bring!" being when you have to find the dragon balls, at which point Piccolo, with Gohan in tow, teams up with the Earthlings to look for them. Oh and Goku gets brought back by Baba to help them look! Can you imagine how insane that'd be in the real story? Goku being brought back mid-way through their training, to team up with still-evil Piccolo and the good guys? It's funny. And to get a lot of locations for this DB hunt, the game goes back to the original. You visit places like Muscle Tower, the pirate cave and Pilaf Castle.
So that's how you make an RPG about a very simple, small-scoped saga. You essentially shoehorn in everywhere from the series that doesn't appear in this era. And that's not even getting in to the game-exclusive areas.
I do like some of the little stories they added to the game. Plus there's one moment in said chapter where everyone teams up to search for the dragon balls, at the end of it they of course need to go their separate ways so they're in position to be in their canon spots when we get back to that part, well since Gohan is supposed to be kidnapped, but has been hanging out with everyone just fine, the game addresses this by actually having Piccolo offer Gohan to stay behind with the heroes, only for Gohan to say he wants to keep training. A surprisingly great character development moment.
This all gets even weirder when you realise that in Japan this was branded as a "Kai" game (it came out around the same time Kai started airing). But that just raises so many more questions! OK, it does help explain why they picked this specific period since that's where Kai starts, but why would it then add 23rd Budokai stuff that doesn't exist in Kai? Why does it add filler that only exists in Dragon Ball Z, that Kai specifically removed to make a more accurate retelling of the manga? If you were a kid who just started watching Kai, and then picked this game up, you'd be so confused, but even more confused when you learned many parts of this game aren't actually made up for the game, but came from the old anime. Why brand it a damn Kai game when it's clearly based on Z?!
So in summary the way this game handles story is an absolute mess. Oh and I figured the reason they didn't do a sequel is because the Namek saga would be awful for this type of game. You'd only really be able to play as Gohan, Krillin and Vegeta for most of it, and there's hardly any interesting landmarks on Namek to visit. And yet, the game STILL teases that a sequel was being worked on! It ends with them talking about the DB's on Namek (as in the manga) and then says "to be continued" before ending with a post credits screen of a silhouetted Freeza. What the heck was going on with this game? Let's not even get in to what the game would do if it ever got to the Boo arc, now that it used up Baba's 24-hour revival magic here.
I've already typed this much and I haven't even gotten to the gameplay yet. The story is easily the least important part of this whole thing, and yet the way it was done just fascinates the hell out of me.
Gameplay is fine. It's a pretty basic turn-based RPG honestly. There's a few things that stand out, like I don't know how many games have a dedicated "recovery" attribute where you auto-gain a bit of HP every turn. You've got a few special moves per character, but since Dragon Ball isn't known as being a very strategic RPG, you're mostly relying on brute strength with these. There's a few buff or healing movies, but I think only Tenshinhan's solar flare can cause a status effect. For the rest, you rely on items.
I don't think it's a bad battle system. It's simple, but it's flashy and fast enough. Basic attacks are a multi-hit combo rather than just a standard sword slash or something, and you even have the chance to get a lucky combo extender for extra damage. You've got a "sparking" meter which essentially acts as a limit bar. When full you can fire off a super move, or if multiple characters have a full one you can chain specific moves together to form an S-Combo. What is an S-Combo? Well it seems to just be literally watching the characters perform the moves as they would have anyway with zero difference, but now it has a unique name! I guess it might do more damage than using the moves alone? I basically never used these, just preferring to fire off the ultimate attacks.
There's a lack of polish in the translation that can be best seen by how the stats call one stat "Tc" which you'd assume stands for "Technique", especially since it's the stat that buffs your Ki moves. So what does every item that interacts with this stat call it? "Skill". Use an item that raises a characters "skill" stat and watch their "Tc" raise. Weird.
The speed stat also felt horribly broken. It's pretty simple how it's supposed to work - order in battle goes by biggest speed number to smallest. The first turn almost always goes like that, but why then does every turn after seem to shit the bed? Why is my Krillin going first on turn 1, but then 2nd on turn 2? There were no stat changes or status moves between. Why is the enemy attacking before or after me seemingly RNG? Why does the enemy sometimes straight up miss a turn? It's like the speed stat in this game is more a suggestion than hard numbers.
The game doesn't take much advantage of being an RPG by adding side quests. There's only 2 in the whole game, and both are long grindy ones rather than small self-contained stories. The first one has you give one NPC 1000 carrots. To get a carrot you need to equip a specific field item and defeat enemies, turning them into carrots. When using this item you do not get money or any regular item drops. So essentially you need to defeat 1000 enemies while forgoing the ability to gain cash or items, and you need to waste an item slot on it. Not very fun.
The other side-quest is pretty great though. Use Tenshinhan's mafuba to capture all non-boss enemies in the game. Whether the move will work isn't guaranteed, but you can raise the chances by lowering enemy health and giving them status effects, or getting new field-items (each is just an upgraded rice cooker). Sounds familiar right? Catching things by weakening them, into containers that have various tiers? To drive this point home even more, there are exactly 150 enemies in the game to capture. It's a very creative side quest. Albeit a grindy one, and the game lacks any info in-battle to say if you've already successfully used the technique on that specific enemy.
The games movement speed was a bit low, but it annoys me more because it has 2 different levels of unlockable speeds. Both are field items, meaning you have to use your slot on them if you wanna go faster than a snails pace. The first is gotten mid-way through the game (in a missable, albeit not easily, chest) and the second is the final reward for that capturing every enemy in the game mission. So yeah you'll likely have almost finished the game by the time you can get it.
Being slow is one thing, but I hate when a game offers what should be a run button as a damn unlockable.
The game has a secret boss, and it's no secret anymore that it's Broly. I guess fitting for the title, but surely Turles would fit both the title AND era? I'm not surprised at all they went with the more popular of the two though.
One other thing I wanna talk about is how in a couple of the chapters where Goku is in otherworld, Kaio sends him on a quest to a game-specific location (I think so anyway, maybe it was from a filler ep). For some reason in these 2 visits to this location, Goku is joined by a fully AI controlled Bubbles and Gregory. This assist party member thing NEVER happens outside of these chapters! Why are freaking Bubbles and Gregory implemented in this way but actual fighters like Chaozu and Yajirobe never get to see the battle screen? Lmao. It's not like it's a case of wanting to make sure Goku wasn't alone in his fights, because many chapters have characters fighting solo, including other chapters with Goku in Other World (like the Princess Snake segment). They're not even that helpful. They're mildly decent the first time, more as damage sponges than anything. But the second time they don't get any stronger despite the fact the enemies do, so their best use is to take a hit or two before they "run away" for that battle. I'd rather have just played Goku alone than have to sit through their animations every turn.
I feel like I've mostly complained about this game despite giving it 4 stars! But that's because it's only really the more minor complaints that are easy to hone in on. I can only really say that I loved playing the game in so many ways. I loved going through all these Dragon Ball locales with gorgeously designed backgrounds. The graphics truly can't be faulted. I liked the additional story stuff, I liked the music and little easter eggs. It's fun to fight well-known characters in a different way than the usual methods for Dragon Ball (fighting games or beat-em-ups).
It's an RPG for Dragon Ball fans, and the love of the franchise kinda just makes the game work in a way it would probably fail as a unique IP.
2023
Resident Evil 4 had to justify a remake pretty heavily. Unlike many games which have a simple excuse of the original version being inaccessible to anyone without a 20+ year old console, RE4 is literally one of the most widely distributed games of all time. It's even playable on all platforms this remake came out on with a HD remaster. So of course they do what they had to to justify a remake: They changed 80% of the game.
