Y'know, despite how hair-pullingly hard this game is, I never really felt mad while I was playing it.

The fourteenth game on my obscure games recommendation list is Kuru Kuru Kururin, recommended to me by Pangburn.

Now, despite the status of this game being "Shelved", I do want to state that I do plan on continuing to play this game throughout the year as I think it is very satisfying, however I wanted to get further through the list and this game is very simple to explain so I figured I'd review it now in a relatively short review.

Kuru Kuru Kururin is an arcadey type game that feels very unique, and is also incredibly difficult. If I had to compare the vibe I get from this game to something else I know, I would say it feels a lot like Super Monkey Ball.

The core plot of the game is that you, Kururin, have been asked by your mom to go and recover your siblings who have all gone to different locations.

You do this by using a little capsule helicopter type thing and flying it through multiple levels, while trying not to damage the propellers by hitting walls.

You have three hearts, and if you get hit three times, the capsule shatters with what is one of the most heart wrenching sound effects I have ever heard in a video game.

The name of the game is simply to try and get through the levels, and if you're good enough, try to speedrun them for the best time while not getting hit.

The levels are relatively short and because there are no lives it is all about practicing and mastering the timing in each stage until you can ace it.

Beating any stage in this game feels immensely satisfying and caused me to pop off like a madman, especially with how triumphant the Goal theme is.

While I may be putting it down for a little while, this game's cute aesthetic, rewarding challenge, and simple mechanics are going to have me coming back until I eventually beat it.

This game feels like it would be way more Backloggd-core if it was released in the US, so play it. Especially if you like Monkey Ball.

In my short time on this platform I've noticed that a not-insignificant portion of FromSoft fans tend to look back on Demon's Souls as nothing but a stepping stone to Dark Souls, and while DeS certainly laid the groundwork for a new sub-genre of adventure games that future titles would learn from, I don't think it's fair to sweep it under the rug as nothing but a prototype.

Something we tend to hear about in games criticism is the idea of conventional design. For example, a platformer that teaches a concept in a safe environment and tests your knowledge on the concept incrementally will likely be heralded as an example of good game design. It doesn't have to be a platformer, every genre under the sun tends to have games that follow what's expected, and more often than not those games see success over those that break the mold. This makes sense to a certain degree, something comfortable to the consumer is clearly a safe investment, odds are they'll be more satisfied with their purchase in the short term, etc. The fallacy here, of course, is the implication that the best games only stem from those that don't take risks, but looking at the most successful games of all time night trick you into believing this. Market trends continue to worm their way into every corner of the medium, allowing for higher profits for the higher ups at big companies leading to more disposable experiences (quick aside, but this is a big reason why i tend to be more cynical towards remakes these days. it's more profitable to take a classic title and reshape it to better fit in with modern standards rather than just preserve the art as it once was).

This is why a game like Demon's Souls slipping through the cracks is all the more fascinating to me. Back in an era where most devs fell into formulaic trappings that some would follow for the next decade, DeS not only made it to shelves in the tangled abrasive state it was in, but actually managed to resonate with it's playerbase. What other game was cool with you missing massive pieces of lore right before the final boss? What do you mean other players can join my world and punish me for successfully regaining my humanity? Even today, Demon's Souls was able to capture my attention in how it was somehow able to tie all these disparate gameplay elements together cohesively.

Now, it'd be foolish of me to write any piece on a Miyazaki-directed title without bringing up the difficulty, but to those of us who've played DeS, the way the game expects mastery from the player is more thoughtful than you might be led to believe. If there's one slice of the game that exemplifies this well, it's gotta be the cycle between soul form and human form. Starting the game with half your health slashed might be devastating to a first-time player, but it will surely teach them one thing: patience. After the player has carefully navigated the first level and taken down their first boss, they're rewarded with their humanity, but only for a fleeting moment. Since they know that this only lasts as long as they can handle, it will make them more cautious of traps and upcoming dangers, as the punishment for death will be severe. But even though they may lose their humanity in the moment, the reward for pushing through can't be understated. It's a brilliant little loop of design that not only keeps the player engaged throughout, but expertly threads the game's depressing mood and theming into the core gameplay. It's gameplay ideas like this that are so insane when stacked up against the larger gaming landscape, but the team behind the project had faith and passion in what they were creating, any potential accolades were secondary to the game itself.

Suffficed to say, it's very cathartic to see a game like Demon's Souls make an impact despite not even the publishers and higher ups at Sony believing in it. Even though Dark Souls was the game that changed the world in a more significant way, it wouldn't have turned out the way it did had Demon's Souls been adjusted to better fit in with the industry. Is it a game that can stumble over its own ideas occasionally? Sure. Are there clearly rough edges that slipped past QA that wouldn't have existed if the team had more experience? Absolutely. But we need more games that are willing to bend conventions and see what they can get away with. We need more rule breakers like Hidetaka Miyazaki that care about creating meaningful experiences above all else. Though even if all creativity was drained from humanity tomorrow and we only got slop for the rest of our existence, at least that wouldn't wash away the diamond in the rough that came to life against all odds.

Simply put, few games have managed to capture my soul quite as much as this, and that's probably the highest praise I can give.

