Hooblashooga
It's still good, but having F2nd as a starting point for this series really spoiled me. There's several songs I adore in here, but most of it is just okay. The Nyan Cat song can't save this setlist for me, I'm afraid. At the very least, they're all fun to play. I appreciate the Diva Room stuff as a distraction for when I'm feeling burnt out on the rhythm game, but I don't ever want to play a virtual rendition of rock-paper-scissors ever again. Whoever thought it was okay to give that minigame a best 3-of-5 win condition was off their rocker.
I was almost tricked into thinking this was a proper, intentionally designed video game. Then I hit mission five, where that facade was torn apart by a pack of angry bears.
The stealth mechanics aren't too shabby, even when presented alongside what's essentially an official pack of custom levels. It's still satisfying to learn the layouts of these small levels and use your stealth skills to complete them efficiently. Just...watch out for the bears.
The stealth mechanics aren't too shabby, even when presented alongside what's essentially an official pack of custom levels. It's still satisfying to learn the layouts of these small levels and use your stealth skills to complete them efficiently. Just...watch out for the bears.
I've dipped my toes into plenty of Cygames titles prior to this one. Got knee-deep into Princess Connect: Re:Dive, waded in the shallows of World Flipper, and went off the deep end for Dragalia Lost, including going down with the ship! What I'm getting at is that Cygames definitely has a winning formula for their gacha games, and while the gameplay (obviously) bears the closest resemblance to Granblue Fantasy, there are elements drawn from all their works that feel familiar. Big AoE attack circles that appear on the ground, visual novel side stories that give minor permanent buffs to character stats, raid-styled bosses that shift between normal, overdrive, and break states. They've translated the allure and mechanics of their mobile games into a product you only need to pay for once, and that alone is commendable. But is it good?
One trick that Cygames has up their sleeve is borrowing (and occasionally poaching) talent from across the industry. I bring this up because Relink was announced to be in development alongside Platinum Games back in 2018, only for their contract with Platinum to end in 2019. Either they "borrowed" some of their staff, or someone from Platinum leaked the recipe for their secret sauce, because Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the most fun Platinum game I've played in almost a decade, and it's not even necessarily made by Platinum. Their DNA is written all over Relink with stuff like like dodge offsetting combos, a cooldown after evading three times, and linear story stages with optional content off the beaten path (treasures, extra encounters, hidden items, etc). I hope some former Platinum talent works at Cygames now, because Platinum's going downhill fast, and their action game expertise needs to be preserved, damn it.
So obviously, I can't just use "punching down on Platinum" as an explanation as to why I like this game, so allow me to heap unfounded praise unto Cygames instead. This game is beautiful. I want to exist here. I stroll through the market of Seedhollow and I can hear every stall owner barking their sales pitches at me, it's been too long since I've played a game with a world that feels lived in. No matter who your team is comprised of, there's quite a bit of banter bouncing around during battles. It really hammers home that your group of skyfarers are like one big family going on adventures. And the music? From soothing serenades to glorious battle themes, this game truly looks and sounds the part.
The story is definitely your typical shounen adventure fare, but I never really minded that because it's constantly topping its previous setpieces as threats escalate, and it's just a fun ride to boot. Some people call it a "12 hour tutorial", and they're not exactly wrong. The game eases you into quite a few major game mechanics via scripted events, and you won't unlock most of the story bosses as standalone quests for a good while after it's all said and done. The "fate episodes" are extremely middling, however. Each character brings their individuality and emotional baggage to the table, and usually explores it via whatever random NPC happened to be within earshot that day. It's usually fine, but it often makes what could be a very personal story into something detached from their identity. We've got more than enough characters in the base roster to have them bounce off each other, but I guess they save that level of interaction for the freakin' mobile game.
While I sincerely appreciate the familiarity that comes with this game's gacha origins, it's also haunted by issues carried over from those titles. For every unique Primal Beast, Avia General, and Bahamut you fight, there's also four elemental variants of the same fucking rock lizard. Again, you gotta work your way back up to the good shit once you're done with the story. With all due respect, I think whittling a raid-style boss's health bar down is an exhilarating experience when the fight is actually interesting. Depending on how you've invested resources into various characters, you'll either finish under par, or you'll be in it for the long haul. I personally pumped 90% of my resources into my personal unga-bunga invincibility potato (Charlotta), and spent the remaining 10% trying to ensure that my remaining three CPU party members weren't too hopeless.
Basic attack combos are pretty braindead, but they're usually based around activating a character's special abilities. For example, pressing Y launches Charlotta into the air, and then pressing X will launch her halfway across the map (or towards the nearest enemy). Every single character has a few defining quirks to their playstyle that sets them apart from each other. They all have their own distinct skills to choose from, which is the real determining factor in choosing who you want to play as. Once you click with someone, it's time to build up their passive traits using sigils. The traits provided by sigils have extremely high level caps, much higher than a single sigil can provide on its own. You can equip multiple copies of the same type of sigil in order to min/max the ludicrous bonuses available at the higher levels, given you have enough sigil slots. It's fun to experiment, so long as you aren't addicted to the idea of a "meta".
Most players seem to be settling into the same meta build with little variation, but you shouldn't feel pressured to conform. Take it from me: Dealing any damage at all is more important than dealing the most damage possible. Meta builds don't really matter until the final tier of quest difficulty. Don't be afraid to equip sigils with survivability in mind. Being KO'd is a detriment to everyone involved. Quests end with a score tally and a ranking, dictated primarily by clear time and side objectives. Ranks and side objectives have extra item drops tied to them, encouraging you to play better, harder, faster, and stronger. In essence, make damage number go up, make enemy health go down faster, get more rewards. I am an advocate for straightforward gameplay loops.
I built my justice potato with the intention of taking her online for co-op. Joke's on me, over a month since release, and apparently the matchmaking is basically broken on PC! I thought it could be because everyone's already busy playing endgame content and I'm late to the party, but I swear the "quick quest" option just doesn't work half the time. If SteamDB says the game has 7000-15000 players online, then why do we seem so disconnected? I switched Steam's download region to Tokyo, and it barely improved anything! Regardless, successfully getting a group together gives you the ideal Relink experience, it's leagues above playing with your braindead CPU partners. When every player has their designated build and knows how to properly play as their character, the game's mechanics finally click.
Unfortunately, I can't praise everything this game does. Particularly, you're constantly being showered in particle effects during combat, which makes it really difficult at times to identify and properly react to incoming attacks. I don't consider that a game-ruiner; Relink is much less a pure action game and moreso an action-RPG with very fluid combat. You can tank a few hits and heal yourself up with no harm done in most situations, but sometimes the act of dodging feels closer to a guessing game. Perfect dodges are a thing in this game though, and the brief invincibility you gain for pulling one off feels glorious. Also, guard. Guard guard guard guard guard. You can casually block way more attacks than you'd expect, do not neglect to do so in a pinch.
I hope I'm not overselling it too much, but outside of Monster Hunter, multiplayer action of this caliber is pretty hard to come by. Most importantly though, I can use this game as an excuse to never ever play the gacha game. What can I say? I feel like a kid who got exactly what he wanted on Christmas morning. If this game is successful, then I hope other Cygames properties can be immortalized as non-gacha games. You hear me, Cygames? Do this for Princess Connect! And Dragalia Lost, and Uma Musume, and World Flipper, and
One trick that Cygames has up their sleeve is borrowing (and occasionally poaching) talent from across the industry. I bring this up because Relink was announced to be in development alongside Platinum Games back in 2018, only for their contract with Platinum to end in 2019. Either they "borrowed" some of their staff, or someone from Platinum leaked the recipe for their secret sauce, because Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the most fun Platinum game I've played in almost a decade, and it's not even necessarily made by Platinum. Their DNA is written all over Relink with stuff like like dodge offsetting combos, a cooldown after evading three times, and linear story stages with optional content off the beaten path (treasures, extra encounters, hidden items, etc). I hope some former Platinum talent works at Cygames now, because Platinum's going downhill fast, and their action game expertise needs to be preserved, damn it.
