Shellboots
2004
The purpose behind Soviet propaganda was not to deceive, but demoralize. The lie had to be so blatant, so bombastic, that it made the power of the institution behind it look utterly unchallengeable. The lies I told my Pikmin were in a similar vein. “The bulborbs are of no consequence,” I said. “You can still pick up the bomb rocks,” I said. “I will save you if you fall into the water” I said. As the falsehoods spewed from my mouth, I could see that the masses were not filled with faithful determination, happily gobbling up the slop of inspiring platitudes. No, instead there was only resignation. Eyes welling up as they knew, no matter where they wandered, they would be venturing down further into the caves. They prayed not necessarily for life, but for enough brutal, unnecessary, nonpermissible death that it would force me to reset the game and improve my performance as their leader. They were comforted only by dreams of one day becoming purple, becoming part of the anointed. The indispensable few. But these were merely dreams, dreams that rested under layers of nightmares.
Pikmin 2 is known for its very vocal fans. After a long wait between sequels, hardcore fans initially seemed split on Pikmin 3’s shift from a focus on survival to a focus on efficiency. Now, the Pikmin fanbase is known for its irreverent derangements, so most people could still agree that all the games were good despite the shitflinging. Still, it seemed like 3 generally came up short as far as the general opinions went. Then, upon Pikmin 3’s re-release on Switch, it seemed like things began to change dramatically. 3 became a much more positively seen course correction after 2 failed to follow up the format from 1. Pikmin 1 remained as an impressive-but-flawed first outing, and public opinion of 2 began to fall behind.
I like Pikmin 2. It does a few things I wish the other games would have kept more relevant. I would rather replay this over a lot of games, perhaps even games I’ve rated higher. Pikmin 2 is just easy to pick up and play like that. However, I have to say I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out for the franchise, with it choosing to skirt around 2’s fundamental ideas to instead focus more on expanding on 1’s more carefully tailored time management challenge. 2’s spelunking spirit still lives on, but its unique feeling of building dread as you dive further down seems mostly lost to time.
Overlap still exists between the games. Pikmin 2 certainly ups the ante as far as treasure collecting goes. There are tons of things to collect which, like many aspects of this game, are a double-edged sword. With more collectables to find, there are more instances of the game stopping every single time a new item is brought back to your base. Treasures piling up one after another when you are just sitting and waiting to move on to the next floor already slows the pace of the game down unnecessarily. The game already demands you pace yourself with a bit of “hurry up and wait” as Pikmin complete tasks, no need to add on to it. A results screen listing your treasures at the end of the day would do fine, and indeed it did in later entries. Pardon the comparison to future games, but I don’t believe this was impossible for Pikmin 2, it might have even been easier.
With so much treasure to collect, you might think there is an increased emphasis on how you route the process of amassing all of this. Not so. You have free reign to take your time in most of Pikmin 2. The surface level areas are difficult to assess in their quality, as they are mostly an excuse to bring you to the cave, where you have unlimited time to work your magic. Strange, given that Pikmin 2 gives you a second captain to control, allowing you to split the group up. Yet once you’re down in the caves, this becomes a moot point. Very few instances in the game benefit from the split up mechanic. It is mostly an act of convenience on the surface, where you can leave a captain at the base to wrangle returning Pikmin.
With the caves being procedurally generated, their challenge generally cannot come from careful routing and puzzle solving. Instead, they are designed to catch you off guard and make you think on your feet, particularly over the incremental randomization. Get ready to fight, because you’re going to be doing a lot of it. With that, you are gifted a new, vitally important combat tool in the Purple Pikmin. Only available for resupply in caves, these are your main fighting force for much of the game. I would argue their actual introduction comes a bit too early, as Red Pikmin are benched from their usual combat role as a result. A later introduction for Purple would have been a very empowering moment for the player. Instead, their presence is quickly rendered a matter of fact. An early fight with a boss that would prove destructive, the Empress Bulblax, was far less impactful thanks to the purples’ ability to stun.
The purples’ are so vital that I felt cheated when I first found out that caves don’t really suggest you bring them with you in your party, as they are not immune to any hazards like fire, electricity, water, or poison. Imagine my shock upon entering a cave that suggested I bring everything but purples, and I found myself struggling to justify barreling through without them. This does raise some interest in the idea of “no purples” run of the game, as most of the challenges are technically beatable without them. However, Pikmin’s combat is not interesting enough on its own for this already longer game to extend its life further through my self-imposed challenge.
A wipeout of your Pikmin population is a common threat you’ll face in these games, and Pikmin 2 is easily the most eager game in the series to do that to you. A beady long legs jumping down from on high to genocide my yellows with the eagerness of a Harvard student realizing those kids with the little hats were still acceptable targets after all these years. Here you are presented with a choice. You can reset the game, perhaps at the cost of your personal time, or persevere and rebuild the group as you go about your normal tasks. Except not really. That’s how it is in Pikmin 1, where you have a macro time limit to complete the game within, a micro time limit of each day, and plenty of ways to repopulate as you are collecting items necessary for completion. In Pikmin 2, the game saves at every new cave sublevel, which will only take a few minutes to complete, and caves do not commonly give you opportunities to repopulate. Taking a day to rebuild on the surface feels like a total waste when you just want to get to the next cave, where the time limit does not exist. Purples in particular are a very precious commodity, and demand a reset should you lose even a few. So your only choice is to reset.
Why then, can I not reset to my last save from the menu? Pikmin 1 let me do that, and the other sequels let me do that. I actually have to close the game and reboot it in order to undo my mistakes. In the game where mistakes that lead to mass death are the most common. Who thought this was a good idea? It does not make the game more challenging, only more cumbersome. It does not create a greater fear of punishment, as the process of resetting carries with it no risk when I’m plopped right back to the same sublevel I was on. Compare Pikmin 1, where resetting could mean a major setback, misallocation of tasks as you repeat the day, or a repeat of your mistakes right at the end of a cycle. I can only assume that the removal of an in-menu reset was to discourage the act of resetting, in a game that was clearly more designed towards trial-and-error style gauntlets. There must have been more than a few changes in direction during development, as this and the aforementioned captain switching mechanic indicate that Pikmin had its priorities a little misaligned.
Reloading is also a completely viable strategy when tackling caves. I recall one particular cave where just crossing a bridge over water lead to mass genocide. The Pikmin pathing is hugely improved in this game over the first, a massive quality of life jump and very impressive given it was on the same hardware. However, sometimes Pikmin have the self-preservation instinct of a pasty British man cruising into Morocco waving a rainbow flag. Caves often end up with baffling setups thanks to their procedural generation, with alcoves and blocked off areas that present you with nothing of note, or enemies awkwardly grouped up so as to make things more vexing than necessary.
The good and bad of this structure culminates in the Dream Den, a harrowing gauntlet of death that is two parts a tense descent down a surprisingly tough series of obstacles and one part a complete slog where you are pretty much over the entire game. If you just want to get it over with, you could even waltz by nearly every enemy and just jump down each subsequent level. Pikmin left idle will follow you down, so there’s no reason to bother engaging with enemies if you’re going for speed.
As overly generous as I thought Pikmin 4’s lock-on was, Pikmin 2’s final boss is a great testament to lock-on as a permanent fixture of the games. It’s well known that you may as well only bring Yellow Pikmin to this fight, for all the good the others will do you. Not only does their higher throwing height help them consistently reach each destructible body part of the boss easier, but electricity is the only hazard in the game which acts as an instant kill. Fire, water, and poison all have a grace period in which Pikmin can be called back and saved, meaning all other Pikmin are completely useless in this fight. This is still a pretty fun final battle, you have to keep on your toes and for those not in the know you will likely lose most of your non-yellows thanks to electric attacks. I personally decided to keep things interesting by performing it the intended way, with a diverse group of Pikmin, but Yellows quickly became the only thing worth preserving.
The bosses are a massive highlight of the game. Trudging through a cave and meeting a unique, powerful creature at the bottom was always a delight. Dealing with unyielding levels of chaos, dodging bomb rocks from flying enemies for twenty minutes, only to be met not by relief but a firestorm of bullets from Man-at-Legs was a ton of fun. Each enemy acts as a different chess piece, and they can be mixed and matched to create a ton of unique combat scenarios with what would otherwise be a very simple system. It’s no wonder that Pikmin 2 enjoyed a lively rom hack scene, which goes a step further and frequently allows the bosses to team up against you.
Bosses were also some of the few times I would just accept my losses and move on. These being at the ends of caves, I would have no further use for many of the pikmin I brought, as my reserves outside had already been built up. While bosses would still cause resets, I appreciated them much more in these scenarios. They hit an excellent sweet spot where I was willing to improve but accepting of my mistakes after a certain point.
These encounters also offer two of the only set pieces where the captain split up mechanic really gets to show its usefulness. A fight against one giant enemy asks you to repeatedly switch between leaders to distract your foe and then attack it from behind. It’s absolutely shocking that no other Pikmin game offers anything like this. It seems like an easy slam dunk. Particularly for Pikmin 4, where your other playable character is just a super Pikmin. There’s also the infamous Water Wraith dungeon, in which you are saddled with only Blue Pikmin upon entry. Here you must quickly complete your tasks within a time limit before the wraith shows up. You may as well reset if you aren’t ready to leave, because the wraith is fast and unforgiving. So you begin again, desperately working to perfect your run through each level, passing the baton between captains, feeling the weight of the encroaching wraith grow heavier. Pikmin 4 would go on to recreate this cave, and while it was similarly fun, the wraith itself just does not compare with the Pikmin 2 rendition’s deadliness.
Pikmin 1, 3, and 4 were perhaps the most sure I’ve ever been of my odds to replay any given game. So I must apologize to 2 fans when I say this is the only one I might hesitate to give another go to. Was it good? Yes. Does it play better than many other games, perhaps even games I’d rate higher? Yes. Is it pretty unique compared to the other games? Yes. Did I find it as fun as the other entries? No, but it's still pretty good. This is one where I’d be much more likely to check out the romhack scene, and indeed I might have done that sooner. Unfortunately, when my computer forgot that its start menu existed, the team of Indian men I conscripted to help me were of no use, and everything was wiped. So instead of setting up an emulator again, I bought this game legitimately on Switch. It’s nice that an entire series is available for legitimate purchase on a single device, and my choice to pay for it here is a testament to piracy as a service problem. If only Nintendo would allow me to just buy their classic library instead of going through their online subscription service, but oh well you little bitch ass bitch boy don’t mind me while I play Path of Radiance the only way a sane person would bother to.
Pikmin 2 is known for its very vocal fans. After a long wait between sequels, hardcore fans initially seemed split on Pikmin 3’s shift from a focus on survival to a focus on efficiency. Now, the Pikmin fanbase is known for its irreverent derangements, so most people could still agree that all the games were good despite the shitflinging. Still, it seemed like 3 generally came up short as far as the general opinions went. Then, upon Pikmin 3’s re-release on Switch, it seemed like things began to change dramatically. 3 became a much more positively seen course correction after 2 failed to follow up the format from 1. Pikmin 1 remained as an impressive-but-flawed first outing, and public opinion of 2 began to fall behind.
I like Pikmin 2. It does a few things I wish the other games would have kept more relevant. I would rather replay this over a lot of games, perhaps even games I’ve rated higher. Pikmin 2 is just easy to pick up and play like that. However, I have to say I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out for the franchise, with it choosing to skirt around 2’s fundamental ideas to instead focus more on expanding on 1’s more carefully tailored time management challenge. 2’s spelunking spirit still lives on, but its unique feeling of building dread as you dive further down seems mostly lost to time.
Overlap still exists between the games. Pikmin 2 certainly ups the ante as far as treasure collecting goes. There are tons of things to collect which, like many aspects of this game, are a double-edged sword. With more collectables to find, there are more instances of the game stopping every single time a new item is brought back to your base. Treasures piling up one after another when you are just sitting and waiting to move on to the next floor already slows the pace of the game down unnecessarily. The game already demands you pace yourself with a bit of “hurry up and wait” as Pikmin complete tasks, no need to add on to it. A results screen listing your treasures at the end of the day would do fine, and indeed it did in later entries. Pardon the comparison to future games, but I don’t believe this was impossible for Pikmin 2, it might have even been easier.
With so much treasure to collect, you might think there is an increased emphasis on how you route the process of amassing all of this. Not so. You have free reign to take your time in most of Pikmin 2. The surface level areas are difficult to assess in their quality, as they are mostly an excuse to bring you to the cave, where you have unlimited time to work your magic. Strange, given that Pikmin 2 gives you a second captain to control, allowing you to split the group up. Yet once you’re down in the caves, this becomes a moot point. Very few instances in the game benefit from the split up mechanic. It is mostly an act of convenience on the surface, where you can leave a captain at the base to wrangle returning Pikmin.
