This game is such an interesting abstraction of the Japanese cityscape and countryside: I would say it feels most not like a central-Tokyo but like it was designed by someone who lived in one of the major cities an hour or two from central Tokyo. You get the occasional dense area with a skyscraper or two (Saffron City), dense collections of single family homes (Celadon City), but there's still the countryside running through mountains and forests, farming towns here and there.

That is easily Pokemon Blue's most interesting trait: it's a world based on reality, but not in the direction of an Earthbound that's more focused on constantly parodying America or people. Pokemon Blue is a game more interested in the idea of adding a layer of mystery (world of pokemon) and exaggeration (everyone catches pokemon!) to the mundane normal everyday life. I imagine this (and the affordances of the Game Boy and the 151 pokemon, and the marketing efforts of Nintendo) is what helped to capture the minds of the initial millions of players! I'm not sure how much of that exists today, where the series feels a bit more phoned in and calculated.

It's honestly quite disturbing the extent that Satoshi Tajiri's artistic idea become full-on media-mix/anime-ified - most symbolic of this is how sprites underwent slight revisions between the original JP red/green to US red/blue to yellow to bring things 'more in line with the anime' - a direction which, I think, informs the series direction today: something that's more interested in doing only what's necessary to keep the brand going, rather than an interest in the kind of design fundamentals Tajiri/team had that allowed them to conceive of Pokemon Blue in the first place.

The story in Blue is most interestingly not at all much of an anime story. Nobody is really fleshed out except potentially Giovanni, the game feels like a series of vignettes where the sport-like Pokemon battling at times briefly overlaps with the reality of our world. Lt. Surge fought with pokemon in a war, Mew is from South America, the moon landing happened in 1969, people are addicted to gambling, there's a crime syndicate, pokemon can die and become ghosts. There's a lot of room for your imagination to think about.

I loved the underground walkways that feel like the long, underground train station walkways in Japan, or even arguably underground shoutengai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai). How the Celadon "Mansion" is a mistranslation of the Japanese Manshon (often a 5-10 story apartment or mixed use building), how it has the Game Freak devs. The department store inspired by big Japan department stores.

I think the first 2/3 of this game (through Silph Tower) is really well paced, I love how you go between countryside exploration and weird little dungeons in urban settings or caves. The last 1/3 of the game feels a bit more out of place - the 'science' angle, while interesting, kind of starts and ends with Cinnabar island. Seafoam Island and Victory Road are fine, but they feel less connected to the whole game's sense of place compared to e.g. the rocket base or mt. moon. I don't think this detracts from the strength of the game, but the game did feel like it was dragging by that point - the fact it began doing block puzzles might be symbolic of that. (Ha ha)

An aside: The core of the "trainers are multiple pokemon, random encounters are one pokemon" is a brilliant design choice - they can express trainer personality through this, they can characterize spaces like dungeons or caves based on who is there. I actually wanted to see more of the Viridian Forest-type dungeon - where not everything is a random encounter tile.

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After playing, it does feel like the game is at a bit of a crossroads. I think Tajiri definitely had more he wanted to do with his vision, but they may not have been in-line with the more obvious routes to 'improving' the game.

The more obvious routes, to me, neither of which interest me personally, are:

- Increasing the traditional storytelling: clear villain characters, more cutscenes, more regularly paced villain-related levels. This could help attract an audience put off by the way Pokemon Blue feels like falling into a story at times (which I personally prefer, haha). It would also increase franchise tie-in and business synergies!

- Making the battle system 'better' and not a pushover. Make the game more technical, increase training options, create harder battles or challenges - as this would be the only way to 'balance' the game from becoming too easy. This lays a lot of weird traps though, and I think pokemon's devs fell into most of them: stark divides between the 'true combat postgame', many compulsive traps around perfecting stats/builds (rather than letting you teambuild freely), etc.

Personally I would have liked it if the game went harder on the weird influences and level layouts, maybe experimenting with a smaller level range or different methods of training other than bland 'QoL' features to help even leveling... but hey! I'm not the billionaire company here...

