when i'm not blatantly baiting i'm happy to let people have their opinions, but man, when are we going to stop equating "addictive" with "interesting game design"? someone of you roguelike fans should try pachinko machines, the addictive randomized endless gameplay will surely blow your minds and rocket to the top of your topsters

i should clarify: i have nothing against gambling games. i gambled away all of my money in yakuza. and this is barely a gambling game! my problem here is moreso with the current state of the indie roguelike being that every game is mashed with the same repetitive trendiest tricks to make le epic addictive gameplay and heralded as the newest masterpiece on the block. it ain't exciting. oh well. it's only a video game, at the end of the day

I cannot lie, I'm genuinely very disappointed in this game, especially with a company as consistently strong an output as Vanillaware it pains me that this game really only has those good ass Vanillaware visuals going for it.

In terms of gameplay, the game has a lot of elements that I would generally enjoy on paper, the formations and the way tactics form together should be so much better than it actually is, there's just so many variables to the point that it largely becomes a numbers game since character building, for the purposes of beating the game (played on the second highest difficulty) is really easy and it's not super hard to make even an unoptimal formation just work through sheer force of will, which really harms the strategy layer. Also the real time Ogre Battle style strategy has a lot of problems on its own. The worst being a lot of quality of life issues, such as not being able to see how your formations will do out of deployment, and the battle forecast changing at the drop of a hat. There's so many variables to battles that you can send a battalion over to an enemy where it says it'll be a sure win, and despite seemingly no other circumstances changing it suddenly switches to a stalemate of a battle which is incredibly frustrating for planning purposes, on top of the fact that if you make mistakes there's no backing out. In many ways I can't help but compare this game to the neighbouring turn based tactics genre, where at least I can make an assessment of which move I can take that would be the most optimal, Unicorn Overlord forces you to throw shit out and if it doesn't work then tough shit, which leads to an incredibly unsatisfying tactical experience. Also there's way too many liberation missions, which I know is for controlling the level curve, but even then the level curve is fucking wacked out by the endgame, there's like a 5 level recommended level jump for no reason. Nearly every gameplay element in the game is something that could work but has a botched enough execution that frustrates me because, man, I really do want to love this game.

But most frustrating of all is the story here, the only way I can describe is like bad Fire Emblem. There's a shitload of characters and they all interact with many others in the army but unlike Fire Emblem these characters offer the substance and flavour of white rice, these characters are truly bland in a way that seems almost alien to me compared to the characters in like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels. The story is also dead simple but still does a few things that really hurt its narrative, the villains in this game are fuckin terrible and their motivations never amount to anything interesting, meanwhile all the good guys are so generically good that even the bad guys that become good have some crutch excuse like mind control, hostage situation, or some other hackneyed out that prevents these characters from really flourishing. The rapport system is something I usually always like because it gives these characters that don't really interact in the main story a chance to be fleshed out as characters but all it can offer is the most shallow looks at these characters in their totality to the point that they're just functions to me, Armour guy, Horse guy, Bow guy they never offer anything more interesting than hating the evil empire because they're evil and it's just really surprising to see a game with so much love put into the production lean back so heavily on just being so consistently mid.

Just a really frustrating offering from Vanillaware from me, especially for a game that nearly bankrupted the company I expected so much better because this game really only has its visuals going for it, but I can get that from any other Vanillaware game and actually have a good game too.

I always have this feeling of wanting to play a pokemon game but realising there are like 50 little speedbumps in terms of what I like:

I like to imagine having my little team set up easily and running through the region with them, developing movesets and little in-character quirks for them to have. This game was a perfect way for me to make that real.

Beyond just the flavour of the experience the game flows very well, really thrusting you into it very quickly and letting you do as little or as much as you want depending on how willing you are to put in the time in.

The environments and Pokemon look great in these 3d spaces and battling is a bit more interesting than usual.

The pokedex is expanded on very cleverly as opposed to just being a checklist, including the fact you're able to complete it without any interference from the other games.

The story was...well it was a pokemon story but it leaned moreso on the side of mystery dungeon than a mainline game with a very charming and simple cast.

Overall a fantastic experience perhaps only dragged down by its at-times meandering post-games.

I've wanted to enjoy playing a pokemon game for a long time and now I feel like I finally could. Might make playing Gen 4 a bit harder however.

2024 is when I decide to really get into the game I've bounced off the most in my entire life, after two Steam refunds and multiple sneers at genre labels on the back of the box specifically tailored to kill me.

