The following write-up can be considered both an addendum to my spoiler-heavy thoughts upon last year’s replay of Shadow of the Colossus as well as an expansion of my blurb from Pangburn’s “Sight and Sound” Backloggd-canon project. I can’t give him enough credit for his work and giving me the opportunity to contribute in my own little way.

If someone were to ask me what I’d consider to be the greatest game of all time, Shadow of the Colossus would most likely not be my first answer. I’d probably point you to a few candidates that not only elevated the medium, but were also titles that I’d consider practically perfect with no major blemishes: perhaps something like Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, or most recently, the original Resident Evil remake. That said, Shadow of the Colossus stands above all of these games in my heart, because despite any gripes, I would argue that practically all of these potential “weaknesses” contribute to the final artistic vision. Somehow, it transcends my definition of a perfect video game, and becomes something much more.

It'd be easy to characterize Shadow of the Colossus as a boss-rush with puzzle elements, but I find that this description misses the point. Trying to classify Shadow of the Colossus as “yet another boss-rush” would be like trying to classify Ico as “yet another puzzle-platformer;” perhaps it would be more accurate to describe both as cases where gameplay, as the vessel for storytelling, happens to be a series of boss fights for Shadow of the Colossus or a series of puzzle-platforming segments for Ico. Fumito Ueda himself claims that “They're not bosses… they’re more like inverted Zelda dungeons.” Labeling the colossi as nothing more than bosses would be doing a disservice to the layers of history that these colossi represent, these storied and often majestic creatures rudely awakened by a complete outsider. Moreover, transforming traversable dungeons into responsive boss encounters breathes life into the experience. You’re not just traversing this static, emotionless backdrop; you’re scaling this moving, living being that knows you’re trying to snuff out its existence, an end to justify the means of cruelty. The colossi serve more than just checkpoints at the end of sequences: they become the sequences, their identities firmly embedded within the few minutes spent observing, climbing, and slaying them up-close as they struggle to persist in the inevitability of the ritual. It lends this whole ordeal a layer of intimacy that simply wasn’t found in many action-adventure games of the time.

For this reason, I also think that trying to compare Shadow of the Colossus’ limited controls to other action-adventure titles of the time is ultimately a fool’s errand. This is not your typical power fantasy by any means; this is the classic tale of David vs Goliath, told sixteen times with various degrees of ambiguity. Despite the fantastical nature of your surroundings, Ueda sought to preserve a strong degree of realism to better capture the gravity of the player's actions. Wander is no glorious action superstar: his quest to slay the colossi regardless of whatever price must be paid reeks of desperation. It’s why his movement speed and jump feel so constrained, and why his sword thrusts feel sluggish at times. There’s a certain weight behind all his actions despite any pullback, and it fits perfectly alongside the sheer size and awe of the colossi. Their ability to swat Wander about like a flea, or send him flying just from a simple stomp, or even how Wander is bucked to and fro from simply trying to stay standing atop shaking colossi conveys fragility better than any spoken or written language ever could. Even the pain experienced by the player from tightly gripping upon the controller, just as Wander tightly clasps onto the colossi’s fur for dear life, plays right into the sheer tension of the encounter: it’s one of the purest expressions of controls as the extension of the body, just taken in the traditionally opposite direction to lend a sense of commitment behind every action taken in the moment.

What I think stumps traditional audiences, is that Shadow of the Colossus is a game that often makes you doubt yourself. It’s easy to lose faith against this hulking behemoth staring you right in the face that could sneeze on you and send you careening several feet away. Couple that with the thumping drums and clashing chords of tracks like Grotesque Figures and Liberated Guardian alongside overcast and dismal settings, and it’s no wonder that the player often feels disempowered. But that doesn’t mean you can’t turn the tides of battle. In fact, Shadow of the Colossus is a game that doesn’t simply coax adaptation, but rather, demands it through emergent solutions. When making mistakes can end up chipping away half your health bar or falling off the colossi entirely to restart preparation and climbing sequences that can take valuable minutes, every decision matters that much more. With Wander’s limited set of controls and tools (jump, climb, a dodge-roll, Agro, and your sword + bow and arrow), every factor in the environment must be considered… and Team Ico pulls this off effortlessly because not a single detail goes to waste. Anything even remotely distinct within the vicinity, including the bodies of the colossi themselves, are most likely a piece of the puzzle required to scale and discover any weaknesses. Moreover, the game keeps you on your feet despite maintaining its core design principles by varying practically every aspect of the colossi designs (including size, which affects their speed) as well as their respective environments, with few discernable patterns in the overall sequence, forcing players to reexamine their surroundings with every new encounter. In that sense, combat is laborious, but calculated: observation is often required to coax interactions that can get Wander into favorable positions, as the colossi AI follow sensible patterns that must be proc’d with specific player responses (i.e. shooting a colossi with an arrow will immediately draw their attention). The other half of the battle is maintaining patience and not losing your composure in the heat of the moment. As the frame rate buckles from the colossi consuming your screen space and the camera flies wildly about, conveying your character’s sheer difference in size so innately, you have to make quick judgement calls on how to preserve what little remains of your dwindling grip gauge through careful positioning (via plants and figuring out the best times & locations to let go and stand still) while never losing sight of your target. Through player perseverance, the fight reaches its climax with valuable player feedback in the form of impactful sword stabs and the triumphant horns of Revived Power. While some would complain that the game never lets you linger in celebration and in fact often leaves you exhausted, I would argue that experiencing that complex, emotional rush is a reward in itself. It is a game that is more than happy to beat you down and leave you feeling insignificant, yet never makes the task outright impossible, and its ability to evoke a variety of emotions while consistently challenging your perceptions is perhaps its most understated strength.

Speaking of challenging perceptions, one frequent complaint is that Shadow of the Colossus’ overworld is empty, with limited meaningful interaction. I reject this assertation that this feature is a weakness, because scattering collectibles and side-quests about the world would defeat the intended purpose of creating a “more realistic feeling of presence.” I also see a lot of players calling it an “open-world” title, and I think this descriptor is slightly misleading; the overworld simply exists to create time and space between each of the intense colossi encounters, and better convey the game’s sense of scale, rather than function as a simulated environment that lets players approach different objectives as they wish. Emptying the overworld of features outside of save shrines and the rare blue-tailed lizard/fruit while silencing the soundtrack (leaving only environmental noises and your horse’s gallop) allows Team ICO to centralize on the act of traversal itself as a form of meditative self-reflection while carefully zooming out and panning the camera to fully display the vastness of the forbidden land, further emphasizing the enormity of this alien world and situation that the wanderer cannot even begin to understand. As an extension of Ico’s core design philosophy of “design by subtraction,” Team Ico sought to remove any element that would distract from the central focus, such as “optional” colossi and excess NPCs. The latter was instead replaced with the sword’s light-beam locator, lending the lighting duality as both a contributing factor of ambience and a gameplay mechanic. As a result, I never did really understand why these long riding sections were often written off by so many; these segments provide a necessary catharsis for players to soak in the subtlety of everything happening around them while discreetly serving as a reminder that there was no place for them on this forsaken earth.

To be fair, it is slightly misleading referring to the player character as a lone wanderer when Ueda heavily stresses the relationship between Wander and his horse, Agro, a detail that often gets overlooked when players bring up the “poor horse controls.” An important distinction that must be made here is that you are not controlling Agro; you are controlling Wander, who is controlling Agro. Realism is again the focus: there’s a natural response time between Wander manipulating the reins and Agro’s subsequent shift in speed. Additionally, this more firmly establishes Agro’s distinct identity within the game, as she has her own AI-movement enabled algorithms that will allow her to proactively avoid danger and return to Wander even without the usual stimulus of Wander calling out. Want further proof of this in action? Try riding Agro over one of the land-bridges or through one of the world’s many forests, and take your thumb off of the left joystick; Agro will naturally steer herself forward and avoid any obstacle or ledge in the way whenever possible. As a result, players have to learn to trust Agro during more-involved riding sections, because attempting to exert too much control will lead to the player fighting the natural horse steering and getting more frequently stuck on geometry; as Ueda himself pointed out, this scheme was based off of the idea that a horse was both a “friend” and a “self-supporting vehicle.” This becomes especially paramount during certain fights where the player must aim and fire the bow and arrow while riding Agro to dodge attacks; these two actions both use the left joystick, and simultaneously juggling the two activities would become nigh on impossible if the player refused to lend Agro any agency during these encounters.

Finally, I’d like to address potential gripes that others may have regarding the storytelling of Shadow of the Colossus. Mind you, I’m not referring to the actual storyline or any particular interpretation of the narrative: I instead want to focus on the act of the storytelling itself. While I’ve heard from friends that the lengthy cutscenes setting up and closing out the game are not ideal, I personally do not believe that these interfere with the game’s pacing in any fashion. Not only do they serve as bookends that do not impact the core experience of switching between riding and scaling colossi, the ending cutscene also serves as a fantastic emotional denouement (during the credits, no less) tying all of your actions together as a nostalgic send-off to further reflect upon your time spent. The short cutscenes in-between the action, on the other hand, keep the player anticipating their next encounter while painting over the deaths of the colossi with the moral ambiguity that would come to characterize Shadow of the Colossus, all with practically no dialogue outside of these moments. It’s also important to note at this time that player control is not completely missing during these segments, because you can still manipulate the camera to some degree during cutscenes to maintain the impression of controllability. This seems to align with Ueda’s beliefs regarding interactivity, for with regards to possible interpretations of the story, Ueda had this to say: “I want them to direct the story themselves.” In this sense, Shadow of the Colossus’ limited storytelling and ambiguous themes make perfect sense, for rather than being a game constructed around a story, it is a story constructed around a game.

To close this off, I want to reiterate that Shadow of the Colossus is by no means flawless. Certain colossi fights take a bit more patience than others due to occasionally stubborn behaviors, rare but sudden frame rate drops in the overworld feel quite unwelcome, and I do have to admit that the fruits and blue-tailed lizards could be eliminated altogether with little consequence to the player. Regardless, many of Shadow of the Colossus’ foibles lend the overall experience a stronger sense of identity in how they meld emergent gameplay with understated storytelling, and are at worse, fairly understandable given how the game was so markedly ahead of its time. Having now completed my third playthrough, I do not believe that Shadow of the Colossus is in any way worthy of the descriptors “aged” or “outdated.” While it does require me to meet it on its own terms, its various innovations and design choices make complete sense once given the context of its scope, and its ability to "tackle any obstacles to building that empathy" remains practically unmatched. Shadow of the Colossus was exactly what it needed to be and accomplished exactly what it sought out to do in the time it was made, and to this day, remains a triumph for the medium with its ambitious yet realized integration of visuals and interaction.

If my thoughts seem somewhat pointed, I promise that this was not written with such intentions. I absolutely understand why others may become alienated or be afraid of everything that it represents; by its very nature, Shadow of the Colossus is a game that doesn’t have something for everyone. Perhaps that is what makes it so compelling to me: because there’s a real element of danger involved. It still feels like a miracle that something so blindingly unconventional yet so realized and unmistakably human and empathetic ever came to fruition in the first place, further challenging contemporary conventions in an era where well-known game developers had already pushed so far in their experimentation. Regardless of whether or not I’ve reached you, my message remains the same: throw away your expectations, and see for yourself what Fumito Ueda created all these years ago. Don’t worry if it’s not your thing; while it genuinely gives me no pleasure to see others struggle with my favorite game, I’ll still be proud that you gave it a fair shot. I only wish that everyone could see what I see in Shadow of the Colossus.

The good news about trying out Solar Ash is that it clicked immediately since it was not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeves: you’ve got skating mechanics inspired by Jet Set Radio, boss fights and designs inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, and a woozy ambient soundtrack alongside gooey and ethereal aesthetics captured in deep space. It’s not hard to decipher Heart Machine’s vision for the game. The bad news about trying out Solar Ash is that being so heavily inspired by two of my favorite games meant that I was both consciously and unconsciously comparing the game in every waking moment of my playthrough, and the cracks in the armor really started to show. Right away, the most obvious issue is the lack of subtlety. The game is so in-your-face with its lore and the overarching details that it fails to leave much room for individual player interpretation. The protagonist Rei is constantly commenting upon everything she comes across, and the audio logs that she stumbles upon where her old crewmates vividly describe the world’s demise don’t leave much up to imagination either. This over-explanation is further compounded by all the jargon thrown into the mix and the exaggerated voice acting, which not only confuses me, but also feels like the authors didn’t really tackle the tone properly; instead of sounding desperate, Rei instead comes off as somewhat angsty to me. The amount of effort put into flaunting all this detail feels quite unwarranted, considering that Shadow of the Colossus was more than happy to let players just linger in their own space and judge for themselves: what happened to “show, don’t tell” guys?

Further invited comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus make it evident to me that despite the reverence of its boss encounters, Solar Ash fails to emulate much of their appeal in any meaningful way. Nothing comes close to the volume swells present in Shadow of the Colossus, because there’s no focused build-up of anticipation when the player is too busy looking for plasma and voidrunner caches alongside traversal puzzles for destroying Anomalies, not to mention Rei’s stream of self-narration breaking up any prolonged moments of silence. More importantly, the boss fights themselves lack any stakes. Shadow of the Colossus emphasizes its sense of scale, as you carefully climb this larger-than-life creature while it desperately flails about, trying to shake you off before you snuff it out by plunging your sword into its vitals. Solar Ash on the other hand, may as well just be a casual Sunday drive through a Mario Kart course; the sigils have been replaced with temporary targets and context-sensitive grapple points, and most of the interaction boils down to holding forward on the joystick and jumping/grappling at the right time. You don’t even need to adjust the camera, because the game will automatically do that for you when you need to shift directions. Say what you want about Shadow of the Colossus’ ballistic camera during the colossi encounters, but it really lent the fights a sense of powerlessness and urgency during this desperate dance of death that Solar Ash lacks. To top this all off, consequences of failure are minimized in the latter; falling off or failing to hit a target in time just sends you back to a close checkpoint to the boss with only one hit point missing, and you can usually grapple right back on the boss to retry the phase within a minute or two. Considering that health boxes are scattered everywhere, you have to actively try to get a game over. It is kind of funny that the final boss fight doesn’t even provide you with a health bar for a potential game over: it’s a mere formality at that point.