Almost done with my Hard Toal run! First, the things I think are good

- The romance and setting. Oh babey
- At certain brief points the combat feels really good

BUT...

For the past few years I've espoused these three Ys games (with the order being Oath > 6 > Origin) but coming back to Origin I see a number of problems.

First, the gameplay's whole point of existing is speed and aggression. It feels absolutely the best when you're doing these things and being rewarded for it. For this reason, Hugo's Hard playthrough kind of sucks: he's slow, aiming is fiddly and you're doing so much thinking about your exact positioning as a result.

BOSSES

The boss movesets are often contradictory with the whole 'pulpy dark high fantasy power metal' aesthetic and "fast and aggression feel good!" idea : a gigantic number (perhaps all?) of the bosses are designed around only having particular safe windows to attack. These range from the most obnoxious (Gelaldy, the fire construct, who you must wait for his hands to pound the ground): these feel almost like Zelda/Mario bosses: you're expected to behave a very particular, strict way, waiting for the moment to bop the enemy.

Some bosses employ this logic but allow you to speed up opening these windows: Khonsclard (sand plant) or Velagunder (poison bubble arm beast), etc. However, because the act of attacking them when vulnerable is so boring (they just sit there waiting to get hit) there's a terrible, clunky rhythm to the fights. Some bosses do the same thing but 'hide' this fact - Shion lets you be aggressive to stop his shield but you'll still have to dodge his easy attacks before making him vulnerable again.

The fights that feel best are the one-on-ones - Epona, Galleon, Hugo, Kishgal - but on harder difficulties, their damage output is so punishing that your only option is to learn their moves perfectly. Doing so isn't much of a task, but it turns the battles into basically a Zelda fight of sorts, where your moves are the items - dodge, do 3 hits, dodge, do 3 hits... repeat until dead.

The problem then, is that the difficulty in this game mainly stems from weird hitboxes, dense bullet and attack patterns that are difficult to dodge because of the top-down camera, and poor visual communication. One boss's attacks are dust clouds on top of moving sand! Your position on the screen can be a bit hard to see because of how small you are.

This is still mostly manageable, but it does push you to use the iframe-granting moves which feels messy. Bosses like Nygtilger are particularly bad on this front: the boss is extremely simple, except that you have to stand on it while it continues to snake around and shoot bombs that get hidden under its body.

If the game wants to be about speed and aggression, then the bosses ought to be tuned to reward that. But due to fundamental issues described, playing at high speeds becomes tricky because the game rarely feels like it's up to snuff on the precision of your movement. So the key to success on harder difficulties feels more like holding back and playing slowly, because moving too fast will lead to you getting hit by a nearly-invisible dust cloud, or you being unable to jump due to the 0.25 second delay after an attack (yes really!)

There's nothing wrong with a jump-delay after an attack, but again the enemies/bosses have to be tuned to account for that... otherwise you just end up playing conservatively, because many times bullets or attacks will whip out at ridiculous speeds during that delay window.

LEVEL DESIGN

What I find the most disturbing about Ys Origin coming back to it, is how they twisted shmup's combo systems into this compulsive, flashy and ultimately shallow system of powering up as you do more hits quickly, to gain EXP faster. I think they 'perfected' this system with Origin (compared to 6 and Oath), it makes the regular levels feel like slot machines.

Here's the problem with the level design: again, think about speed and aggression. The levels are disastrously designed: pressing buttons leads to 10 second camera pans, gigantic hitboxes on spike pillars make you move slow and ploddingly, there's generally a ton of Zelda Design all over the place: use the obvious item on an obvious wall, press a button, run over here, etc. There's almost nothing resembling a true puzzle, it's all there as filler.

The enemy design doesn't really work: let's be generous and pretend that I'm not going to grind out levels so I can just blindly mash my way through anything (which the game strongly encourages and pushes you towards).