The search for the "roguelite I can tolerate the most by being as close to deterministic as possible" ends by embracing the one that is more often flaunted to be a pure RNG-fest, an exercise in putting coins into a jukebox set on "shuffle" and watching the funny lights that happen to pop out that run. Reality is, a top-down cardinal directions shooter with no iframes crutch option (shoutout to EtG) is simply a pretty strong foundation to build your game on top of, and the enemy roster more than enough supplements it with the varied slew of contact, projectile, AoE, delayed, hitscan, chasing etc. monsters threatening space as well as any good action game would.
Concessions have still been made, a noteworthy absent here is enemies anticipating and shooting towards the direction you are currently moving to, the game is clearly welcoming towards the casual gamer's proclivity towards circlestrafing while shooting inwards as the default approach (shoutout to Doom '16). By its randomly generated room nature, it can never properly contend with the handpicked enemy compositions you'd find in a regular action game. What's there is still solid at hell, and the default 1x1 rooms are small enough that their boundaries alone make good arenas to test your skill in weaving between threats, target prioritization, and all other conventional real time skills. The end result is a blazing fast sequence of densely packed encounters that rly make u think & execute before screen scroll is even over, and allow me to reiterate it's so funny this went down in history as The Luck Based One while stuff like Dead Cells me has me repeating 10 minutes of trite every time I want to see something that doesn't bore me. AND you get to put a coin in the funny jukebox too!

The gallery of inscrutably named items enriching the loot pool that make up its main form of progression are what make TBOI infamous, potentially turning your pathetic pea shooter into the most bullshit ms paint rain of death conceivable. I personally don't mind, for now (more on that later), the power gap between the run ending powerups and the purely utilitarian ones, I genuinely would enjoy the overall game much less if it allowed you to consistently become a walking AoE nuke devoid of the minutiae in spacing and fundamentals I've been rewarding with lavish praise until now - what I do enjoy is seeing how every run makes me recalibrate my mental stack on the spectrum between "positioning Isaac well to hit my enemies" and "positioning Isaac well to dodge shit", feeling like I'm really getting my money worth from apparently lame synergies that still allow me to remove either end from the equation. Some of my most successful runs aren't omg ludovico + azazel ggs we take those, but low damage regular-ass shaped projectiles Isaac having spectral, piercing, and homing, allowing me to keep my eyes glued to him and nothing else thereby maximizing evasion. I consider all of this very healthy for the skill ceiling of the game, and it turned what I initially expected to be a "low effort game for when you are sleepy" into a LOCKED IN kinda of mental effort that leaves me wanting for a cigarette, and maybe lying on the bed for a bit, after an hour and a half like the best of 'em.

... That's where my review of the game would've ended a couple of weeks or so ago, being an expanded version of my initial thoughts when I was still early in run progression, halfway through current objective of killing Mom's Heart 10 times (the second "end of run" final boss, arguably the end of the tutorial). I maybe would've added that the game needed some kind of RNG mitigation like a minimum damage floor the lower you go in floors because I want to turn every game into KH2 as it's the stat that most damages a run through sheer bad luck (the game is not beyond this kind of rigging, ie Hush's light pillars are tailored against your current Speed stat so that they are always avoidable). However, the more I progress and unlock final bosses, the more the effects of a bad/unlucky run are felt.

The question that takes up increasingly bigger space in my head is, how does the game incentivize not giving up on those bad runs?

One of the most exciting things about the game is the Devil/Angel Room system. tldr, by doing no damage runs on specific floors you get rewarded with the potentially best shit in the game, starting from the second one. That's another thing I, initially, unequivocally loved, another piece of the puzzle that turns even the lamest, earliest rooms in something requiring proper finesse as bad plays quickly compound into a more miserable time than it needs to be.
If I get hit and miss out on them, my bad, right? Well yes, but no, because only RED HEART damage counts against a no damage floor, and you can find BLUE HEARTS which act like armor above your regular hearts, and, just like regular hearts, each of them takes two hits to deplete. The no hit run turned into a doable 2-hit run. Maybe you are really lucky and drop multiple blue hearts, it's now a 4/6-hit run and now you are coasting so hard it's not even funny. Maybe you get neither and gotta play it straight, and get hit at the very last second of floor 2, and oh, actually there's a pity system and the earlier you get one to spawn the faster you snowball by making others spawn next and you just missed out on all of that, and oh, the rest of the run is also going like shit, and oh, you find yourself flouride staring at the time counter wondering why you shouldn't just spam R(estart) every time you want to play the game hoping the first floor's RNG dumps a bunch of blues on your lap.
How am I incentivized to keep going instead?

