RexZakel
41 reviews liked by RexZakel
Resident Evil 2
2019
Broadly speaking, challenge design in video games tends to revolve around one of two concepts, let's call them "newness" and "oldness." We can represent these two schools with opposite ends of the spectrum: an entirely contextual puzzler like Myst, where your ability to progress is synonymous with your ability to synthesize unfamiliar information, and a single-screen arcade game like Tetris, in which every possible mechanical outcome is immediately apparent and instead it's on the player to react to a rapidly changing state. Though these are extreme examples, as a general rule newness-focused games are less enjoyable when they become old, and oldness-focused games are less enjoyable while they're still new. Unless you manage to wipe your memory, there's not much to get out of Myst on a second run, and, conversely, the foremost tenant of traditional game design is to limit newness as much as possible- Tetris's extraordinary staying power is thanks to it accomplishing this more effectively than any of its peers. Resident Evil is unique in that it's disjointedly designed to harness both newness and oldness: your first playthrough centers around figuring out your goal, hunting for supplies, and traversing the unknown, and everything that follows sees you using your preexisting knowledge of Spencer Mansion's layout to route through it as efficiently as possible. Functionally, that's why there's two protagonists with slightly diverging paths, so a higher percentage of players will complete the game more than once and thus experience both sides of the medallion. It's also why the remake's addition of crimson heads is downright transformative. At first, they're another layer of obstacles that takes you by surprise, even if you've played the original game, and, on revisit, the sense of paranoia that they induce becomes a major wrinkle in how you approach the game's opening hours. Crimson heads are spooky when you don't know they're coming, and they're still spooky when you know they're coming, which best sums up the game's two-way design philosophy. What makes Resident Evil special even among other games that attempt something similar (Super Metroid and Dark Souls come to mind) is that, outside of getting used to its tank controls, there's pretty much no motor skill required. Cover to cover, it's entirely a brain game, and, at its best, it can feel like a constantly shifting set of puzzles and solutions.
I've never much cared for the original Resident Evil 2, mostly because of how it upsets the balance between newness and oldness. My theory is that Kamiya & co. didn't think they could pull off both without feeling derivative of the first game, and instead decided to focus primarily on the new. The RPD HQ is gorgeous but its long, looping hallways make it so there's usually a "correct" path to take at all times, and it's still by far the most well designed of the three locations you visit. Weapon upgrades, puzzle boss fights, and that one window shutter mechanism are all neat but don't feel like they add much to the experience on a deeper level, and the addition of a dedicated "B" campaign means that the newness continues into a replay- let's not forget that Tyrant originally doesn’t show up until your second run. With twenty years of available technological improvements, I fully expected 2's remake to pile on the newness even further, and ink ribbons not being present in the intended difficulty (which is kind of absurd in its own right) was an early sign that I might’ve been correct. But, surprisingly, I enjoyed my second run much more than my first. Part of this is because the added newness often misses- some cool puzzle elements are overshadowed by too many predictably cinematic moments, and everything that happens while transitioning between locations is pretty awful. The boring Ada & Sherry sections, that bizarre crocodile chase that feels straight out of RE4 (in a bad way), having to dodge G’s claws for like five minutes before getting to fight him in the sewers, and that melodramatic “my daughter’s a zombie” cutscene that feels straight out of The Last of Us- getting reminded that people care about, like, the overarching story of Resident Evil always gives me a bit of whiplash. Despite the sewers being significantly streamlined from the original, this stuff breaks up the flow even more egregiously because of how smoothly things were going directly beforehand. But, for me, the game’s lowest point came when I was killed by a licker for the first time and was immediately greeted with a loading screen tip that told me to walk slowly, which canceled out any potential newness that lickers might’ve offered and ensured that I was virtually never bothered by one ever again. That is, until I ran into a licker while I was being chased by Tyrant- forcing you into a situation where you have to modulate your movement speed is a good example of how the game eventually starts to shine. While I prefer the precise, robotic nature of the earlier games’ tank controls, RE2’s remake embraces the scramble. Planning and strategizing, here, are less fun than going in gung-ho, kneecapping zombies on reflex, and picking up items out of desperation rather than out of foresight. It feels like a full realization of the original game’s more action-focused dreams that weren’t attenable in ‘98: being able to damage individual body parts, enemies that are free to move into adjacent rooms, and having to listen for groans and footsteps while running for your life all make for an intense, fast-paced siege and help to alleviate the more linear level design even if they don’t totally make up for it. Does it come close to either version of RE1 for me? No. But it’s a damn good entry in the series. And, most importantly, it transformed a game I never clicked with into one that I ended up enjoying. If that doesn’t qualify it as a great remake, then nothing ever could.
