nintendo's R&D1 began experimenting heavily with the form of the platformer with wario land 2 and 3: each games that attempted to remove typical fail states by making the protagonist invincible and able to acquire temporary abilities after touching specific enemies. while bold puzzle-platformers and generally excellent 8-bit titles, they still hewed close to typical loops of gameplay centered around replaying sections of stages until a goal state is achieved, thus nullifying the practical effects of the absence of player health or damage. their first title on the gba seemed to recognize this and shifted its rejection of form to averting the traditional mario-chartered methodology of building challenge and design iteratively over the course of the game by instead abruptly shifting focus and mechanics between levels. while rooted in the idioms of the prior two wario land entries, WL4 was flippant in how it approached challenges based on these predefined player mechanics, and it rejected both the narrative cohesion of WL2 and the rich environmental persistence of WL3 in favor of rapidly defying player expectations with incongruous level concepts and its frog pillar mechanic that required the player to quickly reevaluate the level in reverse once reaching its endpoint. thus began a trilogy of standout GBA titles where R&D1 deconstructed commonly-held design principles of gaming in order to produce shocking, absurd, and creative experiences.

warioware inc. is where that absurdism really comes into its own. at its root much of gaming involves the player applying their intuition based on real-world experiences to in-game conflicts using a built-in toolkit. games that deviate too far from logical or sensible principles may be seen as obtuse, while games that lean heavily on a player's knowledge of genre conventions may be considered "gamey." warioware leverages this intuition application as a reflex-based game of skill: recontextualize your understanding of the goal state and your toolkit, and do it so fast and naturally that it becomes automatic. that single word or phrase projected at the start of each round instantly locks the player into that goal state, and within an instant of seeing their surroundings they should understand how they can achieve that goal and what the interface may be to perform the actions required. shake a dog's paw, pick your nose, shoot down aliens, match the shape, catch the baseball, chop the block, collect the mushroom, count the frogs, jump the hurdle, dodge the arrows. in the collection of these instances and all others present in the game, the vast breadth of human experience is discretized and miniaturized into flashes of memory. this game is tailor-made to fire as many different synapses in rapid succession as possible.

surrounding this genius distillation of the gaming experience itself is this eccentric framing device of games themselves, mass-produced and advertised to you through the screen, or veering into real-life alternative gaming experiences than the one in your hands as you work your way through the game. aptly the game presents its user interface as a mock desktop, featuring the loosely-connected sets of games into neat little folders for you to work through. each character presents their own idiosyncratic narrative to their gaming experience; my favorite of the bunch is dribble and spitz's Taxi Driver homage that translates the endless neon corridors to a sloshy windshield and a fuzzy car radio, with games flying at you through the haze. they drive their passenger (supposedly you) to the sea, where they proceed to turn into a mermaid and dive into the depths, much to the driving duo's delight. other stories range the spectrum from kat and ana's downright traditional journey through the floors of a shiro to mona's frenzied pizza delivery route where she kills pursuing cops by the dozen.

on its own these pieces would be sufficient for something truly interesting, but warioware elevates the experience through a natural high-score mentality and drive to keep the player engaged and toying around with all of the content. many more microgames unlock in the post-game, where you can endlessly play a character's collection until you run out of health. although your first playthrough of each will end at the boss stage, these boss stages serve as cycle-enders in repeat attempts, where new cycles push the difficulty higher for each individual microgame. suddenly the context you understood for a given microgame is purposefully subverted to further test your reflexes and/or patience. as the speed increases and the microgame flow becomes more hectic, what seemed like cut-and-dry microgames become sweat-inducing tests of pushing that intuition-swap ability to the peak of its potential, and in the process rewiring your brain every precious couple of seconds.

I'm able to gush so thoroughly about this debut in particular because I feel no later entry ever managed to top it. beyond this the warioware series became nintendo's playground for testing out their array of control gimmicks, and thus the games themselves became entirely beholden to the constraints of those input methods. while I imagine their goal was to deepen the interactivity with each microgame, the limits of waggling a wiimote or tapping a screen choked that incredible spark of creativity that they exhibited so genuinely here. the gamepad is already universally the understood abstraction of choice of varied gameplay mechanics, and R&D1 tapped into our inherent connection to it as gamers to make something that not only celebrated games as a form, but refined it to a microscopic, perfectly shaped pearl.

maybe I'm just sour at the moment, but what was the point of this? why did we need to replace the puzzle solving and multitasking of the original with rote lock-and-key style challenges? all I did for hours on end was color matching: blue is water, yellow is electricity, red is fire, white is poison, etc. etc. etc. slowly moving around and disarming traps and then picking off enemies one by one until I could clear a path from the treasure to the ship. totally draining for me past the 10 hour mark especially when it came to the caves.

the real issue here is that pikmin 2 sidesteps many issues with the original instead of attempting legitimate improvements. combat, for example, was originally clunky and imprecise, especially on gamecube (I'm assuming the wii version is better). pikmin 2's solution is to attempt to trivialize it both by supplying the player with purples and adding the ultra-spicy and ultra-bitter sprays. for the latter there's the added annoying process of grinding berries for the sprays, which generally means keeping a leader near the berries waiting around for the pikmin to deal with cobwebs/knock off worms/harvest the fruit; a constant distraction while your other leader is doing the more interesting work. the purples as well add unintended annoyances by being both sluggish and rare, meaning that they die often and you rarely have as many as you would like. these are well-deserved drawbacks, as purples can butcher nearly any standard enemy in the game with no fuss, but losing too many and needing to fall back on your regular troops makes the return to clumsy combat all the more bitter, and it's not like mindlessly massacring hallways of enemies in caves with purples is exactly stimulating either. the day system as well is sidestepped by having the caves exist outside time. these areas totally remove time management for the player and in the process throw a lot of pikmin's natural strategizing out the window in favor of the aforementioned methodical dispersal of all noteworthy obstacles on each floor. some of these elements still exist in the main areas to the game's credit, but given that the levels have been scaled back in complexity from the original and that the day limit has been excised, it feels overly simplified. there were ways to fix this: perhaps make certain key items or enemies only show up periodically for a set of days, pushing savvy players to carefully lay out their day-to-day schedule to catch each event as it comes. that's an approach that has problems of its own, but could still attempt to realize the time management aspects inherent to the original while addressing common complaints.

the aforementioned level design changes are really indicative of the whole package here. the original game's levels felt explorable and flexible in the sense that the tools the player chose to use could vary while also having clear bounds. for example, it's not feasible on a first playthrough to tear down every breakable or bombable wall, so choices must be made via prioritization of objectives; no right answers, and it forces the player to follow their gut instincts and live with potential mistakes. the need for this planning in pikmin 2 is entirely absent. treasures in the overworld tend to be in much more obvious places, and enemy layouts are such that you're expected to clear pathways proactively rather than encouraging risky treasure-carry-paths around sleeping or slow enemies as in the first. as for gates, they all boil down to "match the element to the type of pikmin and then let them rip," and any gate that exists absolutely must be taken down if you're interested in the all treasure ending. presumably the debt repayment is meant to allow some level of player choice in how they pursue objectives, but the 10k coin threshold is so low that there's no impetus to do anything other than wander around and grab whatever is close. the caves just exacerbate the above issues, as the cramped spaces restrict freedom of movement and they are littered with cookie-cutter traps that will send you running back and forth to the starting area with different colored groups of pikmin in your wake. I could go on and on... I got tired of the caves very quickly.

controversial opinion, I know, but this one really seemed mechanically dead to me compared to the first, which already had plenty of issues on its own. perhaps improvements to the pikmin AI or controls could've smoothed things out, but adjustments are so subtle in these areas it's hard for me to give out points. that's not to say there aren't parts I like of course: the world is much more fleshed out in terms of both the denizens of hocotate and olimar's personal journal entries. his mixture of empirically-minded curiosity and existential boredom makes him much richer than he has any right to be, and the letters from home accentuate this, especially with their corner-cutting boss and the just desserts he gets while destitute and on the run from debt collectors. there are also still puzzles here and there I did legitimately enjoy, such as the block-weighing ones that required careful allocation of pikmin to each platform in order to elevate olimar to a higher platform. it's on a strong core, but I think it really misses the mark in trying to improve on the weaknesses of the original. I couldn't even push myself to get all treasures, as I'm writing this after finishing dream den and have no intention of doing much clean-up past that. that final boss was excrutiatingly boring... they really need to put HP indicators on each of his weapons, and killing pikmin with the water cannon off-screen is such a low blow. the fight music was terribly repetitive as well... I could continue on this tangent but I think it's basically clear this game didn't align with me like I was hoping it would after the much more unapproachable first game.

the appeal of a convention stems from the yawning tide of people who embody it; a mass of the like-minded enveloping a space, to the extent that one could never meet or know every one at once. the homogeneity would not be pleasant if it permeated our entire lives, but to momentarily enter a crowd knowing that each person among it could understand your drive and passion is invigorating. when I come to these I tend to roam solo, poking my head into every room I find and silently people-watching from the sidelines. I greet friends of course, and I may strike up a conversation in line waiting for a cabinet, but I find my immersion into the atmosphere alone provides a mental balm before even socializing comes into play.

every year going to magfest I plan new ways to make the experience more comfortable: a well-rounded diet, planned breaks, and more consistent sleeping arrangements. this time my new innovation was a fanny pack, replacing the cumbersome backpack of previous trips with something less intrusive and throwing my misplaced sense of embarrassment at wearing one out the window. with this came a swap from my switch to the smaller form factor of my 3ds. I've come to really lean into my 3ds as of late, bringing it to long waits at the barber or when lazing around at a friend's house. at some point I realized that all my downtime wasted on scrolling twitter could be funneled into a marginally more meaningful hobby by using my 3ds instead. besides, the console is becoming a bit retro! recently a young child saw me with one and asked their mother about the strange two-screened phone I was holding, begging to peer over my shoulder while I played dragon quest.

bringing the 3ds to magfest also gave me the opportunity to try to shore up my puzzles on streetpass, which I had neglected for quite some time. the entire idea behind streetpass - every person's 3ds signalling out in an attempt for two to pass each other and exchange information - was an outgrowth of nintendo's attempts to turn the handhelds into tools for positive social reinforcement, originating at least as far back as the nascent pokemon exchanges on the original game boy. it turned the 3ds into something that continually engaged with the world while you did, giving you brief glimpses into the lives of those around you while you traveled. the most basic of these was puzzle swap, less of a game and more of a mass exercise in collecting pieces of various puzzles distributed by nintendo through occasional content updates. some pieces you could roll for using "play coins" collected while walking with the 3ds in your pocket, but some were exclusively gained through trading with others, and in general the most consistent way to locate certain pieces was by trading with as wide of a group of people as possible. of course, this collaborative effort operated best in a world of mass public transit and high population density, traits missing from the suburban american experience. my regular streetpass contacts were ones at my high school, and the minimal outside interaction led to an eventual disinterest in churning through the same puzzle collections day after day. the eventual death of the 3ds only cemented the end of my streetpassing days.

even just from waiting in the eye-watering badge pickup line at the con, snaked switchback style across an expo room before leaking out from one side of the building to the other, I had already matched with at least 10 people, showering me with new pieces and puzzles I had never gotten a chance to download. a feature past my time called "bonus chance" had kicked in, giving me many pieces from each individual I streetpassed instead of just one like the old days and letting me mop up my collection way quicker than I had anticipated. every break I took during the con seemed to have at least a couple more people trickle into my waiting queue, and by the end of the con I had collected every trade-only piece with less than 100 to go overall. there were people walking around with all of the pieces, people walking around with just a few, some who had scarcely updated their streetpass since the mid '10s, and others who seemed to have gotten in on the tail-end of the whole phenomenon, with lots of pieces for the last few puzzles and barely any for the early ones. for a weekend, this social game that had withered away over five years prior got the chance to bloom again.

these people who I previously just saw from afar, stood next to at adjacent cabinets, or sat behind at a panel now became little figments inside my 3ds. I had always perceived the con as a regional experience, but their data now told me there were those as far as the west coast or even alaska participating, perhaps expats who had moved close by, or former residents flying back to stay with friends. little tidbits such as their most recently played game gave me insight into their tastes, and many of them had included celebratory messages of excitement for the return of the con. their collections, their smiling avatars, their flairs, their messages; it humanized these many con attendees who I often had passed by and further strengthened that bond we shared of mutual attendance. after years of using an ugly caricature of mips from sm64 as my avatar, I finally changed it to one that reflected my face. it only seemed natural to give them the same clarity they gave me.

in the days before resident evil 4, third-person shooters rarely followed a set framework for their mechanics, ranging from the auto-aim of syphon filter to the centered reticle of max payne to old-school resident evil's fixed camera angles and inability to move while firing. as a member of the survival horror subgenre of TPSs, silent hill 2 draws from the RE template while adding its own twists into the formula.