From what I gather, you eventually have to gauge how well a run is going by yourself and pick a proper boss to end it. "If it's going great, try for Delirium or the Repentance content, if not, stop at Mega Satan or even the Lamb, if it really sucks cut your losses and end at Sheol/Cathedral". Or something like that. That sounds palatable NOW that I have unlocks to work towards to against any of them, but once I only the very top echelon left, what the fuck do I personally get out of ending a potential run halfway through at Cathedral? I'm the guy who least needs extrinsic rewards such as unlocks/achievements to enjoy the act of play, but 30 minutes to beat a final boss I've already done dozens of times is still 30 minutes.
What incentive do I have to stay on a run that's gonna end early and on a technicality?

I'm not gonna write a proper conclusion because this is a review I'm specifically keeping open for the inevitable reevaluation as my worries are either assuaged or confirmed by what's waiting for me ahead.




Uncharacteristically of me, I'm gonna put up a list of my pain points while I spitball solutions, which ultimately show you just can't take the fight out of the RNG hater.
1) As mentioned, put some kind of damage floor, or implement a pity system for DMG UP items, or have DMG UP on more items, or whatever needed so I don't have to look at 3.50 Damage on floor 8 (afaik the truly busted damage shit comes from specific multiplier items, not from the humble +0.4s)
2) Introduce some kind of mild pity system for bombs and keys for the first three floors (skipping out on MULTIPLE treasure rooms because you get zero (0) keys for ten minutes is just mind numbing)
3) Remove Hard Mode's changes to shops, namely that they can spawn at a lower quality level than what you currently have them upgraded at (they can't even spawn after the halfway point of a run at all, they require resources to enter, sometimes they are not a shop at all but it's a miniboss, they are not guaranteed to have stuff you want in them, is the additional dice roll really needed?)
4) Change how blue hearts interact with Devil/Anger Room chances or change how they spawn on the first floor. My most immediate idea is "just make one and only one always spawn, but hide it behind multiple layers of rocks so the player needs to choose whether it's worth consuming like three bombs when they can soldier on and try their skill instead", but people would just start Restart spamming for plentiful enough bomb drops instead. Plus characters that fly wouldn't care.

Played on Ultra-Violence with continous play on GZDoom with freelook enabled.

Eviternity 1 was a landmark in doom mapping, in my eyes it's the closest we've gotten to a true spiritual successor to Scythe 2, a WAD that may be my favorite of all time, so the news of a sequel blew me away and made me giddy to see what Dragonfly and crew have cooked up this time but after finishing my feelings are incredibly conflicted.

Eviternity 2 feels bigger and badder as a sequel should with a new weapon and new enemies but their implementation is messy. The new weapon is incredibly powerful and a worthy reward for completing secret maps but if playing pistol start there aren't many instances where you'll be able to fully utlize it's strengths due to it being a secret map reward. Meanwhile the new enemies are a mixed bag with the new soldier and baron being scary foes while the necromancer and nightmare cacodemons being more annoying than fun to fight, especially in closed enviroments.

Themeing has also taken a small hit, areas still look gorgeous as ever with clever usage of OTEX textures but the concrete sites of episode 3 and partial repeat of Evi1's first episode in episode 4 have blurred together in my mind after completion. That said the revisit of the angelic theme as a opener instead of a closer was lovely to see and there are other highlights in the episode 2, 5 and the secret maps. What also doesn't help the themeing is the sense of progression with some episode finales feeling more like a middle chapter than a true end to it's episode, this is especially felt in episodes with a secret map prior to it's finale (E2/E6) or had a more grander map just before (E3/5).

I may sound incredibly harsh in this brief, messy write up but there is still lots to enjoy. The soundtrack is once again incredible and there are some truly great maps and encounters. I mainly wanted to highlight my issues as previously stated, Eviternity 2 left me conflicted in terms of how I felt in regards to the whole experience. That said I still recommend the WAD, there's a strong likelihood you'll enjoy it's experimental maps more than I did and hell, maybe on a replay I will enjoy it more as well but when compared to the original, Eviternity 2 is just good and not incredible.

Favorite Maps: 05, 08, 32, 14, 24
Least Favorite Maps: 33, 25, 30

such a bizarre main narrative this time around. opens with nary a hint of subtlety as per usual but, on the contrary, suggests its writers have direct experience with the subject matter in a way that hasn't exactly been the case for any RGG title prior to this. despite proudly displaying this burgeoning inkling of something rather unique, it shows every card in its deck by the time the second half rolls around and we're made to watch the narrative spin its wheels fruitlessly time and time again. pair that with a modicum more self-awareness than usual and you've got a somewhat frustrating and cumbersome package - the hyperreality of these games is often ill-suited to meaningfully address any issues plaguing modern society because you know the way you'll end up mechanically addressing this is by putting some middle aged guy who represents an extreme solution to the core problem in an armbar. which is still fine, don't get me wrong, but opening the final boss by spelling out 'well, maybe he's got a point here...' feels very much like they don't trust me to reach my own conclusions. obviously it's all endowed with the usual charisma and strength of direction but it's an amateurish legal drama and very likely a weak detective narrative depending on your perspective.

