could've fooled me that this was anything other than a mid licensed title! even the wikipedia page seems like it was out to mislead me: "The gameplay largely focuses on exploration and missions; players often race enemies and interact with supporting characters on timed quests. The game also features many elements found in role-playing games, such as explorable worlds and side tasks." sort of juicing it up a bit!

the simpsons hit & run is a driving game, plain and simple. you occasionally exit the car to do some rudimentary platforming sections to collect coins or other items, but for the vast majority of the campaign and side missions you're behind the wheel. there are a handful of mission types: typical races (which are surprisingly infrequent), avoiding a car chasing you, enemy takedowns a la burnout, trailing someone, trailing someone to collect items they drop, hitting someone to collect items they drop... etc. variations on a theme is what I'm getting at. if you're not moseying around on your own the game offers few curveballs to retain your interest.

good luck actually driving in a straight line however. hit & run has a passable driving model to be clear, but not all the cars are built equally, and it's easy to find ones that oversteer too easily, don't respond to input well, are too erratic on bumpy terrain, or have poor drifting. this wouldn't be a problem if you could simply choose whichever car suited your tastes, but unfortunately the game is littered with missions that force you into a specific vehicle, especially in the endgame. all of this is made worse by the fact that the entire world is rendered in that flat, desaturated 6th gen look that makes the incredibly busy world very indistinct and difficult to navigate. taking one of the slippier cars out for a spin in one of the night levels is just asking for trouble, and the game makes you do it more often than not.

the individual missions also feel cheap and tacked on. the story justifications are dumb and unfortunately not particularly funny, and they really don't drive the plot forward in any meaningful way or include any fun setpieces. the mission repetition is tiring, and the late game ups the ante on difficulty with some truly strict timers on top of the terrible mandatory vehicles. I must single out the takedown missions for somehow ruining one of the coolest things you can do in a video game (destroying other people's cars) by making every car rigid and spongey, entirely sucking out all of the fun in the process. prepare for minutes on end of bumper-checking your opponent and adding a sliver of damage to their gauge, all while desperately waiting for their specious AI to freak out and run into a wall or drive into oncoming traffic, commiting suicide in the process. the endgame attempts to vary things with some nuclear barrel cargo that detonates on any hard impact, but this quickly loses its flavor that you must do it in three back-to-back missions, all of which have an identical route. this is after two missions of the same route without the nuclear barrels. it would be a snoozer if they weren't so goddamn difficult, especially the final mission. I swear to god having just beaten ninja gaiden black that this was the more challenging game.

it didn't have to be this way either. the levels are well-laid out, with lots of shortcuts and explorable secrets littered about. the game does a great job sprinkling references to the show everywhere in the environment, with every major location showing up throughout the game's three hubs. the platforming gets the job done too, and the little areas with buzz cola boxes and wasp cameras were cute attractions that really could've been expanded. when the game actually throws a platforming mission at you in the main story, I felt a little twinge of disappointment that there wasn't more. they're not complex, but with a little extra work they could've fleshed out the game in a much-needed way.

all of this is merely mediocre (and frustrating given the difficulty) but really what dooms this game is the writing. this released right before the 15th season of the show, and to completely honest, I've never been able to make it past the 9th. the writing sidesteps any sort of built-in gags to instead listen to ugly 3D models of the characters make some self-referential joke that gets old fast: barney likes beer, chief wiggum is a pig in both meanings of the word, principal skinner was in 'nam, comic book guy is a nerd, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. it gets even worse when one of the characters is playable or your opponent, where you then get to hear them mouth off constantly while repeating their canned catchphrases over and over. for a series this consistently funny I should not want to feel like I need to turn off the voices. I will say they do save one nice little treat for that incredible challenge of a final level: grampa abe is in the saddle, and getting all of his jokes at the end did make me feel a little better about having to repeat the mission 15-odd times. worst out of the bunch was definitely lisa; yeardley totally phoned in her lines for this one.

pretty much what I would expect for a licensed game, but disappointing given its reputation. I wanna be lenient on it given that I unfairly shotgunned it instead of treating it like a slow burn, but there are some really pressing issues that I can't ignore. one final note: god those FMVs are horrid. thank god the 7th gen EA game was cel shaded. also I played this on a 360, so some of my troubles may have come from the frame drops/screen tearing.

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.

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.

probably the only example of a developer looking at their rhythm peripheral (for an ersatz taiko no tatsujin no less) and deciding that they needed to make an "actual" game to justify its existence. varied environments, a legitimate combo-based scoring system, and reams of new baddies for DK to fight: this has basically everything you'd want from what was effectively a stop-gap release for the core mario team between sunshine and galaxy. it's also nintendo's only true 2D platformer on the gamecube at a time where the genre was relegated to handhelds. for what it wrings out of the limited controls available via the bongos, this is honestly a blast.