With the caves being procedurally generated, their challenge generally cannot come from careful routing and puzzle solving. Instead, they are designed to catch you off guard and make you think on your feet, particularly over the incremental randomization. Get ready to fight, because you’re going to be doing a lot of it. With that, you are gifted a new, vitally important combat tool in the Purple Pikmin. Only available for resupply in caves, these are your main fighting force for much of the game. I would argue their actual introduction comes a bit too early, as Red Pikmin are benched from their usual combat role as a result. A later introduction for Purple would have been a very empowering moment for the player. Instead, their presence is quickly rendered a matter of fact. An early fight with a boss that would prove destructive, the Empress Bulblax, was far less impactful thanks to the purples’ ability to stun.
The purples’ are so vital that I felt cheated when I first found out that caves don’t really suggest you bring them with you in your party, as they are not immune to any hazards like fire, electricity, water, or poison. Imagine my shock upon entering a cave that suggested I bring everything but purples, and I found myself struggling to justify barreling through without them. This does raise some interest in the idea of “no purples” run of the game, as most of the challenges are technically beatable without them. However, Pikmin’s combat is not interesting enough on its own for this already longer game to extend its life further through my self-imposed challenge.
A wipeout of your Pikmin population is a common threat you’ll face in these games, and Pikmin 2 is easily the most eager game in the series to do that to you. A beady long legs jumping down from on high to genocide my yellows with the eagerness of a Harvard student realizing those kids with the little hats were still acceptable targets after all these years. Here you are presented with a choice. You can reset the game, perhaps at the cost of your personal time, or persevere and rebuild the group as you go about your normal tasks. Except not really. That’s how it is in Pikmin 1, where you have a macro time limit to complete the game within, a micro time limit of each day, and plenty of ways to repopulate as you are collecting items necessary for completion. In Pikmin 2, the game saves at every new cave sublevel, which will only take a few minutes to complete, and caves do not commonly give you opportunities to repopulate. Taking a day to rebuild on the surface feels like a total waste when you just want to get to the next cave, where the time limit does not exist. Purples in particular are a very precious commodity, and demand a reset should you lose even a few. So your only choice is to reset.
Why then, can I not reset to my last save from the menu? Pikmin 1 let me do that, and the other sequels let me do that. I actually have to close the game and reboot it in order to undo my mistakes. In the game where mistakes that lead to mass death are the most common. Who thought this was a good idea? It does not make the game more challenging, only more cumbersome. It does not create a greater fear of punishment, as the process of resetting carries with it no risk when I’m plopped right back to the same sublevel I was on. Compare Pikmin 1, where resetting could mean a major setback, misallocation of tasks as you repeat the day, or a repeat of your mistakes right at the end of a cycle. I can only assume that the removal of an in-menu reset was to discourage the act of resetting, in a game that was clearly more designed towards trial-and-error style gauntlets. There must have been more than a few changes in direction during development, as this and the aforementioned captain switching mechanic indicate that Pikmin had its priorities a little misaligned.
Reloading is also a completely viable strategy when tackling caves. I recall one particular cave where just crossing a bridge over water lead to mass genocide. The Pikmin pathing is hugely improved in this game over the first, a massive quality of life jump and very impressive given it was on the same hardware. However, sometimes Pikmin have the self-preservation instinct of a pasty British man cruising into Morocco waving a rainbow flag. Caves often end up with baffling setups thanks to their procedural generation, with alcoves and blocked off areas that present you with nothing of note, or enemies awkwardly grouped up so as to make things more vexing than necessary.
The good and bad of this structure culminates in the Dream Den, a harrowing gauntlet of death that is two parts a tense descent down a surprisingly tough series of obstacles and one part a complete slog where you are pretty much over the entire game. If you just want to get it over with, you could even waltz by nearly every enemy and just jump down each subsequent level. Pikmin left idle will follow you down, so there’s no reason to bother engaging with enemies if you’re going for speed.
As overly generous as I thought Pikmin 4’s lock-on was, Pikmin 2’s final boss is a great testament to lock-on as a permanent fixture of the games. It’s well known that you may as well only bring Yellow Pikmin to this fight, for all the good the others will do you. Not only does their higher throwing height help them consistently reach each destructible body part of the boss easier, but electricity is the only hazard in the game which acts as an instant kill. Fire, water, and poison all have a grace period in which Pikmin can be called back and saved, meaning all other Pikmin are completely useless in this fight. This is still a pretty fun final battle, you have to keep on your toes and for those not in the know you will likely lose most of your non-yellows thanks to electric attacks. I personally decided to keep things interesting by performing it the intended way, with a diverse group of Pikmin, but Yellows quickly became the only thing worth preserving.
The bosses are a massive highlight of the game. Trudging through a cave and meeting a unique, powerful creature at the bottom was always a delight. Dealing with unyielding levels of chaos, dodging bomb rocks from flying enemies for twenty minutes, only to be met not by relief but a firestorm of bullets from Man-at-Legs was a ton of fun. Each enemy acts as a different chess piece, and they can be mixed and matched to create a ton of unique combat scenarios with what would otherwise be a very simple system. It’s no wonder that Pikmin 2 enjoyed a lively rom hack scene, which goes a step further and frequently allows the bosses to team up against you.
Bosses were also some of the few times I would just accept my losses and move on. These being at the ends of caves, I would have no further use for many of the pikmin I brought, as my reserves outside had already been built up. While bosses would still cause resets, I appreciated them much more in these scenarios. They hit an excellent sweet spot where I was willing to improve but accepting of my mistakes after a certain point.
These encounters also offer two of the only set pieces where the captain split up mechanic really gets to show its usefulness. A fight against one giant enemy asks you to repeatedly switch between leaders to distract your foe and then attack it from behind. It’s absolutely shocking that no other Pikmin game offers anything like this. It seems like an easy slam dunk. Particularly for Pikmin 4, where your other playable character is just a super Pikmin. There’s also the infamous Water Wraith dungeon, in which you are saddled with only Blue Pikmin upon entry. Here you must quickly complete your tasks within a time limit before the wraith shows up. You may as well reset if you aren’t ready to leave, because the wraith is fast and unforgiving. So you begin again, desperately working to perfect your run through each level, passing the baton between captains, feeling the weight of the encroaching wraith grow heavier. Pikmin 4 would go on to recreate this cave, and while it was similarly fun, the wraith itself just does not compare with the Pikmin 2 rendition’s deadliness.
Pikmin 1, 3, and 4 were perhaps the most sure I’ve ever been of my odds to replay any given game. So I must apologize to 2 fans when I say this is the only one I might hesitate to give another go to. Was it good? Yes. Does it play better than many other games, perhaps even games I’d rate higher? Yes. Is it pretty unique compared to the other games? Yes. Did I find it as fun as the other entries? No, but it's still pretty good. This is one where I’d be much more likely to check out the romhack scene, and indeed I might have done that sooner. Unfortunately, when my computer forgot that its start menu existed, the team of Indian men I conscripted to help me were of no use, and everything was wiped. So instead of setting up an emulator again, I bought this game legitimately on Switch. It’s nice that an entire series is available for legitimate purchase on a single device, and my choice to pay for it here is a testament to piracy as a service problem. If only Nintendo would allow me to just buy their classic library instead of going through their online subscription service, but oh well you little bitch ass bitch boy don’t mind me while I play Path of Radiance the only way a sane person would bother to.
2017
I have literally never 100%'d this game again after my first playthrough in 2017 entirely because of that one volleyball moon
2023
It’s been a while since I was actually sad to end my time with a game. Pikmin only comes around once in a blue moon, and while I think ten years between games is kind of excessive, I think I genuinely prefer for these games to take their sweet time. I pretty much drowned myself in this game and I have no regrets. Pikmin remains a brilliantly designed series, even with some concessions made.
Looking at those concessions, the old debate over what the appropriate level of difficulty for this series is exactly has reared its head again. Pikmin 4 may give Pikmin 3 a run for its money in the ease with which it can be completed. Not only are you given accessibility options like being able to simply rewind a few minutes at a time rather than an entire day, you also have Oatchi. This dog not only acts as your second captain for this game, but can be upgraded to act like a large group of multifaceted Pikmin all by himself. He also lets you ride around with Pikmin on his back, greatly reducing the risk of strays in the back taking hits. If you were to compare the games side by side, I would say Pikmin 4 ends easier than 3 by the time you’re fully upgraded and have things figured out, but Pikmin 3 put me at risk on account of my ignorance on far fewer occasions. This may just come down to Emperor and Empress Bulblax being back, but the long and short of it is that I used the rewind feature several times in 4 whereas the only time I’d need to redo a day in 3 was due to not amassing as much fruit as I would have liked.
What’s most interesting is that Oatchi actually keeps the game pretty fun in his own way, rather than just dumbing things down with the safety nets he provides. Oatchi acting as a one-man army lends itself to more interesting decision-making than just having two captains. You are now objectively weaker when separated from him, but you can still be much more efficient. Oatchi having his own progression system that allows you to take on tougher challenges is also satisfying to watch unfold. One of the game’s final challenges basically demands a fully upgraded Oatchi in order to earn a platinum medal (dandori issue, I know). A rare instance of a legitimate escort mission with the yellow thing dragging your object of desire away from a pair of thick, wet men. While I think the challenges posed in a game with just another normal captain would be more rewarding to overcome, Oatchi offers unique and fun utility in and of himself. Oatchi fundamentally changes how Pikmin are managed because of his ability to consolidate the space they take up, but he thankfully does not deprive the player of fun new ways to play the game. I would say working towards those platinum medals in 4 is actually quite a bit harder than anything in Pikmin 1, but admittedly completing the base game was still very easy. Pikmin 1 also did not have the luxury of twenty years of perspective to design itself around all its greatest gameplay strengths.
“Dandori” is the word of the day with Pikmin 4. Some esoteric foreigner shit about time management. Pikmin 3’s challenge rooms are now the entire ethos behind Pikmin 4. Unlike both Pikmin 1 and 3 though, 4 has no fail state waiting for you if you want to take your time, outside of a side mode where you play as Olimar. 3’s time limit was basically irrelevant, but I thought 1’s added a great bit of flavor that too many people decry. The lack of a macro time limit doesn’t really harm Pikmin 4, in fact I think the spirit of 1’s emphasis on time management is captured wonderfully here. That repeated shouting of “dandori” ended up being a great incentive to prove I was not a dumb baby and could platinum this baby game. There were seriously a couple of times I walked into a fight with the confidence of Russia throwing down with Japan and I experienced similar results to that endeavor.
4 takes a couple more interesting cues from prior entries to inject some of Pikmin’s old soul back into the mix. In 3, areas were more linear escalations towards boss encounters. These fights were given a ton of fanfare, I definitely enjoyed them. However, simply stumbling upon a boss in its den has its own appeal. This is especially true when the boss is actually more bizarre and unnatural, not less. Walking in on a disco spider just vibing there in its arena raises so many questions, but the humor speaks for itself. On the other side of things, knowing emperor bulblax is just chilling underground in a standard area, waiting for you to throw one Pikmin to start the fight, makes it feel like a more organic part of its environment. The Piklopedia has also made a triumphant return. With it you will have three characters giving their thoughts. You have the more surface level analysis, Olimar giving more thoughtful or speculative journals, and Louie saying things like “Six million Pikmin? In four games? I don’t know about that…” There is one boss that feels more like something out of Pikmin 3, and it makes me wish there were a few more like that. Pikmin 4 has already gone to insane lengths to appeal to virtually all Pikmin fans though, so there really isn’t much more I could reasonably ask for.
Unlike the first game, 4 struggles a bit getting on its feet. This is, without a doubt, the longest game in the series, and the introduction is unlike anything that came before. Lots of dialogue. Lots of new mechanics. Old mechanics get more time allotted to explaining them than before. That last one is particularly bad, because referencing Pikmin 1 shows just how little we really needed some of the newer material explained to us. However, as previously stated, Pikmin 4 is substantially longer than its predecessors. Once the game gets going, you really can move at a breakneck pace to 100% it. For the most part. More impressive than the density of content is how well tuned everything is.
Pikmin 2 struggled to justify Reds when Purples existed. Pikmin 3 set Purples and Whites in a side mode and significantly nerfed their utility, while also making Blues very situational compared to Winged Pikmin. Pikmin 4 has NINE Pikmin types at your disposal in the main game. Balance issues still exist, but it’s astounding I got as much mileage out of each type as I did. Purples are nearly back to their dominant state, but until I had a huge number of them, Reds remained helpful. Red are also capable of carrying fiery pinecones that let you open up barriers, keeping them relevant for longer. Whites have several instances where their fast walk speed is critical to earning platinum medals, but their poison immunity is rendered fairly obsolete by Oatchi. I heard many people lamenting the lack of use for Rock Pikmin in this game, only to find they had quite a few caves, challenges, and even a full area in which they were quite handy. Blue Pikmin got the best deal they’ve had since the first game. Two huge areas and a handful of caves demand underwater utility. Yellow Pikmin still do that thing where they need to be thrown high sometimes. Wow. Good for them. Good for those guys.
