Lightningboalt
I love Ufouria/Hebereke and I'm glad to play it again, genuinely one of the best NES games for my money. This is a truly bizarre port though, the way they quietly dropped it with no fanfare on a random day while overshadowed by its own sequel? The fact that they wrote a whole new translation with the original Japanese character designs intact, but you only see it via screenshots that you unlock and access via a menu?? It's kind of fitting that it is as strange a port as Ufouria itself is a game. Really excited to play the sequel, waiting on the physical release to pick it up even though it's readily available right now, but I'll be there day one.
1994
Selected Jennifer/Gil, did a kick that was occasionally a spinning butt smash, threw in an occasional flying drop kick. Learned how to spit up explosives in the last two fights. At no point did I ever really know what was going on here, I love Ufouria/Hebereke.
1997
The epitome of Keep It Simple, Stupid. Absolutely rules when you can focus on run and gun FPS mayhem... where it falters is when it tries more complex objectives, many of which end up obscure and unreadable without either looking them up or simply having prior knowledge from spending way too much time with it back in the 90s. The game will often not do much of anything to communicate how you're intended to complete some of these objectives (or in some cases even identify what they actually are), and doesn't really have a way to without spelling it out entirely and ruining the exploration. This, combined with some questionable level design, can make the game needlessly frustrating from time to time. Control on anything above Agent? Those turrets are absolute misery, it becomes a truly godawful level. Caverns, the most linear and basic level in the game, will be the easiest thing to run until the very end where horribly placed inept (or seemingly suicidal) enemies at the end regularly throw a grenade at you that they almost always manage to blow themselves and the radio up with. Most of the levels are fun to play through, but some of these little moments just hamper an otherwise very enjoyable game.
What's most impressive to me is that it is a hell of an adaptation of the movie. Watched the movie for the first time two or three years ago, and it makes it very easy to appreciate the care the game took in adapting the various locales and setpieces... it's an achievement by Rare just how authentic it feels to its source. I watched the movie 25ish years after playing the game and could identify almost everything as a discrete moment from the game. Even with N64 graphics, you can identify things with ease, it's insanely readable and shows the care that Rare handled this with. Excellent work.
What's most impressive to me is that it is a hell of an adaptation of the movie. Watched the movie for the first time two or three years ago, and it makes it very easy to appreciate the care the game took in adapting the various locales and setpieces... it's an achievement by Rare just how authentic it feels to its source. I watched the movie 25ish years after playing the game and could identify almost everything as a discrete moment from the game. Even with N64 graphics, you can identify things with ease, it's insanely readable and shows the care that Rare handled this with. Excellent work.
2017
Another quick minimal moon run, trading off every moon, because it's a real fun gimmick. Switch 2 better start off with another 3D Mario on this level.
2017
Quality gimmick run to do, swap the controller with someone every time a moon is collected. Did that, while also trying to be the least helpful of all Marios, only fighting mandatory bosses and avoiding advancing world states... unfortunately couldn't get the Moon Sphynx skip though. Game still absolutely slaps 7+ years later, where has the time gone.
2022
A mostly pleasant game that's at its best when it's a relaxed platformer, but all too often tries to be a frenetic precision platformer. Maybe full 360 degree aiming was a bad idea here, should've kept it to 8 directional movement for simplicity and, more importantly, for some actual precision. It also suffers from the worst sort of boss fight design, the "look how many phases we have! Keep waiting it out and check out all of these phases and attacks!" variety where you might as well consider it an on-rails experience. One of those games where I mostly enjoyed it and had a good time, but its flaws had me ready to get it over with and will keep me from 100%ing it. Just too much hassle there. On the bright side, it absolutely nails the aesthetic and has a great soundtrack, so there's always some solid ambiance to enjoy even if a frustrating level has you fighting the camera and controls.
Always had a soft spot for the original, and this is a well done remake with some good new levels, happy to see it back. That said, I hate to beat a dead horse but this really does cost $10 more than it should.
2023
Got a C on Baba's taxes. Sorry Baba. Look on the bright side, you aren't going to tax jail and you still get your fruit benefits, that's all that matters!