So obviously, I can't just use "punching down on Platinum" as an explanation as to why I like this game, so allow me to heap unfounded praise unto Cygames instead. This game is beautiful. I want to exist here. I stroll through the market of Seedhollow and I can hear every stall owner barking their sales pitches at me, it's been too long since I've played a game with a world that feels lived in. No matter who your team is comprised of, there's quite a bit of banter bouncing around during battles. It really hammers home that your group of skyfarers are like one big family going on adventures. And the music? From soothing serenades to glorious battle themes, this game truly looks and sounds the part.
The story is definitely your typical shounen adventure fare, but I never really minded that because it's constantly topping its previous setpieces as threats escalate, and it's just a fun ride to boot. Some people call it a "12 hour tutorial", and they're not exactly wrong. The game eases you into quite a few major game mechanics via scripted events, and you won't unlock most of the story bosses as standalone quests for a good while after it's all said and done. The "fate episodes" are extremely middling, however. Each character brings their individuality and emotional baggage to the table, and usually explores it via whatever random NPC happened to be within earshot that day. It's usually fine, but it often makes what could be a very personal story into something detached from their identity. We've got more than enough characters in the base roster to have them bounce off each other, but I guess they save that level of interaction for the freakin' mobile game.
While I sincerely appreciate the familiarity that comes with this game's gacha origins, it's also haunted by issues carried over from those titles. For every unique Primal Beast, Avia General, and Bahamut you fight, there's also four elemental variants of the same fucking rock lizard. Again, you gotta work your way back up to the good shit once you're done with the story. With all due respect, I think whittling a raid-style boss's health bar down is an exhilarating experience when the fight is actually interesting. Depending on how you've invested resources into various characters, you'll either finish under par, or you'll be in it for the long haul. I personally pumped 90% of my resources into my personal unga-bunga invincibility potato (Charlotta), and spent the remaining 10% trying to ensure that my remaining three CPU party members weren't too hopeless.
Basic attack combos are pretty braindead, but they're usually based around activating a character's special abilities. For example, pressing Y launches Charlotta into the air, and then pressing X will launch her halfway across the map (or towards the nearest enemy). Every single character has a few defining quirks to their playstyle that sets them apart from each other. They all have their own distinct skills to choose from, which is the real determining factor in choosing who you want to play as. Once you click with someone, it's time to build up their passive traits using sigils. The traits provided by sigils have extremely high level caps, much higher than a single sigil can provide on its own. You can equip multiple copies of the same type of sigil in order to min/max the ludicrous bonuses available at the higher levels, given you have enough sigil slots. It's fun to experiment, so long as you aren't addicted to the idea of a "meta".
Most players seem to be settling into the same meta build with little variation, but you shouldn't feel pressured to conform. Take it from me: Dealing any damage at all is more important than dealing the most damage possible. Meta builds don't really matter until the final tier of quest difficulty. Don't be afraid to equip sigils with survivability in mind. Being KO'd is a detriment to everyone involved. Quests end with a score tally and a ranking, dictated primarily by clear time and side objectives. Ranks and side objectives have extra item drops tied to them, encouraging you to play better, harder, faster, and stronger. In essence, make damage number go up, make enemy health go down faster, get more rewards. I am an advocate for straightforward gameplay loops.
I built my justice potato with the intention of taking her online for co-op. Joke's on me, over a month since release, and apparently the matchmaking is basically broken on PC! I thought it could be because everyone's already busy playing endgame content and I'm late to the party, but I swear the "quick quest" option just doesn't work half the time. If SteamDB says the game has 7000-15000 players online, then why do we seem so disconnected? I switched Steam's download region to Tokyo, and it barely improved anything! Regardless, successfully getting a group together gives you the ideal Relink experience, it's leagues above playing with your braindead CPU partners. When every player has their designated build and knows how to properly play as their character, the game's mechanics finally click.
Unfortunately, I can't praise everything this game does. Particularly, you're constantly being showered in particle effects during combat, which makes it really difficult at times to identify and properly react to incoming attacks. I don't consider that a game-ruiner; Relink is much less a pure action game and moreso an action-RPG with very fluid combat. You can tank a few hits and heal yourself up with no harm done in most situations, but sometimes the act of dodging feels closer to a guessing game. Perfect dodges are a thing in this game though, and the brief invincibility you gain for pulling one off feels glorious. Also, guard. Guard guard guard guard guard. You can casually block way more attacks than you'd expect, do not neglect to do so in a pinch.
I hope I'm not overselling it too much, but outside of Monster Hunter, multiplayer action of this caliber is pretty hard to come by. Most importantly though, I can use this game as an excuse to never ever play the gacha game. What can I say? I feel like a kid who got exactly what he wanted on Christmas morning. If this game is successful, then I hope other Cygames properties can be immortalized as non-gacha games. You hear me, Cygames? Do this for Princess Connect! And Dragalia Lost, and Uma Musume, and World Flipper, and
It's a good thing this is a "Noire game" and not a "Nep game", otherwise this might damage the good reputation of the Neptunia franchise! Ha, haha, haaaaaaaaaa...
I know someone who enjoyed this game because "it's a strategy game, you can't make them bad".
Are you sure about that?
I'd have to say this game's biggest flaw is the fact that it's built like a typical Neptunia RPG. Health and attack values are way larger than necessary, maps and enemy types are constantly reused. The game's big gimmick is lowering the exorbitant SP costs on your skills by keeping other units adjacent to you, represented by a yuri kiss on the cheek. This is counter-intuitive because grouping everyone together makes it absurdly easy for an enemy to stroll over and use an attack that targets your entire cluster of chibis. Sometimes you don't even need to be grouped together, some enemies just have attacks that hit like a truck and cover half the damn map. On top of that, your units can be afflicted with status effects, of which there are WAY too many to keep track of. I don't even know what half of them do!
The game is also just constantly wasting your time (and not just because I'm spending mine playing a Neptunia game, har har). Even once you cave in and turn off all attack animations and whatnot in the settings menu, it still feels like it's dragging its feet. Stop showing me that enemies aren't taking any actions, it adds up when eight or so of them aren't necessarily doing anything as I slowly approach them. So many of this game's maps revolve around shitty gimmicks, like tediously lifting and tossing wooden boxes to gradually create staircases, or avoiding floor panels that damage you and instantly end your turn, or waiting a turn for a moving platform to come back, just so you can board it and wait another turn to have it take you to your destination, and THEN you can depart it on the turn after that. Maps are reused ad nauseam, so you'll grow accustomed to groaning at the mere sight of certain locales.
The writing just rubs me the wrong way, moreso than usual for a game of this pedigree. Most of Noire's friendships just result in her getting sexually harassed in extra scenes, with the accompanying CGs having the Bad kind of voyeuristic feeling. And then there's the self-insert, with probably one of the worst examples of this trope I've ever experienced. A true self-insert comes with a certain amount of agency from the player, but you don't get any choices here. Secretary-san is effectively his own character, one you're expected to project yourself onto. Sorry Noire, our relationship fell through years ago. I've personally been sizing up Vert quite a bit lately...