Almost every section of the game has been changed, remixed, shuffled, expanded, condensed, or straight up removed with something brand new in its place.
I don't know the original game like the back of my hand, but there's so many moments in this game where I was like "oooh it's THIS part" because it's unrecognisable outside of one or two elements.
Areas that are kept more or less the same are still here, but they're pretty rare.
It's essentially like playing 2 games that were built using the same blueprint or something. For old players that's fantastic because it's a brand new experience yet with all the stuff they love welcoming them, making jumping in and settling in a lot easier.
For brand new players who just want to experience the story of Resident Evil, this works just fine. Maybe even better since I assume they updated parts that fit better with newer entries, but I'm no Resident Evil expert.
For new players who want to "experience Resident Evil 4" then it's unfortunately (or fortunately) not the game for them. This is a completely different experience. You can't play this and feel like you can jump in to discussions of the 2005 Resident Evil 4. That doesn't make this bad of course, far from it, I'm simply pointing it out because for those who like to fill up their gaming experience, you'll probably want to play the original to experience THE masterpiece everyone talks about, with this game being supplementary playing material.
Of course the problem with almost reinventing the entire game is that you can't guarantee the same level of quality that came before. I generally liked most of the remixed sections of the game, though that might be just because I liked seeing something fresh rather than because they're better. However so many iconic parts were cut and very few of the brand new additions felt memorable. It definitely felt like a downgrade as far as chapter to chapter experiences went, but don't take that as a big knock on this game - it's still great (see the rating?) it's just competing with an even greater game.
One thing I did like was the inclusion of a lot more puzzles. Resident Evil 4 was very light on puzzles due to the genre shift, so even including the few they had felt almost out of place. The remake added extra ones so it feels more inline with the games preceding this one.
And speaking of things that felt out of place in the original, what was up with that single side quest to shoot the blue medallions that came up at the very start of the game? It was the only side quest in the entire game, unless you count the shooting ranges. Well 4 Remake adds more of those too. Even more medallion ones, but also things like...kill some rats, find and sell specific items. There's not much to them honestly, though you get the odd funny one, like having to deface a portrait of Saddler with an egg. By far the best ones though are the ones that provide fights against mini bosses. There's only 3 in the whole game, but they're the kind of optional content I really like.
Cutscenes probably suffered the most from the changes, a lot of them felt completely neutered. Like the one where Salazar sends Leon through his trap door. Leon no longer saves himself with a grappling hook, and adds a 'F You' in the process by shooting his enemies ear trumpet. Now he just grabs a conveniently placed chain that dangles half way down the trap hole.
When I first started playing this I was actually very frustrated with the controls. Leon felt very sluggish and the guns felt very weak due to the lack of consistent staggers on headshots. I saw one comment that said "Leon moves like he shit himself" which I thought was hilarious. Overtime though I actually started to like the shooting in the game, it feels powerful. I don't know if that's because I just got used to it, or if the upgrades I was buying for the guns made a big impact. I also managed to stop feeling like I was controlling a drunk guy stumbling with every step and control Leon just fine, though his slow speed still kind of bothered me till the end.
Ashley's voice is a lot less shrill and whiny in this game, but she can often sound quite bored, which is unfitting of the situation. This isn't a thing in cutscenes, it's just when you ask her to do random actions, like turn a wheel, she'll just reply "ok" in the most dull voice. It's not a big issue, and you could even justify it by saying it's because she's so tired due to all the shit she's going through.
Ada's voice though... jeez. It feels really unfitting to her character, and the whole performance felt like she was phoning it in.
I'm not too sure how I feel about the knife changes. From great offensive tools that saved ammo, to necessary defensive tools with durability. I do like the extra meat in combat to block and parry things, especially as the enemies are MUCH more aggressive this time around. But the fact it can leave you with literally 0 offensive items feels like an oversight. I think it'd have been better if the knife for offense was the same, and a new consumable defensive tool was brought in.
Also why did they have to give durability to the damn armour too? Sure you can refresh it at the merchant, but it depletes so fast on hardcore.
I will say that while I think the increase in enemy aggressiveness works just fine with the new mechanics, having to fight multiple ranged ones at once is too much of a pain. Considering how long it can take to line up shots with a rifle, it's often hard to find an opening when you've got 5 people firing fire arrows at you every 2 seconds.
Another mechanic I wasn't a fan of was the loss of the ability to tell Ashley to stay something, except in very specific parts with lockers she can hide in. Instead it's replaced with a "stay close" or "fall behind" command. Personally I rarely paid attention to it and never saw a big difference in how things played out.
I do like how they changed the way Ashley had a health bar to instead be that one hit incapacitates her, and 2 kills her. That sounds like a big downgrade, but enemies rarely seem to attack her, preferring to kidnap her instead. Every time she was incapacitated I was able to bring her back no problem. Except for the chapter with the catapults, holy hell she made that part a chore. But the best part is I didn't have to waste any herbs on her!
As an aside, this game works great with the dual sense controller. I was beginning to forget it even had a bunch of the features it does since so few games seem to implement them. But in this game you can feel every single step Leon takes, and guns feel powerful, and the engine of a motorboat is just fantastic.
Almost every section of the game has been changed, remixed, shuffled, expanded, condensed, or straight up removed with something brand new in its place.
I don't know the original game like the back of my hand, but there's so many moments in this game where I was like "oooh it's THIS part" because it's unrecognisable outside of one or two elements.
Areas that are kept more or less the same are still here, but they're pretty rare.
It's essentially like playing 2 games that were built using the same blueprint or something. For old players that's fantastic because it's a brand new experience yet with all the stuff they love welcoming them, making jumping in and settling in a lot easier.
For brand new players who just want to experience the story of Resident Evil, this works just fine. Maybe even better since I assume they updated parts that fit better with newer entries, but I'm no Resident Evil expert.
For new players who want to "experience Resident Evil 4" then it's unfortunately (or fortunately) not the game for them. This is a completely different experience. You can't play this and feel like you can jump in to discussions of the 2005 Resident Evil 4. That doesn't make this bad of course, far from it, I'm simply pointing it out because for those who like to fill up their gaming experience, you'll probably want to play the original to experience THE masterpiece everyone talks about, with this game being supplementary playing material.
Of course the problem with almost reinventing the entire game is that you can't guarantee the same level of quality that came before. I generally liked most of the remixed sections of the game, though that might be just because I liked seeing something fresh rather than because they're better. However so many iconic parts were cut and very few of the brand new additions felt memorable. It definitely felt like a downgrade as far as chapter to chapter experiences went, but don't take that as a big knock on this game - it's still great (see the rating?) it's just competing with an even greater game.
One thing I did like was the inclusion of a lot more puzzles. Resident Evil 4 was very light on puzzles due to the genre shift, so even including the few they had felt almost out of place. The remake added extra ones so it feels more inline with the games preceding this one.
And speaking of things that felt out of place in the original, what was up with that single side quest to shoot the blue medallions that came up at the very start of the game? It was the only side quest in the entire game, unless you count the shooting ranges. Well 4 Remake adds more of those too. Even more medallion ones, but also things like...kill some rats, find and sell specific items. There's not much to them honestly, though you get the odd funny one, like having to deface a portrait of Saddler with an egg. By far the best ones though are the ones that provide fights against mini bosses. There's only 3 in the whole game, but they're the kind of optional content I really like.
Cutscenes probably suffered the most from the changes, a lot of them felt completely neutered. Like the one where Salazar sends Leon through his trap door. Leon no longer saves himself with a grappling hook, and adds a 'F You' in the process by shooting his enemies ear trumpet. Now he just grabs a conveniently placed chain that dangles half way down the trap hole.