The weird thing is, despite how streamlined the boss fights are in Solar Ash, there’s a real lack of polish from strange jank and design decisions elsewhere. Rei’s standard attack combo string consists of three attacks at a time, but the game likes throwing enemy variations at you that require four hits at a time (either a pair of smaller foes that each take two hits, or a singular medium baddy that takes four hits). The result is that you have to actively linger in the same space to completely finish off most enemies, and combat then noticeably interferes with the general flow of movement. Regarding lack of fluidity, I also have to agree with nex3’s point that it’s surprisingly easy to lose momentum altogether from strange collisions due to geometry. The strange momentum physics are reflected elsewhere too, such as when I noticed that jumping from the end of a rail resulted in significantly less momentum conserved than when Rei naturally slid off the rail instead. Finally, it’s kind of a shame that despite how much plasma is thrown at you and emphasized as the main collectible resource (to the point where one of the unlockable suits doubles your rate of plasma collection), there’s only one use for it: restoring a block of your health gauge’s max capacity after losing a cell every time you defeat a boss. In that sense, plasma feels rather superfluous, much like most of the game’s mechanics and features outside of its core traversal.

In spite of all this, I liked Solar Ash enough to complete a save file. I can’t help but feel bummed though, because I should have loved this. I had a good enough time just gliding about the surface of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and zooming about from rail to rail, but there’s so much stuff in-between that doesn’t seem to add anything pertinent to the base structure. I can’t see myself coming back to this for hardcore mode unfortunately, since it just seems like an artificially difficult no-hit playthrough with extra steps, though perhaps I’ll return someday to see if a speedrun challenge feels any better than a standard run. I find myself agreeing with quite a few others here: if practically everything minus the atmospheric visuals/soundtrack and core traversal mechanics were removed, you might actually have one of the most compact yet focused experiences of recent times. As it is now though? It’s just fine. It’ll always be I suppose.

Not too long ago, I was asked by a friend to describe the appeal of Gravity Rush, and it took me a while to come up with an answer. Was it a twist on the classic open-world sandbox? A physics-defying superhero simulator? Both of these descriptions are reasonable to some extent, but neither felt like a perfect characterization of what kept me hooked to my favorite Sony series exclusive. Then a few days later, I stumbled upon this list, and BeachEpisode’s description caught my eye: a platformer where you “tumble through the world with an elegance of a Ghibli movie.”

Just like that, it clicked. In the same way that VVVVVV is a deconstruction of the traditional 2D platformer, Gravity Rush to me feels like the natural progression of deconstructing the open-level 3D platformer. There’s still jumping between floating platforms of course, but the jumping is deemphasized. Instead, since larger objects serving as buoys don’t have pulls towards the center of gravity, it’s up to you to shift the flow of gravity as necessary to prevent yourself from “falling off" and maintain control. Therefore, every surface becomes a possible platform, limited only by your access to said surface and your gravity energy gauge.

Since you aren’t necessarily jumping between platforms, it may be easier to characterize movement in Gravity Rush between two modes: grounded running/sliding, and soaring through the air between grounded movement. With the gravity slide, the protagonist Kat can make tight turns while also easily sliding up surfaces to maintain momentum without needing to jump and re-shift. Meanwhile, aerial movement can be thought more simply as “falling with style” (which explains why Kat’s float is less of a dive without boosting with X and closer to a derpy freefall), but is surprisingly tight; with the ability to slightly adjust your falling orientation with the left joystick, and the ability to either slowly rotate the camera with controller gyro controls or more quickly with the right joystick, the seemingly simple “flying” provides a fairly strong degree of character control. It never feels too disorienting either, because Kat’s hair will always point towards the directed flow of gravity when floating in place, and the camera will naturally rotate back towards “right-side up” from tapping R1 to stop/shift gravity (or you can tap R3 at any time to immediately snap to that perspective). As such, the real challenge is optimizing movement by juggling the two different modes to maintain momentum while never completely depleting the energy gauge. Since gravity sliding uses less energy and spending enough time not shifting gravity (including simple grounded running/waiting or natural freefall) will refresh the gauge, figuring out exactly when to insert these moments in-between gravity shifting traversal alongside collecting blue gravity tokens becomes key to efficiently getting from point A to point B. It’s a deceptively simple yet realized set of controls that can feel overwhelming at first but becomes this thing of beauty once mastered; some might call it less cool since you’re really just flail-falling about, but as an old teacher of mine once asked, isn’t flying really just missing the ground over and over again?

It's for this reason that it becomes quite frustrating that Gravity Rush 2 seems almost afraid to utilize its greatest strength during certain grounded side-missions and a few segments of main story missions. The most obvious culprits here are the forced stealth segments that will immediately catch you upon floating upwards and getting spotted by guards. It unfortunately feels rather counter-intuitive that a game emphasizing freedom of control has a few segments here and there that artificially limit your movement options. There are also quite a few grounded missions that require you to mash the square button to repeatedly talk to NPCs in hopes that they’ll point you to the right direction; definitely not great, but they’re at least over quickly enough and do end up facilitating movement around the city once you’ve got your necessary info to proceed. The absolute worst mission in my opinion however, has to be “Behind the Scenes I,” which has you running through the city on foot while dodging enthusiastic fans; NPC spawns are randomly generated, which means there’s a degree of luck getting a clear enough path and not too many NPCs to where they can’t be easily avoided or jumped over/around. I respect Team Gravity’s ambition in trying to diversify their missions and definitely appreciate the comedy behind the concept, but even I thought this one stuck out like a sore thumb.

While we’re on the topic of complaints, the other glaring complaint I often hear regarding Gravity Rush 2 is that the game feels a bit more grindy than the original title. You’re not likely to pick up many precious gems during most story missions and side missions, so most of your stock is going to come from getting gold medals in challenges and thoroughly exploring the hub areas to snag all the collectibles. Even then, you most likely won’t have enough to thoroughly upgrade all of the combat systems, which is where mining missions come in. Once unlocked, Kat can take a boat to a gravity storm mine and destroy green ore for precious gems. This process can take a while considering that environments are fairly spacious and empty, and it’s not particularly interesting repeating the same mines over and over for those final purchases. To be fair, mining missions do at least provide gravity storms that will occasionally spawn in different bosses for Kat to fight, and can also snag you talismans to augment your abilities and boost certain aspects of combat and movement. As a side note, if you really care about the trophy and don’t care much about the above, it is possible to replay old missions instead to at least get this grind out of the way.

Now, having gotten my major reservations out of the way… I actually like this way more than Gravity Rush Remastered.

The first main reason that comes to mind is that combat definitely has a lot more meat on the bone. In the original Gravity Rush, the flying kick was king; just aim and fire until everything in your path was gone, and if you miss, just keep readjusting and firing until you win anyways. Meanwhile, the sequel significantly buffs your other attack options to where combat no longer feels linearized through abusing the flying kick. Gravity sliding is much easier to implement during combat, not only due to the tighter controls but also due to the addition of a sliding dodge. Stasis Field (telekinesis to grab and throw objects) has also been buffed with a larger range than before, can be used without any temporary immobilization, and allows you to pick up enemies outright to chuck at other foes. You can also hold down the circle button when throwing to produce a piercing projectile at the expense of some of the SP gauge. Finally, Stasis Field can also be used defensively to block physical and energy-based projectiles with the proper upgrades. To tie this all together, the unlockable/farmable talismans really do make a difference in providing that extra kick to your basic abilities (ex: by dealing more damage with attacks, increasing the lock-on range of the gravity kick, decreasing the amount of gravity energy used, etc), and can later be recycled or merged for even more potent combinations of boosts.

The real crux behind the deeper combat, however, is due to the presence of additional Gravity Styles which drastically alter Kat’s abilities. For instance, Lunar Style sacrifices power in exchange for more manueverability. The wormhole kick in particular lets you zoom in on enemies (which tackles the issue I had in the original, of faster flying enemies slightly moving out of the way and causing my kick to miss entirely) and can be used to teleport across the stage. Additionally, Projectiles fired with Lunar Style create lingering hitboxes once they hit their target, which can stun-lock individual enemies and knock off armor. Jupiter Style, on the other hand, slows down Kat’s standard grounded movement but in return, adds a lot more weight to Kat’s grounded combo attacks and allows you to charge up a kick that not only deals more damage, but can also create a shockwave upon impact that can eviscerate nearby foes for better crowd control. Similarly, you can charge and fire larger projectiles in Jupiter Style to instantly wipe out bulkier enemies. These two styles also affect Kat’s traversal options. Lunar will give you access to a quick long and low rocket Jump and a charged spring Jump for height, both of which can be chained off walls to maintain momentum. Meanwhile, Jupiter Style buffs Kat’s gravity slide, by not only increasing the base speed, but also granting Kat superarmor with the relevant final upgrade while allowing Kat to quickly slide-tackle enemies. As such, switching between the different styles (including the basic Normal style) grants Gravity Rush 2’s combat a bevy of different approaches to better handle varied mobs while also adding additional depth to Kat’s movement in-between.

The next improvement surprised me; believe it or not, despite my earlier complaints towards some of the missions, I actually do think that missions on the whole have also been improved. I’ve been a bit harsh so far regarding the missions that I don’t like, but the truth is that most of these feel relatively inoffensive or at the very least, not very intrusive. Stealth missions are quickly bypassed by running past enemies, taking them out one by one, or walking on walls outside of enemy vision. Mining missions, as brought up earlier, can be mostly ignored if you’re willing to grind the aforementioned old story missions for upgrades instead (and in fact, if you don’t care about the trophy or maxing out every single stat, you’ll get enough gems and talismans for the crucial abilities from other side/main missions anyways with little detriment towards movement/combat). It also helps that upgrades to the gravity gauge and health bar have been decoupled from the gems system altogether, and will naturally be augmented from completing story and side missions (as opposed to the original, which only increased the upgrade capacity cap for completing missions), thus providing a stronger incentive to tackle all the game’s sprawling content while lessening the need to gem grind. Granted, I still can’t defend Behind the Scenes I given how many times I had to restart due to bad RNG, but it’s more of an anomaly amongst better arcadey challenges that are otherwise great at testing your combat and movement optimization.

Having said that, there are some great side missions in Gravity Rush 2 that more than make up for the duller moments. One fan-favorite is the cake delivery mission, where Kat has to deliver fragile packages with Lunar Style using plenty of spring and rocket jumps to maneuver around skyscrapers, all the while dealing with recipients begging her for “the good stuff” and dodging attacks from your voracious best friend Raven. My absolute favorite though, has to be the first movie star mission, where a non-powered Kat must play the role of Battle Nurse through the filming of various scenes; the irony of a super-powered protagonist acting as a stunt double for a superhero film without her gravity powers definitely does not escape me. Not every side mission hits of course, but the vast majority of them grant you interesting avenues to exploit Kat’s various movement and combat abilities in a different fashion, and it’s still absolutely heartwarming and adorable to see Kat stumble and bumble her way through all these absurd scenarios while helping so many others along the way; in that sense, Gravity Rush’s side missions actually remind me a ton of my recent playthrough of Yakuza 0 and all the wild sub-stories that it had to offer.

Perhaps that’s the best way to explain my love of this franchise, as I could honestly nitpick the game all day. Gravity Rush 2 suffers from a similar issue to its predecessor in that the FOV feels a bit too constrained at times, which becomes particularly noticeable when you crash into a wall and the camera gets uncomfortably close during areas with tight corridors. Special moves are a strange combination of busted and janky; the Spiraling Claw does tons of damage between enemy clusters but often gets you stuck on walls, the Gravity Typhoon is just a quickfire projectile chuck that is often detrimental in the long-run since it strips the environment of possible projectiles for Stasis Field, and both are essentially rendered obsolete by the Micro Black Hole, which will outright destroy any enemies in Kat’s vicinity. Finally, I have some problems with the pacing here and there, particularly in how the beginning is rather sluggish (without many opportunities to really abuse your gravity shifting powers) while the endgame is quite rapid-fire and blows through multiple story chapters in the course of a couple hours.

Despite all of that, I absolutely adore this game. I have to admit that I don’t really mind that most of the missions are just some combination of flying around and beating up enemies, because Team Gravity does a much better job disguising all this by slightly varying your specific tasks during missions to better facilitate the satisfying bread-and-butter movement + combat without levels feeling too rote. It helps that the core game-feel is greatly accentuated with the little touches like how the wind rumbles around you while boosting, or how falling and landing from great distances creates an earth-shattering boom that stuns you temporarily unless you land and roll with R2. So much of the world feels like it was constructed with such love and care to the point where I’m willing to overlook much of the jank and many of the dips. The environmental storytelling of all the various locales, the little bits of chaos that ensue as casualties of Kat’s gravity powers (from accidentally launching NPCs about to destroying parts of the environment from shifting and landing all over the place), the little responses here and there from other civilians when Kat makes gestures at them… there’s so many details that ultimately bring everything together. I especially appreciate being able to revisit Hekseville again from the original Gravity Rush; it was quite nostalgic catching up with all the familiar locations and characters while understanding how new events played a role into shaping subtle differences. Sure, the story takes so many twists and turns that at times you wonder if anything’s ever played straight in the first place, but there’s this undercurrent of sincerity that keeps you invested throughout the game’s entirety. The final chapter after the fake credits was the perfect way to tie this all up, resolving a lot of the resounding questions left after the ending of the original Gravity Rush while giving Kat & friends the opportunity they needed to go out with an emotional climax.

At the end of the day, there is simply nothing like the Gravity Rush series. No game before or after has ever felt this exhilarating to me, zooming around these anachronistic floating isles and kicking major ass against these shadowy creatures while having fun with friends made along the way. Even despite the missing online functionality, the core solo experience feels just that memorable to me. It’s rare that a game fills me with the same sheer sense of wonder and discovery since the first time I ever completed Okami, nonetheless while considering all the various imperfections involved. Perhaps this game is the perfect encapsulation of a Japan Studio title: an innovative spin on a classic genre that pushed its concepts to their very limits while effortlessly exuding charm. In spite of all the lack of polish here and there, Gravity Rush 2 manages to stay true to itself, and most importantly, never forgets what makes games so much fun in the first place. I’ll forever be saddened at the loss of my favorite Sony developer, because this game deserved so much more. Nevertheless, as long as red apples keep falling from the sky, the seed of hope will find a way to keep hitting us somehow.