I've never much cared for the original Resident Evil 2, mostly because of how it upsets the balance between newness and oldness. My theory is that Kamiya & co. didn't think they could pull off both without feeling derivative of the first game, and instead decided to focus primarily on the new. The RPD HQ is gorgeous but its long, looping hallways make it so there's usually a "correct" path to take at all times, and it's still by far the most well designed of the three locations you visit. Weapon upgrades, puzzle boss fights, and that one window shutter mechanism are all neat but don't feel like they add much to the experience on a deeper level, and the addition of a dedicated "B" campaign means that the newness continues into a replay- let's not forget that Tyrant originally doesn’t show up until your second run. With twenty years of available technological improvements, I fully expected 2's remake to pile on the newness even further, and ink ribbons not being present in the intended difficulty (which is kind of absurd in its own right) was an early sign that I might’ve been correct. But, surprisingly, I enjoyed my second run much more than my first. Part of this is because the added newness often misses- some cool puzzle elements are overshadowed by too many predictably cinematic moments, and everything that happens while transitioning between locations is pretty awful. The boring Ada & Sherry sections, that bizarre crocodile chase that feels straight out of RE4 (in a bad way), having to dodge G’s claws for like five minutes before getting to fight him in the sewers, and that melodramatic “my daughter’s a zombie” cutscene that feels straight out of The Last of Us- getting reminded that people care about, like, the overarching story of Resident Evil always gives me a bit of whiplash. Despite the sewers being significantly streamlined from the original, this stuff breaks up the flow even more egregiously because of how smoothly things were going directly beforehand. But, for me, the game’s lowest point came when I was killed by a licker for the first time and was immediately greeted with a loading screen tip that told me to walk slowly, which canceled out any potential newness that lickers might’ve offered and ensured that I was virtually never bothered by one ever again. That is, until I ran into a licker while I was being chased by Tyrant- forcing you into a situation where you have to modulate your movement speed is a good example of how the game eventually starts to shine. While I prefer the precise, robotic nature of the earlier games’ tank controls, RE2’s remake embraces the scramble. Planning and strategizing, here, are less fun than going in gung-ho, kneecapping zombies on reflex, and picking up items out of desperation rather than out of foresight. It feels like a full realization of the original game’s more action-focused dreams that weren’t attenable in ‘98: being able to damage individual body parts, enemies that are free to move into adjacent rooms, and having to listen for groans and footsteps while running for your life all make for an intense, fast-paced siege and help to alleviate the more linear level design even if they don’t totally make up for it. Does it come close to either version of RE1 for me? No. But it’s a damn good entry in the series. And, most importantly, it transformed a game I never clicked with into one that I ended up enjoying. If that doesn’t qualify it as a great remake, then nothing ever could.
Stellar Blade
2024
(Demo abandoned)
What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?
"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).
As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.
Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.
So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?
This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.
What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?
"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).
As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.
Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.
So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?
This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.
Dead Space
2023
Inessential.