thankfully, lost judgments buoyed by the strongest combat in the dragon engine yet and by its compelling extension to the originals approach to side content. much of the original judgment's side content revolved around currying favour with your community and in building up your reputation bit by bit as you work to dispatch the keihin gang, arms-dealing nuisances who functioned as massive thorns in your side. lost judgment sets much of its side content within the walls of seiryo high school, wherein yagami serves as an advisor to the mystery research club and is made to infiltrate various other clubs and societies at the school in order to investigate a school-wide conspiracy. this facet of lost judgment is often really good! extrapolating a lot from the tenets of substories in previous games is greatly enriched by this adolescent context, which seems to serve as an excellent opportunity for the series' characteristic optimism and humanism to surface while still retaining a lot of the same devil-on-your-shoulder humor. the high school setting obviously never strays too far from the JRPG subconscious, but it's nice to participate in these activities as an adult where the goal is not to lead a kind of fulfilling life but instead to help these kids grow and to tell them to take it easy sometimes cause life ain't easy. a lot of it ends up being touching in ways i didn't expect, and chronicling the journeys of all these respective students and clubs culminates in yet another effective substory finale, something i wish these games would do more rather than throw amon at me and call it a day. some infelicities with some of these minigames - it's both extremely funny and entirely predictable that you're expected to remember more about stray cats than you are about any of the hostesses from girl's bite - but for the most part lost judgment shines in this department.

reminded me a lot of Y5. that's a good thing! appreciated that RGG studio seems to slowly be going back to the Y1/Y2 model of being rewarded for exploration with the judgment subseries; there's still work to be done in this respect but anything beats the borderline mobile game side content structure of, say, Y:LAD. that said im told they hid a fourth battle style behind dlc and that's unforgivable. loved skating through ijincho and kamurocho, weaving through crowds to keep up momentum. similarly enjoyed putting the fear of god into high schoolers.

2004.

A year in gaming like no other, where consumers were banqueted an assortment of games, many of which would become some of the best in gaming of all-time. That year, we saw the release of games like Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Counter-Strike: Source, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Ninja Gaiden, Katamari Damacy and many, many more. More importantly though than that these games were fun, they were innovating. Pushing forward to the future of what games could become. And the game that lead that helped lead this charge and would lay down the foundational bedrock for a scene that would rival AAA studios was Doukutsu Monogatari, or Cave Story. A game that was all created by one developer, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya.

Amaya's game wasn't groundbreaking by any means. Cave Story isn't an innovative milestone nor is it pushing any boundaries. What Cave Story is was polished, taking influence from games that Pixel enjoyed from his childhood, like Metroid and Castlevania that he references. It was an extraordinary game, with absolutely stellar music, gorgeous pixel art, and very snappy run-and-gun action. Cave Story is cited by many indie developers as the game that got them into development or as influence for their games, and in-turn, the art those developers would create would influence other indie developers in this chain-reaction of inspiration that would see the rise of the indie game industry. It is to note that Cave Story is by no means stand out in what it does, even in its legacy of a game from one developer. There is a long history of fan-made and independent content. It would be more apt-to say that Cave Story laid the foundation for indie developers in terms of its inspiration, much like Cave Story was inspired from others before it.

But Cave Story was not even meant to be special, it was an untranslated shareware game, among others in Japan's own long history of doujin soft, that had been going on way long before Cave Story even came to the picture. Japan's history of indie development goes back just as long as the rest of the world, most of which of which were as a hobby. This scene that was once, and in some cases still is, enclosed off from the rest of the world, would have its own fair share of games that inspired others, have doujin games created based off the works of others out of admiration, like Touhou. In 2004, Cave Story would be released into the public in a limited release alongside another game that would predate it.

Yume Nikki.

Yume Nikki released on the same year as Cave Story on the same site. Much like Cave Story, Yume Nikki was also developed by one person, Kikiyama, who would create the entire game's sound, art, programming, everything. It also saw a very limited release, until fans of the game created an English-translation that would see to this games proliferation across the Internet. And much like Cave Story, it's a game that has had a strong influence on so many people across the independent games scene across the globe and has become the primary inspiration for a lot of their games, with the primary example being Toby Fox's Undertale, which in-turn would also spawn it's own creative legacy with others. But what sets this apart from a lot of its contemporaries, despite also not being the first game to accomplish this, is Yume Nikki itself.