while protagonist james' background is never mentioned, we can assume he has formal combat training given his talent with an array of firearms as well as improvised weaponry. by pulling the right trigger, james enters an aiming stance where he will fix his sights on a nearby target. pressing the cross button at this point will cause james to discharge his gun, which can be repeated multiple times to inflict sequential damage on a target. however, attempting to fire with an empty clip will trap him in place while dry reloading. the player must carefully count their ammo usage in the chaos of combat in order to avoid this occurance and safely reload from the inventory menu.

much like this game's ps1 predecessor, james has access to three different types of firearms. the first is the pistol, which provides high manueverability in exchange for low firepower. the shotgun is the middle tier weapon, as it seems to be a semi-automatic with the ability to fire off six shells in succession, but it has a notable amount of recoil. this weapon is designed in an unorthodox fashion compared to its contemporaries, where spread of the shotgun is rather focused and thus is mainly used for blowing enemies back at close range. finally, the rifle provides the highest firepower in exchange for heavy recoil, sluggish recovery time, and low ammo capacity. this weapon sees the most use in slower boss battles, where the damage output becomes a necessity. the tradeoffs between each of these create dynamism in each encounter, where weapon selection becomes as important as actually disposing of enemies. this is unfortunately undercut by the generous amount of ammo for each weapon, making resource conservation less of a focus. however, the ammo allotment is tightly designed such that players can't simply run into battle willy-nilly with the rifle: certain enemies naturally counteract each weapon based on their own behaviors, attack patterns, and agility, and many fights will need to be conducted with the handgun to ensure that precious rifle ammo isn't needlessly wasted on enemies that can easily avoid its shots.

ranged combat dominates much of the latter half of the game, but james enters into silent hill with no equipment and must conduct on-site procurement a la konami's other famous playstation franchise metal gear solid. given the barren state of the town, james must make do with both a wood plank and a steel pipe as he slowly builds up his arsenal of weaponry. the game's biggest enhancement over the original silent hill is its evolution of its melee mechanics. for example, silent hill 2 deftly weaves in the pressure-sensitive buttons of the ps2 in order to differentiate between two types of close-ranged attacks. softly holding the cross button creates gentler, more strategic blows, such as the plank's walking swing and the pipe's lunge. these attacks can be used to overwhelm opponents in order to stagger them for the heavier melee strike. by forcefully pressing the button, james will unleash an nasty overhead capable of quickly downing enemies. developing an understanding of how to correctly manipulate the pressure sensor in order to use each move at will goes a long way in terms of enriching james' arsenal. melee weapons also have one important upside over their ranged brethren: they allow the player to block attacks by holding the square button when standing still. silent hill 3 would extend this to a universal parry, but silent hill 2's implementation feels natural and easy to use in the heat of battle. while these options become less consequential as the game extends into the second half, they do reward those who prefer to stay up close and personal by rewarding james with the giant knife. this hefty blade betrays the developer's japanese side by calling to mind such classic weapons such as cloud's buster sword or guts' ferocious dragon slayer.

there's one other primary attack that must be mentioned: the stomp. by pressing the cross button without aiming over a downed enemy, james will coup de grâce his opponent with a deadly heel strike to the head. this iconic technique is a series staple, and it presages similar attacks that would appear in later games of its ilk such as resident evil 5 and dead space. while in the original resident evil games zombies would often rise up after briefly tasting carpet, the effect was primarily to catch unsuspecting or overeager players unawares when they hadn't quite finished off their foe as well as offering the chance to run by to those low on ammo. in silent hill's case, stomping a downed enemy is the primary way of killing most targets due to the speed of its use compared to simply filling an opponent full of lead. this is especially important for the lying figure enemies, who can deal major damage by scrambling from a fallen state. the average enemy will be able to arise multiple times if left unaccounted for, forcing stomps as a necessity for those hoping to cleanly end encounters. this is especially apparent in group encounters, where other enemies may cut off downed ones from james' approach. in these cases crowd control becomes integral to survival, as the player must prioritize enemies with enough space around them that james can run up to them and stomp them upon toppling them without getting side-swiped by another enemy along the way. when the player has a better grasp of the combat, they may line up enemies in such a fashion that they inadvertently strike one another thanks to the game's friendly fire, potentially toppling or staggering them with minimal input from the player. these nuances make silent hill 2 more than just blindly firing at enemies when it's at its best in terms of encounter design.

as for enemies, the game primarily cycles between three: the lying figure, the mannequin, and the nurse. the lying figure slowly approaches james upon seeing him, emitting an acid spray when james comes into range. the mannequin meanwhile remains in a random position until james comes into range, flailing wildly with its appendages at any provocation from the player. finally, the nurse menacingly struts towards james upon seeing him, swingingly carelessly with a steel pipe at anyone in the vicinity. all three of these require a delicate understanding from the player of their general health pool, behavior in close quarters, and primary weapon of choice for dispatching them. it's unfortunate that the lying figures end up becoming too frequently utilized, especially in the labyrinth zone, which diminishes the impact of the nurses in particular, who rarely show up once james enters the historical society. various other enemies such as the grate-swinging mandarins and the abstract daddies with their devastating command grab show up sparingly as well.

boss fights are not puzzle-based in any way and instead primarily require the player to put distance between james and the boss, fire off shots, and then run for safe territory. while not terribly interesting, bosses in general were rarely well-designed at this point of third-person shooter history. of these, pyramid head is certainly the most notable given his timer-driven boss fights where shots scored on his metallic helmet reduce the amount of time until he leaves the area. other bosses require more finesse, such as eddie and his game of cat-and-mouse in a meat locker between frozen cadavers. skilled players will find that with tight execution they can perform a stunlock on him by using the rifle's shot to stagger him and then following up with rifle shots repeatedly until the fight ends. while most strategies for these fights feel rote, there are certainly ways for astute players to develop novel strategies for them. the major downside to some bosses who reside in larger arenas is that the camera is unable to keep track of them given that it centers on james at all times. this certainly isn't a game-breaker thanks to james being able to automatically aim at off-screen enemies when facing in their direction, but it does make positioning considerations rather awkward.

as a hallmark of the playstation 2's early action lineup, silent hill 2 provides one of the most focused gun-toting romps of the early 00s. it's hard to compare it directly to those that followed in its wake given the modern focus on stick-driven aiming and over-the-shoulder viewpoints, but parallels can be drawn between its synergy between melee and ranged combat and its positioning-focused combat encounters to modern shooters, whether they derive from survival horror antecedents or not. aspects of it have aged poorly such as the awkward camera controls and the lack of enemy variety, which may put off players more used to today's iterations of these genre conventions. however, the simple viscerality of the firing mechanics and small weapon pool combined with the tactics involved with positioning and weapon selection lend the game an arcade-like quality that has been lost in modernity. revisiting these games is vital for understanding the development of this incredibly popular genre today.

the ground truth

there's a tension in game critique between analyzing a game's mechanics in the abstract and incorporating the historical context it exists in. good critique often starts with the former and bleeds into the latter, viewing the raw systems at play using the critic's preconceptions of "good" game design as the ground truth before moving into the wider context of the genre it resides in and the state of the industry. some lean fully into the former and some the latter. however, these two are inherently intertwined; the critic's previous engagement with the wider context taints their preconceptions, and it's impossible to extract any axioms from the ground truth that haven't been tainted in the same way. given that critique is an art and not a science, we can accept this as inevitable and move on. after all, the variety of people's individual preconceptions produces discourse in both its beautiful and toxic forms. if we seek to share critique and provoke the thoughts of others, then having a unique ground truth is meaningful.

this is not favorable to resident evil 4, unfortunately. around its neck is another resident evil 4 which so greatly shaped the medium as to create its own overwhelming ground truth without any path to overturn it. this applies to all remakes of course, but this new resident evil 4 simply begs these comparisons out of the gate. how can I potentially rip the abstract mechanics out of this game and view them without bias when the original product is so closely grafted to its back?

I delved into the simplicity of the original resident evil 4's combat in my previous review of that game. its stagger system and context-sensitive melee options form a crowd-control methodology that remains one of the most memorable aspects of the game to this day. that its remake utterly repudiates these mechanics is shocking at first glance. the context-sensitive melee input's timing is tighter, its area of effect is smaller, and its invincibility frames fail to protect leon quite as effectively as in the original. the inconsistent stagger further complicates this, as I'll get into the next section. these elements of the crowd-control loop structured all combat encounters from the original, and without it the game teeters dangerously close to becoming just another modern zombie game. this was my original impression in that opening village fight, which took me nearly 45 minutes of attempts on hardcore. why did the precision and definitive outcomes get thrown to the wayside in favor of this squishy mess of slow response time, inaccurate aiming, and erratic enemy behavior?

what I had to do as I continued was reframe the ground truth. the original resident evil 4 boils everything down to the above loop in a way that linearizes it. it certainly presents options for the player, but the vast majority of ganados and cultists should be dispatched through this herd->stagger->melee approach. in that way, the game offers complete control over your surroundings virtually all the time. the remake rejects this in favor of widening the option pool, creating further checks and balances on each tool, and fermenting a greater sense of uncertainty and chaos. it captures the experience of being overwhelmed, drowning in a sea of transformed villagers while running low on resources and health. changing the original's combat loop was necessary to conjure these situations.

probably most of you reading the above are going to recoil at that... but stay tuned, I'm setting this up as the ground truth, but I'm going to tear it apart later as well. however, it's necessary to give the game the benefit of the doubt this way in order to observe what it does right as well as understand where it falls short on its own terms.

determinism vs stochasticity

the stagger system in re4r builds something much knottier than its predecessor through a conflux of multiple factors seasoned with a bit of RNG. in other words: it's inconsistent. I doubt we'll ever have a clear idea of how it works until it gets reverse engineered some time from now. in any case, it's a far cry from the deterministic staggers of the original, which could be consistently induced from a headshot or other weak point.

we can view determinism and stochasticity (or randomness) as a continuum for mechanics and games as a whole to fall within, where the former is a pure puzzle and the latter is gambling. let's say that the original falls closer towards the deterministic end while the remake is closer to the stochastic end; of course, each game has elements of both, such as the semi-random enemy AI and plagas spawns in the original and the parry mechanics in the remake. in many action contexts, it makes more sense for move outcomes to be deterministic. we need consistency in order to observe patterns and form strategies with a guarantee of efficacy. if I were playing a game such as souls or monhun and had attacks with heavy commitments fail or produce confusing effects, any outcome that I find myself in could potentially be unavoidable at no fault of my own, and if all my escape options also have heavy commitments or long startups, I may have set myself up for failure through random chance.

however, both versions of re4 are shooters, and by their nature most actions are near instantaneous; point the gun and shoot. if an enemy lasts a bullet or two longer before teeing up a melee attack, the reaction needed to fire off another round to get them into that state is much more negligible. abstractly, this kind of uncertainty actually can create interesting types of decision-making and intentionality for the player. attacks with uncertain outcomes can be planned in such a way that option selects occur, where each potential outcome results in a situation that the player can also take advantage of provided they can react appropriately. it also facilitates quick decision-making with gun selection. if not inducing stagger with the handgun could potentially result in damage, the shotgun may be a better tool; weighing these options becomes more challenging when there is a need to factor in percentage chances of success, especially in the way this interacts with limited quantities of ammo. the new reticle mechanic drawn from the previous two remakes also influences player choices in how it forces the player to remain still in order to let the reticle close and cause more damage/stagger. these all coalesce into a toolkit that creates ambiguity for the player on what options may be best at any given point, often leaving the player to act on instinct in a frenzy and then live with the outcome.

furthermore, re4r extends its knife mechanics in order to create a secondary set of tools for the player to grapple with the uncertainty of gun actions. the knife primarily provides a near-universal option for dispelling enemy attacks when used to parry, which comes at the cost of both knife durability and a small player stagger (though a perfect parry effectively nullifies this). it also can be used to push enemies off when they do a forward grab, backstab enemies, instantly kill some spawning plagas, and fight directly to induce stagger in combination with your other tools. this creates two primary spheres of play: the uncertain long-distance area where the player is more-or-less safe but lacks definite control over their actions, and the short-distance area where the player can definitively control the parries and other close-range actions but is in direct danger from every enemy in the game. compared to the original re4, where running into the fray was encouraged thanks to the high safety of melee actions, the remake creates ambiguity in the choice of range for the player. kiting is an option but the ammo use is inefficient, while parries can highly useful but drain durability and potentially set the player up for damage if they miss a perfect parry while another enemy approaches. both of these areas of ambiguity - for options specifically in the long-range as well switching between long-range and short-range - help instill a sense of claustrophobia as enemies swarm leon.