the main issue is that those damn bongos are so annoying to use in practicality that it makes the game never really extend beyond "cool and interesting" territory. at the same time this game with generic controls would likely be trivially easy even when going for high scores... so I don't really know. this is in many ways smartly built around the limitations of the controls, and the control contextuality is consistently smart and responsive, but when the bongos consistently miss claps the experience begins leaning into drudgery and frustration. I do suggest that those using the bongos try tapping the sides of the bongos as an alternative to clapping; I found this much more reliable. the pads themselves are still tuned to full-on slaps and can feel weaker when taps or clicks are used, which feels like a necessity unless you plan on only playing for 15 minutes. then again, this might have been the goal from the beginning given the bite-sized levels.

the nintendo coat of paint really sells the experience though, with a lot of smart touches that I would only expect from them. as levels get more complex and the potential combo opportunities expand, each kingdom will postpend the ranking screen with a quick peek at a potential combo opportunity you may have missed, which is especially useful if it's particularly hidden or not necessarily intuitive. if you're willing to master the bongos, there's obviously the pieces in place to reach large double-digit platforming combos in some of these sections (your combo multiplier builds every time you interact with a platforming object or jump off a wall before touching the ground), and being able to grab bananas in a chain remotely becomes addicting when you master killing enemies and perfectly grabbing each of their bananas before they hit the ground. it also just rocks that nintendo decided to make a game where the conceit is that donkey kong wants to beat up every other strong creature in the world. no plot or consistency required, just total mayhem.

back when I first tried this series out I made the major mistake of playing kururin paradise first. do not do this!! after getting my ass thoroughly beat in the first half of the game I elected to finish this one instead, and while I certainly prefer paradise as an overall product, it's essential you learn the ropes here. humans have an innate ability to perform simple trig and kinematics by instinct - this is why we're able to quickly determine the speed at which to take turns when driving a car. kururin plays with this by featuring a twirling rigid rotor that must be parallel to the walls you're traversing through in order to avoid a collision. this consistent angular rotation component makes it much more difficult to judge future positioning without careful forethought and a steady hand.

this entry is more of a proof of concept than anything though, as it's rather bare outside of some cosmetic collectables and a handful of new environments. the difficulty ramps up significantly halfway through, but upon this replay I found that what felt more challenging than the actual obstacles was the consistency required for the endgame stages, which can easily take up to three minutes in a single go to complete. much of the graphics are middling pre-rendered assets that don't take advantage of the GBA's 2D prowess, and the music is pretty hit-or-miss as well. however, finishing this one (teeth gnashing over the castle and machine land stages aside) will have you entirely ready to take on the absolutely devious challenges that paradise presents, along with its superior art and multi-exit stages.

I previously compared yoshi's island to klonoa after playing the first game, and it's sort of obvious that for both series they really juiced the concept as far as it would go in the first installment. klonoa handled the transition to its sequel much more gracefully thankfully, and while this doesn't quite live up to the first installment, it's still a stellar platformer in its own right.

I praised the first game for its intricate level designs in the latter half of the game, and for better or for worse klonoa 2 chooses to forego those in favor of snappier encounters and more of a focus on spectacle. this is deserved after all considering the extensive graphical upgrade allowed by the ps2, and where levels become more mindless affairs they become equally more bombastic and setpiece-laden. frequent full environment changes, large flying sections across vast backdrops, and extra wrinkles per level kept me dazzled over the game's runtime. it is not lost on me that the prior design style required a lot of planning energy that they may not have wanted to expend here, and given that I found the ark (the most high concept of this game's levels) to be long-winded and tedious, it is probably for the best that they diverted their efforts away from that type of design.

rather than attempting to build much on the basics presented in the first game, klonoa 2 introduces a couple of new enemy types to focus its puzzles around. the best are probably new bomb enemies that come in both instant explosion and timed detonation variants. the timed one specifically won't die when thrown, and circumvents the prior game's strict adherence to losing an enemy once thrown, allowing for some expansion in puzzle solutions. the most creative may be the likuris, which change color and return to klonoa when hitting another enemy. hitting a certain number of enemies in a row while dashing to higher elevation while it's looping back to you is a great vehicle for tricky puzzle design, and it's unfortunate that certain applications of this fall flat due to some dodgy hit detection. there are also multiple levels with more involved specific gimmicks, including a poison level, timed escapes, hungry monsters that pop out of the background, and chase sequences. these all hit the mark and keep level designs fresh even when the core grab-enemies-and-jump-with-them concept becomes stale.

I have some nitpicks I wanted to throw out there too; just going to rattle them off because they're all pretty brief
-the segues into the cutscenes were very smooth in the first game, but here the cutscenes break up the flow a bit too much for my liking. the plot is longer but doesn't really progress much beyond that of a regular cartoon, and I often found myself wishing I could race through the text more quickly (there is a button that does this but it's fiddly). I much preferred the more direct and high-level plot of the original that didn't gesture towards simplistic character development. it doesn't help that klonoa himself feels less connected to the plot as a whole here.
-the boarding stages (snow, water, sand, etc.) show up more often than they needed to and are passing at best.
-there's a lot of level reuse throughout the game, and while the second time through each is usually still solid there's definitely a weird feeling having to navigate the exact same areas with modified enemy arrangements.
-ending of the game is honestly a little deflating after the ark revisit. the final boss fight is briefer and more arbitrary than the original, as in the phases themselves don't have the same narrative cohesion as the everyone-rallies-together end of the first. final real stage is pretty straight-forward, and the final one before the boss is another boarding stage.

even with my reservations with certain aspects of it, this style of game is very comforting to me; I'm realizing more and more there's something about a distinct level system that makes me feel like I'm making regular progress. the undergirding concepts of klonoa are here in full force and this is absolutely an early aughts banger in an era where big 2D platformers were rare.