Despite the many quality-of-life changes meant to bring this more in line with the rest of the series, like updating the Zero-G sections and letting you use your kinesis more offensively, the broad strokes of the game are surprisingly close to the original. A change I was really looking forward to was the “Intensity Director” which is meant to dynamically alter the mood of areas and what enemies will spawn, but in practice, this mostly seems to determine whether or not you’ll get ambushed while backtracking instead of radically altering the major combat encounter. It’s a nice thrill to occasionally get surrounded by enemies, but as with so many of the new features of the remake, it doesn’t wholly commit to this idea, more a proof-of-concept that could be really transformative if it was expanded on somewhere else. Basic Necromorphs are also substantially less threatening due to the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to stunlock them by stomping on them once their legs have been shot out, and for the sheer effectiveness of these newly revamped kinesis powers (encounters and the ammo economy needed to be dramatically changed to make threats meaningful the player).
Given that this production seems to owe so much to the success of the recent Resident Evil remakes, I wish it would’ve taken a cue from them and include some bolder pieces of design and pacing- throw in an extra Regenerator fight, change the order of levels, or go all the way and pull the best enemies from the entire series to give these fights an extra edge. There are earnest discussions to be had about what function the RE remakes serve (if they’re replacements or reimaginings) but at least they’re distinct- I’m compelled to go back to them from time to time!
Really, I think the hesitance to change to radically alter the structure and encounter design speaks to the real intent of this remake, which seems far more interested in making the narrative flow more seamlessly between this and Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke more or less had to be invented as a character in the sequel, and that made the amount of screentime that was devoted to his guilt over Nicole all the more weightless- retconned baggage that hardly landed. The attempt to expand their relationship mostly works, the revelations here about how their relationship ended are much better about setting the groundwork for their arc in the sequel. For as strong as this dynamic, it seems to have come at the cost of much of the supporting cast; compared to their original versions, everyone on the Ishimura comes as the lifeless versions of themselves. Dr. Kyne and Dr. Mercer were amazing presences thanks to great performances by Keith Szarabajka and Navid Negahban respectively, but without that prior context, I’m not sure these new iterations of the characters will stay in the minds of those who’ve only played the remake.
The biggest sin is that the remake ends up being dreadfully boring to play through in practice, the threats so similar to the original that the horror doesn’t land and the action so easy to break that it actively feels like a regression from the constraints of the earlier version of combat design. There’s obvious passion for the project here, especially in some of the granular details, but seemingly not the broader vision needed to successfully combine the old and new ideas together.
Despite the many quality-of-life changes meant to bring this more in line with the rest of the series, like updating the Zero-G sections and letting you use your kinesis more offensively, the broad strokes of the game are surprisingly close to the original. A change I was really looking forward to was the “Intensity Director” which is meant to dynamically alter the mood of areas and what enemies will spawn, but in practice, this mostly seems to determine whether or not you’ll get ambushed while backtracking instead of radically altering the major combat encounter. It’s a nice thrill to occasionally get surrounded by enemies, but as with so many of the new features of the remake, it doesn’t wholly commit to this idea, more a proof-of-concept that could be really transformative if it was expanded on somewhere else. Basic Necromorphs are also substantially less threatening due to the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to stunlock them by stomping on them once their legs have been shot out, and for the sheer effectiveness of these newly revamped kinesis powers (encounters and the ammo economy needed to be dramatically changed to make threats meaningful the player).
Given that this production seems to owe so much to the success of the recent Resident Evil remakes, I wish it would’ve taken a cue from them and include some bolder pieces of design and pacing- throw in an extra Regenerator fight, change the order of levels, or go all the way and pull the best enemies from the entire series to give these fights an extra edge. There are earnest discussions to be had about what function the RE remakes serve (if they’re replacements or reimaginings) but at least they’re distinct- I’m compelled to go back to them from time to time!