this interpretation isn't without its flaws. the primary issue is that the parry actually drains very little durability compared to some of the other actions (assuming that you aren't using it against certain instakill attacks, which often destroy an entire knife), and as it works on all but a small subset of enemy attacks (such as the hammer or the scythe), it centralizes the other mechanics around itself. perfect parries guarantee a stagger for melee and thus become more appealing than the other options to the point of occasionally just letting enemies approach to get a parry off rather than even considering long-range actions. there are elements that still counterbalance this such as the inability to block attacks from behind (sometimes?) and the uncertainty involved in parrying attacks such as plagas tendrils, but some of this abstract ambiguity becomes lost given the obvious superiority of this mechanic in many instances.

the modern zombie game

last year I reviewed the last of us, a game that in retrospect seems to be one of the many midway points between the original re4 and this remake. in my critique I discuss how the game primarily morphs between three styles of action: cover, stealth, and horde. re4r does add in light stealth elements (specifically in the village chapter), but the most obvious point of comparison between these two are the horde sections.

in that tlou review, I singled out the hotel basement as the best horde section in the game thanks to its non-prescriptive level design and the flexibility of the room layouts. at its best, tlou captured the scramble of running past zombies and efficiently dealing with groups; at its worst, horde encounters would devolve into endlessly running into circles, swapping your various indistinguishable guns around to deal with limited ammo. many months out from my playthrough, several of these fights have congealed together in my brain, with the game's more fleshed-out cover/stealth hybrid sections dominating the majority of my memories. although it had the potential to excel in terms of horde combat, it falls rather slight in execution.

re4r seizes upon this without all of the drawbacks of tlou's lackluster gunplay and overall horde encounter design. in particular, the ammo economy feels skewed away from the original's bountiful reserves to something more akin to tlou. while handgun ammo drops regularly even without the attache case that boosts it, the handgun is the most uncertain of all the weapons, making ammo for your more consistent powerhouses like the shotgun and rifle all the more precious. the new gunpowder system that gives the player the ability to craft ammo at their leisure undermines this somewhat, but the difference between the 20-40 shotgun shells one is likely to hold in the original game to the 5-15 that's more common here makes any shells expended on gunning down basic mooks even more consequential.

more importantly, re4r builds interesting encounters using staggered enemy types, much like the tlou hotel basement encounter does with its bloater and various infected. the most notable instance of this for me during this playthrough was the twin garrador fight, which has been expanded with many more ganados than in the original. the absence of the famous cage fight is disappointing, but the added wrinkles to this garrador fight make up for it, especially in the way that parrying within earshot of a garrador will cause them to charge. throughout this fight the constant influx of enemies forces you to keep moving and stay on the lookout for ways you can chip away at the garradors and silently kill the adds, with tricking the garradors into slicing down reams of enemies being the most satisfying solution for culling the herd. the chainsaw sisters fight also achieves this in an even bigger environment, where you're chased along wooden scaffolding by enemies in growing numbers as you trap your pursuers with lit lanterns from above. both of these fights are great examples of moments where the original game is legitimately expanded through infusing already excellent fights with more complex spaces and enemies pouring in from all sides. by giving the genius sections from the original the flair of modern, more dense zombie games, the designers here effectively breathed new life into these scenarios.

wide breadth and shallow length

something I neglected to mention in the prior section on stochasticity was the laser sight, which seems to maximize stagger on every shot and improve accuracy. if you do want to play more like the original and its stagger-focused crowd control, the laser sight will let you do that from early on in the game. conversely if you'd rather incorporate some stealth, many of the areas have interconnected pathways and ways to sneak up on enemies with the backstab takedown. the bolt thrower now appears much earlier than before with the mines relegated to an additional ammo type, allowing players more interested in creating traps to focus on that weapon. while many of these choices existed in the original, the wealth of gameplay styles has been expanded here, from differentiating and balancing the handguns even further to adding an assault rifle.

in a way, this variety dovetails nicely with the previously mentioned de-emphasis of the stagger and contextual melee in the way that players can choose what aspects of their kit to invest in over the course of the game. this pairs especially well with the overhauled treasure system, which gives the player more strategic methods by which to maximize their earnings via the new multipliers for color combinations with inlaid gems. in theory this is exactly what I had established the intent for the game as earlier: to delinearize combat and make the optimal choices more ambiguous.

however, I have largely ignored the specifics of the encounter design outside of the previously mentioned twin garrador and chainsaw fights. these areas are excellent to be sure, as are others such as the opening village and the catwalks over the precipice after meeting the merchant, but much of the rest of the game becomes less interesting than its predecessor by way of more tempered enemy layouts (or in the words of my previous review, less of a frenzy). compared to the literal hordes of the original, the remake ends up following a more modern pattern of obstacle escalation when constructing its fights. look at the wrecking ball fight and its strict phases that pace out the most dangerous enemies and end with a round of the bug plagas. an even more egregious example is the water room, the first half of which has been thinned and spread out across an upstairs and a downstairs section. by reducing the flow of enemies in these areas, the chaos the game fosters through its mechanics becomes less apparent through the rigidity of the scenario pacing.

the variety in playstyles intersects with this, specifically in how many enemies are often on-screen at once. with smaller groups, the anxiety of constantly juggling foes from many sides melts away, and one can autopilot with whatever strategy they've invested in. this particularly becomes noticable by the island chapter, where encounters in general tend towards mere handfuls of enemies in-between a few bigger areas such as the AA turret or the wrecking ball. after learning the game on its own merits for the first half, I found myself trending towards simply recreating the original game here, with a fully leveled-up silver ghost and its laser sight becoming a stagger machine and melees/parries dominating much of my approach. in the larger encounters this fell apart, with a greater need to scramble and switch between weapons, but the predominance of smaller encounters pushed me towards just playing a clumsier version of the original.

in its own way, what I previously referred to as "linearized" combat in the original really forms the "arcade-like" nature that many have come to love about it. the frenzy of the original and its anti-obstacle escalation doctrine created an incredible spread of scenarios to apply these mechanics to. the original re4 is about observing radically different ideas and designs for encounters and framing them in such a way that you can pull off that herd->stagger->melee loop, just as tetris is a game of turning different stack shapes and tetramino sequences into line clears, or qix is about navigating around the titular entity to find areas to slice away. the small pool of mechanics get stretched in such a way that they never feel rote. meanwhile, the remake takes its wider breadth of options and sacrifices the depth across the length of its campaign, creating more homogenous scenarios overall. there are throwaway rooms in the original that feel more dynamic than major setpieces of the remake, and by the second half I can say it approaches mediocrity. slam-dunks like the double turret section end up feeling like they've run out of ideas. if there's any justification of the original ground truth, where re4r fails while the original succeeds, it's here.

the review

that's a relatively abstract view of the game as a whole though, and obviously I have a lot more thoughts on it from front to back. so let me fire off some random other thoughts that didn't quite fit into my higher-level critique.

bosses overall probably have an equal hit rate to the original. mendez is a good example that I thought improved thanks to a little more structure between the two phases and some extra room; I was never really into meat-and-potatoes bosses like many found in the original. gigante somehow gets worse thanks to exaggerated hitboxes and a jittering, small plagas. the double gigante fight is the opposite, being basically just scripted (throw a flashbang, drop the unarmored one in, wait for luis to come back with the dynamite, blow it up, drop the other one in). krauser is some trial-and-error bullshit and then just a parry fest. salazar stresses leon's clunky movement and the need for camera control far too much... saddler is actually pretty good! the adds in that one give it a nice bit of flavor.

the whole of chapter 11 is just bleh. double gigante, the shockingly boring minecart section, and the one-at-a-time bugs, all of which feel rather slight compared to their original incarnations. and ending with that new krauser fight... this is where I stopped feeling as hype on the game.

side quests are there but thankfully skippable. I didn't really trade for much from the shop since I stuck with silver ghost and ignored all the extra stocks and shit, so I didn't feel the need to touch them much once you hit the castle. backtracking for some of these things is most doable in the village and then feels tacked on later down the line.

the regenerators were never my favorite part of the original, but the way they act here is just ruined by the parry. my roommate had her hands over her eyes the whole time they were chasing me until the fifth time I parried them, and then even she realized that they didn't really pose a threat. the electricity puzzles they plopped in here are obnoxious and tedious; I solved every one just by a simple brute force method. the wrench was cute though, that'll stay burned into my brain even when some of the rest of this game fades away.

I'm fine with slow leon but oh my god some of the aspects of this control scheme are dire. quick turn was butchered not only by being incredibly inconsistent but also by giving three bizarre options for it: back and run (which causes accidental backwards runs), back and crouch (which is basically a death sentence if you end up crouching in place), and back and the left stick button (the fuck were they thinking?). just let me put it on cross... also it seems like I wasn't able to crouch in the middle of a run? confusing oversight. combined with frequent flubbed ground stabs and the weird valid angles for parries... just rough all around.

can't believe how many evade QTEs they stuck in here after it seemed like they were going to excise them overall. why would you cut the salazar statue chase (the fire breathing is cool though) in favor of giving random-ass scythe enemies an unparryable attack with a QTE evade? and the bosses are still so reliant on it... at the same time I get the reluctance to add a dodge roll to this. a general dodge would've required a complete design overhaul, and it's sort of overkill with the ability to strafe, but the overreliance on them especially when it comes to boss battles feels like a major case where a reimagining would have been greatly appreciated.

the simultaneous success of dmc1 and failure of dmc2 put a variety of studios in an interesting position of "who could develop the next essential character action title," and team ninja really capitalized on the opportunity to try to take the crown. this became apparent to me during the game's beefy runtime considering just how different it is than today's CAGs in terms of structure and focus. in many ways ninja gaiden '04 (and by extension black) is a bold attempt at the 3D action-adventure game that sits as a bit of an evolutionary dead-end as CAGs have become increasingly combat-focused.

much of this can be seen in parallels between ninja gaiden and devil may cry 3, which released just a year after the former. dmc3 still retains some of the resident evil-derived exploration and interconnected world of its predecessors, but really pushes towards a focus on flashy and dynamic combat at every turn. ninja gaiden instead truly leaned into the scenario design that dmc1 played around with. instead of focusing on a single castle awkwardly chopped up into different missions, ninja gaiden generally focuses each chapter on a completely different area of the map, serving as mini-dungeons with their own puzzles, unique hazards, enemy types. as the game comes to a close these areas become more and more entwined, but the level segmentation is tremendously well-planned, and it clears up much ambiguity over what key items work where and how to progress the story. thanks to helpful notes from ayane, objectives are explained to the player, and if you pay any attention to the various locks around the game world it's easy to keep track of where to go. this kind of simple exploration really does wonders to vary the pace and avoid the trap of "I just did combat arenas for an hour straight and it's all memory-sludge in my head."

on the contrary, each scenario sticks out so precisely in my head that it's a wonder they came up with so many excellent ideas. taking down the airship by destroying the main generators and slaughtering a cyborg on the roof while flying through a storm, descending into the crypt and rising back up to place the chalice at the altar only to fight a giant skeleton monster and watch it crash to the bottom, where the floor has collapsed into a egyptian-tinged den of traps, the half-ice half-magma section where you switch between sides in order to eventually relight a furnace; hell, they nailed a 40-minute underwater section that serves as a great breather between non-stop action otherwise. unlike devil may cry, ninja gaiden manages to entirely switch its mood and playstyle on a dime when it wants to and surprise the player with some new idea at every turn. the variety kept me going "one more save point" over and over again where most CAGs generally lose me at 60/90 minute sessions, which is a credit to how itagaki and the team understood how to perfectly scale the intensity of an adventure over a 16 hour runtime.

of course, with so many great ideas thrown into the mix, there's bound to be some bad ones, and unfortunately there are some major clunkers to be found here. the entire military base raid for one is suffocating both in how the enemy forces exclusively use firearms which stagger the battle pacing and how there are not one but three different vehicular bosses in this section, all of which necessitate use of the clunky OOT-style first-person bow aiming controls. another particular sore point for me near the end of the game was the dreadful phantom pirahna labyrinth, where the game explicitly tells you to spam your flail light attack to avoid needing to mash out of their bite grab that bleeds your health as more and more leech onto you. the fact that these fish will blip into existence as others die really ratchets up the frustration during these sections, which frankly I died to the most during the last two chapters of the game (and ghost doku lmao). smaller puzzles and platforming sections will likely jolt you as the game wears on much as they did me, and it occasionally requires taking a break and coming back to it another time when the brutality of failure in one of these less-than-fair sections becomes too heavy.

thankfully overall I found the rest of the game surprisingly fair. given that ryu's powerful ultimate technique attack harnesses "essence" drops from enemies (colored orb drops shamelessly cribbed from dmc), currency and health drops are exceedingly frequent, and you will have an abundance of currency and health at any point in the game so long as you balance your UT usage. health consumables are also in fair supply, and the smaller variety are rather cheap at the in-game store; I virtually always bought a full set without significantly denting my essence reserves. save points are smartly placed in high foot-traffic locations and replaying sections will rarely take more than a few minutes as long as you diligently save. this latter point is frequently harped upon as a major problem with the game, and I have to assume people bothered by it are simply not used to having to replay sections of games at all; the devs thankfully didn't force us to restart the mission entirely as in dmc1 or pre-SE dmc3, and the backtracking necessary in most levels makes frequently passing by save points common. on that note: I never found the lack of lock-on frustrating given that ryu's soft lock-on is intelligent and don't really see a need for it in a game without firearms anyway. rarely did I whiff without it being completely my fault, and if you're blocking and countering frequently you should already be lined up with your foe.