Due to the gigantic hitboxes and speed of enemy attacks, and the way that enemies rarely combine in a synergistic way - you're encouraged to slowly take your time and pick things off. When designing enemy encounters for a game that's meant to be fast-paced with movement, it's better to have enemies with slower (not necessarily slow) attacks, few to no invulnerable states, and that attack at various ranges. By balancing the combinations of enemies, you can create combat encounters that each subtly feel different. The fast pace is maintained, but without making it incoherent if you choose to play aggressively.

The difficulty, then, comes from trying to avoid the slow accumulation of mistakes. Trying to play fast is impossible in Ys Origin - you'll just group all the enemies together and get stunlocked by something, unless you have enough DPS to overpower them. Your attacks' weird forward motion/tracking will just drag you into some bullet flying at 10,000 MPH.

I'm of the opinion that adding more numbers to Action games doesn't fix anything, it just serves to hide inherent problems. If there were no numbers in Ys Origin's combat or healing items, it would clearly feel kind at odds with itself. You'd be playing at a weirdly slow pace so as to not get hit by the weird overlap of enemy behaviors, you'd be circle strafing and bopping stuff slowly. But with numbers, this is hidden because by the time you're about to complain about anything, you've leveled up 3 times and now everything dies in like 3 hits and so much health items are dropping you can ignore the entire design.

IN CONCLUSION

This game feels very symbolic: only released 3 years before Demon's Souls, it sits at the point right before 3D action games basically started to completely lose their connection to physical reality, shifting from a focus on spacing and movement, and, well, Action, towards the realm of reading animations to perform dodge rolls and parries, waiting for meters to cool down to perform your Magical Gacha Slam!

Ys Origin has at its core something that kind of makes sense, but the entire design of the game misunderstands it. Entire boss battles break if you miss weapon upgrades, stage hazards take out 30% of your health if you overlooked an armor box.

Padding out things with incessant numbers and resistance multipliers, a game designed by math formulas, curves, nerds and spreadsheets, rather than thinking about what it feels like to touch literally anything and how that might be pleasurable if transmitted to a player.

IN CONCLUSION IN CONCLUSION

It's called ACTION for a reason! Designers take note: You don't DODGE ROLL out of the way of a FUCKING CAR, you MOVE OUT OF THE WAY. Jesus Christ!


4/5 because of epona and hugo and setting a game in the final dungeon of ys 1 is sick

some more toree levels !!! and they're not so good !!!

this is a bonus 4 levels free game and I would be pretty excited if the levels weren't kind of janky

theyre in a longer format where you get a lot of verticality and a lot more stars here and there BUT they do feel kind of tacky and a bit undercooked which can result and cheap tricks and deaths like who the fuck thought skyscrapers penetrating the entirety of the level was a cute thing to add ?

not that bad but they're still reused assets and reused osts for a mid experience so yeah good luck

Heavily advertised as stylish, fluid, fancy, but at least the first hour plays like an empty-feeling open world that's also tricky to navigate to the point of needing quest marker vision. It feels really all over the place because it's weirdly uneven: the UI splash transitions are incredibly polished, but then the UI text is so tiny it's hard to read on my TV.

There's character banter/many popups used to bandaid over poorly communicated design (slowing time down lets you grapple farther?? stepping on some black goo starts timers?). I'm not one to be against weird controls but they don't seem intentionally weird, rather just miscalculations or like quick-patch-up-fixes.

The strange semi-diegetic dialogue ("I can grapple farther by pressing A!" or "Oh no not another enemy!") feel a lot like AAA games like an Uncharted or something.

I, of course, love narrative in games, but it's a balance that needs to be considered, not dropped in. Sometimes narrative can merely be a bandaid over a game world having trouble communicating narrative-feeling-elements through its game design.


now, the movement...

The level design weirdly pulls you into these momentum-stopping things: climbing on walls Assassin's Creed style, overly straightforward 3D combat with a weirdly punishing health system. Sometimes the level ideas are kind of dense and compact - not a bad thing on its own, but the movement wants to be about speed and long jumps! The level ideas sometimes feel like little skate parks, but the movement isn't built quite right to take advantage of these levels. And ultimately skating games are about a different avenue of expression (the tricks, reading the walls/floors/slopes/rails for the corresponding wallslides/manuals/tricks/grinding).