Really, I think the hesitance to change to radically alter the structure and encounter design speaks to the real intent of this remake, which seems far more interested in making the narrative flow more seamlessly between this and Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke more or less had to be invented as a character in the sequel, and that made the amount of screentime that was devoted to his guilt over Nicole all the more weightless- retconned baggage that hardly landed. The attempt to expand their relationship mostly works, the revelations here about how their relationship ended are much better about setting the groundwork for their arc in the sequel. For as strong as this dynamic, it seems to have come at the cost of much of the supporting cast; compared to their original versions, everyone on the Ishimura comes as the lifeless versions of themselves. Dr. Kyne and Dr. Mercer were amazing presences thanks to great performances by Keith Szarabajka and Navid Negahban respectively, but without that prior context, I’m not sure these new iterations of the characters will stay in the minds of those who’ve only played the remake.
The biggest sin is that the remake ends up being dreadfully boring to play through in practice, the threats so similar to the original that the horror doesn’t land and the action so easy to break that it actively feels like a regression from the constraints of the earlier version of combat design. There’s obvious passion for the project here, especially in some of the granular details, but seemingly not the broader vision needed to successfully combine the old and new ideas together.
Balatro
2024
Obviously not really poker, despite the theme. Strange things happen with the cards in your hands, the poker terminology rapidly descends into insular gibberish, and probability is controlled - but tantalizingly never fully in your control, one always feels the freedom found from giving oneself over. Maximum difficulty runs have a sub-50% winrate, as far as I know.
It's not actually replicating the flow of a poker game. It's about endlessly seeking less so wins and losses, but simply spending more time in The Zone before you're kicked out; of ditching the flashy presentation and exciting music and narrative overtures of its competitition and being a smooth ride to get you into The Zone, of gradually ramping up stimulation to change your baseline level of what's satisfying, of abandoning your agency and accepting that the house always wins and that we will die and it's better to spend your time on the way there insensate and comfortable.
It's not poker, it's a slot machine.
It's not actually replicating the flow of a poker game. It's about endlessly seeking less so wins and losses, but simply spending more time in The Zone before you're kicked out; of ditching the flashy presentation and exciting music and narrative overtures of its competitition and being a smooth ride to get you into The Zone, of gradually ramping up stimulation to change your baseline level of what's satisfying, of abandoning your agency and accepting that the house always wins and that we will die and it's better to spend your time on the way there insensate and comfortable.
It's not poker, it's a slot machine.
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 floorsbecause 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.
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
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.
this did its job of making me excited for 8 and accomplished very little else.
they are showing a willingness to make kiryu as a character and kuroda as an actor extend way fucking further than he did in the prior seven games - i don't think i can even visualize kiryu so consumed by helpless despair that snot is coming out of his nose as he trembles and weeps for any incarnation of the character prior to this, and that flexibility relative to the series baseline is what i appreciated about ichiban. i was dreading kiryu's return for infinite wealth, but i think they might actually have a real angle for him.
that being said, this game sabotages every part of its narrative, mechanical, thematic, tonal, and character construction for 80% of its runtime in the disgustingly cynical decision to make it a $50 game instead of a focused DLC or interlude. if this game was a DLC that shipped without any side content past substories and the ayame network, but used that smaller scope to tell a focused, well-paced narrative without constant utterly horrific pacebreakers this would be fantastic, and you can very much tell that something of that scope was closer to the original intent than this.
until the literal point of no return, there is not a single plot beat in the entire game that doesn't have 5-30 minutes of utter dead air between it and the next thing of value. i have little interest in these games' coliseum matches and this game makes you do them on literally six different fucking occasions. you constantly go between it and the couch, and it means that you become hyper-familiar with exactly two alleyways in sotenbori as you repeatedly walk back and forth between two points of interest instead of these games' ability to make you ping-pong between a variety of locations throughout the world.