I was at the rope in the chandelier room early on trying to get yorda to descend with me and quickly got frustrated. she kept noodling about at the top, pacing in place, occasionally looking down at me, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why she can't just climb down (at this point I had seen her climb ladders so I hadn't realized that ropes were off-limits). every so often she would look over to the windows to our left and stare for a bit, and after I had exhausted my options on the lower floor I decided to return to her. what I found was that these windows were actually my key to progressing, and once I had scaled them and explored the collar beams above I soon realized she was pointing me in the right direction all along. that was the moment I transitioned from simply seeing her as just another mechanic to keep track of to trying to respect her autonomy and trust her as an actual companion. there's a point late in the game where she's been weakened and will trip if you drag her along too quickly, and I found myself legitimately gently keeping pace with her arm in arm.

this "design by substraction" methodology interests me because in a lot of ways it's more of a process of substitution. as an early representative title for the ps2, it spends the vast majority of its time playing up the strengths of the hardware's rendering at the expense of its mechanics. this isn't a bad thing at all. these simple environmental puzzles encourage the player to explore each room and contextualize their location in this vast castle that interconnects the more you progress. long sequences of riding elevators or scaling walls are framed with far-off vistas in the background, detailing a sense of time and space that simply couldn't exist in a prior era with poor draw distances. objects bleed together in murky rooms to highlight bloom effects from light streaming from windows, which often higlight where to go next or what objects to examine. the gameplay itself is perfectly functional, and its simplicity enhances the world around it in a way that earlier generations absolutely could not replicate.

while I do like the majority of the puzzles here, it's the platforming that really pulled me out of the fiction and into frustration at multiple points in the adventure. ico has a weird contextual jump that is fickle about when it follows realistic physics, and thus it can be distressing when the dev's design implications don't quite reach the player and expected actions can't be performed. upwards and backwards leaps feel interchangeable at points, and it's tricky to determine forward momentum during certain leaps when it's obvious that they're semi-scripted. the game's final main section is an uncomfortably long platforming challenge that kills the mood at what should be a critical emotional point, and I wonder how my opinion of the game would have changed had this part been shortened or changed to be more puzzle-driven (it doesn't help that the section before this is an abridged and somewhat disappointing redo of the east arena section, which is my favorite part of the game).

I also have to admit yorda is a bit underused in terms of actual puzzle design. at best she serves as a virtual tether on ico; anytime he needs to explore an area without her, it becomes a race to solve the puzzle before she is taken by the shadow creatures. this creates multiple nice parallel puzzles where you are searching both for how to progress through the castle as well as how yorda can follow without navigating the same treachery. other than a few simple puzzles where she must hold down switches for you to get through certain doors early on, she rarely ever actually directly interacts with the puzzles, and as the game progresses more puzzles arise where she can remain by your side constantly and thus is more just there than anything. the shadow creature sections also could have served as tense moments where block puzzles or similar must be quickly solved while keeping yorda away from the creatures. however, in most cases they can simply be extinguished without progressing nearby puzzles, and by the latter half of the game they barely register as present given the power of the sword.

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.

I imagine there was some need for the capcom's old arcade team to prove themselves going into the demise of clover. taking over the reins from one of the most critically acclaimed development teams of the era was no small feat, and while the staff sowed the seeds of real powerhouses like itsuno-era devil may cry and monster hunter, there were also a lot of clunkers along the way. in between the oft-forgotten resident evil outbreak series and the infamous resident evil 6 a team led by director eiichiro sasaki tried their hand at something fresh and interesting on wii, yielding the charming and family-friendly point-and-click adventure zack & wiki near the start of the console generation. it's unfortunate that playing the game now is an unnecessarily arduous experience frought with intentional frustration at every turn.

there are a couple smart choices to z&w's puzzle design that make initial impressions positive; after all, I played this as a kid and thought it fascinating if a little too difficult for me at the time. the game is divided up into levels that feature self-contained puzzles, keeping all required items for a puzzle within the locality. there's also a regular group of items that reappears between most puzzles, which helps each puzzle from getting too into the weeds with unexplained objects. it's unfortunate that the game still never makes it past simple "try every holdable item with every single interactable part of the map" puzzles, which doesn't exactly make for invigorating brainteasers. some puzzles push the envelope a bit more with clever little twists, and when these clicked I felt legitimately proud to deduce their answers. the mirror mirror puzzle is not particularly complex but it's one of the most fun and playful in the game and its ending coup de grace legitimately put a smile on my face. some of the other puzzles draw from similar puzzles from other capcom titles, including the light beam puzzle that's in dmc3 (reappears in re5 iirc) and the chemical mixing puzzle from resident evil. however, rarely does it live up to its potential in terms of the raw design, and it exacerbates the myriad of other issues with the game.

