MacBlank
Cute little nonagram game! It's pretty straightforward, divvying its puzzles into 'Normal' and 'Big', with the latter being a series of puzzles that each form a small part of a larger pixel art image. There are 24 total 'Big' puzzles, each one consisting of up to 100 smaller puzzles, so you're going to be here a while if you go for 100% completion. I actually did find it quite worthwhile to do so - there's a simple but nice little story that's slowly revealed through the 'Big' puzzles, and 100% completion rewards the player for seeing it through. Very nice little diversion.
I really only have this and Mario's Super Picross as reference for nonagrams, so I don't really know what sort of things are endemic to the genre. I must admit that I had some issues with this that I didn't have with Super Picross. A lot of the 'Normal' puzzles are variations on a theme - there are probably a dozen or so different types of flowers, for example. This sort of works thematically given the game's motif of a lunar garden, but I did fall into a cadence with each set of Normal puzzles, waiting for the inevitable one the game simply labeled 'flower'. There are some translation issues as well - nothing serious, the narrative's intent comes through clearly enough, but you can tell English isn't the primary language for the writer.
The main things I did have issues with were positioning and repetition. There's an odd choice made with some of the pictures in some of the 'Normal' puzzles where the image is not lined up down the middle, mostly as a consequence of putting a picture with an even-numbered pixel width in an odd-numbered pixel grid, or vice-versa. A big thing I fell into with Super Picross was pattern recognition with symetric graphics, so this uneven positioning throws things off a bit. Meanwhile, there are a LOT of repeated shapes in the 'Big' puzzles, mostly down to the use of background elements like stars that you repeatedly have to carve out. I was initially on-board with this - like I said, pattern recognition was one of my main tools in my last nonagram game - but the game does this trick SO many times that it starts to remove the challenge and visual artistry behind it. I should think that creating a compelling collage-type puzzle in the context of a nonagram is very difficult, and falling on something like putting hundreds of stars for the player to fill out over thousands of individual puzzles is a necessity - but I wouldn't have minded more variation to keep things interesting. I think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it did get pretty distracting by the end.
But like I said, it is worth playing to 100% completion. Just take your time with this one and don't rush it if you don't wanna.
I really only have this and Mario's Super Picross as reference for nonagrams, so I don't really know what sort of things are endemic to the genre. I must admit that I had some issues with this that I didn't have with Super Picross. A lot of the 'Normal' puzzles are variations on a theme - there are probably a dozen or so different types of flowers, for example. This sort of works thematically given the game's motif of a lunar garden, but I did fall into a cadence with each set of Normal puzzles, waiting for the inevitable one the game simply labeled 'flower'. There are some translation issues as well - nothing serious, the narrative's intent comes through clearly enough, but you can tell English isn't the primary language for the writer.
The main things I did have issues with were positioning and repetition. There's an odd choice made with some of the pictures in some of the 'Normal' puzzles where the image is not lined up down the middle, mostly as a consequence of putting a picture with an even-numbered pixel width in an odd-numbered pixel grid, or vice-versa. A big thing I fell into with Super Picross was pattern recognition with symetric graphics, so this uneven positioning throws things off a bit. Meanwhile, there are a LOT of repeated shapes in the 'Big' puzzles, mostly down to the use of background elements like stars that you repeatedly have to carve out. I was initially on-board with this - like I said, pattern recognition was one of my main tools in my last nonagram game - but the game does this trick SO many times that it starts to remove the challenge and visual artistry behind it. I should think that creating a compelling collage-type puzzle in the context of a nonagram is very difficult, and falling on something like putting hundreds of stars for the player to fill out over thousands of individual puzzles is a necessity - but I wouldn't have minded more variation to keep things interesting. I think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it did get pretty distracting by the end.
But like I said, it is worth playing to 100% completion. Just take your time with this one and don't rush it if you don't wanna.
This review contains spoilers
All right, here we go.
I loved both Life is Strange and Before the Storm. I have my issues here and there, but Life is Strange hit such an incredible sweet spot for me, and Before the Storm was proof that the first game was more than just a one-time thing. So when Don't Nod announced that they were returning for another spin-off - a free release, one that would lead into their own sequel to Life is Strange, to boot - I was ecstatic. It took me a little bit to get around to it, but I sat down one fine Sunday to play through it.
And, um, after playing it, I decided Life is Strange 2 could wait for another day. As of this writing, I still haven't played LiS2.
(to be fair, part of that is also because I was told that LiS2 tackles Trumpism, and I really wasn't ready to deal with that in fiction in 2018. But Captain Spirit was a non-zero factor).
Captain Spirit is such a cynical, mean-spirited story. You're playing a little boy, Chris, who uses his imagination to combat his chores, all the while exploring his house and life situation. That's all well and good, but what the game is actually about is his widower father, who's slipped into drinking after his wife's death and stands to lose custody of his son. You're trying not to bother your day-drinking father while he watches and falls asleep to a basketball game on the living room TV. You eventually have to wake him up, and the expected happens. Your father engages in a little abuse, you almost break your back, and you meet the protagonists of the upcoming sequel, whom Chris has nothing to do with. The end, see you next time.
I think the problem lies in my expectations. I'd been told by a friend that Captain Spirit was a Calvin & Hobbes sort of story. I really need to temper my own expectations when someone uses Calvin & Hobbes as a point of comparison, because I think Calvin & Hobbes means something different to me than it does everyone else - but I get what was meant: a kid using his imagination to turn mundane reality into exciting adventures. I'm all for that, but the part of me that likes to engage with that type of media is almost wholly divorced from the part of me that likes to engage in more serious character drama. This game tries to have it both ways, and I'm afraid that all the fun that comes from Chris's adventures as Captain Spirit melts away with the certain knowledge that a drunken, cuss-riddled encounter sits around the corner. It's like, you know that you're going to be slapped in the face at some point on a given day, you just don't know when. Hard to have a good time with that certain knowledge looming over you.
And it's a real shame, because I think there's some fun with Captain Spirit's adventures in isolation. There's something very true to form with a lot of it. That you can somewhat customize Captain Spirit's appearance is cool, and I love how minimalist the audio design is for the imagination sequences. Like, yeah, the only sounds you hear SHOULD be the sounds Chris is making, contrasted with the lager-than-life visuals. That makes perfect sense.
I'm willing to believe that I simply am not in the audience for this game. Life is Strange appealed to me because I saw a lot of myself in Max, and Before the Storm appealed to me because I'd grown attached to Chloe (and the game has a lot of fun incidental moments). I think, if I'd grown up in a life situation such that I could identify with Chris, this might've resonated with me, too. Even so, there isn't any actual narrative catharsis I can see from experiencing this. There is no resolution presented to Chris and his father's situation, the game just cuts after Chris is saved by and meets the LiS2 brothers. I think, if I was like Chris as a kid, I would see verisimilitude, but no actual release for the feelings this work brought on.
Maybe I'll change my tune once I get around to LiS2, but for now - you can skip this one. You stand to gain nothing from it.
I loved both Life is Strange and Before the Storm. I have my issues here and there, but Life is Strange hit such an incredible sweet spot for me, and Before the Storm was proof that the first game was more than just a one-time thing. So when Don't Nod announced that they were returning for another spin-off - a free release, one that would lead into their own sequel to Life is Strange, to boot - I was ecstatic. It took me a little bit to get around to it, but I sat down one fine Sunday to play through it.
And, um, after playing it, I decided Life is Strange 2 could wait for another day. As of this writing, I still haven't played LiS2.
(to be fair, part of that is also because I was told that LiS2 tackles Trumpism, and I really wasn't ready to deal with that in fiction in 2018. But Captain Spirit was a non-zero factor).
Captain Spirit is such a cynical, mean-spirited story. You're playing a little boy, Chris, who uses his imagination to combat his chores, all the while exploring his house and life situation. That's all well and good, but what the game is actually about is his widower father, who's slipped into drinking after his wife's death and stands to lose custody of his son. You're trying not to bother your day-drinking father while he watches and falls asleep to a basketball game on the living room TV. You eventually have to wake him up, and the expected happens. Your father engages in a little abuse, you almost break your back, and you meet the protagonists of the upcoming sequel, whom Chris has nothing to do with. The end, see you next time.
I think the problem lies in my expectations. I'd been told by a friend that Captain Spirit was a Calvin & Hobbes sort of story. I really need to temper my own expectations when someone uses Calvin & Hobbes as a point of comparison, because I think Calvin & Hobbes means something different to me than it does everyone else - but I get what was meant: a kid using his imagination to turn mundane reality into exciting adventures. I'm all for that, but the part of me that likes to engage with that type of media is almost wholly divorced from the part of me that likes to engage in more serious character drama. This game tries to have it both ways, and I'm afraid that all the fun that comes from Chris's adventures as Captain Spirit melts away with the certain knowledge that a drunken, cuss-riddled encounter sits around the corner. It's like, you know that you're going to be slapped in the face at some point on a given day, you just don't know when. Hard to have a good time with that certain knowledge looming over you.
And it's a real shame, because I think there's some fun with Captain Spirit's adventures in isolation. There's something very true to form with a lot of it. That you can somewhat customize Captain Spirit's appearance is cool, and I love how minimalist the audio design is for the imagination sequences. Like, yeah, the only sounds you hear SHOULD be the sounds Chris is making, contrasted with the lager-than-life visuals. That makes perfect sense.
I'm willing to believe that I simply am not in the audience for this game. Life is Strange appealed to me because I saw a lot of myself in Max, and Before the Storm appealed to me because I'd grown attached to Chloe (and the game has a lot of fun incidental moments). I think, if I'd grown up in a life situation such that I could identify with Chris, this might've resonated with me, too. Even so, there isn't any actual narrative catharsis I can see from experiencing this. There is no resolution presented to Chris and his father's situation, the game just cuts after Chris is saved by and meets the LiS2 brothers. I think, if I was like Chris as a kid, I would see verisimilitude, but no actual release for the feelings this work brought on.
Maybe I'll change my tune once I get around to LiS2, but for now - you can skip this one. You stand to gain nothing from it.
2002
This review contains spoilers
Some background, first. I was first made aware of this game through an LP, which I stopped shortway in once I saw how coooooool the opening was. I later decided to incorporate the game into a small project I devised to hype myself up for the then-upcoming Persona 5: I'd play a jRPG from a different series counting up. Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Wild ARMs 3, Breath of Fire IV, Persona 5. I got as far as Wild ARMs 3 before falling off, largely for unrelated reasons (I was working a new job that wasn't shaking out, and my motivation got sapped away). I made a couple other token attempts at it over the years, at most only getting a couple dungeons into Chapter 1. It wasn't until I decided to play it on-stream that I finally had the time and motivation to see it through to its end.
And, while it became clear after a while that my cohost and I were largely playing the game for ourselves rather than an audience, I'm glad we played through it on-stream, because there's no way in hell I would've had the motivation to finish this on its own.
I'm largely unfamiliar with Wild ARMs overall, so I can't be sure if some of this game's quirks are exclusive to this game or parts of the series overall. I know stuff like the Tools, individual character prologues, and sci-fi bent are series-wide elements while the FP system is wholly invented for this title (though backported to one of the Wild ARMs 1 remakes?). Keep that in mind as I talk about this game and critique particular elements.
Wild ARMs 3 feels very much like a product of the PS1 era school of jRPG design, just made on the next console's technology. I could very easily see a version of this coming out on PS1, maybe leaning more into sprites than 3D models and splitting its four chapters into four discs. I acknowledge that Wild ARMs 3 feels deliberately subversive in this regard, with stuff like Skies of Arcadia-esque vehicle combat, its retooled FP system reading more like a fighting game's Super meter than traditional Magic Points, emphasizing defending by tying it to weapon reloads, its focus on upgrading the same weapons rather than cycling them out at new milestones, being able to dodge enemy encounters through the Migrant system, creating a save point Mimic, and the extreme limitation of healing items outside the Secret Garden. But this all feels like mechanical commentary on the state of things from this era. Anyway, the Mediums/Guardians are another take on Final Fantasy Summons/Espers, there's an arena and a Pit of 100 Trials-esque bonus dungeon, and there are plenty of WEAPON-esque superbosses roaming around, waiting for players to take them down.
I think an issue I have with Wild ARMs 3 is that, for as much as it tries to subvert its template with its unique mechanics and its setting, it struggles to sustain its own identity. The myriad of unique mechanics are great attention-grabbers, but it rarely feels like the game evolves its high concepts. An easy mechanical example of this comes from the game's three modes of transport - horses, the Sand Craft, and Lombardia. Like Final Fantasy before it, Wild ARMs 3 uses these to gate off different parts of the overworld, with horses being used to clear canyons, the Sand Craft navigating the sea, and Lombardia acting as an airship replacement. Entirely fair, not terribly unique but always a solid way to create mechanical complexity to world exploration. But Wild ARMs 3 goes one step further by taking a leaf out of Phantasy Star's book and changing up combat when you're riding something. Good idea, but I feel like each of these has a disproportionate amount of focus:
- Horse combat is normal combat, just with different animations. As charming as it is to watch every enemy in the game running to keep up with the party, there are very few unique encounters, nor are there any unique interactions for attacking enemies on horseback, even though the animations would suggest otherwise.
- The Sand Craft gets a huge amount of focus in the game's second and third Chapters, with a bunch of wholly unique mechanics and its own upgrade system, yet this ultimately boils down to a complete distraction. Dragon Fossils are easy to come by after the initial 15, which makes the act of gating upgrades behind them pretty arbitrary. There is a single check the game makes gated behind the Sand Craft's upgrades - you must defeat Balal Quo Naga to acquire Raftina, who is required to enter Dim Root Path towards the end of Chapter 3. But Balal Quo Naga is a complete boolean check: either you're able to overwhelm it in one hit (i.e., you have the Ark Smasher), or you aren't able to outpace its healing. After this, the Sand Craft is all but forgotten, particularly after you encounter...