The true ending of this game is locked behind Noire having a lily rank of at least 70 with every other unit by the end of the game. This mandates an endgame grind that's a total snog-I mean slogfest. I unironically think this game is on the same level of enjoyment I had with the original HDN on PS3, and that is a very low bar to cross. You are missing nothing by ignoring this, even if you're a Nep freak like me.
I know someone who enjoyed this game because "it's a strategy game, you can't make them bad".
Are you sure about that?
I'd have to say this game's biggest flaw is the fact that it's built like a typical Neptunia RPG. Health and attack values are way larger than necessary, maps and enemy types are constantly reused. The game's big gimmick is lowering the exorbitant SP costs on your skills by keeping other units adjacent to you, represented by a yuri kiss on the cheek. This is counter-intuitive because grouping everyone together makes it absurdly easy for an enemy to stroll over and use an attack that targets your entire cluster of chibis. Sometimes you don't even need to be grouped together, some enemies just have attacks that hit like a truck and cover half the damn map. On top of that, your units can be afflicted with status effects, of which there are WAY too many to keep track of. I don't even know what half of them do!
The game is also just constantly wasting your time (and not just because I'm spending mine playing a Neptunia game, har har). Even once you cave in and turn off all attack animations and whatnot in the settings menu, it still feels like it's dragging its feet. Stop showing me that enemies aren't taking any actions, it adds up when eight or so of them aren't necessarily doing anything as I slowly approach them. So many of this game's maps revolve around shitty gimmicks, like tediously lifting and tossing wooden boxes to gradually create staircases, or avoiding floor panels that damage you and instantly end your turn, or waiting a turn for a moving platform to come back, just so you can board it and wait another turn to have it take you to your destination, and THEN you can depart it on the turn after that. Maps are reused ad nauseam, so you'll grow accustomed to groaning at the mere sight of certain locales.
The writing just rubs me the wrong way, moreso than usual for a game of this pedigree. Most of Noire's friendships just result in her getting sexually harassed in extra scenes, with the accompanying CGs having the Bad kind of voyeuristic feeling. And then there's the self-insert, with probably one of the worst examples of this trope I've ever experienced. A true self-insert comes with a certain amount of agency from the player, but you don't get any choices here. Secretary-san is effectively his own character, one you're expected to project yourself onto. Sorry Noire, our relationship fell through years ago. I've personally been sizing up Vert quite a bit lately...
The true ending of this game is locked behind Noire having a lily rank of at least 70 with every other unit by the end of the game. This mandates an endgame grind that's a total snog-I mean slogfest. I unironically think this game is on the same level of enjoyment I had with the original HDN on PS3, and that is a very low bar to cross. You are missing nothing by ignoring this, even if you're a Nep freak like me.
Believe it or not, I'm not exactly a Kingdom Hearts fan. Years ago, I wanted to know if there were any good action games on PSP, and I ended up here. This game technically serves as the first one in the series' timeline, even if it's somewhat revelatory to plot points in the already existing KH games. And hey, three characters to choose from! This will in no way backfire spectacularly. To expedite my writing process and keep myself sane, I've got a format going this time. For each character, it'll go: character's gameplay style, non-specific gameplay mechanic, character's story summary. Capisce?
-----VENTUS-----
Ventus is a perky kid. He holds his keyblade backhanded, and he can't seem to keep his feet on the ground. Grounded combos are difficult to pull off, if even possible to begin with. His floaty nature gives him a real tendency to whiff his attacks. A finishing attack like "air flair" does a ton of damage, if it even connects to begin with.
The command deck takes a page out of TWEWY's book, allowing for full freedom of what abilities you have on hand at any time. You can make decks filled with your ideal string of attacks, or you can keep swapping mastered abilities out for ones with low experience, constantly keeping your playstyle fresh. There's no MP, the only things stopping you from spamming the same commands repeatedly are your deck size and command reload speed. Using specific types of commands will also shift you into a command style, a more powerful form with unique normal attacks. When mastered, you can even fuse commands together to make stronger commands, along with attaching crystals to get passive abilities. I do wish there was a way to know which abilities you'll fuse (outside of a guide), because several of these are very necessary for basic survival. Do not try to engage bosses without skills like Second Chance, Once More, or Leaf Bracer. You're gonna have a bad time.
After witnessing his friends' Keyblade Master exams, a strange masked boy taunts Ventus with the idea that his friends are going to leave him behind someday. With no memories to his name aside from the time he's spent with Aqua and Terra, Ventus flies the coop, in search of what worlds await out there. Out there he meets the newest member of the public domain, gets tickets to Disneyland, and learns that Xehanort wants to make him into a weapon with a very stupid name (it's pronounced "keyblade", but spelled "X-blade", thanks Nomura)!
And then the game asks you to do it again.
-----TERRA-----
Terra focuses on brute force more than anything else. Big broad swings with pretty long animations, at least comparatively. I'd welcome the more grounded combat if Terra didn't have such stiff mobility. He has miserable end lag after landing, dodging, atacking, skills, pretty much anything, if I'm being honest. His moveset is fine for normal enemies, but most bosses tear him apart like a dog chomping on a chew toy. I found the best way to use Terra was to get into a command style as soon as possible. Anything's better than his standard moveset, but if all else fails, you could always just shoot your enemies instead.
The shotlock is such a busted mechanic. It's like bringing a firing squad to a sword duel. It's awkward to use in the moment, holding down L+R to bring up a reticle that roots you in place isn't ideal. If your shotlock command is a high enough level though, this is completely negligible! Max out your lock-on, fire, hit the QTEs (if there are any), and watch the enemy's health bar m e l t. Most normal bosses can be felled with two or three fully charged shotlocks. It's a genuine strategy you can fall back on if you're just sick of the game, something I felt strongly while playing as Terra.
Terra is so fucking funny to me, dude. I'm sure they wanted him to come off as naive, but the way he immediately meets and puts trust into the villain of nearly every world he visits is just hilarious. The way Xehanort encourages Terra to embrace the darkness is cool and all, love watching that asshole being a charismatic manipulator, especially to such a lost puppy searching for validation. Poor guy just wanted the power to protect his friends, no matter the cost.
And then the game asks you to do it AGAIN.
-----AQUA-----
Aqua earned her Mark of Mastery in the game's opening for good reason: she's the best character in the whole damn game! Magic is her strong suit, but her melee attacks are quick and connect very easily. Throw in an easily spammble cartwheel dodge roll, and this girl's actually got a full kit going. The devs had to have done this on purpose, considering you also play as Aqua in the final/secret episodes.
Oh yea, d-links are a thing, I forgor. I didn't use a single one during Aqua's portion of the game, that's how forgettable and worthless they are as a mechanic. Each one replaces your current deck with a predetermined one, and automatically shifts you into a command style based on that character, complete with a unique finisher. The most lucrative thing you can use the D-Links as is a single free Megalixr per fight, and even then I constantly forgot to use them.
For most of her plot's runtime, Aqua's on cleanup crew. She usually arrives in a world in time to finish the story arc, sometimes even after the fact. It serves as a nice bit of finality as you head into the real meat of Aqua's story, the final/secret episodes. That aside, playing Aqua first would probably be really weird and kinda boring, not gonna lie. Not too much happens on her end until the story is reaching its climax. Pete gets sent to the shadow realm.
AND THEN THE GAME ASKS YOU TO- oh wait no, we're actually pretty much done here.
