Enkorru
4 reviews liked by Enkorru
My god this was the longest five and half hours of my gaming life. Why does my roommate have nostalgia for such absolute garbage. This is the platonic ideal of a Bad Game, so bad in so many ways that you can near feel the heat from the dumpster fire that must have been its development.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
Iwata’s dead, Shiggy’s checked out, and there’s no one to tell Aonuma no.
What the fuck is this.
I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.
Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.
This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.
Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.
Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?
Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.
The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.
The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”
And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?
I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!
Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!
Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.
ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.
I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.
Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.
When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.
I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.
In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!
Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.
For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.
Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.
I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.
Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.
Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.
I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.
——
June 28th 2023 Edit: wish different reviews could have different play statuses. Oh well. “Completed” the game with more words,, but in my heart this review should stay Abandoned.
What the fuck is this.
I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.
Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.
This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.
Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.
Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?
Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.
The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.
The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”
And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?
I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!
Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!
Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.
ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.
I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.
Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.
When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.
I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.
In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!
Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.
For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.
Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.
I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.
Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.
Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.
I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.
——
June 28th 2023 Edit: wish different reviews could have different play statuses. Oh well. “Completed” the game with more words,, but in my heart this review should stay Abandoned.
Played with a buddy who had nostalgia for it. A very chill and mindless hang-out game. Unlike the first Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, we were able to finish this one without using cheat codes. So congrats, developers, you graduated from Literally Unplayable™ to Fine, I Guess™!
It's amusing to see how this game came from an era where D&D was still fringe and cringe instead of mainstream. Like, all the NPC characters are Boobarella. We got evil buxom scientist. We got evil buxom dragon woman. We got ambiguously evil buxom merchant woman. All voice acted in that community theater way where the line reads betray dreams of thespian prestige without the craft or ability.
At least in fairness, my dude refused to cover his nipples no matter what kind of armor I tried on him. (Maybe your inventory wouldn't be full all the time if you wore some damn clothes!)
My play experience was casting Haste and then mashing the Fireball button in the vain hopes my magic would hit something before my play partner would run up and kill it with their wild Hastened sword swings. Some wizard made me pay him like 30,000 gold to tell me about my lost memories, only to put a marker on my map literally two miles from town. I wanted to kill him, predatory ablest git.
In all, a smoother game than the first, but much less memorable. The first was so bad as to be incomprehensible, so unbalanced that each new level could be a Saga™ of player experiences, so agonizing my buddy near pissed themselves laughing at my incredulous disdain. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II disappointed me with its mid-ness.
It's amusing to see how this game came from an era where D&D was still fringe and cringe instead of mainstream. Like, all the NPC characters are Boobarella. We got evil buxom scientist. We got evil buxom dragon woman. We got ambiguously evil buxom merchant woman. All voice acted in that community theater way where the line reads betray dreams of thespian prestige without the craft or ability.
At least in fairness, my dude refused to cover his nipples no matter what kind of armor I tried on him. (Maybe your inventory wouldn't be full all the time if you wore some damn clothes!)
My play experience was casting Haste and then mashing the Fireball button in the vain hopes my magic would hit something before my play partner would run up and kill it with their wild Hastened sword swings. Some wizard made me pay him like 30,000 gold to tell me about my lost memories, only to put a marker on my map literally two miles from town. I wanted to kill him, predatory ablest git.
In all, a smoother game than the first, but much less memorable. The first was so bad as to be incomprehensible, so unbalanced that each new level could be a Saga™ of player experiences, so agonizing my buddy near pissed themselves laughing at my incredulous disdain. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II disappointed me with its mid-ness.
Bottom line: it’s fine. My 8 year old nephew 100%’d this game twice, and that feels like all that should matter. But - this game makes me uncomfortable. Because my nephew did not 100% Super Mario Odyssey, or any game before this, which provides the lens I need to dig into this game’s funny feeling.
That funny feeling started as soon as the game booted up and asked me to share my data. I know many games do this, but seeing it in the context of Kirby planted this seed in my head of “market testing.” That seed blossomed as I played the game and thought about how this game was marketed, how it reviewed, and it’s now franchise record sales. There are so many touchpoints that made me feel like I was playing game product as much as an actual game.
Forgotten Land’s whole gimmick, of Mouthful Mode, feels like a reaction to Mario Odyssey as much as an imitation. People responded well to the weirdness of Mario becoming a photo-realistic T-Rex and chilling in New York City. And by well, I mean twitter loved it. And by loved it, I mean it had high engagement. The weirdness was gif-able. My real world friends are still weirded out by the real people in Odyssey’s New York City. (I hate them!)