- Lombardia is her own unique character, with her own dungeon and boss fight and everything, becoming pivotal to how the game resolves its third chapter. But in terms of how she fights, she's essentially a stripped-down version of the Sand Craft. Instead of each character having a unique role managing the vehicle, you basically just get four characters' worth of identical turns. What complexity existed in the Sand Craft's combat (for as much of a distraction as it presented to the narrative) is completely striped away, and Lombardia's fights just feel even more like going through arbitrary motions.
To bring my point back, for as much emphasis as each of these get, the actual depth to each of these is only skin deep. And since they're so shallow, there's little sense that these things really enrich this world, and so the experience of playing the game falls back into going through familiar established motions.
The absolute worst aspect of this are the game's villains. The game sort-of presents itself as a segmented vignette storyline, with its central party wandering around like ronin (or cowboys!), showing up to help individual problems that crop up as a consequence of the overarching plotline. This episodic approach is a great idea on paper that complements its western setting. The problem comes down to its execution. Each Chapter has its own villain to get its unique focus, slowly building in scope from a rival crew headed by a bandit gun-for-hire to a world-ending ghost-in-the-machine. In between that, you have three dumbasses called Leehalt, Melody, and Malik, later joined by their boss Siegfried. I cannot articulate how boring these stupid cloaky armory demony dipshits are, and how much they grind any scene featuring them to a screeching halt. They're there to tether the version of the world we see in the first chapter (a standard western setting with spirits and magic) to the version we see in the last chapter (a ruined planet, once verdant but since corrupted by alien influence and life-draining technology). Every scene they're in, they slowly exposit a little more of what's going on, sprinkling in a little more technobabble about how this setting works or what they're trying to do. They command the focus of every single dungeon, teleporting in to screw over the good guys then dipping out after they've either created or partaken in a boss fight. You fight these losers (or Janus, who they've sucked the charisma out of, or their weird minotaur android Asgard) at least a dozen times, with little mechanical progression across any of these fights. They are like a gravity well of pacing and character development, since these losers have none of their own and only exist to cause problems. This would be excusable if they were only there for a little bit, but not for the grand majority of the game's run time! Forget about Sephiroth, freaking Garland from FF1 has more presence than any of these assholes.
This isn't even getting into how stupid the game's technobabble is. Like yes, you're gonna have willing suspension of disbelief with this sort of thing. So sure, human aliens from Earth have syphoned the life force from this planet. I don't quite get how humanity was made to believe that the events of 10 years ago happened unknown millenia ago, but sure, okay, that's our premise. But then it turns out that you can just shoot a specially-modified gun at an ethernet cable to restore the quintessence of the planet? What? And what are Elws???
I've been pretty mean, but for as many things as there are to dislike about this game, there are just as many that I love. Much of the non-villain cast is great! Our heroes are all very fun - Virginia, Gallows, and Clive are great characters with lots of fun moments throughout (Jet's okay too). Maya Schrodinger is a fantastic character, easily the most consistently compelling character around and perhaps this game's strongest realization of its Western genre, with her moral ambiguity and the way she makes Virginia grow through their rivalry. There are all sorts of memorable NPCs in the party members' families, and a lot of who the major players are feel thoroughly defined by how their pre-existing relationships develop over the course of the game. The fact that every NPC in the game has a unique name, if not a unique design, makes this dying world feel strangely alive.
Sidequests are good, too! I only had the patience for some of them during my playthrough, so I didn't see the bottom of the Abyss or the end of Gunner's Heaven, but I appreciate that they're there. Likewise for the Telepath Towers and Millenium Puzzles; even though my colorblindness prevented me from being able to play the latter, they're clever puzzles that I hold nothing against. The Secret Garden probably comes too early into the game for how broken its reward is, but the Decaying Labyrinth that's tied to it is a legitimately great dungeon with an excellent gimmick. I love how many little character pieces simply exist for the player to discover, like Martina's whole subplot (definitely wish I'd seen that through on my playthrough) and the entire novel embedded in the story purely so Clive has something to share with his daughter. And while I can't say that I'm behind every decision made with the optional boss fights - it takes a certain level of misplaced moxie to ask the player to fight the same boss literally 100 times - I will say, one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen in a video game is the "Adult Magazine" fight. Great layered setup and pay-off.
Dungeons and music fall into the trap of being repetitive, but they are strong before they're overused. A lot of the game's later dungeons stand out for this reason - because the game takes its time committing to its sci-fi shift, by the time it actually gets there and has dungeons to reflect that motif, it's too late for the game to spam them - stuff like Demondor and Nightmare Castle look great and have fun gimmicks to spice them up. And even though the game could waaaaay benefit from the EarthBound thing of multiple tracks for incidental encounters, "Gunmetal Action" is still a damn great combat theme.
Finally, while I do not understand why they decided to leave in so many debug features, I'm grateful they did. Don't like the silly names you gave the main party? Just talk to some completely incidental NPC with the mystical power of changing your entire identity! Don't like an NPC's name? The game has you covered - just use a Name Tag on them to change it! Feel free to spice up your spell names, too! And if you wanted to know what day of the year it was, Armengard has you covered, with 366 unique lines that show up contingent on the date listed on the PlayStation's internal clock - a feature that goes completely unused throughout the rest of the game. It's weird, but this is the sort of thing that gives this game such a strange, unique identity.
I think, if I'd grown up with Wild ARMs 3 or played it at a time of my life when it could have informed my tastes, it could have easily been one of my very favorite games. Gen 2 of Pokémon is my favorite, one of the reasons for which being the sheer amount of loose, incidental stuff that goes into making it feel like a more complete world. I get a lot of that feeling playing Wild ARMs 3 as well. It's a game that focuses on breadth over depth, and while that makes the experience of shotgunning a game in a sequential livestream format unappealing, this would be a great game to simply live with. If, say, you were someone who spent a year chipping away at it, checking in every day to see what Armangard had to say, trying to solve another Millenium Puzzle, trying to find more Telepath Towers, drilling a little deeper down into the Abyss, all the while pushing bit-by-bit further into the main story? I could easily see this being someone's favorite game. That unfortunately isn't the case for me. Still, it's a game I'm grateful exists and that I had the chance to play.
And, while it became clear after a while that my cohost and I were largely playing the game for ourselves rather than an audience, I'm glad we played through it on-stream, because there's no way in hell I would've had the motivation to finish this on its own.
I'm largely unfamiliar with Wild ARMs overall, so I can't be sure if some of this game's quirks are exclusive to this game or parts of the series overall. I know stuff like the Tools, individual character prologues, and sci-fi bent are series-wide elements while the FP system is wholly invented for this title (though backported to one of the Wild ARMs 1 remakes?). Keep that in mind as I talk about this game and critique particular elements.
Wild ARMs 3 feels very much like a product of the PS1 era school of jRPG design, just made on the next console's technology. I could very easily see a version of this coming out on PS1, maybe leaning more into sprites than 3D models and splitting its four chapters into four discs. I acknowledge that Wild ARMs 3 feels deliberately subversive in this regard, with stuff like Skies of Arcadia-esque vehicle combat, its retooled FP system reading more like a fighting game's Super meter than traditional Magic Points, emphasizing defending by tying it to weapon reloads, its focus on upgrading the same weapons rather than cycling them out at new milestones, being able to dodge enemy encounters through the Migrant system, creating a save point Mimic, and the extreme limitation of healing items outside the Secret Garden. But this all feels like mechanical commentary on the state of things from this era. Anyway, the Mediums/Guardians are another take on Final Fantasy Summons/Espers, there's an arena and a Pit of 100 Trials-esque bonus dungeon, and there are plenty of WEAPON-esque superbosses roaming around, waiting for players to take them down.
I think an issue I have with Wild ARMs 3 is that, for as much as it tries to subvert its template with its unique mechanics and its setting, it struggles to sustain its own identity. The myriad of unique mechanics are great attention-grabbers, but it rarely feels like the game evolves its high concepts. An easy mechanical example of this comes from the game's three modes of transport - horses, the Sand Craft, and Lombardia. Like Final Fantasy before it, Wild ARMs 3 uses these to gate off different parts of the overworld, with horses being used to clear canyons, the Sand Craft navigating the sea, and Lombardia acting as an airship replacement. Entirely fair, not terribly unique but always a solid way to create mechanical complexity to world exploration. But Wild ARMs 3 goes one step further by taking a leaf out of Phantasy Star's book and changing up combat when you're riding something. Good idea, but I feel like each of these has a disproportionate amount of focus:
- Horse combat is normal combat, just with different animations. As charming as it is to watch every enemy in the game running to keep up with the party, there are very few unique encounters, nor are there any unique interactions for attacking enemies on horseback, even though the animations would suggest otherwise.
- The Sand Craft gets a huge amount of focus in the game's second and third Chapters, with a bunch of wholly unique mechanics and its own upgrade system, yet this ultimately boils down to a complete distraction. Dragon Fossils are easy to come by after the initial 15, which makes the act of gating upgrades behind them pretty arbitrary. There is a single check the game makes gated behind the Sand Craft's upgrades - you must defeat Balal Quo Naga to acquire Raftina, who is required to enter Dim Root Path towards the end of Chapter 3. But Balal Quo Naga is a complete boolean check: either you're able to overwhelm it in one hit (i.e., you have the Ark Smasher), or you aren't able to outpace its healing. After this, the Sand Craft is all but forgotten, particularly after you encounter...
- Lombardia is her own unique character, with her own dungeon and boss fight and everything, becoming pivotal to how the game resolves its third chapter. But in terms of how she fights, she's essentially a stripped-down version of the Sand Craft. Instead of each character having a unique role managing the vehicle, you basically just get four characters' worth of identical turns. What complexity existed in the Sand Craft's combat (for as much of a distraction as it presented to the narrative) is completely striped away, and Lombardia's fights just feel even more like going through arbitrary motions.
To bring my point back, for as much emphasis as each of these get, the actual depth to each of these is only skin deep. And since they're so shallow, there's little sense that these things really enrich this world, and so the experience of playing the game falls back into going through familiar established motions.
The absolute worst aspect of this are the game's villains. The game sort-of presents itself as a segmented vignette storyline, with its central party wandering around like ronin (or cowboys!), showing up to help individual problems that crop up as a consequence of the overarching plotline. This episodic approach is a great idea on paper that complements its western setting. The problem comes down to its execution. Each Chapter has its own villain to get its unique focus, slowly building in scope from a rival crew headed by a bandit gun-for-hire to a world-ending ghost-in-the-machine. In between that, you have three dumbasses called Leehalt, Melody, and Malik, later joined by their boss Siegfried. I cannot articulate how boring these stupid cloaky armory demony dipshits are, and how much they grind any scene featuring them to a screeching halt. They're there to tether the version of the world we see in the first chapter (a standard western setting with spirits and magic) to the version we see in the last chapter (a ruined planet, once verdant but since corrupted by alien influence and life-draining technology). Every scene they're in, they slowly exposit a little more of what's going on, sprinkling in a little more technobabble about how this setting works or what they're trying to do. They command the focus of every single dungeon, teleporting in to screw over the good guys then dipping out after they've either created or partaken in a boss fight. You fight these losers (or Janus, who they've sucked the charisma out of, or their weird minotaur android Asgard) at least a dozen times, with little mechanical progression across any of these fights. They are like a gravity well of pacing and character development, since these losers have none of their own and only exist to cause problems. This would be excusable if they were only there for a little bit, but not for the grand majority of the game's run time! Forget about Sephiroth, freaking Garland from FF1 has more presence than any of these assholes.
This isn't even getting into how stupid the game's technobabble is. Like yes, you're gonna have willing suspension of disbelief with this sort of thing. So sure, human aliens from Earth have syphoned the life force from this planet. I don't quite get how humanity was made to believe that the events of 10 years ago happened unknown millenia ago, but sure, okay, that's our premise. But then it turns out that you can just shoot a specially-modified gun at an ethernet cable to restore the quintessence of the planet? What? And what are Elws???
I've been pretty mean, but for as many things as there are to dislike about this game, there are just as many that I love. Much of the non-villain cast is great! Our heroes are all very fun - Virginia, Gallows, and Clive are great characters with lots of fun moments throughout (Jet's okay too). Maya Schrodinger is a fantastic character, easily the most consistently compelling character around and perhaps this game's strongest realization of its Western genre, with her moral ambiguity and the way she makes Virginia grow through their rivalry. There are all sorts of memorable NPCs in the party members' families, and a lot of who the major players are feel thoroughly defined by how their pre-existing relationships develop over the course of the game. The fact that every NPC in the game has a unique name, if not a unique design, makes this dying world feel strangely alive.
Sidequests are good, too! I only had the patience for some of them during my playthrough, so I didn't see the bottom of the Abyss or the end of Gunner's Heaven, but I appreciate that they're there. Likewise for the Telepath Towers and Millenium Puzzles; even though my colorblindness prevented me from being able to play the latter, they're clever puzzles that I hold nothing against. The Secret Garden probably comes too early into the game for how broken its reward is, but the Decaying Labyrinth that's tied to it is a legitimately great dungeon with an excellent gimmick. I love how many little character pieces simply exist for the player to discover, like Martina's whole subplot (definitely wish I'd seen that through on my playthrough) and the entire novel embedded in the story purely so Clive has something to share with his daughter. And while I can't say that I'm behind every decision made with the optional boss fights - it takes a certain level of misplaced moxie to ask the player to fight the same boss literally 100 times - I will say, one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen in a video game is the "Adult Magazine" fight. Great layered setup and pay-off.