I think viewing a story from multiple characters' perspectives and seeing how events overlap is cool as hell, and Birth By Sleep's story succeeds on that front. The problem arises when the actual game comes into play. Each character gets their own unique bosses to contend with, but you spend each character's story running through the exact same rooms, fighting the exact same enemies in the exact same worlds, and there's no real getting around that. It has pretty good presentation for a PSP game, but ends up being one of those unfortunate cases where the longer you're exposed to something, the more flaws you end up noticing.
On a positive note, I like the world choices in this game. Deep Space feels like a particularly inspired choice (Lilo and Stitch is so good dude), and Neverland always made for a fun finale at the end of each playthrough. Yoko Shimomura hasn't let me down yet, and her distinct composition style continues to entrance me. Personal favorites include:
-Neverland's Scherzo
-Future Masters
-The Tumbling
Anyways, Birth By Sleep? More like birth my sleep. I need a nap. Wake me when Kingdom Hearts gets good.
-----VENTUS-----
Ventus is a perky kid. He holds his keyblade backhanded, and he can't seem to keep his feet on the ground. Grounded combos are difficult to pull off, if even possible to begin with. His floaty nature gives him a real tendency to whiff his attacks. A finishing attack like "air flair" does a ton of damage, if it even connects to begin with.
The command deck takes a page out of TWEWY's book, allowing for full freedom of what abilities you have on hand at any time. You can make decks filled with your ideal string of attacks, or you can keep swapping mastered abilities out for ones with low experience, constantly keeping your playstyle fresh. There's no MP, the only things stopping you from spamming the same commands repeatedly are your deck size and command reload speed. Using specific types of commands will also shift you into a command style, a more powerful form with unique normal attacks. When mastered, you can even fuse commands together to make stronger commands, along with attaching crystals to get passive abilities. I do wish there was a way to know which abilities you'll fuse (outside of a guide), because several of these are very necessary for basic survival. Do not try to engage bosses without skills like Second Chance, Once More, or Leaf Bracer. You're gonna have a bad time.
After witnessing his friends' Keyblade Master exams, a strange masked boy taunts Ventus with the idea that his friends are going to leave him behind someday. With no memories to his name aside from the time he's spent with Aqua and Terra, Ventus flies the coop, in search of what worlds await out there. Out there he meets the newest member of the public domain, gets tickets to Disneyland, and learns that Xehanort wants to make him into a weapon with a very stupid name (it's pronounced "keyblade", but spelled "X-blade", thanks Nomura)!
And then the game asks you to do it again.
-----TERRA-----
Terra focuses on brute force more than anything else. Big broad swings with pretty long animations, at least comparatively. I'd welcome the more grounded combat if Terra didn't have such stiff mobility. He has miserable end lag after landing, dodging, atacking, skills, pretty much anything, if I'm being honest. His moveset is fine for normal enemies, but most bosses tear him apart like a dog chomping on a chew toy. I found the best way to use Terra was to get into a command style as soon as possible. Anything's better than his standard moveset, but if all else fails, you could always just shoot your enemies instead.
The shotlock is such a busted mechanic. It's like bringing a firing squad to a sword duel. It's awkward to use in the moment, holding down L+R to bring up a reticle that roots you in place isn't ideal. If your shotlock command is a high enough level though, this is completely negligible! Max out your lock-on, fire, hit the QTEs (if there are any), and watch the enemy's health bar m e l t. Most normal bosses can be felled with two or three fully charged shotlocks. It's a genuine strategy you can fall back on if you're just sick of the game, something I felt strongly while playing as Terra.
Terra is so fucking funny to me, dude. I'm sure they wanted him to come off as naive, but the way he immediately meets and puts trust into the villain of nearly every world he visits is just hilarious. The way Xehanort encourages Terra to embrace the darkness is cool and all, love watching that asshole being a charismatic manipulator, especially to such a lost puppy searching for validation. Poor guy just wanted the power to protect his friends, no matter the cost.
And then the game asks you to do it AGAIN.
-----AQUA-----
Aqua earned her Mark of Mastery in the game's opening for good reason: she's the best character in the whole damn game! Magic is her strong suit, but her melee attacks are quick and connect very easily. Throw in an easily spammble cartwheel dodge roll, and this girl's actually got a full kit going. The devs had to have done this on purpose, considering you also play as Aqua in the final/secret episodes.
Oh yea, d-links are a thing, I forgor. I didn't use a single one during Aqua's portion of the game, that's how forgettable and worthless they are as a mechanic. Each one replaces your current deck with a predetermined one, and automatically shifts you into a command style based on that character, complete with a unique finisher. The most lucrative thing you can use the D-Links as is a single free Megalixr per fight, and even then I constantly forgot to use them.
For most of her plot's runtime, Aqua's on cleanup crew. She usually arrives in a world in time to finish the story arc, sometimes even after the fact. It serves as a nice bit of finality as you head into the real meat of Aqua's story, the final/secret episodes. That aside, playing Aqua first would probably be really weird and kinda boring, not gonna lie. Not too much happens on her end until the story is reaching its climax. Pete gets sent to the shadow realm.
AND THEN THE GAME ASKS YOU TO- oh wait no, we're actually pretty much done here.
I think viewing a story from multiple characters' perspectives and seeing how events overlap is cool as hell, and Birth By Sleep's story succeeds on that front. The problem arises when the actual game comes into play. Each character gets their own unique bosses to contend with, but you spend each character's story running through the exact same rooms, fighting the exact same enemies in the exact same worlds, and there's no real getting around that. It has pretty good presentation for a PSP game, but ends up being one of those unfortunate cases where the longer you're exposed to something, the more flaws you end up noticing.
On a positive note, I like the world choices in this game. Deep Space feels like a particularly inspired choice (Lilo and Stitch is so good dude), and Neverland always made for a fun finale at the end of each playthrough. Yoko Shimomura hasn't let me down yet, and her distinct composition style continues to entrance me. Personal favorites include:
-Neverland's Scherzo
-Future Masters
-The Tumbling
Anyways, Birth By Sleep? More like birth my sleep. I need a nap. Wake me when Kingdom Hearts gets good.
2007
"Wow, I wonder what this Katamari game will bring to the series?"
>is a katamari game
>idontknowwhatiexpected.jpg
I think this game's big shtick is that the power of the Xbox 360 enables at least a thousand items to be onscreen at any given time. It's impressive on a technical level, but I feel like having this much shit going on at any given moment makes the game feel really busy, and detracts from the level design pretty hard. We're still working with Me and my Katamari's new scoring system, judging you based on size and a specific "type" of items rolled up. When there's so much to roll up, it really makes trying to focus on a specific type feel like a fool's errand.
It's not hard to feel Keita Takahashi's departure from the series in this one, the King's dialogue is very cookie-cutter, and the game is generally just going through the motions. I remember this game catching flack for being one of the earlier offenders for on-disc DLC, which really hurts it in the long run. All of the unique "gimmick" stages are locked behind paywalls, $1 for each. The game really needed this content to be free from the start. I beat this in an hour and a half, a single sitting.
That all said, I'm still shocked that this game has a decent leg up on the PS3's Katamari Forever. Beautiful Katamari runs at 60 FPS, has online multiplayer, and even an iDOLM@STER song. That sure is something.
>is a katamari game
>idontknowwhatiexpected.jpg
I think this game's big shtick is that the power of the Xbox 360 enables at least a thousand items to be onscreen at any given time. It's impressive on a technical level, but I feel like having this much shit going on at any given moment makes the game feel really busy, and detracts from the level design pretty hard. We're still working with Me and my Katamari's new scoring system, judging you based on size and a specific "type" of items rolled up. When there's so much to roll up, it really makes trying to focus on a specific type feel like a fool's errand.