Okay,

I've dabbled into a lot of Character Action games for the past three years and was excited to finally give this one a swing since the 3D Ninja Gaiden games are the only few CAGs I have yet to explore, but after finishing this one I can't help but find myself having very mixed feelings on it. I feel like an insane person for not liking this as much as I should, considering how much praise this game gets around the CAG community, and while there are aspects of NGB I like a lot, I couldn't help but be a little dissatisfied with this one.

That disappointment stings more for me considering I took a full week trying to get the game physically and pulling out my old Xbox only to find out my Xbox's disc drive stopped working when I was testing it, an issue notorious with old Xboxes. The Xbox is kind of a worthless console, like if this thing didn't have Halo I'd probably prefer owning a Dreamcast. Couldn't emulate this game either because Xbox emulation is still very far behind and unstable. But luckily I still had my 360 laying around (until I realized I had no controllers for it so I had to spend another 30$ on one) so I could finally play it. Thanks Microsoft for at least having decent backwards compatibility on your platforms. This'll be the one credit I'll give you, you evil bastards.

Tangent aside, finally booting up this game after all the trouble I went through had me on the edge of my seat. The game makes a strong first impression. This is hands down one of the best looking Xbox games and it still holds up fairly well to this day with the exception of overly shiny, plasticy looking character models common in the 6th gen era of consoles, but even they have a higher polygon count not seen before from that era. The most notably impressive aspect is the animation. Ryu’s movement and attacks have a perfect amount of weight and impact to them. Whether you’re running on walls, doing the Izuna drop, or doing a fully charged Ultimate Technique, the game never stops selling you on the idea that Ryu is this badass skilled ninja. His weapons also have some of the most visceral sound effects in any CAG I’ve played. The swords have this loud comical slicing sound upon every hit while the flail’s whipping sounds always made it fun to, well, flail around. The presentation of this game cannot be understated and the fact the game always runs at 60FPS (arguably the most necessary inclusion for these types of games) is beyond impressive. On a technical level, Ninja Gaiden Black is still a mind-boggling marvel.

The game also makes it apparent how different it’s combat is almost immediately from it’s competition. You notice right away Ryu’s moves have quick start up frames but a ton of end lag to them, necessitating every attack to be a commitment and inviting enemies to punish Ryu upon missing, and enemies don’t let up, they’re dynamically aggressive and hit like bulldozers. Ninja Gaiden Black enemies see you from a country mile and will make an immediate B-line towards Ryu upon smelling him. They’ll charge in numbers, dodge/jump over your attacks, grab you if you’re blocking for too long, throw projectiles or shoot guns at you etc. This makes every encounter an immediate threat to be dealt with, but upon successfully killing them you get rewarded with Essence, a multi-purpose item that either gives you currency, health, or Ki charges (a limited use special move Ryu can use), but what’s interesting is charging a strong attack near these will absorb them and decreases the time needed for an Ultimate Technique, a super powerful move that does devastating damage and makes Ryu fully invincible during the animation, but normally requires a long charge up time to activate them. Normally these Essences are picked up automatically near Ryu, but if Ryu is blocking they won’t be collected, allowing the player to choose whether to take them for their bonuses or absorb them with a strong attack for a quick UT. This turns the combat encounters into a gigantic split-second decision making balancing act where the player upon every kill has to decide whether to collect their earnings, heal, refill their Ki, or sacrifice all of that for a more aggressive option in combat. All of this makes Ninja Gaiden Black’s combat stand out from other CAGs I’ve played, and on paper this makes for a really engaging combat system. Here’s the thing though, as I got more comfortable with how NGB works, I found I liked these ideas more in isolation.

The reality is because a lot of Ryu’s normal combos aren’t rewarding enough to justify them in normal use, it railroads a lot of the combat into doing the more obviously viable options. A lot of Ryu’s combos surprisingly don’t do a ton of damage, can’t deal crowd control very well, and carry a lot of end lag baggage with them, making them feel flimsy and weak to throw out. Except for one: The Izuna Drop. For the low cost of 100 Essence at the shop, Ryu gets a combo from a light > strong attack launcher that puts him in the air to execute it more safely, instantly kills whatever is in it, and does a small AoE when he lands on the ground to deal damage around Ryu which makes him more safe upon landing. This works for every human-sized enemy in the game, and while the Izuna Drop is indeed the sickest move in video game history, I begrudgingly became rather tired of looking at the same animation for the 200th time to set up essences around me for UTs with every Ninja/Soldier/Human-sized fiend demon thing that approached me. To compensate for this, you sometimes have to fight larger sized enemies with super armor moves or weak flying enemies that ask you to think more outside the box, but even they have a samey feeling strategy attached to dealing with them. Because UTs reward is so massively safe and strong, this makes fighting the larger enemies like the dinosaur fiends or zombies with full UTs the more sane option and the same can be said after killing a few smaller enemies and waiting for the rest of them to charge into a UT. I see a lot of praise go towards the humanoid enemies in this game like the Spider Ninjas, but not these enemies and because none of them are fun or interesting, and don’t get me started on the command grabbing Ghost Fishes that spawn in front of you in swarms and can pin you down and loop you if you don’t mash fast enough. For about 90% of the encounters in this game I found myself rolling back and holding Y near essences to watch the same five second animation over and over again or positioning myself to do an Izuna Drop on a human enemy over and over again, and after a while I couldn’t help but find the combat surprisingly dull and stale, no matter how cathartic that Izuna Drop animation is.