I've neglected to discuss the combat given that I wanted to highlight less-discussed elements of the game, but yes, the combat is phenomenal. another aspect of this game's odd branch off of dmc1 is its more traditional and less combo-focused combat that instead favors rapid decision-making and opponent reads. it's not surprising to me that this was developed by a fighting game studio, because the combat first-and-foremost reminded me of something like tekken. in those games I am frequently weaving around opponents, waiting for openings, and then seizing on split-second encounters to score a juicy launcher and deal the bulk of my damage. here it's the same, removed from the one-to-one paradigm to instead wider groups of enemies all vying to attack you at once. izuna drop was my bread-and-butter and securing that light attack (or simply whiffing and catching them with the launcher) was my prize. much like a fighting game enemies will punish you for repetition of simple maneuvers or grab you out of a block frequently, and thus staying instinctual and reactive during combat is a must. it's free-flowing and easy to come up with new links or surprise enders given ryu's strong moveset and stable of weaponry, and while I primarily stuck to dragon sword during my playthrough, I still felt like I was discovering new things and improving the more I played.

a few minor quibbles about the combat (mainly controls) that I would like to bring up however: for one, the density of different button combinations and the amount of contextual ones meant that it occasionally felt like a crapshoot on what would actually come out at any given time. flying swallow was a particularly noticeable one for me, as I didn't really nail down its use until I started incorporating the homing jump into my play, and even afterwards it was a bit dodgy even when I was clearly pointing towards an opponent. incorporating the platforming moves in also never came naturally to me, especially since ryu's wall-run can be spotty on whether it will go vertical or horizontal, and the battle camera further aggravates that. in general I would say ryu's platforming is a little slippery: for 2004/5 it's excellent and an improvement on dmc1's stiff movement and a contemporary like sands of time's rigid traversal system, but it definitely shows its age and results in some unneeded frustration.

bosses are also mostly good, but not particularly ambitious in terms of movesets of fight setup. larger bosses mostly boil down to typical [look to the windup -> dodge the move -> spam an attack for a bit] flowcharts that leave a bit to be desired, especially for bosses like the dragon where I felt like I was mainly just chipping away with the windmill shuriken. humanoid bosses tend to suffer from ryu being too fast and dynamic and the boss needing to stay somewhat calm in order to be fair and predictable, and thus to balance it away from ryu's favor there's a lot of indeterminate blocking that I found annoying and perplexing. using two flying swallows back to back with one clinking off and one hitting makes little sense, and it ruins some of the immersion of trying to figure out the fight when it feels like random chance and not taking advantage of openings. none of them are particularly bad though (except the tanks/copters), and all of them are absolutely manageable or even a little easier than you would expect given the notorious difficulty of the game. the endgame fight where you float on a chunk of rock was also way better than the space harrier section of dmc1, so major props to team ninja there.

there's so much to discuss with this game, and I'm not sure I can even accurately give an opinion given that I've only done a normal playthrough and will likely not go for a hard run anytime in the near future (that's just not how I play games unfortunately). there's so much more content waiting for me when I get back, and hopefully I will given how much this game has imprinted on my brain. equally invigorating, anxiety-inducing, thrilling, and frustrating in all the best of ways.

new year's update from the abode: just finished the ff7 end credits crawl right as I closed out of the game I missed the ball drop. a bit of a shame but oh well... got a bit crossfaded and had a steamed pork bun so I was relaxed all the same. just sitting here pondering... why is this game the go-to "old-school classic game that's also political"? metal gear solid came out just a year later and has a much more coherent (if sort of uninspired) political statement, whereas ff7 is just totally all over the place. the effects of shinra's power plant experimentation on the lifestream are incredibly well-documented throughout the game, so the bedrock of the environmentalist message is there (the way it's presented reminds me of princess mononoke, released the same year), but the direct action via ecoterrorism part is fumbled so bad. there's a scene where barrett (leader of ecoterrorist insurgency AVALANCHE and party member) basically turns to the camera and says "hey I was thinking about it and I realized blowing up the energy reactors was actually wrong, sorry about that!" with absolutely no nuance or discussion at all, much less even presenting the reasoning that led him to that in the first place. the anti-capitalist stuff... like shinra is a "corporation" but it's functionally a giant malevolent social entity somewhere between a militant nation-state and an international empire/world order. if the name had been "people's republic of shinra" and no other content was changed I'm sure we would get puffy right-wing doughboys extoling the game's "critique of totalitarianism" in an equally baseless way. it's not that the intent isn't there - ff7r did a better job interrogating the class hierarchy of midgar while at the same time attempting to rectify AVALANCHE's contradicitions - but it's insubstantial to the point where I'm not sure I would even classify it as a "theme." I think it may be fair to say that the game has an anti-capitalist aesthetic, or setting.

some of it might be lost in translation too: it's shocking that modern ports of this game are still using the original translation. a presumably much richer text lies obscured behind a fog of awkwardly terse dialogue riddled with mistakes and typos. the clumsy cursing is charming to be sure, especially for a game of its era, but this script should have been cleaned up ages ago. it's really a shame, and one that has me wishing I had chosen to play the retranslation instead... especially since I find the HD versions sort of ugly with how much the clean polygonal characters stick out on the low-res backgrounds. I'd be much happier playing it in 240p with everything blended together as originally intended.

regardless of all of the above though, the story is a legitimately fascinating and grim refutation of the typical jrpg tropes of hero, past, sacrifice, and redemption that few other works can attest to, much less any that also simultaneously introduced much of the world to jrpgs in the first place. it's not just the lack of a fantasy setting that is surprising but the shockingly-fresh fusion of early industrial age ephemera with japan's distinct flavor of body-horror cyberpunk. that beginning chapter in midgar, the power plant raids, the MBV sign, the cathedral, wall market, and the assault on shinra tower all flow past the player as something uncompromised in its design and totally divorced from what had come before. midgar is a husk of a metropolis filled to the brim with refuse and abandoned buildings, and when cloud and his party finally venture from beyond its walls, it becomes quickly apparent that their world is completely beyond saving as well. much of the middle sections of the game focus on lifeless landscapes filled with mutated creatures and interspersed with dots of human survival. cloud himself is broken and often a passive force, and his self-realization as a victim of shinra and yet a vital agent of change serves as the hingepoint from where the game shfits from dejected wandering to assertive heroism (though the details of his past are probably better explained via the wiki than in-game). in a lot of ways, the protagonists - who tbf are rather shoddily assembled beyond the characters from the midgar section - are united on their will to succeed despite having already lost virtually everything. square's unflinching ending further subverts expectations by not rewarding the heroes for their actions: their civilization was on its death knell regardless of their intervention.

ff7 also just has some goddamn good jrpg combat, the kind I think about when I'm picturing comfy turn-based action in my head. every character is fully modular thanks to materia, which determines all skills, magic, and stat bonuses for each character. with virtually no grinding you can pick and choose your preferred tools and build your characters to taste; for most of the endgame I had cid handling barrier magic and taking potshots while cloud tanked and red xiii handled heal, time, and black magic. the limit break system in play here is also an incredible mechanic that gives players powerful tools when serious damage has been taken that opens up a lot of potential for amazing comebacks. the way you snap to your next turn once the gauge fills removes all of the stress of taking a particular large blow and having to wait to recuperate... just totally flawless. boss and encounter design is rock-solid as in the previous titles, and for what the game lacks in difficulty thanks to the flexibility of materia it makes up for in spades with the flashy combat visualizations. putting so many resources into lively battle animations and appealing summons shows that square more than understood the power of next-gen for jrpgs more than perhaps any other studio (team andromeda nonewithstanding?). there's quibbles I have for sure: it can be hard to tell which direction to click to select a character in some cases, and summon animations really should've been skippable. dungeon design is also underwhelming thanks to the unwieldy and often visually cluttered pre-rendered backdrops. however, just sitting down and playing this is comfier than perhaps any other ATB-era ff game... three characters, great low-poly models, awesome animations, and flexible battle mechanics.

overall it's a classic, a lovely romp through the minds of square's best creative talent, and satisfying to complete. it's hard to pinpoint for me what puts this one just out of masterpiece range... it pretty much comes down to the pacing being so incredibly uneven, the official translation being terrible, and the dungeon design feeling lackluster (though the scenery is almost always gorgeous). if anything I really need to replay this with the retranslation on my ps2 and see if getting a more authentic experience pushes it over for the edge for me. still fantastic regardless, and a perfect way to cap off the year.

in my previous ace combat 2 review I briefly discussed control theory in the mechanical sense. every input to a system is manipulated and corrected upon to attempt to achieve a desired output, whether it's PID as mentioned in the previous post or LQR or some other more obscure variation. theoretically we can extrapolate these controllers and the actuators they drive to chains of controllers in sequence, all spitballing commands back and forth endlessly. my advisor once told me fighter jets are inherently unstable systems desperately wrangled to usability by their data synthesis routines. this "sensor fusion" complicates the matter; we control our fighter craft indirectly through another controller, obfuscating the point at which the command originates.

in a similar way, we interface with our craft through fingers gripped around the control column; a kind of cross-talk between physical device and flesh providing the controller of your mind and the controller of your plane with the illusion of direct communication. the yoke of a plane used to be directly tied to the craft's actuators, yet as time has gone on the scope of these vehicles has increased to the point where such direct leverage isn't feasible. now the control surface exposed inside the cockpit transmits signals via fly-by-wire to that central computer, which screens inputs and fuses together these signals with its own conceptions and assumptions; reinterpreting and redefining our input along the way. it provides only simulation and never true control; we always sit at its periphery, merely influencing lest our behavior yields catatrosphic results. so too does our body age, the actuators of our extremities atrophying and failing more and more to meaningfully turn our brain's desperate commands into action. organs slowing down in best cases or growing erratically in worst cases, the information and nutrients delivered in our blood finding it harder to squeeze through veins from atherosclerosis, and neurons dying, erasing our memories along with them. our consciousness begs for control the older we grow as it simultaneously loses the ability to assert its will.

where does the body end and the mind begin? at what interface in our aircraft does the body melt into the enclosure of the craft, where we begin perceiving the motions of the plane as motions of the self, inextricably linked? at what point can we transcend the limits of our being, sloughing off our skin into more powerful bodies? rena, trapped inside the prison of her body, restricted from ever tasting the kiss of sunlight, yearns for the embrace of her true self, the Night Raven. cynthia, with rationale never fully revealed to the player, seeks too to enjoin with the culmination of the human race within the electrosphere, removing the clunky interfaces of bodies to bodies in search of ethereal, unattainable connection. their stories are unquestionably entwined and offer repercussions on those around them, pulling everyone into the web of their desires. and through it all each one, whether as plain-spoken as keith or erich or idealistic as the former two, exist solely within the bounds of their aircraft. it is, after all, their only way with interfacing with world as conveyed through the game and its engine; the only place these characters can exert control and expression outside of prescribed and pre-recorded cutscenes. each interaction with these characters exists only through video streams in the electrosphere until the moment of takeoff, where finally they can interface with the world as it exists, within the bounds of these two discs.

thus it follows that abyssal dision, the christ of ouroboros, is the villain of this entry. having already unwillingly yielded himself to the pull of the electrosphere, he grapples with the truth that within the digital world the need for control dissipates. the only way to wield power remains externally in the physical dominion. thus he exerts his own will, now at one with his craft, having achieved everything rena and cynthia could ever dream of, clawing desperately for the ability to feel and live and want and fuck. and then you, nemo, the silent overseer of this, provide the antithesis to dision. the player, given the illusion of flesh within the bounds of an in-game aircraft, become the controller of life and death. the reaper. through your (admittedly binary) choices you shape the world in your image, with each path leading you to cutting off the evolutionary dead-end that is dision. once you're already committed to forgoing the physical limits of your body there simply is no going back!

control structures grow and propagate beyond the individual controller beings who make up this planet, elongating tendrils into the social structures of our kind. small communities expand into empires, into feudal fiefdoms of divinely-ordained control patterns, and eventually into mass financialization under capitalism. top-down hierarchies of CEOs and boards overseeing department leads down to individual managers and teams, whether silent and steady or as manically tempermental as the current gutting of twitter. in ac3 these expand into powers of their own - general resource and neucom - stateless, directionless entities going through the motions of imminent warfare without rhyme or reason. between them exists the UPEO, a supposedly neutral international body, financially affirming both sides while simultaneously being crushed between them, all while supporting a gormless mass of euro-asian countries barely referenced throughout the text. much like in real life, who provides the control asserted by the united nations? do our (in the US) implicitly anti-UN charter military actions somehow legitimize said institution by monopolizing violence on its behalf? this is what the mouthpieces on our side of the pond would have you believe, regardless of the tepid or non-existent objections from the first world or the aggrieved lashings of what remains of the second world. economic control through sanctions, institutional control through the UN Security Council and its prized rotating member seats, physical control through wage slavery, and mental control through the torrent of social media.