the developers were pretty clear in interviews that they entirely intended to add some supposedly-needed brutality to the genre by introducing death as an intrinsic mechanic in many puzzles. I'm not inherently against this, as it gives fail states a little flavor, and it teaches the player which solutions aren't worth pursuing. however the team was hell-bent on making you start the entire puzzle over each and every time you die, and considering how frequent death comes, you will have to needlessly replay puzzles constantly. this is already such a waste of the player's time, but when combined with a puzzle structure that requires constant experimentation with item combinations, adding often unforseen death to the mix is excruciating for the game's pace and a great disservice to the concept. thanks to the outcry from western playtesters, a way to revive at checkpoints was added, but it costs in-game money via tickets that can only be purchased in the hub which also constantly get more expensive in a game where grinding cash involves replaying old puzzles again. there are also many puzzles that feature softlocks if steps are done out of order, and the game will let you waste tickets on reviving without letting you know that you've softlocked yourself! eventually I began saving tickets for emergencies only (such as failing the ungodly motion control sections) and felt obligated to slog through puzzle openings over and over again.

as a sidebar, there's also a scoring system built into the game that seems entirely superfluous and in some cases confusing. once all the steps are memorized for a given level, it's trivial to replay it optimally and get a high score, so why even bother having it? it's tacked on in a way that feels overconfident in the soundness of the concept without considering that puzzles games aren't really the same as skill-based action games. this gets even worse when you get max points for doing something before finding out that you're actually doing it out of order and the score-counter isn't nuanced enough to tell, which makes it even more confusing when you get softlocked after the game gives you positive feedback on your actions.

there is one thing barring players from maxing out score on each level after solving the puzzle, and that are the motion controls. man does this game really believe in the promise of the wii as a platform for interacting with the game more directly, and it really leans hard into stuffing the game full of absolutely broken yet mandatory sections with motion controls. actions feel sluggish and delayed given that they're evidently scripted and awaiting some arbitrary input rather than truly mapping the control to the wiimote itself. some particularly bad ones include the fishing minigame, the spider baseball section, sword fighting (red steel eat your heart out!!), and worst of all that anchor toss in the final boss. that final one not only really fucked with my arm (this whole game really caused a lot of wear-and-tear on my arm, which was already shaky from daily IIDX sessions) but also completely confused me on how the actual toss worked because of the lack of tutorialization. even guides admitted to not understanding how it works until I eventually found a gamefaqs forum explanation: instead of flicking the wrist to toss after spinning up to max speed, smoothly angle the wiimote down towards the screen. entirely unintuitive and the exact opposite of the intention: it pulled me completely out of the game and killed my immersion.

this is on top of shaky pointing and clicking in a supposed point-and-click game, clunky object interactions, and a general over-animation to certain aspects of the game (such as the revival menu) that slows down an already meandering genre to an absolute crawl. in the first boss stage (the giant monkey in the ruins) I somehow managed to wedge myself into a ledge literally softlocking me from being unable to move and forcing me to restart at the very end of the puzzle. it's even worse in instances where the game requires you to book it lest you get killed by not moving fast enough, which especially becomes painful when using a ticket respawns you right before you're about to die and you end up wasting your new lease on life because zack won't get his ass into gear. half the time his path-finding algorithm decides to have him loop around walking away from your target rather than taking the direct route. picking up objects can take multiple clicks (especially since the camera angle changes and can push your pointer off an intended object), and zack's lengthy animations for simple tasks make replays an utter chore. just so many paper cuts to try to wade through this game that you're better off not even trying.

the final world before the endgame actually dialed back on the needless death and had a couple simple but breezy puzzles in a row that gave me a little hope that maybe the underlying concepts were good and it was just held back by a thick veil of jank. there's even a monhun-esque siege on a ship that takes place before the final levels and was surpisingly fair - allowing you to have a health bar in that section is a great compromise between forcing you to think on the fly while also not making single mistakes result in total failure. those final two levels though... the first one builds upon the complexity of other levels tenfold and quickly escalates into classic point-and-click moon logic territory. many potential softlocks, long and seemingly unrelated chains of steps, logic that doesn't apply across separate items (why can I carry flakes in the chalice and not the empty vases sitting around near the flake dispenser?), and the godawful sword-fighting that can only be avoided by waiting for slow guard cycles you must sneak around. it even dropped to a choppy half-framerate anytime I walked in the upper left corner of the map! totally draining and would likely take hours without a guide, especially if you don't wanna waste tickets to save them for if guard fights go awry. the final boss further continues the pain parade through a gauntlet of motion control challenges, including that atrocious anchor throw section mentioned earlier. it's honestly difficult to review games the way I do it (generally writing the review without outlining in a single burst right after finishing) because of how few games stick the landing, but this is really a next level cavalcade of shit right at the very end. I wanted to give this just a smidge of the benefit of the doubt but it really had to lean into all of its worst aspects right before the credits rolled.

sorry to all the fans of this game I upset, but man this is the worst game I've played in a long while. I rarely feel like I waste my time playing something, especially since writing a negative review can be cheap heat on backloggd, but I truly did not enjoy the vast majority of my time playing this in a way that was really draining.

a sad example of a sequel completely treading water and failing to expand its series concept a single iota. in many ways you could take my ape escape review and just plop it here without anything changed. many of the positives of the original game stemmed from its novelty in the space of 3D platformers and its excellent psx engine that showcased the hardware at its peak. its sequel seems infinitely lazier and less ambitious in comparison, cribbing extensively from the original with little variation and a lot of repetition. not bad, but terribly disappointing.