But if I wasn’t straight up bored by the lack of options in combat, I was frustrated with the design decisions that the game was built around. The most obvious complaint being that Ryu has a 3rd person manual camera throughout but lacks a hard Lock-On mechanic similar to games that predates NGB like Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry and the game’s soft Lock-On is not really intelligent, making it a real hassle to reposition the camera in the middle of combat to see the enemy only for a move to miss because Ryu wasn’t targeting the correct person, or if he was targeting anything at all. I’ve grown more and more disdain for manual cameras in CAGs that aren’t Bayonetta or God Hand (But even Platinum Games had to compensate for Bayo’s camera by making it so enemies don’t attack you unless they’re on screen, despite that game both having a soft and hard lock-on. This is why the isometric camera in The Wonderful 101 was good, people! Because you didn’t have to manually adjust the camera to see what you’re fighting! It just simply displayed everything on screen! It was just too “different” for you guys to appreciate!) so this is like a CAG nightmare for me. It also doesn’t help that the game doesn’t really care where these enemies are placed. A lot of praise is given to this game for it’s Resident Evil-esque level design, but the cramp hallways mixed with the aggressive enemies makes it so you will get side-swiped by enemies running at you with an attack near a corner or shot at by a bullet across the level on a first playthrough. It’s like they designed the map first and made the decision for the game to have hyper-aggressive AI after. The most funny example I found highlighting this haphazard enemy placement was at a save point in chapter 6 I walked out and was immediately surrounded and hit by three Spider Ninjas that were spawned just a little off-screen from the save point. This was the only example of this happening near a save point to be granted and may have been intentional for this one save point, but stuff like this happens in normal play nearly all the time, especially in the city missions.

Speaking of the city, let me bring back that Resident Evil-esque exploration into the spotlight again. A lot of praise is given to it’s lock and key design similar to those games, but here I don’t like it. Because this game is chapter based, when a chapter ends there are a lot of times the game doesn’t give you good direction on where to go next unless you’re in a linear set piece chapter. You kind of just have to stumble around the city to look for a key item that just might be relevant to the current chapter you’re on. (Some of these items you grab don’t even get used till the end game like the stone tablets.) and some methods of getting them are clumsy. Like in chapter 5 you’re supposed to go into this bar and the guy tells you that you need a ticket to get in. I’ve walked around the plaza for a while fighting the same enemies respawning over and over again only to figure out I was supposed to go into Muramasa’s shop and buy something to trigger a cutscene of him giving me the ticket, even though before I triggered the “need ticket” cutscene I actually visited Muramasa’s shop beforehand. I have no idea why he couldn’t just give me the ticket when I visited his shop for the first time, but it made the realization all the more frustrating when unintuitive flags like this show up in the game’s progression. The level design also makes the chapters long dude, like I was clocking in about 30 minutes to an hour each chapter, ballooning the runtime to about 17 hours on my first playthrough (HowLongToBeat reports around 16 ½ hours.) making this the longest CAG I’ve played so far. Even The Wonderful 101 which I always hear criticized as being too long is only 14 hours, and that kind of pacing for an action game like this is grueling and tiresome! Chapter 11 is all about fucking swimming in water for half an hour and then the boss fight shows up and it’s Doku, your rival fight the game built up to! In a level where you barely have combat encounters for the entirety of it! Why!? This is like Jeanne 4 being after the 40 minute After Burner level in Bayonetta levels of bad here and nobody talks about it! At least let me dry off my boots a little.

The boss fights in Ninja Gaiden Black is kind of what kills this game the most for me personally. One of the things I love the most about CAGs is how many of them come up with very unique and interesting boss fight concepts to test your mastery of the game’s mechanics. They’re usually my favorite parts in each of these games, especially rival fights that pit you against an opponent that mirror the strength of your character like Vergil from Devil May Cry, Jeanne from Bayonetta, Azel from God Hand etc. Good boss fights alone is what gets me coming back to replay these games, and I think here in NGB they’re all kinda bad! Don’t think I can name a single one I liked except for maybe Alma, because she dodges around your attacks dynamically which forces you to deal with her attack animations and punish them quickly, which can lead to her getting knocked down for more attacks on her deleting mass chunks of her health bar. Everything else though are either kind of boring like the boss in Chapter 4, or the bone dinosaur, or the dragon, or the rehash fights of the tentacle monster or the elemental worms (You hit a big thing that doesn’t flinch and dodge it’s slow super armor attacks at the right time.) or boss fights in the military base chapter where you fight two tanks and a helicopter where all you do is shoot arrows at it with your bow and roll away to go refill them. (Boy I hope that's not a trend in the sequel!!!) and then there's just fights that don’t make a lot of sense even after beating them? Doku was easily the biggest disappointment for me because he not only highlights how limited your combat options really are in this game with his arbitrary windows to deal damage to him without him blocking. (Speaking of which, you get this jumping dive attack with your Dragon Sword called “Flying Swallow” that kinda breaks the game, and Team Ninja knew this so they made the bosses simply not take damage from it, rather than just rebalancing the move better. Lol.). It was incredibly frustrating to go after him with a laggy attack while he was throwing his sword only for the sword to magically appear back into his hands, blocking the attack and punishing me before I got a chance to dodge roll. Very unsatisfying rival fight, and then you get to fight him again in his spirit form with a worse arena and camera! Aw yeah now this is gaming!