For all the survival horror that I've dabbled with over the past few years, this is the title that made me the most cognizant of the "survival" aspect. It’s this elaborate balancing act of juggling every limited resource at your disposal: ammo for bosses and enemies, kerosene to burn necessary corpses after downing zombies to secure routes, health items as fail safes, ink ribbons to save when deemed necessary, and most importantly, inventory space to minimize backtracking with the bare minimum (knowing what you’re likely to use up as you progress so you have enough room to forage). What’s key to all of this is that it’s often worthwhile not downing zombies at all to not only conserve ammo, but also prevent the possibility of a more dangerous Crimson Head when kerosene is not only limited but requires further planning for refueling and additional inventory slots (lighter + flask). It’s punishing, but in the best way possible; damage and death become instruments of observation to properly plan out backtracking and understanding exactly what goes where. Perhaps my favorite example of this in action was abusing the various doors in a room connecting the shed corridor with a safe room; by quickly going in and out of the entrances, I could not only reset a Hunter’s awareness and spawn, but also place myself in a position where I could immediately run at the Hunter to proc an attack and slip past every time. It certainly helps, regardless, that there’s plenty of leeway for careful experimentation, thanks to all of the scattered health items about the mansion (granted, often requiring careful planning to optimize grounded herbs in rooms and keeping enough inventory space open for trips). It’s also fairly firm at setting its boundaries by telegraphing enemy placement far in advance with rattling doors/windows to signify enemy shifts, background moaning when a zombie is present in the room, and even environmental noises like crunching fallen glass to make up for the lack of vision with fixed camera angles.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the horror has been neglected. If anything, I found this game far more unsettling beyond sudden surprises. It’s not so much the fear of the unexpected, but rather, the lingering fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while you’re expecting the unexpected. They're scripted events, sure, but they're well disguised thanks to every room often acting as its own isolated microcosm without the presence of the protagonist (not to mention that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the middle of things and forget about each individual room, which makes it all the more viscerally shocking) and there's still a feeling of player control with careful planning and routing. This fits perfectly alongside its core philosophy of risk versus reward, the existential dread of having to backtrack through several zombie infested corridors when you realize you forgot an inventory key and having to constantly and deliberately throw yourself into tight situations just to save another trip across the map. It’s what makes this such an ideal speedrunning game: not necessarily because of satisfying movement or combat, but because Resident Evil is really a game about time management. Every second wasted tromping through another passageway is time that could contribute to a zombie reviving as a Crimson Head or another second spent replaying if you’re not willing to use that extra ink ribbon. The primal fear arising from guaranteed safety as a fleeting resource lends perfectly to the need for optimization; in that sense, pressuring players into constantly checking the map to avoid confrontations and getting lost goes hand in hand with spending as little time as possible, for nothing is more terrifying than having to rewind the simulations in your head for another go.

I can’t help but feel that every detail of this game was thought down to the bone, even the original tank control scheme. That’s right, I’m actually defending tank controls for once in my life… how the turns have tabled. Dodging enemies can seem tougher, but most are conveniently placed near corners and more open areas to give you the room necessary to dodge with a backstep/quick burst to the side if you’re willing to wait and bait committal attacks. More importantly, using tank controls lets you maintain your direction and momentum while running through different camera angles of a room. With alternate controls, you most likely have to hold down the joystick to maintain velocity and upon a new camera angle, will have to quickly retap to keep the intended direction with each new angle. This becomes paramount in tighter chase sequences, where even slight moments of stagnation can lead to damage/death, as well as one timed puzzle where I had to press a button and then quickly run through several fixed angles to get into position to push a statue. In addition, I found it rather difficult to reliably walk (as opposed to running full-time) with alternate controls over tank controls, which can absolutely backfire during an end-game sequence where running for a prolonged period can trigger an explosion during nitro delivery. Therefore, the circumstances created by the environment not only are doable with tank controls, but in fact necessitate the usage of such controls.

Everything just comes together as this tightly designed package. Puzzles have fairly evident tells and can be figured out with careful observation of the surroundings while facilitating the inventory scramble that plays so heavily to the game’s survival elements. The lore never feels overbearing or excessive, and does a great job weaving in hints for crafting approaches and figuring out exactly what has to be accomplished. There’s never an explicit timer on screen outside of the final ending segment, yet the game is great at creating circumstances where you’re forced to make decisions on the fly from environmental stressors and considering the mansion not just on a per room basis, but as a sum of its parts. I genuinely don’t think I have any gripes; it was more than happy to beat me down, but understanding its parameters to scale up against its challenges was an incredibly fulfilling experience. I’d damn well say that REmake is the most focused and cohesive survival horror experience I’ve ever played. Not just a perfect remake, but perhaps a practically perfect game.

A return to form for Rain Games. While World to the West stretched its exploration to the limits of tedium, with tons of tiring backtracking inbetween and a lack of a satisfying finish to tie things up, Teslagrad 2 feels much more like the true successor to the original metroidvania puzzle platformer thanks to its snugly contained world and understated narrative. This time however, there's a lot more depth to the package thanks to the emphasis on movement mechanics. The game does a great job wordlessly demonstrating all the different uses of each unlockable ability through classic obstacle escalation (starting with simple polarized magnets, then introducing polarity tunnels, ziplines, throwable magnetic blocks, and much more), throwing the player into a variety of different situations that facilitate the usage of these different tools. As a result, it feels less like trial and error and more like a constant stream of progression. Furthermore, it's great at keying you in on the multifaceted nature of your unlocks, such as being able to use the magnetized throwing axe as both a door destructor and as a pivot that you can launch yourself off of to reach new heights. The highlight here is the slide tackle, which once unlocked, allows you to quickly traverse boost rails and loops/valleys to quickly shoot yourself into the air or across vast expanses. It's not afraid to lean into this momentum-focused exploration either, with some optional time trials that unlock even more hidden abilities like directional blink and double jump that certainly aren't necessary to clear the base game, but become super useful if you're just looking to fly through the environment and find every hidden battery.

There's only a few minor complaints this time around. Firstly, there's no fast travel, so backtracking upwards after falling a bit can take a bit more time due to less of an emphasis regarding vertical movement potential. This is at least mitigated thanks to all the secret tunnels, waterfalls (allowing quick blinking through water), and ziplines that can be activated to quickly backtrack this seemingly expansive world while stumbling upon secrets along the way. Secondly, boss fights have been mostly improved with the addition of shield generations before each fight, allowing you to take a second hit (so there's a bit more leeway, giving you more time to adapt to boss strategies on the fly), though the fights are still mostly quite static (dodge a wave of attacks and strike back, rinse and repeat) and require a lot more waiting than anything else. Finally, the slide tackle and the ground-pound are mapped to the same key, which can make momentum conservation a little more tricky when you're trying to retain your sliding state but suddenly grind to a halt and shoot downwards once there's enough height between you and the ground. I did eventually get used to this, but it would have been nice if there were any ability to separate the two actions from the same input and allow for separate rebinds.

Regardless, this definitely feels like a step forward from the original Teslagrad, which felt somewhat unassuming and at times felt a bit awkward and sluggish given the emphasis on magnetic puzzle solving over platforming in a fairly linear environment. The richly detailed backgrounds and the heavy environmental storytelling via the collectible batteries and various heirlooms in the backdrops further compliment the game's confidence; it's fairly comfortable leaving the player to their own devices and letting them explore the playground at their own pace, with tons of toys to mess around with. It definitely helps that the time trials come with fantastic bonus incentives, and that completing all the trials also unlocks a secret map for scrounging those last pesky batteries, as is the hidden boss that serves as its own reward once you've experienced all that the world has to offer. The price tag may seem steep to some, given that it only took me 6 and a half hours to 100%, but the joy of zipping around the world is more than enough incentive for me to consider a future replay. It's a more than worthy send-off for Lumina's journey that will remain as one of my favorite surprises of 2023, and definitely one of the better metroidvanias I've ever played.

It recently dawned upon me that Teslagrad 2 came out about a week ago, but then I noticed that the main character, Lumina, was actually one of the starting characters from World to the West, a mostly forgotten title that was dubbed "a standalone followup of Teslagrad." I find this description to be rather misleading despite the relationship, because I don't think the two play or feel similarly at all. The original Teslagrad was a fairly compact and straightforward 2D metroidvania platformer; sure, it wasn't anything groundbreaking at the time and some of the boss fights were annoying, but it knew exactly what it wanted to be and accomplished just that in its short runtime. World to the West on the other hand, is much more ambitious, focusing on the exploration of a sprawling map in a connected top-down overworld (think: 2D Zelda dungeoneering set in a faraway landscape), but with its own twist of simultaneously utilizing four different protagonists to thoroughly comb the different environments and save the world from imminent destruction. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a glaring fundamental issue: at no point does your gang of four ever feel like a cohesive unit.

Every character essentially acts on their own; they have their own separate health gauge (with any health augmentations only applying to the character that collects said powerup), they all have their own save data of collected totems that can be used as fast travel/checkpoint poles, and you can only control one character at a single time. To switch between characters, you must backtrack to any totem and switch-off at those points to other characters which may be located anywhere across the map depending on where you left them beforehand. The result is that World to the West feels less like a Cookie & Cream like, which requires simultaneous juggling of multiple entities on the same screen to clear paths, and instead functionally resembles Donkey Kong 64 and its respective character-swap system.

It's a real shame, because on paper, it's actually pretty fun controlling each individual protagonist. Your four different characters all have different abilities and physiques to take advantage of varying scenarios across the map. Lumina the Teslamancer can quickly blink through bars/over gaps and power switches, Knaus the orphan can tunnel under hazards/walls and ice skate across water, Miss Teri the explorer has a scarf to grapple across ledges and can mind-control local wildlife to do her bidding, and Lord Clonington the pugilist can shatter barriers and quickly scale walls. In practice, however, the circumstances often interfere with your degree of control; every environment should be navigable by each protagonist, but that doesn't mean that every protagonist can reach that destination within each particular sector of the map alone. Oftentimes, the different paths that the protagonists must take are greatly stratified to the point where individual characters must backtrack several rooms down to access a completely different path for the same destination. The resources for all characters are too spread apart here for everyone to fully function as expected on each screen, and this flaw is further exacerbated because many of the necessary paths are gated by character specific obstacles that require you to travel out of your way to steer other protagonists that already have their pathing figured out elsewhere. The map is also quite bare and doesn't show any symbols to indicate specific protagonist-coded obstacles, so you may want to keep a notepad on hand so you don't forget about what lies in the way and can clear the necessary obstacles as soon as possible.

To sum this issue up, obstacles are often strewn about "unrelated" paths that block off other characters, and are not telegraphed in advanced or even marked upon discovery, which means that you have to further backtrack to totem poles to switch characters. That's of course, assuming that you've already made it to said totem pole with the necessary character to break down said barrier, because totem pole progress is character-specific, so chances are, you'll have to figure out another path just to get that character to the necessary checkpoint to begin the process anew. It's this vicious cycle of having to constantly check the scant map and slowly moving characters back and forth between new checkpoints that you know exist but don't have saved (because the story chapters just focus on one or two characters moving around specific sections of the map at a time), and then ferrying across every single character to slowly inch across the overworld once you figure out your new destination or need to collect another battery (15 required to unlock a mandatory gate) to progress the plot. Do you enjoy playing the same map four different times just to get your whole party from point A to point B? That's what this felt like the entire time.

The payoff just isn't there to justify this padding. Outside of the scripted story events where a couple characters interact at any given time to unlock new abilities, there's never any sense of camaraderie between your four protagonists; you can talk to any unused character while they're resting at a specific totem pole, and that's all the extra dialogue you will ever get. Since characters generally end up traveling their own paths between each destination (with the common exception of removing barriers for other characters, one step at a time), there's never any sense of cooperation outside of those scant moments and it feels less like Dungeon Duos and more like Octopath Traveler. The pacing feels like the final nail in the coffin here, with the first eight chapters just focusing on one or two specific characters at a time and making sure the player understands the abilities of each character; you don't really get let loose until chapter nine, which ends up taking over 50% of the run time since it then becomes mandatory to more thoroughly explore the overworld with the full party available to reach the final chapter. It's over in a flash once you've reached this point of no return; the final boss is fairly straightforward (and I would argue, easier than many of the story fights earlier on) and the dialogue-free ending cutscene afterwards leaves a lot to be desired.

Needless to say, I could not be bothered to 100% this game. There's a nice little backstory regarding the land's lore revealed from collecting all the different batteries, but I was absolutely exhausted from having to play the same areas over and over again within such a short time span and my goodwill only eroded every time I had to backtrack further to find alternative paths of travel. It definitely doesn't help that a lot of the unlockable treasure chests scattered throughout just provide coin that as far as I can tell, serve no use other than buying maps to find more batteries that I'd naturally stumble upon through discovery anyways. The lack of meaningful interaction between the cast and the underwhelming send-off was just the cherry on top of this unrealized jumble that could have been so much more. Thankfully I'm still looking forward to Teslagrad 2 from the little I've played so far, but as it stands, this will remain the tale of how the West was lost.

I spent a lot of time editing this review with Pangburn and discussing the game's various aspects thoroughly with him. Thanks again for all the help!

I’ll get my major gripes out of the way first: many of them are due to potential areas of improvement in Yakuza 0’s combat. I admit that I’m not a huge fan of the Style System, which felt underwhelming to me because it usually results in spreading myself too thin while locking the best abilities until the very late game. Money is a bit harder to come by in the early game (unless you can consistently win against the roaming enemy Mr Shakedown, who can just as easily bankrupt you upon defeat if you aren’t prepared with the adequate combat upgrades), and each combat style is tuned to adapt for specific situations (i.e. Rush Style is agile and allows Kiryu to quickly slip behind single enemies and bog them down with attacks, while Beast Style is often better at handling multiple foes by picking up large objects and swinging them for effective crowd control). However, a lot of the valuable defining traits for specific styles (i.e. Iron Gut on Beast Style to guard against knife/gun attacks, or Quickstep Blow on Rush Style for quick evasion into powerful attacks) cost significantly more than previous steps (2 million yen for Rank 2 abilities to 30 million yen for the above Rank 3 abilities), so I felt incentivized to invest equally into the different styles instead of trying to specialize. As a result, my characters felt somewhat lacking through most of the game’s runtime, since I had to split my investments equally between the different styles to accommodate for different situations (and thus often lacking crucial abilities). Eventually, the three-style system becomes effectively superseded once your protagonists finish their main side-quest lines and unlock a “true” 4th style reminiscent of prior entries in the series that combines traits of the previous styles, which to me seems to only further highlight how insignificant progress within the style system can feel.

Enemy variety is also rather bland in the Yakuza games (most likely due to the beat-em-up structure), which in turn further homogenizes combat. Most enemies are simple grunts around your size that will charge at you with standard close range attacks. Some will try and stagger you with knives and swords, a few have tasers on hand, and near the late game, a couple of enemies will have guns. While tasers and guns can stunlock you and force you to mash to stand back up, you can just pay for the corresponding expensive upgrade in each style to nullify stuns altogether. As such, I ended up fighting every enemy as if they were functionally the same, and once I purchased the necessary unlocks, tearing through them like paper became a simple task. The only time I had to accommodate for a different enemy type occurred during specific story missions, where sometimes larger grunts with superarmor appear that actively require baiting and punishing. Otherwise, most non-boss combat starts to all blend together, and it never quite hits that sweet spot between mindlessly mashing to take out scores of enemies or getting tossed around like a salad by guns and tasers.