When I first started playing this I was actually very frustrated with the controls. Leon felt very sluggish and the guns felt very weak due to the lack of consistent staggers on headshots. I saw one comment that said "Leon moves like he shit himself" which I thought was hilarious. Overtime though I actually started to like the shooting in the game, it feels powerful. I don't know if that's because I just got used to it, or if the upgrades I was buying for the guns made a big impact. I also managed to stop feeling like I was controlling a drunk guy stumbling with every step and control Leon just fine, though his slow speed still kind of bothered me till the end.
Ashley's voice is a lot less shrill and whiny in this game, but she can often sound quite bored, which is unfitting of the situation. This isn't a thing in cutscenes, it's just when you ask her to do random actions, like turn a wheel, she'll just reply "ok" in the most dull voice. It's not a big issue, and you could even justify it by saying it's because she's so tired due to all the shit she's going through.
Ada's voice though... jeez. It feels really unfitting to her character, and the whole performance felt like she was phoning it in.
I'm not too sure how I feel about the knife changes. From great offensive tools that saved ammo, to necessary defensive tools with durability. I do like the extra meat in combat to block and parry things, especially as the enemies are MUCH more aggressive this time around. But the fact it can leave you with literally 0 offensive items feels like an oversight. I think it'd have been better if the knife for offense was the same, and a new consumable defensive tool was brought in.
Also why did they have to give durability to the damn armour too? Sure you can refresh it at the merchant, but it depletes so fast on hardcore.
I will say that while I think the increase in enemy aggressiveness works just fine with the new mechanics, having to fight multiple ranged ones at once is too much of a pain. Considering how long it can take to line up shots with a rifle, it's often hard to find an opening when you've got 5 people firing fire arrows at you every 2 seconds.
Another mechanic I wasn't a fan of was the loss of the ability to tell Ashley to stay something, except in very specific parts with lockers she can hide in. Instead it's replaced with a "stay close" or "fall behind" command. Personally I rarely paid attention to it and never saw a big difference in how things played out.
I do like how they changed the way Ashley had a health bar to instead be that one hit incapacitates her, and 2 kills her. That sounds like a big downgrade, but enemies rarely seem to attack her, preferring to kidnap her instead. Every time she was incapacitated I was able to bring her back no problem. Except for the chapter with the catapults, holy hell she made that part a chore. But the best part is I didn't have to waste any herbs on her!
As an aside, this game works great with the dual sense controller. I was beginning to forget it even had a bunch of the features it does since so few games seem to implement them. But in this game you can feel every single step Leon takes, and guns feel powerful, and the engine of a motorboat is just fantastic.
2013
The literal only thing I knew about this game before I played was that it was solitare with horse racing. Except it wasn't even the version of solitare that I knew, so I knew nothing about this game.
The mechanics work surprisingly well for two wildly different ideas. Though they do work against each other too. The luck based game of solitaire doesn't mesh well with the need to consistently do well for the horse part (or is it luck? Is every single game of solitaire technically winnable if you're not bad like me?). Then again there's a lot of luck involved in the horse racing part too, as you could end up perfecting the card game only to be sandwiched so tight in the final sprint that you literally can't possibly win. Or there's times when I do well on the set off portion only for other horses to bump me so far out of the "comfort zone" that it's impossible to come back from. So you've really got 2 layers of RNG to deal with, which is a bit frustrating in a game where winning trophies is the goal.
But what I really don't like about the game is the age system. A horse stops growing after 10 or so races, which means you can't gain exp, thus its stats are capped. When this happens you can play some more races in "mature mode" (some of which are mandatory for even getting the credits since they only show up in this mode), but after another 10 or so races in this mode (or 3 losses), the horse is retired. You can then breed that horse in the farm, but only for a certain amount of times before it becomes unbreedable and thus useless for the rest of the game.
What this means is you'll end up raising a shit ton of horses, raising them, getting them skills and exp, only for the horse to become unusable after all that effort and you have to start fresh. Sure you can use that horse to breed other horses, for a little while, but not only is this time consuming since you'd at minimum need a good male and female horse, but it takes a full round in "growth mode" to even make a baby horse, so you have to essentially waste a round just to get that offspring for the next decent thing to use. Then it just repeats over and over, and only by constantly getting good male and female horses AND overcoming the RNG so they do well in races, is there a way to consistently climb the difficulty ceiling of the game. Because if you've have a pair of horses that can make good babbys, but the babbys do badly in races, the parents will stop love making, and you're back to square one.
And that's not even getting in to many other aspects of the breeding system, like how horses with the same "peak times" are better compatible, or how to even be able to race in certain races your horse needs to be a short or long distance runner (based on that peak type stat).
Fun game absolutely destroyed by a convoluted and grindy system. But it should be noted this is ONLY a problem if you want to complete the game, which unfortunately requires winning every race in the game at least once, bar one "bonus" race. If you're content just jumping in to the game and playing some solitare, and racing some horses until you get tired of it, you'll have a lot more fun. The whole resetting your skills every time may still be a bit annoying though.
Let me give some more praises to the game too, the game has 5 unique owners whose horses you essentially use in racing - even your own bred horses will get one of the owners attached to them. They all have unique personalities and come in to occasionally chat with your protagonist in cheap little puppet-style scenes. It can be entertaining to see these colourful characters interact, but admittedly by the end of the grind I was skipping through all the dialogue. There are also unique horse models that you can get too, like horses with fire-style hair, a horse with a cat hanging onto its back, or a horse with a dragon shaped head etc. So that's neat.
The mechanics work surprisingly well for two wildly different ideas. Though they do work against each other too. The luck based game of solitaire doesn't mesh well with the need to consistently do well for the horse part (or is it luck? Is every single game of solitaire technically winnable if you're not bad like me?). Then again there's a lot of luck involved in the horse racing part too, as you could end up perfecting the card game only to be sandwiched so tight in the final sprint that you literally can't possibly win. Or there's times when I do well on the set off portion only for other horses to bump me so far out of the "comfort zone" that it's impossible to come back from. So you've really got 2 layers of RNG to deal with, which is a bit frustrating in a game where winning trophies is the goal.
But what I really don't like about the game is the age system. A horse stops growing after 10 or so races, which means you can't gain exp, thus its stats are capped. When this happens you can play some more races in "mature mode" (some of which are mandatory for even getting the credits since they only show up in this mode), but after another 10 or so races in this mode (or 3 losses), the horse is retired. You can then breed that horse in the farm, but only for a certain amount of times before it becomes unbreedable and thus useless for the rest of the game.
What this means is you'll end up raising a shit ton of horses, raising them, getting them skills and exp, only for the horse to become unusable after all that effort and you have to start fresh. Sure you can use that horse to breed other horses, for a little while, but not only is this time consuming since you'd at minimum need a good male and female horse, but it takes a full round in "growth mode" to even make a baby horse, so you have to essentially waste a round just to get that offspring for the next decent thing to use. Then it just repeats over and over, and only by constantly getting good male and female horses AND overcoming the RNG so they do well in races, is there a way to consistently climb the difficulty ceiling of the game. Because if you've have a pair of horses that can make good babbys, but the babbys do badly in races, the parents will stop love making, and you're back to square one.
And that's not even getting in to many other aspects of the breeding system, like how horses with the same "peak times" are better compatible, or how to even be able to race in certain races your horse needs to be a short or long distance runner (based on that peak type stat).