Dungeons and music fall into the trap of being repetitive, but they are strong before they're overused. A lot of the game's later dungeons stand out for this reason - because the game takes its time committing to its sci-fi shift, by the time it actually gets there and has dungeons to reflect that motif, it's too late for the game to spam them - stuff like Demondor and Nightmare Castle look great and have fun gimmicks to spice them up. And even though the game could waaaaay benefit from the EarthBound thing of multiple tracks for incidental encounters, "Gunmetal Action" is still a damn great combat theme.
Finally, while I do not understand why they decided to leave in so many debug features, I'm grateful they did. Don't like the silly names you gave the main party? Just talk to some completely incidental NPC with the mystical power of changing your entire identity! Don't like an NPC's name? The game has you covered - just use a Name Tag on them to change it! Feel free to spice up your spell names, too! And if you wanted to know what day of the year it was, Armengard has you covered, with 366 unique lines that show up contingent on the date listed on the PlayStation's internal clock - a feature that goes completely unused throughout the rest of the game. It's weird, but this is the sort of thing that gives this game such a strange, unique identity.
I think, if I'd grown up with Wild ARMs 3 or played it at a time of my life when it could have informed my tastes, it could have easily been one of my very favorite games. Gen 2 of Pokémon is my favorite, one of the reasons for which being the sheer amount of loose, incidental stuff that goes into making it feel like a more complete world. I get a lot of that feeling playing Wild ARMs 3 as well. It's a game that focuses on breadth over depth, and while that makes the experience of shotgunning a game in a sequential livestream format unappealing, this would be a great game to simply live with. If, say, you were someone who spent a year chipping away at it, checking in every day to see what Armangard had to say, trying to solve another Millenium Puzzle, trying to find more Telepath Towers, drilling a little deeper down into the Abyss, all the while pushing bit-by-bit further into the main story? I could easily see this being someone's favorite game. That unfortunately isn't the case for me. Still, it's a game I'm grateful exists and that I had the chance to play.
2001
Believe it or not, I consider the silly drunk squirrel game an arthouse project.
Let me state first that I normally have no interest whatsoever in this game's brand of humor. I have never liked South Park, and I can only take Family Guy in small doses. Actually, I've always been a bit surprised how much I like this game, since I enjoyed it enough to run through it in full three times - more than any other Rare game I've played to date. Part of it is my personal connection - I have a fond memory of my mother surprising me with this game as a birthday present my first year of college, since I'd hyped up the game's notorious reputation for her. I played part of the game for my roommate, a guy who'd grown up with Banjo-Kazooie but had never heard of this game, and I remember him being shocked that "They're swearing!!!!" Fun game to surprise people with.
But that's only part of it. A lot of it comes from the journey the game took to become what it is now. It's a well-known story, but for those who don't know - Conker was conceived of as a Tex Avery-style mascot for Rare, but with the runaway success of Banjo-Kazooie, his game's original incarnation (Twelve Tales: Conker 64) was seen as an also-ran of Rare being its kiddy, cutesy self. Development stalled for many years, long enough that the team behind the companion release (Conker's Pocket Tales) was able to finish their work twice over. Frustrated by the lack of forward momentum, Chris Seavor pitched a crass, parodic take on the original Twelve Tales, and Conker became the little bastard we know today.
Consequently, the end product is colored by the accumulations built up over 5-6 years of development. So many of the misanthropic, ill-mannered jokes read as the team taking the piss (sometimes literally) on all of their development struggles to date. There are all sorts of meta nods, like how the baby dinosaur that Conker sacrifices would have been Berri's companion in Twelve Tales, or the condensation of the expansive movesets from Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 into a generic all-purpose Context Sensitivity Zone, or the key collectable being completely unimaginative wads of cash.
I think that's the start of what makes the game more than just its crass jokes. Like, there's no subtext to Marvin the freakin' mouse critter in Barn Boys; the humor really is just an absurdist punchline rooted around the arbitrary sexism of metal crates that exist as obstacles, and gibbing a flatulent rodent. It's not funny to me because I find those jokes funny; it's funny because of who's telling the jokes and why they're telling it. Rare's pissed off and indulging in some dadaist humor that brings into question the underpinings of what a video game is. Like, why the hell not field a quest by a sentient block involving a cheese farm?
The other half of the equation on its surface level is its referential humor. And I'm not gonna pretend that there is something inherently deep about a video game referencing Bram Stoker's Dracula or Jaws or anything. It is funny, seeing the opening to Saving Private Ryan recreated with adorable squirrel characters getting mowed down, up to and including a grey squirrel retrieving his own severed arm. But I do think that for as inherently ridiculous as its plot cul-de-sacs are, the fact that Conker (the game) treats them as a single continuous narrative lends itself some cumulative weight. Like the speech at the end of "It's War!" is certainly genre work, but that doesn't make it any less poignant. To say nothing of how it all piles up in the ending, and how narrative weight comes crashing back down even in spite of Conker (the Squirrel's) fourth wall awareness.
It's been said before, but Bad Fur Day is much stronger as a third-person shooter than as a platformer. Credit where it's due, the creators realized this and left most of the actual mechanical challenges for the game's Night segments, with the only real speedbumps during the Day portions being "Barry's Mates", Bomb Run", and "Mugged". I also think BFD is very smartly-paced for its variety format, pivoting just when things start getting tedious. Nothing is really given time to overstay its welcome (though "It's War" probably runs a little long, and the final boss, while a fun throwback to Mario 64, is surprisingly fiddly for how simple it is).
And, like, when the game isn't deliberately looking like crap, it looks amazing. You can kind of tell that Conker's model got way more attention than anyone else looking at it side-by-side with the others in multiplayer, but that's not a bad thing. Rare wanted a Screwy Squirrel mascot, and boy did they get it. It's absolutely astounding to think that Super Mario 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day exist on the same console.
I think, to loop back around to the main point, my love for Conker, and why I consider it an arthouse game, is because of its surprisingly unique place as an auteur project for its place in the gaming landscape. These days auteur games are less of a surprise, with directors' influence being more visible in their work. But for Rare and especially for Nintendo (indirectly, since Ninty was just a publisher, but implicitly since the two were joined at the hip), it feels like it comes out of nowhere. So much of what I see in Bad Fur Day comes from where Rare was at in their company history. There's something poignant in that ending, knowing that this was the end of Rare's heyday on the SNES and N64. Maybe not their last game with Nintendo, but the last major release to have its own clear identity. A swan song, sung in and by scat.
Let me state first that I normally have no interest whatsoever in this game's brand of humor. I have never liked South Park, and I can only take Family Guy in small doses. Actually, I've always been a bit surprised how much I like this game, since I enjoyed it enough to run through it in full three times - more than any other Rare game I've played to date. Part of it is my personal connection - I have a fond memory of my mother surprising me with this game as a birthday present my first year of college, since I'd hyped up the game's notorious reputation for her. I played part of the game for my roommate, a guy who'd grown up with Banjo-Kazooie but had never heard of this game, and I remember him being shocked that "They're swearing!!!!" Fun game to surprise people with.
But that's only part of it. A lot of it comes from the journey the game took to become what it is now. It's a well-known story, but for those who don't know - Conker was conceived of as a Tex Avery-style mascot for Rare, but with the runaway success of Banjo-Kazooie, his game's original incarnation (Twelve Tales: Conker 64) was seen as an also-ran of Rare being its kiddy, cutesy self. Development stalled for many years, long enough that the team behind the companion release (Conker's Pocket Tales) was able to finish their work twice over. Frustrated by the lack of forward momentum, Chris Seavor pitched a crass, parodic take on the original Twelve Tales, and Conker became the little bastard we know today.
Consequently, the end product is colored by the accumulations built up over 5-6 years of development. So many of the misanthropic, ill-mannered jokes read as the team taking the piss (sometimes literally) on all of their development struggles to date. There are all sorts of meta nods, like how the baby dinosaur that Conker sacrifices would have been Berri's companion in Twelve Tales, or the condensation of the expansive movesets from Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 into a generic all-purpose Context Sensitivity Zone, or the key collectable being completely unimaginative wads of cash.
I think that's the start of what makes the game more than just its crass jokes. Like, there's no subtext to Marvin the freakin' mouse critter in Barn Boys; the humor really is just an absurdist punchline rooted around the arbitrary sexism of metal crates that exist as obstacles, and gibbing a flatulent rodent. It's not funny to me because I find those jokes funny; it's funny because of who's telling the jokes and why they're telling it. Rare's pissed off and indulging in some dadaist humor that brings into question the underpinings of what a video game is. Like, why the hell not field a quest by a sentient block involving a cheese farm?
The other half of the equation on its surface level is its referential humor. And I'm not gonna pretend that there is something inherently deep about a video game referencing Bram Stoker's Dracula or Jaws or anything. It is funny, seeing the opening to Saving Private Ryan recreated with adorable squirrel characters getting mowed down, up to and including a grey squirrel retrieving his own severed arm. But I do think that for as inherently ridiculous as its plot cul-de-sacs are, the fact that Conker (the game) treats them as a single continuous narrative lends itself some cumulative weight. Like the speech at the end of "It's War!" is certainly genre work, but that doesn't make it any less poignant. To say nothing of how it all piles up in the ending, and how narrative weight comes crashing back down even in spite of Conker (the Squirrel's) fourth wall awareness.
It's been said before, but Bad Fur Day is much stronger as a third-person shooter than as a platformer. Credit where it's due, the creators realized this and left most of the actual mechanical challenges for the game's Night segments, with the only real speedbumps during the Day portions being "Barry's Mates", Bomb Run", and "Mugged". I also think BFD is very smartly-paced for its variety format, pivoting just when things start getting tedious. Nothing is really given time to overstay its welcome (though "It's War" probably runs a little long, and the final boss, while a fun throwback to Mario 64, is surprisingly fiddly for how simple it is).
And, like, when the game isn't deliberately looking like crap, it looks amazing. You can kind of tell that Conker's model got way more attention than anyone else looking at it side-by-side with the others in multiplayer, but that's not a bad thing. Rare wanted a Screwy Squirrel mascot, and boy did they get it. It's absolutely astounding to think that Super Mario 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day exist on the same console.
I think, to loop back around to the main point, my love for Conker, and why I consider it an arthouse game, is because of its surprisingly unique place as an auteur project for its place in the gaming landscape. These days auteur games are less of a surprise, with directors' influence being more visible in their work. But for Rare and especially for Nintendo (indirectly, since Ninty was just a publisher, but implicitly since the two were joined at the hip), it feels like it comes out of nowhere. So much of what I see in Bad Fur Day comes from where Rare was at in their company history. There's something poignant in that ending, knowing that this was the end of Rare's heyday on the SNES and N64. Maybe not their last game with Nintendo, but the last major release to have its own clear identity. A swan song, sung in and by scat.
I have a soft spot for The Lion King 2, but even I think presenting an anthology game of both Lion Kings 1 and 2 as a Simba-centric story is kind of an odd choice.
For that matter, trying to make an action game out of The Lion King 2 is an odd choice. Maybe I'm just used to the decisions made in Virgin Interactive's Lion King games, so I think little of (for example) turning the morning report segment of the first movie into the game's intro level. But even so, it's shocking to see the entire first act of Lion King 2 skipped over. Like, I get that the movie is a lot slower and more ponderous than its predecessor, but it feels like the cornerstone element of the movie - the budding of Kiara and Kovu's relationship - is almost completely exorcised. Meanwhile, the fairly disposable scene of Kiara and Kovu being chased by Rhinos gets a whole level, because they're that desperate for things they can have Simba do. And Simba fights Zira to the death, which kinda misses the point of how that movie ended ("Welcome to the Pride, Kovu. Sorry I had to kill your mom."). Maybe this is why other tie-in games for Lion King 2 (Active Play, Gamebreak) were less literal and more loose in their adaptations?
Speaking of Virgin Interactive - while I'll be quick to admit that their work on The Lion Ling is flawed, there's simply no contest in a comparison between 16-bit Lion King and Simba's Mighty Adventure. The Lion King did as much as it could given its like 6 month dev cycle, and the fact that the characters look as much on-model as they could - still backed by Disney animators, no less - is a great visual treat and of a respectable length (even if it's artificially inflated by difficulty spikes). Simba's Mighty Adventure feels impossibly small and unambitious in comparison. Get to the ends of each linear obstacle course with X amount of collectables, and you're good. Maybe some extremely light combat. We're working with budget PS1 models, so no ambition whatsoever in terms of visual presence; the game's just trying to get over the line here. I guess the climactic fights are better in Mighty Adventure (the Virgin Scar vs the Chad Zira?), but it's still kinda weird that Scar/Zira's whole thing is to hop on a ledge where they can go neener neener while rocks and logs or whatever fall on Simba. I guess Scar has geomancy in this iteration?
If you're jonesing for a video game adaptation on The Lion King 2, I guess you're pretty starved for choice. But I'd still say go for minigame compilation Gamebreak over this.
For that matter, trying to make an action game out of The Lion King 2 is an odd choice. Maybe I'm just used to the decisions made in Virgin Interactive's Lion King games, so I think little of (for example) turning the morning report segment of the first movie into the game's intro level. But even so, it's shocking to see the entire first act of Lion King 2 skipped over. Like, I get that the movie is a lot slower and more ponderous than its predecessor, but it feels like the cornerstone element of the movie - the budding of Kiara and Kovu's relationship - is almost completely exorcised. Meanwhile, the fairly disposable scene of Kiara and Kovu being chased by Rhinos gets a whole level, because they're that desperate for things they can have Simba do. And Simba fights Zira to the death, which kinda misses the point of how that movie ended ("Welcome to the Pride, Kovu. Sorry I had to kill your mom."). Maybe this is why other tie-in games for Lion King 2 (Active Play, Gamebreak) were less literal and more loose in their adaptations?