-all the original gadgets reappear, but the new ones are rather slight lock-and-key affairs that only serve to increase the amount of time you spend menuing to swap them in. the water cannon, bananarang, and magnet each have their own obstacles that can only be solved using them, and in no cases do the developers attempt to expand upon their usage or make legitimate puzzles involving them. lots of "oh the monkey is in a cage labeled with a banana, time to throw the bananarang" and "look a fire pit, time to use the water cannon" etc.

-dunno if I had rose-tinted glasses in the first game or not but good god the controls are stiff and unresponsive here. hikaru has no smooth speed-up and instead jerks into motion at the slightest touch of the analog stick. his first jump has range but is low, and his second jump is high but awkwardly kills all momentum. the sky flyer also feels less fluid than the original, or maybe I'm just misremembering. regardless, precision platforming felt more strenuous this time around, and the devs seem to have taken notice given that they gutted much of the legitimately difficult trials from the original

-level themes are inconsistent and slapdash compared to the mostly focused time-periods schtick of the original. no context for why I'm anywhere doing anything other than just catching more monkeys! the more elaborate interlocking levels of the original are also dumbed down here to mainly linear courses or maybe a loop here or there. might be giving the original too much credit but again I feel like it also did a better job giving monkeys specific challenges rather than just strewing them across the world haphazardly.

-soichi terada is absent this time around and thus the crystalline breakbeat and house of the original is pushed aside in favor of generic and schmaltzy midi abominations that left me with no other choice than to blare podcasts on top of it. going from a game that so perfectly nailed its quirky atmosphere with a polygonal shonen running around catching heavily-armed monkeys with a net all soundtracked by lite-rave blasts and comedown room leads... to this boring happy-go-lucky generic mascot platformer aesthetic that sucks the life out of the experience. dreadful

-ape escape itself is such a flawed design concept that the lack of changes are really striking. I said in the prior review that the right stick is meant for the camera; more specifically trying to triangulate angles between 1) your movement and position on the left stick 2) the angle of attack or object use on the right stick 3) the erratic movement of the auto-cam is actually less accurate than just having the camera on the right stick in the first place. one game (two really with ape escape 2001) should have been enough to prove this, but ape escape 2 blunders along with all of the same issues, inaccuracies, and frustrations of the original. of all the gadgets, the net is now somehow even more annoying because new cinematic swing animations that play randomly (or maybe when the game thinks you have a guaranteed successful catch?) have such severe windup that the monkey can actually simply walk out of your range during it, leading to an embarassing whiff that begs the question of why such an animation even exists.

the game's biggest positive is that at the same time of all of this it is still ape escape and is still a totally competent 3D platformer that I legitimately enjoyed in a brain-dead podcast game way during the middle section. by that point I already knew that the game was a clunker (after playing the first areas and being completely turned off the game for months) and had not quite reached the endgame (which felt utterly perfunctory and totally devoid of any iteration in challenge over the prior levels). bosses are fine too: functionally on-par with contemporaries with easy-to-parse attack patterns. the vehicle areas are simplistic but nice diversions, and thankfully they aren't over-deployed to the point of becoming stale.

ape escape thrives on its cheeky experimental streak, and unfortunately ape escape 2 lacks that charismatic edge to keep the player engaged. I wasn't expecting to see a series with a concept so fresh and flippant trot out the hits so soon in its chronology. somehow not a surprise sony withheld this one from the states for an entire year only to let ubisoft publish it in their stead.

it's a rarity in a game where you're presented a playfield that you can actually traverse completely, and yet jumping flash nailed it all the way back in 1995. at this point in history it would've been normal to favor punitive over expansive design, but the developers here gave the player three giant jumps, infinite ammo, and a save system all of which give complete freedom in how objectives are approached (much to some contemporary reviewers' chagrin). each stage consists of obtaining multiple jetpacks strewn across the level, the ground of which exists as narratively-justified floating chunks of earth and metal. enemies wander about in the vicinity paying little attention to you until the endgame, leaving to search for each jetpack your only true objective.

with excessively permissive traversal mechanics and layout design comes a dearth of bespoke challenges for the player to undertake. it's not that the game is too easy, but that the lack of guardrails hinder attempts to adequately test the player. the game gestures at occasional constraints - ie conveyor belts that require the player to find their starting point in order to reach objects at their end point - but these rarely extend beyond merely requiring the player to jump to the right place. granted this is not a poor decision, as a gauntlet of precision platforming would likely have ended up frustrating even with the generous jump height and conspicuous drop shadow. however, I felt that the larger levels had many underutilized areas that were unnecessary given how easily they were skipped by taking other paths. more often than not these levels consist of stumbling about until the poor draw distance finally reveals the next target.