There’s also a weapons system involved in all this, but it feels rather extraneous. There’s never any real need for weapons given the functional homogeneity of most of the enemies. Moreover, many of the combat scenes in the game are placed in locations with plenty of breakable loose objects lying astray that often serve that exact purpose as is. Additionally, weapons have a durability counter, and to repair weapons, you either have to use Repair Kits (which are obtained randomly from Dream Machines) or trek to the local Dragon & Tiger. The actual fees involved are a trifle considering how much money you’ll end up earning, but having to waste tons of time farming Repair Kits from Dream Machines to fix your weapon in the middle of combat or spend time outside of combat walking back and forth from the Dragon & Tiger is a pain in the ass. As such, I basically never bothered with weapons in-game, save for the one quest with Simon where you have to purchase and farm weapons & materials/recipes from Dragon and Tiger (and that is a whole different time-consuming RNG endeavor altogether, though again, it never felt crucial due to how little I used weapons).

If there’s one silver lining to all this, it’s that the combat never truly felt like a significant barrier to me due to its simplicity. It becomes pretty straightforward to cheese and simplify combat once you figure out the easiest strategies for each protagonist. Majima’s Breaker style was fantastic at stunlocking enemies due to how many hitboxes got thrown out in each cycle, and later on, Slugger became my go-to because the extended X-X-X-Y-Y cartwheel combo broke every enemy’s stance and was actually positive on hit in every story fight I encountered on Normal difficulty. Meanwhile, Kiryu’s Beast style quickly became my mainstay; picking up large objects and batting away foes was a bit too overpowered most of the time. As mentioned previously, the quick crowd control options, alongside better defensive tools such as superarmor, provided Beast Style with most of the utility necessary to clear the majority of the game’s standard fights. Thus, even if combat was uninteresting most of the time, it was at least over quickly enough to where I could proceed with little stress, especially when utilizing stamina drink stockpiles for powering through damage.

I’ll give Yakuza 0 some credit though, as a few of the boss fights were engaging enough to leave a mark on me. The Kuze fights are a huge highlight here, considering that his first fight resulted in my first game-over, and it was extremely satisfying performing visibly better with each consecutive fight, especially since a few of these fights are no-frills 1v1 fights that forced me to rely upon more of my toolkit. In particular, I found Kuze and other bosses to be far more aggressive and willing to combo me for larger damage margins and chipping away at my health while I was knocked down. Defensively, they were more up to par too, with much more emphasis placed upon quick dodges and guards to nullify my lighter attacks. The final boss fight for Kiryu takes the cake for my favorite boss encounter overall given how the different phases mirror Kiryu’s own abilities, and it put a smile on my face when I realized that they were willing to pull the exact same stunts that I had also been abusing in combat. In particular, I couldn’t stop smirking during the second phase of the final boss, when my opponent began picking up tables and chairs to slam and hurl at me. It’s a very visceral yet humanizing way to top off the game, and I do wish that more of the other fights had enemies that were willing to resort to similar underhanded tactics to highlight just how dirty the crime world can get.

That said, you’re not really here for the mostly inoffensive combat: the real bulk of the game is everything else, more specifically the various interactions between every other system in the game including the different connecting narratives and side/substories. Perhaps that is the true strength behind the franchise: no one system stands out above the others, and as a result it becomes something much more than the sum of its parts. It may sound like a weakness, and it is a major weakness of many games that try to do everything at once, yet Yakuza 0 escapes this pitfall because everything is seamlessly and inexorably linked.

A lot of this is in part due to the centralization of progression systems within the game. Everything is linked to exorbitant amounts of money, which is not only thematically appropriate but also results in all grinding leading to the same collected pool. Money can be earned through fights, certain sidegames, and most importantly, Kiryu’s real estate and Majima’s cabaret club. In turn, money is used to upgrade your characters (and weapons) for fights, pay for entering certain sidegames as well as upgrading necessary materials for better performance, and paying for properties and staff in your respective side gigs. I was afraid at first that the existence of all these different activities would result in a million different systems that I’d have to memorize and optimize for different purposes, but since they all feed back into the same resource, everything you do ultimately results in some form of progress towards the same end goal, resulting in a much more focused experience than what I had first assumed on a surface level.

To expand upon the two main side stories, Kiryu and Majima must essentially fight rival head honchos of each section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori through the collection of landshare/influence. Kiryu can purchase certain properties in each area to later invest and gain dividends, while Majima can partner with properties to increase Club Sunshine’s fanbase and gain more notoriety during cabaret club nights. As the player gains more control over each sector, more of the background behind the opposing head honchos is revealed until inevitable confrontation occurs, usually in the form of a minigame/street fight for Kiryu and a “club battle” for Majima where Club Sunshine must outcompete its opposition while enduring enemy abilities. These side stories feed right into the overall progression system, since they provide a reliable source of income as well as an incentive to engage in outside activities and explore the two hub areas for staff and valuable resources. As mentioned previously, the definitive and more overpowered 4th fighting style unlocked from completion is a great cherry on top of this whole endeavor.

Aiding all of this are the numerous substories scattered throughout the two main hubs. No side quests are marked immediately on the map with markers when you first start new chapters; instead, you have to unlock them by stumbling into the correct section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori or by engaging in certain activities long enough. Once you do unlock these side quests, actually fulfilling them is simple enough, since blue question box markers will appear on the map showing you where to head next to progress. The result is that exploration in the overworld opens up fairly organically; the player is incentivized to wander about naturally without any pressure to eliminate all the lit up checkpoints on the map from the start. Additionally, side quests often are completed in spurts, and players often have to travel outside of a given quest’s area to activate its next section on the map, meaning that they have a choice of whether or not they want to continue seeing the quest through at that very moment or spend time elsewhere and return to that sidequest later. Finally, completing sidequests can lead to unlocking other related side quests as well as gaining aforementioned helpful staff, properties, and useful items (such as an encounter finder, to track down street fights more easily). Yet, there’s no single substory that feels so important in terms of personal or monetary gain that players have to go out of their way to fulfill all necessary conditions for it. By doing this, Yakuza 0 never imposes and merely suggests; players can complete and explore as much as they wish with little negative externalities if they choose not to go all the way.

To add on the above, the actual activities themselves are designed in a way where there’s just enough depth to allow for significant improvement if players choose to dedicate more time to their favorite pastimes, but again, not too much depth to where it takes an eternity and a half to master certain activities. For instance, consider the bowling minigame. It’s quite simple to pick up: you can adjust your ball’s weight, starting position, trajectory, and power, with the obvious caveat that heavier balls are tougher to aim but better at retaining momentum. You don’t necessarily need to keep close track of every option to succeed and best your buddies in three-frame sets, but there are nice little side rewards in the form of completion points (CP) (which can be used at shrines to unlock unnecessary yet helpful little abilities such as longer dashing times and more Nouveau Riche encounters to fight for more cash) for bowling ten strikes. Further plays also increase friendship with the attendant there, which will result in a sidequest that allows you to recruit a chicken as staff for your real estate firm once you bowl a turkey. There’s also a separate side mode called Split Game where you have to more carefully aim your ball across special split pin arrangements that allows you to earn more cash and a potential CP. Again, there’s plenty of optional rewards that are great for upgrading your character and systems if you choose to invest a bit of time here and there, but even then, more grindy minigames are optional to the point where they become unobtrusive; as such, you can switch between a multitude of different activities with little consequence whenever your current focus starts to wear you down.

The story can also be thought of as another of the game’s smaller systems, thanks to how it never feels particularly intrusive. After clearing the first chain of events in Chapter 1 as well as the associated tutorials, the main introductions take a step back and you can begin messing around with the aforementioned sidequests and minigames. The game is very good at telegraphing exactly when the player needs to be committed to the story and when they are free to meander about; at no point does the game ever feel like it is forcing you to put down what you are doing at that exact moment in time to return to the main storyline. At the same time, progressing through the story events is greatly streamlined whenever the player needs to do so. Therefore, despite the main storyline’s linearity, the game manages to retain a visage of non-linearity; the wide variety of activities available at any given time allow you to swap between the story and optional content effortlessly at your heart’s content.

Just as there’s a balance between story progression and player-driven exploration, there’s a certain balance struck in the game’s tone that’s present throughout each narrative thread weaving into one another that exemplifies an undercurrent of sincerity. The central plotline jumps back and forth between Kiryu’s struggles escaping the Dojima family after being framed for murder, and Majima’s struggles serving as a blackmailed affiliate of his old yakuza family while seeking release from his gilded cage. Both are constantly caught in increasingly absurd scenarios by old friends and random strangers alike, and play fantastic straight men juxtaposed to the sticky situations that they must resolve. Alongside this, RGG Studio balances frenzied street brawls between topless yakuza members with dramatic scenes of characters pouring their hearts out. Even the substories carefully walk this tightrope between cheesiness and earnestness: one of my personal favorites has to be Stadium Jumper Strut, where you have to escort a guy whose dream is to walk across Iwao Bridge. He begs for Majima’s assistance, for every time he tries, he is beaten up by thugs because he refuses to take off his stajun jacket that’s riling them up. It’s an absolutely ridiculous premise, yet even I had to admit that sealing the deal with the life lesson of “pursuing dreams regardless of what others think” put a smile on my face. Camp meets candor time and time again, and as a result, Yakuza 0 never feels too sarcastic or too overbearing; it’s a cozy and compelling mix that kept me hooked during every story beat throughout.

There’s so much more I could say regarding Yakuza’s imperfections thanks to its many ambitions. There’s a forced stealth section that feels a bit clumsy since you have to guide and protect an escort at the same time. To do so, you must hide amongst crowds to avoid detection by patrolling foes, and this becomes a bit awkward since enemies can spot you from far away and enter/leaving crowds has a noticeably long animation with a forced delay between entering and leaving, so staying out of these optional fights is much more tricky in practice. Majima’s cabaret management progression feels not quite as well-integrated, since it’s actually possible to keep gaining fans by playing the club minigame over and over without purchasing properties, and the final stretch requires a bit more grinding as preparation to avoid your hostesses losing all their HP from the opposing club’s special ability. Finally, special moves can be taught by mentors through their respective side missions, and while Majima’s mentor missions are fantastic (Fei Hu’s lessons are a thrill, having to adapt against his quick Kali Sticks and Nunchakus), Kiryu’s mentor missions feel a bit squandered and too by-the-books. My favorite mentor missions there would have to be Miss Tatsu’s training, which involves puzzles where you have to destroy crates for money while eliminating mannequins with guns. It’s a bit more clunky than expected, since you often don’t have enough time to react and throw/dodge when picking up boxes to attack these targets, but it’s definitely an interesting thought exercise of what could have been and it helps that it’s accompanied by a track that quite frankly puts the main Beast Style theme to shame.

Yet at the end of the day, I have to wonder how much these nitpicks matter in the overall scheme of things. I came into Yakuza 0 wanting to fight Kuze and experience a change in pace, and I left feeling quite emotionally invested and fulfilled considering how much time I wasted cheering to x3 Shine and flaunting my new disco moves to Let’s Dance I Wanna Take You Home. While I have to admit that I can’t see myself 100%ing the game anytime soon, and I’m not quite ready to dive into the rest of the series lest the experience begins to outstay its welcome, I’m more than content leaving everything as it stands. It’s obviously doing something right if I’ve managed to spend over 70 hours messing around with everything that even mildly interested me without any single aspect feeling too disjointed or particularly irritating. My fears that Yakuza 0’s wide appeal was an indicator of numerous hours of padding and shallow interaction between systems appear to have been unfounded, and needless to say, I can wholeheartedly recommend Yakuza 0 despite the rough patches. I’m looking forward to the inevitable YaKuze spinoff where we get to play as the old man in the profession where men tend to die young.

While going through Warioware: Touched! last year, I had my fair share of criticisms, mainly that the game felt somewhat trivial since every microgame was some form of poke + drag (or in the case of the mic games, just yelling til I won). On a surface level, it would appear that the other major Nintendo minigame collection series, Rhythm Heaven, falls into the same trap, since every game appears to be tap and flick, but I don't find that to be true. Quite the opposite in fact, as Rhythm Heaven DS is extremely challenging, yet super satisfying and fair.

Rhythm Heaven succeeds where I think Warioware: Touched! falls flat, because the former is much more subtle about mixing up devices to introduce an organic difficulty curve than the latter. Every minigame's gimmick is conveyed via some combination of call & response, memorizing rhythmic motifs, and recognizing appropriate audio & visual cues. This difficulty then gets ramped up, both within minigames and throughout the game's progression, by introducing new or different elements that alter how the mechanics are presented and utilized in some fashion, but ultimately retaining the core fundamentals. For instance, you might have to play "in the dark" for certain sections of minigames and rely heavily upon audio cues, or have to deal with sudden (yet firmly telegraphed) tempo shifts with tougher rhythmic variations, or even shift the backing melody or player actions to the off-beat to keep the player honest and in-tune with the minigame's workings. This, combined with the simple yet realized controls of tap, hold, and flick (lending itself naturally to syncopation from tap/hold + flick alongside quick note playing from tapping) allows for a much more robust toolkit and strengthened intricate designs for a broadly diversified minigame ecosystem. Even if all these different rhythm games revolve around the same theme (i.e. finding the natural flow and beat in simple and often mundane tasks), they all manage to stand out from one another despite seemingly simple controls because the rhythms at which they are executed from one another can be so drastically varied and iterated upon.

The attention to detail is especially evident within the remix microgames at the end of each five game minigame chain. These finales add a fresh coat of paint to the previous four microgames (and once you get past the initial 30, sometimes even more than just four) and putting players' execution and knowledge banks to the test while ferrying them between the different concepts with ease. There's an overlying melody to the whole affair, just played with a different filter for each specific minigame type, and moreover, they're linked in a way where the players can recognize the carried-over beat and be in specific positions where they're ready to quickly adapt to the new control scheme. For instance, consider Remix 8: the ping-pong into vegetable slice looks intimidating at first, but once you realize that swiping the paddle in the former has the exact same rhythm as swiping to slice vegetables in the latter, then it's merely a case of recognizing the visual/audio disguise and maintaining your composure. Another example that comes to mind is within Remix 10, where there's a section transitioning from the snowboarding minigame to the choir kids' Glee Club. Normally, you'd think that there would be some issues immediately flashing into Glee Club, since you can't possibly know what's coming up without prior experience and not holding your stylus on the screen will result in your Choir Kid automatically singing as per the control scheme of hold and release to play notes. However, this is accounted for with the lead-in snowboard minigame, because the last few frames of that section telegraph a jump, which requires the player to hold down the stylus on the screen and then flick and release. Since the jump hasn't occurred yet, the player should still be holding down, and this transitions naturally into the Glee Club's neutral state, where they can then release the stylus to the telegraphed beat and proceed onwards. It's little moments like these that make all the different jumps between previous minigames feel seamless, and transform the remixes into challenging, yet extremely fulfilling victory laps.