And so we get Carby. Carby is weird. It’s transgressive. It’s meme-able in the same way Mario’s capture mechanic was. Making characters that can glom onto any real world thing or object is marketing genius for building unexpected associations with your character and product. The merchandising potential is high while having to maintain few new character trademarks. Gimmicky transformations are nothing new to Kirby. Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Planet Robobot featured plenty. But something about the way they are used in Forgotten Land put me on edge. And I think that’s because the basic gameplay of playing as Kirby in the Forgotten Land is boring.
The best Kirby games have smooth movement and a wide range of character actions for Kirby that make it fun to explore his otherwise simple levels. Transitioning to 3D in Forgotten Land came with some compromises that took away freedom of movement without offering substitutes. Kirby can no longer fly vertically infinitely. It’s perfectly viable to fly over levels in most 2D Kirby games, but the act of mashing the jump button gets tiring enough that you’ll eventually fall back to properly engaging with the game. Kirby no longer can run. The input for doing so in 2D was a double tap, something that can’t be registered as easily in 3D. So instead of adding another button for running, Kirby’s stuck on one speed.
As a result of these restrictions, the level design is plain. The camera lets you tickle it, but the levels are linear enough you’ll forget the option exists. Walk around, projectile spam with the same-y feeling copy abilities at enemies who mostly stand around giving the stink eye. Wait for a gap in canon ball blasts, hop over a bottomless pit. After enough of these elements have been remixed to feel like a game level, it usually ends with a Mouthful Mode transformation sequence. Yes, its funny when Kirby becomes a vending machine or a set of stairs, but you’re kinda wandering through barren levels getting pointless trinkets until something funny happens and then the level ends. Because if the level ends on something funny, that’s what you remember, so it must have been a fun time, yeah?
Forgotten Land reminded me of the difference between how critics and customers play games. Critics binge games, so love tangible details that are easy to write about. Variety and novelty work well on them because they are unlikely to replay levels, and games with lots of different powers and meme-able moments are easier to remember and describe to fill space. For me, it feels like the set pieces and gimmicks are to distract from the fact the base interactivity of the game character just isn't that fun or engaging.
Nothing sparks my intuition for a game’s insecurity like checklists, and Forgotten Land is brazen. Finishing any level immediately shoves a scorecard in your face with everything you did and did not accomplish. I appreciate games that let you track trinkets, but the presentation belies the intent. Unlike Mario Odyssey that hid its checklist in a menu you had to seek out, Forgotten Land is constantly making you aware of your “progress.” The main pause menu has a big completion percentage taking up more screen space than anything else. And to finish a world, you need to have accomplished a certain number of checklist items to challenge that world’s boss. These multiple systems in place guiding you to think about playing a level again, mere seconds after you’ve finished it the first time, irk me.
These systems irk me because they exist alongside other systems that feel even more sinister. Not in a vacuum, but because this is a Kirby game. Kirby can upgrade his copy abilities, but to do so, requires you find a trinket and amass quantities of two in-game currencies. One of these currencies is earned in separate challenge rooms from the main game levels. It feels so disconnected from the experience of playing the game one might ponder, “why couldn’t the hidden trinket just… be the ability upgrade, if we had to have one?” And the answer to that is to normalize children to the kind of game environments that have microtransactions.
Forgotten Land does not have microtransactions. However, it does have a “history of Kirby” book containing info about previous Kirby games. Notable, however, is it only shows Kirby games that are currently available for purchase on the 3DS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch systems. Many of which are free-to-play spin-off games with currencies, upgrades, and menus very similar to the ones found in Forgotten Land - except these currencies cost real-world money. Notably absent from this picture book are older games like Kirby 64 and Kirby Super Star, which contain most of the inspiration in enemy and level design that Forgotten Land is aping.
This context also explains something odd that bothered me about the gacha-style collectible figures in Forgotten Land. (Another system that is pointless and dumb in any video game and is here being used to normalize gambling in a children’s game.) Figurines of enemies and bosses have pointless fluff Pokedex descriptions, but only those introduced in Forgotten Land. Series mainstays have no descriptions, lest they mention their origins and engender curiosity for these older, self-contained, non-monetizable games. (A departure from the historically themed collectables from the 3DS games, I might add.)