I think what Solar ash's movement fits better into is something like those CS surfing maps, 3D sonic, etc.

So there seems to be a base-level conflict between Level Design Direction and Moveset, and even conflicts within Moveset itself.

That's not to say there aren't any moments where the level design works (at least after an hour) but it tends to be more in fragments. I can see moments where stuff shines, but then I'm climbing on a goo wall again or 3-hit-comboing an enemy.

The "speedrun a course to clear it" idea is interesting. I think that you have to get checkpoints to extend the timer is great. But at the same time the checkpoints being precise things you have to hit, kind of feels like it restricts the level design expression even more - it almost makes the levels feel kind of 'automatic'? Think about the mario 64 yoshi race - it's essentially a timed challenge, but it's still left up to you how to make your way up the mountain. Should you take the bridge or long jump it? Run around the balls or not?

And it's not like getting checkpoints to extend a timer is no good, but the fact the time extends are so precise and attention-focusing feels off.

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But, there also feels like a feel-conflict between the way you are supposed to move fast and then sometimes stop or move precisely to slash stuff. It makes me think to Sonic Adventure - the reason your homing attack, well, homes, isn't a mistake - it's because they wanted to add simple combat for texture but also let you maintain a relative level of speed. Imagine if Sonic had to stop to punch the enemies instead of just bopping them in a row! Solar Ash's combat admittedly is fast, but it's still a strange context switch.

I also think the affordance of the dash button feels mushy - you're already moving quite fast to start, so a button to make you move faster feels like it mostly leads to something like making it harder to read distances in the level geometry gaps. (Compare this to the way that the walk vs run feel a lot more clearly distinguished). Going from fast to faster can work in some contexts, but to me it's better as a puzzly mechanic. I think a "go from fast to faster" mechanic makes more sense in a racing game where the focus is micro-optimizations, but in something like Solar Ash it kind of muddies up making jumps /grinds/grapples .


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There's also the health system which seems to be symbolic on the surface but feels like a way to justify having little plasma cells to collect and grind. And that it's tied into combat makes it not stick the landing even more - if the combat feels flat, then a health system tied to it probably can't carry much narrative weight. I love the idea of having symbolic systems in the games (heart machine? plasma?) but it seems tied to the wrong system here.

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Lastly the first boss battle: I know it's taking inspo from Shadow of the Colossus but this game lacks the gravitas of its implementation. SotC works because you're slow and puny, tiny and have a horrible time trying to cling on to the giant colossus thing. There's no friction getting on or off the boss in Solar Ash - completing a hit weirdly respawns you on the ground, ready to get back on - an easy grapple away. If it's easy to get on then it doesn't feel that tense being on it. SotC might have easy moments when stepping on the colossus, but those are exaggerated into sheer tension because you may have had to do something tedious to get on the colossus.

In Solar Ash, punctuating moments of speed with a full stop (the hit) feels odd to me. It's not to say it doesn't feel a little cool running on a serpent, but like I mentioned with the time extends earlier - the fact that 'hurting the boss' is so strictly signposts serves to exaggerate the Mario Boss/Zelda-Puzzle quality of fighting them, shifting the focus from movement/speed into following a trail to the next clearly marked thing to slash open.

Boss fights in platformers are always tricky. I'm not even sure I'm convinced that 3d platformers should have boss fights - at least not in the 'use flimsy combat to hit an enemy 3 times' - perhaps something else entirely should be in their place in terms of emotional climaxes.

Or idk, maybe it could be a race. Race 3 people to the death, but one of them is your friend! A melodramatic dialogue takes place as you lap them, reaching the finish line before them...
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This is a pretty harsh review overall, but both 3D platformers and action games are important to me and I think it's important to talk about why games' designs fail! And it does bother me that a lot of resources and promotion go into games that aren't making the mark design-wise.

Like with the way other game designs or art directions fail - it is sometimes a matter of things appear decent up-close - at the level of single mechanic or animation, audio log or NPC, but taken as a whole there is little harmony.

can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.