New to the series are Ice and Glow Pikmin. Ice is one of those things that threatens to trivialize the entire game. You receive them quite early and a handful of them make fighting most enemies a breeze. They DO require you to have some other types on hand if you want to maximize efficiency though, as their damage output is peanuts compared to the other types. You will also lose out on any opportunity to farm more Pikmin from corpses of enemies who are defeated while frozen, as they leave nothing to harvest after shattering. I would say it was a solid effort in trying to balance something so strong. Most interestingly, it feels like the Pikmin type limit, forcing you to only have three types out at once, and the recommended Pikmin usage screen, were made to push the player into situations where they would not have Ice Pikmin around. It’s a bit artificial, I’m pretty sure you can get faster results by relying on Ice more. At the very least, while maximum efficiency might demand carrying some Ice Pikmin at all times, they are still not the be all, end all to your time management.
Glow Pikmin are an interesting resource. They are primarily available in night missions, a side mode focused on tower defense. As such they are designed around accommodating your needs in this mode. You fight against hordes of advancing enemies, so the glowies are given the ability to teleport to you as soon as they are idle for a moment, as well as a powerful stun attack that extends its duration the more glowies you have. This makes them a powerful resource, but one that can only be summoned in caves outside of their dedicated missions. You must expend a resource in order to make use of them, so most players will be keeping themselves in check here, even if you do amass plenty of glow seeds. I actually don’t find these units as strong as Purples, who remain king. But if you’re willing to forgive the glowies’ repeated demands that their “fellow Red Pikmin” stage public terror attacks on Bulborb HQ then you will find a very fun new addition to these games.
Winged Pikmin sadly drew the short straw for this game. I can admire that they went out of their way to actually include them for certain caves and challenges, but their pathing in this game leaves them feeling significantly less impactful. White Pikmin and Oatchi will generally get you better dandori. Worse is that Winged Pikmin still have the same 0.5x modifier to their attack that White Pikmin and Ice Pikmin have, but the tradeoff just isn’t worth it. There aren’t even any enemies where you really see the benefit in using the winged Pikmin, as ultra spicy spray on stronger Pikmin expedites the need to reach elevated enemies faster. However, there are a few instances where Winged Pikmin help in perfecting a puzzle, like the white onion challenge.
Structurally, Pikmin 4 is broken up between large areas, caves, and various dandori challenges. Different areas favor different Pikmin, but you can generally play with other types if that’s just how you prefer to do things. You will be given suggested party setups for each area, and are limited to three Pikmin types, a first for the series. I feel this limitation needlessly restrains expressiveness, but it is admittedly rare where it feels like I would appreciate having more than three types of Pikmin. The levels are larger than ever, so you’re given many opportunities to move your base around should you need to swap things around. This is most common in Serene Shores, where the water level will change midday. As I alluded to before, Blue Pikmin get to shine in this game in a way that they haven’t since the first. Not only do these larger areas give them plenty of opportunities to prove their worth, there are also several caves that favor them as well. These more open areas, compounded by the revolutionary ability to jump in a Pikmin game, lend themselves to a greater sense of verticality than we have had in this series before. Some might feel that this leads to a lack of density in the main levels compared to say, Pikmin 3, where every corner is basically a new slice of dandori. However, 4 does a lot to compensate for this through caves and challenges, on top of this design decision giving you a greater sense of scope for your adventure in general.
Oddly enough, the game has one of the most pointless fakeout credits sequences I’ve ever seen. Leading off of Hero’s Hideaway, a fantastic area in which you have to occasionally deal with an unkillable enemy that steals your troops away, you are treated to a hint at Louie’s whereabouts. This leads into not one but two entirely new areas, and not just small areas that ostensibly act as boss arenas like Pikmin 3’s Formidable Oak. They are fully expanded upon areas, just as robust as what preceded them. Really, really do not get what they were going for here, but both levels prove more than worth your time.
Caves will often restrict what Pikmin you are even allowed to bring. Not only because the environment favors them, but in some situations you’re forced to use these Pikmin precisely because the challenge is actually more difficult for this specific type. I actually wish there was more like this in the game. What’s more, if a cave allowed me to change a Pikmin’s type along the way, then it shouldn’t allow me to enter with that changed type to begin with. I would’ve found that much more interesting. You generally won’t be grinding for units without their corresponding onion though, so these limited challenges generally work as intended. Of particular note is that Pikmin 2’s Water Wraith cave is more or less completely remade in Pikmin 4. Should this be criticized as rehashed content? It’s been nearly twenty years since that game was released. I guess time makes that less objectionable.
Dandori challenges make up some of the best content in the game. You can pass any of these with a mere bronze medal, if you’re a huge fucking loser. Very few games manage to provide that last second desperation as I worked to complete a challenge, and Pikmin 4 pulled it off multiple times. I am talking the literal last second, a big fat “1…0” displayed on my screen telling me how close I was to failure, just before I scored a Platinum Medal. More than once. Dandori issue, yes, but one I’m thankful for. Granted, a few of these were done without full upgrades, like a captain with a pluckaphone or a 100 strength Oatchi, but being capable of scoring high marks on these challenges without those things is a testament to just how well designed the game is. To add to this, I was not actively trying to hinder myself, this all happened quite naturally, and I wasn’t even aware of the pluckaphone until later. I recall one particular challenge where the solution seemed to be using purple pikmin in a way that felt wrong, with them carrying relatively light loads, but it worked. This could have been an inefficient solution, but realizing that it was a solution at all was fun. This is the kind of content that begs for some additions down the line, crafted with pure malicious glee by developers.
Not all of Pikmin 4’s content is a home run. Night missions end up a bit too simplistic, albeit fun for what they are. They only make you sweat a bit towards the end, where you may find yourself frantically running back and forth between bases to make sure a tennis ball spider does not trample your bipedal canine while a ball of amphibious miasma encroaches on you. I will say that I’m glad these missions still account for some interesting routing, with some of them being beatable before any enemies of note even become aggressive. There’s also a series of dandori battles, distinct from dandori challenges. These are a way of integrating the multiplayer feature into the main game. The random and chaotic nature of these leave them feeling much less geared towards the appeal of the standard challenges, so I felt a greatly diminished incentive to perfect them. Still, this mode does seem like it would be a blast to play with friends, but sadly my friend swore off these games after a failed attempt at Pikmin 3 multiplayer years ago, where he was left stuck behind a gate for several minutes as I jacked off in a corner somewhere.
It’s pretty amazing that even Pikmin 4’s weakest content still ends up being pretty good. From top to bottom, there was never anything in this game that I actively disliked doing. There are only a few things that actually bring the game’s score down from 5/5 for me. Granted, I gave Bloodborne a perfect score, and that game is far from perfect, it’s just that the flaws never outweighed how I reflected on the experience as a whole. Maybe time will change that for Pikmin 4 as well (it did for Pikmin 1 pretty much immediately upon my second playthrough), but a few changes leave me scratching my head. Why is lock-on not on a toggle? This feature has virtually removed the need for aiming, and you do have the ability to switch targets, but it’s often a bit overeager to send my Pikmin where I do not need them. A flick of the wrist should have been enough for micro adjustments, but lock-on is just too sticky. “It works most of the time” is simply not enough when this is my primary interaction with the world around me. If I were to screw up throwing things on gyro, then at least I know that’s on me. Lock-on screw ups feel more vexing to deal with. True, they’re just a momentary vexation, but those moments are too common for me to give this a pass. Why are certain features like swarming, something that used to be a default ability, locked behind endgame progression? Maybe charging is just better, but there was no reason to throw this ability into the corner like this. These kinds of things, compounded by the extreme increase in dialogue fluff, make me view the game less favorably than a literal five star experience. They are pervasive enough issues that I cannot ignore how they impacted my experience, even if I think the game is stellar overall.
A testament to just how densely packed the content is in this game, I nearly forgot to talk a bit more about the side mode featuring Olimar as the main playable character. This mode is thrown in here for seemingly no reason other than to find yet more ways for any kind of fan to enjoy Pikmin 4. It reintroduces the macro time limit of Pikmin 1, but it’s even stricter. This was likely done because the player is already familiar with the areas Olimar is exploring. Despite this being well-trodden territory by this point, the time limit and new treasures to collect make this mode feel fresh enough to be worth exploring. Olimar and Moss also become more powerful as the days go by, rather than this being tied to player choice. An interesting decision that turns the time management in this mode into a race against your own space-time obliterating power. It also opens up the Sage Trials for you, which I will once again say is my favorite content in the game.
When I was done with everything, all I could think about was either replaying this game or another Pikmin game. It’s such an oddball franchise that has always had difficulty finding a wider audience thanks to its surface level cuteness being mixed with a healthy dose of moroseness. Something it does without veering into glib territory to reassure the self-conscious adults that it’s in on the joke. The game goes above and beyond in adding little bits of goofy character. I’m happy to see that, with Pikmin 4, this franchise may have finally found that larger pool of fans, and years from now I can say I liked Pikmin before it was cool.
Looking at those concessions, the old debate over what the appropriate level of difficulty for this series is exactly has reared its head again. Pikmin 4 may give Pikmin 3 a run for its money in the ease with which it can be completed. Not only are you given accessibility options like being able to simply rewind a few minutes at a time rather than an entire day, you also have Oatchi. This dog not only acts as your second captain for this game, but can be upgraded to act like a large group of multifaceted Pikmin all by himself. He also lets you ride around with Pikmin on his back, greatly reducing the risk of strays in the back taking hits. If you were to compare the games side by side, I would say Pikmin 4 ends easier than 3 by the time you’re fully upgraded and have things figured out, but Pikmin 3 put me at risk on account of my ignorance on far fewer occasions. This may just come down to Emperor and Empress Bulblax being back, but the long and short of it is that I used the rewind feature several times in 4 whereas the only time I’d need to redo a day in 3 was due to not amassing as much fruit as I would have liked.
What’s most interesting is that Oatchi actually keeps the game pretty fun in his own way, rather than just dumbing things down with the safety nets he provides. Oatchi acting as a one-man army lends itself to more interesting decision-making than just having two captains. You are now objectively weaker when separated from him, but you can still be much more efficient. Oatchi having his own progression system that allows you to take on tougher challenges is also satisfying to watch unfold. One of the game’s final challenges basically demands a fully upgraded Oatchi in order to earn a platinum medal (dandori issue, I know). A rare instance of a legitimate escort mission with the yellow thing dragging your object of desire away from a pair of thick, wet men. While I think the challenges posed in a game with just another normal captain would be more rewarding to overcome, Oatchi offers unique and fun utility in and of himself. Oatchi fundamentally changes how Pikmin are managed because of his ability to consolidate the space they take up, but he thankfully does not deprive the player of fun new ways to play the game. I would say working towards those platinum medals in 4 is actually quite a bit harder than anything in Pikmin 1, but admittedly completing the base game was still very easy. Pikmin 1 also did not have the luxury of twenty years of perspective to design itself around all its greatest gameplay strengths.
“Dandori” is the word of the day with Pikmin 4. Some esoteric foreigner shit about time management. Pikmin 3’s challenge rooms are now the entire ethos behind Pikmin 4. Unlike both Pikmin 1 and 3 though, 4 has no fail state waiting for you if you want to take your time, outside of a side mode where you play as Olimar. 3’s time limit was basically irrelevant, but I thought 1’s added a great bit of flavor that too many people decry. The lack of a macro time limit doesn’t really harm Pikmin 4, in fact I think the spirit of 1’s emphasis on time management is captured wonderfully here. That repeated shouting of “dandori” ended up being a great incentive to prove I was not a dumb baby and could platinum this baby game. There were seriously a couple of times I walked into a fight with the confidence of Russia throwing down with Japan and I experienced similar results to that endeavor.
4 takes a couple more interesting cues from prior entries to inject some of Pikmin’s old soul back into the mix. In 3, areas were more linear escalations towards boss encounters. These fights were given a ton of fanfare, I definitely enjoyed them. However, simply stumbling upon a boss in its den has its own appeal. This is especially true when the boss is actually more bizarre and unnatural, not less. Walking in on a disco spider just vibing there in its arena raises so many questions, but the humor speaks for itself. On the other side of things, knowing emperor bulblax is just chilling underground in a standard area, waiting for you to throw one Pikmin to start the fight, makes it feel like a more organic part of its environment. The Piklopedia has also made a triumphant return. With it you will have three characters giving their thoughts. You have the more surface level analysis, Olimar giving more thoughtful or speculative journals, and Louie saying things like “Six million Pikmin? In four games? I don’t know about that…” There is one boss that feels more like something out of Pikmin 3, and it makes me wish there were a few more like that. Pikmin 4 has already gone to insane lengths to appeal to virtually all Pikmin fans though, so there really isn’t much more I could reasonably ask for.