My only outstanding complaint is that certain minigames require considerably more accuracy and precision to master than others, and are often far more finicky about their timing requirements without obvious visual/audible feedback regarding slight misses, which can make repeated plays for that Superb/Perfect ranking a bit obnoxious. Glee Club and Moai Doo-Wop 2 are two of the more infamous culprits, to where some users have even created strategy guides. I can certainly relate, as it took me over 8 tries on Glee Club to snag a superb before I realized that the tight timing during the quick notes in the middle of the track was the section that was stumping me, since being off by just a hair there doesn't result in the other Choir Kids giving you the stink-eye. As a related aside, I did have a bit of difficulty with Rockers 2, since this minigame introduces the use of the L/R button as a whammy bar and feels a bit out of place, being the only minigame that doesn't exclusively use the touchscreen and forcing me to bend my left hand around to access the button. That said, I'll choose to chalk that one up to a skill issue since the unlockable Technical Guitar Course afterwards gives you plenty more opportunities to get used to this mechanic. Regardless, I find Rhythm Heaven to be a very honest and approachable set of minigames despite the level of mastery often required, and I can easily see myself coming back to this one to spend more time honing my skills. It's a complete and realized package that's truly the epitome of doing a lot with very little, and I eagerly look forward to testing my mettle with the remaining games in the series.

I was able to get my hands on a WIP machine-translated copy of the original Slime Mori-Mori thanks to Nick, check out his work!

This is honestly a very solid foundation for the Dragon Quest Heroes spinoff series. You play as the iconic blue slime, living out their quiet rural life amongst other friendly slimes when suddenly, the Plob show up and kidnap everyone from your village and it's up to you, the hapless and adorable squishy hero, to rescue everyone and repair your village while beating the Plob at their own game of discovering the world's many secrets. If you've played the DS sequel to this (Rocket Slime), then this basically controls the same; you can stretch out your slime's body and let go to perform an Elasto Blast, which propels you into enemies, obstacles, and other objects and will often shoot them into the air, where you can then catch, carry, and throw these objects and enemies to your delight. The Elasto Blast is both your main form of attack as well as a movement and object interaction tool in this sense.

The original Japan exclusive Slime Mori Mori focuses on dungeon traversal; your Slime buddies have all been boxed up within the various ecosystems scattered across the giant island, and it's your duty to break open these boxes and send them home by either carrying them back to the entrance, or throwing them onto balloon lifts and train cars headed back. The backbone is solid enough strictly speaking, but as someone coming from many hours spent in Rocket Slime, this is where the lack of quality of life starts to show a bit. All of the balloon lifts and many of the train cars/cargo floats have a capacity of one, which means you can only chuck one passenger/object/monster on at a time and have to wait around a little for the next transport to come about. In the case of balloon lifts, this wait is exacerbated since it respawns off screen and you have to meander about in a separate area of the dungeon before it comes back. Dungeon exploration in general has some great ideas, but again, when comparing to its successors, becomes a bit rote. A lot of the exploration boils down to carrying over Bomb Rocks from other rooms to blow up barriers, or collecting an assortment of other objects elsewhere and bringing them over to statues to imitate their object order and unlock doors. The actual puzzle combinations outside of these two interactions are quite interesting though; there's a lava area where you have to drop loose tiles from an above floor to create platforms for traversal, there's a beach area with water spouts and sand where you can bury yourself to flip enemies and travel under tunnels, and so on so forth. It does suck a little that some progress isn't saved, such as the poppable Plob balloons that block progress in the mountain zone, but this is generally a trifle once you figure out the dungeon layout as is.

The real breadwinner of the original game however, has to be the over-the-top boss fights. Some of my favorites here include a fight against two twin Plobs (one with a fire gauntlet and the other with an ice sword) who attempt to take you down simultaneously but are susceptible to team damage (so it's more fun dodging their attacks and watching them actively interfere with one another), and a turtle monster who, upon realizing that you're using the sand to flip and damage it, floods the room with water to prevent burying and forces an old rival of yours to appear to help you out with fireballs and aerial dodging, transforming the fight into almost a pseudo shmup. Some of the fights do phone it in a bit (i.e. the 2nd golem fight in the secret forest is more or less a juiced up version of the 1st golem fight with slightly tougher attacks), but in general, these boss fights are exemplary of the cartoony and vibrant charm of the series. They're absolutely ridiculous and don't try to take themselves seriously whatsoever, and are a great diversion from the often repetitive dungeon crawling.

Again, my main reservation here is less that the game sucks, and more that it's just quite overshadowed at this point by its successors. I don't find the dungeon exploration very externally rewarding unfortunately; you can send some monsters and materials back to help repair the town or sell materials for money, but outside of some permanent health bar capacity/wallet upgrades and a few unlockable minigames, there's not a huge incentive to keep grinding out materials unless you really do care that much about fixing up your town as a good citizen. Dungeon exploration is also held back a bit by the arbitrary time limit (which will end your run if you're there past nightfall), so it does become necessary to keep an eye out on the day-night cycle gauge if you don't want to spend another 100G buying time sand as a fail safe. Having said that, the tank/ship battles in the later installments are a welcome improvement in tying all the different adventure game elements together, and definitely add more meat to the bone on what is already a pretty promising beginning to the series. It doesn't take too long to run through the whole game (maybe about 10 hours or so for my first playthrough), and while I admit that I can't comment too heavily on the dialogue due to the limits of the machine translation, the classic happy-go-lucky appeal of Rocket Slime is all still there with surprisingly well animated and colorful visuals. If you're a fan of Rocket Slime looking for more content, then I'd recommend giving this a shot just to check out its humble beginnings, and definitely don't be afraid to ask for help if you get stymied by the translated hints.

Well, I do at least appreciate the honesty this time around.

I was actually quite excited for The Pathless, even though my adventure of exploring Journey-likes throughout the last two years has not been great. I’ve been trying to elucidate exactly why I’ve been so consistently disappointed by all of the spiritual successors in the time since, and I think I’ve figured out why. To put it simply, it’s a matter of focus and cohesion.

The more I’ve written about various video games on Backloggd, the more I’ve come to realize that these are the two qualities I treasure the most when discussing what makes a good video game. With focus, you need a game where every element is fine-tuned to achieve the same overall goal, with a clear and same intent expressed and achieved by every item. That however, is not to be confused with cohesion, which deals with how these pieces fit together. There needs to be a sense of community and harmony amongst all the different elements; often, different elements in games clash not just from opposing intents, but also from clashing rhythms. That doesn’t mean you can’t change the tempo throughout of course, but there has to be some sort of underlying glue to justify this tempo shift with purpose. In other words, focus keeps the destination within sight while cohesion keeps everything moving towards said destination.

Most Journey-likes actually have the issue of too much focus and cohesion in my opinion. They’re so dead-set on becoming the next Journey, copying the ambience, game structure, and storytelling to a T, that despite the golden formula “working” since it was already proven in 2012, these games all feel rather uninspired since their lack of ambition fails to elevate the final product to anything more than yet another indie copycat, forgoing any sense of identity. For what it’s worth though, The Pathless is an antithesis of the usual formula because it is at least trying to do something different.

In this iteration, you get to play as the Hunter, who has traveled to a mysterious island afflicted by a curse, and must traverse the wilderness to free possessed spirits from a malevolent warrior dubbed “The Godslayer.” You can think of The Pathless as a combination of Journey, Breath of the Wild, and Shadow of the Colossus: the overall narrative strikes many of the same beats as thatgamecompany’s magnum opus, as do the visuals (courtesy of Matt Nava, creator director of Giant Squid and one of the main artists behind Journey in fact) and the original score (composed by Austin Wintory, who also composed Journey’s OST), while the exploration loop borrows heavily from BOTW’s open world structure and the boss fights seem heavily influenced by the epic dances of death of SOTC. I think you can see where this is going; it’s a combination of some of my favorite trends (and in fact, some of my outright favorite video games), and it’s like your favorite band from your high school days got revived for a world tour to play all their greatest hits.

It's such a shame, that Giant Squid’s ambition led to this jumbled mess lacking in focus and cohesion.

Let’s start with the most noteworthy positive: the core movement within the overworld. I admit I wasn’t too impressed at first, since I originally thought that all you need to do is just hold down the right trigger and release as soon as you finishing locking onto floating talismans with the outline turning red to refill and maintain momentum in your dash gauge. However, as wondermagenta points out, there’s actually more to this: if you release your trigger as soon as the outline is about halfway filled, you’ll fire a golden “skillshot,” which not only flies faster (so you can fire at even more targets), but also provides an even larger speed boost. This becomes even more important if you’re firing while airborne, as nailing successive skillshots means that you’ll spend less time free-falling (since you can’t glide while charging your arrow) and thus gain more overall distance. So, there’s two levels of optimization here: planning your path amongst the talismans to avoid firing arrows that get blocked by obstacles like hills and trees and jumping/gliding over rivers and gaps that would slow you down, and reacting on the fly by charging and releasing the arrow to chain skillshots and maintain momentum and the dash gauge. You can absolutely just autopilot and rely strictly on a full red outline + context sensitive aiming to get by of course, but nailing this skillshot over and over turns simple overworld traversal into quite the engaging exercise instead of just holding the control stick forward.

The problem then, is just about everything else.

We'll begin by considering the puzzles that serve as the “destinations” between the core movement. They’re an intentional slowdown from the freeform travel for sure, but unfortunately, I find this change of pace rather unwelcome. You need to solve a certain minimum of puzzles in each area to unlock emblems to activate spirit towers, so there are plenty of puzzles you’ll be forced to tackle. Unfortunately, despite all the different combination of elements (torches, ring switches, weighted switches, etc) interchanged throughout, they all begin to bleed into one another by the end because they’re all absolutely tedious affairs.

Your AI companion is one key reason here: you essentially have to keep an eye on your falcon and guide it closely to switches or while dragging around hoops. Waiting for the falcon to finish is not particularly engaging, and positioning gets particularly annoying in some circumstances such as this where you not only have to stand in the right spot to get the falcon to drag it to the appropriate height, but also quickly swap targets by again getting into the right position (for the context sensitive prompt and for the falcon to “come” to you) before quickly letting go and getting into position for the shot. Speaking of which, the game also often feels far too finicky about being in the right position when taking shots for switches and torches, such as this example. It looks like I’m in the vicinity to shoot an arrow at the first torch to light the 2nd behind it, but the game is rather stingy about factoring in the perfect height for a shot, not just the specific direction itself. You also have to be the proper distance away (if the shot is made too close, your arrow will just clang and disappear), and this gets further complicated since many of the torches/switches must be shot properly in mid-air with a full charge/powershot. As a result, it’s rather obnoxious constantly adjusting your player model and taking potshots at what should be a simple line of sight aim to get your wanted trajectory to properly register. Finally, a lot of these puzzle sections are large enough to justify dashing between objects of interest, but in many scenarios, no talismans are around to refill your dash gauge; as a result, you’ll most likely have to spend most of your time slowly walking around the area, a far cry from the enthralling dashing and sniping that The Pathless exemplifies.

Some of these “puzzles” are actually cursed shrines that immobilize your falcon as the main condition, and that brings us to the next major nitpick: The Pathless often tries to be a precision platformer, and it really does not succeed because the game was not built for verticality. You see, in these cursed shrine sections, you are often reliant upon shooting talismans while airborne to nail specific long and extended jumps, and this doesn’t quite work because the Pathless’s vertical movement is split between a simple standard high jump with little horizontal momentum, and talisman shot-boosted jumps with tons of horizontal momentum. You’ll constantly find yourself undershooting with the former, and often overshooting with the latter. There’s no gimmick to these areas besides the lack of a usable eagle, and the only other formality attached is that you have to waste more time rubbing your eagle to purify it of its curse afterwards, resulting in these shrines feeling rather like gimmicky padding.

It gets worse though: this issue also translates to the overworld, because a good chunk of the hub levels relies heavily upon scaling cliffs and buildings that can’t be easily covered with the sub-par standard jump and thus require you to expend wing flaps for that quick vertical boost (since shooting mid-air talismans gives little vertical height, instead focusing on a quick forward horizontal boost). Since flaps are also a finite resource that must be recharged by remaining grounded, cliff/building traversal requires a fair bit of waiting around for full recharges; I’d like to say that this issue gets alleviated as you progress, but that would also be misleading since while you will have more flaps to work with from collecting flight crystals from optional puzzles/exploration and defeating bosses, the heights themselves also gradually increase and will require more flaps as is. This issue could have actually been more properly tackled if shooting talismans in mid-air restored flaps, or if the blue crystals that provide significant vertical boost that are introduced in the 4th area were introduced earlier for this specific purpose; as it stands, I think those crystals are a great addition, but stands as a case of too little and too late when the majority of the game feels stunted by how awkwardly verticality is handled.

To expand upon this further, players often need to rely upon Spirit Vision to figure out points of interest, marked by orange glows when the radar wave rolls over the landscape. There’s two major issues here. Firstly, much of the landscape is obscured by tall environmental objects (cliffs, towers, hills, etc), which can make it quite difficult to make out exactly where all the glows are and if everything’s been covered, unless you get to a high enough height yourself to pick out every point; as we’ve established, this is a pain in the ass because traveling up and down just to temporarily spot points of interest is extremely time consuming. Secondly, not every glow is created equal: many of these glows are smaller exploration points with simpler one-note solutions that reward you with yellow experience crystals, and it’s not as easy to pick apart smaller and larger/more prominent glows when smaller exploration points are often clustered together. For what it’s worth, these puzzles are quite diverse in nature and include activities such as lighting all the torches, playing Simon Says, and platforming from one end to another while “the floor is lava.” Unfortunately, the reward is just not there; the only thing that these experience crystals give you is more flaps with your eagle when you level up, which again is not a great incentive because flying often feels removed from the established momentum-based running. There’s no “dash” when flying, so forward momentum has to be preserved by shooting talismans that are scattered rather loosely in the air, and aiming your bow will result in vertical drop because your eagle can’t hold you while you aim, in a way defeating the original purpose of flying. The result is that movement potential is actually somewhat stunted by the amount of flying required throughout, and that exploration feels tedious at times because figuring out exactly where to go is not necessarily simple nor rewarding. I think this feedback loop could have been better handled by allowing players to invest experience towards stat growth of their choosing (higher jumps, faster movement speed, a larger dash gauge, etc) rather than just funneling all experience towards more flaps.