Fun game absolutely destroyed by a convoluted and grindy system. But it should be noted this is ONLY a problem if you want to complete the game, which unfortunately requires winning every race in the game at least once, bar one "bonus" race. If you're content just jumping in to the game and playing some solitare, and racing some horses until you get tired of it, you'll have a lot more fun. The whole resetting your skills every time may still be a bit annoying though.
Let me give some more praises to the game too, the game has 5 unique owners whose horses you essentially use in racing - even your own bred horses will get one of the owners attached to them. They all have unique personalities and come in to occasionally chat with your protagonist in cheap little puppet-style scenes. It can be entertaining to see these colourful characters interact, but admittedly by the end of the grind I was skipping through all the dialogue. There are also unique horse models that you can get too, like horses with fire-style hair, a horse with a cat hanging onto its back, or a horse with a dragon shaped head etc. So that's neat.
Addicting high-score based arcadey style actionfest. It loses some points for losing 2 characters from the original, replacing them with only 1 new one, and missing 1 map and replacing it with nothing.
2016
I like the gameplay in fusions, it has a very novel battle system that is both very simple, yet has a lot of strategy behind it. Positioning plays a huge deal in the game, as knocking opponents outside of the invisible ring will cause extra damage, and reset their position on the timeline (basically making it so they have longer to wait for their turn). So it's all about trying to get opponents outside the ring, while keeping yourself far from the edge. But position also matters for many other things, like certain moves will only hit opponents close enough to you, or moves will fit in a straight line or arc, so you want to group opponents up in specific ways.
Then there's ki blasts vs physical attacks. Ki blasts cannot be blocked (although super attacks that are a "beam" type can be countered with a beam struggle if the opponent has an appropriate move and enough ki), but they do less knockback. Physical moves do more knockback, but every time you activate one, your opponent gets a chance to block it in a semi-RNG system where you have to predict which direction the attack will hit you. So if you think they'll hit you out the ring, they'd punch you from the left so you'd fly right, thus you want to block left. But they might be planning to hit you towards their teammate instead for a bit of extra damage, so it's semi-RNG in a lot of cases. Of course with AI specifically they don't always follow logic at all, so this block system can feel pure rng in some cases.
My biggest issue with the battle system is the lack of ability to speed up or skip animations. They are very slow, and repetitive battles. In big story battles it's fine to watch everything play out, but the majority of fighting in this game is just grinding or otherwise a filler battle to activate something else. It desperately needed a way to speed these up.
I've gotta give them props for the controls outside of battles too. Flying around a 3D space on a 3DS might seem limiting with only one circle pad (the additional one on new models does nothing) but they really made it work. And they managed to put all the iconic locations into the game by having the world take place in weird space-time distortions so all these landmarks everyone knows are just kind of scattered around.
Customisation is pretty good. Every time you unlock a new (canon) character you get the option to buy their outfit for your own CAC. This even includes things like Saibamen and Cell. So you can have a totally normal looking human on a Saibamen body.
But we're all here for the what-if fusions right? There's some really great ones here. But it's also where my biggest complaints with the game lie...
First of all, fusing and unfusing is such a tedious process. You go through so many confirmation screens, and every single time you do a fusion, or undo one, you have to reassign all the special moves the fusee's had. For a game that has this as a central mechanic, to the point they have a pokédex-esque completion screen for getting every single character, including fusions, the fact they didn't streamline this process is baffling.
Characters can also only fuse with specific characters, which makes sense, it's not like they could design a unique fusion for god knows how many potential results. But I'm not a big fan of the way they did this, because many characters only have 1 potential partner, but that partner can have multiple. Piccolo, for example, can fuse with both Pikkon and Boo saga Gohan (among some others), but both of these characters can ONLY fuse with Piccolo. That means if you want to fuse Piccolo with Pikkon, Gohan is left without a fusion, because you can't make multiple fusions with one character, you have to unfuse them first. There are so many cases like this, where one character can have so many fusion partners, but those partners HAVE to be with this one guy, leaving so many lonely non-fusees.
Then there's a bunch of characters that can't fuse with anyone at all.
Transformations count as their own character slots, and weirdly none of them can fuse with anyone. Even transformations of characters that CAN fuse. Like you can fuse base Kid Gohan and base Kid Trunks, but you can't fuse SSj Kid Gohan and SSj Kid Trunks into the Super Saiyan version of that very fusion. Literally all they'd have had to do is change the hair to blonde!
These are technically lies. Your OC can fuse with literally any character in the game. Of course because you get to design your OC with gender, hair style, and even race, they can't have unique designs. Whenever you fuse your character it's basically just your character + the fusion choice's hair style, with both their hair colour and yours thrown in (think how Gotenks has black and lavender hair). So if you decide to fuse your OC with Tenshinhan, you literally just create a bald version of your character lol. They're also the only ones able to fuse with the transformed characters. Even their name stays exactly the same, and their place in your "pokédex" is always 000. It's clear that OC + anyone is not supposed to be a real "fusion", but more like a power-up for your OC. I think this is a great way to do it since any other system would be like not letting your OC fuse with anyone, having a set design for them so they can make specific fusions with specific characters, or something.
You might look at the character list and go "holy shit there's over 1000 characters in this game!", and...yeah kinda. There's even some very interesting picks, like Bra and Gine. But only the first 110 or so are canon show characters (plus a handful of game-specific main characters). Then there's maybe 50-60 fusions of these canon characters. The rest of this millennial roster are pure made up characters. And I get it, you gotta have filler characters to pad out those filler fights. Some of them even get a bit of story in the game, like a female version of the Ginyu Force. But why the hell are their fusions so complex? These no need at all for these characters nobody even wants to use to have literal entire fusion trees with a ton of criteria for each one. Like let's say you want to fuse Jerry with Todd, but before you do that Jerry must have previously fused with Jeff, and Todd must have previously fused with Sarah. So now that you've done both of those fusions, you have to unfuse them (keep in mind the annoying reassigning of special moves every time) and now you try to fuse Jerry and Todd, but you still can't because first Todd needs to know this specific move! Why the hell did they make such intricate and convoluted fusion trees for these literal who characters?? Why is 80% of the roster just padding with weird models nobody gives a crap about? Literally the only thing it does is make the roster LOOK bigger, and make 100% completion not worth it.
If they just made it so that none of the game-only characters could fuse, except maybe a few unique ones that get spotlight in side quests, and make even just 50 more unique versions of canon characters, it'd have been so much better!
In short? This game is a fusion of a great concept with horrible execution, and fun but slow gameplay with no way to mitigate the pacing.
Then there's ki blasts vs physical attacks. Ki blasts cannot be blocked (although super attacks that are a "beam" type can be countered with a beam struggle if the opponent has an appropriate move and enough ki), but they do less knockback. Physical moves do more knockback, but every time you activate one, your opponent gets a chance to block it in a semi-RNG system where you have to predict which direction the attack will hit you. So if you think they'll hit you out the ring, they'd punch you from the left so you'd fly right, thus you want to block left. But they might be planning to hit you towards their teammate instead for a bit of extra damage, so it's semi-RNG in a lot of cases. Of course with AI specifically they don't always follow logic at all, so this block system can feel pure rng in some cases.
My biggest issue with the battle system is the lack of ability to speed up or skip animations. They are very slow, and repetitive battles. In big story battles it's fine to watch everything play out, but the majority of fighting in this game is just grinding or otherwise a filler battle to activate something else. It desperately needed a way to speed these up.
I've gotta give them props for the controls outside of battles too. Flying around a 3D space on a 3DS might seem limiting with only one circle pad (the additional one on new models does nothing) but they really made it work. And they managed to put all the iconic locations into the game by having the world take place in weird space-time distortions so all these landmarks everyone knows are just kind of scattered around.