Look, I get it, I get that there's a lot of people who are really into this game. Whether I watch videos of it, scroll through reviews, or talk about it in Discord servers, there's a lot of people who herald this game as "THE GOAT" or "ONE OF THE BEST XBOX GAMES" or "ONE OF THE BEST CAGS" and yeah I get it, there's still a lot to like about this one. It's presentation is slick and sharp like a katana blade, the game does it's best to give Ryu all the grace of a badass ninja whether he's running on wall to wall or elegantly finishing off crowds of enemies in rapid succession. Putting all my grudges with the combat aside, there's a genuine satisfaction in stumbling into a room with seemingly infinitely spawning enemies and after clearing it being rewarded with a health upgrade, it triggers all the dopamine receptors in my brain most of these dumbass games give me. But like any other blade you use for too long, I found it to dull out on me after a while. Annoyances I've had with the combat and level design kept rearing their ugly heads over and over again and I just kept wanting the game to be over 4 hours ago and yet Team Ninja kept insisting to throw more gimmicky sections for another half hour chapter at me. I know this review is probably my longest and rambly yet, but as I said, this is what the game did to me: it made me feel like an insane person bro! So many times this game made me turn over my shoulder and look at my library of CAGs I could be replaying that arguably does a lot of the things this game does but better. I thought about replaying this game on Hard mode before writing this down, but then I thought about fighting those fucking Ghost Fishes again and figured I'd take my internally planted advice and go replay Bayonetta instead.

Sorry guys. :/

I'm probably stating the obvious opening my review this way, but whether or not Metroid is truly BACK with Dread depends entirely on what you look for in the series. It's Samus, it's caverns, it's bombing random blocks, but is it intricate world-design and schmovy survival action? Ehhhh.

Mechanically, Dread picks up where Samus Returns left off, which itself picked up where Fusion and Zero Mission left off more than 15 years ago. Samus snaps onto ledges, automatically curls up into a ball when you approach tunnels, accelerates and decelerates immediately and falls like a rock. For the average person, the adjectives that will come to mind when comparing these controls to the "old" and "clunky" Super Metroid are likely "tight" and "slick" and "modern."

I find it interesting to think about Dread in this context, because it illuminates how we often cling to obvious answers for why certain games are the way they are, instead of simply looking at the experience for what it is. And the experience Super Metroid provided was to let the level design essentially act as a blank canvas for your consistent, non-arbitrary moveset. The tiniest bit of wall can still be kicked off of, and the morphball lets you squeeze through whatever gap you feel you should be able to, because so little of Zebes's geometry was put in place specifically to require the use of individual movement mechanics. One of Super's most famous skips involves barely rolling under the metal gate in Brinstar just before it shuts, which works not because it's a set piece specifically crafted for the morphball, but because the collision boxes are so generalized and speed is retained so naturally.

Look at Zero Mission meanwhile and if you try to wall-jump off of a small platform at a low angle, you won't be able to, because for as saucy as its movement tech may look, the game still expects you to contend with its rigid ledge grabs and pull yourself into arbitrarily positioned morph ball tunnels. All the way back in 2004, we were already playing a Metroid game where speedruns end up hinging more on deliberately hidden shortcuts in the level design, rather than deep exploitable movement tech à la Super.

And don't misunderstand; it is cool that these newer Metroids try to specifically cater to that kind of player mentality. But it's also at least a little mistrustful toward those same players, to expect them to learn all these incredibly specific ways the level design can be broken, rather than hand them a deep set of movement mechanics and let them look at any given part of the game world and say "hmm yeah I can probably do that." If anything, these games have to rely on deliberate speedrun shortcuts because the mechanics on their own give you so little to work with.

Dread's exact place in this debate is confusing, as it's already proving to have far more speedrunning tricks up its sleeve than I personally expected. Originally I was going to go off on how dumb it is that the game bars you from using your power bombs if you find them early, how that proves that the game doesn't really work in a systemic fashion (like Super Metroid, where pick-ups function completely independently of each other within the game's logic,) blah blah blah.

Clearly though, a lot of the skips we're seeing in this early stage of Dread's life are simply the result of clever hitbox manipulation and routing. With how many power-ups come as direct rewards for completing set pieces and killing bosses, I sincerely didn't expect people to reach sub-two-hour playtimes within mere weeks of Dread's release; my expectation was that Dread would be too reliant on tight event triggers. For what it is, it's impressive the game doesn't just come apart at the seams when you break its sequence, and it would be short-sighted to dismiss Dread purely based off that earlier power bomb example.

That said, that fundamental philosophical difference between Dread and a game like Super is still deeply felt in every fiber of the experience. Dread is ultimately still a game that tries to restrict you at every turn, with its rigid wall-jump arcs and doors that conveniently lock behind you even when you're closing in on the final boss already. You can go into either experience with a solid grasp of Samus's movement, but no knowledge of specific level design skips, and Super will feel far more spontaneous and freeing than its 2021 successor; that sense of "yeah I can probably do that" is never coming back. And I feel this says a lot about MercurySteam's priorities with Dread: dogged surface-level adherence to Super's tropes, items and hands-off vibe, without genuine mechanical follow-through.