bosses are thankfully forgiving in their damage output and projectile uses considering that the poor robbit you command utilizes tank controls and thus can not strafe. even when they took potshots at me I never felt like I wasn't able to maneuver around to some extent and avoid them. presumably these become more difficult in the "extra" stages which repeat the levels with different object arrangements, but I didn't feel the need to go through this mode after already playing each of the stages once. those playing on psp as I did may notice frequent frame dips, although from watching longplays it seems like the psx original has a much more consistent framerate. probably time for me to admit the psx emulator on psp leaves a lot to be desired...

for a game with a very obvious gimmick (push around blocks that constitute the high-level logic of the world) it really pulls no punches when it comes to actual level layouts. there are only so many stages where you make the walls intangible or control them yourself that really seem novel, and the game never rests on its laurels when it comes to utilizing cheap heat like this in the stages. every potential trick or shortcut or simple solution you could think of for a level has been ruthlessly excised thanks to the strict sokoban layout the game adheres to, and the potential for unforseen failure from accidentally pushing the "you" block out of the way or trapping a block in an unmovable spot or destroying an important object far outstrips any cute logic shenanigans in magnitude.

by the same token, the solutions themselves require a level of elasticity that I rarely encounter in puzzle games that makes successfully concocting a solution all the more rewarding. navigating both the explicit on-screen rules and the implicit requirements of the layout requires stacking so many disparate elements in your brain and jamming them together until everything finally aligns and you finally forsee the correct order of events to move forward. this gets even more complicated as the game moves into multiple moving characters at once, teleportation, the elusive empty and all blocks, and faux gravity. a good 70% of the game is totally optional, and it revels in that it can contort the premise so completely and utterly just as long as the average player can make it through enough levels to unlock the finale. I managed to complete 70 flat before tackling the finale and it felt like a worthwhile exploration of so many different mechanics and ideas, even if I couldn't approach many of the really brain-bending challenges.

if anything, the only real umbrage I can take with the design is how the lack of dialog or tutorialization makes certain game mechanics opaque. it doesn't really come down to a need for explanations per se, but rather that occasionally confusing mechanics are introduced without puzzles that illustrate exactly what makes them tick, which is an issue in a game where every facet and knock-on effect of a given logical construct will be needed at some point or another to solve a puzzle. if I stumble through the intro puzzle for a world, there's a good chance I'm going to struggle to apply my knowledge of it meaningfully when its required. still, the game encourages experimentation with its built-in rewind option that you'll struggle to find many instances where progress is truly detered as long as you're aptly trying every tool at your disposal.

got to the end of terra's campaign and realized this game requires three playthroughs to complete and put it down for a year. what a vicious tactic for padding out game length... eventually I felt the urge to come back tho, I just needed a break from kingdom hearts.

+the command deck is pretty much exactly what kh needed to gel as a combat engine. no real menuing necessary, just cycle through a couple moves and fire them off to your heart's content. helps the balance a fair bit too when you can load up on cure spells. you can definitely tell that this draws quite a bit mechanically from twewy, which released a couple of years prior.
+melding also locks in an intoxicating macro-loop centered around making better and better commands. the fact that you can slot in abilities during the melding process really did it for me: I was swapping out commands constantly trying to accrue abilities and to experiment with new tactics.
+on top of all of this, command styles allow the player to seamlessly transition into different super styles that hearken back to the drive forms of kh2. these require you to use different sequences of commands to transition, and later in the game you can transition through multiple styles. they're all a joy to use, and I'm glad there wasn't any menuing involved like with kh2.
+for the most part each campaign actually has a different set of bosses, which makes the replaying feel less repetitious. pretty decent overall too, not as high as kh2's highs but probably more fair than kh1.
+lilo and stitch is sick.
+much like twewy as well I really did enjoy the grind to some extent literally just from getting to upgrade commands and acquire new abilities. the mirage arena seems cool as well as an obvious gesture towards monhun fans, I'd still like to try this grind in multiplayer on the psp version at some point

-these worlds are so empty... absolutely nothing to see in most areas. it's more of a side effect of this being a handheld 3D game tho, so I'm not knocking off points for this alone
-this is the first real game by the osaka team (who had done re:com prior) and you can tell they didn't quite nail the physics and feel of kingdom hearts proper. characters are so slow and clunky with their attacks, with frustratingly long recovery animations and inconsistent input buffering. feels almost a bit like a return to the combat of the first game.
-maybe I'm just forgetting how the older games worked but lock-on is dreadful here. the implicit lock-on works solely on whatever enemy is closest, which ignores your analog stick direction and will often flip you 180 if you knock your current target too far away. switching between targets isn't terrible (it's like kh1) but is still a bit of a pain.
-having three classic disney princess worlds back to back at the start is a little much. too homogenous in design imo.
-aqua is a queen but also her gameplay sort of sucks without some grinding. having a magic-heavy character in the mash-x game series doesn't feel great and in the latter worlds the enemies get very spongey unless you're grabbing a couple extra levels here and there.
-general kingdom hearts shit. having one million contextual actions that don't flow into each other at all, guard/dodge roll on the same button, QTEs injected into combat, all exacerbated by having a much clunkier engine than kh2.
-shotlock is sort of neither here or there as a mechanic but d-links get to the point where it feels extraneous. I'm not against it in theory but the multitude of options and general mediocrity of the abilities gained make it a glorified free heal in practicality
-certain end bosses did get repeated, and specifically vanitas really grated on my nerves with the repetition across the campaigns. very reminiscent of riku replica from re:com