Speaking of Virgin Interactive - while I'll be quick to admit that their work on The Lion Ling is flawed, there's simply no contest in a comparison between 16-bit Lion King and Simba's Mighty Adventure. The Lion King did as much as it could given its like 6 month dev cycle, and the fact that the characters look as much on-model as they could - still backed by Disney animators, no less - is a great visual treat and of a respectable length (even if it's artificially inflated by difficulty spikes). Simba's Mighty Adventure feels impossibly small and unambitious in comparison. Get to the ends of each linear obstacle course with X amount of collectables, and you're good. Maybe some extremely light combat. We're working with budget PS1 models, so no ambition whatsoever in terms of visual presence; the game's just trying to get over the line here. I guess the climactic fights are better in Mighty Adventure (the Virgin Scar vs the Chad Zira?), but it's still kinda weird that Scar/Zira's whole thing is to hop on a ledge where they can go neener neener while rocks and logs or whatever fall on Simba. I guess Scar has geomancy in this iteration?
If you're jonesing for a video game adaptation on The Lion King 2, I guess you're pretty starved for choice. But I'd still say go for minigame compilation Gamebreak over this.
Your biggest tip-off that Stephen Hillenberg had nothing to do with this: the curious inclusion of "sea ants" as minions for Plankton. SpongeBob spin-off material usually skewed a little closer to real-world marine life for filler characters, but not in this case. Also, SpongeBob actually gets a learner's permit at one point.
It's a quintet of five pretty forgettable mini-games tied together with two different loose narratives. Mini-games have basic theming to connect them to the TV show's high concepts, but they're not particularly compelling - just basic little time-wasters between narrative beats. Why is there a mini-game about collecting cheese off hooks? It happened in an early episode once, all you need to know. The real question is, why is the mini-game's name a fart joke, when SpongeBob of this era never really went there?
You're mainly playing this for the weird historical curiosity this game presents, being an early enough adaptation that the characters could get away with being wildly off-model and out-of-character here. The animation is trying its best, but it's definitely a swing and a miss for me.
If it colors your read on my review, I only did a "Right Side" run. No interest in a "Wrong Side" run, even if it's a different story, since... it's all just the same filler mini-games.
It's a quintet of five pretty forgettable mini-games tied together with two different loose narratives. Mini-games have basic theming to connect them to the TV show's high concepts, but they're not particularly compelling - just basic little time-wasters between narrative beats. Why is there a mini-game about collecting cheese off hooks? It happened in an early episode once, all you need to know. The real question is, why is the mini-game's name a fart joke, when SpongeBob of this era never really went there?
You're mainly playing this for the weird historical curiosity this game presents, being an early enough adaptation that the characters could get away with being wildly off-model and out-of-character here. The animation is trying its best, but it's definitely a swing and a miss for me.
If it colors your read on my review, I only did a "Right Side" run. No interest in a "Wrong Side" run, even if it's a different story, since... it's all just the same filler mini-games.
The earliest possible candidate for what we might consider Modern Kirby. Also, by no coincidence, Shinya Kumazaki's directorial debut. I wouldn't really get Kumazaki's vision for the series until Triple Deluxe, but in retrospect you can see the template for it laid bare here, grafted into the framework of Kirby Super Star.
I think I'm fonder of the game these days, but without the context of the games after it, it's easy to expect more from this package. The original game is largely untouched (though with the Nightmare in Dream Land aesthetic over the original game's, and pre-rendered CGI cutscenes over spritework), but much of this release's marketing touted four additional game modes. I definitely remember being charmed but not over the moon for these modes. Revenge of the King is a long-delayed punchline, finally giving Spring Breeze an equivalent to its source material's Extra Mode (with the surprise return of long-lost boss Kabula, to boot!). Meta Knightmare Ultra is a speedrunning mode, a revival of and expansion upon the bonus mode from Kirby's last remake. Helper to Hero is essentially a themed Arena, with the gimmick being that the player is restricted to a single ability (specifically through the context of a player 2's moveset). And True Arena is the Arena for the new bosses.
These are cute, but I definitely was expecting something more unique on launch. I didn't know about the rejected "haunted house" concept from the original Super Star, but I was hoping to see something like that here, offering something fundamentally new instead of a remix. I also sort of think tacking a speedrun mode onto Super Star specifically takes away some of the original game's magic; condensing Great Cave Offensive into a single sprint past everything, and striping Revenge of Meta Knight of its dialogue, removes a ton of those modes' tone and identity.
Finally, the True Arena is kind of a let-down! I actually think Super Star's base Arena is one of my very favorites in the series, since it emphasizes JUST how much content is stuffed into the game. No bosses are recycled in Super Star's regular modes until Milky Way Wishes (save Whispy Woods, but that's only in service of a fakeout with Twin Woods), so there's this sense in the original game that all these adventures are wholly unique experiences, with Milky Way Wishes serving as a reunion tour. Suddenly seeing, say, Heart of Nova, Dyna Blade, and Reactor Core juxtaposed together really makes it feel like you're running through several games' worth of bosses. Base Arena in Super Star Ultra was neutered to high hell by adding extra baby tomatoes to replace Maxim Tomatoes, but it's an understandable sacrifice if there's a True Arena in the awnings.
But True Arena only includes the bosses from the new modes! That's barely anything! Just feels like a boss rush of Revenge of the King, with Wham Bam Jewel, Galacta Knight, and Marx Soul grafted on. I like these fights, and this arena is definitely still a challenge (there's an embarrassing VOD of me struggling against it for 5 hours before finally getting so angry that I almost fainted), but I wish it captured that sense of scale that the original game's did.
Ah, but I'm being harsh on Revenge of the King. Even at the time I very much appreciated the pay-off it represented, suddenly bringing back and highlighting character after character from the original. Masked Dedede is a great fight, and I love the character beat that it makes for the bully king, marking the final point he (of his own volition) really tried to make a grand stand against Kirby. This is the starting point for his long character arc, and that strangely melancholic but hopeful note it ends on is a mere promise of things to come.
I've thought a lot about whether I prefer Super Star or Super Star Ultra, the original or its remake. I think, if you're of a certain age or had a certain set of formational experiences, there's no question about which one. But for me... I think it's a question of measuring the intentionality of what Super Star was going for versus what its remake was going for. Funnily enough, I think Super Star Ultra, like its predecessor, is a game that exists not in the present, but in "past" and "future" - but for wholly different reasons. Super Star was an experiment, pulling everything leading up to it together while going in a radically different direction, one that the rest of its series wouldn't recognize for a long time after. Super Star Ultra is much more confident in the wave it's about to make, assured in the template for the series to come, and pulls very pointedly from its past to make a very certain statement.
In my case, I do think I prefer the original's hopeful gamble over the remake's called shots. Both are good, and I respect both for different reasons, but one means more to me than the other. Still, if this is the mode by which you experienced Super Star, you probably had a pretty good time of it.
I think I'm fonder of the game these days, but without the context of the games after it, it's easy to expect more from this package. The original game is largely untouched (though with the Nightmare in Dream Land aesthetic over the original game's, and pre-rendered CGI cutscenes over spritework), but much of this release's marketing touted four additional game modes. I definitely remember being charmed but not over the moon for these modes. Revenge of the King is a long-delayed punchline, finally giving Spring Breeze an equivalent to its source material's Extra Mode (with the surprise return of long-lost boss Kabula, to boot!). Meta Knightmare Ultra is a speedrunning mode, a revival of and expansion upon the bonus mode from Kirby's last remake. Helper to Hero is essentially a themed Arena, with the gimmick being that the player is restricted to a single ability (specifically through the context of a player 2's moveset). And True Arena is the Arena for the new bosses.
These are cute, but I definitely was expecting something more unique on launch. I didn't know about the rejected "haunted house" concept from the original Super Star, but I was hoping to see something like that here, offering something fundamentally new instead of a remix. I also sort of think tacking a speedrun mode onto Super Star specifically takes away some of the original game's magic; condensing Great Cave Offensive into a single sprint past everything, and striping Revenge of Meta Knight of its dialogue, removes a ton of those modes' tone and identity.
Finally, the True Arena is kind of a let-down! I actually think Super Star's base Arena is one of my very favorites in the series, since it emphasizes JUST how much content is stuffed into the game. No bosses are recycled in Super Star's regular modes until Milky Way Wishes (save Whispy Woods, but that's only in service of a fakeout with Twin Woods), so there's this sense in the original game that all these adventures are wholly unique experiences, with Milky Way Wishes serving as a reunion tour. Suddenly seeing, say, Heart of Nova, Dyna Blade, and Reactor Core juxtaposed together really makes it feel like you're running through several games' worth of bosses. Base Arena in Super Star Ultra was neutered to high hell by adding extra baby tomatoes to replace Maxim Tomatoes, but it's an understandable sacrifice if there's a True Arena in the awnings.
But True Arena only includes the bosses from the new modes! That's barely anything! Just feels like a boss rush of Revenge of the King, with Wham Bam Jewel, Galacta Knight, and Marx Soul grafted on. I like these fights, and this arena is definitely still a challenge (there's an embarrassing VOD of me struggling against it for 5 hours before finally getting so angry that I almost fainted), but I wish it captured that sense of scale that the original game's did.
Ah, but I'm being harsh on Revenge of the King. Even at the time I very much appreciated the pay-off it represented, suddenly bringing back and highlighting character after character from the original. Masked Dedede is a great fight, and I love the character beat that it makes for the bully king, marking the final point he (of his own volition) really tried to make a grand stand against Kirby. This is the starting point for his long character arc, and that strangely melancholic but hopeful note it ends on is a mere promise of things to come.
I've thought a lot about whether I prefer Super Star or Super Star Ultra, the original or its remake. I think, if you're of a certain age or had a certain set of formational experiences, there's no question about which one. But for me... I think it's a question of measuring the intentionality of what Super Star was going for versus what its remake was going for. Funnily enough, I think Super Star Ultra, like its predecessor, is a game that exists not in the present, but in "past" and "future" - but for wholly different reasons. Super Star was an experiment, pulling everything leading up to it together while going in a radically different direction, one that the rest of its series wouldn't recognize for a long time after. Super Star Ultra is much more confident in the wave it's about to make, assured in the template for the series to come, and pulls very pointedly from its past to make a very certain statement.
In my case, I do think I prefer the original's hopeful gamble over the remake's called shots. Both are good, and I respect both for different reasons, but one means more to me than the other. Still, if this is the mode by which you experienced Super Star, you probably had a pretty good time of it.
1996
If I was to describe Super Star in two words, it would be "past" and "future".
Super Star has never existed in the "present" for me. Since I got my start on the series with Nightmare in Dream Land and stopped playing for a while after Epic Yarn, Super Star was always the odd title out, a forgotten evolutionary dead end for which references were unexpected. I knew the score: the only relevant title for a given series' identity was the last major release and little more. So it was with the big three series I followed around this time (Pokémon, Mario, Kirby). Super Star getting dual shout-outs in Squeak Squad and Super Smash Bros. Brawl were big exceptions to the rule.
So Super Star existing in the "past" is obvious. What about the "future"? There are a few ways to interpret that.
First is the future Super Star made for itself. It of course became the template for Modern Kirby, beginning with Super Star Ultra. In some ways, the design decisions made by Ultra which became the True template for Modern Kirby (on top of little things like using the Nightmare in Dream Land sprites over the original) would lock Super Star itself in the "past". Nevertheless, Super Star would eventually fulfill its destiny of becoming the mold upon which Kirby was based in the series' "future".
There is also the future of Super Star's reality. It presented a radical change for what Kirby was at the time of its release, converting a straightforward if experimental 2D platformer into a highly-experimental platforming Beat-'Em Up. The contrast between Spring Breeze and the original Kirby's Dream Land (a game only 4 years old at the time) was a striking show of how many leaps and bounds the game was ahead of its "past". Each mode has something different to offer (well, Dyna Blade's just Spring Breeze with a map screen), and it's compelling to see how much the identity shifts with only a couple rule changes. I would've loved to see how much that rejected haunted house mode would've changed things up, but it's also hard to imagine it slotting naturally into the progression you get with the modes as they are: Spring Breeze to Dyna Blade to Great Cave Offensive to Revenge of Meta Knight to Milky Way Wishes (Gourmet Race is a cute pace-breaker). The player awaits every new unlocked mode, waiting to see what rests for them in the "future".
Then there's the finale of Milky Way Wishes. Musically, a lot of Super Star is great, and it's easy to see why this game in particular gets remixed so often whenever the series melodically reaches to its "past" (though, isn't it funny that "Gourmet Race" of all things got the push it did?). But more than your "Gourmet Race"s and "Candy Mountain"s and "My Friend and the Setting Sun"s, the tracks I come back to here are the one-two punch of "Kirby's Triumphant Return" and "Staff Roll". The former has been so brilliantly set up over the course of the game. "Green Greens" is introduced at the top as its own piece, then later remixed as "Crystal Field" in Great Cave Offensive with an additional musical bridge between loops. That musical bridge recurs in Revenge of Meta Knight, becoming a musical stinger at the end of "Havoc Aboard the Halberd". Through this, the leitmotif becomes a musical promise of perseverance and persistence against the odds. Then finally, in the very end, when Kirby throws a mischievous jester into a wish-granting computer the size of a star, and a cataclysmic explosion rips across the universe, there Kirby is, flying home as that same musical sting heralds his victory.
And then the credits music starts in the exact same musical key.
I pause for a quick sidebar. One of the greatest, most important musical triumphs in cinema is John Williams' main theme for Star Wars. It's a well-known fact, but it bears reiteration: the full 20th Century Fox logo sequence had gone unused for decades, but was brought back for the original Star Wars. Part of the reason why that movie's opening crawl was so impactful was because John Williams composed the main theme in the same key (B♭ Major) as the 20th Century Fox logo. The melodic continuity from the majestic studio logo into the film proper is what made Star Wars what it was: something larger than life commanding attention in a way no one had ever seen before.