Instead, Dread is a 2021 video game through and through, meaning it's highly concerned with having you go through a tight progression of escalating challenges. Here's the part where you pull out blocks with your Grapple Beam, here's where you Shinespark through a billion walls in a row for a bit, here's where you're ambushed by a mini-boss. And you know what, I'll say Dread pulls off that modern action romp thing as well as you could hope for. The high movement speed, instant acceleration and low input lag make for a game that's immediately fun to pick up, being able to 360-aim or parry while running and slide right into tunnels without ever breaking momentum makes Samus feel like a fresh bar of soap in your hands. Sprinting through ZDR's many expansive rooms, evocative panoramas stretching out behind you, rays of light softly flowing in, thumping sound effects massaging your ears as you light up the entire screen with big neon-yellow laser shots -- it hits.

The bosses are a surprising highlight. They'll often use different types of projectiles in conjunction with each other, which either can or can't be removed from the screen with your own shots, and some even have relatively dynamic movement and spawn patterns. As rigidly as these enemies tend to cycle between individual attacks, there is enough variation and opportunities to stay on the offensive within those attacks for them to stay remarkably fresh over repeat attempts. I was especially impressed with this duo of mini-bosses you encounter a few times over the course of the game: you can freely bait each one of them to any given part of the sizable fighting arena, resulting in dynamic outcomes and spontaneous situations that feel like relatively uncharted territory for this kind of 2D action game.

But Dread's pursuit of action movie bombast comes at a cost. As I said, it's a tight progression of escalating challenges: the game never stops funneling you forward, often going as far as locking anything that's not the critical path behind you, the proverbial carrot always right in your face. In fact, if you've gone through Dread with the creeping suspicion that the game never actually lets you stray from its single intended path (unless you specifically sequence break or backtrack for capacity upgrades,) then I'm here to rip that band-aid off and tell you that that seems pretty accurate. I'd do more serious testing into this if I were writing something a little more legit than a Backloggd review, but: every one of Samus's key upgrades (minus Space Jump and Scan Pulse) has a corresponding type of lock in the world, and it seems there's never a point where getting one upgrade opens up enough paths that you could, for example, choose the order in which to get the next two.

This is my fancy way of saying that Dread is basically a straight line, except for those few cheeky shortcuts that let you adjust the item sequence a little bit. But that's really only shocking if we forget that, again, it's Fusion and Zero Mission that set Metroid on this exact trajectory in the first place. Comparing Dread to its GBA predecessors, I can kinda take or leave individual aspects of either style. Zero Mission for example showed that you can have a pretty linear game without inhibiting wall-jumps so aggressively, but at least Dread has the decency to not put big glowing waypoints on my map. Etc., etc.

Dread is forcing me to accept that I'm a bitter 16-bit boomer and how, for as much as games can't stop using the same ingredients, the particular way the Super Metroid dish is assembled has just not been matched by anything. Everyone who's played Super Metroid remembers making it back to the surface, to Samus's ship, the dreary rain giving way to triumphant horns, after running a whole lap around Zebes and getting all the key power-ups you need to explore the rest of the planet. It's not only emotionally powerful, it's where the real game begins, finally letting you search for the path forward in whatever way you see fit. This is complimented by a whole slew of genuinely optional upgrades like the Spazer or Plasma Beam, which present a much stronger backtracking incentive than Dread's endless supply of Missile Tanks.

This structure -- first a guided tour around most of the planet, then letting you loose to kill the game's remaining bosses -- hasn't been replicated by any other Metroid. But approaching Dread in particular under this lens reveals just how haphazard MercurySteam's approach to level design is, and how it and Super are too fundamentally incompatible to really be compared, even though Dread is constantly setting itself up for that juxtaposition.

I urge you to play close attention to how Dread's world is assembled. The game world's elevators always connect to these one-way horizontal tunnels: a dead-end to one side, a door to the rest of the area on the other. Individually, many of the rooms have dense, zig-zaggy layouts, but they're stacked together in a relatively linear fashion: the path keeps snaking West for example, until you reach the end of the respective map and the room suddenly curves backward, to naturally guide you back toward where you started.

This way, Dread essentially always auto-pilots you exactly where it wants you to go. Try any alternative door on this path, and they'll always feed into some kind of dead-end (again, unless it happens to lead to a sequence break.) It's to the point where, sometimes, you're funneled into a random teleporter that connects to a random room in a totally different area that you would never think to visit otherwise, and once you're there, the cycle I just described begins anew. Unlike every other Metroid, even the games outside Super, Dread never actually asks you to backtrack or figure out where to go yourself. The level design always curves and bends conveniently to guide you forward, and at best you might have to intuit which wall to bomb next.

The difference is easiest to explain with Super: here, every area is instead entered via a vertical shaft, which ends up functioning as a kind of hub, with many different spokes on either side. These can fork into one-off rooms, long horizontal tunnels, or even another hub-like vertical shaft. You play around in that set of rooms for a bit until maybe you get a new power up, which is where you're meant to draw the connection that "hmm maybe it's time to go and check out some of those other rooms."

It's not just that Super is asking you to understand its level design as an actual world, it has the knock-on effect that you can understand it in the first place. The layout feels planned and internally consistent, rooms have actual navigational functions (again, singular tunnels and shafts that connect to many different rooms on their own) instead of just being video game levels for you to blast through.