with ac3 there is the ability to choose sides, yet each wingman plaintively intones that there are no victors, and no allegiances. the compulsion of action is compulsion enough to drive one to fight for either side regardless of intrinsic motivation. even pledging fealty to ouroborous in a grasp at true revolutionary action devolves into killing one's idols. keith and fiona both serve and gain nothing, which shows complicity but at the same time a sort of tender sadness. it is an acceptance of no alternative, verbally impugning their controlling entity while being completely unable to actually affect change outside of its purview. this is unfortunate but honest to how we live; I see legions of my peers and students I've taught profess broadly leftist rhetoric and a desire to use their skills for good that end up desperately looking at chances to contribute to the public good while working for lockheed or raytheon or bloomberg or jane street or etc. etc. etc. the only "stable" alternative is to pursue a didactic profession as I have, and even then there's the perils of navigating away from amorphous sums of defense contracting research grants all while treading water as an adjunct or visiting lecturer for years. when I see erich desperately flailing in his position playing mercenary under the guise of peacekeeping, I see those I work with or used to work with, trapped in a superstructure without the perceived means to escape it.

within this framework, ac3 manages to weave actual threads of plot momentum through its missions, unlike the prior two ac entries which primarily barreled the player forward to military victory. rather than the driving top gun-style thrill of earlier games, ac3 prefers a more measured, dreary approach to its environments, scenario design, and sound. rushing through rain to exterminate another set of indecipherable targets as part of a bombing run is simply work, not a heroic endeavor. icy synth envelopes and jittery, fragmented percussion dominate the soundscape of these affairs. the tense canyon runs of prior games is transformed here into a foggy ravine where a river runs through, reflecting the entities above it not unlike the opening hour of panzer dragoon saga, which released a year before. here you trail a ghostly reconnaissance ship with rena to either a hidden laboratory shadowed by the cliffs or a dead end, both of which yield different follow-up missions (one where you earn rena's trust and assist her in locating her beloved night raven and one where you prevent a ship containing a biological weapon from colliding with towers in an industrial district). these small touches lend narrative cohesion to the experience, with ebbs and flows more suitable for a longer-form game.

unfortunately this also leads to the game's only notable problems: its repetition in mission layouts between routes and odd difficulty spikes. the first issue is inevitable given the structure, and easily ignorable if you space out each route a bit thanks to the different viewpoints you experience for each sortie and the variety of different specific objectives on each map (even if they just amount to hit X ground targets... but that's totally expected for psx ace combat). each route ending also features completely novel setpieces such as the XR-900 fleet hijacked at the end of general resource's campaign or the claustrophobic geofront invasion in the neucom ending. of these perhaps the only mission type repeated too often for its own good is the sphyrna battle, which occurs around five or six times and loses its luster quickly.

the difficulty spikes are more egregious, although there were only two main ones I personally struggled with: broken wings at the end of the UPEO route and self awareness at the end of ouroborous II. the former is simply a giant lopsided dogfight that will effectively wall the player if they don't understand the nature of the game's unique handling. the latter requires the player to assault a series of ground targets while the night raven is in pursuit. night raven often limits itself in fights (there are multiple fights against it where it will do little but evade you) but here it feels it necessary to blast you with a laser beam that has no warning beyond a small, untelegraphed sound effect. very frustrating mission that capped off my experience with the game rather poorly, but I can justify it by at least noting I was able to beat it through careful examination of its behavior (it struggles to accurately shoot when you are ascending, so moving in hill-like patterns will allow you to avoid its blasts up into high altitude and then careen back to earth faster than it can chase you as you swoop into to destroy a target).

in particular in comparison to ac2 this game requires a much more nuanced understanding of aircraft control. rolling the plane was the first difference that was apparent to me; where ac2 allows smooth and responsive rolling, ac3 includes an inertial element to the rotation that will cause more than a slight adjustment to apply significant torque, potentially overshooting your target angle. differences in aircraft are also more apparent, made particularly noticable for narrative reasons when demonstrating neucom's technological might in the high-power low-mobility remora craft in the mission power for life or when conducting a mission in the vacuum of space in, potentially the game's most well-known mission, zero gravity. planes overall turn wider, will gain much more noticable momentum when flying downward (hence the self awareness strategy), and stall more realistically, causing the engine to lose its energy transfer and create a wobbly descent rather than the abrupt free-fall in ac2. learning how to perform basic immelman turns and split Ss became imperative to remaining nimble in dogfights, and this eventually extended to true mobility in 3D space, where combinations of these "vertical" adjustments with lateral movements became bread-and-butter. ac2 never comes close to requiring this, and although the vast majority of missions in ac3 rarely approach anything more difficult than its predecessors, the late-game trials it assesses you with are satisfying.

this is on top of numerous quality of life changes and upgrades, such as enemy draw distance at nearly 8000 meters away instead of barely 3000, gorgeous cloud cover replacing flat skies, selectable weapons, and instant mission retries with no monetary penalty. of these the most notable is that updated HUD designed by mr. driller mainstay minoru sashida. ergonomically curved with tasteful sections dedicated to the radar and plane status, the altitude and speed readings are significantly more visible. the best addition of all is the orientation ring, which provides not only an immediate compass display but also an invaluable visual on how the plane is oriented: the cardinal directions rotate to reflect your perspective relative to the Z axis, and the overall ring detaches itself from surrounding the vehicle the further you alter the pitch. it's so intuitive and natural to the experience that it makes flying in the first-person mode seemingly a must.

with that it comes full circle: a further sense of realistic control enhancing the feeling of instability and obfuscated input. I have to imagine that the reason ac3 is the only ac to retain this flight model is for this reason... it directly impacts the ambiance of the game by reducing its grandiose trappings. death-defying maneuvers are the exception and not the rule. yet simultaneously it creates a sense of communion with your craft; rather than bending it to your will you must cooperate with it and its controller. from the brain to the fingers to the playstation controller to the engine to the flight modeling, each cooperating through different abstraction layers to provide the sensation of real control. not (entirely) compromised to simply entertain while still maintaining the player's sense of agency. all of this with the goal that via immersion you'll fuse in and become one. in effect, sublimation.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.

the lynchpin of pikmin 1 discourse is the time limit; intensely upsetting for some and the core of the game's appeal to others. this 30 day time limit serves a dual function: it not only provides a rigid skill barrier for players to overcome in order to reach an acceptable ending, but it also enhances the fear of the unknown. pikmin 1 explicitly highlights olimar's journey as one of necessity, where his survival is never guaranteed or even feasible. he has absolutely no understanding of the planet he's landed on (though his observations form valuable foreknowledge for later series protagonists), and thus every interaction he has with the unfamiliar flora and fauna must be taken with care. the time limit synergizes with this to create a looming, uncertain objective. without a layout of the planet to observe and plan around, every single miniscule decision becomes weighed against hundreds of similiarly small decisions down the line based on their efficiency. this creates an anxious drive to further improve and strategize, with the tension of olimar's life on the line ever growing the more you commit to your actions. while this system is static and not particularly interactive from a mechanical standpoint, and pikmin 3 would toy with its implications on routing via the fruit juice system, pikmin 1's implementation remains finely tuned to maximize the fear of unfettered exploration.

it may surprise you, then, that hey pikmin expertly turns this immersive friction on its head. from the moment it begins, one can sense that this olimar is older, less naive, and more familiar with the eccentricities of faraway planets. when he crash-lands on yet another planet, there is little in the way of suspense or anxiety. immediately there is a new objective put in front of him: 30,000 sparklium needed as fuel to escape. to the casual player, this might seem like an ordinary challenge, one that scarcely can capture the emotional resonance of the original pikmin. many have struggled to stay with this game because of it. I know I fell prey to this way of thinking myself.

however, after a mere few worlds, the genius of this requirement becomes apparent. the necessary sparklium to leave the planet is vast, and the rate at which you obtain it seems slight in comparison. the old fear began setting in, just as potent and all-consuming as before. even without an explicit time limit, hey pikmin weaves the claustrophobia of pikmin 1 by fostering a profound sense of ennui. this is a game shrouded in decay, obsessed with teasing out the ending drops of lust for adventure; exhaustively interrogating olimar's exploitation of each world he encounters. its minimalist level design and mechanics follow suit. I quickly found the further in I dug that these elements combine together to make every second spent fruitlessly in the game's world to be wasted time. every empty corridor without much sparklium or moment of inelegant routing through a level reintroduced that telltale anxiety, the feeling that I might have let more precious seconds slip through my hands. in these times I felt like olimar, synapses blown from an overexposure to new, meaningless experiences while desiring only to escape the planet.

beyond my personal feelings, the game's use of its sparklium as a ludonarrative device becomes essential for routing as well, as there is a vital interplay between treasure collection and overall "speedrunning" through the critical path. while the game features a significant amount of treasure, secret stages, and other collectables, the heady brew of boredom concocted by its featureless environments and slow progression are obviously intended to ensure that no player would be able to stomach actually taking a completionist route through the game (it wouldn't make sense for olimar to want to spend more time on the planet). therefore, the player is met with a choice at every fork in their road. will they spend valuable time searching for more treasure in each level and risk spending unnecessary time playing the game when easier treasure exists later on, or will they beeline towards the exit, expecting that it will be more time efficient to gather treasure in a later level? while this may sound similar to how pikmin 1 lays out many of its interactables such as destroyable gates and bridges that may be unnecessary in the long run, hey pikmin makes a major refinement to this formula. pikmin 1's time limit is cloying and artificial; it forces the player to consider their time spent playing as wasted through the mechanic. hey pikmin manages to instill the feeling of wasted time through its own design; a much more organic solution. this wouldn't be possible if the developers didn't center the game around this simultaneously rich yet hollow sensation of weariness. its lack of design speaks volumes. this unique manipulation of the player's expectations on platformer design spoke to me; I felt a wave of relief that brought me to the verge of tears when I finally reached my sparklium goal a mere two stages before the game was set to finish, saving myself from further time spent backtracking through old levels for treasure.

hey pikmin further breaks down the series' valorization of far-flung exploration by providing a new perspective on the relationship between olimar and the pikmin. other games in the series establish olimar as a paternal figure to the pikmin, as he guides their reproduction through the onion. while the onion is briefly featured in hey pikmin, olimar's primary method of gathering pikmin to his cause is now pulling them out of marked spots in the environment. these spots often replenish when your pikmin stock gets too low, creating an uneasy sense of worthlessness to maintaining a full pack of pikmin. furthermore, pikmin procured in each level are simply discarded after the fact, with olimar extracting more and more pikmin from the environment in each level. indeed, this game goes furthest in suggesting that olimar's direction of the otherwise-sentient pikmin violates their personhood and sense of worth.

there are two main aspects to this. the first is another ludonarrative trick that the series has had up its sleeve since the first entry. this is an incredibly subtle touch by the developers, so it may not be obvious to some, but by making the pikmin AI horrifically stupid, it actually conveys the idea that the pikmin themselves are stupid. hey pikmin goes out of its way to show that olimar takes the pikmin into situations outside of their natural environment they are highly ill-equipped for cognitively, such as moving platforms, small differences in elevation, and areas near tiny enemies. this recklessness on the part of olimar juxtaposed with his inability to emote and lack of character comes off as a recharacterization of him as perhaps sociopathic. hey pikmin approaches this idea from another direction as well; in what seems like a homage to the strong anti-capitalist themes of pikmin 2, olimar uses the pikmin cast aside at the end of each level as a task force for resource extraction in other parts of the planet. this small between-level management minigame reeks of colonial exploitation, casting a new shadow at olimar's "activities" on each planet he visits. while pikmin 2 analyzed the economic implications of resource extraction from the untainted wilderness, hey pikmin instead centers those desperate workers forced into servitude at the fringes of empire.

vastly overlooked by the majority of the gaming public thanks to its late release in the life of the 3ds and seeming low-budget status, hey pikmin is a crowning aesthetic achievement that none should miss. it brilliantly unravels the myths behind pikmin as a series while simultaneously building upon the ideas of its forebears. pass it by only if you want to miss a shocking portrait of the listlessness and apathetic abuse at the heart of exploration. a forward step for the medium; sleep paralysis in video game form.