It's not hard to feel Keita Takahashi's departure from the series in this one, the King's dialogue is very cookie-cutter, and the game is generally just going through the motions. I remember this game catching flack for being one of the earlier offenders for on-disc DLC, which really hurts it in the long run. All of the unique "gimmick" stages are locked behind paywalls, $1 for each. The game really needed this content to be free from the start. I beat this in an hour and a half, a single sitting.
That all said, I'm still shocked that this game has a decent leg up on the PS3's Katamari Forever. Beautiful Katamari runs at 60 FPS, has online multiplayer, and even an iDOLM@STER song. That sure is something.
2014
This game is like one of those "gaming addiction" t-shirts. You know the one. You wore it growing up because you thought it was cool, then you grew out of it mentally and physically, but several years down the line, you kinda miss when you liked stuff like that. This is precisely how I feel about Sunset Overdrive.
Everything about this game feels like the last hurrah of the raunchy, edgy side of Insomniac, the one that internally named "A Crack in Time" as "Clockblocked". A game from an interim after the PS3 caused R&C to lose its edge, and before they were doomed to work on Marvel slop with safe writing for the rest of their days. The writing in this game is not going to appeal to everyone; Hell, if I played this a few years back, I'd probably blow it off. The reason it broke through to me is because it never backs down, and it knows to never take itself seriously.
The actual plot is completely aimless though. As it turns out, you gotta do more than make a varied series of missions with really funny scenarios to actually make a memorable story. At its core, Sunset Overdrive just wants you to have fun. In a unique subversion, the orange-flavored Fanta zombie apocalypse isn't portrayed as the endtimes; It's a chance to start your life for real, no one around to tell you what to do, be your own boss. You're trapped in a surveillance state controlled by a soda brand, but you're not gonna let them stop you from enjoying yourself.
Everyone puts on an excellent performance, but Yuri Lowenthal definitely steals the show as the voice of the male protagonist, an everyman who's taking all this chaos in whatever stride he can. There's basically no fourth wall as far as the writing is concerned, so if you're still sick of those writing trends, a decent chunk of the dialogue will probably make you wince. I thought it was done pretty tastefully though. It's mostly just unafraid to remember it's a videogame, if it thinks it can make you laugh.
This game's soundtrack is like your high school band festival. One guy going ham on his electric guitar, another going apeshit on the drums, and a vocalist shouting lyrics so loudly that even the people in the very back of the venue can hear them. I don't think I'd personally listen to any of this music outside the game, but it works phenomenally for this game's tone. While a lot of the songs sound similar by nature, their individuality always keeps me guessing when a new one kicks in. I'm more likely to remember certain events from the game if you play the songs associated with them, music's kinda nuts like that.
I see a lot of reviews saying "ohhhhh, this is where Spiderman PS4 got its movement mechanics!", and I subsequently have no idea what these people are on about. The movement mechanics in Sunset Overdrive aren't heavily automated and cinematic. Instead, you control the buttons you push, bouncing, grinding, swinging, and wall-running across a veritable playground for these moves. You can grind on pretty much anything that looks like a straight edge, and there's a healthy amount of objects to jump off in order to keep your momentum going. There's a lot of random junk sprinkled around the map to collect, and I always go for it because the movement makes it so seamless. Fast travel is a nice gesture, but it feels wholly unnecessary when shmoovin' and groovin' is this engaging. Jogging around on foot will see you quickly swarmed by enemies, so grinding and bounding around them while firing away is the ideal way to play, made more enjoyable by a fairly generous auto-aim. Chaining different moves together raises your style meter, and at certain thresholds, equippable buffs known as "amps" activate, incentivizing you to keep moving. It ALL feeds back into the movement mechanics, and it never gets old.
So yeah, Spiderman PS4's origins? Get outta here, this is more like a long-lost Ratchet & Clank title, if anything. R&C1 weapons always felt homemade, like they were sloppily welded together in your garage or something. All the weapons you get in Sunset Overdrive feel like they're made of random junk that you'd find in the aftermath of a fraternity party. Shit like hair spray, stuffed animals, fireworks, vinyl records, and we can't forget the liquid nitrogen, a staple of college life. Weapons gain experience, level up, and can be equipped with amps to give them extra effects. Sounds like the Omega Mod system in Ratchet: Deadlocked to me. Hell, your crowbar is basically Ratchet's wrench, straight down to the aerial slam and using it to bust crates for money/ammo.
Imagine an alternate universe where this game released on PS4 instead. I bet it would've been considered a cult classic in some circles. No shade towards the talented people working at Insomniac, but I would've gladly taken a sequel to Sunset Overdrive instead of more capeshit. Fate dealt them a cruel hand, and now they're stuck working in the Marvel Mines forever, probably. Ah well, I'm just happy this game exists at all. Feels like an anomaly when you put it between R&C: Into the Nexus and R&C (2016).
It's bright, it's colorful, it's loud, but most of all, it's a blast. It's Sunset Overdrive, baby.
Everything about this game feels like the last hurrah of the raunchy, edgy side of Insomniac, the one that internally named "A Crack in Time" as "Clockblocked". A game from an interim after the PS3 caused R&C to lose its edge, and before they were doomed to work on Marvel slop with safe writing for the rest of their days. The writing in this game is not going to appeal to everyone; Hell, if I played this a few years back, I'd probably blow it off. The reason it broke through to me is because it never backs down, and it knows to never take itself seriously.
The actual plot is completely aimless though. As it turns out, you gotta do more than make a varied series of missions with really funny scenarios to actually make a memorable story. At its core, Sunset Overdrive just wants you to have fun. In a unique subversion, the orange-flavored Fanta zombie apocalypse isn't portrayed as the endtimes; It's a chance to start your life for real, no one around to tell you what to do, be your own boss. You're trapped in a surveillance state controlled by a soda brand, but you're not gonna let them stop you from enjoying yourself.
Everyone puts on an excellent performance, but Yuri Lowenthal definitely steals the show as the voice of the male protagonist, an everyman who's taking all this chaos in whatever stride he can. There's basically no fourth wall as far as the writing is concerned, so if you're still sick of those writing trends, a decent chunk of the dialogue will probably make you wince. I thought it was done pretty tastefully though. It's mostly just unafraid to remember it's a videogame, if it thinks it can make you laugh.
This game's soundtrack is like your high school band festival. One guy going ham on his electric guitar, another going apeshit on the drums, and a vocalist shouting lyrics so loudly that even the people in the very back of the venue can hear them. I don't think I'd personally listen to any of this music outside the game, but it works phenomenally for this game's tone. While a lot of the songs sound similar by nature, their individuality always keeps me guessing when a new one kicks in. I'm more likely to remember certain events from the game if you play the songs associated with them, music's kinda nuts like that.
I see a lot of reviews saying "ohhhhh, this is where Spiderman PS4 got its movement mechanics!", and I subsequently have no idea what these people are on about. The movement mechanics in Sunset Overdrive aren't heavily automated and cinematic. Instead, you control the buttons you push, bouncing, grinding, swinging, and wall-running across a veritable playground for these moves. You can grind on pretty much anything that looks like a straight edge, and there's a healthy amount of objects to jump off in order to keep your momentum going. There's a lot of random junk sprinkled around the map to collect, and I always go for it because the movement makes it so seamless. Fast travel is a nice gesture, but it feels wholly unnecessary when shmoovin' and groovin' is this engaging. Jogging around on foot will see you quickly swarmed by enemies, so grinding and bounding around them while firing away is the ideal way to play, made more enjoyable by a fairly generous auto-aim. Chaining different moves together raises your style meter, and at certain thresholds, equippable buffs known as "amps" activate, incentivizing you to keep moving. It ALL feeds back into the movement mechanics, and it never gets old.