Speaking of frustrating gaps interrupting continuous movement, did I mention the forced stealth sections? That’s right, The Pathless has mandatory forced stealth segments, my favorite addition to any great video game. Every time you enter a new area, a red cyclone will appear and swarm the player, chucking your eagle buddy off into the grass several feet away while you must inch your way towards retrieving it and avoiding detection from the searchlights of the possessed spirit demon. While getting caught doesn’t result in dire consequences (you just lose some progress on your experience bar and are thrown out of the cyclone), actually getting caught isn’t much faster than doing the task properly, so you might as well try. That doesn’t remove the red cyclone however; it remains within the area as this malignant tumor that seems to follow you around and will shove you back into another forced stealth section if you get too close to the eye of the storm. It especially loves showing up at the most inconvenient times, such as when you’re trying to solve puzzles for emblems or clearing up that last small orange glow for EXP, which again breaks up any built-up momentum and limits player choice because you’re running away if you don’t want to sit through another playable cutscene and there’s nothing you can do about the situation except solve puzzles more quickly for faster tower activation to rush towards the next phase to get it off the screen. And even that’s another case of limiting player choice: why situate the mandatory boss encounter in the center of the area where there’s other exploration I might want to tackle first, instead of isolating the red blob without encapsulating anything else of interest?

Boss fights usually have two distinct sections: the chase, and the arena. The first phase is actually quite thrilling: you spiral around the red storm pursuing the now fleeing beast, shooting the talismans in your path to maintain momentum, and must land enough hits on the beast in the form of eye targets before letting your eagle get the final takedown. It’s not free thankfully, due to the need to keep refilling the dash gauge while hunting and because the beast will spew pulsing fireballs and leave behind flame walls that must be circumvented or jumped to avoid getting stunned and falling further behind. If this was the entire boss fight, then I would have been left quite satisfied.

But, there’s more. Once your eagle knocks the beast down, the fight gets transported to the arena at the center of each area for an epic showdown. Or so it seems, but these fights actually lack any teeth. They essentially become rhythm game segments where you just have to aim and fire your bow whenever you see the flashing white context-sensitive prompt while you walk around in circles and jump occasionally to dodge attacks. Not only do I feel like these fights fail to utilize the full toolkit of The Pathless (namely, the smooth ground momentum-based movement), they’re also quite trivial in that once you’ve figured out the first phase, that is basically all there is to it. These fights simply have no stakes involved; if you happen to take too much damage and get knocked out of the arena, all you have to do is walk right back in and resume the fight in the exact phase where you left off. It’s what separates the one-dimensional fights of this game from the intimate dances of death of Shadow of the Colossus. In the latter, the sense of scale is fairly apparent because you are this ant crawling up a giant hulking stone creature, clinging on for dear life while the screen shakes wildly and the frames spiral out of control as you scale this magnificent artifact, plunging your sword into its weaknesses while it writhes in agony. In the former, you get to take a few potshots at a slightly oversized animal here and there while tilting your joystick to the left/right against a beast that’s all bark and no bite, letting go of the right trigger whenever you see a flashing white box on screen and once in the blue moon, getting the chance to shoot a crystal to regain dash gauge or jumping and hovering with your eagle to dodge the ground for a bit. Summed up, it’s a far cry from what originally inspired it in the first place, and it’s just too scripted and too straightforward for any emotion to be properly conveyed in the first place.

At this point, I think I’ve gone into enough detail regarding the lack of focus. Giant Squid wanted to introduce so many different elements into the game, that looking back upon this, so many of these different elements feel rather undercooked and require far more polish to really stand out on their own.

That said, there’s also a lack of fluidity throughout the whole experience; the clean ground movement across the overworld is consistently broken up due to the middling and sluggish puzzles, and in fact the dashing and shooting is often stymied by how much verticality is required for travel as well. The exploration loop gets broken up over and over due to the glowing red storm following you and interrupting any puzzle solving, while the loop itself is really more of a frayed tangle of threads since much of the exploration leads you to unrewarding mini-puzzles. Even the boss fights themselves are more of a nuisance than a highlighted destination because they goad you to stop whatever you’re doing just to get rid of the possibility of forced stealth segments, and go from an exhilarating hunt to a glorified cutscene. The gameplay elements all feel at odds with one another, and momentum isn’t preserved because the game insists on shifting the player back and forth with little purpose. What really seals the deal though, concerning the lack of cohesion, is that the underlying narrative to tie everything together just isn't there.

I think there’s two lines of reasoning regarding the weak storytelling. The first reason is that the execution doesn’t live up to the premise, both in terms of the characters and the worldbuilding. The forced relationship between the eagle and the hunter has been pointed out by many before me, so I won’t go into excess detail here; needless to say, I concur that at no point does the eagle ever feel like a separate entity. Almost all of your interaction with the eagle revolves around the eagle as a gameplay mechanism: send your eagle to move around weights and targets, shoot off your eagle to knock down the boss, go after your eagle in the forced stealth segment to be rid of the storm temporarily and then rub it a few times so you can flap again, etc. The eagle never gets a chance to do anything of its own volition; it’s essentially stuck as yet another “thing” you have to account for to avoid getting stuck and nothing more.

I also have to question the writing behind the main villain himself, and whether or not his personality really fits with the overall tone set. Much of the worldbuilding is included within the exploration loop; you wander about the vestiges of a ruined civilization, and scattered throughout the decaying buildings and forgotten relics are memories of a society torn asunder, with some lost souls praying for a release from their supposed doom while others give in to madness and pray to their new “savior” only to find themselves on the receiving end of the gods’ anger. It’s such a promising (albeit somewhat tropey and clichéd) idea to run with… which is why I was left quite disappointed by how over the top and comically evil the main villain comes across at the end. Are you kidding me guys, this is the supposed Godslayer that you were all looking towards for direction? He was literally spouting lines like “wItTNeSs My aScEnSiOn” during the final confrontation, how did he ever get this far on the storyboard for what was supposed to be an introspective and spiritual tale? Maybe this civilization deserved its demise if this was the best they could muster up.

Even more importantly though, beyond all the loose-fitting gameplay mechanisms and the dissonant writing, is the lack of cohesion beyond the narrative and the gameplay itself. The way I see it, video games have great potential as a medium, because they’re capable of marrying storytelling and gameplay through interaction in a way that other mediums cannot; when done properly, the gameplay should serve as a vessel for the narrative. Thus, there should be both mechanical meaning and narrative/metaphorical meaning behind actions in a game to tie everything together. However, the Pathless has a lack of narrative purpose behind much of what is going on in game. Mechanically, it makes sense why smaller puzzles are scattered throughout the areas to help guide players’ attention and keep them engaged with smaller tasks, but it's never really explained in-game why this came to be. Why do I suddenly get one more additional “flap” whenever I get enough of these crystals, and why do I now get to “mega-flap” when I’ve beaten this particular boss? The best example of this disparity between gameplay and narrative however, has to be the secret ending (obvious spoiler alert from clicking on the link, you’ve been warned) that is unlocked once you collect every talisman in all the areas and activate the golden switches in the purified arenas. Again, it mechanically makes sense for there to be some kind of reward for finishing every major puzzle in the game, but it bothers me that there’s nothing in the world-building or story hinting at the possibility of another end; I never even knew there was a secret ending until I looked it up. I have no problem justifying mechanical purpose for elements within the game, but if they can’t be justified within the narrative itself… then how is my sense of immersion supposed to remain intact?

I’ve deliberated upon writing this particular review; I don’t particularly enjoy writing negative reviews, especially ones of indies emulating my favorites, and my feelings have only become more and more complicated as I’ve pondered over these past few weeks. In the past, I’ve gone from feeling sheer disappointment and anger while reviewing Journey-likes, to mostly indifference and acceptance that this was just the way things played out, and that industry would continue to pump out palette-swaps of one of my favorite games until the death of the sun. This time though? I just feel bummed. There was so much shaping up to be a success here: it had all the right inspirations in all the right places, the “glue” that was supposed to hold everything together seemed solid enough, and Austin Wintory’s score is phenomenal. But this just… isn’t it. The lack of detail tying everything together more than shows when you try to dive deeper into the pool, and ultimately, this could have easily been the next Journey, but now it will never be anything more than yet another spiritual successor living in the shadow of its idols. I didn’t want to be this harsh, but I suppose I get this emotional towards the things I love. Maybe it’s time I moved on and finally got around to that long delayed replay of Journey. Sometimes, you just can’t beat the classics.

If you combined portions of Warioware Mega Microgames, Twisted, and Touched, you'd essentially have Warioware Gold. For the most part, everything flows together well and it's pretty easy switching between the forms of control since it's all within the palms of your hand, so mastering the juggle of every type of minigame is quite satisfying. That said, I do think that the game lacks a bit of novelty despite how cohesive the whole experience is, with a good chunk of the library's microgames brought back from prior installments. The few minigames that I've played that combined multiple different control forms (control pad, gyro controls, touch screen, and mic) were fantastic, such as the final boss fight and the Mewtroid minigame, I just wish there were more of them bundled into the core experience to maximize the potential of the 3DS. In addition, a lot of my previous complaints from Touched (that is, the touchscreen minigames are a tad too easy and are all some form of poke or drag, and the mic minigames can all be won by yelling loudly enough at the right time) do carry over which lessens the overall package a little bit, but it's still a pretty fun experience that I can see myself coming back to considering how much stuff there is to unlock and all the arcade and challenge modes to mix everything around. As such, I maintain that Gold doesn't have as distinct of an identity as the other games before it as someone who's gone through a lot of the series' history, though the cleaned up visuals are surprisingly charming and the classic absurdist tone (noting that I actually don't mind the voice acting) and silly slice-of-life background threads are all still there; if you don't feel the need to revisit all the prior games, then you could definitely do a lot worse than the compilation of most of its best moments.

I won’t mince my words here: the last month has been a bit underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some solid titles that I finally got to finish and everything’s been interesting enough to where I still wrote about it, but nothing’s quite blown my mind recently. Flywrench might have set the bar a bit too high, for better or for worse. So, it looks like it’s time for another nostalgia reset; what better way to get myself back in gear than to go back to the source? Consider this write-up a follow up to my original Donkey Kong Country piece; since I think I’ve fleshed out obstacle escalation theory a ton by this point, I’ll focus more on differences between the two games this time around.

There’s an old Eurogamer review round-up that sort of laments the lack of differences between the original DKC and Diddy’s Kong Quest, referring to the sequel as a victim of “lack of ambition.” I honestly don’t agree with this assessment; Donkey Kong Country 2 preserves much of the original design philosophy for sure, but the game’s levels are often structured so differently with so many new ideas that I find it quite baffling to describe the sequel as “not terribly imaginative.” If anything, there were so many new ideas that many of them led to a lot of dissonance regarding expectations of flow and functionality between the two games. I’ll try to go over as many of the outstanding features as I can, but first, we should address the change in scope that seems to have thrown off so many of us, myself included.

In a retrospective Retro Gamer interview, lead designer Gregg Mayles describes this best: “If we had made it speed runs again then there wouldn’t have been much scope for us to go anywhere different with it.” The focus then, shifted from a speedrunning-friendly momentum-based platformer to a platformer that emphasized exploration, all while still emphasizing fluidity through interchangeable moving parts. Mayles later adds, “[they] wanted to maintain the same ‘go first’ gameplay where all the barrels and baddies were set up so if you went first time – or got the timing right – then the levels were very fluid, but I also wanted to add something new to it. So the first one was very linear, and the second one introduced exploration.”

This is perhaps the most pronounced improvement from the original to the sequel: secret finding and completion now feels significantly more intuitive and fulfilling. While I never personally had much of an issue with exploration in the original, I have to admit that there isn’t much of an incentive trying to find bonus rooms outside of collectibles that all lead to extra lives and the thrill of stumbling upon treasure troves through tougher maneuvers. Diddy’s Kong Quest, however, shows far more focus: the usual spelling and slot minigames alongside treasure troves have been replaced with timed challenges that actively test players’ abilities as par the level’s themes: for example, the bonus area in the first half of Screech’s Sprint requires players to switch between characters to balance out cartwheel jumps and hovering, a bonus area in the windy Gusty Glade requires players to time jumps across dragonflies while being boosted by a current, and so on so forth. Moreover, secret entrances and bonus barrels are more clearly marked with elements such as stray bananas, enemy clusters guarding paths, platforms that are just off-screen, and even banana arrows redirecting players to areas of interest or spelling out button prompts to supercharge animal buddies/team throw. One particularly clever example comes in the level “Target Terror”, where an enemy throwing barrels at you in the car ahead drops to a track below the main track if you decide to make the jump, signifying for future runs that there’s probably something hidden below.

Another improvement towards secret finding comes in the form of cannonballs that have to be carried across segments of the level to activate a cannon into potential bonus sections; it’s a welcome change since it pools the difficulty into the task of ferrying the cannonball while grappling/avoiding enemies inbetween, instead of attempting to create difficulty via obscuring the bonus area entrance. Finally, the reward is also greatly enhanced: instead of more lives to throw into the fray, you receive Kremcoins that can be used to unlock guarded golden barrels by Klubba and access tougher levels in the Lost World to achieve that true ending and snag that sweet, sweet 102% completion. Again, I never found the original limited exploration in DKC to be much of a detriment, but I nevertheless believe that the exploration loop feels much more fleshed out and substantial this time around.

This layer of calculation behind the mechanics translates to practically every single one of the mechanics in the sequel, starting with the characters themselves. It’d be easy to write off Dixie Kong as a Diddy Kong clone, considering that their weight and physics are about the same and Dixie was originally created by iterating upon Diddy’s design in the first place. However, let’s consider Donkey Kong’s value as a controllable character in the original; outside of being a heavier character to one hit KO Armys, Krushas, and Klumps by jumping (Diddy must generally use barrels and cartwheels to defeat these enemies, or in the case of Krushas, often outright avoid them), as well as the abilities to hand slap the ground (not really useful in the original outside of collecting some stray items with no hints and defeating stunned Rock Krocs in one level) and holding the barrel directly above his head, Donkey Kong mostly serves as the character you play when you don’t feel like risking the more agile Diddy Kong to potential death. Diddy’s quicker cartwheel and faster jump means that he is the weapon of choice for most of the platforming in the long expanses of the original DKC, and Donkey Kong is often there just as a “back-up” second life.

In Diddy’s Kong Quest, Dixie and Diddy are stratified enough to where your second character is more than just a representation that you can take a second hit. Diddy is of course, still a pleasure to control thanks to his quick cartwheel jump providing a “low and long” form of movement, and holding the barrel directly in front gives Diddy a quick form of defense for approaching enemies. Dixie, on the other hand, snags Donkey Kong’s utility of holding the barrel directly above the character’s head and utilizing overhead throws with a bit extra. All of her moves involve her long blonde ponytail, including her ability to hover in mid air by holding down Y to slow her descent and reach dangling collectibles while more carefully maneuvering past flying obstacles. As a result, it might be easier to think of Diddy as the better character for the classic speedy platforming experience, while Dixie is not quite as agile but is extremely helpful for spanning larger gaps and taking your time while ascending/descending vertically.