"For Resident Evil 4, I actually didn't stop my frenzy myself. I wanted a producer to step in and stop it for me," - Shinji Mikami

resident evil 4's gameplay mechanics can be summed up as the following: you have four different main gun types accompanied by grenades. enemies walk up slowly towards you with a few different weapon types, and to shoot them you must stop in place and take aim in an over-the-shoulder perspective. generally with multiple enemies, the goal is to stagger one and then run up and kick it, which not only gives leon copious I-frames but also serves as an AoE to any surrounding enemies. the handgun generally serves as your bread-and-butter choice in most close-quarters situations, while the shotgun clears out groups quickly, the rifle can eliminate precise long-distance targets, and the TMP allows a low-damage spray-and-pray solution for specific high-density situations. leon comes equipped with a knife at all times that can quickly kill downed enemies without expending ammo as quickly as well as open item crates strewn across the world. the majority of enemies are identical "ganados" fodder which can wield a variety of weapons, and can generally be taken down quickly with headshots. however, after a ganados's head explodes, there is a potential for a dangerous parasite "los plagas" to extrude from the wound, which can attack from range and generally requires high-powered weaponry (or a flash grenade) in order to kill. with all of this in mind, the core tenets of gameplay consist of keeping leon a comfortable distance from enemies, setting up AoE opportunities when possible, and strategically prioritizing highly-dangerous targets with complementary weapon selections.

that's the "gameplay" in a nutshell. it's a bit like saying super mario bros. 3 is a "game where the player must traverse from platform to platform via jumping, while analyzing the hazard space for the safest path..." blah blah blah. for so many games I feel like you can summarize the core experience with the mechanical interaction description, but when you get to something as unconventionally designed in terms of scenario as re4, it sort of defies being encapsulated by its mechanics. it takes virtually no time for the game to spread its wings, sort of like a biblical angel, literally so complex that it's not completely comprehendable upon first glance. and even this metaphor feels overwrought now that I've written it out because the game is so nonchalant about its own vastness. its almost workmanlike in how stuffed with content it is, treating the abundance of twists and new ideas as simply part of what it takes to put together a AAA.

that comparison with mario 3 wasn't idly tossed in; both games share a need to constantly change the objectives and gimmicks level-by-level, room-by-room. I don't think I can name a single time in re4 where I felt like it reused an idea, or remotely let a concept get stale before the credits rolled. yet the game delicately avoids feeling unfocused at the same time. instead of adding too many ingredients and risking a muddled palette, the designers instead simply rearrange old components in a new way every time you walk through a transition. you don't necessarily need to introduce a new enemy type every five minutes when you can just add switches you need to hit, or hidden doors that flood new enemies in when you hit a certain trigger, or a series of staircases that put leon on his back foot when attempting to attack those at the top, or even wrecking ball controls you need to nurse while facing an onslaught of enemies from all directions. the base gameplay is simplistic enough to apply to virtually any situation you could ever imagine and fun enough to carry whatever you throw at it, so why not throw everything into the pot?

the garradores are a great example of this. the first garrador you meet is fresh enough to stand on its own; you enter its dungeon, grab some key item or flip some switch (honestly can't remember), and attempt to leave, only for it to violently awake and begin chasing you. while its long iron claws make it immensely dangerous, it is blind and thus can only track you by sound. tricking it to getting its claws embedded in a wall or simply sneaking behind it opens up an opportunity to strike its plagas from behind, exposing its weak point and allowing you to dispose of the monster before exiting the dungeon. not long after this it appears for a second time. surely the logical iteration would be simply to add some other enemies into the equation, right? or maybe put it in a room where there are fewer ways to trick it into chasing after noises away from your position?

the game plops you into a cage with the garrador with multiple enemies on the perimeter snarl and take potshots at you, safe behind grates enclosing you in with the murderous creature. attempting to fight back will alert the garrador to your presence, ensuring your swift defeat. there happens to be an door the player can use to exit the cage, but it has a padlock that requires the player shoot it off, again putting the player at risk of the garrador closing in. does the player choose to avoid the attacks from outside the cage, luring the garrador into a spot where the player can take care of them before dealing with the rest? or do they risk leaving the cage with the garrador in immediate pursuit, hoping that the space to maneuver outside makes the encounter easier? one intrepid forum user in a thread I read discussing favorite parts of the game shared their solution: throw a grenade near the door, which instantly disintegrates the padlock, distracts the garrador towards the blast, and allows the player to sneak out and begin taking care with the external opponents. as someone who has always been a bit grenade-shy no matter why game I play, I would've never thought of this (I took the garrador out and ate the external damage before leaving the cage). it's this multiplicity of solutions for any given confrontation that makes the design truly sing.

all of these are strung between simple feel-good classic resi item fetching and some small puzzles here and there that keep the game structured and the locality of each area present in the player's mind. when even with these elements the combat becomes overbearing, the game throws a curveball, letting the player navigate the hedge maze or forcing them to evade the verdugo. that latter boss concept gets repeated later with the U3 without reusing a single lick of content, instead choosing a completely different way to instill the horror of a disgusting entity chasing you. imagine how easy it would've been for them to use multiple elevator-ride fights; the design team threw in a ski-lift section instead. area with ashley operating switches while you provide cover fire? somehow they restricted themselves to only doing it once. which lest I forget, when the game feels like there's not quite enough spice, they'll toss ashley into the equation, who you must escort and protect to avoid an instant game over. somehow they even made this work! the enemies primarily focusing attacks on you and your ability to instantly take care of anyone who attempts to abscond with her in their grasp goes a long way towards making what should be a detestable mechanic overall rather nonintrusive.

unfortunately, with the relative simplicity of the gameplay, bosses tend to be less exciting and more of an afterthought. unload bullets into the boss, run away, reload, rinse and repeat. it doesn't help that virtually every boss is replete with attacks that require dodging via a QTE, which show up far too often in the game in general and jeopardize any real fear or unique qualities for each fight. at worst you can simply use a rocket launcher to instantly kill any boss that is giving you a hard time (I used the free one in the castle on salazar), but overall most of them are more like ammo dumps rather than true tests of skill. on that note, I also can't say I like the regenerators or iron maidens very much. it's a late-game reminder that the genre is technically survival horror, and I think it does a solid job on that note, but hitting the weak spots can be fiddly, especially when they're located on the monster's back like in the first iron maiden fight. for a game that otherwise doesn't really penalize non-optimal shots on regular enemies it's a bit of a nuisance, but I never ran out of ammo regardless and it seems like eventually you will kill one of these enemies with raw damage even if you don't quite hit the final weak spot.

obviously a game this utterly rich with peerless design drew a lot of attention, and like that aforementioned angel, grotesque in its majesty and scope, onlookers and fellow designers created images of it that couldn't capture the vastness of its splendor. more specifically, everyone ran with the novel camera perspective to instead make legions of less-inspired shooters bursting with endless arenas of slight variations on the same theme, with none of the charm or endless inspiration capcom production studio 4 seemed to contain. in hindsight, I don't think resident evil 4 really separates itself all that much from something like gears of war in the sense of carrying a certain level of prestige or dignity. both games simply set out to make great action experiences for those interested. resident evil 4 is humble in its creativity, but frenzied in its drive to never give the player a second of boredom amidst its staggering campaign.

what this game really nails is fulfilling this chaotic destructive urge in the player while also refusing to give into any sort of alienating or cynical aesthetic to justify it. in many ways it's a flippant creation mythos, rendering the earth asunder to create the sky anew. keita takahashi's sculpture student background can instantly be seen through these stellar structures that form from societal detritus, expanding and growing and taking on unique forms of every permutation of the level. each run is a celebration, with joyous rhythms from a range of latin, jazz, and electronic influences intertwined with screams, cries, and gunshots as the existing structures crumble and make way for astral creation. and it's so bittersweet when it finishes too.

gameplay is also masterful of course, not really shocking anyone by saying that. control this giant haphazard clump as you ricochet off of obstacles and absorb everything in your path. they could have easily left the game with no opposing force and instead intricately laid out a full playfield of different sized objects in each level, constantly forcing the player to make snap judgments about what can be picked up, where they should proceed next, and how they should weave through these patterns. the perfect push-pull of precise object management sections with the catharsis of finally breaking through to the right size where nothing can stand in your way.

after playing the original jet set radio so much in my younger years, I was absolutely salivating at the prospect of getting to play its follow-up at some point. however, my dad was a firm sony acolyte by that point, so I never had an opportunity to snag an xbox and give jsrf a shot. right before I began college I managed to get ahold of an original xbox for $40 (an unthinkably low price to me now, where an og will cost ~$120) with a copy of jsrf/sega gt 2002 for $10 (which even at the time was a complete rip-off, I found a 50 cent copy mere weeks later). that first playthrough began so well, but as I progressed, it dawned on me just how severely different and compromised the experience was versus the original, and after beating it I reluctantly admitted to myself that the venture had been a bust. I got to play one more title on xbox (silent hill 2, which was an absolute godsend for poor gamers like myself in the pre-definitive edition on pc days) before it succumbed to trace corrosion from a capacitor leakage on my 1.4 board. I scrambled to fix it, eventually installing a new motherboard/HDD combo until within months the EEPROM failed and I was left with a brick yet again. recently I opted to get an xbox 360 s on sale instead, and after finding jsrf on the backwards compatibility list, I felt the urge to return and perhaps see the game in a new light, or to reevaluate the game without its predecessor looming over it.

instead, with a heavy heart I must say that jsrf is even worse than I remember it being upon my first playthrough. the wonder I felt traversing the startlingly-large areas on my first playthrough has been replaced with utter boredom, and the aspects I so hated past the halfway point now strangle my enjoyment even further. it's remarkably ambitious, and I respect the team's desire to remix the original gameplay and setting into an alternate interpretation of the original, but its design strips out the genius of jsr's interlocking mechanics and accentuates the worst aspects.

jsrf moves away from the mission-based structure of the original and allows players to explore a segmented open world, all centered around the GG's garage. there's some level of interconnectivity between the levels, but in actuality three main hubs exist: one based around shibuya terminal, one based around the sewage facility accessed through rokkaku-dai heights, and one highway connecting 99th street, the skyscraper district, and highway zero together with various one-off areas attached. any unlocked area can be accessed at any time to complete optional challenges and collect graffiti souls. however, the game is otherwise rather linear, with objectives being relayed via cutscenes and directives from professor k over the returning pirate radio station Jet Set Radio. occasionally these objectives can be completed out of order, but otherwise a slightly uncomfortable amount of time is spent backtracking to reach far-flung destinations.

the level design itself initially comes off as much more expansive than its predecessor, but further examination reveals the actual tasks are more rigid and demanding. the majority of areas are designed as giant loops to faciliate various races and chases throughout the game, and given that there are often one-way chokepoints that prevent the player from exploring them backwards, it is difficult to freely move about in each beyond going around the loop repeatedly. when missing objectives or collectables along the way this becomes exceedingly tedious. shibuya terminal is a tidy contraindicator to this trend at the very least. this level drastically expands upon the modest bus terminal from the original jsr by adding a mesh of walkways high above the cars below, with nooks and crannies spread throughout and numerous ways to transport oneself from edge to edge. fittingly enough, the game opens with a kinetic sizzle reel of the GG's rolling through this area and performing a dazzling array of tricks all while bounding between rails and lightpoles and jumping between bus stop overhangs. some of the other non-loop stages are not so lucky. 99th street features a nice dragon statue centerpiece but with two nearly-identical downtown shopping areas on either side that lack identity beyond reinterpreting a similar yet singular area from the original title. hikage street is even worse, with three boxed areas with a giant spiraling staircase each, and an interconnecting maze that will force the player to repeatedly and slowly puruse their map in order to proceed.

in terms of the challenges presented, jsrf hews far closer to being a traditional platformer than jsr. each area is focused around a single type of obstacle, and generally moving through each area requires repeatedly surmounting the obstacle, whether it's chained wall-rides on billboards, flipping off of ladders, or doing boost jumps out of half-pipes. unfortunately, given that the skating and grinding has still not progressed far from jsr, there simply isn't enough nuance in control available to actually iterate the difficulty of the obstacles throughout each area, and so instead the game resorts to simply copy-pasting structures for long spans and forcing the player to repeat the same tricks ad nauseum with little variation. enjoy mindless rail-to-wall-ride-back-to-rail sections in chuo street? have fun going through five in a row every time you have the misfortune of needing to visit the rear of the stage for any reason. some stages pull this off better than others: the sewage facility, while mostly linear in terms of how the obstacles are reached, has a variety of different half-pipe-centric challenges throughout its runtime that keep the concept fresh throughout, even though a section requiring literal jump-between-platforms platforming halfway through illustrates how poorly jsr's slippery momentum-based movement translates to grind-less areas. on the other end of this is the fortified residential zone towards the end of the game, where the bottom level involves flipping off ladders and the top level involves making long jumps off of steep downward ramps towards spiral rail climbs. on this bottom level, remembering which of the many identical ladder sections you've already climbed (switches must be activated at the top of each one) becomes tiresome, especially since the map does not seem to help in the slightest. by the time you've surpassed both levels, you're thrust into three back-to-back sections requiring you to fall through wooden awnings to find which ones are sturdy enough to support your weight and can lead you to the next area. one by itself would have been troublesome enough, but three separate ones chained together with no breaks truly illustrates a laziness in design that should have been cut down to size long before the game went gold.

the controls themselves have been tweaked, and on the surface the changes fix many issues with the first game:

-player acceleration has been bumped up slightly, removing some of the sluggishness many complained about. on its own this is a great change other than making turn radii just a wee bit wider than the first game, but the way it interacts with the grinding is suspect. when jumping, the difference between a regular jump and a trick jump (with exaggerated air time)
depends on the speed the player currently has, just as in the first game. since the player is overall faster, it's very difficult to ever pull off a regular jump, and so virtually every jump from a rail is overly floaty.