It's the Year of the Dragon, so I finally played Spyro Year of the Dragon. Just like Crash 3, Spyro 3 relies heavily on bad gimmicks because it mistakenly thinks it needs them to keep things fresh. Unlike Crash 3, Spyro 3 doesn't have incredibly good non-gimmick levels to fall back on. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have even noticed the levels feeling kinda lackluster if it wasn't for the gimmicks being so prevalent... they really just bring everything down and highlight the deficiencies. It's really not a bad game, I still mostly enjoyed it, but it's easily the worst and least essential of the trilogy; it doesn't have any aspects that would make me recommend it over the previous two.
2000
It's been over 10 years since I last replayed this, so naturally I had to prove that I still have it by deliberately doing the Anti Guy Brigade and crushing all three of them in the same turn. Flower Fields really is the only low point here, if only just for the annoying layout and weird backtracking, but we follow it up with the Penguin Murder Mystery so I can't even be mad. Delightful nostalgia trip, can't wait to finally replay TTYD this year too.
2021
"Video games are supposed to be fun" - the motel clerk in Lake, whose name I never learned
I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.
There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.
Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!
And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.
And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.
Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?
What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.
I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.
There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.
Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!
And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.
And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.
Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?
What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.
1995
Unique experiment in early 3D, it was very pleasant with a cute aesthetic. Little clunky at times, and very short, but overall it works really well and is fun once you get back into the tank controls mindset.
"With my dying breath, I curse the poor!" - Greg the Dragon seconds before magically obliterating the Gransys Slums for absolutely no rhyme or reason
Dragon's Dogma is that sort of game where it feels like it shouldn't work at all, but by sheer force of will it does anyhow. Godawful slow traversal across a mostly empty world? Oh, you bet, and yet I got sucked in and happily wandered around that barren repetitive landscape with almost nothing to see in it, fighting all of like 5 enemy types and having a great time while my pawns chattered incessantly about things hating fire. The story is extremely thin and lacking in detail, but do you think I'm really gonna sit there and just let that bastard dragon take my heart without giving him a piece of my mind? Hell no, give that back, that's mine! It's an incredibly weird game that stands out as one of the more experimental and interesting works Capcom put out during the entire PS3/360 era - despite its flaws, there's something unique and compelling here that lands just right. Definitely interested to see what they do with the sequel, and maybe I'll check out the post-game and DLC content before then.
Dragon's Dogma is that sort of game where it feels like it shouldn't work at all, but by sheer force of will it does anyhow. Godawful slow traversal across a mostly empty world? Oh, you bet, and yet I got sucked in and happily wandered around that barren repetitive landscape with almost nothing to see in it, fighting all of like 5 enemy types and having a great time while my pawns chattered incessantly about things hating fire. The story is extremely thin and lacking in detail, but do you think I'm really gonna sit there and just let that bastard dragon take my heart without giving him a piece of my mind? Hell no, give that back, that's mine! It's an incredibly weird game that stands out as one of the more experimental and interesting works Capcom put out during the entire PS3/360 era - despite its flaws, there's something unique and compelling here that lands just right. Definitely interested to see what they do with the sequel, and maybe I'll check out the post-game and DLC content before then.
2023
While it's a fair bit shorter and easier than the original due to its nice QOL changes, it's still a delightful adventure. Can't believe it's back even after having finished it. Love its aesthetic and remixed soundtrack, such a welcome experience to revisit it after all this time. Plus, the post-game boss battles are a fun addition... in particular the wonderful payoff to a joke made 27 years ago.
God DAMN that was one of the most abrupt and rushed endings I've ever seen in any media, it's practically on the level of the movie Blood Debts. Look, I know this is a game for kids, but you have the villain sitting there for 20 minutes typing away at a computer while you explain the entire plot of the game to the mayor... run up, kick him in the dick, and restrain him. Holy shit. Why are you letting the scrawny bastard scientist doing evil plans just sit there RIGHT NEXT TO YOU for eons while you explain how his plan is evil! He's actively doing his evil plan! You are right there! Stop him! Do something!