Moreover, the sequel also places additional emphasis upon having both characters available to you at once. Most of this comes in the form of the team-throw: you can pick up your partner at any time and angle the throw to reach collectibles and platforms/hooks that would normally be impossible to jump to. Additionally, since Diddy and Dixie are both lightweights, Krunchas can only be defeated with the team-throw outside of barrel usage and animal buddies, since jumping onto Krunchas will just result in Diddy/Dixie bouncing off. Finally, certain barrel cannons are marked with either Diddy or Dixie’s face, meaning that you will need to either be using that particular character or throwing that particular character into the cannon to be launched. Having both characters on your screen has an inherently deeper meaning than just possessing another hit; not only will you need to pick the correct character for the best approach, you must often have both on-hand to maximize opportunities with the team-throw and be allowed access to character-coded barrels.

Regarding character control, animal buddies have also been greatly buffed. The original was admittingly a bit more wishy-washy towards usage of animal buddies; while they were intended as a power-up, levels had to nevertheless be designed without explicit usage of them, resulting in many situations where animal buddies at best felt like extraneous helpers that could sometimes help unlock secret areas and provided another hit point of health, and at worst feeling like an active detriment (ex: Rambi’s awkward size and maneuverability in Manic Mincers, or Espresso’s inconsistency safely walking over Klap Traps in Orangutan Gang). As seen previously, animal buddies like Rambi and Engarde can throw out attack hitboxes to break fake walls for secrets, but Diddy’s Kong Quest goes beyond that and often sculpts entire playgrounds for animal buddy abilities, going as far as to include animal buddy transformation barrels for particular sections.

Toxic Tower is a great example of this in action: you start with a very open and wide section that requires very high and lengthy jumps, often on Zingers, to scale the initial heights, as per Rattly the Snake’s speciality with the charged superjump. Then, the stage transitions to a more enclosed series of chambers and tight passageways, with tons of vertical navigation and roaming enemies that require Squawk’s flight and egg shots to clear. Finally, the stage’s final stretch is a straight shot up to the exit, forcing the player to rely upon Squitter the Spider to quickly create temporary web platforms to scale up the chute while pursued by the ever-rising toxic waste. As an addendum to maintaining composure with the animal buddy, “No Animal Signs” will force the Kongs to abandon that particular playstyle while often rewarding players that manage to get that far with their animal buddy intact with a reward, such as banana bunches, extra lives, or in some cases, barrels that can be used (and only appear in that particular fashion) to open up yet another secret area. The end result is yet another design tool that’s been pushed to its furthest extents so far for more varied level structures, broadly increasing the DKC toolkit while maintaining the same core principles.

On that note, Donkey Kong Country 2’s most defining experimental level design trend is perhaps its enthusiasm to dabble with verticality. While the original only had one primarily vertical level in Slip Slide Ride, the sequel happily mingles with scaling heights every other level or so, with some levels that resemble a spiraling zig-zag with interspersed horizontal platforming like Windy Well while others commit hard to a full scalar climb such as the aforementioned Toxic Tower. It seems antithetical at first to design so many vertical levels in a game that’s practically mastered its horizontal traversal with the fast cartwheel jump for maintaining momentum, but in my opinion, it’s simply a different language of platforming that builds off the same organic obstacle escalation and fluid movement, and with that different language comes a different set of tools to express the language more fluently. Skyhooks, barrel cannons, animal buddy abilities such as Rattly’s superjump and Squitter’s temporary web platforms, climbable ropes and chains, and even certain water levels that experiment with the changing height of the liquid and interspersing dry land platforms are just some of the many level elements that are utilized to aid ascending player movement, alongside the usual hazards to spur players into action such as the aforementioned rising toxic goo in Toxic Tower and the bramble walls encountered while flapping about with Squawks. Even within this new territory, DKC 2 subverts its own set expectations with two levels that force players to travel downwards, in the form of Parrot Chute Panic (which has players slowly descend a Zinger infested hive with the help of purple budget Squawks) and Black Ice Blitz (which as a foil to Parrot Chute Panic, goads players into quickly descending a slippery icy chasm to avoid being swarmed by grounded foes). Though it is easy to criticize the sequel for taking such a seemingly drastically different approach to level design, I do believe that Diddy’s Kong Quest deserves to stand on its own merits and absolutely presents a more calculated and methodical, yet just as focused platforming experience.

What stands out to me as this game’s greatest strength is that no idea is ever repeated verbatim, both within the game and with respect to the original DKC. A great way to illustrate these wrinkles that are used to diversify level navigation is through examination of the three minecart levels, which have now been rethemed as roller coasters. Target Terror has Diddy and Dixie leaping between skull cars to hit green checkmark barrels while avoiding red X barrels to open up closed gates and avoid closing already open ones. Meanwhile, Rickety Race recontextualizes the roller coaster ride as a straight up competition, incentivizing players to defeat and bypass enemy skull cars to eventually stomp the goon in first place and snag the level’s DK coin. Finally, Haunted Hall introduces the timer into the equation, and requires the player to collide into + barrels while avoiding – barrels to maintain timer longevity and avoid certain doom from the pursuing Kackles. At the end of the day, all of these examples are horizontal auto-scrollers, but thanks to the varied level objectives defining how traversal must be accomplished, the levels still feel distinct without any single one bleeding into another.

I could go on and on about the sheer amount of fresh level elements introduced in DKC 2 and just how many of them remain memorable to me, from the air draft balloons in Red Hot Ride to the rolling giant tires of Jungle Jinx to the usage of Clapper seals in Lava Lagoon purifying the lava into water and creating this mad scramble to make it in one piece to the other side before the liquid heats up again, and so on so forth. Sure, most of these elements are only present in one or two levels and could be written off as “gimmicks,” but that doesn’t take away from their value. Rare’s willingness to throw realism out the window and tinker with so many different kinds of mechanisms may seem at first quite unfocused, but by embracing experimentation that’s all designed to keep the player moving, that eagerness actually points to a deeper level of commitment that few platformers manage to effectively achieve.

Of course, there’s another piece to the puzzle that stops the game from ever feeling too stale, and that’s the theming itself. Again, Rare’s abandonment of realism is a key motivation; while the original DKC was often limited to natural landscapes and caves outside of Kremkroc Industries, Diddy’s Kong Quest commits fully to the absurdity of fighting alligator pirates in an unfamiliar land and as a result, greatly diversifies its various settings from the decks and sails of the Gangplank Galleon (a fitting beginning, considering that the previous adventure ended here), to the glowing infernal pits of Crocodile Cauldron, to the abandoned urban amusement wasteland of Krazy Kremland that nature has begun reclaiming with brambles and overgrown beehives. You don’t need me to tell you that this is one of the most richly textured games on the SNES, with plenty of corresponding level elements such as the sticky honey walls of Hornet Hole and the eerie disappearing ropes of Ghostly Grove to further sell the exoticism and accentuate the level of detail presented in each environment.

I’d be remiss though, to not spend a paragraph gushing about the soundtrack, something that I’d consider a formality at this point while praising the game. If the original Donkey Kong Country OST was a 10, then this is an 11. Not only are there practically no wasted tracks within the repertoire, but also every notable track ends up being a standout. I’m led to believe that David Wise was in a class of his own, because even to this day, the diverse and richly layered instrumentation is like no other. The whistling wind of Jib Jig, the bubbling lava of Hot Head Bop, the screams of excitement from Disco Train: the sheer attention to detail to embed all these different environmental SFX into the tracks themselves so that the effects never break your attention away from the task of platforming is incredible. It’s the cherry on top of this whole package; sure there’s a part of me that might get a little annoyed falling several stories in yet another mine shaft level, but at least I get to do it while the steel hammer samples in Mining Melancholy go for another run.

I’ll quickly address the lingering complaint that I had from the first game as well; I had previously lamented that bosses in Donkey Kong Country seemed to be a one and done affair, though the sequel does a great job substantially increasing their interactivity. Some are still a bit simple but at least have some extra steps to them: these include the first Krow fight, which you can clear by jumping on egg projectiles and then waiting for Krow to run into the held egg (though it is at least justified by being the first boss fight) and Kudgel, whose boss fight becomes a case of “jump when he lands to avoid getting stunlocked” and then ramming TNT barrels into him when appropriate. Fortunately, the highlights leave these fights in the dust. The clear standout for me here is the fight against Kleever, this giant possessed cutlass that slashes at you relentlessly while you jump to and fro between skyhooks dodging fireballs and waiting for the cannonball to respawn to get your hit in. There’s also a boss fight vs yet another giant bee, but unlike the fight vs Queen B in DKC, this King Zing fight lets you play as Squawks and shoot eggs at the giant bee’s stinger, alternating with an invincible phase where you have to dodge spikes in the closest thing resembling a bullet hell in the series and then segueing into a quickfire second phase where Squawks has to defeat an outer circle of respawning normal sized Zingers before landing the final hit.

Even the final fights vs K Rool (sorry, Kaptain K Rool) have been juiced up, with plenty more jumping and rolling to be done to dodge scores of spiked cannon balls as well as some colorful gas clouds that can mess with your control scheme or movement speed if you’re not careful. The first fight is a bit longer than previous boss fights since it serves as the final boss gauntlet, but there's at least some wiggle room since a Buddy Barrel is given to you at the start of each new phase if you've taken a hit. While the true final boss fight in Krocodile Kore more or less uses the same types of attacks as the first encounter, I appreciate that they’ve at least upped the ante with some new attack patterns and scaling everything they have to throw at you in one “phase” before letting you plug up his blunderbuss with a cannonball for good. All in all, it’s improvements across the board for bosses, and while some of them are still a bit lame, it’s a vast jump up from the one-dimensional and often palette swapped fights of the original game.

So, with all the welcome changes out of the way, do I really have any outstanding major complaints to spill? I’ll admit, I often struggle to find any substantial errs in Diddy’s Kong Quest. It’s a more difficult game for sure, but I also find it surprisingly fair: the game gives you plenty of leeway with all the bananas, KONG letters, and hidden balloons and coins to win more lives at Swanky’s Bonus Bonanza, assuming you’re playing competently enough and exploring levels to their greatest extent. Moreover, most levels are pretty condensed and usually don’t take more than several minutes to clear when carefully approached, with plenty of Buddy Barrels and the Star Barrel halfway through the level as fail-safes if you end up taking a hit or two. I’ve also found during my experience that the obstacle escalation theory continues to holds true, and that dangerous moments are often greeted with plenty of warning prior and enough time to react and adapt accordingly, with instances where I’m confronted with something that I’m genuinely not prepared for few and far between. With that said, there are a few exceptions:

- Web Woods is often cited as one of the most notorious levels in the game: the majority of this stage is spent playing as Squitter, with large stretches of abyss that have to be crossed with disposable web platforms while sniping any Zingers and Mini Nectys in the way. Upon my replay, I don’t think it’s as hard as others make it out to be, but it definitely feels a bit longer because Web Woods forces either extremely careful movement and web shots when going fast ( see Mike Kanis’ recording for an example ) or for casual playthroughs, steady and often strenuous platforming across daunting gaps while juggling enemies at the same time. I’ll concede that the level could probably be improved upon with a few smaller gaps and removing the extraneous introductory Kongs platforming section, but otherwise, I think this level serves its purpose well and just takes a bit of time to get used to. Though, I do think that putting the DK coin in the end-of-level target is pretty lazy and evil considering that the coin flashes in the display for less than half a second and you'll have to replay the whole level again if you were just a hair off.

- Screech’s Sprint is probably the most significant difficulty spike present in DKC 2 in my opinion (which is saying something considering Toxic Tower is the level right before this), and as the final level before the first K Rool fight, is unfortunately a bit of a slog and probably my least favorite level in the game. The first half of the level is solid end-game platforming through the brambles and isn’t too bad, but the second half of the level is an extremely tight race as Squawks against his goth counterpart Screech, that has to be played close to perfectly if you’re not aware beforehand of the many shortcuts hidden in the brambles since second place will result in instant death. That’s not even bringing into account the KONG letters that are all present in the race segment, or the hidden DK coin (that can at least be collected in a throwaway run). Needless to say, it’s a cool concept, but there’s not much time given for the player to scale up and adapt to the sudden rush of precision required for the race or to discover all the ins and outs of the course, so if any level in the game feels like throwing away lives and banging your head against the wall, I’d wager that it would probably be this one. Also, it overrides Stickerbush Symphony with its own theme... which isn’t a bad track, but it's automatically my least favorite track in the OST because anything that takes away from the GOAT of VGM is an instant con in my book.

- Animal Antics is generally the final level tackled by most players who are going for the true final boss fight (as the final level in the Lost World), and while I hesitate to call any single level gimmicky, I suppose this is the one that comes closest to the definition. It’s a marathon that involves the usage of all five animal buddies, which already sounds like quite an exhausting affair. However, it’s exacerbated by the fact that the first two animal buddy segments (Rambi and Engarde) are pretty straightforward by this point, but the next two right after the Star Barrel in the form of Squitter and Squawks generally take up a lot more time, especially because the Squawks segment requires you to navigate yet another bramble maze while a mercurial wind current keeps blowing you left and right and forces you to alternate between fighting the wind or fighting the controls to avoid being blown astray by the wind. The final segment with Rattly is not particularly difficult, but it sure is intimidating as hell since there are no Buddy Barrels to be found there and you’ve probably already taken a hit as Squawks, turning what should be the victory lap of a marathon into a one of the most nerve-wracking level finishers, since dying here means getting sent back to the Star Barrel and having to do Squitter, Squawks, and Rattly all over again. It probably doesn’t help that Toxic Tower utilizes the animal buddy swap formula more succinctly either, with a smoother difficulty curve to boot.

Besides these three levels though, I can’t really say that the difficulty in Diddy’s Kong Quest ever felt discouraging to me. If anything, I found my second full playthrough even more fulfilling this time around; while I was still in the process of mastering the controls during my first run, I really got the chance to flesh out my understanding of the levels during my replay and spend more time adapting and figuring out how all the different moving parts and hazardous elements fit together in different ways. With so many new combinations to consider, I could honestly keep at this for days, even weeks upon end putting my skills to the test; more depth via tighter execution barriers from tougher obstacle courses with even more secrets to explore results in a higher skill ceiling after all. It’s really quite rewarding to figure out game-plans for each level and grind out the specific inputs necessary; as Gregg Mayles put it, the fluidity and momentum is still there, just a tad bit more difficult to grasp, and that makes actually achieving it all that much sweeter.