-rails grab more easily than they did in the first, making missed grinds less frequent. in the original this would have been a nice change, but jsrf vastly increases the number of grindable surfaces at any given time, and it results in far too many instances of the player randomly grabbing onto rails when they aren't meant to. a grind button is still desperately needed here, and possibly a way to quickly jump between parallel rails a la sonic.

-large graffiti has been changed from a series of QTEs to a group of various one-shot graffiti points in a row. while theoretically this should keep the pace steady, it ends up causing unnecessary interruptions because the targeting system simply refuses to let you do a line of them in one go. occasionally I have actually gotten a run of five or seven graffiti points when holding the button down, but it's so inconsistent and really halts the game when I have to round back to get the one or two points that somehow didn't get covered, especially when they're on a rail.

-the previously unused X and Y buttons have now been allotted to performing tricks, which is a godsend on rails, where they allow you to build speed without jumping. if I had to single out one addition that really elevates the experience and that I would love to backport to jsr, it would be this one. however, there's an awkward unforced error in the design here in that the player must use a certain rhythm to perform them lest it fails. if the rhythm were consistent it would be no big deal, but it absolutely changes depending on location/speed/incline/etc. and is entirely indecipherable. I would also raise the max cap on speed you could gain a bit, but that's a more minor tweak.

-you can also now turn around at will by pressing Y while moving compared to the awkward analog stick method from the original. you also frequently turn around while performing tricks, and will land moving backwards. this is way more of a hindrance than a boon, since you cannot boost while turned around, and as far as I'm aware your turn radius is even larger than it was before. totally useless feature as far as I'm concerned.

-boosting has been changed from a cooldown with minor effects to a 10-can cost with a major increase in speed. in theory I agree with the decision, but the price is just way too much... five cans probably would have worked, but with every character having a 30 can cap now, you'll have to jettison a third of your cans for a three second boost. there's also a frustrating smear filter it applies to the screen when boosting, and it can make it difficult to discern fine details when the boost is being used before jumping.

I've now penned an awful lot of words describing just basic movement/graffiti/level design/etc., and that's because here it makes up a good 75% of the game. unlike the first game, which required an understanding of multiple intertwined mechanics and hazards to successfully develop routes for each level, here you're often required to simply go around spraying every graffiti point in an environment with no pushback from external forces. herein lies the major design paradigm shift between the two titles: the original focused on creativity and route-planning in environments with dynamic processes, whereas jsrf focuses on fixed challenges delivered in strictly partitioned segments. the challenges themselves require a greater level of finesse to accomplish, but the only punishment is generally falling some distance and needing to try again. every punishment is delivered via frustration and lots of retracing steps to climb up and attempt the trick again, and while this is technically easier than the original, which required full-mission retries upon death, this game feels so much more unnecessarily punitive. the verticality of many stages exacerbates this issue with just how far you can fall from a screw-up. failure in jsr often encouraged new strategies, and each level was open-ended enough in that game to allow route changes if a particular approach wasn't working. here it's just constantly bashing your head against clunky challenges over and over again, and the game is so much worse for it.

of course, there's more beyond simply spraying graffiti and platforming here. for one, combat has taken on a heightened important in quartered-off encounters. generally you will run into an invisible trigger that plops you into a small arena surrounded by electrified fences and forced to fight cops or golden rhino. fighting mainly consists of running into opponents, knocking them down, and spraying them... and it really never gets more complicated against human foes. the lack of mechanics and variety seems almost unfinished considered how many times you need to take on enemy forces, and beyond some armored opponents requiring a boost to knock over there's little challenge or strategy in taking down humanoid opponents. the sole exception is a late-game miniboss who can use doc ock-esque extendable robotic arms to attempt to attack you, allowing you to grind on his arms once they have been shot and knock him down; even this fight never increases in complexity past the beginning. there's also a couple true bosses to take on, which range in quality. the mid-game fight against the spider-esque police mecha is so quick and simple as to be unmemorable. there's a late-game train robot which is great in how it forces you to jump between rails to dodge various telegraphed attacks, but as mentioned before jumping between rails is very clumsy, and you'll often waste so many cans boosting to get close enough to attack that you won't have enough to actually attack with. the final boss is particularly annoying in that you must boost into it multiple times with no indicator that you are doing any damage until it finally breaks open the weak point. by this point, you must drop to the bottom of the stage, grab cans to restock, and then climb all the way back up in a rather annoying sequence that requires you to make multiple blind jumps (the camera faces towards the player during spirals, and with jumps at the end of the spirals you must memorize where the rail ends... very frustrating). the original boss was certainly not amazing, but it was at the very least much less involved in terms of the platforming involved. the original stood out to me in how little it emphasized combat overall and how well the game performed without it, so the move towards required combat here grates on me a bit, especially since it's not particularly fun.

rival gangs also show up here, with their own set of events for you to take on. "Tagger's Tag" returns from the original game, where you must chase each rival gang member in a loop and spray them a certain number of times. this is arguably the worst part of the original game, and thankfully it's slightly better here. the new lock-on system makes staying behind a moving target much easier, and downed rivals don't deal damage like they used to. a couple of the fights do have much higher can counts required to take them on (poison jam took me 30 a pop), which is certainly annoying, but since you can hold the button down here to spray consistently it's less of a problem. races aren't too difficult either given that you understand the loop in a given stage. however, the capture the flag game is a total dud. in open levels where you could choose and optimize routes between flags, perhaps this could be fun, but in both of the available capture the flag matches the areas are virtually straight lines you must run between. if you grab the first flag, and the next flag is straight behind you in a corridor, your opponents trailing you will have an instant headstart on that flag, making racing for it pointless. in the hikage street version, it's better to straight-up memorize the flag placements and then only go for the odd-numbered flags. rounding these out is the absolute slog that is death ball. halfway through the game you're captured and forced to win three back-to-back death ball rounds to earn your freedom. this sport consists of grabbing a ball and running it around a track while avoiding your opponents. there's a mechanic where you can toss a ball to and from your AI-controlled partner, but it's completely broken, and your companion is next to useless in terms of tactics. on my first playthrough this was a nightmare for me, and this time I ended up trivializing it by simply standing in place, waiting for the AI to get closeish, and then running while hoping the AI didn't attempt to run backwards and cross me at any point. total waste of time, and especially unbearable considering you have to do three in a row.

I do want to give the game credit where credit is due of course, and it's impossible to downplay the technical improvements the game has made over the dreamcast original. it's sadly unclear what the early dreamcast builds of this looked like, but this is pushes the xbox non-stop to great effect with long draw distances and complex level geometry. the new aesthetic moves away from the 10-minutes-in-the-future setting of jsr while completely skirting any sort of gritty cyberpunk look in favor of sleek, almost retrofuture robot-esque characters and pastel colored buildings. I still have a preference for the original areas, but it relates more to the jsrf having such artificial area design to the point where it ruins the immersion that the original creates with its much more naturalistic urban layouts. the soundtrack is also incredibly strong, favoring a heavier dance influence over the more kitschy plunderphonics of the original. there are fewer guest tracks, but the ones that appear are just as memorable as those from the first game. real talk: birthday cake gets some undue hate, but the real detestable track here is Aisle 10. such a beyond-corny rap track that reeks of loser white boy energy; I was shocked to find out that it was an actual hit that they licensed and not some shitty no-name artist. thankfully we also got contributions from The Latch Brothers, a very solid beastie boys side project. there's a lot of solid little technical touches; the one that sticks out for me is how the characters seem to melt at high speeds, like their polygons begin warping from the momentum they carry.

it's not that I don't want to like this game; I wanted to love it when I originally played it. I made it up to the death ball tournament completely convinced that it was a classic in its own right and that my frustration would cease with time. this replay has made it so incredibly apparent that this isn't the case though, and any slight nostalgia I had for it quickly disappeared given the how dull the experience is. to me "dull" describes the majority of the game, and there's no better section that illustrates it than the noise tank section past the halfway point. you're required to take down many noise tanks that have infested the previous areas you've already explored, and rather than any sort of intelligent enemy design they simply stand in bunches looping their dance animation, often floating inexplicably above the ground waiting for you to run into them so they can disappear with no effects. just a total drag that siphons your time by running you through on-rails areas you've already experienced. no matter what I do in this game it always seems to interrupt my flow to toss me into some shit I don't wanna do: some random fight, running back and forth between areas, untelegraphed and uncancellable events with rival gangs, and any number of other tedious and frustrating activities, none of which make me think about the mechanics outside of basic execution. it's not the kind of game I want to invest time into, and to me it doesn't live up its predecessor.

a note about playing this on 360: everything I said above but a good smattering of slowdown (depends on area + player character) along with some screen tearing. it made the skyscraper district -- already one of the worst areas in the game -- so bad as to give me a headache... it's definitely not the optimal way to play, but this game is already rather inaccessible as is, so I wouldn't blame anyone for trying it out that way.

been feverishly trying to finish up my last few games for 2AGO recently and I figured it'd be a good idea to do a quickie runthrough mgs3 for some easy points. run it on a low difficulty, skip all the cutscenes, and end up earning a ton of points in return. not a bad idea by the looks of it... until one of the mods suggested that I should run it on the original "snake eater" release on normal difficulty for some extra points. that didn't sound too bad! I legit went and bought a copy of the game to play on a real ps2 with a real sorta tiny CRT on our coffee table. playing mgs3 as it was originally "meant" to be played intrigued me, as it has since I was a high school student playing it for the first time.

I must have been a junior when I first played it. it was fall (I believe I played the whole game in november), and it felt like one of those gaming coming-of-age moments where I had really enveloped myself in something fantastical and totally unique. I had conquered this worldly adventure, defeated each member of the cobra unit, sabotaged the shagohod, and watched the white blossoms fade to crimson at a time in my life when I was still delving into the kinds of classic games that would really define my tastes for years to come. at the time I was actually playing on a crt as well - a much bigger one that my parents had bought two decades prior, with the 16:9 ps3 port awkwardly squashed into a 4:3 composite signal. it was challenging and often stressful, but it infused me with a sense of courage and awe at the same time. it was more complex than anything I had played, broader in scope than virtually any of the (admittedly older) worlds I had ever seen, and crafted more expertly than even most books I had read up to then.

I first knew this was going to be a rough replay when I began a hard run of the hd port after doing multiple marathon dogtag runs of mgs2 back in the early months of the pandemic. the latter I had affirmed was still my favorite (as I've spent much time privately and publically digesting), and I was expecting mgs3 to be a little rougher around the edges... but let's just say I didn't make it far past the ocelot fight. now less focused on the presentation and more on the mechanics, the game just didn't sing to me like those repeat runs of mgs2 had, and I quickly instead moved on to trying mgs4 and peace walker for the first time.

now back to this playthrough: how troubling is the infamous top-down camera that defines the original release, hastily "corrected" in the subsistence release a year later? I'm divided a bit on this. if I had a mind to, I could easily tug some contrarian thread extoling the cinematic framing that the fixed camera provides versus its clunkier free-cam counterpart a la yakuza 2, and admittedly at points I did feel this way. kojima explained the initial camera perspective was to unite the game as part of a trilogy with mgs1 and 2, and while it feels more likely to me that the the 3D camera was deemed too taxing performance-wise (the game as a whole really strains the ps2), I sort of understand the throughline he was trying to create there. playing mgs3 in its original form visually conditions the player to remember their experiences in shadow moses and the big shell, and in the process affixes its areas as extensions of the older environments rather than a full reinvention.

but mgs3 is a reinvention; it may as well be the start of a brand-new series. mgs2 perfected the old metal gear formula - military locales with slight sci-fi elements, smaller indoor areas, no natural cover, truly ghost-like stealth - in such a way that there wasn't a point to continuing on with those design parameters. mgs3 is the rough draft for a new kind of stealth game. old metal gear had its run, but it was time to catch up with titles that really took advantage of the 3D space and the locales it could create. the new metal gear made you a natural predator, slithering through foliage, feeding off the land, disposing of guards, and patiently taking stock of potential openings. and really? it's a concept that kojima didn't really nail until mgsv. in that game you have so much at your disposal that you do truly become the big boss of legend, the punished demon wrecking havoc on soviet troops through countless outposts and bases. you're actually superhuman, and unknowable to those that you prey upon. even through that it never ceases to feel dynamic and punishing if you don't plan your moves, perform reconnaissance, and stay on your belly.