Yume Nikki does not play like anything I've ever seen before, with LSD: Dream Emulator probably being the closest example we have, and yet Yume Nikki is still unique of its kind. Yume Nikki is a game where you're experiencing the dreamscape of your unconscious mind. There are no specific goals, there is no dialogue, there is no direction. There is only experience. Drifting around these multivaried and interconnected areas of your REM sleep reality, all abide by unspoken, archaic rules. Worlds inhabited by all of peculiar creatures, if you can even call them that. Common themes that binds one particular area offset from another with their own entirely different gimmick. These worlds were not meant to be traveled but be explored, not to pass by but to immerse in. These long, often unending segments of your dream stretch out unfathomably long with often repeating objects in varied patterns dispersed widely across the abstract plane. It also seems so repetitious, especially underscored with tracks that last no longer than ten seconds before they loop back.

And yet, that is the point.

The long journey to of discovery of one's own mind, the human tendency to find patterns and symbolism in things that seem incomprehensible to anyone else. To seek meaning in things where their may not even be any and may not matter if it means something to us. These long stretches of pure infinite void to find discovery in things about ourselves and trying to make sense of the chaos that we have no control over, there is a sense of understanding. As you traverse further into the worlds deeper and deeper below the surface, things become more sensible and concrete and another branch far deeper are the things that we don't understand but have a profound effect on us. The further down we go, the more sensible it is and the more terrifying the implications, as the things that make sense are the things that are the reasons why they're pushed so far below in the dark depths of Madotsuki's mind, likely distorted memories of things that should never be resurfaced. Memories of key moments in her life that we do not wish to ever see. While Yume Nikki is quite abstract it is not without some obvious themes and common interpretations found from the clues you find plummeting down the rabbit void. A sense of identity, trauma, and death are very common imagery found throughout the game and lots of theories that the community have surgically went over the game. For me, I ignored all of those because they're not relevant to what I want to take away from this personally and feel like using things as guides and theories would get in the way of the intended idea of directionless roaming around without any sense of guidance or preconceptions.

If there's any one goal the game might have it's collecting these Effects that will transform Madotsuki into various forms with some power. All of which have very little-to-no use and almost none needed to "progress" in the game. But what they do have is consequence. The unpredictable events that it can bring to the inhabitants of your mind, and in doing so, discover a little more (or less) about ourselves. I used an Effect to transform myself into a traffic light and interacted with one inhabitant, in a place fathoms below the surface of our dream, who are one of the few people who actually resembles something like a human in a landscape where everything looks distorted and crude. What I got was a complete surprise and something I never would have expected from a game that thrives off unpredictability and the strange at the very beginning.

Even as I completed the game and remained stunned at the ending of a game I already knew years in advance would happen, the first thing I did was boot it back up again and kept going. Yume Nikki has this wonderful sense of atmosphere that I kept finding myself going back to even after its completion, because it wasn't complete. There was more to see and discover and more to know about what this game is. To retread familiar grounds and journeying through tonally whiplashed zones, both visually and through its sound. It's hard to really nail down what this game is trying to go for or to explain the hook of what makes this game. In fact, conceptually it sounds extremely boring. There are no puzzles, nor action, exploring the worlds sounds repetitive, there's no story. And yet, for many, it's their favorite game of all time and has saw almost as much popularity over Cave Story.

It has found its own niche audience that has grown in popularity. Many fan games were created that were almost as good, if not just as good, as Yume Nikki. And while it's not a big foundation starter for a global industry kickstarter like Cave Story, it would help lay the cement and provide further inspiration to younger developers to create things of their own: things that were more profound, thought provoking, creative, or just downright silly and strange. That's what's fascinating about doujin soft games is that they didn't care much about making games that fit some niche but to fit the things themselves they would want to put out. Born from that were some incredible titles of ingenuity, while of course among the piles of rather mediocre titles. Regardless though, all made out of some love or passion from what the things that influenced them that would be discovered by others to translate these games to be shared worldwide and influence other generations of artists to create something of themselves. Yume Nikki while has its influences that clearly inspired it, like Mother 1, it doesn't behold to any conventions or adhere to any standard industry practices. It's just whatever Kikiyama wanted to make, no strings attached.

2004 was a good year.

And Yume Nikki is an art like nothing else.

We love fixed attack angles! As fun as it can be to control hordes of enemies coming in at every angle, there’s an equal amount of joy in jockeying player characters with limited angles of attack into a perfect position against deviously placed enemies. And there’s no better example of this dynamic than controlling a SUPER VEHICLE-001 METAL SLUG.