So we have it too in Kirby Super Star, only at the end of the equation. "Kirby's Triumphant Return" segues immediately, without a break in melodic continuity, into the "Staff Roll". First the music is slow and soft, lulling Kirby into a well-deserved rest. Then, as the little hero dreams and the camera shifts into the sky and endless cosmos, it snaps into focus. The music is constantly building and building, eager and excited. After a quick reprisal of a riff from "Green Greens" - where the adventure started - it returns to the beginning of its loop, still eager. As though the song is a dream of Kirby's and a promise to the player of many tomorrows yet to come...
I don't know that Kirby Super Star had ever been my absolute favorite Kirby. For a while, it was a possible contender, but that's no longer the case now. Still, there are so many things within Kirby Super Star that I love, and that are what the series means to me. What the series could be, and that which the series reached for later on. A waypoint, as both one of the final direct efforts of the series' original creator, and one of the final major releases for its console of origin, right on the cusp of gaming entering a whole new dimension. A relic, but also a way forward.
In other words: "past" and "future".
Super Star has never existed in the "present" for me. Since I got my start on the series with Nightmare in Dream Land and stopped playing for a while after Epic Yarn, Super Star was always the odd title out, a forgotten evolutionary dead end for which references were unexpected. I knew the score: the only relevant title for a given series' identity was the last major release and little more. So it was with the big three series I followed around this time (Pokémon, Mario, Kirby). Super Star getting dual shout-outs in Squeak Squad and Super Smash Bros. Brawl were big exceptions to the rule.
So Super Star existing in the "past" is obvious. What about the "future"? There are a few ways to interpret that.
First is the future Super Star made for itself. It of course became the template for Modern Kirby, beginning with Super Star Ultra. In some ways, the design decisions made by Ultra which became the True template for Modern Kirby (on top of little things like using the Nightmare in Dream Land sprites over the original) would lock Super Star itself in the "past". Nevertheless, Super Star would eventually fulfill its destiny of becoming the mold upon which Kirby was based in the series' "future".
There is also the future of Super Star's reality. It presented a radical change for what Kirby was at the time of its release, converting a straightforward if experimental 2D platformer into a highly-experimental platforming Beat-'Em Up. The contrast between Spring Breeze and the original Kirby's Dream Land (a game only 4 years old at the time) was a striking show of how many leaps and bounds the game was ahead of its "past". Each mode has something different to offer (well, Dyna Blade's just Spring Breeze with a map screen), and it's compelling to see how much the identity shifts with only a couple rule changes. I would've loved to see how much that rejected haunted house mode would've changed things up, but it's also hard to imagine it slotting naturally into the progression you get with the modes as they are: Spring Breeze to Dyna Blade to Great Cave Offensive to Revenge of Meta Knight to Milky Way Wishes (Gourmet Race is a cute pace-breaker). The player awaits every new unlocked mode, waiting to see what rests for them in the "future".
Then there's the finale of Milky Way Wishes. Musically, a lot of Super Star is great, and it's easy to see why this game in particular gets remixed so often whenever the series melodically reaches to its "past" (though, isn't it funny that "Gourmet Race" of all things got the push it did?). But more than your "Gourmet Race"s and "Candy Mountain"s and "My Friend and the Setting Sun"s, the tracks I come back to here are the one-two punch of "Kirby's Triumphant Return" and "Staff Roll". The former has been so brilliantly set up over the course of the game. "Green Greens" is introduced at the top as its own piece, then later remixed as "Crystal Field" in Great Cave Offensive with an additional musical bridge between loops. That musical bridge recurs in Revenge of Meta Knight, becoming a musical stinger at the end of "Havoc Aboard the Halberd". Through this, the leitmotif becomes a musical promise of perseverance and persistence against the odds. Then finally, in the very end, when Kirby throws a mischievous jester into a wish-granting computer the size of a star, and a cataclysmic explosion rips across the universe, there Kirby is, flying home as that same musical sting heralds his victory.
And then the credits music starts in the exact same musical key.
I pause for a quick sidebar. One of the greatest, most important musical triumphs in cinema is John Williams' main theme for Star Wars. It's a well-known fact, but it bears reiteration: the full 20th Century Fox logo sequence had gone unused for decades, but was brought back for the original Star Wars. Part of the reason why that movie's opening crawl was so impactful was because John Williams composed the main theme in the same key (B♭ Major) as the 20th Century Fox logo. The melodic continuity from the majestic studio logo into the film proper is what made Star Wars what it was: something larger than life commanding attention in a way no one had ever seen before.
So we have it too in Kirby Super Star, only at the end of the equation. "Kirby's Triumphant Return" segues immediately, without a break in melodic continuity, into the "Staff Roll". First the music is slow and soft, lulling Kirby into a well-deserved rest. Then, as the little hero dreams and the camera shifts into the sky and endless cosmos, it snaps into focus. The music is constantly building and building, eager and excited. After a quick reprisal of a riff from "Green Greens" - where the adventure started - it returns to the beginning of its loop, still eager. As though the song is a dream of Kirby's and a promise to the player of many tomorrows yet to come...
I don't know that Kirby Super Star had ever been my absolute favorite Kirby. For a while, it was a possible contender, but that's no longer the case now. Still, there are so many things within Kirby Super Star that I love, and that are what the series means to me. What the series could be, and that which the series reached for later on. A waypoint, as both one of the final direct efforts of the series' original creator, and one of the final major releases for its console of origin, right on the cusp of gaming entering a whole new dimension. A relic, but also a way forward.
In other words: "past" and "future".
2023
This caught my eye when it was announced, but I only thought to buy it 'cause it was highlighted by the Game Awards. Never say that the system doesn't work.
This is essentially a short visual novel exploring the experiences of a Tamil immigrant couple and their Canadian-born son, largely told vicariously through the context of family recipes. I'd picked it up with the hopes that I could take away a recipe or two, but while a lot of it is laid out, there's a fair amount of "yadda yadda yadda"ing for the sake of narrative flow (but the team is hoping to put out a cookbook, so maybe I'll look into that). So while you can mess up a recipe, the game's quick to let you try again until you succeed; Cooking Mama this ain't. But again, the focus is on the story, with the recipes being used as conversation points and narrative devices to guide the player along.
This game feels very authentic. Being a White American with distant German/Irish heritage, I have no real claim to authority in the overall cultural authenticity of this Tamil narrative, so I must take a lot as given. But there is a lot that resonates with even a know-nothing like me. I of course love the recipes and music; I'm afraid the significance of it changing genres over time is a nuance lost on me, but I very much love that it's paying that much attention to detail. How it represents the Tamil versus English languages is really fascinating - stuff like how Kavin's text boxes get muddier to Venba the more quickly he speaks English is more transparent, but I also like the detail of how Kavin's dialogue in Tamil appears more slowly than Venba's or Paavalan's. Also that bit where Kavin finds himself playing cultural ambassador for a well-meaning but ignorant White showrunner, and writes a whole block of text that he eventually walks back without sending - I think anyone who's been in a position to explain their heritage to people who don't know has felt that.
(also, like, the bit where Kris asks if Chicken Tikka Masala would be a good fit for his show's Tamil character - I'm not at all well-versed in different Indian regions, let alone regional cuisine, but even I could tell that was off. Sometimes all you need is context)
I think the narrative overall is very smartly-paced. I like how the devices used to justify the game's puzzles shift over time. That one chapter in the middle, where Venba doesn't have any commentary to offer the player and simply cooks, is a great understated beat of character development. The game gets away with a lot of its storytelling through subtext like this, like how Paavalan's worker ID has a completely incorrect name, or how Venba and Paavalan never once replace their beat-up bed over the course of 26 years.
And, like, I love the art. Do I even need to say that the art is good? Very fun, simple, expressive character models.
I don't think this game was made for me, in that way that a lot of stories about immigrant experiences and world cultures aren't made for me. Playing through this, I felt like I was listening in on a conversation actively being simplified so someone like me could understand it. I don't mean that as a negative, and I honestly think that sort of narrative treatment is perfectly fair. I don't know that I should necessarily be the target demographic for this type of story, and I think of the act of presenting it in a way I can understand and empathize is a courtesy more than an obligation. That such an effort was made is very much appreciated, and makes it an easy recommendation for me.
This is essentially a short visual novel exploring the experiences of a Tamil immigrant couple and their Canadian-born son, largely told vicariously through the context of family recipes. I'd picked it up with the hopes that I could take away a recipe or two, but while a lot of it is laid out, there's a fair amount of "yadda yadda yadda"ing for the sake of narrative flow (but the team is hoping to put out a cookbook, so maybe I'll look into that). So while you can mess up a recipe, the game's quick to let you try again until you succeed; Cooking Mama this ain't. But again, the focus is on the story, with the recipes being used as conversation points and narrative devices to guide the player along.
This game feels very authentic. Being a White American with distant German/Irish heritage, I have no real claim to authority in the overall cultural authenticity of this Tamil narrative, so I must take a lot as given. But there is a lot that resonates with even a know-nothing like me. I of course love the recipes and music; I'm afraid the significance of it changing genres over time is a nuance lost on me, but I very much love that it's paying that much attention to detail. How it represents the Tamil versus English languages is really fascinating - stuff like how Kavin's text boxes get muddier to Venba the more quickly he speaks English is more transparent, but I also like the detail of how Kavin's dialogue in Tamil appears more slowly than Venba's or Paavalan's. Also that bit where Kavin finds himself playing cultural ambassador for a well-meaning but ignorant White showrunner, and writes a whole block of text that he eventually walks back without sending - I think anyone who's been in a position to explain their heritage to people who don't know has felt that.
(also, like, the bit where Kris asks if Chicken Tikka Masala would be a good fit for his show's Tamil character - I'm not at all well-versed in different Indian regions, let alone regional cuisine, but even I could tell that was off. Sometimes all you need is context)
I think the narrative overall is very smartly-paced. I like how the devices used to justify the game's puzzles shift over time. That one chapter in the middle, where Venba doesn't have any commentary to offer the player and simply cooks, is a great understated beat of character development. The game gets away with a lot of its storytelling through subtext like this, like how Paavalan's worker ID has a completely incorrect name, or how Venba and Paavalan never once replace their beat-up bed over the course of 26 years.
And, like, I love the art. Do I even need to say that the art is good? Very fun, simple, expressive character models.
I don't think this game was made for me, in that way that a lot of stories about immigrant experiences and world cultures aren't made for me. Playing through this, I felt like I was listening in on a conversation actively being simplified so someone like me could understand it. I don't mean that as a negative, and I honestly think that sort of narrative treatment is perfectly fair. I don't know that I should necessarily be the target demographic for this type of story, and I think of the act of presenting it in a way I can understand and empathize is a courtesy more than an obligation. That such an effort was made is very much appreciated, and makes it an easy recommendation for me.
2005
One of the things I most loved about Homestarrunner.com was the "anything goes" vibe of following the site in its heyday (I found it fairly late into this period in mid-2006, but that still gave me a few years' worth of new content to follow). It's something that defies attempt to archive it, since an archive will necessarily organize things, losing that anarchical updating style that made it a fun surprise to follow in real-time. Like, you were usually there for Strong Bad responding to an email, but sometimes you'd tune in on Monday to find that you were apparently there for a G.I. Joe parody's Thanksgiving Episode, or a music video crossing a fictional Scandinavian heavy metal band with a double-fictional gangsta rapper, or a sloppily-drawn comic about a quartet of teen-aged girls trying to get several boys on Vamlumtimes Day and dying gory deaths in the process.
And sometimes you were there for video games. The Brothers Chaps put out a surprising amount of these, mostly exploring riffs or jokes from their cartoons. They were rough, buggy, often simple, and very silly, but darn if they didn't all have heart. There were a lot of different types of Flash Games they put together, but to my way of thinking, the two biggest were Peasant's Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest...)))), and this. A Mega Man parody based on a 70s anime parody (named after a throwaway line said by a dopey athelete in a fantasy sequence) of a masked luchador named after some characters from NES game Pro Wrestling.
Alright, despite the obvious Mega Man base for Stinkoman's sprite and abilities, the game is generally more straightforward as a platformer. A full level select, Robot Master setup is a bit too ambitious for this game's scope. But it is very much having fun being a silly idiosyncratic supposedly 80s game. There is no logical consistency to what makes up this world, with a character at one point walking across a screen transition from the planet's surface to the moon. Level concepts are played with either because it's the done thing ("Stratosfear!" and "Turbolence"), for maximum silliness ("Dumb Wall!" is a very basic level mechanically, but it's so stupid a high concept that it makes it all the more enjoyable), or a combination of the two ("Negatory!" is perhaps one of the few times I've seen a video game acknowledge stuff like the Minus World, and a great trip to boot). The game is so quick to pivot what it's doing that nothing has the time to grow stale; you can very much tell that the Brothers Chaps ran with whatever ideas amused them, between the level concepts and the writing that at times feels like a joke on a joke on a joke.
So they developed the first 9 levels over the course of 2005, and then it took them 15 years and the pending death of Flash as a platform to finally deliver the long-promised level 10. And they joke about it, but you can reeeeeally tell that the last level came out 15 years later. The jump from Level 9 to Level 10 is astounding in just about every way. Background sprites are suddenly ridiculously more sophisticated, physics feel a little better, level design is longer and more impactful, they got friggin' Toby Fox to compose the last couple stages' music. It's jarring, and in any more serious release would strike me as awkward. But for Stinkoman and Homestar Runner, accidentally hailing the end of an era? It feels perfect.
Flash being dead and Ruffle being an imperfect emulator, I'm not sure if this game has an audience anymore, though I know the Brothers Chaps are working to restore the game. But if you're able to, it's a cute, extremely-out-of-context snapshot into the energy of a lot of Homestar Runner, distilled through the lens of early anime and NES-era gaming.