So yeah, Spiderman PS4's origins? Get outta here, this is more like a long-lost Ratchet & Clank title, if anything. R&C1 weapons always felt homemade, like they were sloppily welded together in your garage or something. All the weapons you get in Sunset Overdrive feel like they're made of random junk that you'd find in the aftermath of a fraternity party. Shit like hair spray, stuffed animals, fireworks, vinyl records, and we can't forget the liquid nitrogen, a staple of college life. Weapons gain experience, level up, and can be equipped with amps to give them extra effects. Sounds like the Omega Mod system in Ratchet: Deadlocked to me. Hell, your crowbar is basically Ratchet's wrench, straight down to the aerial slam and using it to bust crates for money/ammo.
Imagine an alternate universe where this game released on PS4 instead. I bet it would've been considered a cult classic in some circles. No shade towards the talented people working at Insomniac, but I would've gladly taken a sequel to Sunset Overdrive instead of more capeshit. Fate dealt them a cruel hand, and now they're stuck working in the Marvel Mines forever, probably. Ah well, I'm just happy this game exists at all. Feels like an anomaly when you put it between R&C: Into the Nexus and R&C (2016).
It's bright, it's colorful, it's loud, but most of all, it's a blast. It's Sunset Overdrive, baby.
Went in expecting scary, was pleasantly surprised to find spooky instead. It's got the goofy charm of Rareware's other titles, and it actually carries a vibe similar to Luigi's Mansion. It's a lighthearted kind of horror, with British "humor" mixed in for good measure. The Grim Reaper shreds on his sycthe like an electric guitar, it doesn't get much better than that.
Despite taking place in a sprawling manor, Ghoulies is completely linear. Door locks behind you when you enter a room, only way out is the other unlocked door in the room. Approach that door, and you're locked into a challenge, which is the main gameplay loop. Each room gives you an objective, usually along with some restrictions. Complete the objective, and the door unlocks. Break the rules, and the Grim Reaper shows up. Get touched by him, and face erasure. You attack by pointing the right stick in the direction of your enemies and picking up stuff with A. There are soup cans lying around or hidden within breakable objects that you can down for some extra boosts, and you will need these.
So, I like the setup that Ghoulies has going here, but they muddy it up in a lot of ways. First off, your health is "randomized" upon entering a room (I'm pretty sure this is always scripted, but it's presented like it's random), usually limiting your approach right off the bat. No need to be concerned about your health, it'll just be fucked over in the next room anyways. Second, there is usually NOTHING denoting if an object is breakable or not. You're just gonna be smearing your face up against walls while swinging at ghosts, and not the tangible kind. Certain objects contain those coveted soup cans though, which are often necessary to finish the more difficult challenges. Actually, scratch that. The powerups provide a solid opportunity to avoid engaging with the challenges. You'll probably die once or twice in most rooms, and knowing exactly where each powerup is located is a necessary piece to solving each room's combat puzzle.
I call each room a "puzzle" in the sense that you're gonna need to find a consistent method to break through this game's undercooked mechanics. It doesn't take long for each rooms' challenges to double and even triple down on failure conditions. The Reaper can be used to your advantage (there's some light enemy infighting mechanics in this game), but most of the time, the reaper showing up is quite literally a death sentence. These systems are so annoying that the game's "easy mode" doesn't necessarily provide a smoother experience to those who're struggling (or just want to get it over with). Doubling your health doesn't mean a damn thing when breaking the rules spawns an instakill hazard. It also doesn't mean diddly-squat in rooms where your health gets randomized to like, 1 HP.
Man, for Rare's first project on Xbox, I'm just kinda sad at how prototype-y it feels. It left me feeling equally charmed and frustrated. "Fun horror" is a genre that deserves more than a green man with a vacuum, or a gang of mystery-solving teenagers and their dog. Still, at about five hours in length, I don't really regret playing it.
Despite taking place in a sprawling manor, Ghoulies is completely linear. Door locks behind you when you enter a room, only way out is the other unlocked door in the room. Approach that door, and you're locked into a challenge, which is the main gameplay loop. Each room gives you an objective, usually along with some restrictions. Complete the objective, and the door unlocks. Break the rules, and the Grim Reaper shows up. Get touched by him, and face erasure. You attack by pointing the right stick in the direction of your enemies and picking up stuff with A. There are soup cans lying around or hidden within breakable objects that you can down for some extra boosts, and you will need these.
So, I like the setup that Ghoulies has going here, but they muddy it up in a lot of ways. First off, your health is "randomized" upon entering a room (I'm pretty sure this is always scripted, but it's presented like it's random), usually limiting your approach right off the bat. No need to be concerned about your health, it'll just be fucked over in the next room anyways. Second, there is usually NOTHING denoting if an object is breakable or not. You're just gonna be smearing your face up against walls while swinging at ghosts, and not the tangible kind. Certain objects contain those coveted soup cans though, which are often necessary to finish the more difficult challenges. Actually, scratch that. The powerups provide a solid opportunity to avoid engaging with the challenges. You'll probably die once or twice in most rooms, and knowing exactly where each powerup is located is a necessary piece to solving each room's combat puzzle.
I call each room a "puzzle" in the sense that you're gonna need to find a consistent method to break through this game's undercooked mechanics. It doesn't take long for each rooms' challenges to double and even triple down on failure conditions. The Reaper can be used to your advantage (there's some light enemy infighting mechanics in this game), but most of the time, the reaper showing up is quite literally a death sentence. These systems are so annoying that the game's "easy mode" doesn't necessarily provide a smoother experience to those who're struggling (or just want to get it over with). Doubling your health doesn't mean a damn thing when breaking the rules spawns an instakill hazard. It also doesn't mean diddly-squat in rooms where your health gets randomized to like, 1 HP.
Man, for Rare's first project on Xbox, I'm just kinda sad at how prototype-y it feels. It left me feeling equally charmed and frustrated. "Fun horror" is a genre that deserves more than a green man with a vacuum, or a gang of mystery-solving teenagers and their dog. Still, at about five hours in length, I don't really regret playing it.
When the topic of Nuts and Bolts comes up, I can't help but wonder if an entire generation was fooled into thinking this game was the devil, all because an overreactive e-celeb exaggerated its flaws to the point of drowning out any proper discussion. There's obviously the original teaser misleading people, and fans desperately expecting a Banjo-Threeie, but was the hate truly deserved?
The plot of N&B is about God himself intervening in a potential Banjo-Threeie situation, and declaring that his funny car game would be a better way to settle our duo's bitter rivalry with the witch. Can't exactly say no to God, so this is our lot in life now. Everyone is here, even if they've all been repurposed for various roles in LOG's game.
A good place to start is probably presentation, seeing as the new art style frequently causes people to recoil in terror at first sight. I wouldn't say I prefer it over the original's more outwardly cartoonish look, but I wouldn't call it bad, it even grew on me after a while. It's a good middle ground, carrying over the somewhat blocky look of N64 models. Everything looks like it's been manufactured or scrounged together, which does fit the scrappy tone of making funny vehicles. Even the more "organic" areas like Nutty Acres have giant gears on the outer walls, and metal clouds dangling from wires high above. The real showstopper in this game is Grant Kirkhope and his compositions. The whimsical melodies of the N64 games have been enhanced into these enchanting pieces done by a full orchestra. This style of music fits the bear and bird like a backpack and a pair of pants.