Customisation is pretty good. Every time you unlock a new (canon) character you get the option to buy their outfit for your own CAC. This even includes things like Saibamen and Cell. So you can have a totally normal looking human on a Saibamen body.
But we're all here for the what-if fusions right? There's some really great ones here. But it's also where my biggest complaints with the game lie...
First of all, fusing and unfusing is such a tedious process. You go through so many confirmation screens, and every single time you do a fusion, or undo one, you have to reassign all the special moves the fusee's had. For a game that has this as a central mechanic, to the point they have a pokédex-esque completion screen for getting every single character, including fusions, the fact they didn't streamline this process is baffling.
Characters can also only fuse with specific characters, which makes sense, it's not like they could design a unique fusion for god knows how many potential results. But I'm not a big fan of the way they did this, because many characters only have 1 potential partner, but that partner can have multiple. Piccolo, for example, can fuse with both Pikkon and Boo saga Gohan (among some others), but both of these characters can ONLY fuse with Piccolo. That means if you want to fuse Piccolo with Pikkon, Gohan is left without a fusion, because you can't make multiple fusions with one character, you have to unfuse them first. There are so many cases like this, where one character can have so many fusion partners, but those partners HAVE to be with this one guy, leaving so many lonely non-fusees.
Then there's a bunch of characters that can't fuse with anyone at all.
Transformations count as their own character slots, and weirdly none of them can fuse with anyone. Even transformations of characters that CAN fuse. Like you can fuse base Kid Gohan and base Kid Trunks, but you can't fuse SSj Kid Gohan and SSj Kid Trunks into the Super Saiyan version of that very fusion. Literally all they'd have had to do is change the hair to blonde!
These are technically lies. Your OC can fuse with literally any character in the game. Of course because you get to design your OC with gender, hair style, and even race, they can't have unique designs. Whenever you fuse your character it's basically just your character + the fusion choice's hair style, with both their hair colour and yours thrown in (think how Gotenks has black and lavender hair). So if you decide to fuse your OC with Tenshinhan, you literally just create a bald version of your character lol. They're also the only ones able to fuse with the transformed characters. Even their name stays exactly the same, and their place in your "pokédex" is always 000. It's clear that OC + anyone is not supposed to be a real "fusion", but more like a power-up for your OC. I think this is a great way to do it since any other system would be like not letting your OC fuse with anyone, having a set design for them so they can make specific fusions with specific characters, or something.
You might look at the character list and go "holy shit there's over 1000 characters in this game!", and...yeah kinda. There's even some very interesting picks, like Bra and Gine. But only the first 110 or so are canon show characters (plus a handful of game-specific main characters). Then there's maybe 50-60 fusions of these canon characters. The rest of this millennial roster are pure made up characters. And I get it, you gotta have filler characters to pad out those filler fights. Some of them even get a bit of story in the game, like a female version of the Ginyu Force. But why the hell are their fusions so complex? These no need at all for these characters nobody even wants to use to have literal entire fusion trees with a ton of criteria for each one. Like let's say you want to fuse Jerry with Todd, but before you do that Jerry must have previously fused with Jeff, and Todd must have previously fused with Sarah. So now that you've done both of those fusions, you have to unfuse them (keep in mind the annoying reassigning of special moves every time) and now you try to fuse Jerry and Todd, but you still can't because first Todd needs to know this specific move! Why the hell did they make such intricate and convoluted fusion trees for these literal who characters?? Why is 80% of the roster just padding with weird models nobody gives a crap about? Literally the only thing it does is make the roster LOOK bigger, and make 100% completion not worth it.
If they just made it so that none of the game-only characters could fuse, except maybe a few unique ones that get spotlight in side quests, and make even just 50 more unique versions of canon characters, it'd have been so much better!
In short? This game is a fusion of a great concept with horrible execution, and fun but slow gameplay with no way to mitigate the pacing.
This game is absolutely packed with references, cameos and easter eggs that rival the newly released Super Mario Bros. movie (this won't age the review at all!).
Seriously though if you were a long-time Mario fan when this game came out, this game would be like the ultimate gift. Even playing it for the first time now, I can still appreciate the insane amount of sources they pulled from to put into the game. Enemies can be anything from generic Mario enemies, to spin-off stuff like the viruses from Dr. Mario, to variations on them (like mechanical dogs with chain chomp heads, scuba diva Goombas or Bullet Bills with Scope Rifles).
Of course it's not only references, the game has plenty of original content, including taking place in a brand new Kingdom to the Mario world, with everything within having a naming scheme that I...didn't really care for, even if it did fit the tone.
The combat is very interesting in this game since every action, offense and defense, requires player input. If you want to get extra damage on your basic attack you need to time it right, and if you want to pull off a special attack at all you'll need to time and input a short sequence of button prompts. You can even set these to your required difficulty level - you can set it to the easiest mode where the timing prompts play in slow motion with the game telling you which buttons to press, or you can set it to hard mode where the timings play at normal speed and don't tell you which buttons to press. The benefits of hard mode is that it takes up less "bro points" to do the move (think MP in any other RPG).
But I think it's the defensive stuff that makes the combat work so great. You can time your Bros. jumps or hammer strikes when an enemy is attacking to either dodge or counter attack. It makes every single enemy feel unique because the way they attack determines how/if they can be countered. It's such a refreshing system that can make even the most simple of battels feel more engaging for a playstyle that many consider slow.
I guess they do rely on this system a bit too much to carry battles though because Mario and Luigi's movesets are pretty lacking. 2 characters is already a small amount for an RPG, and these guys only get a total of 4 special moves (each with an upgraded version) and 3 basic moves, all of which are slowly unlocked over the course of the game. And yet, somewhat contradictory, it feels like these 4 special moves are also "too many". What I mean by that is, there doesn't feel like nearly enough variation in attacks. There's some simple things such as hammers can attack spiky enemies, but for the most part it rarely felt like there was any specific move that fit a specific enemy, so you just go with whatever. Mario also gets fire power and Luigi gets lightning somewhat late in to the game, so you get a grand total of 2 elements to use across this small arsenal. Even these elements feel underutilised, sure I noticed an enemy or two that was weak to, or absorbed one type of damage, but it was never worth it to me to test these elements out when stomping on an enemy was usually good enough to do the job.
There's a few times when Mario & Luigi are split up too, and Bros. moves can't be used in these instances, so in these battles they must be completed with only 3 basic moves.
So the battle system is weird. It's very fun, but very limited. Whether the battle interaction justifies the lack of options is a very tough question.
Moving on, since this is a Mario game, even if it's an RPG, platforming elements still show up. And it's where my biggest issue with the game came from. The GBA only has a few buttons, but there's a LOT of field actions in this game. And not only does every action they can do to interact with the world have an individual effect, but an effect when used on the other brother AND the order the brothers are set in matters. What this means with few buttons is that you're constantly micromanaging which action is set at any one time, and which of the 2 moustached fella's is in the lead. The amount of times I skipped past an action, or rushed and pressed the wrong one so I made Mario tiny by hammering him with Luigi instead of doing the super jump was annoying. It's a very minor annoyance, yes, but it's one that persists throughout the game.
Speaking of that super jump ability, it's easily the worst one because of how unnecessary it is. It's literally just used to get to platforms slightly too high to reach at a regular jump, but why? Why not just make the platforms normal height? It's not like it was done for gating the player off, since it's one of the two first abilities you learn. It has no puzzle or challenge attributed to it. It's like they just needed a filler ability for Luigi to match Mario's spin one, so they then had to justify adding it by throwing in a bunch of platforms that force you to waste just a couple extra seconds to get past. Yes it's a petty complaint.