Maybe you also played through Dread and couldn't shake the sense that it was kind of flavorless? That it lacked pacing? And the sense that I'm actually moving through a world? You may find those feelings hard to pin down exactly, but they have real game design reasons behind them, and as much as Dread tries to wow you with visually stunning one-off rooms and events at key progression junctures, the way there can't help but feel hollow. MercurySteam stacked together all these set pieces and micro-challenges in the most seamless 2021 way they could, but once you take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's clear you're dealing with an un-traversable clustered mess of mini-video game levels, rather than a world you're meant to understand every inch of. It's telling you unlock the ability to warp freely between any of the game's previously one-way teleporters in the post-game: the map is just too fucking cumbersome to navigate otherwise.

This lack of commitment to actually capture the essence of those older Metroids is even more evident in Dread's use of a modern auto-checkpoint system: we're at least back to dedicated save rooms to lock in your progress and get a break from the action after Samus Returns, but anytime there's even a slight chance of death, you can expect to respawn just one room earlier. Under that light, you can't help but feel incredibly underwhelmed with how inconsequential the EMMI prove to be to the overall experience, considering they're the game's only major gameplay element not cribbed verbatim from older Metroids.

I suppose this is another aspect that has me thinking on how design and player sensibilities have fundamentally shifted over the years. To me, many of Dread's challenges felt fleeting; often satisfying to learn and execute, but ultimately with no real tension or significant room for error... and that last part is what's crucial. I'm going to state the obvious again, but if EMMI kill the player instantly, that means a single mistake will be enough to erase all their progress since the last checkpoint. It stands to reason then, that as a designer you'd make these runs as short as possible to keep possible frustration at a minimum.

So really, what makes the EMMI fall flat is less the lack of real consequence for failure specifically, and more how that reverberates on the design of the EMMI sections themselves. You never actually spend significant time with the first four EMMI (this does not include the first tutorial variant,) the run to the exit is so short you're actually likely to get it on a random attempt without having had to consciously study their behavior or the level design much. Early gimmicks like having to stand still to raise the room's water level do get the blood pumping a bit, but they're far too infrequent to turn the EMMI zones into something more substantial-feeling.

Here's the contradiction many game designers and players don't seem to want to acknowledge: if you give me a trial & error challenge that lasts a minute, kills me instantly, and will take ten attempts to get past, you actually use more of my time than if you'd given me a more substantial challenge with more room for error that sets me back circa three minutes in the event that I fail (which I might not.) Not only that, while the latter situation actually has stakes, the former will have me go through the motions and get used to it so much that I'll be too emotionally numb to feel much of anything by the time I succeed. It's too easy to forget that the idea behind game design is to elicit feelings from the player; you have to understand that they're going to be way more afraid of punishment than they actually need to be. That's the whole point.

It wasn't until the purple and blue EMMI where I got into extended tugs of war and felt legitimate... well, dread, having to move through their domains. The way water is used to slow Samus down in places is especially intelligent, as it becomes impossible to outpace the EMMI once you enter. You'll have to carefully estimate how long it will take you to get across, and you may even want to lure your predator somewhere else first based on your planning.

Consistently exciting was the use of the Omega Blaster, where you get to flip the tables and need to assess the ideal spot in the level design to shoot at the EMMI from (since you need to deal damage consistently to take out their armor.) It leverages your previously gained knowledge of the room layout back when you were the prey, and having to gauge distances and movement timings in this way feels legitimately original in the 2D game space Dread is occupying.

And UNLIKE Metroid Dread, I don't have a smooth convenient segue into my conclusion for this review. It's ultimately a game that left me excited and disappointed in pretty much equal measure. It's undeniably fun to have Metroid's base mechanics back in this giga-polished AAA 2D 2021 Nintendo game, but Dread is not really any less conservative than Samus Returns was four years ago. And even if all you wanted was "more Metroid," is Dread really meeting that bar when it's following up at least FOUR games that were all incredibly daring, sometimes even groundbreaking in their time? The most disruptive thing Dread does is not giving the normies an Easy Mode.

This and RE7 are the two series entries I hadn't played the longest and was the most curious to revisit, and with RE8 featuring Chris + many similarities to 4 and 5, I thought this might be a good opportunity to refresh my memory. In the case of 5, I decided less than halfway through that I'd quit because I was honestly kind of bored and time is a little too precious at the moment.

Under that light, this 3 out of 5 score may be surprising; I'm coming away from RE5 feeling there's enough of interest going on here on paper that warrants a quick write-up. You could chalk it up to there being way too much of RE4's DNA in 5 for it to be straight-up bad, but that's a little cynical when it actually does elevate itself meaningfully from its predecessor in a few ways. Being able to quick-select weapons and items with the D-Pad is an obvious QoL improvement that, in practice, legitimately incentivizes more spontaneous play — it’s easy to want to tap into weapons you otherwise wouldn’t if they’re right at your fingertips. But it also goes hand-in-hand with a now real-time inventory that's still one of the most elegant, yet tension-inducing systems I've seen for this kind of thing. While RE4's attache case has become far more iconic, RE5's square grid takes that fun novelty of freely positioning your items and turns it into a legitimately relevant choice: your 3x3 item grid directly corresponds to the four D-Pad directions (so a shotgun on the leftmost square can be accessed by pressing left, while the First Aid Spray in the top right can't be equipped the same way,) which is both intuitive and something you'll have to regularly manage intelligently while under the active stress of combat. From that perspective, even putting ammo on your quick-select and being able to hand it to Sheva more quickly that way becomes a valid consideration.