The firing angle of your Slug’s turret turns as you move (or hold up/down), which makes the act of realigning your firing angle intrinsically tied to movement, and in turn intrinsically ties it to every other threat in the game that’s locking down your position. Backing up to turn your turret backwards may not always be safe when there’s a grenade or mine behind you. That the Slug’s cannon can only fire towards the right side of the screen creates an asymmetric situation where enemies coming from the left must be handled differently than those from the right. Given this fact, you’re always trying to figure out how to maneuver enemies in front of your cannon. Figure it out, and you’re rewarded with juicy damage. The coolest example of this has to be the stage 4 boss in Metal Slug 2/X, where if you narrowly avoid being hit by its cannon shells, you can have your Slug ride the shockwave of the explosion to propel yourself upwards and so get a perfect cannon firing angle at the boss’ weak point. Therein lies the joy of controlling an unwieldy massive thing: of getting it to do exactly what you want to and using it to systematically dismantle situations at full speed. Having to deal with multiple high-HP targets approaching you from multiple uncomfortable angles is where Slug combat shines.

With your angles of attack being limited, naturally the game keeps placing enemies in off-angle positions. The uneven stage terrain is crucial to making this dynamic work. Stage elements like barricades, slopes and trenches aren’t merely decorations, but actual hazards that serve to obfuscate getting a clean shot on the enemy (and vice versa!)[^1]. After all, in a game where your main attack angles are limited to the cardinal directions while on-foot or a limited turning speed in the Slug, controlling a situation where the stage terrain is completely flat would be too straightforward. If the enemies directly spawned into your line of fire, you would only need to hold down the fire button and move forwards without a thought. This is precisely why during moments where the terrain is flat, Metal Slug prefers to spawn enemies from above or below rather than from the left or right, playing with the fact that you can only shoot directly upwards.

Another key to making this dynamic work is there is no single weapon that can easily or consistently cover large parts of the screen. All weapons you get via POW drops are weak in at least one area[^2], and you can only carry one at a time. Arguably the Slug has the most versatility with its all-range Vulcan Gun and powerful Cannon blasts, but this means having to pilot the big unwieldy Slug. The fact that no weapon can quite consistently cover any given situation is what forces the player to engage with the dynamic of negotiating terrain and enemy placements at all, instead of it turning into a game holding down the fire button and running forwards. Powerful screen-covering weapons like Contra’s Spreadgun or Ninja Spirit’s Kusarigama work well within their own “shoot down enemies coming from every direction” context, but in the “jockeying for the proper firing angle” context of Metal Slug, it’s easy to see how such powerful weaponry could negate a lot of Metal Slug’s mechanical nuances.

Now controlling a big unwieldy thing with limited angles of attack is fun and all, but that still leaves the question of how you are supposed to avoid getting hit in such a thing. Metal Slug’s answer is as follows: ejecting from the Slug gives you a generous amount of i-frames, and the Slug will not collide with any enemy attacks if you are not piloting it. It’s these details that render Slug combat playable at all and what prevent it from turning into a battle of attrition. Consider the following. As enemy attacks in Metal Slug had to be designed to be (mostly) reactable and avoidable on-foot, being unable to avoid such clearly avoidable attacks in the Slug would not feel right on a visceral level. The amount of babysitting that would be required for the Slug to not take any hits would at worst be borderline impossible with the already cramped screen space of the game, and at best reinforce an incredibly slow and passive playstyle if you want to keep your Slug. That ejecting from the Slug makes you briefly invincible and the Slug does not collide with any attacks is the magic glue that gets around these issues and makes the interplay of on-foot/vehicle combat all work. (Which only makes it even more baffling that the game doesn’t really tell you or show you something as essential as ejecting from the Slug making you invincible…)

While we’ve covered the dynamics of jockeying for the right firing angle, we haven’t talked much about how to deal maximum damage once you get that firing angle. This is where things start getting dicey…

You see, grenades deal a lot of damage, but normally there’s a projectile limit of two grenades on-screen per player. However, this means that if you throw grenades at an enemy point-blank so they detonate right as you throw them, you can essentially throw grenades as fast as you can hit the fire button. That means that if you position yourself in an enemy’s face, you can deal ludicrous damage.

This gets even more nuts when you’re piloting a Slug, because while crouching in the Slug you throw grenades instead of firing cannon shells, and while in the Slug, the on-screen projectile limit for grenades is completely lifted! This technique is so powerful that you can demolish barriers in seconds and speedkill certain bosses before they can even get a real shot off! This gets particularly interesting against flying enemies such as the stage 2 boss or final boss, as you’re first trying to climb (your Slug) up platforms where your grenades can connect with the enemy aircraft. It’s an identical dynamic to what I described at the start of this article (w/r/t aligning your Slug’s cannon with a boss for bonus damage), except this one can also be done while on-foot. The only thing that keeps this technique in check is that you don’t have infinite grenades, as they can only be replenished from saving certain POWs or as drops from specific enemies. Sounds cool, right? Well…