it's a fascinating companion piece to 6, both for the obvious narrative connections, but also in the way that both games are fundamentally compromised. 6's insane ambition and messy development create a seamless experience with chunks missing, and a plot that is essentially white noise as their best-laid plans fizzle apart in the pursuit of pure polygon-pushing. it's something i have sympathy for. gaiden is, instead, something that has flashes of true brilliance and pathos, with a unique atmosphere and a real desire to be connective tissue and closure all at once. its failures come from pure fucking greed and a meaningless search for length over focus. i can't forgive it for the fundamental cynicism of the decision to charge $50 for this
they are showing a willingness to make kiryu as a character and kuroda as an actor extend way fucking further than he did in the prior seven games - i don't think i can even visualize kiryu so consumed by helpless despair that snot is coming out of his nose as he trembles and weeps for any incarnation of the character prior to this, and that flexibility relative to the series baseline is what i appreciated about ichiban. i was dreading kiryu's return for infinite wealth, but i think they might actually have a real angle for him.
that being said, this game sabotages every part of its narrative, mechanical, thematic, tonal, and character construction for 80% of its runtime in the disgustingly cynical decision to make it a $50 game instead of a focused DLC or interlude. if this game was a DLC that shipped without any side content past substories and the ayame network, but used that smaller scope to tell a focused, well-paced narrative without constant utterly horrific pacebreakers this would be fantastic, and you can very much tell that something of that scope was closer to the original intent than this.
until the literal point of no return, there is not a single plot beat in the entire game that doesn't have 5-30 minutes of utter dead air between it and the next thing of value. i have little interest in these games' coliseum matches and this game makes you do them on literally six different fucking occasions. you constantly go between it and the couch, and it means that you become hyper-familiar with exactly two alleyways in sotenbori as you repeatedly walk back and forth between two points of interest instead of these games' ability to make you ping-pong between a variety of locations throughout the world.
it's a fascinating companion piece to 6, both for the obvious narrative connections, but also in the way that both games are fundamentally compromised. 6's insane ambition and messy development create a seamless experience with chunks missing, and a plot that is essentially white noise as their best-laid plans fizzle apart in the pursuit of pure polygon-pushing. it's something i have sympathy for. gaiden is, instead, something that has flashes of true brilliance and pathos, with a unique atmosphere and a real desire to be connective tissue and closure all at once. its failures come from pure fucking greed and a meaningless search for length over focus. i can't forgive it for the fundamental cynicism of the decision to charge $50 for this
Crymachina
2023
This game is messy but really cool. Just download a cheat engine table because it's really not worth dealing with how weird damage gets in the lategame and how you start to fall off the exp curve.
Blisteringly fast-paced and pathologically unable to let its characters have a moment of rest, it balances the consistently-dire stakes with goofy skits that let the cast worm their way into your head. Balances an earnest, potent, and overtly queer and anticapitalist message with a cool lil sci-fi plot that has some neat worldbuilding when they're not directly quoting from Hebrew scripture. I think there's a few points where it cribs a little too heavily from Yoko Taro in terms of how it delivers its punches, but it has a decidedly unique flavor and construction of its own, and I'm an absolute sucker for one of the late-game twists about Eve. Reconciliation is not always an option, and nothing is more pure than killing for the people you love - except for misquoting Tampopo to your crush to seem cool before hyperfixating on shoyu tonkotsu ramen and undoing that coolness factor instantly.
Blisteringly fast-paced and pathologically unable to let its characters have a moment of rest, it balances the consistently-dire stakes with goofy skits that let the cast worm their way into your head. Balances an earnest, potent, and overtly queer and anticapitalist message with a cool lil sci-fi plot that has some neat worldbuilding when they're not directly quoting from Hebrew scripture. I think there's a few points where it cribs a little too heavily from Yoko Taro in terms of how it delivers its punches, but it has a decidedly unique flavor and construction of its own, and I'm an absolute sucker for one of the late-game twists about Eve. Reconciliation is not always an option, and nothing is more pure than killing for the people you love - except for misquoting Tampopo to your crush to seem cool before hyperfixating on shoyu tonkotsu ramen and undoing that coolness factor instantly.
Doom Eternal
2020
(Played on Nightmare, mods used: Original TAG1, AI Restoration, Fixed Immora)
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.
however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.
small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.
with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.
however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.
small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.
with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.
Sea of Stars
2023
This review contains spoilers
I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
