Back on my bullshit again, it seems...

I have a kinda weird relationship with this game. I love it a lot, but I consider it to be a weaker entry in the series. I just have tons of little issues. The huge amount of tutorials, the annoying roadblocks, the fact that there's almost too many moves you can do. Just lots of minor annoyances. Doesn't help that this was my first time playing a THPS game on the GameCube, which that d-pad was not made for games like this.

But... despite all that, I really love the Ethos of this game. It almost feels like the most Authentically Punk game in the series! Yes, some of the crude 2000s humor is an eyeroll, but the rags-to-riches story is really endearing with some fun characters and plays around with the history of the sport in an interesting way. Plus, it's still a Tony Hawk game! It's tons of fun! These levels are top notch. Sure it's not a true open world, but I respect the ambition a ton.

Overall, it's hard for me not to love a game in this series. The only Neversoft one I don't love is Proving Ground. So even a weaker Tony Hawk game still fucking rules.

I have like, at least 100k characters at minimum at the ready everytime to explain why I love this game; But I'll just explain it very succinctly here.

Treasure's games are designed with a 'Turing-completeness' to their greater design space. A term coined by John Carmack when describing Doom, it is essentially a game that presents infinite possibilities. The producer and creator of this game, Kafuichi went on record stating he wanted to make an action game that wasn't strictly memorizable. And even though the combat is very unbalanced, the boss AI generally being easy to throw loop, he really did succeed. Even though the game's relatively easy, any challenge the game throws at you posits some of the most emergent gameplay I've ever seen.

The attribute mechanic is very introspective and just, COOL. I love how the zero teleport analog in this game can launch enemies, at a perfect angle where they'll get subsequently juggled, and you can grab them out of mid air and pole vault off of them or use their bodies as bullet soaking shields. Everything Shyna can do in this game is additive to it's core conceit. The difficulty might be a bit lopsided to some, the last few bosses being very particular. It kind of reminds me of Cave Story, how the bloodstained sanctuary tests muscles the game didn't build, because nothing else is quite like it. I still love this game to death. It's easily the coolest game ever created.

for some reason i received this game a couple days before it actually released. which might as well, cuz it was made for me.

we are living in a skung licensed game renaissance and im here for it.

great little adventure game that was clearly made with passion for the source material. its v faithful to the book, expands to it in neat ways, and is packed with many cute lil references to the series.

and sure, its buggy, to the point where the game just sorta stops dead in its tracks sometimes due to something being busted, but that was usually fixed with just quitting to the menu and reloading. i dont really mind it, and im sure most issues will be fixed in time.

they should maybe have fixed tintins dead eyed stare tho, lmao.

note: i played in french with dutch subs for the true canon experience.

tintin : ) GOTY 2023

also, blue lotus game when???

Goddamn.

This game is such a marked improvement over DW2 it's honestly kind of insane.

DW2 isn't really a musou, I'd argue. It's just a 3D beat em up.

Here, in DW3, is where the entire genre that Koei have been riding the wave of for two decades was built. This is where DW gets its own style, where the levels take on a format beyond mountainous terrain and walls, where the music stops being "guy goes ham on the guitar before a 15 second break", and where objectives actually matter - to an extent. I could go on, but really; this game is foundational, and while it's not perfect, it's honestly kind of overwhelming to go back this far and see where it all came from?

Anyway, enough gushing, time to review.

I appreciate that characters are no longer stuck with the same attacks for the entire runtime, buuuuuuut linking new combos to weapon drops was a bit of a shit move. For reference, I gunned the campaigns of Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian just to be ~all-encompassing~ and in the latter it took me until about 3/4th the game to get a weapon that let me use C5. It's not great.
Also, as an aside, this game made kinda understand why some people whinge about clones; I dicked about with a lot of auxiliary cast members in Free Mode and damn, everyone with a sword feels near-identical. Even characters with more interesting weapons felt samey since C2/3/4 are launch/stun/sweep on almost everyone.

On the level front, just... Holy fuck they're actually enjoyable, barring some issues I'll get to later. The presence of objectives and events helps keep things entertaining to a degree, a welcome respite after DW2's ascetism. And, of course, there's the trademark dogshit DW3 dub to keep you entertained too. Above all else though, I appreciate that the paths forward are far less binary and droll.
But eesh, they hadn't really nailed the enemy density:level size ratio just yet. It's really noticeable in Chibi, where it feels as though a third of the map goes completely unused. Even outside of it, there's a loooooooooot of trekking through empty space, because...

I know PS2 musou fans swear by the morale system, and this game's especially, but in my experience (playing on Hard, thanks to some old PCSX2 save data giving me a starting boost) the morale system actually makes the game feel terrible.
I'm no musou spring chicken, so these games are easy to me by default. Here, in DW3, it actually feels as though the game punishes me for being good by letting me not play it.
An average DW3 stage sees me daisy chain officer kills together, sink the enemy morale, and then struggle to find new things to kill as my emboldened allies sweep the stage like locusts. This isn't an issue in any other DW, even this game's immediate predecessor, so it stands out really heavily here.

Further compounding this is the decidedly strange stage distribution for some characters. For the three I finished it's fine, there's a very nice buildup from easy peasy to hard. For characters like Gan Ning, you get a boring filler stage (the fandom wiki even calls them as such) and are then thrown in at the proverbial deep end with Chibi. For a newer player, I can see how this might be a little odd or even offputting, as the game makes no indication of which characters are the 'core' characters (i.e, have the most stages and better difficult distribution).

Looping back to the topic of presentation though, it's amazing just how much more of a game DW3 is, let alone a musou game. Stages are visually distinct, characters have a personality (despite the dub cutting most of it out) as opposed to being silent golems, the music finally has a distinct flair to it and the flow of levels actually feels like a battle now. While the progression systems suck, they're at least there, and help add a little justification to why you would ever engage with this game beyond a couple of musou/xtreme mode runs.

This game also sparked a ton of feelings regarding my history with the musou genre, a history which spans about 22 years and may be older than some of the people reading this review.

But I'll leave that till this marathon concludes. Till next time.