if anything what really kills it is having to play through the whole experience three times. having a single 30-hour campaign to build up your command roster and abilities as to finally have a busted character at the end would rule, but instead you end up having to restart the game with a fresh slate multiple times and never quite meet your potential. it's even worse that many abilities are random rolls - I ran through the aqua campaign with a full stack of attack haste and zero magic haste because I could not get the right random abilities. it's not a gamebreaker, but it really hurts what should have been the absolute selling point of the game.

so in the end it's bad like the other kingdom hearts games without any of wild or charming elements that draws me towards them, however reluctantly. and to be fair I often felt that same feeling here, just looser, and perhaps solely to see what happened to the trio as they approached their tragic ends that set in motion the events of the following titles. I got what I came for, but virtually all of it laid tucked away at the end, either behind 30 hours of tedium or a 100% requirement (god knows I just watched it on youtube). it's sort of been downhill for me once I realized that kh2 was probably going to be the high point of the series and that the rest was going to be more of a chore than anything.

it's odd to think that there aren't many other games that take cues from yoshi's island considering how well respected it is. the slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs were incredibly novel in the mid-90s, but the shift away from side-scrolling platformers with the rise of 3D wilted this particular evolutionary branch before it had time to really blossom. thankfully while klonoa doesn't feature the sprawl of yoshi's beloved headlining debut, it offers a tightly-paced knockout of a platformer that tills the same field to create a masterfully crafted experience.

the gameplay of klonoa centers around the titular character's ability to grab virtually any enemy and use them as a makeshift projectile, which has the added by-product of giving him an extra jump when the enemy is thrown downward. while simple in concept, the planners stretched this mechanic as far as it would go thanks to smart enemy design and an excellent difficulty curve. klonoa is limited in his abilities outside of this power - he does have a yoshi-esque flutter jump when he's not carrying anything - so with any danger ahead of him the player must carefully consider enemy placement both for utility and avoidance. an enemy may need to be carried from a separate section in order to boost klonoa past an obstacle, or ungrabbable enemies in the way may force the player to lure grabbable ones over to use as ammo. further into the game the execution becomes more strict with strings of enemies to chain jumps with, insta-death surfaces, and shielded enemies, but the game never manages to feel unfair. given the number of lives that the game hands out, most will find the difficulty at that sweet spot between leisurely and strenuous. it's the perfect level of challenge for encouraging replays for collectables, and it provides enough training with mechanics to make that difficult extra stage feel achievable.

the macro-design shows a clear influence from some of the key-driven levels present in yoshi's island. levels here don't stick to a left-to-right structure and instead generally feature per-room challenges that require a higher level of spatial awareness thanks to elements of both the foreground and background playing into small puzzles. while early on each stage rarely approaches non-linearity outside of small side-jaunts that contain collectables, the later stages begin playing with interconnected stage designs that feature loop-backs and stage-wide object effects such as turning elevators on or opening doors. none of it is truly exploratory (outside of one neat stage that features four keys that can be obtained in any order), but it does go a long way towards actualizing the locations beyond mere vessels of challenge.

vision 6-2 in particular shows a keen awareness of parallelism as an effective way to both present a series of challenges and the feeling of an authentic environment. this level involves a single large cylindrical tower with a long column-filled room that contains different pathways to take. more difficult pathways are locked behind timed switch puzzles at the end of the pathway before it. these switch puzzles inside the tower must be accessed by moving a block located outside of the tower behind a puzzle centered around a super-sized version of a common enemy which impedes progress. reaching this section on the outskirts of the tower requires making it through a climb sequence from within the tower, and before that a precision platforming section over a perilous drop away from the tower. the cycle of these different elements each getting increasingly more difficult imparts the feeling of true progress as one makes their way further and further through the column-filled corridor until they finally reach the end, where they can ascend the final part of the tower to reach a monumental boss fight. an exceptional display of level design chops that illustrates - more than just mechanical understanding - a conscious synthesis of micro-design and macro-design to elevate mere gameplay into a worthy struggle through perilous odds that rewards persistance and patience.

it must be said that the bosses are all excellent as well. each provides a unique twist on the enemy-throwing formula that utilizes the same hierarchy of movement, primary, and auxillary obstacles that I layed out in my cuphead review. klonoa has the extra trick up its sleeve of having those enemies be both tool and trial at once, and the bosses use this to great effect. in many instances the auxillary attack itself consists of or contains the very enemies you need to use to damage the boss, and weighing when to avoid them and when to seize them for an attack creates a lovely risk/reward element that keeps each fight fresh. no boss resembles any other boss, and most of them provide a perfect blend of attacks to keep the player on their toes and repetition to a minimum (the second boss is a little stale tho, there's a lot of downtime during it that unfortunately makes it the weakest of the bunch).

