Seeing Liz review this here made me remember I once played this! I wrote a really long essay on it that I don't really agree with (please don't dig it up.. or do...)

Perhaps the epitome of the 'teach the player without using words' late 00s/10s philosophy of game design - a not-bad rule of thumb that could (generously) be interpreted as 'maintain some level of clarity/consistency/ design in a way that people can figure out more complex things themselves' that was ultimately twisted into pure idiocy about NEVER USING WORDS that forgets that COMPLETELY NOT USING WORDS ONLY WORKS IF THE GAMEPLAY REALLY FITS OR YOU CAN ASSUME A PLAYER HAS LEGACY KNOWLEDGE FROM PAST GAMES. Sure it's not a bad idea to try and convey puzzle mechanics to players through the experience of using them, but then 10 years of video essays later and everyone thinks it means to make an overwrought first level that 'teaches you how to double jump without using words'. NO!!! THE PRINCIPLE MAKES SENSE IF IT'S SOME PUZZLE GAME LIKE THE WITNESS WHERE THE PUZZLE RULES MAKE INTUITIVE SENSE BUT WOULD BE CLUNKY TO STATE OUTRIGHT!!!!

But... The Witness!! Why do I like it? Why, it has a deep philosophy about the humanity of mankind... NOT!!! I like this game because the puzzles are fun to solve, they interact with the environment, and they sort of acknowledge that a fun part of puzzle solving is failing, walking away and coming back. It incorporates walking way and coming back into the environment and layout! The island is pretty and fun to walk around! The Witness level design "Bangs". I like the tactile feeling and sound design of looking at the panels and drawing the solutions. I could draw those puzzle lines for days.

Look. If I'm being honest I don't really like pure puzzle games that much. I make my little progress across the level select, inevitably get stuck and then forget about the game. My life is a Brain Teaser, I don't want to just Solve Brain Teasers. I don't want to solve middling puzzles in service of revealing some arbitrary conspiracy mystery: I just want to do some fun good puzzles and see some stuff, and this game has that. Playing this was a "Good Time".

Anyways it's time for "Analgesic Lore": did you know a super early version of Even the Ocean - honorary recipient of a 3.6 average Backloggd score rating - was supposed to be a 2D game about exploring islands with PUZZLES...? Well it was, and it never got anywhere because I just don't like puzzles that much, maybe. Then again I made Sephonie's Linking Puzzle system (ironically that game was on an island), which weren't really 'puzzles', but...

More exploration puzzlers set in 3D. Please! Do it for me!

Almost done with my Hard Toal run! First, the things I think are good

- The romance and setting. Oh babey
- At certain brief points the combat feels really good

BUT...

For the past few years I've espoused these three Ys games (with the order being Oath > 6 > Origin) but coming back to Origin I see a number of problems.

First, the gameplay's whole point of existing is speed and aggression. It feels absolutely the best when you're doing these things and being rewarded for it. For this reason, Hugo's Hard playthrough kind of sucks: he's slow, aiming is fiddly and you're doing so much thinking about your exact positioning as a result.

BOSSES

The boss movesets are often contradictory with the whole 'pulpy dark high fantasy power metal' aesthetic and "fast and aggression feel good!" idea : a gigantic number (perhaps all?) of the bosses are designed around only having particular safe windows to attack. These range from the most obnoxious (Gelaldy, the fire construct, who you must wait for his hands to pound the ground): these feel almost like Zelda/Mario bosses: you're expected to behave a very particular, strict way, waiting for the moment to bop the enemy.

Some bosses employ this logic but allow you to speed up opening these windows: Khonsclard (sand plant) or Velagunder (poison bubble arm beast), etc. However, because the act of attacking them when vulnerable is so boring (they just sit there waiting to get hit) there's a terrible, clunky rhythm to the fights. Some bosses do the same thing but 'hide' this fact - Shion lets you be aggressive to stop his shield but you'll still have to dodge his easy attacks before making him vulnerable again.

The fights that feel best are the one-on-ones - Epona, Galleon, Hugo, Kishgal - but on harder difficulties, their damage output is so punishing that your only option is to learn their moves perfectly. Doing so isn't much of a task, but it turns the battles into basically a Zelda fight of sorts, where your moves are the items - dodge, do 3 hits, dodge, do 3 hits... repeat until dead.