All of this modern gaming garbage - the achievements, the crafting, the currencies, the gacha, the base building, the incessantly chittering NPCs, the extreme number of reminders to upgrade, the data collection, the ads - I just hate it. And I know it works. It wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work.
When my nephew played Mario Odyssey, he’d find a challenge he thought was fun, and do it over and over again. He didn’t care that he didn’t get a moon. He didn’t need to collect every dumb hat, or scour the world for every trinket. The gameplay caught his interest, and the menus stayed out of his way. With Kirby, I know that isn’t the case, which makes me go from “wow, he really loved Forgotten Land!” to a sense of unease I can’t quantify.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is… fine. If you’re the type of person who only has time to play a level or two after work, it’s fine. If you are trying to get someone into gaming, it’s fine. (The co-op sucks. (Why no upgrades for Bandana Waddle Dee?)) But it’s not good. It’s expensive without feeling quality. I have no nostalgia for it, but Kirby Super Star is still the best Kirby game on the Switch. I find this expensively-produced mediocrity so weird.
Someone worked very hard on vector graphic animations for every level, (something that also feels like a response to Odyssey’s travel stickers), but the levels are so insipid in concept that the decals do nothing to help you remember what happens within them. The sound design lacks punch, relying on sound effects that have been in use for decades without expanding the soundscape to match the graphical fidelity of a 3D player space. The main theme song is hummable not due to its musical merits, but because it is reused and remixed in so many environments. One rendition has a guitar “wail” so embarrassing it conjures to mind parodies of Christian rock.
There is no greatness in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There is no pulse that implies the work of great artists, but plenty of fingerprints left by corporate entities. I can more easily imagine the meetings of suits discussing what transformations to be shown in a Nintendo Direct than I can whoever drew the terrible boss designs. It feels like a project not striving to make something good, but a well-managed, well-funded project that allowed its average minds ample time to finish their tasks. I hope none of this nonsense represents KIrby in the next Super Smash Bros. game.
If I ever have to see that stupid sexy cheetah woman again and her terrible glittery eyeshadow I'll scream
That funny feeling started as soon as the game booted up and asked me to share my data. I know many games do this, but seeing it in the context of Kirby planted this seed in my head of “market testing.” That seed blossomed as I played the game and thought about how this game was marketed, how it reviewed, and it’s now franchise record sales. There are so many touchpoints that made me feel like I was playing game product as much as an actual game.
Forgotten Land’s whole gimmick, of Mouthful Mode, feels like a reaction to Mario Odyssey as much as an imitation. People responded well to the weirdness of Mario becoming a photo-realistic T-Rex and chilling in New York City. And by well, I mean twitter loved it. And by loved it, I mean it had high engagement. The weirdness was gif-able. My real world friends are still weirded out by the real people in Odyssey’s New York City. (I hate them!)
And so we get Carby. Carby is weird. It’s transgressive. It’s meme-able in the same way Mario’s capture mechanic was. Making characters that can glom onto any real world thing or object is marketing genius for building unexpected associations with your character and product. The merchandising potential is high while having to maintain few new character trademarks. Gimmicky transformations are nothing new to Kirby. Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Planet Robobot featured plenty. But something about the way they are used in Forgotten Land put me on edge. And I think that’s because the basic gameplay of playing as Kirby in the Forgotten Land is boring.
The best Kirby games have smooth movement and a wide range of character actions for Kirby that make it fun to explore his otherwise simple levels. Transitioning to 3D in Forgotten Land came with some compromises that took away freedom of movement without offering substitutes. Kirby can no longer fly vertically infinitely. It’s perfectly viable to fly over levels in most 2D Kirby games, but the act of mashing the jump button gets tiring enough that you’ll eventually fall back to properly engaging with the game. Kirby no longer can run. The input for doing so in 2D was a double tap, something that can’t be registered as easily in 3D. So instead of adding another button for running, Kirby’s stuck on one speed.
As a result of these restrictions, the level design is plain. The camera lets you tickle it, but the levels are linear enough you’ll forget the option exists. Walk around, projectile spam with the same-y feeling copy abilities at enemies who mostly stand around giving the stink eye. Wait for a gap in canon ball blasts, hop over a bottomless pit. After enough of these elements have been remixed to feel like a game level, it usually ends with a Mouthful Mode transformation sequence. Yes, its funny when Kirby becomes a vending machine or a set of stairs, but you’re kinda wandering through barren levels getting pointless trinkets until something funny happens and then the level ends. Because if the level ends on something funny, that’s what you remember, so it must have been a fun time, yeah?