Even when vehicle construction is thrown into the mix, Banjo and Kazooie can't seem to escape their collectathon roots. Funnily enough, the area that does it best is the hub, Showdown Town. You gotta use your trolley to escort crates back to Mumbo's shop to redeem valuable parts, bring Jiggies back to the town square to "bank" them, and take globes out to their pedestals in order to open up new stages. As you defeat Gruntilda in each stage, a new ability gets added to your cart, and the hub opens up little by little. The levels themselves take on a structure akin to SM64 or Sunshine. They're split up into "acts", with each act containing a certain collection of missions. Like the aforementioned 3D Mario games, each act usually contains a slightly tweaked level layout, or continuity with the previous acts' missions.
So, each level is a big empty hub with a handful of NPCs that dole out challenges. Without going into the nitty-gritty, each challenge uses these massive hubs for a surprising variety of tasks. I'd describe mission types in more detail, but I think my blueprint list (in reverse-chronological order) speaks for itself. Same for the workshop; it's surprisingly versatile, and if you can imagine a fucked up contraption, chances are there's a way to make it. That's this game's strongest appeal: Seeing a challenge, and having a twisted spark of inspiration, and personally creating an abomination that somehow gets the job done. This is also why LOG is a shitty game designer! A decent amount of challenges lock you into "LOG's choice" vehicles, which wholly misses the point of making your own funny machines to solve problems. If a mission dictates a "LOG's choice" machine, it will either be pathetically easy or obnoxiously hard and unfun. There is no in-between.
The writing in N&B is as smarmy and quippy as ever, but there's also a ton of self-loathing, commentary on the direction the industry is headed in, and jabs at Rareware's legacy as a studio. It puts a damper on the game's mood, but it's really engaging in the sense that it gives you the idea that something went horribly wrong during Rare's time at Microsoft. Either that, or Rare just saw the writing on the wall and believed that there wasn't going to be a good place for them in the industry going forward. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is frequently the butt of a joke, and the "Logbox 720" stage has several Rare game discs with messages printed on them that are easy to miss. The Tooie disc asks "did you like it more or less?" Viva Piñata is deemed to have earned the award of "best game no-one played". Even Rare feels the need to ask, "will Nuts and Bolts be remembered in a decade?"
While I was still getting my thoughts together on this game, a coworker asked me if he should get Nuts & Bolts. In that moment, I realized just how narrow this game's demographic is. It's still a good game if you just like slapping maddening machines together, but the game definitely expects a certain amount of familiarity and investment in Rare's legacy as well. If you're into Rare, you probably already know what this game's deal is. If you're not, I don't know if it's asking too much to educate yourself on a single studio's entire history before playing. Even without that background, it's still a fun game. Underrated and overhated, that's the mantra I'm going with on this one.
Anyone who praised Tears of the Kingdom because it focused on building funny vehicles needs to apologize to Nuts & Bolts.
The plot of N&B is about God himself intervening in a potential Banjo-Threeie situation, and declaring that his funny car game would be a better way to settle our duo's bitter rivalry with the witch. Can't exactly say no to God, so this is our lot in life now. Everyone is here, even if they've all been repurposed for various roles in LOG's game.
A good place to start is probably presentation, seeing as the new art style frequently causes people to recoil in terror at first sight. I wouldn't say I prefer it over the original's more outwardly cartoonish look, but I wouldn't call it bad, it even grew on me after a while. It's a good middle ground, carrying over the somewhat blocky look of N64 models. Everything looks like it's been manufactured or scrounged together, which does fit the scrappy tone of making funny vehicles. Even the more "organic" areas like Nutty Acres have giant gears on the outer walls, and metal clouds dangling from wires high above. The real showstopper in this game is Grant Kirkhope and his compositions. The whimsical melodies of the N64 games have been enhanced into these enchanting pieces done by a full orchestra. This style of music fits the bear and bird like a backpack and a pair of pants.
Even when vehicle construction is thrown into the mix, Banjo and Kazooie can't seem to escape their collectathon roots. Funnily enough, the area that does it best is the hub, Showdown Town. You gotta use your trolley to escort crates back to Mumbo's shop to redeem valuable parts, bring Jiggies back to the town square to "bank" them, and take globes out to their pedestals in order to open up new stages. As you defeat Gruntilda in each stage, a new ability gets added to your cart, and the hub opens up little by little. The levels themselves take on a structure akin to SM64 or Sunshine. They're split up into "acts", with each act containing a certain collection of missions. Like the aforementioned 3D Mario games, each act usually contains a slightly tweaked level layout, or continuity with the previous acts' missions.
So, each level is a big empty hub with a handful of NPCs that dole out challenges. Without going into the nitty-gritty, each challenge uses these massive hubs for a surprising variety of tasks. I'd describe mission types in more detail, but I think my blueprint list (in reverse-chronological order) speaks for itself. Same for the workshop; it's surprisingly versatile, and if you can imagine a fucked up contraption, chances are there's a way to make it. That's this game's strongest appeal: Seeing a challenge, and having a twisted spark of inspiration, and personally creating an abomination that somehow gets the job done. This is also why LOG is a shitty game designer! A decent amount of challenges lock you into "LOG's choice" vehicles, which wholly misses the point of making your own funny machines to solve problems. If a mission dictates a "LOG's choice" machine, it will either be pathetically easy or obnoxiously hard and unfun. There is no in-between.
The writing in N&B is as smarmy and quippy as ever, but there's also a ton of self-loathing, commentary on the direction the industry is headed in, and jabs at Rareware's legacy as a studio. It puts a damper on the game's mood, but it's really engaging in the sense that it gives you the idea that something went horribly wrong during Rare's time at Microsoft. Either that, or Rare just saw the writing on the wall and believed that there wasn't going to be a good place for them in the industry going forward. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is frequently the butt of a joke, and the "Logbox 720" stage has several Rare game discs with messages printed on them that are easy to miss. The Tooie disc asks "did you like it more or less?" Viva Piñata is deemed to have earned the award of "best game no-one played". Even Rare feels the need to ask, "will Nuts and Bolts be remembered in a decade?"
While I was still getting my thoughts together on this game, a coworker asked me if he should get Nuts & Bolts. In that moment, I realized just how narrow this game's demographic is. It's still a good game if you just like slapping maddening machines together, but the game definitely expects a certain amount of familiarity and investment in Rare's legacy as well. If you're into Rare, you probably already know what this game's deal is. If you're not, I don't know if it's asking too much to educate yourself on a single studio's entire history before playing. Even without that background, it's still a fun game. Underrated and overhated, that's the mantra I'm going with on this one.
Anyone who praised Tears of the Kingdom because it focused on building funny vehicles needs to apologize to Nuts & Bolts.
2009
I don't think I've been filtered faster by a game in my entire life. This game starts to stray from the few things I enjoyed from BK real fast, in pursuit of simply being BIGGER. Characters can't help but flap their lips with no end in sight, and the camera dramatically pans like I'm visiting the Eyewitness Museum every time I do one little thing. There's what feels like three times the amount of ground to cover, with no new movement techniques to compensate. Even with the game granting you all your abilities from BK at the start (a nice bit of continuity), I feel like there's nothing to actually use them on, so the game keeps piling on even further moves to compensate. Ooooooor, they'll just let you play as Mumbo, because there CLEARLY wasn't enough to engage with already. Sometimes the game gives up on pretending it's a platformer and just becomes a first-person shooter. I am constantly getting lost in these massive, labrynthian areas, even with the multiple warp pads.
It's really overwhelming, and I'm not having fun. I think it's best I leave it at that before I further trample all over the childhoods of the people who think this is an uber-masterpiece.
