started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.