Unlike the first game, 4 struggles a bit getting on its feet. This is, without a doubt, the longest game in the series, and the introduction is unlike anything that came before. Lots of dialogue. Lots of new mechanics. Old mechanics get more time allotted to explaining them than before. That last one is particularly bad, because referencing Pikmin 1 shows just how little we really needed some of the newer material explained to us. However, as previously stated, Pikmin 4 is substantially longer than its predecessors. Once the game gets going, you really can move at a breakneck pace to 100% it. For the most part. More impressive than the density of content is how well tuned everything is.
Pikmin 2 struggled to justify Reds when Purples existed. Pikmin 3 set Purples and Whites in a side mode and significantly nerfed their utility, while also making Blues very situational compared to Winged Pikmin. Pikmin 4 has NINE Pikmin types at your disposal in the main game. Balance issues still exist, but it’s astounding I got as much mileage out of each type as I did. Purples are nearly back to their dominant state, but until I had a huge number of them, Reds remained helpful. Red are also capable of carrying fiery pinecones that let you open up barriers, keeping them relevant for longer. Whites have several instances where their fast walk speed is critical to earning platinum medals, but their poison immunity is rendered fairly obsolete by Oatchi. I heard many people lamenting the lack of use for Rock Pikmin in this game, only to find they had quite a few caves, challenges, and even a full area in which they were quite handy. Blue Pikmin got the best deal they’ve had since the first game. Two huge areas and a handful of caves demand underwater utility. Yellow Pikmin still do that thing where they need to be thrown high sometimes. Wow. Good for them. Good for those guys.
New to the series are Ice and Glow Pikmin. Ice is one of those things that threatens to trivialize the entire game. You receive them quite early and a handful of them make fighting most enemies a breeze. They DO require you to have some other types on hand if you want to maximize efficiency though, as their damage output is peanuts compared to the other types. You will also lose out on any opportunity to farm more Pikmin from corpses of enemies who are defeated while frozen, as they leave nothing to harvest after shattering. I would say it was a solid effort in trying to balance something so strong. Most interestingly, it feels like the Pikmin type limit, forcing you to only have three types out at once, and the recommended Pikmin usage screen, were made to push the player into situations where they would not have Ice Pikmin around. It’s a bit artificial, I’m pretty sure you can get faster results by relying on Ice more. At the very least, while maximum efficiency might demand carrying some Ice Pikmin at all times, they are still not the be all, end all to your time management.
Glow Pikmin are an interesting resource. They are primarily available in night missions, a side mode focused on tower defense. As such they are designed around accommodating your needs in this mode. You fight against hordes of advancing enemies, so the glowies are given the ability to teleport to you as soon as they are idle for a moment, as well as a powerful stun attack that extends its duration the more glowies you have. This makes them a powerful resource, but one that can only be summoned in caves outside of their dedicated missions. You must expend a resource in order to make use of them, so most players will be keeping themselves in check here, even if you do amass plenty of glow seeds. I actually don’t find these units as strong as Purples, who remain king. But if you’re willing to forgive the glowies’ repeated demands that their “fellow Red Pikmin” stage public terror attacks on Bulborb HQ then you will find a very fun new addition to these games.
Winged Pikmin sadly drew the short straw for this game. I can admire that they went out of their way to actually include them for certain caves and challenges, but their pathing in this game leaves them feeling significantly less impactful. White Pikmin and Oatchi will generally get you better dandori. Worse is that Winged Pikmin still have the same 0.5x modifier to their attack that White Pikmin and Ice Pikmin have, but the tradeoff just isn’t worth it. There aren’t even any enemies where you really see the benefit in using the winged Pikmin, as ultra spicy spray on stronger Pikmin expedites the need to reach elevated enemies faster. However, there are a few instances where Winged Pikmin help in perfecting a puzzle, like the white onion challenge.
Structurally, Pikmin 4 is broken up between large areas, caves, and various dandori challenges. Different areas favor different Pikmin, but you can generally play with other types if that’s just how you prefer to do things. You will be given suggested party setups for each area, and are limited to three Pikmin types, a first for the series. I feel this limitation needlessly restrains expressiveness, but it is admittedly rare where it feels like I would appreciate having more than three types of Pikmin. The levels are larger than ever, so you’re given many opportunities to move your base around should you need to swap things around. This is most common in Serene Shores, where the water level will change midday. As I alluded to before, Blue Pikmin get to shine in this game in a way that they haven’t since the first. Not only do these larger areas give them plenty of opportunities to prove their worth, there are also several caves that favor them as well. These more open areas, compounded by the revolutionary ability to jump in a Pikmin game, lend themselves to a greater sense of verticality than we have had in this series before. Some might feel that this leads to a lack of density in the main levels compared to say, Pikmin 3, where every corner is basically a new slice of dandori. However, 4 does a lot to compensate for this through caves and challenges, on top of this design decision giving you a greater sense of scope for your adventure in general.
Oddly enough, the game has one of the most pointless fakeout credits sequences I’ve ever seen. Leading off of Hero’s Hideaway, a fantastic area in which you have to occasionally deal with an unkillable enemy that steals your troops away, you are treated to a hint at Louie’s whereabouts. This leads into not one but two entirely new areas, and not just small areas that ostensibly act as boss arenas like Pikmin 3’s Formidable Oak. They are fully expanded upon areas, just as robust as what preceded them. Really, really do not get what they were going for here, but both levels prove more than worth your time.
Caves will often restrict what Pikmin you are even allowed to bring. Not only because the environment favors them, but in some situations you’re forced to use these Pikmin precisely because the challenge is actually more difficult for this specific type. I actually wish there was more like this in the game. What’s more, if a cave allowed me to change a Pikmin’s type along the way, then it shouldn’t allow me to enter with that changed type to begin with. I would’ve found that much more interesting. You generally won’t be grinding for units without their corresponding onion though, so these limited challenges generally work as intended. Of particular note is that Pikmin 2’s Water Wraith cave is more or less completely remade in Pikmin 4. Should this be criticized as rehashed content? It’s been nearly twenty years since that game was released. I guess time makes that less objectionable.
Dandori challenges make up some of the best content in the game. You can pass any of these with a mere bronze medal, if you’re a huge fucking loser. Very few games manage to provide that last second desperation as I worked to complete a challenge, and Pikmin 4 pulled it off multiple times. I am talking the literal last second, a big fat “1…0” displayed on my screen telling me how close I was to failure, just before I scored a Platinum Medal. More than once. Dandori issue, yes, but one I’m thankful for. Granted, a few of these were done without full upgrades, like a captain with a pluckaphone or a 100 strength Oatchi, but being capable of scoring high marks on these challenges without those things is a testament to just how well designed the game is. To add to this, I was not actively trying to hinder myself, this all happened quite naturally, and I wasn’t even aware of the pluckaphone until later. I recall one particular challenge where the solution seemed to be using purple pikmin in a way that felt wrong, with them carrying relatively light loads, but it worked. This could have been an inefficient solution, but realizing that it was a solution at all was fun. This is the kind of content that begs for some additions down the line, crafted with pure malicious glee by developers.
Not all of Pikmin 4’s content is a home run. Night missions end up a bit too simplistic, albeit fun for what they are. They only make you sweat a bit towards the end, where you may find yourself frantically running back and forth between bases to make sure a tennis ball spider does not trample your bipedal canine while a ball of amphibious miasma encroaches on you. I will say that I’m glad these missions still account for some interesting routing, with some of them being beatable before any enemies of note even become aggressive. There’s also a series of dandori battles, distinct from dandori challenges. These are a way of integrating the multiplayer feature into the main game. The random and chaotic nature of these leave them feeling much less geared towards the appeal of the standard challenges, so I felt a greatly diminished incentive to perfect them. Still, this mode does seem like it would be a blast to play with friends, but sadly my friend swore off these games after a failed attempt at Pikmin 3 multiplayer years ago, where he was left stuck behind a gate for several minutes as I jacked off in a corner somewhere.
It’s pretty amazing that even Pikmin 4’s weakest content still ends up being pretty good. From top to bottom, there was never anything in this game that I actively disliked doing. There are only a few things that actually bring the game’s score down from 5/5 for me. Granted, I gave Bloodborne a perfect score, and that game is far from perfect, it’s just that the flaws never outweighed how I reflected on the experience as a whole. Maybe time will change that for Pikmin 4 as well (it did for Pikmin 1 pretty much immediately upon my second playthrough), but a few changes leave me scratching my head. Why is lock-on not on a toggle? This feature has virtually removed the need for aiming, and you do have the ability to switch targets, but it’s often a bit overeager to send my Pikmin where I do not need them. A flick of the wrist should have been enough for micro adjustments, but lock-on is just too sticky. “It works most of the time” is simply not enough when this is my primary interaction with the world around me. If I were to screw up throwing things on gyro, then at least I know that’s on me. Lock-on screw ups feel more vexing to deal with. True, they’re just a momentary vexation, but those moments are too common for me to give this a pass. Why are certain features like swarming, something that used to be a default ability, locked behind endgame progression? Maybe charging is just better, but there was no reason to throw this ability into the corner like this. These kinds of things, compounded by the extreme increase in dialogue fluff, make me view the game less favorably than a literal five star experience. They are pervasive enough issues that I cannot ignore how they impacted my experience, even if I think the game is stellar overall.
A testament to just how densely packed the content is in this game, I nearly forgot to talk a bit more about the side mode featuring Olimar as the main playable character. This mode is thrown in here for seemingly no reason other than to find yet more ways for any kind of fan to enjoy Pikmin 4. It reintroduces the macro time limit of Pikmin 1, but it’s even stricter. This was likely done because the player is already familiar with the areas Olimar is exploring. Despite this being well-trodden territory by this point, the time limit and new treasures to collect make this mode feel fresh enough to be worth exploring. Olimar and Moss also become more powerful as the days go by, rather than this being tied to player choice. An interesting decision that turns the time management in this mode into a race against your own space-time obliterating power. It also opens up the Sage Trials for you, which I will once again say is my favorite content in the game.
When I was done with everything, all I could think about was either replaying this game or another Pikmin game. It’s such an oddball franchise that has always had difficulty finding a wider audience thanks to its surface level cuteness being mixed with a healthy dose of moroseness. Something it does without veering into glib territory to reassure the self-conscious adults that it’s in on the joke. The game goes above and beyond in adding little bits of goofy character. I’m happy to see that, with Pikmin 4, this franchise may have finally found that larger pool of fans, and years from now I can say I liked Pikmin before it was cool.
2002
Color me impressed.
Kingdom Hearts is the impossible game. I’ve been looking back on how the hell something like this came into existence for years and still fail to come up with a proper answer. If Square Enix tried to go through Disney to get something like this made today, Disney wouldn’t even do them the courtesy of laughing at them. Square would just be completely ignored. 2002 Square though? Those guys were kings of the ring. People thought they were the BEST storytellers, the BEST game designers. Nothing could possibly go wrong when it came to a crossover between the biggest name in animation and the biggest name in video game RPGs.
And honestly? Not that much went wrong here. Yeah, I went into this fully aware of the series’ reputation. “It’s convoluted,” they said. “It’s cringe,” they said. Yeah, those things are kind of true, but this first game isn’t dragged down much by some earnest silliness. I’m sure a lot of people decry that this isn’t a more explicit crossover of IPs, as the Disney worlds and characters are isolated from each other and the FF characters are full-on reinterpretations that play pretty small roles, but the presence of the original characters competently stands in for how you might imagine something more explicitly Japanese colliding with western products would go. Having a new character act as the lead allows both newcomers to and fans of one or both of the IPs involved to have some kind of anchor. While the worlds you visit generally retread the content of their film counterparts, they were also an opportunity to see a different angle of each setting and respective principal character, something a kid who knows those stories would probably be wowed by compared to a normal video game adaptation.
Among KH’s many surprises was its combat. Something that was called “mashy” even close to its original release date. While that can be true, and you can have a good enough time just running up against a wall until it breaks, I found the combat’s quirks fun to master. Your basic three hit combo can have its level of commitment reduced by timing swings correctly. Your air combos are faster and can be sped up even further by canceling them with short hops. You have a quick select menu for spells that adds a layer of decision-making to major encounters. You have a spell that grants greater protection from damage but costs more than a normal healing spell. Get caught in the wrong string of attacks and you’ll be reeling over having picked the wrong defensive spell between the two. Your weapon of choice has different passive abilities like a higher critical hit rate or more slots for MP, and comes in a variety of lengths that act as compensation for or counter to their other qualities. So you now have to make a choice over how much keeping a little bit of space between you and a boss means to you.