The problem then, is that the difficulty in this game mainly stems from weird hitboxes, dense bullet and attack patterns that are difficult to dodge because of the top-down camera, and poor visual communication. One boss's attacks are dust clouds on top of moving sand! Your position on the screen can be a bit hard to see because of how small you are.

This is still mostly manageable, but it does push you to use the iframe-granting moves which feels messy. Bosses like Nygtilger are particularly bad on this front: the boss is extremely simple, except that you have to stand on it while it continues to snake around and shoot bombs that get hidden under its body.

If the game wants to be about speed and aggression, then the bosses ought to be tuned to reward that. But due to fundamental issues described, playing at high speeds becomes tricky because the game rarely feels like it's up to snuff on the precision of your movement. So the key to success on harder difficulties feels more like holding back and playing slowly, because moving too fast will lead to you getting hit by a nearly-invisible dust cloud, or you being unable to jump due to the 0.25 second delay after an attack (yes really!)

There's nothing wrong with a jump-delay after an attack, but again the enemies/bosses have to be tuned to account for that... otherwise you just end up playing conservatively, because many times bullets or attacks will whip out at ridiculous speeds during that delay window.

LEVEL DESIGN

What I find the most disturbing about Ys Origin coming back to it, is how they twisted shmup's combo systems into this compulsive, flashy and ultimately shallow system of powering up as you do more hits quickly, to gain EXP faster. I think they 'perfected' this system with Origin (compared to 6 and Oath), it makes the regular levels feel like slot machines.

Here's the problem with the level design: again, think about speed and aggression. The levels are disastrously designed: pressing buttons leads to 10 second camera pans, gigantic hitboxes on spike pillars make you move slow and ploddingly, there's generally a ton of Zelda Design all over the place: use the obvious item on an obvious wall, press a button, run over here, etc. There's almost nothing resembling a true puzzle, it's all there as filler.

The enemy design doesn't really work: let's be generous and pretend that I'm not going to grind out levels so I can just blindly mash my way through anything (which the game strongly encourages and pushes you towards).

Due to the gigantic hitboxes and speed of enemy attacks, and the way that enemies rarely combine in a synergistic way - you're encouraged to slowly take your time and pick things off. When designing enemy encounters for a game that's meant to be fast-paced with movement, it's better to have enemies with slower (not necessarily slow) attacks, few to no invulnerable states, and that attack at various ranges. By balancing the combinations of enemies, you can create combat encounters that each subtly feel different. The fast pace is maintained, but without making it incoherent if you choose to play aggressively.

The difficulty, then, comes from trying to avoid the slow accumulation of mistakes. Trying to play fast is impossible in Ys Origin - you'll just group all the enemies together and get stunlocked by something, unless you have enough DPS to overpower them. Your attacks' weird forward motion/tracking will just drag you into some bullet flying at 10,000 MPH.

I'm of the opinion that adding more numbers to Action games doesn't fix anything, it just serves to hide inherent problems. If there were no numbers in Ys Origin's combat or healing items, it would clearly feel kind at odds with itself. You'd be playing at a weirdly slow pace so as to not get hit by the weird overlap of enemy behaviors, you'd be circle strafing and bopping stuff slowly. But with numbers, this is hidden because by the time you're about to complain about anything, you've leveled up 3 times and now everything dies in like 3 hits and so much health items are dropping you can ignore the entire design.

IN CONCLUSION

This game feels very symbolic: only released 3 years before Demon's Souls, it sits at the point right before 3D action games basically started to completely lose their connection to physical reality, shifting from a focus on spacing and movement, and, well, Action, towards the realm of reading animations to perform dodge rolls and parries, waiting for meters to cool down to perform your Magical Gacha Slam!

Ys Origin has at its core something that kind of makes sense, but the entire design of the game misunderstands it. Entire boss battles break if you miss weapon upgrades, stage hazards take out 30% of your health if you overlooked an armor box.

Padding out things with incessant numbers and resistance multipliers, a game designed by math formulas, curves, nerds and spreadsheets, rather than thinking about what it feels like to touch literally anything and how that might be pleasurable if transmitted to a player.

IN CONCLUSION IN CONCLUSION

It's called ACTION for a reason! Designers take note: You don't DODGE ROLL out of the way of a FUCKING CAR, you MOVE OUT OF THE WAY. Jesus Christ!