It is cool that it gives you another avenue for optimizing damage and clear time, but there’s also such a thing as too much damage. If the nadespam technique is so powerful to the point of letting you skip otherwise fun and interesting encounters, then its existence is more of a net negative than anything. That said, skipping or bulldozing encounters outright can be acceptable if it’s challenging to pull off (which most applications of nadespam aren’t) or if it involves skipping encounters in the first quarter of the game that were easy by design and pose no huge challenge to experienced players anyways. The developers must have realized how overpowered this was, as they nerfed this starting from Metal Slug 2/X[^3]. Of course, one can simply choose not to use nadespam in order to keep these challenges intact. To reference the Xeet of the official Doom Xwitter account: “you control the buttons you press”. But this also comes at the cost of depriving yourself of the otherwise fun dynamic of point-blanking grenades for bonus damage! It’s not that it is inherently unfun, merely that it is unfortunately overpowered and creates balance issues out of the wazoo.

When you can stockpile and spend a powerful resource to such an extent, it is not only too powerful, but also leads to an incredibly all-or-nothing power curve that’s impossible to balance around[^4]. Take the final boss, for example. If you enter with a Slug and a good stockpile of grenades, it’s an excellent boss fight! You’re constantly jockeying your Slug up the platforms where you can get in position where your grenades and cannon shells can hit the boss, all the while dealing with homing missiles or direct shots impeding you--having to always calculate if it’s safe enough to squeeze in more damage or if it’s time to GTFO. But if you enter on-foot or die during and are reset to your peashooter pistol with only 10 grenades? WORST BULLETSPONGE BOSS EVER. An excruciatingly long fight with little means to optimize your damage as you’ll be out of nades immediately unless you get lucky with the item drops from the POWs (who only spawn in at bosses during set but long intervals). Then you get the stage 3 boss. Without nadespam you get a fun fight about dodging lasers from below and mines to your sides, but with nadespam you can kill it before it even fires its big gun. That’s the problem with all-or-nothing power curves: do you balance the game around the player being full power, or not? You could somehow try both as Metal Slug did, but it’s not a satisfactory solution. At the start you get encounters and bosses that are tuned to be still fair even if you die and can’t nadespam but die easily if you do, and at the end you get the exact opposite. Encounters are then balanced around nadespam or entering with your Slug by having enemies with tons of health, meaning they become painfully drawn out if you do end up losing or wasting all your grenades, Slugs, and weapons.

Is it then the fact that you lose most of your resources on death that lies at the root of this all-or-nothing power curve? For experienced players it might be, but for new or learning players who have yet to learn a route optimizing item drops? I doubt it. An experienced player will know when and where to use grenades, and knows how and when to get item drops from POWs. But once a learning player runs out of ammo/grenades or gets their Slug blown up even without dying, then what? Optimizing damage with grenades or your Slug, ejecting from your Slug as a makeshift defensive maneuver--those are dynamics that are now temporarily gone[^5]. The fact these are based on limited resources (that aren’t easily replenishable) means that running out not only depowers you but also gives you less tools to play the game with. This could work if grenades were easier to replenish and Slugs easier to keep with you, but that is simply not the case.

Even without the harsh punishment on death, for new players there’s still a necessary memorization burden that needs to be overcome if you want to not die and face a challenge with all the tools in your arsenal, but what exactly is gained from placing such a “you either know or you don’t” burden on the player? Of course, there will always be optimizations in games that are largely a matter of knowing, but to then make them mandatory if you want to play the game with all tools at your disposal? All that accomplishes is expediting the learning process—it doesn’t make the game more interesting. It certainly might be more profitable to an arcade operator, though.[^6]

If anything, I would say the real problem with Metal Slug is that it treats elements like the Slug or grenades or your weapons as limited power-ups rather than as core parts of your toolset. By designing the game around them being limited, or more specifically, around them possibly not being available to you at all–the game inherently limits the scope for how they can be used and how the game can challenge your usage of them. The game cannot–without severe concessions–design challenges around something you may have no access to at all. It is not that they are limited by resources at all that’s the issue, but rather that it’s a realistic possibility that you might not have access to these tools for noticeable periods of time. Nearly all PC FPS games in the 90s had limited ammunition for their weapons, but they were usually still designed in a way where if you played reasonably, you’d always have more than enough ammunition for your workhorse weapons. Encounters could be designed around the assumption that the player at least had access to those weapons, and that is precisely something that Metal Slug cannot assume. For example, a stage specifically designed around Slug combat can never really go all-out with the encounter design because of the risk that the player ends up permanently losing the Slug (which is partially why Stage 4, which gives you a Slug from the start, feels like it’s holding back the whole time). It can only clumsily try to design around them being both available and unavailable, which inherently limits the scope of the stage design than if it was something that was always readily available or almost never at all.