A bit less intuitive are your party members. By default, Donald and Goofy are programmed to commit suicide in front of you. I understand that classic cartoons are very different from what we expect from our modern, sanitized lives, but watching beloved single father Goofy Goof repeatedly set himself aflame as Bill Farmer screamed in anguish was a little much for me. You will have to set Donald to favor defensive actions to make sure your party is of any use to you.
Outside of wanting to forget Donald's attempts at "help" as readily as Disney wants to forget Song of the South, this simple combat system gives you a surprising amount of control over the flow of fights, and you can make conscious optimizations to reward yourself with more expedient encounters. This includes some added replayability with what kind of build you select at the start, favoring attack, defense, or magic while limiting one of those traits in turn. Beginners are told to pick the shield and discard the staff, while players going for pure speed grab the staff and discard the shield. You can have a pretty distinct experience based on your play style despite seeming fairly limited to start with. I don’t think a game that wasn’t confident in its combat would give me the option to completely disable gaining exp. While I think that is an addition rom the Final Mix version that I played, it’s still a pretty incredible testament to how far this game lept from the turn-based games that inspired it. I don’t think there would be a game that really captured the ideas around Final Fantasy’s active time battle system in a fully real-time format until FF7R, but KH was a strong early outing.
Kingdom Hearts was apparently out to prove it really was an RPG, because unlike most action games, it leads with its weaker material and ends much stronger. A straightforward tutorial is followed up with a leisurely stroll around an island doing some fetch quests. This would be mostly inoffensive, if not for one brief attempt at a “race” that clued me into how odd some of the platforming was going to feel. Sora lands like a rock, so jumping from platform to platform felt far from fluid. This sequence and the optional fight with your friend/rival Riku is meant to be revisited and trivialized on subsequent playthroughs of the game, but I know with certainty I would neve get these right, especially after getting used to my other abilities gained down the road.
Trouble in paradise arises as the island is enveloped in darkness, Sora’s oneitis is whisked away, and Riku is absorbed into a Lovecraftian ether assuring us that he’s just going to ask some perfectly reasonable questions about the history of central banking. The slow pace of the game continues as we are made to walk around Traverse Town. Combat encounters are not going to feel very exciting here. I feel like the game waiting to give you a dodge roll was a mistake. Even when you aren’t getting much use out of it, it can add a bit of dynamism to the flow of each fight. This is where I first picked up on how the game spares me the horror of having to deal with enemies respawning every time I reenter a room. It takes a couple of reentries before they rear their heads again, and they can often be ignored once you know where to go.
So you link up with Donald and Goofy, deciding to need it rather than keep it. You blitz on over to Wonderland, and this first Disney world does a solid job translating the film’s content into a video game setting. It only takes two-ish locales from Alice in Wonderland, the room with the potions and the queen’s garden, but a decent amount of variety is pulled from them. Negotiating with flowers is thankfully straightforward as they will just tell you what they want, so no guesswork is needed. This is one of the better examples of back-and-forth tasks the game is going to burden you with. It’s a short checklist of things that tend to open up a little more of the area as you go. We are not at the worst of this yet. The boss fight here can sadly take a while if you’re a bit sheepish over your capabilities or did not spec into magic. However if you’re willing to just dive in on this lanky fella then it’ll be over quickly.
Your next options are the jungle and the colosseum. The colosseum can come off as a fat load of nothing to those just trying to get through the game normally, but it’s the source of a substantial amount of optional content and some of the game’s best boss fights. If you do not make an attempt at Sephiroth, you will have sorely missed out. Interesting to note that this is actually the first time a character like him or Cloud would even be shown in a real-time format, so it’s no wonder these depictions had such a huge impact on their later incarnations. Though I wouldn’t be a real FF fan if I did not take a moment to seethe over “emo Cloud” being such a cool guy when his original depiction was much more of a dweeby weirdo getting made fun of for trying way too hard to act cool.
The jungle kind of sucks. I have trouble finding much defense for how much needless backtracking there is in this one just to activate cutscenes. In fact it’s often a bit unclear that’s what you need to be doing so you could waste even more time unnecessarily. I have seen some pretty neat optimized routing for this section but it’s sadly not quite enough to salvage it for me. I do get to take a moment to look at Jane, the best Disney girl, so it was kind of worth it in the end. I also got to beat up a leopard, which is something I always wanted to do in real life. Also, did you know that leopards only have a lifespan of 10-12 years? If a leopard killed Tarzan’s parents twenty years ago, then who the fuck did Tarzan kill in the movie?
As another aside, Tarzan claims that the boss here is “ooh ah ooh ah Not-Clayton” but what did he mean by this exactly? Is it a heartless posing as Clayton? Is he merely referencing that Clayton is not alone and is accompanied by a giant chameleon? Is it physically Clayton but possessed or enhanced by the power of darkness in some way? My friend Mike (whom I have blocked on twitter) insists that it is literally not Clayton. I think the following cutscene where the chameleon falls on Clayton implies that it was the real Clayton. If he was possessed, then we have just killed a man who was mostly innocent in this version of the story and even the actions of his own agency could have been manipulated by the heartless. Even Kerchek gets to live here. Clayton was tragically cast as the villain of this story because a higher power deemed it so. In another life, we could have been friends.
Revisiting Traverse Town demands a fair amount of busy work, but you do get to open up an optional minigame world to communist China and climb trees with Xi Jinping and friends. You also get to run into Riku again. It seems that, since we last saw him, Riku has been doing a lot of reading and insists that we should read the passages from Deuteronomy that he texted us earlier. He’s also believing every word from someone who has literal devil horns adorned to her head. I am a huge Sleeping Beauty fan, so getting to see Maleficent be so involved in the greater scope of the game is fun for me, especially since many of the other Disney characters seem more confined to their own worlds.
Agrabah is another generally well designed world. The combat here implements a bit of platforming so you think more about your positioning and try not to fall from your advantageous spot. You also have a nice variety of areas within the streets, outside the Cave of Wonders, the upper level of the cave, the lower level, and the treasure trove. The only thing that’s really missing is the palace interior. You also have to get a truncated version of the film’s character arc for Aladdin, rushing us to his third wish to free Genie. So Al wastes his first two wishes with shit we could have accomplished easily. This is one of those retreads that I accept as a necessary concession. It’s not just the film’s plot, but if you stray too far and have us dealing with like, animated series Aladdin, people who aren’t me wouldn’t be that interested
Jafar’s boss fight is a bit of a dud. The preceding sorcerer Jafar fight isn’t bad, but genie Jafar has the worst aim of all time and you’re mostly waiting for Iago to pass by so you can eviscerate Gilbert Gottfried.
Monstro is one of those worlds I had heard was infamous, only to find it totally inoffensive. It’s a small maze. What was so objectionable about this? Is it just one of those things people blow up because they got lost as kids? Why don’t I hear that about the following world? The fucking water one. Anyway, Riku is here again and this time he’s going on about how his ideology is totally predicated on economic reform only. Pinnochio is here, btw. He and Gepetto have been swallowed up here. Pinnochio is then swallowed up by a big heartless and you have to save him. Now, from my understanding, KH fans like some guy called “Chibi” really enjoy this kind of thing. I am personally not a huge fan of witnessing double-vore, but we end up leaving Gepetto and Pinnochio in this place to supposedly digest for all eternity anyway. Mission accomplished, boys. We entered the belly of the beast and took responsibility for our capital B Being, cleaning our room and slaying the dragon, bucko. (Note: We really will be slaying a dragon later)
The next world is Atlantica. Thankfully this is KH1 so dad is yet to walk in on us having a dance party with Princess Ariel the pretty mermaid. First and foremost, this world is a better example of the abridged/altered plots of the movies. Atlantica wisely ignores the movie’s plot of Ariel wanting to walk on land so she can get laid. However it successfully honors the spirit of the film with its cliff notes still focusing on the conflict between the free-spirited Ariel and her overbearing father, which leads to a deal with Ursula. Maybe praise for such sparse storytelling is unnecessary, but when you have to do something like this eight times per game you should give credit where it’s due.
I’m not really sure how much of Atlantica’s issues are its own versus mine. There are literal arrows pointing me in the right direction for the Final Mix version of this game, and I still managed to get lost trying to find my way back to Ariel’s hideout so I can progress the story. I don’t know how people feel about the swimming here, but it seems deliberately designed to not be as frustrating as underwater segments of the previous era. You move quickly and combat moves about as fluidly as it does on land. Still, the world is a little too large and there are too many enemies to fight per room in order to progress with a shy dolphin to the next area. Twice. I still found this meandering more engaging than the jungle, and I thought it ended pretty strong with both Ursula boss fights. I hear the second one, against giant Ursula, is infamous online for being incredibly frustrating. I’m assuming this must be referencing the original release which has a less free camera, because I found this to be a fun challenge among the required boss fights of the game. There’s plenty of healthy telegraphing of attacks, and conditioning that teaches you to not be greedy with openings. Ariel is also one of the more useful guest party members. I’m sure many peculiar folks online were saddened to find out she did not whip out her feet in this version of the tale, but she can absolutely throw hands.
Halloweentown is here. It is in this game. I liked it. I certainly didn’t dislike it. It’s like if the jungle section was less of a slog. A lot of quick back-and-forth running around to trigger cutscenes before you open up another small area. The combat here against the trash mobs can actually get a little dicey, with these guys who leap down and slash to deal huge damage. So the game is officially not pulling punches at this point. You also have another gimmicky boss fight waiting for you at the end of this segment. While the flow here is notably more in the game’s corner than your own, you still have a lot of control over how quickly this fight concludes. Again, whatever distaste I saw for this online prior to playing for the first time seems to be a projection of childhood frustrations. There’s also an additional fight against a house because the developers really wanted you to appreciate the exterior of this environment and not just run by all the enemies. Fair.
I don’t know if making Neverland the final world in a game about coming of age and loss of innocence was intentional, but I like to pretend it was. Of course, Neverland being last in line here means that apparently Captain fucking Hook has a higher in-universe power level than the likes of Jafar, Ursula, Oogie Boogie, (possibly) Hades, and Not-Clayton. He truly has climbed the competency hierarchy and channeled his inner chaos. Neverland is a fairly brief and confined world, and I can imagine it might’ve been frustrating with the original release’s camera, but it works fine in Final Mix. You are even granted the ability to fly freely here, something the swimming section preps you for. The movement feels very natural even if you only have access to a downgraded version of it outside of this world. Hook’s fight, like several others, is fairly accommodating in granting you extra enemies to beat up on in order to restore your magic. Pan is another one of the more fun guest party members with the ability to freeze enemies in place the way Bobby Driscol wishes he could have frozen time before getting blacklisted. There’s also a pretty neat optional gimmick fight here with a super boss that demands hyper awareness of a ticking clock that will kill your party one by one. It’s a great use of an iconic setpiece from Disney’s catalog.
You get a pocket Tinker Bell here. I have no comment. I just want you to know that you will have Tinker Bell available to summon and there is nothing else to think about in regards to Tinker Bell but she is literally right there in your pocket like seriously imagine though.
Hollow Bastion is where the game goes from pretty good to outright excellent for a while. Your movement is all freed up now, so traversal through the area is about as smooth as it’s going to get. The rooms here vary in size to let you judge the space between you and enemies in a variety of ways. The enemy types are split between bulkier damage dealers and flying enemies, both of which force you to reposition constantly. Beast is here as the only guest party member to not be present in their own world. While I was deprived of a Gaston boss fight, I could still breathe a sigh of relief as the game reassured me that the entire country of France had been obliterated by the Heartless.
The string of boss fights here are all high quality. Dragon Maleficent is a great example of how broken Tinker Bell is, but can be defeated without assistance once you understand that the massive tail whip attack is actually telegraphed. It’s just tough to see because it’s a giant dragon that takes up 75% of the screen. Riku is fully possessed here after going on a rant about how Bob Chapek “cucked out and deserved what he got” without any elaboration. The fight is a 1v1 that puts your understanding of the mechanics to the test. You can either totally crush it or struggle for longer than necessary. The original release is notorious for an unskippable cutscene preceding this fairly tough fight. Although this boss only took me a couple of tries, an unskippable cutscene probably would have made this totally intolerable and borderline drop-worthy as an adult. As a kid in 2002 with much fewer games to play, it would have been incredibly frustrating but probably something I would have stomached.
So Riku is then transformed into a chiseled greek god by the powers of evil and we bail on the Hollow Bastion. After a brief reprieve we dive right back in and head to the endgame so we can take on Ron DarknesSantis and stop him from taking over Disney World. Some of the newer enemies here are a real challenge to get through, but they also outstay their welcome after a while. They have a tendency to shield themselves or outright disappear, so you have to constantly shift focus to new targets and come back to finish off the previous enemy later. It starts out pretty interesting but becomes tiring after a while. The Chernobog reveal completely blew my socks off as I had no idea it was in this game, it helps that the fight itself was pretty damn good. The following room is a seemingly endless gauntlet of enemies that would have utterly destroyed my will to continue had I died in there, on account of the aforementioned defensive enemies, but thankfully I got through it on the first try. Apparently you can also just summon Simba to clear each wave near-instantly. So fuck me.