Forgotten Land reminded me of the difference between how critics and customers play games. Critics binge games, so love tangible details that are easy to write about. Variety and novelty work well on them because they are unlikely to replay levels, and games with lots of different powers and meme-able moments are easier to remember and describe to fill space. For me, it feels like the set pieces and gimmicks are to distract from the fact the base interactivity of the game character just isn't that fun or engaging.
Nothing sparks my intuition for a game’s insecurity like checklists, and Forgotten Land is brazen. Finishing any level immediately shoves a scorecard in your face with everything you did and did not accomplish. I appreciate games that let you track trinkets, but the presentation belies the intent. Unlike Mario Odyssey that hid its checklist in a menu you had to seek out, Forgotten Land is constantly making you aware of your “progress.” The main pause menu has a big completion percentage taking up more screen space than anything else. And to finish a world, you need to have accomplished a certain number of checklist items to challenge that world’s boss. These multiple systems in place guiding you to think about playing a level again, mere seconds after you’ve finished it the first time, irk me.
These systems irk me because they exist alongside other systems that feel even more sinister. Not in a vacuum, but because this is a Kirby game. Kirby can upgrade his copy abilities, but to do so, requires you find a trinket and amass quantities of two in-game currencies. One of these currencies is earned in separate challenge rooms from the main game levels. It feels so disconnected from the experience of playing the game one might ponder, “why couldn’t the hidden trinket just… be the ability upgrade, if we had to have one?” And the answer to that is to normalize children to the kind of game environments that have microtransactions.
Forgotten Land does not have microtransactions. However, it does have a “history of Kirby” book containing info about previous Kirby games. Notable, however, is it only shows Kirby games that are currently available for purchase on the 3DS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch systems. Many of which are free-to-play spin-off games with currencies, upgrades, and menus very similar to the ones found in Forgotten Land - except these currencies cost real-world money. Notably absent from this picture book are older games like Kirby 64 and Kirby Super Star, which contain most of the inspiration in enemy and level design that Forgotten Land is aping.
This context also explains something odd that bothered me about the gacha-style collectible figures in Forgotten Land. (Another system that is pointless and dumb in any video game and is here being used to normalize gambling in a children’s game.) Figurines of enemies and bosses have pointless fluff Pokedex descriptions, but only those introduced in Forgotten Land. Series mainstays have no descriptions, lest they mention their origins and engender curiosity for these older, self-contained, non-monetizable games. (A departure from the historically themed collectables from the 3DS games, I might add.)
All of this modern gaming garbage - the achievements, the crafting, the currencies, the gacha, the base building, the incessantly chittering NPCs, the extreme number of reminders to upgrade, the data collection, the ads - I just hate it. And I know it works. It wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work.
When my nephew played Mario Odyssey, he’d find a challenge he thought was fun, and do it over and over again. He didn’t care that he didn’t get a moon. He didn’t need to collect every dumb hat, or scour the world for every trinket. The gameplay caught his interest, and the menus stayed out of his way. With Kirby, I know that isn’t the case, which makes me go from “wow, he really loved Forgotten Land!” to a sense of unease I can’t quantify.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is… fine. If you’re the type of person who only has time to play a level or two after work, it’s fine. If you are trying to get someone into gaming, it’s fine. (The co-op sucks. (Why no upgrades for Bandana Waddle Dee?)) But it’s not good. It’s expensive without feeling quality. I have no nostalgia for it, but Kirby Super Star is still the best Kirby game on the Switch. I find this expensively-produced mediocrity so weird.
Someone worked very hard on vector graphic animations for every level, (something that also feels like a response to Odyssey’s travel stickers), but the levels are so insipid in concept that the decals do nothing to help you remember what happens within them. The sound design lacks punch, relying on sound effects that have been in use for decades without expanding the soundscape to match the graphical fidelity of a 3D player space. The main theme song is hummable not due to its musical merits, but because it is reused and remixed in so many environments. One rendition has a guitar “wail” so embarrassing it conjures to mind parodies of Christian rock.
There is no greatness in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There is no pulse that implies the work of great artists, but plenty of fingerprints left by corporate entities. I can more easily imagine the meetings of suits discussing what transformations to be shown in a Nintendo Direct than I can whoever drew the terrible boss designs. It feels like a project not striving to make something good, but a well-managed, well-funded project that allowed its average minds ample time to finish their tasks. I hope none of this nonsense represents KIrby in the next Super Smash Bros. game.