While the jump from the original Donkey Kong Country to Diddy’s Kong Quest came with mostly scores of improvements (even if most of the improvements were over features that never genuinely bothered me in the first place), there is one quality of life issue that does weigh on my mind as an obvious area of improvement. Aside from the tracked Kremcoins and optional DK coins, a third type of collectible in the form of banana coins is also present. However, just like the lives and banana count, the banana coin count is reset whenever the system is turned off since it’s not tracked, which becomes a bit obnoxious because banana coins are mandatory whenever requesting services from the other Kongs, from asking Cranky for hints and Funky for flights to other worlds, to even saving the game itself. It’s at least slightly mitigated since banana coins are plentiful within levels and are respawned every time you revisit, and the first time visiting Wrinkly and Funky for saving and flights respectively in each area will always be free. Nevertheless, I concede that this is a bit of a barrier for newer players who feel the need to save more often or for players who don’t have as much time on their hands to commit to longer sessions to build up lives and banana coin stocks, and Rare did seem to learn from this since paying to save is limited to just Diddy’s Kong Quest in the original trilogy.

All in all, I’m not sure if I have any far-reaching takeaways to present here or if there were really any lessons to be learned in the first place, but I’m glad I finally found the time and the opportunity to come back to really flesh out my understanding of a title that once frustrated the hell out of me as a kid. Sure, I could join the never-ending debate of which title has the greater legacy or “aged better,” but at the end of the day, I don’t think I necessary prefer Diddy’s Kong Quest over the original Donkey Kong Country or vice versa; I simply think that they’re different appeals for different moods. If I want to feel good about myself and just dash through levels in my comfort zone, I’ll pick up the original and spend a couple of hours speedrunning Blackout Basement or Loopy Lights. However, if I want make my hands sweat a bit more and really put my execution to the test, then DKC 2 will be my weapon of choice and I’ll get to feel overwhelmed while the woozy arpeggios of Forest Interlude roll over me once more. Whichever one I pick, I think I’d have a pretty damn good day.

As it stands, I’m not quite ready to put Donkey Kong Country 2 on a pedestal as my favorite 2D momentum-based platformer of all time. That said, I’ll call it an “honorable draw” as Gregg Mayles stated five years ago, and it’s about time that I started being more open with myself regarding my appreciation for what Diddy’s Kong Quest brought to the table. Hopefully, all this musing about will encourage some more to do the same. Thanks for reading, everyone.

Rain in many ways reminds me of a new-school twist on Ico. You play as a young boy who’s stumbled into a strange, twisted alternate dimension of mid-20th century Paris, after he chases after an invisible girl in the rain and must now escape this haunted reality with the girl while avoiding shadowy creatures in the torrential downpour. Much of the early to mid-game involves staying outside of the rain and tiptoeing around puddles to avoid loud splashing sounds to sneak past these invincible monsters or luring them with visible dolls and sudden noises to create paths for yourself and your companion. It’s an interesting subversion to the player’s potential discomfort, since you’re safest while invisible but also have to carefully watch and plan your movements because you won’t be able to easily tell what you’re doing (relying on slow and steady footprints) unless you choose to make yourself seen again and risk attack. Fortunately, the girl’s AI doesn’t need constant attention either, as the AI will respond accordingly to your own actions and move/create cover to shield from the rain and provide other distractions when necessary to help you along your way without much hesitation or questionable pathing.

Unfortunately, this approach gets thrown out the window as the game begins to wrap up. From chapter 7 and beyond, the introduced stealth and puzzle combinations give way to pure platforming “run right rapidly” action. While it's not the first time that you’re exposed to chase sequences, the previous chase sequences were spaced far apart enough to where they never got too tedious, and there’s not much of a break between the chases in the last third of the game. By this time, the giant monster chasing you has also somewhat outstayed its welcome, and instead of feeling like this mysterious, malevolent force, it now feels more akin to a DnD mob boss that got revived by a Dungeon Master for one too many cameos after its supposed “death.” As a result, the final moments of the game seem far too unwilling to capitalize on the earlier calculated and thoughtful stealth-puzzle sequences and resort to sluggish and overused escape segments. It’s not a great feeling that a good chunk of the game feels this exhausting to see through to the end, and this weakness is exacerbated considering that the whole game can be beat in less than four hours.

As it stands, I think Rain has some great ideas at play, and a fantastic melancholic yet nostalgic atmosphere from the weathered architecture and warm streetlights in the never-ending storm. I do feel however, that there is a lot of squandered potential, from certain ideas that just aren’t used often enough (such as utilizing more dirty puddles to negate stealth from dirt stains, and deep puddles to force players to cleanse dirt and become invisible once more while creating risk via sudden noises), to a lack of hidden areas that could have been used as a vessel for additional environmental storytelling and potential secrets for those who are willing to explore more, to a somewhat unnoteworthy soundtrack that’s mostly propped by ambient downpour noise. I also question if the white text narration was necessary to tell the story, as I feel like the developers could have fully committed to the minimalist approach and handled the narrative via character gestures and shifts in the eerie surroundings. As pointed out by ToasterNinja, there’s not much replay value to be found either, since the post-game memories added for a new playthrough either add very little backstory or just sum up plot points instead. I suppose you could do worse for PS3 exclusives, and the distinct setting and carefully scripted stealth-puzzles more than do their part to establish memorable moments; I just wish that the game was a fuller and more realized experience with a bit more meat on the bone to really live up to the shadow of the greats it was inspired by.

It might be easiest to think of the original Knytt as the Yume Nikki of 2D platformers. You play as a weird little creature that got abducted by a friendly alien, only to crash land upon a foreign planet and be tasked with collecting the fallen parts of the spaceship to return home. All you’ve got at your disposal is the classic single jump and wall cling/climb, as well as a searchlight that will point you towards the closest spaceship part. The collected parts won’t upgrade your toolkit in any fashion (and as such I find it misleading to mark this as a traditional Metroidvania) and there isn’t a single word of dialogue spoken or written in the landscape; as a result, this is a platformer dedicated to exploration as its own reward.

There’s no map in Knytt, so you’d think that it would be quite easy to get lost and stumble about with little direction. However, Knytt provides enough environmental context if you pay close attention and the searchlight will keep you moving through the sprawl with ease. While the game is less focused on mechanical difficulty, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s trivial: any liquid as well as particular invincible enemies (marked for danger when your character glows red upon approaching) can still end your life and send you back to the nearest checkpoint (though fortunately the quick respawn never feels frustrating). Having said that, the act of jumping and climbing about this unfamiliar yet vibrantly colored landscape, aided greatly by the tight controls, is more than enough to keep the player occupied while sporadic ambient tunes chirp in the background accompanied by the satisfying plodding of your footsteps.

As a result, the difficulty stems not from execution tests, but rather from spatial recognition and keeping the big picture in mind when figuring out exactly how sections of the overworld link to one another to maintain progression. A lot of players get frustrated when they keep running into dead ends, impassable expanses of fluid, or taunting one-way passages, but personally, I see it as fantastic motivation to figure this all out and fit each individual piece into the underlying puzzle; if it’s not a straight shot, then somewhere and somehow, there must be another path to get to the other side regardless. Perhaps it's quite simple and is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but Knytt isn’t trying to be. It’s one of the most focused and emblematic pure adventure platformers of all time, with tons of replayability due to its open-ended nature and extraordinary warm ambience, and a few tucked away secrets and shortcuts for the more discerning eye. Considering that a full playthrough takes less than an hour and that it’s free, I’d easily recommend it nevertheless; as one of the first indie greats, Knytt feels like a snug encapsulation of its era that doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

I’m late to the party because it ended up taking me over a month to finish after getting distracted with real life, but I gotta say… if this is how Shinji Mikami chooses to go out, then what a way to go out indeed.

The easiest way for me to describe Hi-Fi Rush is that simply put, it just works. Melding rhythm game and character action game/spectacle fighter mechanics clicked right away for me due to the natural process of acclimating to the classic push and pull of combat; figuring out enemy behavior and deciding how to best exploit that is often linked to cycles after all, so why not pair that with choruses and motifs of classic song structure to turn the whole experience into a musical symphony? The level of detail that Tango Gameworks instills to immerse the player and keep them on beat is admirable; pulsing LED walls, bouncing hedges and trees, synced-up lasers and retractable platforms to keep the player accountable, even Chai’s audible footsteps when romping about or his idle animation of swaying and snapping his fingers to the beat are all there to make sure you never lose track of the flow of the gameplay.

The linkages between the main “chorus” engagements are a bit more of a mixed bag admittingly, not necessarily because they’re “bad” but rather because these sections feel quite simple when compared to the flashy combat. During the lowest points of this level traversal, Chai gets to wander about these mostly deserted linear corridors (sometimes with hidden offshoots for collectibles) and occasionally wack a couple of crates for health or gears. There’s also a good chunk of platforming involved, but it’s definitely a bit awkward at first and never quite fluid. Chai doesn’t have a lot of standard horizontal momentum but can very quickly double jump, so classic platforming feels a little more precarious than it needs to be and often requires the quick forward dash to snag that extra distance. The result is an interesting conundrum, in that it’s super easy to undershoot without the dash but also surprisingly easy to overshoot while using the dash, never quite hitting that sweet spot.

Fortunately, the difficulty does scale up as you progress further into the story, and it’s much more enjoyable once the designers get to let loose by inserting more and more specialized elements. Shoot a barrier here, smash a wall over there, grapple through a series of skyhooks or chain rocket jumps to the beat to gain height, and so on, so forth. This is all is more or less a series of scripted action sequences that could just be thought of as a more complex 3D version of Bit Trip Runner, so while I’m clearly nitpicking, I do feel like these sections could be spiced up by scattering in some overworld enemies as obstacles that could also serve as anchor points to quickly grapple towards for skilled players to retain momentum. Regardless, the best of these segments will keep you moving forward and actively tapping your foot to the beat like a playable music video, and who’s really going to complain when you get to zipline and dodge hanging containers to Inazawa Chainsaw?

If there’s any real complaints that I have, it’s that Hi-Fi Rush's combat almost feels a bit too straightforward. There are two main components to this, and I’ll be deferring to a few other reviews I’ve read because I am more or less a noob at character action games (though I did still clear story mode on Hard difficulty despite this being the first character action game that I have ever beat, whatever that might be worth) and I think their perspectives added a lot to what I think could be touched upon in future works.

Firstly, Hi-Fi Rush has a few too many fail-safes in my opinion. The easiest way to explain this one is that positioning is unfortunately not very important in the grand scheme of combat. I’m going to agree with GoufyGoggs here to some degree: because enemy attacks are tied to the beat, and parrying actually cancels any of Chai’s attacks regardless of animation length or exact timing during the animation length, it’s fairly doable for players to auto-pilot by mashing attacks to wail on enemies (since the game doesn’t really punish you for attacking off beat as is) and correctly parry in time according to the given audio/visual cues as hinted by the background tracks to avoid taking damage at all. If this isn’t up your avenue though, it’s also pretty easy to cheese combat. Since enemy attacks lock-on and are telegraphed with quite a generous window, it’s pretty simple to continually dodge attacks by mashing the fast and high double jump or dashing to the beat in a circle around enemies, and then spamming your buddies’ assists to soften up opponents/tear through their super armor gauge because as CheesyChip has brought up, there’s not much of a cooldown, even without using the relevant support cooldown chips. It then becomes pretty trivial to lock onto enemies to go for the kill, by using the quick Magnet Grab to close distance as long as Chai’s looking in the proper direction, or if they’re close enough, abusing the generous attack magnetism (as pointed out by ProudLittleSeal here) to segue into a combo. I think these gaps could have been somewhat closed up if your attacks were more committal and couldn’t instantly be cancelled by parry (at least making the first few frames of the animation non-cancellable), if more enemy attacks were homing/adjustable so you couldn’t dodge everything by just mashing jump and dash, and if the support character cooldown was lengthened just a tad. To sum this up, Hi-Fi Rush’s combat is very honest about what it is and what to expect, which is why streamlining the combat to this degree makes it that much more basic when you’re willing to actively break and exploit the systems.

Secondly, while Hi-Fi Rush certainly provides a lot of room for creativity regarding combo potential, I’m not sure if the circumstances necessitate experimentation or for that matter, really encourage it. There are a lot of purchasable flashy standard combos that can be quite helpful with all different types of range and animations, but you don’t really need most of these combos when the grapple and dash will help you close distances and chain most combos as is and your standard bread and butter combos will get you through anyways if you’re not actively chasing high scores; even Rhythm Master difficulty of dropping below a C with the rhythm gauge shouldn’t be an issue as long as you’re landing all your hits and parrying/dodging most attacks. As pointed out by CheesyChip, these purchases are often pretty pricey and those gears can instead be used to purchase permanent upgrades like increased life gauge capacity, a health tank to revive Chai if he runs out of health, or Reverb Gauge increases to allow for stronger Special Attacks (which also will rack up a pretty penny). The actual levels will give you just enough gears for the necessities or to swap/try out a few attacks, and you can sell unused attacks if you need money in a pinch, though optimal level scrounging usually won’t provide enough to tackle both causes at once and you can’t grind levels with replays during the first run of story mode. That said, this concern is at least alleviated if you clear challenges on the Rewards board for gears (and this was in fact my main income during the latter half of the game), though it’s rather annoying that you can’t check up on your task progress in-between levels without exiting to the main menu and loading back into the hideout before returning to checkpoints. I also freely admit that my money was most likely not well spent on upgrading the chips and buying additional chip slots, which I found rather underwhelming since most of the chip upgrades were simple 10%/20%/30% stat upgrades (depending on the level the chip was upgraded to and however many slots it took up) and it was often more fruitful trying out new special attacks or focusing on the other permanent upgrades.

Nevertheless, I found that these areas of improvement were ultimately minor blemishes during my overall time spent; while I’ve spent a good chunk of time nitpicking systems and sections that could be even better with some touchups here and there, the core concepts and general execution absolutely kept me hooked. Aside from a strange glitch where my dodges failed to register during specific defense sequences of the final boss (forcing me to have to complete the ending segment of the final boss on Normal mode, where the glitch was inexplicably missing), Hi-Fi Rush was a thrill ride that I didn’t want to get off. The vibrant cel-shaded visuals, the clean and easy to grasp combat alongside rocking tunes that are more than happy to reward you for paying attention to the underlying rhythm, and a colorful and focused cast of characters with plenty of dad jokes, jovial banter, and layers upon layers of development and personality… I could go on and on about why this was such a memorable experience for me. Kudos to Tango for having the balls to shadow drop the game within the first month of the year, because as I see it, most major releases of 2023 will have trouble matching up to this.

Hi-Fi Rush is a game that feels so alive, and it feels damn good to have been alive taking in this breath of fresh air. As usual, I look forward to Shinji Mikami’s future endeavors if this is the level of creativity and cohesion that can be expected from him simply producing. And even if there is no next time, here’s hoping that Hi-Fi Rush will encourage many more greats to come with its unabashed charm and unapologetic sincerity.