All that’s left of the game are a couple of fights with Ansem. It’s a pretty strong finish but the second phase is what really feels like the final boss in terms of difficulty. Some might hate the borderline un-reactable attack that virtually incapacitates you and drains your resources to stay alive while it’s active, but I think this lends the encounter a distinct sense of danger not present anywhere else in the game’s required fights. If everyone had something like this, then I’d hate it. As a single endgame boss fight, I love it. A final boss with a few things that are oppressive or unfair makes it more satisfying when you realize they can be beaten. The boss is also very generous with checkpoints and does not force you to redo any phases.
Ansem ends up turning into a giant flesh monster devil god with a sexy Billy Zane proxy attached to it, and watching Donald Duck and Goofy go toe-to-toe with this kind of thing is the stuff not even my dreams could have come up with. I’m sure this bizarre juxtaposition will not become a trend with the series going forward.
Idk the ending is nonsense. Kingdom Hearts is light but also we still have to close that door and Riku has to be on the other side of it rather than just pushing it with you and Michael Mouse is here and we’re gonna explain why he’s shirtless later thank you Nomura very cool.
So suffice to say I was actually pretty pleased with this one. While familiarity with the IPs will certainly enhance enjoyment, and I wouldn’t really recommend the game to someone who hasn’t seen or played any of the source material, it’s shocking to think the aesthetics and gameplay might be enough to carry this experience. If you’re used to more modern games deftly blending snappier combat and customization then you might not click with it, but it’s not hard to imagine why this game is a favorite of so many people who played it near release. Not just because of its recognizable foundations, but because it takes those things and earnestly crafts something totally new and novel with them.
Try not to take its storytelling all that seriously and lecture people over how this ridiculous concept is, in fact, ridiculous to watch unfold. There’s value in the absurd, and not just in an ironic sense. If a group of people made an enjoyable piece of entertainment out of an utterly insane idea with bizarrely broad, abstract, and robotic storytelling that it confidently seems to think is none of those things, then that is absolutely worth giving some thought to, even with a few laughs at its expense.
Kingdom Hearts is the impossible game. I’ve been looking back on how the hell something like this came into existence for years and still fail to come up with a proper answer. If Square Enix tried to go through Disney to get something like this made today, Disney wouldn’t even do them the courtesy of laughing at them. Square would just be completely ignored. 2002 Square though? Those guys were kings of the ring. People thought they were the BEST storytellers, the BEST game designers. Nothing could possibly go wrong when it came to a crossover between the biggest name in animation and the biggest name in video game RPGs.
And honestly? Not that much went wrong here. Yeah, I went into this fully aware of the series’ reputation. “It’s convoluted,” they said. “It’s cringe,” they said. Yeah, those things are kind of true, but this first game isn’t dragged down much by some earnest silliness. I’m sure a lot of people decry that this isn’t a more explicit crossover of IPs, as the Disney worlds and characters are isolated from each other and the FF characters are full-on reinterpretations that play pretty small roles, but the presence of the original characters competently stands in for how you might imagine something more explicitly Japanese colliding with western products would go. Having a new character act as the lead allows both newcomers to and fans of one or both of the IPs involved to have some kind of anchor. While the worlds you visit generally retread the content of their film counterparts, they were also an opportunity to see a different angle of each setting and respective principal character, something a kid who knows those stories would probably be wowed by compared to a normal video game adaptation.
Among KH’s many surprises was its combat. Something that was called “mashy” even close to its original release date. While that can be true, and you can have a good enough time just running up against a wall until it breaks, I found the combat’s quirks fun to master. Your basic three hit combo can have its level of commitment reduced by timing swings correctly. Your air combos are faster and can be sped up even further by canceling them with short hops. You have a quick select menu for spells that adds a layer of decision-making to major encounters. You have a spell that grants greater protection from damage but costs more than a normal healing spell. Get caught in the wrong string of attacks and you’ll be reeling over having picked the wrong defensive spell between the two. Your weapon of choice has different passive abilities like a higher critical hit rate or more slots for MP, and comes in a variety of lengths that act as compensation for or counter to their other qualities. So you now have to make a choice over how much keeping a little bit of space between you and a boss means to you.
A bit less intuitive are your party members. By default, Donald and Goofy are programmed to commit suicide in front of you. I understand that classic cartoons are very different from what we expect from our modern, sanitized lives, but watching beloved single father Goofy Goof repeatedly set himself aflame as Bill Farmer screamed in anguish was a little much for me. You will have to set Donald to favor defensive actions to make sure your party is of any use to you.
Outside of wanting to forget Donald's attempts at "help" as readily as Disney wants to forget Song of the South, this simple combat system gives you a surprising amount of control over the flow of fights, and you can make conscious optimizations to reward yourself with more expedient encounters. This includes some added replayability with what kind of build you select at the start, favoring attack, defense, or magic while limiting one of those traits in turn. Beginners are told to pick the shield and discard the staff, while players going for pure speed grab the staff and discard the shield. You can have a pretty distinct experience based on your play style despite seeming fairly limited to start with. I don’t think a game that wasn’t confident in its combat would give me the option to completely disable gaining exp. While I think that is an addition rom the Final Mix version that I played, it’s still a pretty incredible testament to how far this game lept from the turn-based games that inspired it. I don’t think there would be a game that really captured the ideas around Final Fantasy’s active time battle system in a fully real-time format until FF7R, but KH was a strong early outing.
Kingdom Hearts was apparently out to prove it really was an RPG, because unlike most action games, it leads with its weaker material and ends much stronger. A straightforward tutorial is followed up with a leisurely stroll around an island doing some fetch quests. This would be mostly inoffensive, if not for one brief attempt at a “race” that clued me into how odd some of the platforming was going to feel. Sora lands like a rock, so jumping from platform to platform felt far from fluid. This sequence and the optional fight with your friend/rival Riku is meant to be revisited and trivialized on subsequent playthroughs of the game, but I know with certainty I would neve get these right, especially after getting used to my other abilities gained down the road.
Trouble in paradise arises as the island is enveloped in darkness, Sora’s oneitis is whisked away, and Riku is absorbed into a Lovecraftian ether assuring us that he’s just going to ask some perfectly reasonable questions about the history of central banking. The slow pace of the game continues as we are made to walk around Traverse Town. Combat encounters are not going to feel very exciting here. I feel like the game waiting to give you a dodge roll was a mistake. Even when you aren’t getting much use out of it, it can add a bit of dynamism to the flow of each fight. This is where I first picked up on how the game spares me the horror of having to deal with enemies respawning every time I reenter a room. It takes a couple of reentries before they rear their heads again, and they can often be ignored once you know where to go.
So you link up with Donald and Goofy, deciding to need it rather than keep it. You blitz on over to Wonderland, and this first Disney world does a solid job translating the film’s content into a video game setting. It only takes two-ish locales from Alice in Wonderland, the room with the potions and the queen’s garden, but a decent amount of variety is pulled from them. Negotiating with flowers is thankfully straightforward as they will just tell you what they want, so no guesswork is needed. This is one of the better examples of back-and-forth tasks the game is going to burden you with. It’s a short checklist of things that tend to open up a little more of the area as you go. We are not at the worst of this yet. The boss fight here can sadly take a while if you’re a bit sheepish over your capabilities or did not spec into magic. However if you’re willing to just dive in on this lanky fella then it’ll be over quickly.
Your next options are the jungle and the colosseum. The colosseum can come off as a fat load of nothing to those just trying to get through the game normally, but it’s the source of a substantial amount of optional content and some of the game’s best boss fights. If you do not make an attempt at Sephiroth, you will have sorely missed out. Interesting to note that this is actually the first time a character like him or Cloud would even be shown in a real-time format, so it’s no wonder these depictions had such a huge impact on their later incarnations. Though I wouldn’t be a real FF fan if I did not take a moment to seethe over “emo Cloud” being such a cool guy when his original depiction was much more of a dweeby weirdo getting made fun of for trying way too hard to act cool.
The jungle kind of sucks. I have trouble finding much defense for how much needless backtracking there is in this one just to activate cutscenes. In fact it’s often a bit unclear that’s what you need to be doing so you could waste even more time unnecessarily. I have seen some pretty neat optimized routing for this section but it’s sadly not quite enough to salvage it for me. I do get to take a moment to look at Jane, the best Disney girl, so it was kind of worth it in the end. I also got to beat up a leopard, which is something I always wanted to do in real life. Also, did you know that leopards only have a lifespan of 10-12 years? If a leopard killed Tarzan’s parents twenty years ago, then who the fuck did Tarzan kill in the movie?
As another aside, Tarzan claims that the boss here is “ooh ah ooh ah Not-Clayton” but what did he mean by this exactly? Is it a heartless posing as Clayton? Is he merely referencing that Clayton is not alone and is accompanied by a giant chameleon? Is it physically Clayton but possessed or enhanced by the power of darkness in some way? My friend Mike (whom I have blocked on twitter) insists that it is literally not Clayton. I think the following cutscene where the chameleon falls on Clayton implies that it was the real Clayton. If he was possessed, then we have just killed a man who was mostly innocent in this version of the story and even the actions of his own agency could have been manipulated by the heartless. Even Kerchek gets to live here. Clayton was tragically cast as the villain of this story because a higher power deemed it so. In another life, we could have been friends.
Revisiting Traverse Town demands a fair amount of busy work, but you do get to open up an optional minigame world to communist China and climb trees with Xi Jinping and friends. You also get to run into Riku again. It seems that, since we last saw him, Riku has been doing a lot of reading and insists that we should read the passages from Deuteronomy that he texted us earlier. He’s also believing every word from someone who has literal devil horns adorned to her head. I am a huge Sleeping Beauty fan, so getting to see Maleficent be so involved in the greater scope of the game is fun for me, especially since many of the other Disney characters seem more confined to their own worlds.
Agrabah is another generally well designed world. The combat here implements a bit of platforming so you think more about your positioning and try not to fall from your advantageous spot. You also have a nice variety of areas within the streets, outside the Cave of Wonders, the upper level of the cave, the lower level, and the treasure trove. The only thing that’s really missing is the palace interior. You also have to get a truncated version of the film’s character arc for Aladdin, rushing us to his third wish to free Genie. So Al wastes his first two wishes with shit we could have accomplished easily. This is one of those retreads that I accept as a necessary concession. It’s not just the film’s plot, but if you stray too far and have us dealing with like, animated series Aladdin, people who aren’t me wouldn’t be that interested
Jafar’s boss fight is a bit of a dud. The preceding sorcerer Jafar fight isn’t bad, but genie Jafar has the worst aim of all time and you’re mostly waiting for Iago to pass by so you can eviscerate Gilbert Gottfried.
Monstro is one of those worlds I had heard was infamous, only to find it totally inoffensive. It’s a small maze. What was so objectionable about this? Is it just one of those things people blow up because they got lost as kids? Why don’t I hear that about the following world? The fucking water one. Anyway, Riku is here again and this time he’s going on about how his ideology is totally predicated on economic reform only. Pinnochio is here, btw. He and Gepetto have been swallowed up here. Pinnochio is then swallowed up by a big heartless and you have to save him. Now, from my understanding, KH fans like some guy called “Chibi” really enjoy this kind of thing. I am personally not a huge fan of witnessing double-vore, but we end up leaving Gepetto and Pinnochio in this place to supposedly digest for all eternity anyway. Mission accomplished, boys. We entered the belly of the beast and took responsibility for our capital B Being, cleaning our room and slaying the dragon, bucko. (Note: We really will be slaying a dragon later)
The next world is Atlantica. Thankfully this is KH1 so dad is yet to walk in on us having a dance party with Princess Ariel the pretty mermaid. First and foremost, this world is a better example of the abridged/altered plots of the movies. Atlantica wisely ignores the movie’s plot of Ariel wanting to walk on land so she can get laid. However it successfully honors the spirit of the film with its cliff notes still focusing on the conflict between the free-spirited Ariel and her overbearing father, which leads to a deal with Ursula. Maybe praise for such sparse storytelling is unnecessary, but when you have to do something like this eight times per game you should give credit where it’s due.
I’m not really sure how much of Atlantica’s issues are its own versus mine. There are literal arrows pointing me in the right direction for the Final Mix version of this game, and I still managed to get lost trying to find my way back to Ariel’s hideout so I can progress the story. I don’t know how people feel about the swimming here, but it seems deliberately designed to not be as frustrating as underwater segments of the previous era. You move quickly and combat moves about as fluidly as it does on land. Still, the world is a little too large and there are too many enemies to fight per room in order to progress with a shy dolphin to the next area. Twice. I still found this meandering more engaging than the jungle, and I thought it ended pretty strong with both Ursula boss fights. I hear the second one, against giant Ursula, is infamous online for being incredibly frustrating. I’m assuming this must be referencing the original release which has a less free camera, because I found this to be a fun challenge among the required boss fights of the game. There’s plenty of healthy telegraphing of attacks, and conditioning that teaches you to not be greedy with openings. Ariel is also one of the more useful guest party members. I’m sure many peculiar folks online were saddened to find out she did not whip out her feet in this version of the tale, but she can absolutely throw hands.