And sometimes you were there for video games. The Brothers Chaps put out a surprising amount of these, mostly exploring riffs or jokes from their cartoons. They were rough, buggy, often simple, and very silly, but darn if they didn't all have heart. There were a lot of different types of Flash Games they put together, but to my way of thinking, the two biggest were Peasant's Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest...)))), and this. A Mega Man parody based on a 70s anime parody (named after a throwaway line said by a dopey athelete in a fantasy sequence) of a masked luchador named after some characters from NES game Pro Wrestling.
Alright, despite the obvious Mega Man base for Stinkoman's sprite and abilities, the game is generally more straightforward as a platformer. A full level select, Robot Master setup is a bit too ambitious for this game's scope. But it is very much having fun being a silly idiosyncratic supposedly 80s game. There is no logical consistency to what makes up this world, with a character at one point walking across a screen transition from the planet's surface to the moon. Level concepts are played with either because it's the done thing ("Stratosfear!" and "Turbolence"), for maximum silliness ("Dumb Wall!" is a very basic level mechanically, but it's so stupid a high concept that it makes it all the more enjoyable), or a combination of the two ("Negatory!" is perhaps one of the few times I've seen a video game acknowledge stuff like the Minus World, and a great trip to boot). The game is so quick to pivot what it's doing that nothing has the time to grow stale; you can very much tell that the Brothers Chaps ran with whatever ideas amused them, between the level concepts and the writing that at times feels like a joke on a joke on a joke.
So they developed the first 9 levels over the course of 2005, and then it took them 15 years and the pending death of Flash as a platform to finally deliver the long-promised level 10. And they joke about it, but you can reeeeeally tell that the last level came out 15 years later. The jump from Level 9 to Level 10 is astounding in just about every way. Background sprites are suddenly ridiculously more sophisticated, physics feel a little better, level design is longer and more impactful, they got friggin' Toby Fox to compose the last couple stages' music. It's jarring, and in any more serious release would strike me as awkward. But for Stinkoman and Homestar Runner, accidentally hailing the end of an era? It feels perfect.
Flash being dead and Ruffle being an imperfect emulator, I'm not sure if this game has an audience anymore, though I know the Brothers Chaps are working to restore the game. But if you're able to, it's a cute, extremely-out-of-context snapshot into the energy of a lot of Homestar Runner, distilled through the lens of early anime and NES-era gaming.
1997
Of Shinichi Shimomura's three directed Kirby titles, this is probably the one I think about least. It's not bad; far from it, it's a great, cozy little game. It's more that this one was less-readily available to me during my middle school years, when I got into Kirby. I eventually picked it up off Wii Virtual Console, but I'd already played Dream Land 2 and Kirby 64 ages before this one, and this consequently felt like half-and-half of what I liked from those games.
...in all but aesthetics, of course. Holy moly do I love how this game looks. That soft, colored pencil squigglevision is so unique to this game, and it seems to have come out of nowhere, too! Easily a contender for one of the best-looking games on the console, continuing Kirby's trend of releasing late and testing the system's graphical capabilities.
I'll also grant that this is the only of Shimomura's games to feature co-op. At the cost of one hit point, Gooey can split off from Kirby to function as a second player. Adapting Gooey into a second Kirby is a fun choice; I generally find him less interesting than the variety you get from Super Star's Helpers, but it's a fun expansion of a completely disposable character from the prequel, and the Helper system wouldn't really work with this game's limited movesets. And I mean, he's such a weird li'l goober, with his prehensile tongue and his being more explicitly a well-meaning cosmic horror.
The issue I have is imbalance in level design. The goal in each level is to earn a Heart Star, each piece of which is used to build up the Love Love Stick required for the Good Ending. To get each Heart Star, the player(s) must fulfill the "request" of a friendly NPC contextual to that level. The details are never specifically spelled out in-game, but they're usually easy to intuit - don't squish the flowers (or maybe do), clear the mini-game, bring a certain friend to the end of the stage, etc. I have some issues with these challenges themselves - some lack conveyance (you can sort-of step into the logic of MuchiMuchi wanting to be touched by ChuChu, but there's some assumptions that need to be made to get there), and some are just mean (I've played the game at least four times through, and I'm still always thrown by Chef Kawasaki's sound-based mini-game).
But the real problem with this design is that it's overly-centralizing. In the first level, for example, the challenge is to avoid squishing Tulips. That's straightforward enough, but the Tulips only show up in one of the level's four-five rooms. This makes the remaining rooms superfluous in the context of the challenge, and thus often feel like wasted space, depending on what the challenge is. If I botch Tamasan's mini-game, why should I continue playing out the level, knowing the outcome is a forgone conclusion? Not as significant if you're only interested in playing to credits, I suppose, but for completion, it's a little funny.
You can make a similar argument in Shimomura's other two Kirby games, but I don't really feel it as much there. Since there's only one Rainbow Drop per world in Dream Land 2, I don't feel like the world design must focus around it, more that it's an embedded secret that exists as a complement to that world's overall design. Kirby 64 has three Crystal Shards per level, so no one shard centralizes a given level's focus; besides, each level's theming is strong enough to suggest its own purpose independent of the overarching game's goals. When I'm playing Shiver Star Stage 2 in Kirby 64, the level is clearly about Kirby and friends traveling over a mountain through a cloudy passage; the placement of the Crystal Shards within it are irrelevant because the level's theming justifies it. When I'm playing Cloudy Park Stage 2 in Dream Land 3, the level is clearly about satisfying the chicken; the visual theming of the level is irrelevant, so long as I'm keeping an eye out for any chicken-related interactions.
I'm drilling into this a lot, but I should make it clear that I still think Dream Land 3 is a pretty solid game. Like I said, it's short and cozy enough that I've beaten it four times, more than most other games I've played. Heck, I superfluously bought it on Wii U when I already had it in my Wii's Virtual Console, just because. It's a good game! Not a special highlight of what I like about the series, but comfortably good and nice for a periodic revisit.
Plus, there are a bunch of shout-outs to everything from the Super Scope to Shin Onigashima, to say nothing about how bloody violent the final fights are. Lots to love here.
...in all but aesthetics, of course. Holy moly do I love how this game looks. That soft, colored pencil squigglevision is so unique to this game, and it seems to have come out of nowhere, too! Easily a contender for one of the best-looking games on the console, continuing Kirby's trend of releasing late and testing the system's graphical capabilities.
I'll also grant that this is the only of Shimomura's games to feature co-op. At the cost of one hit point, Gooey can split off from Kirby to function as a second player. Adapting Gooey into a second Kirby is a fun choice; I generally find him less interesting than the variety you get from Super Star's Helpers, but it's a fun expansion of a completely disposable character from the prequel, and the Helper system wouldn't really work with this game's limited movesets. And I mean, he's such a weird li'l goober, with his prehensile tongue and his being more explicitly a well-meaning cosmic horror.
The issue I have is imbalance in level design. The goal in each level is to earn a Heart Star, each piece of which is used to build up the Love Love Stick required for the Good Ending. To get each Heart Star, the player(s) must fulfill the "request" of a friendly NPC contextual to that level. The details are never specifically spelled out in-game, but they're usually easy to intuit - don't squish the flowers (or maybe do), clear the mini-game, bring a certain friend to the end of the stage, etc. I have some issues with these challenges themselves - some lack conveyance (you can sort-of step into the logic of MuchiMuchi wanting to be touched by ChuChu, but there's some assumptions that need to be made to get there), and some are just mean (I've played the game at least four times through, and I'm still always thrown by Chef Kawasaki's sound-based mini-game).
But the real problem with this design is that it's overly-centralizing. In the first level, for example, the challenge is to avoid squishing Tulips. That's straightforward enough, but the Tulips only show up in one of the level's four-five rooms. This makes the remaining rooms superfluous in the context of the challenge, and thus often feel like wasted space, depending on what the challenge is. If I botch Tamasan's mini-game, why should I continue playing out the level, knowing the outcome is a forgone conclusion? Not as significant if you're only interested in playing to credits, I suppose, but for completion, it's a little funny.
You can make a similar argument in Shimomura's other two Kirby games, but I don't really feel it as much there. Since there's only one Rainbow Drop per world in Dream Land 2, I don't feel like the world design must focus around it, more that it's an embedded secret that exists as a complement to that world's overall design. Kirby 64 has three Crystal Shards per level, so no one shard centralizes a given level's focus; besides, each level's theming is strong enough to suggest its own purpose independent of the overarching game's goals. When I'm playing Shiver Star Stage 2 in Kirby 64, the level is clearly about Kirby and friends traveling over a mountain through a cloudy passage; the placement of the Crystal Shards within it are irrelevant because the level's theming justifies it. When I'm playing Cloudy Park Stage 2 in Dream Land 3, the level is clearly about satisfying the chicken; the visual theming of the level is irrelevant, so long as I'm keeping an eye out for any chicken-related interactions.
I'm drilling into this a lot, but I should make it clear that I still think Dream Land 3 is a pretty solid game. Like I said, it's short and cozy enough that I've beaten it four times, more than most other games I've played. Heck, I superfluously bought it on Wii U when I already had it in my Wii's Virtual Console, just because. It's a good game! Not a special highlight of what I like about the series, but comfortably good and nice for a periodic revisit.
Plus, there are a bunch of shout-outs to everything from the Super Scope to Shin Onigashima, to say nothing about how bloody violent the final fights are. Lots to love here.
2002
Played for the Tarvould's Quest Mario Party League, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNiBuIKkhNOcetedJo2kjJwenDNYqHsFt
This was actually my first Mario Party. Way early on, after my family got our GameCube, we borrowed this game for a weekend. Truthfully I no longer remember how we borrowed it; I seem to recall it being lent to my father by a coworker, but it just as easily could've been a Blockbuster rental. Anyway, I did a pretty decent amount of the game's single-player offerings during that weekend, but it didn't hold my interest enough for me to clear all the boards while we borrowed it. For years, I always wondered about it, as I'd see the game logo crop up every time I viewed my memory card saves on my GameCube. There it was, towards the top of the list. My family got a lot of mileage out of Mario Party 6, which we'd buy for ourselves a few months later. Would we have had as much fun with 4?
I mention all this because, now that I've had the time to play through and sit with 4, those years of wondering probably represent the most fun I had with Mario Party 4. Maybe I would've liked it okay if I'd played more of it as a kid, but as an adult? There's little for me to hold onto.
Hudson basically cranked out one Mario Party a year from the first to the eighth release, but they took two gaps, one with each console generation gap. I'm not sure how true this is, but part of me imagines that much of this delay was so the team could take the time to adjust to the new console by rebuilding character models, assets, etc. This would've marked the GameCube debut for a lot of these characters, so a LOT of the Mario series regulars would've needed to be redesigned for the console shift (and I know most of these guys appeared in Melee as Trophies or whathaveyou, but they used their N64 designs there; compare Daisy's skintones from Mario Party 3 to Melee to Mario Party 4, for an easy comparison). And I will say that for its era, a lot of this looked pretty good. There's a big focus on photorealism and modeling precise physics and graphics, with something like the mini-game "Makin' Waves" a visual showcase in a lot of the same ways Super Mario Sunshine was working towards.
Problem being that there's little soul to how these characters and these worlds look. There's such a focus on photorealistic, sterile environments that a lot of the game doesn't "feel" very Mario. Since I mentioned it, compare Super Mario Sunshine to Mario Party 4. Isle Delphino aesthetically makes sense in Mario's world, with the Piantas, the Nokis, and so on feeling like characters that could conceivably co-exist in a world with, say, Koopalings or Bob-Omb Buddies. Mario Party 4 would've been developed in tandem, so I don't think it's fair to expect Isle Dephino and its denizens to show up. Still, the island locations we see in some of the mini-games, and the worlds of the boards themselves, don't really feel like places that exist in or around the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario Parties 1-3 were generally great at inventing boards and settings jammed with Mario-like flavor. I think of Horror Land's playful take on an unfamiliar genre for Mario, with its giant ketchup spill, and party of ghosts wandering the highway and its hidden Mad Piano; or Wario's Battle Canyon leaning into lore established in Mario 64 and presenting a war conflict like a stage play; or Creepy Cavern having Dorrie, Swoopers, and those Whomps playing their own version of Mario Party (Matryoshka Party?). By contrast, the Mario Party 4 boards feel less like places that might come out of Mario's world and more like places from the real world that are full of Mario characters. There's a sense of sterility to it all, particularly in the play area being on elevated pathways rather than integrated into the environment. Everything uses sophisticated renders, but it doesn't "feel" right.
This is without even getting into the actual content of the game! Frankly, I think all the boards this time around are duds, save Bowser's Gnarly Party (but Bowser Boards are usually hard to screw up). Goomba's Greedy Gala is funny for how dickish it is, but after the initial joke there's little to hold onto. I can't tell if Thwomp's two Extra Boards are deliberately poorly-designed or what, but I'm not much a fan, short and inconsequential as they are. Everything else is just there to be a big fat waste of your time, ESPECIALLY Toad's Midway Madness, where the nature of the board guarantees that a player will periodically get screwed over in that initial teacup loop regardless of how they actually play.
This is in no small part a consequence of the game's MiniMega system, the first of the series' many forays into ill-conceived gimmicks. It's a decent high-concept, playing into series identity in a way that codifies the existing Mushroom items. In practice, it's pretty terrible. Mega's benefits are pretty straightforward (double dice, squish existing players), but Mini is where the problem lies. The logical offset to something like Mega would be a clear penalty, so naturally the game needs to introduce incentives to be Mini. The way they decide to do this is through Mini-Gates and Mini-Mini-Games, functions of the board you can only access when you're a little guy. A consequence of THIS is that large portions of the boards end up being inaccessible or seeing infrequent use. This combined with the quite uninspired board design makes a lot of the experience of the boards homogenized and going through motions.