mgs3 never gets quite that far. in an effort to boost believability, the ever-useful soliton radar has been stripped from snake's arsenal. a sad choice but necessary to reach the next level of truly self-reliant stealth action. on its own this wouldn't be a problem, but at the same time the guard's have been granted some sort of hivemind ability to immediately spring into action at the slightest glimpse of your person. mgs2 distinguished itself on having its AI naturally react to your presence with tension and fear, needing to radio HQ to inform the others that you were sighted, but mgs3 cuts down this reaction time to a split second instead. briefly spotted by a guard 100 feet away? now everyone in the location will descend on your location instantly. no chance to get a quick headshot because someone accidentally walked up on you alone or even use CQC. if you happen to miscalculate a single guard's location or miss their existence entirely, you will certainly be punished.

this punishment is more of a light slap on the wrist though. mgs3 leans on far more "get from point A to point B" objectives and in the process kneecaps its ability to punish you for not remaining stealthy. given the amount of lethal heavy weaponry you receive, it's obvious that stealth was never the sole intended option. snake can eat dozens of bullets and outrun guards easily, making simply running to your destination often much quicker and more viable than actually attempting a redo of a given area once your cover is blown. you can't reset to a checkpoint anyway, so might as well just skedaddle and try to get a couple screens ahead before forcing a death and getting to respawn in a later area with the alert wiped.

even when you're forced to actually remain in an area to complete a specific objective, it feels mandatory to tranq virtually everyone. the tranq gun feels somewhat divisive on whether it simplifies the gameplay loop too much, and mgs3 feels like it leans on it heavily for less experienced players to get by. the alternative is CQC - which the game is absolutely effusive about - but in a game where guards can easily hear your footsteps, actually getting close to get the grab and not just awkwardly punch them feels night impossible in many cases. it's worth mention that CQC has a clunky, over-involved set of states that left me with the manual firmly in hand for my entire first run. instead, most rooms initally led me to finding a good vantage spot, getting solid tranq shots on everyone I could see, and crawling about through hoping to death that I hadn't missed an obscured opponent.

and the CQC reminds me: oh god, the controls. mgs2 already had a bit of a stuffed control scheme, but servicable to those who would learn it. mgs3 leans too heavily on the pressure-sensitive buttons of the dualshock 2, and in the process makes certain things like firing a weapon (specifically the AK-47) feel woefully unresponsive. having to look up why I was failing counter-CQC against the boss only to find that I was not hitting the button hard enough felt like a slap to the face. the crawling is also abysmal given how vital it is to progression. it is difficult to turn and you will occasionally get stuck on objects if you go prone too close to something else, making apparent how little they felt the need to update said controls over predecessors that used it far more sparingly. weapons still lack a reticle, and certain weapons require holding L1 on top of already holding R1 just to aim down sights, which makes the motorcycle chase section more uncomfortable than it had to be. it's a system that should have been overhauled following mgs2, and it's unfortunate that this game released before over-the-shoulder aiming became the norm.

this of course is ignoring the "survival" aspects, interrupting the above gameplay with constant detours into the menu. changing camo to get a high index is mandatory if you literally don't want to be seen crawling from extremely long distances away, which forces menuing on many room transitions to adapt to the environment. god forbid you miss an important camo from not exploring, because some of them feel near mandatory (I was often screwed indoors for this reason). the food menu is an easier one, simply letting you refil your stamina with various foodstuffs you've obtained or carved. the cure menu is obnoxious and tedious, but veterans will know that using said menu is virtually pointless on normal difficulty anyway since letting wounds heal on their own is mandatory to expanding the HP bar, so I basically never bothered with it until near the end.

and I could keep going on, just blabbing about how annoying I find playing this game now, analyzing the mechanical interactions that fail, and just generally whining about what may be one of the beloved games ever made. there is no satisfaction in this for me! this particular replay, with a stuttering framerate and no freecam and skipping all the cutscenes and codec calls and just running at the instant I got an alert felt like a sledgehammer utterly crushing my perception of the game. it's so hard for me to discern what I actually think about this game. the gameplay really didn't change at the end of the day: the way I played it just did. with my original playthrough I let myself actually try to embody naked snake, and in the process experiencing his finest hour was cathartic. on this playthrough I rushed through and neutered the game's impact.

one of the ways to rectify this is to lean into the kojima-isms present in the game, which are possibly more present here than any of his other games. you can blow up the enemy's ammo/food supply to hurt their morale and make their weapons useless! blow up the helicopter at the base in the early game to prevent it from patrolling the mountains! throw rotten food at the fear to get him to eat it when he gets low on stamina! but do these really enhance the overall gameplay? or are they just trivia to spout and share? they don't legitimize the game's structure unless your criteria for a game's quality is how many weird things you can know about it. I don't want to let my opinion of the game rest entirely on such a flimsy structure. obviously those little touches are still cool, but my big praises for mgs2 don't revolve around the fact that you can use the directional mic during the emma sniper section to hear her talk to the diarrhea guy. it's still great for discussing the game with friends though; one of my friends is playing it for the first time and when he told me he decided he was just going to kill every guard in his path I had a good laugh at his expense knowing that he'd be complaining endlessly once he got to the sorrow.

so this is the real reason I've been reluctant to attempt to retrospectively review this game. having not played it since 2015, I couldn't really write a review in post without replaying the game, but something meant to be a breezy playthrough like I just finished ended up unveiling ugly aspects of the game I wish I didn't have to consider. however you as the reader conceive of my reviewing style, I certainly self-consciously see it somewhere in the more formalist space, less concerned with conveying experiential nuance in favor of revealing mechanical interactions and the strengths of the underlying rules and objectives of the game. thus it was impossible for me to work through my conception of the game without me in the process undermining my own thesis on how amazing this game actually is and how much it blew my mind back in high school.

so the replay was a bit of a blessing in disguise; it let me split my psychic image of this game a bit, and shunt all of those negative feelings into this playthrough while still maintaining the idealized vision of that First Time. I think the two can coexist, and maybe sometime I'll finally finish that hard playthrough while actually watching the cutscenes and doing everything the "right way". then through gritted teeth I can do my masterpiece review, dissecting its cold war setting and observations on the expendability of even those deemed "special" in order to further the goals of the state. maybe I can do a volgin and solidus comparison, or explain the parallels between bosses like vulcan raven and the fury, or the evolution from sniper wolf to the end. I can share my praises for the gorgeous environments, the sublime pacing, and the top-notch level design. the setpieces, that gorgeous theme, and the heartbreaking credits song. but that review isn't this review, and it may just live in my brain perpetually. mgs3 as I originally played it will continue to live as its own log, potentially review-less. the only context being that date, and the memories swirling around growing ever fainter as I grow older and less connected to my high school self. perhaps laughing at my friend for his killing spree was bit hypocritical; I did coup de grace every enemy my first playthrough, only to face the sorrow in a grueling 20-minute encounter that rattled me quite a bit. the younger me would be proud to learn I killed only one guard on the road to the sorrow fight this time.

there is something definitive I'll pull from this experience though, and it's probably a big reason why I didn't just leave this at "this game hasn't aged well for me." most of the bosses in this game are not really that impressive on a second-go-round, which is fine for metal gear; they're much more about witnessing their monologues for the first time and getting to see the big gimmick of each fight (for the record, I ran my system clock forward to kill the end quickly; I'm doing this for a competition after all!). however, I somehow forgot to pick up the snow camo - I think I grabbed it and then died and forgot to grab it again on the replay - and thus was forced to face the boss naked. the fight was protracted and unexpected, and in that way it suddenly became what my younger me remembered from all those years ago. blindly stumbling around turned to methodically picking new sniping positions where I felt momentarily safe, and desperately flailing against her CQC became praying for chances for free damage. when I finally witnessed the flowers turn in all of its single-digit framerate glory that catharsis of surmounting the challenge returned. it was elation. I did sit and watch those final scenes, and man does it still make me tear up. that graveside view of big boss honoring the true patriot will never not affect me. so that's how I know that somewhere I still think metal gear solid 3 is a unalienable masterpiece, a peak of the medium that no one should miss, and one of the unquestionable most profound games for me at the sunset of my adolescence.

but god if they had just remade this on the fox engine or something I would much rather play that instead. maybe I'll give in and try that 3ds port...

odyssey's main contribution to the collectathon canon was the acknowledgement that to make a robust collectathon experience, there needed to be a constant shuffling of verbs to avoid tedium and vary the challenges available to the player. while this has always been a feature of the genre, the usual approach is to overburden the main character with loads of unlockable powers, or to lock new toolkits behind minigames that limit player expressivity within strict spatial barriers or time limits. odyssey's capture mechanic neatly allows temporary changes in player verbs without overloading mario's basic (though very nuanced ofc) toolkit while also bounding capture use organically via locality with a lot of room for the player to experiment.

while the new kirby obviously doesn't implement the open-area trappings of odyssey, it incorpoates the capture via the new mouthful mode, which overlays whatever copy ability he has with a new basic toolkit from whatever he's swallowed. doing this allows the developers to dip into the deep well of alternative verbs without violating the player's choice of copy ability, but at the same time implementing these takes away from the number of copy abilities available. the weird and wild among kirby's long list of ablities over the years have been culled in favor of these limited mouthful abilities, and since the set of mouthful objects becomes well-worn quickly, it can make the second-to-second gameplay feel monotonous.

however, kirby levels are not iterative in the way that mario levels are, where challenge concepts are evolved over the course of a small period to test the player's abilities in more and more demanding contexts. instead, kirby levels have always bounced from idea to idea with more focus on surprising and disorienting the player; each three-star door could completely flip the level's idea on its head, or shift to something else entirely. with this design technique in place, the mouthful abilities really shine as ways to quickly shift a player's attention towards the new limited verbs before shoving them into something different. these are joyrides, not obstacle courses, and the game only gets better and better as it continues to develop the amount of variety for the player into the endgame. the beginning is shallow and rote of course (as all kirby games are to some extent), but quality only scales up as the adventure goes on. the later levels are a whirlwind of mechanics that consistently delighted me; a veritable funhouse of new ideas and environments. the added treasure rooms bolster the experience as well by offering more compelling tests of the player's comprehension of each toolkit, at least when they go beyond simple gauntlets of enemies.

on pop star this would have only pushed the pink puffball so far, but in this new world the developers wring a lot of fascinating vistas and locales out of this decaying metropolis. each world hews close to tried-and-true world themes with the added twist of navigating human-like architecture, which is new territory for the series and novel for platformers in general. at their best, the overgrown foliage and buried structures paradoxically make the land feel more alive than many of kirby's previous retreads of familiar territory. at worst, they make the engine sputter while simultaneously limiting the scope of the world outside the explicit frame of the camera. while the on-rails approach suits kirby's overall hurried design, it also means that true hidden paths and secrets cannot truly lie outside of the player's view, making them often feel like perfunctory methods of handing out additional coins or ablities. to further develop the world, the devs have added the waddle dee town, which expands as the game progresses to offer a variety of optional content and items. unfortunately it's not much more than an interactive menu, but at the very least it offers a beefy package to those interested in content besides the main levels.

what really sealed this as one of my favorite kirby games were the bosses, all of which really thrive in a 3D space. there's much more room for interesting patterns and dynamic encounters when you aren't limited to 2D, and the developers did a great job overall designing bosses that smartly harness the space (besides sillydillo, who is undercooked and not particularly interesting to fight). with the added bonus of kirby's new witch time-esque dodge ability, trying to take down each boss as efficiently as possible is more interesting than it ever has been before in the series, even if some of the new weapon upgrading can trivialize encounters. in fact, it works so naturally that it fits the kirby series in an odd way: older games have a reputation for secretly housing stellar beat-em-up mechanics, and this game seems to have snuck in its own little character action sequences.

to that end, what this series really needs to shine in 3D is to lean into those aspects. let me carry multiple copy abilities at once and swap between them for combos. give me more enemies with complex attack patterns that don't go down in a single hit. strip out some of the platforming and give me better mini-bosses instead (the variety for them here is noticeably poor). provide an option for a true nightmare difficulty from the beginning. this game is quite good on its own merits, but what truly elevates it is the joy of combat, especially when that final gauntlet of bosses hits absolutely perfectly. another game in this style won't cut it, give us the action game kirby we deserve...

the fact that it leans into those strengths at all at least illustrates that the designers have more confidence in their level design abilities than in star allies, where the combat was again very fleshed out but placed in levels that never even vaguely attempted to leverage the character's strengths. for that alone forgotten land would be up there on my list of kirby games, and given the solid size of the package (ever more important now that the series retails for $60 a pop), I'd say it's worth trying out for any switch owner. it's the first game I've played in a while where I'm actually looking forward to playing a bit more of the post-game content, even if I'm not compelled to do every optional objective. this is about as polished of a kirby experience as we've ever gotten.