I guess that’s a good opportunity to discuss RE5’s most divisive aspect. I actually feel deciding what weapons to give Sheva and how to manage her inventory space adds sincerely novel layers to gameplay in a way I haven't quite seen like this elsewhere. I recall giving her a sniper rifle being a good way to keep her from getting hit constantly back on PS3, which is both sort of interesting? Because it's a logical result of the mechanics presented? (it's obvious that she aims extremely well but is also very trigger-happy, so giving her a weapon with high damage, long reach and slow fire makes natural sense to optimize her AI’s behavior) But these kinds of considerations can’t help but come across as unintuitive hacks in the moment: in a game with resource management and non-regenerating health, having to specifically leave the way those resources are spent to an AI + a number of dynamic unpredictable factors never feels quite right. Babysitting Sheva because she will otherwise get hit constantly or churn through different types of ammo seemingly at random ironically feels like what the internet always tries to convince you Ashley (who’s transparently deterministic) was like in RE4.

Which begs the question of whether RE5 would've been better off as a solo-game. Sheva's inclusion has much deeper implications on the flow of the campaign than is initially evident, and it's clear that a lot of the encounter design flat-out isn't as good as it was in RE4. It's most obvious with bosses, where a lot of interesting elements get thrown at a wall, only for the game to not capitalize on them. There's this extended on-rails sequence early in the game, at the end of which you fight one of those El Gigante type enemies from RE4 by targeting its weak spots. You dodge some of its punches with QTE prompts, then watch it pull this long pylon from the ground to hit you with. You would expect that pylon to now present some kind of new obstacle, but instead you end up ALSO dodging it via the same QTE as every other attack in this fight.

Another early boss (the crawling bat thing) is set within this circular arena with a couple huts and some elevation changes. You would expect those level design features to factor into the fight somehow, but instead you’re meant to linearly bait it into some proximity mines (place mine, walk back, wait for it to run in, then dash past it, quick-turn, place another mine.) It would play out the exact same way if the arena was just a straight line instead. In a game with this much intelligent game design, it’s surprising how often newly-introduced elements don’t actually provide gameplay variety.

Those two scenarios also serve as such obvious points of comparison for how RE4 always went those couple extra notches with its encounters. The El Gigante fights in either game speak for themselves, clearly being able to run around and choose weapons freely and having to scrounge for ammo as shit goes down in RE4 is more engaging. But even RE4's take on an on-rails sequence, the mine cart set piece, where you get to move between carts freely, have enemies jump in from all sides, and need to avoid multiple kinds of obstacles, takes such a gigantic dump on RE5 that it's kind of hard to believe it was made five years prior.

While all that sounds pretty negative, I hope it comes across that RE5 is more just... boring, rather than offensive. I couldn't find a smooth segue into the weapon upgrade system for this review, but that shit is still exemplary (love how upgrading capacity restores your ammo) and something more looter-shooter type games should take serious note of more. So while RE5 does overall present something substantial and different from its predecessor, I wouldn't say it's engaging enough to really warrant more than one playthrough when you could be playing that game instead.

(footnotes: the headshot context melee attack being changed from Leon's wide-reaching roundhouse to a more linear punch kinda sucks and doesn't really allow you to take as many risks with crowd-control)

“Really sorry about your ass.”

(some spoilers for OG FF7’s first ten hours, no spoilers for FF7R)

I started this review series by listing my absolute favorite games; both because being positive feels good, but also to provide a kind of baseline for what to expect here, I suppose. In that same vein, I feel it’s also important to show contrast: if my favorites are all about pure mechanical expression and smooth, organic interactions, then FF7R, conversely, represents everything that holds games back to me. This thing is so rigid and limited that it somehow manages to feel more outdated than the turn-based 90s RPG it’s remaking. While FF7’s original design-ethos was built on detailed one-off environments, contextual storytelling and intuitive yet flexible battle mechanics, FF7R completely tears down all of these pillars, leaving in their place the kind of nightmare-hyperbole-parody that weebs are describing when they talk about the latest Call of Duty or Uncharted.

Action-adjacent Square RPGs like Dissidia or Crisis Core can have this tendency to not ground your actions in the game world very much — it’s the difference between button presses triggering canned interactions between actors, or throwing out an actual hitbox that I need to connect with the enemy. FF7R feels like the final form of this in the worst possible way: for as gnarly as the impact of Cloud’s flashy sword combos on enemy grunts may look on the surface, there isn’t actually any real physicality to how your attacks throw them around, nor does the addition of square-mashing add anything meaningful mechanically when compared to FF7. You quickly realize that your standard attacks don’t actually do appreciable damage and solely exist to pad out the time between ATB moves, a process that previously moved along on its own. No amount of alibi-action disguises the fact that this is, at its heart, still a turn-based RPG, where enemies weak to fire need to be hit with the fire spell and damage can’t be reliably avoided. You get about five hundred different ways to “parry” attacks, none of which actually require any careful timing on your end, but interact with enemies in ways that are completely arbitrary. The final boss in particular is a hilarious display of just how bad this game wants to look like a Devil May Cry, while still working under NES JRPG rules and refusing to adopt things like consistent telegraphing or hit reactions. In those instances, it’s some of the most shallow and repetitive action-gameplay imaginable.