Halloweentown is here. It is in this game. I liked it. I certainly didn’t dislike it. It’s like if the jungle section was less of a slog. A lot of quick back-and-forth running around to trigger cutscenes before you open up another small area. The combat here against the trash mobs can actually get a little dicey, with these guys who leap down and slash to deal huge damage. So the game is officially not pulling punches at this point. You also have another gimmicky boss fight waiting for you at the end of this segment. While the flow here is notably more in the game’s corner than your own, you still have a lot of control over how quickly this fight concludes. Again, whatever distaste I saw for this online prior to playing for the first time seems to be a projection of childhood frustrations. There’s also an additional fight against a house because the developers really wanted you to appreciate the exterior of this environment and not just run by all the enemies. Fair.
I don’t know if making Neverland the final world in a game about coming of age and loss of innocence was intentional, but I like to pretend it was. Of course, Neverland being last in line here means that apparently Captain fucking Hook has a higher in-universe power level than the likes of Jafar, Ursula, Oogie Boogie, (possibly) Hades, and Not-Clayton. He truly has climbed the competency hierarchy and channeled his inner chaos. Neverland is a fairly brief and confined world, and I can imagine it might’ve been frustrating with the original release’s camera, but it works fine in Final Mix. You are even granted the ability to fly freely here, something the swimming section preps you for. The movement feels very natural even if you only have access to a downgraded version of it outside of this world. Hook’s fight, like several others, is fairly accommodating in granting you extra enemies to beat up on in order to restore your magic. Pan is another one of the more fun guest party members with the ability to freeze enemies in place the way Bobby Driscol wishes he could have frozen time before getting blacklisted. There’s also a pretty neat optional gimmick fight here with a super boss that demands hyper awareness of a ticking clock that will kill your party one by one. It’s a great use of an iconic setpiece from Disney’s catalog.
You get a pocket Tinker Bell here. I have no comment. I just want you to know that you will have Tinker Bell available to summon and there is nothing else to think about in regards to Tinker Bell but she is literally right there in your pocket like seriously imagine though.
Hollow Bastion is where the game goes from pretty good to outright excellent for a while. Your movement is all freed up now, so traversal through the area is about as smooth as it’s going to get. The rooms here vary in size to let you judge the space between you and enemies in a variety of ways. The enemy types are split between bulkier damage dealers and flying enemies, both of which force you to reposition constantly. Beast is here as the only guest party member to not be present in their own world. While I was deprived of a Gaston boss fight, I could still breathe a sigh of relief as the game reassured me that the entire country of France had been obliterated by the Heartless.
The string of boss fights here are all high quality. Dragon Maleficent is a great example of how broken Tinker Bell is, but can be defeated without assistance once you understand that the massive tail whip attack is actually telegraphed. It’s just tough to see because it’s a giant dragon that takes up 75% of the screen. Riku is fully possessed here after going on a rant about how Bob Chapek “cucked out and deserved what he got” without any elaboration. The fight is a 1v1 that puts your understanding of the mechanics to the test. You can either totally crush it or struggle for longer than necessary. The original release is notorious for an unskippable cutscene preceding this fairly tough fight. Although this boss only took me a couple of tries, an unskippable cutscene probably would have made this totally intolerable and borderline drop-worthy as an adult. As a kid in 2002 with much fewer games to play, it would have been incredibly frustrating but probably something I would have stomached.
So Riku is then transformed into a chiseled greek god by the powers of evil and we bail on the Hollow Bastion. After a brief reprieve we dive right back in and head to the endgame so we can take on Ron DarknesSantis and stop him from taking over Disney World. Some of the newer enemies here are a real challenge to get through, but they also outstay their welcome after a while. They have a tendency to shield themselves or outright disappear, so you have to constantly shift focus to new targets and come back to finish off the previous enemy later. It starts out pretty interesting but becomes tiring after a while. The Chernobog reveal completely blew my socks off as I had no idea it was in this game, it helps that the fight itself was pretty damn good. The following room is a seemingly endless gauntlet of enemies that would have utterly destroyed my will to continue had I died in there, on account of the aforementioned defensive enemies, but thankfully I got through it on the first try. Apparently you can also just summon Simba to clear each wave near-instantly. So fuck me.
All that’s left of the game are a couple of fights with Ansem. It’s a pretty strong finish but the second phase is what really feels like the final boss in terms of difficulty. Some might hate the borderline un-reactable attack that virtually incapacitates you and drains your resources to stay alive while it’s active, but I think this lends the encounter a distinct sense of danger not present anywhere else in the game’s required fights. If everyone had something like this, then I’d hate it. As a single endgame boss fight, I love it. A final boss with a few things that are oppressive or unfair makes it more satisfying when you realize they can be beaten. The boss is also very generous with checkpoints and does not force you to redo any phases.
Ansem ends up turning into a giant flesh monster devil god with a sexy Billy Zane proxy attached to it, and watching Donald Duck and Goofy go toe-to-toe with this kind of thing is the stuff not even my dreams could have come up with. I’m sure this bizarre juxtaposition will not become a trend with the series going forward.
Idk the ending is nonsense. Kingdom Hearts is light but also we still have to close that door and Riku has to be on the other side of it rather than just pushing it with you and Michael Mouse is here and we’re gonna explain why he’s shirtless later thank you Nomura very cool.
So suffice to say I was actually pretty pleased with this one. While familiarity with the IPs will certainly enhance enjoyment, and I wouldn’t really recommend the game to someone who hasn’t seen or played any of the source material, it’s shocking to think the aesthetics and gameplay might be enough to carry this experience. If you’re used to more modern games deftly blending snappier combat and customization then you might not click with it, but it’s not hard to imagine why this game is a favorite of so many people who played it near release. Not just because of its recognizable foundations, but because it takes those things and earnestly crafts something totally new and novel with them.
Try not to take its storytelling all that seriously and lecture people over how this ridiculous concept is, in fact, ridiculous to watch unfold. There’s value in the absurd, and not just in an ironic sense. If a group of people made an enjoyable piece of entertainment out of an utterly insane idea with bizarrely broad, abstract, and robotic storytelling that it confidently seems to think is none of those things, then that is absolutely worth giving some thought to, even with a few laughs at its expense.
I don’t fault anyone for considering Metroid Prime to be one of the greatest games of all time. Go ahead and slap a fiver on it, I won’t really object. It’s the kind of game you can’t help but respect and appreciate. It had no right to be as good as it was. Retro studios was a complete nobody developer that spent the entirety of its time putting out fires and only fell into Nintendo’s hands due to their corrupt leadership being so blatant that the larger entity had to buy them out. This shitshow studio was tasked with transitioning one of Nintendo’s most cherished franchises into a new dimension while also challenging nearly every convention of what people expect from a first-person shooter. Somehow, someway, they more or less pulled this off. Then, on top of that, they made Metroid Prime one of the best-looking releases in video games up to that point.
All credit to the man in the arena. Also I didn’t have that much fun playing it and I’m a freak who likes Prime 3 the most. Years ago a friend and I played the entire trilogy back-to-back, and I walked away feeling like I had really missed something with those first two. As if there were great games in there that I just didn’t see. Revisiting it now, I would say I see the great game more clearly, but it’s like a book made out of gold in a language I can’t read, or the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read written on a scorched notepad.
As far as the remaster goes, it’s strange to say this one feels like a rare breed. With the exception of some very minor gripes, this game is pretty much exactly what you want out of a remaster. It takes the original, gives you some options to improve quality of life, and faithfully upgrades the graphics without anyone on the team thinking they could “fix” anything or reinterpret it. Thank god there are at least a few people out there who can dust off a beloved classic with a bit of humility. All trademark immersive elements that made people go crazy for this game in 2002 are still present and just as on point as they were back then. While it doesn’t have the same level of interactivity as something like Deus Ex or System Shock 2, Metroid Prime more or less obliterates everything that preceded it in terms of atmosphere. The game really makes you FEEL like Samus Aran except without any AGP.
You know what you do in Metroid. You walk around, find some stuff, walk back, and unlock other stuff. Metroid Prime understands this. What it often struggles with is making the process of walking back feel empowering. Movement needs to evolve, enemies need to start feeling like throwing darts at balloons. Upgrades like the double jump, gravity suit, and plasma beam help accomplish this, but the constraints of the level design, movement, and combat have me more often just breathing sighs of relief over things becoming slightly more tolerable. I was hoping to start opening up more shortcuts to interconnected areas using my various powerups to make the process of backtracking less tedious, but Prime is pretty content to have you slowly walk from point A to point B.
You’re far less likely to want to blast enemies with something like missiles. In a 2D game, grabbing the missile that drops from an enemy is barely more than breathing to you. In Prime, the greater verticality/space in general combined with the slower movement speed make this much more of a chore. You can get around this by charging your power beam to draw items in, but that’s more just another step in the tedium of it all. This is BEFORE enemies get beefier and more aggressive. I was pretty bored with all the time I spent hopping around enemy fire.
Even people who love Prime admit that its combat is, at best, nothing special. Sadly you are made to engage with it all-too frequently. Enemies won’t usually leave you be, and you either have to blast away or tank some damage. The lineup of enemies won’t do you the courtesy of staying dead either. Whether you’ve used a save point or not, these guys are coming back within a few minutes. So rev up that arm cannon.
I actually look back on one often maligned sequence pretty fondly. The trek down phazon mines, where there is only one save point at the top and one at the bottom, had me pretty engaged. The combat I had disliked for most of my play time suddenly made me anxious and frustrated in ways I wanted to overcome rather than abandon. There were legitimate demands on me to think things through before I rushed into a scrap. It helps that this ends on the best fight in the game, the Omega Pirate. While it still has the trappings of a typical Metroid boss where you can just run into a wall and hope for the best, it’s not nearly as effective of a strategy. This section may not have the stronger level design of Chozo Ruins or Phendrana, but it may be the only sequence with an emphasis on combat that kind of clicked with me. Although I don’t think I’d like it if such a daunting series of events was the norm throughout the game. I just wish the game didn’t think it needed to keep respawning enemies to keep you interested.
The Phazon Mines sadly fall off tremendously once you’re done with its linear clencher sequence, though. If you liked it at all to begin with. Walking your way back through its tight corridors is a major slog with the previously-mentioned enemies who won’t stay dead, and the map becomes a serious eyesore thanks to the area being strung together with elevators that layer on top of each other on the map screen.
One of the parts I thought I’d hate revisiting but had an alright time with was the endgame scavenger hunt. At that point nothing could threaten me and I really could just waltz through each area I had missed an artifact in. This is helped along by the game’s outstanding soundtrack. Even this, however, reached a breaking point when I realized I not only had to go back to Phendrana Drifts from the other side of the game world, I had to go to the absolute very end of Phendrana Drifts. The game lets you know about this artifact quest early on, but most of the artifacts aren’t obtainable without late game power-ups. There was no surer way to kill my interest in exploring for optional upgrades than feeling like I wasn’t going to have the right equipment anyway.
Actually, I just remembered that at least one of the artifacts expects you to use the Phazon Suit, which is acquired after defeating the Omega Pirate. The hint after the Omega Pirate leads you outside the mines and to the Chozo Artifact area. Which then tells you that one of the artifacts is in the mines. I only dodged this horrible bit of backtracking because I remembered this artifact. Holy shit. Lmao imagine being the kid who listened to the hints and getting slapped with that lmao lol
Phendrana is the biggest winner in terms of level design. This is the most detailed playground of ideas for progression, puzzle solving, and backtracking with your power ups. It offers the same layers of verticality that the Phazon Mines do, only with more openness and a much more palatable time working around enemies. The boost ball, spider ball, wave beam, thermal visor, and gravity suit all have segments dedicated to them here, and it’s the first place where you’ll really be getting mileage out of your double jump. With each pass, you’ll feel like you’re doing more than just unlocking doors, and find a pretty rewarding gameplay experience. All that being said, Phendrana does have a notable downside.
So I’d like to talk about Magmoor Caverns. Magmoor is accessible from most areas in the game, but is the only area through which you can access Phendrana Drifts. This is a massive blow to the game’s level design. In fact I’d go so far as to say I’m not really sure why Magmoor Caverns exists.The couple of puzzles, platforming challenges, and artifacts could have been placed in the blander parts of the other areas. Maybe the intent was that having extra space like this could help immerse players in the game world, but I began to resent Magmoor a little too much as time went on. But again, at least they made it accessible from all other areas.