Let's get back to praising the game. I really liked the soundtrack, which like anything else, has a mix of new stuff, with old remixes.
The game is full of decently fun mini-games, each of which can be replayed after its mandatory play for extra rewards.
A very small thing, but the luck stat in this game is called "moustache". It also gives you discounts in the store if you grow this "mous-stat". It's that kinda thing that just makes the game a joy.
The game is surprisingly not as hand-holdy as I thought it'd be. Like this is babbys first RPG in many ways. It's not hard at all and many systems are simplified, such as equipment pretty much only ever having basic "power/defense/hp/bp(mp)" numbers and then maybe a simple effect added on. But it gives you access to the world map pretty early on. Of course most of it is locked off until you get the required abilities, but it still surprised me that it let the player explore and find this out themselves, rather than railroading them to the next story point. Hell if I'm being honest, sometimes the game gives you so LITTLE direction on what to do next I had to look up a guide on where to go at a couple of points.
Part of me felt like this game had too many tutorials, but I don't think that's true. It does give a new one every time you learn a new ability, so to some people that's too many, but I think the main problem is how SLOW they were. Whenever characters are talking, this game is definitely very slow.
By RPG standards it is, of course, pretty basic. But it's an RPG for Mario fans first and foremost. However the fact that they went further with the gameplay than the simple turn-based battle system just really helped so that I could enjoy the game even after all the Mario fanservice started to lose its effect.
Seriously though if you were a long-time Mario fan when this game came out, this game would be like the ultimate gift. Even playing it for the first time now, I can still appreciate the insane amount of sources they pulled from to put into the game. Enemies can be anything from generic Mario enemies, to spin-off stuff like the viruses from Dr. Mario, to variations on them (like mechanical dogs with chain chomp heads, scuba diva Goombas or Bullet Bills with Scope Rifles).
Of course it's not only references, the game has plenty of original content, including taking place in a brand new Kingdom to the Mario world, with everything within having a naming scheme that I...didn't really care for, even if it did fit the tone.
The combat is very interesting in this game since every action, offense and defense, requires player input. If you want to get extra damage on your basic attack you need to time it right, and if you want to pull off a special attack at all you'll need to time and input a short sequence of button prompts. You can even set these to your required difficulty level - you can set it to the easiest mode where the timing prompts play in slow motion with the game telling you which buttons to press, or you can set it to hard mode where the timings play at normal speed and don't tell you which buttons to press. The benefits of hard mode is that it takes up less "bro points" to do the move (think MP in any other RPG).
But I think it's the defensive stuff that makes the combat work so great. You can time your Bros. jumps or hammer strikes when an enemy is attacking to either dodge or counter attack. It makes every single enemy feel unique because the way they attack determines how/if they can be countered. It's such a refreshing system that can make even the most simple of battels feel more engaging for a playstyle that many consider slow.
I guess they do rely on this system a bit too much to carry battles though because Mario and Luigi's movesets are pretty lacking. 2 characters is already a small amount for an RPG, and these guys only get a total of 4 special moves (each with an upgraded version) and 3 basic moves, all of which are slowly unlocked over the course of the game. And yet, somewhat contradictory, it feels like these 4 special moves are also "too many". What I mean by that is, there doesn't feel like nearly enough variation in attacks. There's some simple things such as hammers can attack spiky enemies, but for the most part it rarely felt like there was any specific move that fit a specific enemy, so you just go with whatever. Mario also gets fire power and Luigi gets lightning somewhat late in to the game, so you get a grand total of 2 elements to use across this small arsenal. Even these elements feel underutilised, sure I noticed an enemy or two that was weak to, or absorbed one type of damage, but it was never worth it to me to test these elements out when stomping on an enemy was usually good enough to do the job.
There's a few times when Mario & Luigi are split up too, and Bros. moves can't be used in these instances, so in these battles they must be completed with only 3 basic moves.
So the battle system is weird. It's very fun, but very limited. Whether the battle interaction justifies the lack of options is a very tough question.
Moving on, since this is a Mario game, even if it's an RPG, platforming elements still show up. And it's where my biggest issue with the game came from. The GBA only has a few buttons, but there's a LOT of field actions in this game. And not only does every action they can do to interact with the world have an individual effect, but an effect when used on the other brother AND the order the brothers are set in matters. What this means with few buttons is that you're constantly micromanaging which action is set at any one time, and which of the 2 moustached fella's is in the lead. The amount of times I skipped past an action, or rushed and pressed the wrong one so I made Mario tiny by hammering him with Luigi instead of doing the super jump was annoying. It's a very minor annoyance, yes, but it's one that persists throughout the game.
Speaking of that super jump ability, it's easily the worst one because of how unnecessary it is. It's literally just used to get to platforms slightly too high to reach at a regular jump, but why? Why not just make the platforms normal height? It's not like it was done for gating the player off, since it's one of the two first abilities you learn. It has no puzzle or challenge attributed to it. It's like they just needed a filler ability for Luigi to match Mario's spin one, so they then had to justify adding it by throwing in a bunch of platforms that force you to waste just a couple extra seconds to get past. Yes it's a petty complaint.
Let's get back to praising the game. I really liked the soundtrack, which like anything else, has a mix of new stuff, with old remixes.
The game is full of decently fun mini-games, each of which can be replayed after its mandatory play for extra rewards.
A very small thing, but the luck stat in this game is called "moustache". It also gives you discounts in the store if you grow this "mous-stat". It's that kinda thing that just makes the game a joy.
The game is surprisingly not as hand-holdy as I thought it'd be. Like this is babbys first RPG in many ways. It's not hard at all and many systems are simplified, such as equipment pretty much only ever having basic "power/defense/hp/bp(mp)" numbers and then maybe a simple effect added on. But it gives you access to the world map pretty early on. Of course most of it is locked off until you get the required abilities, but it still surprised me that it let the player explore and find this out themselves, rather than railroading them to the next story point. Hell if I'm being honest, sometimes the game gives you so LITTLE direction on what to do next I had to look up a guide on where to go at a couple of points.
Part of me felt like this game had too many tutorials, but I don't think that's true. It does give a new one every time you learn a new ability, so to some people that's too many, but I think the main problem is how SLOW they were. Whenever characters are talking, this game is definitely very slow.
By RPG standards it is, of course, pretty basic. But it's an RPG for Mario fans first and foremost. However the fact that they went further with the gameplay than the simple turn-based battle system just really helped so that I could enjoy the game even after all the Mario fanservice started to lose its effect.
2021
This review contains spoilers
This was my first Tales game, and I went in with zero expectations or anything to compare it to (just for context on the review).
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
I instantly found the story to be engaging. It was obviously a well thought out world and it's workings. I know some people hated the direction the story ended up going, but I more or less liked it to the end, and thought the twists provided a good endgame.
What I wasn't a fan of was the actual writing. There is way too much repetitive and redundant dialogue in this game. Everything feels like it has to be stated multiple times by multiple characters. It's worse if you count optional dialogue prompts. I swear to god every one of the main cast has a specific inner struggle and you will hear about it a LOT. Over and over. You'll hear exposition from one character only for the cutscene to end and a new cutscene to just have your party reaffirm the exposition.
This reaches its apex near the finale where you get about 3 hours straight of dialogue, cutscenes and exposition with maybe 10 minutes of actual gameplay between. It was torture even for someone who liked the story.