If these limited tools in Metal Slug were then more easily replenishable or weren’t limited by resources at all, then not only would it lighten the memorization/routing burden significantly, but it would also provide a more predictable set of tools to design stages around. If grenades are a tool that are nearly always available to you, then it’s easier to set enemy health values balanced around the existence of nadespam, and to have stages more thoroughly explore the application of grenades. If the Slug was a tool that was more readily available to you, then we could have more stages that more thoroughly explore the possibilities of vehicle gameplay or on-foot/vehicle interplay.

This would all require a more radical re-examination of Metal Slug’s gameplay formula, which at a glance is unfortunately not something I’ve seen the sequels try to attempt. Metal Slug’s formula certainly has potential that certainly shines through, but if it really wants to get there it should treat its own tools more as fixed parts of its toolset. I should note that it is still possible to take the long-term resource management route, that your ammo and the state of your Slug(s) carry over between stages and have multiple nuanced means to be managed, but this is also something that, again, requires a radical re-examination of the formula.

I give Metal Slug a THANK YOU! out of YOU'RE GREAT!

Footnotes:

[^1]: Slopes especially affect your Slug, as the firing angle of your cannon is relative to the orientation of your Slug.

[^2]: For example: The Shotgun is powerful and fires in a wide cone but lacks range and rate of fire. The Flame Shot penetrates enemies in a straight line but lacks damage. The Heavy Machine Gun can cover diagonal angles but also lacks damage. The Missile Launcher homes in on enemies, but it has an on-screen projectile limit that effectively limits its rate of fire at longer distances.

[^3]: In Metal Slug 2/X they added a maximum rate-of-fire limit to throwing grenades from a Slug specifically (there the rate of fire isn’t even tied to the number of grenades on-screen like when you’re on foot, so whether you point-blank nadespam in a Slug or not doesn’t matter!). In doing so they curbed the maximum potential power of this technique, but this also added the interesting nuance where if you do want to nadespam, you’d have to eject from the safety of the Slug and dump grenades point-blank on foot.

[^4]: Now, I do think it’s possible to make games with an all-or-nothing power curve without it turning into a balancing nightmare, and I think it relies on the speed with which you go from 0 to 100 and vice versa. Take something like Psyvariar, where you’re always playing on the razor’s edge of grazing bullets for brief but absolute invincibility as a reward. In Psyvariar you get real powerful real fast, but it requires constant focus to keep up and can be lost just as quickly. Designers can reasonably predict the player’s power levels and balance encounters around this, as the player can go from 0 to 100 at any time. Metal Slug’s power curve by contrast is slowly built-up using items you pick up throughout the stage. Once you’re fully powered-up it’s hard to lose your advantage, but if you do, the recovery from death is lengthy and crushing. Playing well then feels too rewarding while making a mistake feels too punishing. Encounters are either balanced around you being at full power, or they are not. Deaths can thus quickly spiral into a game over; staying at full power ends up feeling less like a reward and more like a requirement.

[^5]: Such ‘debuffs’ where you are temporarily locked out from using certain tools or moves can be interesting, as they can force you to change and improvise your strategy in the middle of a perilous situation. One example I like is how getting hit by Pukers in Dead Space 2 briefly disables your ability to sprint, thus forcing you to stand your ground against enemies instead of trying to create distance as you normally would. However, these kinds of debuffs only make the game more interesting if they still leave you with enough tools to let you approach a situation in interesting and nuanced ways. A debuff that for example transforms you into a weak character (such as a chicken) that can only do one or two moves is likely not going to bring many nuances to the gameplay. A pistol-only Metal Slug run then won’t have the same depth as if you had access to your full arsenal, let alone the appeal of what makes Metal Slug’s gameplay unique.

[^6]: Arcade games do tend to be unfairly put down as ‘quarter munchers’ by Western audiences (even though there is actual precedent for that in Western arcade halls specifically, but that’s a story for another time), however the fact remains that for arcade operators credits need to flow one way or another. One common resulting design tendency in arcade games was to look the other way when it comes to deaths spiraling into one another–something that’s also known as Gradius Syndrome. Games by Irem (the parent company that Team Nazca, the developers of Metal Slug, split off from) were rather notorious for this. You’d get a ton of games that–if you were at full power–were still technically fair, but if you died once you’d better hope you died at a spot where you could still recover your items, otherwise you could kiss your run goodbye. Arcade-style games originally developed for home systems have been less likely to exhibit this tendency, now that they no longer operate on actual quarters.

Once again, the Markdown markup for footnotes will remain as is until Backloggd adds support for them.