Countless FF7R skill videos do show how much this new combat system can pop off, since it gives you control over when and how to queue up party attacks and provides some unique states for active positioning on the battlefield. What those videos all have in common though is that they're exclusively shot in the game’s VR challenge missions with precise Materia setups; ideal conditions for the system to shine that flat-out don’t exist in the rest of the game. Campaign mob fights run the gamut from boring to soul-crushingly tedious (those goddamn sewer fish guys,) while any fun you could be having with bosses is knee-capped by absurd damage gating and forced cutscene transitions that will eat any excess damage you put out that moment. This aspect should’ve been a top priority with the boss design considering how much combat revolves around slowly building up this Stagger bar, where the majority of the fight is spent purely setting up the boss for when you can finally lay the smack down (which, just like for FFXIII, already does a lot to make individual actions feel linear and meaningless.) The way all that damage will regularly evaporate into nothing due to factors completely outside your control feels like having a bag of Tetsuya Nomura-shaped bricks dropped right on your nutsack just as you’re about to cum.

Under that light, the proposition of digging into the Materia system and trying to get the most out of it is absolutely laughable. I can’t even begin to tell you how many boss fights I went into only to realize halfway through (after some kind of form-change or mechanical switch-up) that my setup wasn’t optimal, forcing me to either slog and fumble through the rest of the battle, or back out and start from scratch with this new knowledge. All that’s on top of the godforsaken menus you’re forced to work with that hit this abominable sweetspot between clunky stone-age level interface design and the suffocating swathe of meaningless skill trees you’ve come to expect from modern AAA games. How is it possible that healing outside of battle literally takes longer in this game than it did in Final Fantasy (just Final Fantasy. 1. the first one.) on the NES?

FF7R’s final Shinra HQ invasion has to be one of the worst isolated parts of any game I’ve ever played and represents a microcosm for how little it respects your time. Every issue I’ve discussed so far is amplified now that your party is split in half, with no way to quickly transfer setups between the two teams. Fights are now sandwiched between “””platforming””” sections that have Tifa monkey bar-ing by transitioning from one excruciatingly slow canned animation into the next. To get back to what I was saying in that second paragraph: for as much as Uncharted’s climbing for example is brain-dead easy, it at least provides some vague sense that I’m in control of a character in a physical setting, instead of giving commands to a robot on the fucking moon. The least you could say about Uncharted, also, is that it gives you shit to look at. What is the point of remaking the most popular JRPG of all time as this PS4 mega-game when that entails turning all of its handcrafted backgrounds into featureless copy-paste tunnels and compressed-to-shit JPEG skyboxes, all of which now necessitate what feels like hours upon hours of squeeze-through loading?

All that begs the question: what exactly did I push through this trash heap for in the end? I categorically reject the notion that a game this mechanically regressive can still come together purely as a vehicle for cutscenes or something, but even entertaining that idea for a minute has me confused over what the big deal is. My impression is that FF7R managing, against all expectations, to not be some Advent Children-level train wreck sapping any and all life out of these characters, is enough for it to come across as this masterful reexamination of the original story to many players (also that the whole cast is hot.) The reality is that, while some of the dialogue and character interactions does hit, this game is 40 hours long and naturally a lot of that extra time is padded out by your party members giving each other directions to hopefully not get lost in this FFXIII-ass level design. It’s pure filler and adds little of value to the existing story.

FF7R’s most crucial mistake, and why I’ve now realized this remake-series was an awful idea to begin with, is to think that just knowing wider information about a character will automatically make us care about them more. I first played the original in 2015, and back then, the deaths of Biggs, Wedge and Jessie legitimately shocked me. And it’s not because I was particularly attached to those characters — instead, it was all in the execution: sudden, unceremonious, unfair and way too soon. That’s the whole reason it worked, and it was a way to make you hate the faceless corporation that was Shinra that actually felt earned. FF7R not only tries to endear us to Avalanche by giving us exponentially more time with them, it bone-headedly draws out their deaths in a way that’s so corny and obvious it borders on parody. You’d think giving the villains more screen-time would be a harmless at-worst change, but presenting them as these hot badasses only makes this feel even more like some generic Shounen anime and less like the systemic fight against capitalism that was the original.

I’d be lying if I said the way they contextualize this remake within FF7’s overall story wasn’t kind of clever, but my gut tells me this twist is only gonna feel more lame as time passes. It’s already at the point where it derails any and all discussion about the game; where somehow being a little bit meta means all the shit about it that makes me want to off myself is actually intentional and smart. The literal first numero uno side-quest I did in FF7R involved crawling into some back-alley, killing a pack of rats, going back to the quest giver to be told I “didn’t kill the right rats,” heading to the same spot again and finally killing the new rats that just spawned there. The starting area this quest takes place in has to be one of the ugliest sections I’ve seen in any AAA game, with hazy washed out lighting and NPC animation that hasn’t evolved a bit from FFX on the PS2.

The most poignant experience I had in my time playing FF7R was in Wall Market. It's easily the most gassed-up part of the game online, mostly to do with the fact that it’s a vehicle for wacky anime cutscene shenanigans and how the characters ramp up the horny to the max of what a Square Enix game is comfortable with (that Don Corneo confrontation is cringeworthy with all the awkward pauses between lines.) In Wall Market, you can enter this bar. The barkeeper will ask you to sit down and have a drink. You can’t do either of those things; you just stand there as the NPCs around you gaze into the void.

FF7R is not the fully-realized mega budget dream version of Midgar we've all been salivating at the thought of, and it’s not some clever meta commentary either. No, I’m pretty sure it just sucks.