what perhaps really elevates this game beyond the rest of its ilk is its attention to aesthetic detail. no aspect feels cheap or rushed, from the rotating pentagonal prism health bars that each boss has to the gorgeous vision start splashes with unique names and subtitles each. every character is well-animated and meshes well with the 3D backdrops, and the game doesn't skimp on gorgeous oscillating polygonal effects illustrating the magical capabilities of the cast, small particle effects when klonoa runs across certain surfaces, and cinematic swirling camera angles as klonoa takes corners and breathes in monumental structures. the story is also full integrated into gameplay, with smooth transitions and everything handled in-engine with unique sprites that really sell the integration. the story itself is compact and strays little from a vague KH-esque light and darkness dichotomy, which suits the pacing of the game perfectly; mature enough for adults to appreciate while simplisitic enough to avoid overwhelming a child. it neatly foreshadows up to its infamous final cutscene twist, and while shockingly abrupt and bittersweet for a game of this nature, it perfectly captures the emotion with the turmoil and rush of the final FMV before the credits roll. it's evident that this is the culmination of hideo yoshizawa's vision of an action game that marries unvarnished gameplay to cinematic qualities.

a little note to fellow popstarter users: this game is pretty playable up to the end if you can stomach semi-frequent crashes between levels that will require a quick reset (thankfully this is after you save, so you won't lose any progress). in a couple of cases this skips important cutscenes, so be advised. I also found it impossible to reach the credits thanks to a crash after the final boss, and thus after a couple tries I resorted to duckstation to finish the game off. disappointing to be sure, but it's a testament to the game's quality that I was perfectly willing to replay the final boss (all three phases) over and over again to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and frankly it was worth it in the end just so I could play the majority of the game on a proper CRT! this is a game that benefits greatly from that phosphorescent swirl of an authentic old screen.

crossed my fingers that this one would cross the best aspects of pikmin 1 and 2 into a single game, and I'm pleased to say they effectively nailed it. this series benefitted greatly from a decade off to reflect and redesign, smoothing out some of the ragged edges of the series in the process.

the first game played the most like a proper RTS: resource and time management where choosing preferred solutions yielded good results even when not optimal. the second game did away with the frustration inherent to the debut's strict time limit but in the process featured puzzles and problems with rigid, simple solutions. the third game attempts to triangulate a happy medium by adding in a heavy exploration element that could only be accomplished with more powerful hardware and expanded level sizes.

each area feels less bounded and instead generally features multiple winding routes with objectives that can often be handled in parallel. the second game rarely made effective use of the two leaders, while this game often encourages using all three at once to accomplish tasks simultaneously to optimize time. running around from place to place with a single squad would simply take too long, and the game pushes the player to maximize efficiency by fixing their days remaining on the planet to their juice supply, which requires consistently bringing new fruit back to the ship alongside moving the story forward. most people will not struggle to keep their juice supply up, rendering the pressure somewhat irrelevant, but the drive to collect fruit helps flesh out the experience.

the speciality pikmin from the second game have now been replaced with rock pikmin and winged pikmin. rock pikmin break combat much in the same way the purple pikmin did, except they now can smash through glass barriers. winged pikmin are completely new, and can both hover over water as well as open and lift certain objects other pikmin cannot. neither requires the dreadful dungeon grinding in the second game to obtain and instead can be farmed by regular means. they still fall into a lot of the same lock-and-key puzzles of the first game, but thanks to the greater amount of multitasking, this becomes less of a chore to deal with.

most of my issues with the game come down to nitpicks with the changes made with the jump to wii u. the touchscreen controls are great but strained my hand a bit during boss battles where a lot of tapping was required, and the loss of the whole right side of the controller is a bit of a sore spot for me. thankfully pikmin type switching is very easy to do now, and most of the other functionality can pretty much be handled with the new apps selection on said touchscreen. I also feel like the pikmin are somewhat less self-sufficient than they previously were, with my most deaths of any game in the series from leaving pikmin unattended near minor enemies such as the little bugs that burrow from beneath the ground. nothing too game-breaking, but still unpleasant for sure.

the final area really surprised me with its novel concept that really focuses on keeping track of multiple things at once. it initially frustrated me (especially early on when there weren't as many routes to take during the chases) but later on I really settled into the rhythm of routinely swapping between all my leaders to make sure they were on task. the ability to send a leader and their pikmin to a predefined location is exceedingly useful in this game, and would've really made the difference in the second one to improve the multitasking functionality in that game. it also helps that this game allows you to tackle bosses on multiple days with no penalty, which radically decreases the frustration of having a wipe on a first encounter with an unfamiliar boss.

certainly the most enjoyable time I've had with any of the three games in the trilogy. I feel like I may have missed out on part of the experience by not collecting all the fruit, but it was a good enough time as it stands. after all, I can always come back another to attempt a proper 100% run, which certainly seems less rote here than it did in the second game.