I actually really enjoyed the original, it's a simplistic game but I had fun with it and liked it for what it is. It cruised by on charm and decently clever Pokemon themed storytelling across various interesting setpieces, it was never anything IMPRESSIVE but it was solid comfort food. This genuinely starts out pretty solidly. The first case is a fun little caper and we were pretty sold on the game from that alone, exploring the city was fun and the interactions were pleasant and made the world feel like it had some life in it. We were excited to see what was in store! It then proceeds to fall into very poorly paced linear storytelling that clearly is intended to do nothing more than wrap up the first game and forcefully end this sub-series. God, the chapter focused on "hey, we're gonna tell you what's up with Dad and Pikachu" was so slow and painful to crawl through, the amount of times the game just screams to the characters "this is what happened" and Tim just sits there all "huh. That's weird." without piecing it together for like three hours, god damn it, that was absolutely miserable pacing. It's a shame because, again, this is nothing earth shattering but I found it fun and enjoyable the first go around, would've been easy to just churn a few of these out and I'd have been there for each one! And even here, there are plenty of isolated moments where I was having a good time! But no, let's just focus so much on a poor main plot, write worse, and pace it so painfully slowly that you have trouble holding your interest. What really kept me invested was the little sidequests. They're braindead easy, you just talk to a character, go find another character, and you either solve it there or return to the original character to solve it. There are no puzzles involved but it was fun to connect little story threads and soak in the atmosphere of the world. Look, it's the holiday season, some simplistic pleasant moments based purely on vibes are a good reprieve right now. But whenever the actual plot shows up? It just gets stupid, they'd consistently have potentially smart moments (Electrode is exploding? Get Wooper!) and every single time they'd undercut it by deciding that you aren't allowed to think or react, we're just gonna spell out the solution and have you do it. There are no fail-states. Just go back to the other room and talk to Wooper, you are literally not allowed to do anything else, that's it, why should you solve puzzles in the detective game about figuring out puzzles?
This is so clearly forcefully rushed out, and yet they've been working on it since around 2018. What happened here? This isn't a complicated or demanding game, nor is it long. It has Pokemon money behind it, did they give it nothing for funding? What happened! I'm really just sad about it, because I was genuinely looking forward to this since it was announced, and it severely underwhelmed. There will clearly never be another one because Detective Pikachu is no longer a character and the ending is so abrupt that it basically openly tells you that you will never see these characters again. Fuck you for caring - it's done, it's over, we're not revisiting this, we're the Pokemon company: we don't let projects complete themselves in a satisfying way.
I actually really enjoyed the original, it's a simplistic game but I had fun with it and liked it for what it is. It cruised by on charm and decently clever Pokemon themed storytelling across various interesting setpieces, it was never anything IMPRESSIVE but it was solid comfort food. This genuinely starts out pretty solidly. The first case is a fun little caper and we were pretty sold on the game from that alone, exploring the city was fun and the interactions were pleasant and made the world feel like it had some life in it. We were excited to see what was in store! It then proceeds to fall into very poorly paced linear storytelling that clearly is intended to do nothing more than wrap up the first game and forcefully end this sub-series. God, the chapter focused on "hey, we're gonna tell you what's up with Dad and Pikachu" was so slow and painful to crawl through, the amount of times the game just screams to the characters "this is what happened" and Tim just sits there all "huh. That's weird." without piecing it together for like three hours, god damn it, that was absolutely miserable pacing. It's a shame because, again, this is nothing earth shattering but I found it fun and enjoyable the first go around, would've been easy to just churn a few of these out and I'd have been there for each one! And even here, there are plenty of isolated moments where I was having a good time! But no, let's just focus so much on a poor main plot, write worse, and pace it so painfully slowly that you have trouble holding your interest. What really kept me invested was the little sidequests. They're braindead easy, you just talk to a character, go find another character, and you either solve it there or return to the original character to solve it. There are no puzzles involved but it was fun to connect little story threads and soak in the atmosphere of the world. Look, it's the holiday season, some simplistic pleasant moments based purely on vibes are a good reprieve right now. But whenever the actual plot shows up? It just gets stupid, they'd consistently have potentially smart moments (Electrode is exploding? Get Wooper!) and every single time they'd undercut it by deciding that you aren't allowed to think or react, we're just gonna spell out the solution and have you do it. There are no fail-states. Just go back to the other room and talk to Wooper, you are literally not allowed to do anything else, that's it, why should you solve puzzles in the detective game about figuring out puzzles?
This is so clearly forcefully rushed out, and yet they've been working on it since around 2018. What happened here? This isn't a complicated or demanding game, nor is it long. It has Pokemon money behind it, did they give it nothing for funding? What happened! I'm really just sad about it, because I was genuinely looking forward to this since it was announced, and it severely underwhelmed. There will clearly never be another one because Detective Pikachu is no longer a character and the ending is so abrupt that it basically openly tells you that you will never see these characters again. Fuck you for caring - it's done, it's over, we're not revisiting this, we're the Pokemon company: we don't let projects complete themselves in a satisfying way.