I hate to say it, but if I'm having fun with Mario Party 4, it's in spite of rather than because of anything it's doing. That or I'm playing a mini-game, there are a few pretty strong mini-games this time around. But I find myself less drawn into Mario Party's mini-games than I am the high-level board play, and that's pretty frankly lacking in this game. Not hard to see why Hudson decided to switch things up for the next game...
This was actually my first Mario Party. Way early on, after my family got our GameCube, we borrowed this game for a weekend. Truthfully I no longer remember how we borrowed it; I seem to recall it being lent to my father by a coworker, but it just as easily could've been a Blockbuster rental. Anyway, I did a pretty decent amount of the game's single-player offerings during that weekend, but it didn't hold my interest enough for me to clear all the boards while we borrowed it. For years, I always wondered about it, as I'd see the game logo crop up every time I viewed my memory card saves on my GameCube. There it was, towards the top of the list. My family got a lot of mileage out of Mario Party 6, which we'd buy for ourselves a few months later. Would we have had as much fun with 4?
I mention all this because, now that I've had the time to play through and sit with 4, those years of wondering probably represent the most fun I had with Mario Party 4. Maybe I would've liked it okay if I'd played more of it as a kid, but as an adult? There's little for me to hold onto.
Hudson basically cranked out one Mario Party a year from the first to the eighth release, but they took two gaps, one with each console generation gap. I'm not sure how true this is, but part of me imagines that much of this delay was so the team could take the time to adjust to the new console by rebuilding character models, assets, etc. This would've marked the GameCube debut for a lot of these characters, so a LOT of the Mario series regulars would've needed to be redesigned for the console shift (and I know most of these guys appeared in Melee as Trophies or whathaveyou, but they used their N64 designs there; compare Daisy's skintones from Mario Party 3 to Melee to Mario Party 4, for an easy comparison). And I will say that for its era, a lot of this looked pretty good. There's a big focus on photorealism and modeling precise physics and graphics, with something like the mini-game "Makin' Waves" a visual showcase in a lot of the same ways Super Mario Sunshine was working towards.
Problem being that there's little soul to how these characters and these worlds look. There's such a focus on photorealistic, sterile environments that a lot of the game doesn't "feel" very Mario. Since I mentioned it, compare Super Mario Sunshine to Mario Party 4. Isle Delphino aesthetically makes sense in Mario's world, with the Piantas, the Nokis, and so on feeling like characters that could conceivably co-exist in a world with, say, Koopalings or Bob-Omb Buddies. Mario Party 4 would've been developed in tandem, so I don't think it's fair to expect Isle Dephino and its denizens to show up. Still, the island locations we see in some of the mini-games, and the worlds of the boards themselves, don't really feel like places that exist in or around the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario Parties 1-3 were generally great at inventing boards and settings jammed with Mario-like flavor. I think of Horror Land's playful take on an unfamiliar genre for Mario, with its giant ketchup spill, and party of ghosts wandering the highway and its hidden Mad Piano; or Wario's Battle Canyon leaning into lore established in Mario 64 and presenting a war conflict like a stage play; or Creepy Cavern having Dorrie, Swoopers, and those Whomps playing their own version of Mario Party (Matryoshka Party?). By contrast, the Mario Party 4 boards feel less like places that might come out of Mario's world and more like places from the real world that are full of Mario characters. There's a sense of sterility to it all, particularly in the play area being on elevated pathways rather than integrated into the environment. Everything uses sophisticated renders, but it doesn't "feel" right.
This is without even getting into the actual content of the game! Frankly, I think all the boards this time around are duds, save Bowser's Gnarly Party (but Bowser Boards are usually hard to screw up). Goomba's Greedy Gala is funny for how dickish it is, but after the initial joke there's little to hold onto. I can't tell if Thwomp's two Extra Boards are deliberately poorly-designed or what, but I'm not much a fan, short and inconsequential as they are. Everything else is just there to be a big fat waste of your time, ESPECIALLY Toad's Midway Madness, where the nature of the board guarantees that a player will periodically get screwed over in that initial teacup loop regardless of how they actually play.
This is in no small part a consequence of the game's MiniMega system, the first of the series' many forays into ill-conceived gimmicks. It's a decent high-concept, playing into series identity in a way that codifies the existing Mushroom items. In practice, it's pretty terrible. Mega's benefits are pretty straightforward (double dice, squish existing players), but Mini is where the problem lies. The logical offset to something like Mega would be a clear penalty, so naturally the game needs to introduce incentives to be Mini. The way they decide to do this is through Mini-Gates and Mini-Mini-Games, functions of the board you can only access when you're a little guy. A consequence of THIS is that large portions of the boards end up being inaccessible or seeing infrequent use. This combined with the quite uninspired board design makes a lot of the experience of the boards homogenized and going through motions.
I hate to say it, but if I'm having fun with Mario Party 4, it's in spite of rather than because of anything it's doing. That or I'm playing a mini-game, there are a few pretty strong mini-games this time around. But I find myself less drawn into Mario Party's mini-games than I am the high-level board play, and that's pretty frankly lacking in this game. Not hard to see why Hudson decided to switch things up for the next game...
What Banjo-Kazooie was to Super Mario 64, Grabbed by the Ghoulies was trying to be for Luigi's Mansion: Rare's (specifically the Mayles team's) spin and progression of Nintendo's launch title, exploring what was possible on next-gen hardware through a simple treatise on basic beat-'em up mechanics wrapped up in a silly, spooky narrative. The problem Ghoulies ran into, and the reason it's not-so-well-remembered, is that it was delivered out of context. The Mayles team developed it as a low-stakes cool-down project following Banjo-Tooie. It probably would've done fine on GameCube, maybe reading as an also-ran around whatever Donkey Kong and Sabre Wulf projects Rare was developing concurrently. But Microsoft acquired Rare, and the Luigi's Mansion-analogue became Rare's Xbox debut, when all eyes on it expected a Super Mario Sunshine- or maybe even Wind Waker-analogue. No cool-down project should have that type of pressure on it.
Ghoulies is a pretty great time, honestly! "Twin-stick beat-'em up" sounds like an odd high-concept to wrap your head around, but it's actually quite straightforward: Cooper's moveset is extremely unimportant, with all the different animations largely existing for flavor more than anything. The focus is instead placed on crowd control - something always present in beat-'em ups but usually more as a consequence of level progression and managing enemy spawns more than anything. The game actually gets a good deal of mileage out of it even before the gameplay modifiers, as you fall into a pretty good rhythm weaving around enemies, trying to manage different enemy classes' attacks and patterns. For a somewhat more contemporary analogue, I'd compare it to something like One Finger Death Punch or Kung Fury: Street Rage, just in 3 dimensions.
But those gameplay modifiers are the heart and soul of the experience, and what keeps it from getting too repetitive over its one-hundred rooms. How they're paced out is great fun, too. The fluctuating hit point total makes for a great tone-setter for each room (though, if the mad Baron can just mess with Cooper's HP like that, why doesn't he just leave him at 1 the whole game? Ah well, we wouldn't have a game otherwise). Sometimes you have a special weapon, and managing its heat gauge becomes part of the challenge. On top of all this, most rooms have additional modifiers too, like "Only defeat X type of enemy", "Don't take damage", "Don't damage the environment", etc. Always interesting to see what challenge the game will offer next, and try to figure out how you're expected to see it through.
Or... you can always fail the challenge, since losing the challenge doesn't mean starting it over. It just means that the Reaper has entered the playing field. Touching the Reaper means instant death, but maybe you can avoid him while you wrap up what you have to do? I always always love the extra challenge a game gets out of having a playable fail state, where you can salvage a botched run despite the odds being stacked against you. Tying it into the Grim Reaper, in the same way Persona 3 would do a couple years later, makes it all the sweeter to me.
Also, is the Reaper here a repudiation of Gregg the Grim Reaper from Conker, or is Gregg the Grim Reaper Chris Seavor taking the piss on Gregg Mayles for wanting to have a reaper in his next game? You decide.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies isn't a favorite game of mine, but it's one where I feel it easily could be. The more I sit on it, the more fondly I find myself thinking about it, and the more fun and clever I find its design decisions. I think the game's undergone a bit of a critical re-examination following Rare Replay, which I think it was due; I'm certainly grateful Rare Replay gave me the chance to play it in the first place!
Ghoulies is a pretty great time, honestly! "Twin-stick beat-'em up" sounds like an odd high-concept to wrap your head around, but it's actually quite straightforward: Cooper's moveset is extremely unimportant, with all the different animations largely existing for flavor more than anything. The focus is instead placed on crowd control - something always present in beat-'em ups but usually more as a consequence of level progression and managing enemy spawns more than anything. The game actually gets a good deal of mileage out of it even before the gameplay modifiers, as you fall into a pretty good rhythm weaving around enemies, trying to manage different enemy classes' attacks and patterns. For a somewhat more contemporary analogue, I'd compare it to something like One Finger Death Punch or Kung Fury: Street Rage, just in 3 dimensions.
But those gameplay modifiers are the heart and soul of the experience, and what keeps it from getting too repetitive over its one-hundred rooms. How they're paced out is great fun, too. The fluctuating hit point total makes for a great tone-setter for each room (though, if the mad Baron can just mess with Cooper's HP like that, why doesn't he just leave him at 1 the whole game? Ah well, we wouldn't have a game otherwise). Sometimes you have a special weapon, and managing its heat gauge becomes part of the challenge. On top of all this, most rooms have additional modifiers too, like "Only defeat X type of enemy", "Don't take damage", "Don't damage the environment", etc. Always interesting to see what challenge the game will offer next, and try to figure out how you're expected to see it through.
Or... you can always fail the challenge, since losing the challenge doesn't mean starting it over. It just means that the Reaper has entered the playing field. Touching the Reaper means instant death, but maybe you can avoid him while you wrap up what you have to do? I always always love the extra challenge a game gets out of having a playable fail state, where you can salvage a botched run despite the odds being stacked against you. Tying it into the Grim Reaper, in the same way Persona 3 would do a couple years later, makes it all the sweeter to me.
Also, is the Reaper here a repudiation of Gregg the Grim Reaper from Conker, or is Gregg the Grim Reaper Chris Seavor taking the piss on Gregg Mayles for wanting to have a reaper in his next game? You decide.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies isn't a favorite game of mine, but it's one where I feel it easily could be. The more I sit on it, the more fondly I find myself thinking about it, and the more fun and clever I find its design decisions. I think the game's undergone a bit of a critical re-examination following Rare Replay, which I think it was due; I'm certainly grateful Rare Replay gave me the chance to play it in the first place!
An absolute bare-bones budget title, but quite excellent given its scope. The team at Ludosity (for which I hold nothing but respect, largely since that's where one of my favorite developers, Daniel Remar, ended up) was clearly passionate for this project and did everything they could to make it the best they could be. At the risk of making assumptions, I feel like the nature of the project and its setbacks has been transparently laid bare. Nickelodeon approached Ludosity about developing a platform fighter; Ludosity accepted; Nickelodeon had them on a tight leash with respect to funding and brand requirements; the game was a critical disappointment but a commercial success; Nickelodeon started listening to feedback and eased restrictions; Ludosity applied lessons learned and their increased budget for the DLC and sequel.
That growth and progression is the main thing to hold onto, since if you look at the game as it came out of the box without due context, it's bound to be a disappointment. I can see why this game has its mixed reputation, between rough animation (Danny Phantom and Ren & Stimpy in particular are animated pretty poorly), its initial lack of voice acting (easily the heart and soul of many of these characters), and its dry suite of modes. I do think, given what Ludosity had to work with, they focused on precisely the right thing by creating razor-sharp gameplay core. Not that it's exactly a crowded field, but this is probably the closest someone's come outside the indie space to challenging Super Smash Bros.' claim to the throne.
And I know that developer Thaddeus Crews has said that the endless Smash Bros. comparisons have been more harmful than not for Nick All-Stars. I can respect that, but I really must must make the comparison here to emphasize two things. First, this game had the scope of the original Smash Bros. but is mechanically in-line with the far more technically-sophisticated Melee; this aspiration impresses me far more than a given indie or passion project with theoretically infinite dev time and resources to secure the mechanical tone it was going for. Second, Nick All-Stars did Smash Bros. better than Sony did Smash Bros.
One thing I appreciate in crossover rosters is when character picks are creative. Conventional wisdom dictates that you pick main characters all the time, but Nick All-Stars is content to buck that trend. Your Rugrats character pull is in-universe mascot Reptar rather than any of the literal baby leads (although there would've been something cathartic about putting Angelica Pickles in the arena). None of the Wild Thornberries cast are fighters by nature, but Nigel Thornberry is given a silly animal-based moveset to complement his memetic status. Arnold of Hey Arnold! is pacifistic by nature, so violent deuteragonist Helga Pataki carries the series. Oblina is there over Ickis, April O'Neil is there over Donatello and Raphael, Toph is there over other more-prominent Avatar characters, etc. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of being disappointed that a given lead isn't there, but I dunno, it's a little more special to see fan favorites or variety. Hugh Neutron making the DLC felt like K. Rool and Banjo-Kazooie making it to Smash Bros. all over again. Anyway, character picks aren't idle inclusions; you have lots of careful little expressions of source material, like how Helga's projectile draws in opponents (appropriate for the character who only knows to express her feelings for others through aggression), or... basically everything my friends said here about CatDog.
There really was something special to watching this game grow. With Smash Bros. (that comparison again; I know, I know), each new game felt like Christmas, particularly in following its pre- and post-release cycle. I've resolved myself to accepting that the next Smash Bros., whenever it happens, won't feel the same; it can't, after Ultimate did something amazing that can never be done again. But suddenly, this game came out of the woodwork. It was a different developer working with a different ensemble towards different project goals, but damn if it didn't feel like Christmas in July.