The blow was only somewhat softened by the fact I at least liked the characters. If I had to listen to overly drawn out exposition there's worst groups I could have spent it with. But I still have an issue or two with them, mostly regarding their derivative archetypes. The two leads are an obvious romatic set-up, yet they spend 90% of the game in that "I-it's not like I like you or anything!" mode. It gets old, fast.
my biggest is problem the games treatment of Law by Rinwell. They're also set-up as an obvious love interest to each other, yet spend the whole game arguing (and to be fair these two are teens, making it more excusable). But it not only doesn't complete its natural evolution to full blown couple, it's also massively unbalanced. While I'm not a fan of the "they like each other but insult each other" stuff, Alphen and Shionne take a lot of shots at each other on equal terms. With Rinwell and Law, the game treats Law like he's some kind of unforgiveable dumbass (which he can be at times), with Rinwell especially roasting him almost all the time. Yet Rinwell is hardly ever called out on the times she's a dumbass, so if you have two characters who insult each other constantly, but treat one of them as being much "better" than the other, it just feels like bullying. Law is a guy with a crush teasing a girl he likes and gets an appropriate amount of exasperation from the gang. Rinwell is a girl who just seems to despise a guy, even if disproportionally warranted, and gets backed up by everyone whenever she says anything bad about him. Law deserves so much better.
I liked the art style of the game. Very clean and stylish. Some of the locations in particular are beautiful, my favourites being Cyslodia and Elde Menancia. They also implement some full anime cutscenes, but these are paced rather awkwardly. There's I think 3 within the first major area of the game, then just don't show up until about half way through when another pops up, then there's maybe 2 or 3 more for the entire rest. It just felt skewed when the first 5-10 hours held half of these specially dedicated cutscenes.
The battle system of course deserves a mention, and I had a lot of thoughts on it that I probably couldn't properly express because it's a mess of jumbled thoughts in my head. I like a lot of the things in it, such as the amount of customisation you can have regarding your allies AI controlled actions, such as a full "strategy" sheet with prompts like "Do this action when meeting this criteria". It wasn't massively expansive, like you couldn't have one character make sure they combo a specific move when another character uses one of their moves, but there's a lot of control over when things like healing spells are used, when characters engage or run in a fight, when buffs are applied etc.
Each character plays completely different. Whether you like mages who attack from afar, lightning bruisers who want to get up close and attack with as many hits as possible but have to rely heavily on dodging due to their weak defences, or tanks who get up close and rely on blocking over dodging - there's a character in the game for your style, and switching between them in battle is as simple as 2 button presses.
There's a lot of flashy presentation with "boost" attacks too - unique cutscene moves that take any 2 members of your party doing a combo attack.
Each member also has a specific special move that works best against certain enemy types, like Shionne's on flying enemies, and Law's on armoured ones.
But I also had a lot of problems with the battle system. I found the majority of artes to be very unimpactful. You get so many abilities that are just different strings of your character model attacking the enemy and they just don't...seem any different from each other in the long run. Like one of them might have Alphen stab his sword at the enemy a lot of times, while another will have him slash it. But what's the difference? There are SO MANY artes and so few of them that seem to have a specific function in battle. It doesn't help that there's no power rating to these skills on the menu, so the only way to test them out is using them all in battle one by one and comparing them. That might not be too bad, except artes also power up the more you use them, up to 5 tiers, a new one being reached after using the move X times. Trying to find out if "stabby sword" at 2 stars is better than "stabby sword deluxe" at 0 stars is just not something I care to experiment with when you get a new skill every few minutes. And you'll have trouble seeing exact damage values even if you do want to test them, because the battlefield is absolute CHAOS when you have 4 members out at once. By the endgame there were so many spells and particle effects I genuinely couldn't tell which moves were mine or my opponents. I was trying to dodge tornado's that I wasn't sure were even coming from the enemy.
The game does let you set even your own character to be fully automatic though, and at a certain point I did just that, only taking over when I was bored, or for boss fights. The AI is actually surprisingly decent too, able to pull off some long combos. There's a few things they won't do by themselves, but for the most part you can rely on it. They also get access to their full arsenal of moves, while a player will only have the 3 (later 6) ground + aerial attacks assigned to buttons. This will mean if you want to distribute out those star tiers on your artes evenly, you're probably better off letting the AI control the characters anyway. Unless it comes to aerial skills... Because the AI NEVER jumps, it means the only way the characters will use their aerial moves is if they use another move that sends them into the air, and to be fair most characters have at least one, if not multiple. But Shionne specifically doesn't get a single one (unless I missed it), meaning she will never use her massive library of moves that can only be used in the air. She even gets perks on her "skill tree" specifically dedicated to air battle. Like I get that being player controlled is an option, but I don't think any other character has such a heavy emphasis on perks that straight up can't be used in auto-mode.
It really is the kind of game where almost every praise I have comes with a "but", even if the but is comparatively smaller. The amount of character and relationship-building dialogue during battles, in camp fires etc (aka dialogue that happens in the background so it doesn't take up game time) is very nice, but you'll hear the same lines way too much.
I could probably say a lot more about the game, but with the purpose of my reviews mostly being for myself to read back on when I want to know exactly how I felt about a game, I think I've said enough that if I come back to this in 3 years I can be like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't like Tales of Arise quite as much as I seem to remember".
(Moving this review from the 1994 version since I logged it under the wrong one - written in June 2022)
It's great to finally be able to play these games as one big playthrough as intended. I do think the zones in this game vary wildly in quality, you can see my (very very) short comments on them here and here.
Luckily the bad stages don't seem quite as bad when they're no longer 1/6th of the entire game. And by adding them all together you may just get away with quantity over quality anyway.
What else is there to really say about this game that wasn't covered in either of the first 2 reviews? Well Hyper Sonic of course is a huge new addition. Essentially doing all 7 special zones in both 3 & Knuckles. It's a faster, higher jumping version of Super Sonic that glows multiple colours. It's pretty cool. But I haaaate that when you start collecting the Super Emeralds you can no longer use regular Super Sonic. Why punish players like that? Also Hyper Sonic can breath underwater while Super Sonic can't despite the fact I'm pretty sure there's zero sections in the game where you can get Hyper Sonic that also contain water.
Basically both games are very clearly 2 halves of another game, so this version is the only way to feel like you're getting the true experience.
It's great to finally be able to play these games as one big playthrough as intended. I do think the zones in this game vary wildly in quality, you can see my (very very) short comments on them here and here.
Luckily the bad stages don't seem quite as bad when they're no longer 1/6th of the entire game. And by adding them all together you may just get away with quantity over quality anyway.
What else is there to really say about this game that wasn't covered in either of the first 2 reviews? Well Hyper Sonic of course is a huge new addition. Essentially doing all 7 special zones in both 3 & Knuckles. It's a faster, higher jumping version of Super Sonic that glows multiple colours. It's pretty cool. But I haaaate that when you start collecting the Super Emeralds you can no longer use regular Super Sonic. Why punish players like that? Also Hyper Sonic can breath underwater while Super Sonic can't despite the fact I'm pretty sure there's zero sections in the game where you can get Hyper Sonic that also contain water.
Basically both games are very clearly 2 halves of another game, so this version is the only way to feel like you're getting the true experience.
2011
(Moving this review from the 1993 version since I logged it under the wrong one - written in June 2022)
Even before I played this game, I always thought it was kind of ugly. Way too much clutter on screen, a lot of things placed in ways that look like little billy got a hold of debug mode and went wild.
When it comes to the whole gimmick of the game, the time travel, it feels underutilised. The only thing you can really do with it is go to the past, find a machine, destroy it and then the future version becomes a "good future". The problem with this is that it involves multiple steps:
1. Find a past time post
2. Get enough momentum to time travel
3. Look all over the stage and find the machine
4. Find a future time post to get back to the present
5. Get enough momentum to time travel
6. Find ANOTHER future time post to get back to the future
7. Congrats, after probably going back and forth in the level multiple times, you can enjoy your enemy-free future. For about all of the 2 minutes it takes to even complete a stage (and that's if you were at the very start).