It's really overwhelming, and I'm not having fun. I think it's best I leave it at that before I further trample all over the childhoods of the people who think this is an uber-masterpiece.
2008
For "one of the greatest collectathon platformers of all time", I enjoyed it about as much as I expected to. I think this game's strengths really only lie in its presentation. All the characters are intricately designed (well, for an N64 game) and animated with a ton of squash-n-stretch. The witty dialogue and distinct funny noises everyone makes keeps them weirdly memorable in the long run. I feel like Grant Kirkhope went too far in on a single leitmotif, to the point where it becomes a grating earworm, but I have to praise how instruments dynamically change depending on where you are and what you're doing. This is particularly effective in Gruntilda's Lair, the massive, labrynthian hub world that brings all the levels together. The scale of these worlds must've been insane on N64.
Alas, a platformer is only as good as its platforming challenges and controls, neither of which stack up in my eyes. Most of the "moves" you learn are context sensitive actions. You can only initiate flight off of one panel type, or do a beeg jump off another type. All moves except the Talon Trot bring you to a dead stop when using them, and the former's only use is going fast! Aiming the Beak Bomb mid-flight is stupid and bad. The hardest "puzzles" I had to solve were ones where you had to fire eggs at things, because that move is so situational that I constantly forgot I had it. The game often focuses more on solving environmental puzzle solving for most objectives, and when put in situations where actual platforming is required, it's usually a do-or-die scenario, like climbing Click-Clock Wood's tree.
Also, I don't care if it was harder on the N64 because your note count reset upon death, Rusty Bucket Bay is just a shit level overall. It alone knocked half a star off my opinion of this game. On top of the cheap obstacles, you also have exhaust pipes you just have to infer that you can jump down, and windows that you just have to know that you can break. It straight up sucks!
Alas, a platformer is only as good as its platforming challenges and controls, neither of which stack up in my eyes. Most of the "moves" you learn are context sensitive actions. You can only initiate flight off of one panel type, or do a beeg jump off another type. All moves except the Talon Trot bring you to a dead stop when using them, and the former's only use is going fast! Aiming the Beak Bomb mid-flight is stupid and bad. The hardest "puzzles" I had to solve were ones where you had to fire eggs at things, because that move is so situational that I constantly forgot I had it. The game often focuses more on solving environmental puzzle solving for most objectives, and when put in situations where actual platforming is required, it's usually a do-or-die scenario, like climbing Click-Clock Wood's tree.
Also, I don't care if it was harder on the N64 because your note count reset upon death, Rusty Bucket Bay is just a shit level overall. It alone knocked half a star off my opinion of this game. On top of the cheap obstacles, you also have exhaust pipes you just have to infer that you can jump down, and windows that you just have to know that you can break. It straight up sucks!
2015
It's called "Rare" Replay because of all the rare achievements you'll get for merely starting each game once. Who bought this collection, yet still couldn't be bothered to sample the entire catalogue? Some people, I swear.
I had to break in my new Xbox Series X with a no-brainer: A collection that released on for the previous Xbox system, comprised of games that released anywhere between 1-4 decades ago. A handful of these are games that I've been meaning to play for years now, along with others where I feel like I might as well try them, since they all come bundled together. "Thirty games" is a bit misleading, seeing as the earlier third or so could be classified as, well, I think the British term for it is "rubbish." I appreciate that these titles have been preserved here, but most of them aren't fun for very long. They try to redeem that with "Snapshots", simple challenges with their own leaderboards. They're a fun distraction that can't distract me from the older games' archaic nature, I'm afraid.
The rest of the catalogue is so damn meaty that I have less reason to complain. Completing objectives in each game gradually provides you with a wealth of bonus content, including interviews, promotional materials, and even looks at cancelled projects. It's a really nice gesture for people who are interested in this company's history and lasting legacy.
The obvious complaint with this collection probably the lack of anything Donkey Kong. We don't ask who Rare was working for from 1994 to 2002 around here. It's a bit funny (and sad) to see their original N64 offerings with Xbox buttons injected into their graphics, along with removing any mention of Nintendo in general. Kinda surprised that they didn't include both versions of Conker, even if most purists would probably pick the N64 version any day. Some people have preferences, and others will probably cry "preservation." What's also bittersweet is how their history abruptly ends at Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. No comment on that game's quality (I'll give it a fair shake sometime soon), but it's definitely a downer to end their legacy on. No mention that they were enslaved into making Kinect games and Xbox Avatars after the fact, either. Maybe that one's for the best though.
I had to break in my new Xbox Series X with a no-brainer: A collection that released on for the previous Xbox system, comprised of games that released anywhere between 1-4 decades ago. A handful of these are games that I've been meaning to play for years now, along with others where I feel like I might as well try them, since they all come bundled together. "Thirty games" is a bit misleading, seeing as the earlier third or so could be classified as, well, I think the British term for it is "rubbish." I appreciate that these titles have been preserved here, but most of them aren't fun for very long. They try to redeem that with "Snapshots", simple challenges with their own leaderboards. They're a fun distraction that can't distract me from the older games' archaic nature, I'm afraid.
The rest of the catalogue is so damn meaty that I have less reason to complain. Completing objectives in each game gradually provides you with a wealth of bonus content, including interviews, promotional materials, and even looks at cancelled projects. It's a really nice gesture for people who are interested in this company's history and lasting legacy.
The obvious complaint with this collection probably the lack of anything Donkey Kong. We don't ask who Rare was working for from 1994 to 2002 around here. It's a bit funny (and sad) to see their original N64 offerings with Xbox buttons injected into their graphics, along with removing any mention of Nintendo in general. Kinda surprised that they didn't include both versions of Conker, even if most purists would probably pick the N64 version any day. Some people have preferences, and others will probably cry "preservation." What's also bittersweet is how their history abruptly ends at Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. No comment on that game's quality (I'll give it a fair shake sometime soon), but it's definitely a downer to end their legacy on. No mention that they were enslaved into making Kinect games and Xbox Avatars after the fact, either. Maybe that one's for the best though.
2005
Unlike Tetris, it feels like you're rarely, if ever, making substantial moves. The skill ceiling for meaningful play is significantly higher here though. It feels like you're just fucked later down the line if you don't form any "flowers" early in a game, because once you're in the later levels, the amount of different colored pieces you have to deal with makes that nigh impossible. Those flower pieces can be used for more accurate piece movement (if you're good at the game), so not having access to one late in a game limits your ability to do much of anything. Also, why is the music so haunting? It sounds like Zero has me trapped in an escape room, and the only way to leave is to match a black pearl flower. I think I'm gonna die here, please help
Skyrim is a game that you cannot avoid. It's available on damn near everything. It's not a matter of if you'll play Skyrim, it's a matter of when. As far as I can tell, this must be some rite of passage, and my time has finally come. Enter H'kage, a female Khajiit who slices and dices, strikes from the shadows, and will rob you blind if given the chance. This game brought out my inner kleptomaniac AND hoarder. Neither of those things are good for the game's save file size, but we'll get to that problem in a while. For now, it's time to embrace Bethesda's masterpiece.
The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.
Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.
There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.
Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.
Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.
The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.
Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.
There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.
Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.
Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.
2009
Remarkably more engaging than the first game. Kinda overstays its welcome after a certain point, but I anticipated that simply from it being a Ubisoft game. For how much I complained about "binary stealth" in my review of the previous game, I was elated to find that you can simply walk along with a crowd to blend in. It's so seamless, and it enabled one of the funnier moments of my playthrough: casually walking into the audience of my target and firing a bullet into him at close range. They never saw it coming.
The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.
I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.
The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.
I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.