4/5 because of epona and hugo and setting a game in the final dungeon of ys 1 is sick

THE MAZE...reminded me of yu-no's later amazing 'labyrinth' (in the metaphorical sense)

To give more details... it's a meta take on the mystery/detective genre? Of course by the 80s mystery had likely played with twists around point of view / narrator a lot, I wonder if this was the devs' stab at adapting those ideas to a game format. As an experiment, I'm not sure it entirely works fully - in hindsight you can read Yasu's actions as disobeying you, twisting the truth, but in the moment it feels like the game is just kind of buggy or missing info - even if this feeling is likely intentional. Whereas in a book..you can read the book. You could get 'stuck' in a book but not in the same way you get stuck in a game.

That's not to say that the game is pretty funny at times, playing with the command-input format (different texts playing for repeated interactions, gags, etc). I like that it's very aware of the affordances the commands give - building tension through the labyrinth, Yasu's constant stare in some spots.

I kind of wonder how you were to deduce this yourself. I ended up using a guide halfway through so I wasn't sure if you could ask Yasu about the IOU or diaryy to get hints that he was the culprit... oh well!

Other than the feelings of 'we're never going to figure this out' and the tension of Yasu's always wanting things to be done with I think the main characters don't get quite enough screentime for the payoff/reveals to feel super justified.

But overall hey! Pretty interesting still. And the use of that maze at the end is such a great subtle horror moment. We think of old games as being archaic but really they seem happy to shift registers at will...

Heavily advertised as stylish, fluid, fancy, but at least the first hour plays like an empty-feeling open world that's also tricky to navigate to the point of needing quest marker vision. It feels really all over the place because it's weirdly uneven: the UI splash transitions are incredibly polished, but then the UI text is so tiny it's hard to read on my TV.

There's character banter/many popups used to bandaid over poorly communicated design (slowing time down lets you grapple farther?? stepping on some black goo starts timers?). I'm not one to be against weird controls but they don't seem intentionally weird, rather just miscalculations or like quick-patch-up-fixes.

The strange semi-diegetic dialogue ("I can grapple farther by pressing A!" or "Oh no not another enemy!") feel a lot like AAA games like an Uncharted or something.

I, of course, love narrative in games, but it's a balance that needs to be considered, not dropped in. Sometimes narrative can merely be a bandaid over a game world having trouble communicating narrative-feeling-elements through its game design.


now, the movement...

The level design weirdly pulls you into these momentum-stopping things: climbing on walls Assassin's Creed style, overly straightforward 3D combat with a weirdly punishing health system. Sometimes the level ideas are kind of dense and compact - not a bad thing on its own, but the movement wants to be about speed and long jumps! The level ideas sometimes feel like little skate parks, but the movement isn't built quite right to take advantage of these levels. And ultimately skating games are about a different avenue of expression (the tricks, reading the walls/floors/slopes/rails for the corresponding wallslides/manuals/tricks/grinding).

I think what Solar ash's movement fits better into is something like those CS surfing maps, 3D sonic, etc.

So there seems to be a base-level conflict between Level Design Direction and Moveset, and even conflicts within Moveset itself.

That's not to say there aren't any moments where the level design works (at least after an hour) but it tends to be more in fragments. I can see moments where stuff shines, but then I'm climbing on a goo wall again or 3-hit-comboing an enemy.

The "speedrun a course to clear it" idea is interesting. I think that you have to get checkpoints to extend the timer is great. But at the same time the checkpoints being precise things you have to hit, kind of feels like it restricts the level design expression even more - it almost makes the levels feel kind of 'automatic'? Think about the mario 64 yoshi race - it's essentially a timed challenge, but it's still left up to you how to make your way up the mountain. Should you take the bridge or long jump it? Run around the balls or not?

And it's not like getting checkpoints to extend a timer is no good, but the fact the time extends are so precise and attention-focusing feels off.

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But, there also feels like a feel-conflict between the way you are supposed to move fast and then sometimes stop or move precisely to slash stuff. It makes me think to Sonic Adventure - the reason your homing attack, well, homes, isn't a mistake - it's because they wanted to add simple combat for texture but also let you maintain a relative level of speed. Imagine if Sonic had to stop to punch the enemies instead of just bopping them in a row! Solar Ash's combat admittedly is fast, but it's still a strange context switch.