It's just so much effort when the literal only non-aesthetic difference is being able to play the level with no enemies, despite it being harder to get to that point than just running through a level normally.
You COULD just be doing it to 100% the game, but you can get the good ending just by collecting all the time stones from bonus stages, which is way faster (and once you have all 7, you can go to the good future of any level straight away).
Also all the stages seemed metal/robot themed to varying degrees, which combined with having 4 aesthetic versions of each stage, left most stages with little identity, just bleeding into the next metal-themed stage.
Bosses are definitely interesting. You don't even directly fight most of them. But also half of them don't even feel like bosses so much as they feel like platform sections with Robotnik watching you.
Having said all this, it's still pretty fun to play. It's just that its whole entire gimmick feels pointless, and levels need more variety.
Even before I played this game, I always thought it was kind of ugly. Way too much clutter on screen, a lot of things placed in ways that look like little billy got a hold of debug mode and went wild.
When it comes to the whole gimmick of the game, the time travel, it feels underutilised. The only thing you can really do with it is go to the past, find a machine, destroy it and then the future version becomes a "good future". The problem with this is that it involves multiple steps:
1. Find a past time post
2. Get enough momentum to time travel
3. Look all over the stage and find the machine
4. Find a future time post to get back to the present
5. Get enough momentum to time travel
6. Find ANOTHER future time post to get back to the future
7. Congrats, after probably going back and forth in the level multiple times, you can enjoy your enemy-free future. For about all of the 2 minutes it takes to even complete a stage (and that's if you were at the very start).
It's just so much effort when the literal only non-aesthetic difference is being able to play the level with no enemies, despite it being harder to get to that point than just running through a level normally.
You COULD just be doing it to 100% the game, but you can get the good ending just by collecting all the time stones from bonus stages, which is way faster (and once you have all 7, you can go to the good future of any level straight away).
Also all the stages seemed metal/robot themed to varying degrees, which combined with having 4 aesthetic versions of each stage, left most stages with little identity, just bleeding into the next metal-themed stage.
Bosses are definitely interesting. You don't even directly fight most of them. But also half of them don't even feel like bosses so much as they feel like platform sections with Robotnik watching you.
Having said all this, it's still pretty fun to play. It's just that its whole entire gimmick feels pointless, and levels need more variety.
Not really an expansion since it's just in the base version of most releases of these games. Still, I'll review it anyway.
Pretty much Resident Evil 4 abridged. You go through a few select sections from Leon's campaign, minus I think one new one in chapter 4, facing enemies in much the same way.
It is kind of funny how the game tries to keep things consistent between this and Leon's game. A locked door that Leon has to go through some hoops to open just says "it won't open for some reason". You can still get into the room via Ada's hookshot, and despite this attempt at saying "hey Ada can't open this door because Leon needs to do that and that would be inconsistent!", Ada can still loot this room anyway, which logically would leave nothing left for Leon (and somehow the items in the room change between the two characters).
It's not amazing or anything, and it doesn't really add any new mechanics besides the hookshot, which isn't a game changer. But if you wanted to play Resident Evil 4 as Ada, I guess this is a way to do it.
Pretty much Resident Evil 4 abridged. You go through a few select sections from Leon's campaign, minus I think one new one in chapter 4, facing enemies in much the same way.
It is kind of funny how the game tries to keep things consistent between this and Leon's game. A locked door that Leon has to go through some hoops to open just says "it won't open for some reason". You can still get into the room via Ada's hookshot, and despite this attempt at saying "hey Ada can't open this door because Leon needs to do that and that would be inconsistent!", Ada can still loot this room anyway, which logically would leave nothing left for Leon (and somehow the items in the room change between the two characters).
It's not amazing or anything, and it doesn't really add any new mechanics besides the hookshot, which isn't a game changer. But if you wanted to play Resident Evil 4 as Ada, I guess this is a way to do it.
It's weird to think that Resident Evil 4 would work, let alone be considered a competing best entry game in the franchise along with REmake. It practically reinvents everything the franchise was known for, removing all signs of survival horror for a more action focused game. Puzzles are few and far between. Linearity is more pronounced now, with things like weapons no longer being found on the map, but bought from a merchant, along with weapon upgrades. The game even lacks zombies of all things, at least in the usual sense. It even adds elements that people just dislike about gaming in general - half the game is essentially an escort mission, and quick time events are everywhere.
So why is it so good?! I guess because the shift was done so well, the game acting so fluently in the genre, that newcomers may not even realise it hasn't always been this way. The shooting in the game feels so satisfying and set pieces are so memorable, such as the minecart section. The atmosphere is incredible too, which helps a lot to keep that horror Resident Evil vibe.
Inventory management is still around, but not at all like it used to be. Whereas old games were more about trying to juggle the many key items with your weapons and healing, this one gives you a ton of space, puts key items in a separate section completely, but now the literal positioning of your non-key items matters. Like before weapons take up varying amounts of space, but not just a case of shotgun = 2 slots and pistol = 1. A shotgun will take up a comparatively large section, and rather than fitting neatly into squares, you have to manoeuvre your items around in an efficient way in the trunk to maximise the amount of stuff you can store at once. It's like its own little minigame which is surprisingly addictive, and satisfying.
I liked the game a lot. Just a few minor nitpicks here and there, most notable for me was the lack of quick weapon switching. This game will have you swapping weapons a lot, so needing to go into your menu every single time to throw a single grenade can throw off the flow of the battle just a little bit.
So why is it so good?! I guess because the shift was done so well, the game acting so fluently in the genre, that newcomers may not even realise it hasn't always been this way. The shooting in the game feels so satisfying and set pieces are so memorable, such as the minecart section. The atmosphere is incredible too, which helps a lot to keep that horror Resident Evil vibe.
Inventory management is still around, but not at all like it used to be. Whereas old games were more about trying to juggle the many key items with your weapons and healing, this one gives you a ton of space, puts key items in a separate section completely, but now the literal positioning of your non-key items matters. Like before weapons take up varying amounts of space, but not just a case of shotgun = 2 slots and pistol = 1. A shotgun will take up a comparatively large section, and rather than fitting neatly into squares, you have to manoeuvre your items around in an efficient way in the trunk to maximise the amount of stuff you can store at once. It's like its own little minigame which is surprisingly addictive, and satisfying.
I liked the game a lot. Just a few minor nitpicks here and there, most notable for me was the lack of quick weapon switching. This game will have you swapping weapons a lot, so needing to go into your menu every single time to throw a single grenade can throw off the flow of the battle just a little bit.
Lots of fun brain teasers mixed together with a charming little story. They don't do an amazing job with fitting the puzzles into the story (not that I'd expect them to) but they do have a few moments where it either ties in to what's happening, or a character has a personality based around puzzle types that can be pretty fun. There is a heavy reuse of puzzle types the further you get though. Even most of the bonus puzzles you can unlock are just the same ones you've done before but on "hard mode".
There's probably some kind of analysis that could be done on people based on what puzzles they find easy or struggle with.
I liked that some puzzles gave you items which were used for other puzzles. The room one was a fun way to show off character personalities, albeit one where the "rules" didn't seem consistent. The gizmo also had a neat little effect when it was completed.
There's probably some kind of analysis that could be done on people based on what puzzles they find easy or struggle with.
I liked that some puzzles gave you items which were used for other puzzles. The room one was a fun way to show off character personalities, albeit one where the "rules" didn't seem consistent. The gizmo also had a neat little effect when it was completed.