That growth and progression is the main thing to hold onto, since if you look at the game as it came out of the box without due context, it's bound to be a disappointment. I can see why this game has its mixed reputation, between rough animation (Danny Phantom and Ren & Stimpy in particular are animated pretty poorly), its initial lack of voice acting (easily the heart and soul of many of these characters), and its dry suite of modes. I do think, given what Ludosity had to work with, they focused on precisely the right thing by creating razor-sharp gameplay core. Not that it's exactly a crowded field, but this is probably the closest someone's come outside the indie space to challenging Super Smash Bros.' claim to the throne.
And I know that developer Thaddeus Crews has said that the endless Smash Bros. comparisons have been more harmful than not for Nick All-Stars. I can respect that, but I really must must make the comparison here to emphasize two things. First, this game had the scope of the original Smash Bros. but is mechanically in-line with the far more technically-sophisticated Melee; this aspiration impresses me far more than a given indie or passion project with theoretically infinite dev time and resources to secure the mechanical tone it was going for. Second, Nick All-Stars did Smash Bros. better than Sony did Smash Bros.
One thing I appreciate in crossover rosters is when character picks are creative. Conventional wisdom dictates that you pick main characters all the time, but Nick All-Stars is content to buck that trend. Your Rugrats character pull is in-universe mascot Reptar rather than any of the literal baby leads (although there would've been something cathartic about putting Angelica Pickles in the arena). None of the Wild Thornberries cast are fighters by nature, but Nigel Thornberry is given a silly animal-based moveset to complement his memetic status. Arnold of Hey Arnold! is pacifistic by nature, so violent deuteragonist Helga Pataki carries the series. Oblina is there over Ickis, April O'Neil is there over Donatello and Raphael, Toph is there over other more-prominent Avatar characters, etc. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of being disappointed that a given lead isn't there, but I dunno, it's a little more special to see fan favorites or variety. Hugh Neutron making the DLC felt like K. Rool and Banjo-Kazooie making it to Smash Bros. all over again. Anyway, character picks aren't idle inclusions; you have lots of careful little expressions of source material, like how Helga's projectile draws in opponents (appropriate for the character who only knows to express her feelings for others through aggression), or... basically everything my friends said here about CatDog.
There really was something special to watching this game grow. With Smash Bros. (that comparison again; I know, I know), each new game felt like Christmas, particularly in following its pre- and post-release cycle. I've resolved myself to accepting that the next Smash Bros., whenever it happens, won't feel the same; it can't, after Ultimate did something amazing that can never be done again. But suddenly, this game came out of the woodwork. It was a different developer working with a different ensemble towards different project goals, but damn if it didn't feel like Christmas in July.
Has to be one of the more convoluted video game titles I know. It's no Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, but for a Disney game (particularly a non-Kingdom Hearts one), it's quite the kludgy mouthful. Quick child, let us away to play us some Walt Disney World Registered Trademark Symbol Quest Colon Magical Racing Tour Unregistered Trademark Symbol.
The PC port of this was one of my first kart racers, preceded only by the first Nicktoons Racing. It's always been an odd thing to hold as a cornerstone of nostalgia, because it's almost completely unmoored from anything I would have had context for as a kid. I'd never been to Disney World, I'd never seen Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, I'd never played any of the kart racers that served as obvious points of reference, I'd never played Gex 3 (from which some songs are sourced)... about the only through-lines I had were Pinocchio, classic Chip 'n' Dale shorts (which, to be honest, are far more relevant; I have no idea why the guys are in their Rescue Rangers outfits here), and the idea of what Disney World was, from VHS ad tapes and my sister boasting about getting to go. Even now, I've never been to Disney World, so I can't vouch for how they did adapting the different attractions.
But I have since played a buncha kart racers, so I finally had context for what they were going for this revisit. It's, curiously, a fairly direct clone of Crash Team Racing, with some cues taken from Diddy Kong Racing. The game was turned around pretty quickly, so while there IS an adventure mode with some bonus arena tracks, there isn't any hub area to explore (too bad, Disney would've make for a fun overworld), and tracks are divided into three sets of three (plus a couple bonuses) rather than the standard four sets of four. Items are also a very basic mix, limited to analogues for Mario Karts' Shells, Mushroom, Star, and Lightning Bolt, plus a creative alternative to the Banana Peel in the Tea Cup.
I'm actually not gonna come swinging right out the gate, as I do think this is a fairly competent racer. Crystal Dynamics did a generally serviceable job aping CTR's thing, not entirely getting the nuances that make CTR so brilliant but understanding it well enough to get by. The tracks are creative reinterpretations of the rides that expand upon their overall ideas by featuring a ton of split paths; Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, and Pirates of the Caribbean are all littered with alternate routes, and while I'm sure there is an optimal path that speedrunners lean into, it's neat seeing the variety of routes on casual runs. In the case of Pirates (one of the few rides whose tricks I know), this is how they were able to showcase all the different scenes in the context of a kart racer; I'm sure this is the case for a lot of the other rides-turned-tracks, too. There are lots of cute thematic moments here and there, too, like Space Mountain starting with a liftoff sequence with a bunch of speed pads, or the secret ski launch in Blizzard Beach.
On the flipside, DINOSAUR! kinda sucks (like its namesake movie!) Tomorrowland Speedway also feels like a Luigi Circuit, which, I don't think should have been a priority for this game. There's something really hollow about Splash Mountain, too, but maybe that's why it's a bonus track rather than one of the main picks. Definitely feels like Crystal Dynamics ran out of time making that one. Also, while it's cute that they licensed music like "A Pirate's Life for Me" and "Grim Grinning Ghosts", getting the songs out of context makes them sound so repetitive.
The drift system is mostly there. I'm not great at kart racers, so I can't say with authority how this stacks up, but it generally feels okay. The issue I run into is that it's a bit too easy to activate. Years of practice in Mario Kart and its peers has taught me that there's a second's delay between your drift hop before you start building up sparks, which can be useful for extremely precise maneuvers. That delay isn't present here, so you end up being able to build mini-turbos instantly. I actually quite appreciate this for certain sections, like the 90° turns in Haunted Mansion, but it does make the arena tracks (Epcot Test Track, Typhoon Lagoon, Hollywood Studios) more trouble to negotiate. I imagine "snaking" is ridiculously easy to pull off in this title, so if you're good, you can probably smoke the competition.
I mentioned items before, but to drill into them a bit more - they're surprisingly unbalanced for how simple they are. There is no Blue Shell analogue, and Frog Spell (the Lightning Bolt analogue) is a bit bugged, so there isn't a great way to slow down first place if they have an insane lead. There is also little defensive play, which is generally something I'm not worried about (Shells/Banana Peels do the job well enough in most Marios Kart) but you really really feel here. See, when a CPU opponent hits an item balloon, they don't have to roll the item - they instantly get their item, and they will instantly use it if it's advantageous. This is quite obnoxious if you're right in front of the pack going through balloons, as it isn't uncommon to suddenly have Red Acorns (Triple Red Shells) coming at you. Usually six of them in sequence, so even if you rolled Acorns (or are about to roll them; an odd quirk is that the item roll is just for show, and the game already acts as though you have gotten the item you're gonna get), your defensive shield is quickly chewed away, and then you get bodied by a conga line of homing missiles. And sometimes squished, if you are a frog. Really makes you appreciate the delay baked into other kart racers, so you don't immediately get ambushed by every opponent the moment you hit the item balloons.
I also have to say, there are few kart racer projectiles more pathetic than Green, non-homing Acorns. If you use them as anything besides a shield, you're a chump.
I think the idea of the cast - weird Disney World Gijinkas - is cute. Like, Jiminy/Chip/Dale are all there for marketing, but everyone else is just a pure aesthetics character. I also like that it's not just the rides, but the idea of princess/cast member fandom. Polly Roger is the best, but I wouldn't hold it against you if you liked Baron Karlott, or Bruno Biggs, or Tiara Damáge better. We may have words if you're an Oliver Chickly III die-hard.
So, like, this isn't really a lost gem or anything, but it's worth the quick playthrough if you're a big kart racer fan. Maybe don't go for all trophies, but getting all the machine parts and first-place flags needed to unlock Splash Mountain is a breezy enough time. You could do a lot worse for budget Disney-themed kart racers developed by major studios during the 5th console generation trying to imitate existing big-name counterparts.
The PC port of this was one of my first kart racers, preceded only by the first Nicktoons Racing. It's always been an odd thing to hold as a cornerstone of nostalgia, because it's almost completely unmoored from anything I would have had context for as a kid. I'd never been to Disney World, I'd never seen Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, I'd never played any of the kart racers that served as obvious points of reference, I'd never played Gex 3 (from which some songs are sourced)... about the only through-lines I had were Pinocchio, classic Chip 'n' Dale shorts (which, to be honest, are far more relevant; I have no idea why the guys are in their Rescue Rangers outfits here), and the idea of what Disney World was, from VHS ad tapes and my sister boasting about getting to go. Even now, I've never been to Disney World, so I can't vouch for how they did adapting the different attractions.
But I have since played a buncha kart racers, so I finally had context for what they were going for this revisit. It's, curiously, a fairly direct clone of Crash Team Racing, with some cues taken from Diddy Kong Racing. The game was turned around pretty quickly, so while there IS an adventure mode with some bonus arena tracks, there isn't any hub area to explore (too bad, Disney would've make for a fun overworld), and tracks are divided into three sets of three (plus a couple bonuses) rather than the standard four sets of four. Items are also a very basic mix, limited to analogues for Mario Karts' Shells, Mushroom, Star, and Lightning Bolt, plus a creative alternative to the Banana Peel in the Tea Cup.
I'm actually not gonna come swinging right out the gate, as I do think this is a fairly competent racer. Crystal Dynamics did a generally serviceable job aping CTR's thing, not entirely getting the nuances that make CTR so brilliant but understanding it well enough to get by. The tracks are creative reinterpretations of the rides that expand upon their overall ideas by featuring a ton of split paths; Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, and Pirates of the Caribbean are all littered with alternate routes, and while I'm sure there is an optimal path that speedrunners lean into, it's neat seeing the variety of routes on casual runs. In the case of Pirates (one of the few rides whose tricks I know), this is how they were able to showcase all the different scenes in the context of a kart racer; I'm sure this is the case for a lot of the other rides-turned-tracks, too. There are lots of cute thematic moments here and there, too, like Space Mountain starting with a liftoff sequence with a bunch of speed pads, or the secret ski launch in Blizzard Beach.
On the flipside, DINOSAUR! kinda sucks (like its namesake movie!) Tomorrowland Speedway also feels like a Luigi Circuit, which, I don't think should have been a priority for this game. There's something really hollow about Splash Mountain, too, but maybe that's why it's a bonus track rather than one of the main picks. Definitely feels like Crystal Dynamics ran out of time making that one. Also, while it's cute that they licensed music like "A Pirate's Life for Me" and "Grim Grinning Ghosts", getting the songs out of context makes them sound so repetitive.
The drift system is mostly there. I'm not great at kart racers, so I can't say with authority how this stacks up, but it generally feels okay. The issue I run into is that it's a bit too easy to activate. Years of practice in Mario Kart and its peers has taught me that there's a second's delay between your drift hop before you start building up sparks, which can be useful for extremely precise maneuvers. That delay isn't present here, so you end up being able to build mini-turbos instantly. I actually quite appreciate this for certain sections, like the 90° turns in Haunted Mansion, but it does make the arena tracks (Epcot Test Track, Typhoon Lagoon, Hollywood Studios) more trouble to negotiate. I imagine "snaking" is ridiculously easy to pull off in this title, so if you're good, you can probably smoke the competition.
I mentioned items before, but to drill into them a bit more - they're surprisingly unbalanced for how simple they are. There is no Blue Shell analogue, and Frog Spell (the Lightning Bolt analogue) is a bit bugged, so there isn't a great way to slow down first place if they have an insane lead. There is also little defensive play, which is generally something I'm not worried about (Shells/Banana Peels do the job well enough in most Marios Kart) but you really really feel here. See, when a CPU opponent hits an item balloon, they don't have to roll the item - they instantly get their item, and they will instantly use it if it's advantageous. This is quite obnoxious if you're right in front of the pack going through balloons, as it isn't uncommon to suddenly have Red Acorns (Triple Red Shells) coming at you. Usually six of them in sequence, so even if you rolled Acorns (or are about to roll them; an odd quirk is that the item roll is just for show, and the game already acts as though you have gotten the item you're gonna get), your defensive shield is quickly chewed away, and then you get bodied by a conga line of homing missiles. And sometimes squished, if you are a frog. Really makes you appreciate the delay baked into other kart racers, so you don't immediately get ambushed by every opponent the moment you hit the item balloons.
I also have to say, there are few kart racer projectiles more pathetic than Green, non-homing Acorns. If you use them as anything besides a shield, you're a chump.
I think the idea of the cast - weird Disney World Gijinkas - is cute. Like, Jiminy/Chip/Dale are all there for marketing, but everyone else is just a pure aesthetics character. I also like that it's not just the rides, but the idea of princess/cast member fandom. Polly Roger is the best, but I wouldn't hold it against you if you liked Baron Karlott, or Bruno Biggs, or Tiara Damáge better. We may have words if you're an Oliver Chickly III die-hard.
So, like, this isn't really a lost gem or anything, but it's worth the quick playthrough if you're a big kart racer fan. Maybe don't go for all trophies, but getting all the machine parts and first-place flags needed to unlock Splash Mountain is a breezy enough time. You could do a lot worse for budget Disney-themed kart racers developed by major studios during the 5th console generation trying to imitate existing big-name counterparts.