I also think the affordance of the dash button feels mushy - you're already moving quite fast to start, so a button to make you move faster feels like it mostly leads to something like making it harder to read distances in the level geometry gaps. (Compare this to the way that the walk vs run feel a lot more clearly distinguished). Going from fast to faster can work in some contexts, but to me it's better as a puzzly mechanic. I think a "go from fast to faster" mechanic makes more sense in a racing game where the focus is micro-optimizations, but in something like Solar Ash it kind of muddies up making jumps /grinds/grapples .


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There's also the health system which seems to be symbolic on the surface but feels like a way to justify having little plasma cells to collect and grind. And that it's tied into combat makes it not stick the landing even more - if the combat feels flat, then a health system tied to it probably can't carry much narrative weight. I love the idea of having symbolic systems in the games (heart machine? plasma?) but it seems tied to the wrong system here.

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Lastly the first boss battle: I know it's taking inspo from Shadow of the Colossus but this game lacks the gravitas of its implementation. SotC works because you're slow and puny, tiny and have a horrible time trying to cling on to the giant colossus thing. There's no friction getting on or off the boss in Solar Ash - completing a hit weirdly respawns you on the ground, ready to get back on - an easy grapple away. If it's easy to get on then it doesn't feel that tense being on it. SotC might have easy moments when stepping on the colossus, but those are exaggerated into sheer tension because you may have had to do something tedious to get on the colossus.

In Solar Ash, punctuating moments of speed with a full stop (the hit) feels odd to me. It's not to say it doesn't feel a little cool running on a serpent, but like I mentioned with the time extends earlier - the fact that 'hurting the boss' is so strictly signposts serves to exaggerate the Mario Boss/Zelda-Puzzle quality of fighting them, shifting the focus from movement/speed into following a trail to the next clearly marked thing to slash open.

Boss fights in platformers are always tricky. I'm not even sure I'm convinced that 3d platformers should have boss fights - at least not in the 'use flimsy combat to hit an enemy 3 times' - perhaps something else entirely should be in their place in terms of emotional climaxes.

Or idk, maybe it could be a race. Race 3 people to the death, but one of them is your friend! A melodramatic dialogue takes place as you lap them, reaching the finish line before them...
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This is a pretty harsh review overall, but both 3D platformers and action games are important to me and I think it's important to talk about why games' designs fail! And it does bother me that a lot of resources and promotion go into games that aren't making the mark design-wise.

Like with the way other game designs or art directions fail - it is sometimes a matter of things appear decent up-close - at the level of single mechanic or animation, audio log or NPC, but taken as a whole there is little harmony.

With this 2003 release, Sylvanian Families saw its last ever 'regular game' (there's a fashion designer-themed one in 2004).

This is the most modern-feeling (not necessarily positive) SF game yet. Included is a world map that actually makes sense, quest markers, and the elimination of a strict time system. Likewise, leveling up is eliminated. In its place is a more complex item/bartering system: by finding fruit and rocks on the ground, you can trade them for food (which you can eat for "Dream Points" (money)), or trade them for money. You also get money by doing minigames, and you can grind these minigames. It's easier than ever to gain a ton of money and buy all the furniture quickly.

The game is split into a clear daytime and evening session, with the game split into "school days" or "free days". On free days, you can take on one quest, which is usually a simple and uninteresting fetch quest with some kind of story (a rabbit lost her notebook, etc). after this event, the game becomes evening. You can also water or feed the titular mysterious tree, although I never found out what it leads to.

It's a more 'easy to understand' and progress rhythm. A library at school gradually gets new 'books' (historical information on various SF toys lol), as you grind minigames you get to play harder and more valuable versions.

It seems like the gardening system was eliminated in favor of all the other stuff, but I'm not totally sure. There's a mysterious cave you can wander around.

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Well, that's all the back-of-the-box description stuff I found out by playing. As a game it's certainly more approachable than the other SF games, but I feel like all the smoothed over design acts to emphasize how kinda pleasantly dull the writing and story are. The lack of a time system means that you kind of end up just grinding for money or items each day, and day/night mostly feels like a way to be able to see a new cutscene.

On one hand I'm glad they managed to establish a game loop that's at least kind of interesting/playable without lots of guides, but eh it just feels kind of too straightforward overall, and without any of the weird design decisions of the past games it's just a typical kid's game of the era with some cute art/songs. Oh well!