There’s a cutscene that plays after you get the boost ball, where Ridley flies over you and towards the Talon Overworld. You can surmise that wherever he’s going is not Magmoor Caverns, because obviously that’s underground. However I need to trek all the way through Magmoor Caverns to get back to Talon Overworld, and then immediately double back to Phendrana. This is not the only time something like this happens. I will at least shower some praise here, as that Ridley cutscene is a rare instance where an “automated hint” is a cutscene that only implies where to go instead of a system that literally just tells you where to go.
That hint system is an interesting point of contention. It was probably a necessity that popped up during playtesting. The world was too large, the FOV was too small, and your movement was too slow (especially in the original release with the old control scheme). There was just no way that every player was going to retain certain important information. I understand it’s optional, and many people would just look things up online even in 2002, but I think this kind of thing defeats the purpose of a game like Metroid. Map markers would have been a more elegant solution for information retention, or a map with more color coding/details than what is present. I started playing with the hint system turned off, but I turned it on around the time I decided I would not be doing an immediate follow-up playthrough. While I found most of the hints unnecessary, there are a few where I was left scratching my head as to how the hell I was supposed to know that. The game pretty much gives up a few times and just slaps you with hints immediately after you get power-ups. I believe one of them was right before going to the Life Grove from deep within the Phazon Mines. I can also recall at least one occasion after acquiring a new beam upgrade where the game ended up telling me what specific door I had to use it on. The other doors of that same type were apparently all dead ends.
I think I just prefer the way games like Ocarina of Time (and I suppose, at a later date, Metroid Prime 3) handle this kind of puzzle solving in a 3D space. Particularly when backtracking is involved. The scope of the game is incredible but I wish some of that space was used more economically. I’m sure there are people who like that both the individual rooms and map as a whole are so large, as it makes the world feel more organic and less like it exists purely as a shoot-go-bang video game romp.
I imagine this game gets better and better each time you replay it. Metroid games are meant to be replayed, after all. I just don’t have any desire to revisit it myself. I thought I had missed something when I played this game all those years ago, but I don’t think I missed that much. It’s a technical wonder that isn’t for me. At times it feels like a dream that a game as unique as this exists and is lucky enough to be so worshipfully regarded. Its impact has been pretty much entirely positive. I just don’t find the process of actually sitting down and playing it all that enjoyable.
Oh and I forgot to mention the morph ball. That was amazing. The way it interacts with all the geometry in the game. That’s crazy. How’d they do that? Definitely something we take for granted when it works as perfectly as it does but would have been a nightmare if any little thing was off. Retro’s talent pool really was a cut above.
All credit to the man in the arena. Also I didn’t have that much fun playing it and I’m a freak who likes Prime 3 the most. Years ago a friend and I played the entire trilogy back-to-back, and I walked away feeling like I had really missed something with those first two. As if there were great games in there that I just didn’t see. Revisiting it now, I would say I see the great game more clearly, but it’s like a book made out of gold in a language I can’t read, or the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read written on a scorched notepad.
As far as the remaster goes, it’s strange to say this one feels like a rare breed. With the exception of some very minor gripes, this game is pretty much exactly what you want out of a remaster. It takes the original, gives you some options to improve quality of life, and faithfully upgrades the graphics without anyone on the team thinking they could “fix” anything or reinterpret it. Thank god there are at least a few people out there who can dust off a beloved classic with a bit of humility. All trademark immersive elements that made people go crazy for this game in 2002 are still present and just as on point as they were back then. While it doesn’t have the same level of interactivity as something like Deus Ex or System Shock 2, Metroid Prime more or less obliterates everything that preceded it in terms of atmosphere. The game really makes you FEEL like Samus Aran except without any AGP.
You know what you do in Metroid. You walk around, find some stuff, walk back, and unlock other stuff. Metroid Prime understands this. What it often struggles with is making the process of walking back feel empowering. Movement needs to evolve, enemies need to start feeling like throwing darts at balloons. Upgrades like the double jump, gravity suit, and plasma beam help accomplish this, but the constraints of the level design, movement, and combat have me more often just breathing sighs of relief over things becoming slightly more tolerable. I was hoping to start opening up more shortcuts to interconnected areas using my various powerups to make the process of backtracking less tedious, but Prime is pretty content to have you slowly walk from point A to point B.
You’re far less likely to want to blast enemies with something like missiles. In a 2D game, grabbing the missile that drops from an enemy is barely more than breathing to you. In Prime, the greater verticality/space in general combined with the slower movement speed make this much more of a chore. You can get around this by charging your power beam to draw items in, but that’s more just another step in the tedium of it all. This is BEFORE enemies get beefier and more aggressive. I was pretty bored with all the time I spent hopping around enemy fire.
Even people who love Prime admit that its combat is, at best, nothing special. Sadly you are made to engage with it all-too frequently. Enemies won’t usually leave you be, and you either have to blast away or tank some damage. The lineup of enemies won’t do you the courtesy of staying dead either. Whether you’ve used a save point or not, these guys are coming back within a few minutes. So rev up that arm cannon.
I actually look back on one often maligned sequence pretty fondly. The trek down phazon mines, where there is only one save point at the top and one at the bottom, had me pretty engaged. The combat I had disliked for most of my play time suddenly made me anxious and frustrated in ways I wanted to overcome rather than abandon. There were legitimate demands on me to think things through before I rushed into a scrap. It helps that this ends on the best fight in the game, the Omega Pirate. While it still has the trappings of a typical Metroid boss where you can just run into a wall and hope for the best, it’s not nearly as effective of a strategy. This section may not have the stronger level design of Chozo Ruins or Phendrana, but it may be the only sequence with an emphasis on combat that kind of clicked with me. Although I don’t think I’d like it if such a daunting series of events was the norm throughout the game. I just wish the game didn’t think it needed to keep respawning enemies to keep you interested.
The Phazon Mines sadly fall off tremendously once you’re done with its linear clencher sequence, though. If you liked it at all to begin with. Walking your way back through its tight corridors is a major slog with the previously-mentioned enemies who won’t stay dead, and the map becomes a serious eyesore thanks to the area being strung together with elevators that layer on top of each other on the map screen.
One of the parts I thought I’d hate revisiting but had an alright time with was the endgame scavenger hunt. At that point nothing could threaten me and I really could just waltz through each area I had missed an artifact in. This is helped along by the game’s outstanding soundtrack. Even this, however, reached a breaking point when I realized I not only had to go back to Phendrana Drifts from the other side of the game world, I had to go to the absolute very end of Phendrana Drifts. The game lets you know about this artifact quest early on, but most of the artifacts aren’t obtainable without late game power-ups. There was no surer way to kill my interest in exploring for optional upgrades than feeling like I wasn’t going to have the right equipment anyway.
Actually, I just remembered that at least one of the artifacts expects you to use the Phazon Suit, which is acquired after defeating the Omega Pirate. The hint after the Omega Pirate leads you outside the mines and to the Chozo Artifact area. Which then tells you that one of the artifacts is in the mines. I only dodged this horrible bit of backtracking because I remembered this artifact. Holy shit. Lmao imagine being the kid who listened to the hints and getting slapped with that lmao lol
Phendrana is the biggest winner in terms of level design. This is the most detailed playground of ideas for progression, puzzle solving, and backtracking with your power ups. It offers the same layers of verticality that the Phazon Mines do, only with more openness and a much more palatable time working around enemies. The boost ball, spider ball, wave beam, thermal visor, and gravity suit all have segments dedicated to them here, and it’s the first place where you’ll really be getting mileage out of your double jump. With each pass, you’ll feel like you’re doing more than just unlocking doors, and find a pretty rewarding gameplay experience. All that being said, Phendrana does have a notable downside.
So I’d like to talk about Magmoor Caverns. Magmoor is accessible from most areas in the game, but is the only area through which you can access Phendrana Drifts. This is a massive blow to the game’s level design. In fact I’d go so far as to say I’m not really sure why Magmoor Caverns exists.The couple of puzzles, platforming challenges, and artifacts could have been placed in the blander parts of the other areas. Maybe the intent was that having extra space like this could help immerse players in the game world, but I began to resent Magmoor a little too much as time went on. But again, at least they made it accessible from all other areas.
There’s a cutscene that plays after you get the boost ball, where Ridley flies over you and towards the Talon Overworld. You can surmise that wherever he’s going is not Magmoor Caverns, because obviously that’s underground. However I need to trek all the way through Magmoor Caverns to get back to Talon Overworld, and then immediately double back to Phendrana. This is not the only time something like this happens. I will at least shower some praise here, as that Ridley cutscene is a rare instance where an “automated hint” is a cutscene that only implies where to go instead of a system that literally just tells you where to go.
That hint system is an interesting point of contention. It was probably a necessity that popped up during playtesting. The world was too large, the FOV was too small, and your movement was too slow (especially in the original release with the old control scheme). There was just no way that every player was going to retain certain important information. I understand it’s optional, and many people would just look things up online even in 2002, but I think this kind of thing defeats the purpose of a game like Metroid. Map markers would have been a more elegant solution for information retention, or a map with more color coding/details than what is present. I started playing with the hint system turned off, but I turned it on around the time I decided I would not be doing an immediate follow-up playthrough. While I found most of the hints unnecessary, there are a few where I was left scratching my head as to how the hell I was supposed to know that. The game pretty much gives up a few times and just slaps you with hints immediately after you get power-ups. I believe one of them was right before going to the Life Grove from deep within the Phazon Mines. I can also recall at least one occasion after acquiring a new beam upgrade where the game ended up telling me what specific door I had to use it on. The other doors of that same type were apparently all dead ends.
I think I just prefer the way games like Ocarina of Time (and I suppose, at a later date, Metroid Prime 3) handle this kind of puzzle solving in a 3D space. Particularly when backtracking is involved. The scope of the game is incredible but I wish some of that space was used more economically. I’m sure there are people who like that both the individual rooms and map as a whole are so large, as it makes the world feel more organic and less like it exists purely as a shoot-go-bang video game romp.
I imagine this game gets better and better each time you replay it. Metroid games are meant to be replayed, after all. I just don’t have any desire to revisit it myself. I thought I had missed something when I played this game all those years ago, but I don’t think I missed that much. It’s a technical wonder that isn’t for me. At times it feels like a dream that a game as unique as this exists and is lucky enough to be so worshipfully regarded. Its impact has been pretty much entirely positive. I just don’t find the process of actually sitting down and playing it all that enjoyable.
Oh and I forgot to mention the morph ball. That was amazing. The way it interacts with all the geometry in the game. That’s crazy. How’d they do that? Definitely something we take for granted when it works as perfectly as it does but would have been a nightmare if any little thing was off. Retro’s talent pool really was a cut above.
2022
Pokémon Scarlet is the first new game I’ve played in the series since Sun back in 2016. While I enjoyed that game well enough, I felt like the series was going in a direction that no longer appealed to my sensibilities. I still kept up with the series, but I was content to stave off trying a new game until something new sparked my interest. Had I reviewed Sword and Shield, I likely would have been immensely unkind to it. While I understand that the true value of Pokémon for many is its multiplayer, the truth is that many players make it through the campaigns and post-game quests before never going through again. Their own multiplayer experiences would likely boil down to a few matches against friends with their in-game teams. The increasingly pilpul-like reasons given in interviews behind the stripped-down story quests of newer entries, and the willingness of the fanbase to defend virtually any decision made by GameFreak, turned me off to the series for a long while.
I never cared about the “dex cut” that occurred in Sword and Shield, to be clear. I have never once transferred old Pokemon to new games, and frequently wipe the slate clean on save files. Cycling Pokemon in and out was an inevitability as the catalog of monsters grew larger and larger. I found it immensely unfortunate that this potentially reasonable development decision became the chief criticism of GameFreak’s work when there was so much more to complain about. Of course, there were many people arguing the point with more nuance, pointing out how the production value and content density/quality of the game was clearly not compensating for the dex cut, but sadly the waters were already muddied. Those darn entitled gamers were at it again, bullying the hardworking developers. All the bitching was to no avail, as Sword and Shield obliterated sales charts, and it seemed like GameFreak would never have any reason to improve or reassess their insane yearly churn out of games.
So what drew me back in here? Well for one, I was gifted an early copy of the game for my Nintendo PC, so the opportunity cost was literally just my time. Secondly, this game swerves off hard from Sword and Shield’s literal straight line region and Sun and Moon’s tiny unfinished areas. It’s a full-on open world with 18 main quest missions that can be completed in any order. For me, this is the final nail in the Cofagrigus for any excuse over the main campaigns being lacking in order to quickly shuffle players along to the multiplayer. Pokemon is supposed to be an adventure, and for more reasons than just that open world, Scarlet and Violet occasionally succeeded in bringing that feeling back to the franchise for me. They got there stumbling all over themselves but they sort of did it. Please bear in mind that my experience does not involve much engagement with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which to my understanding is similarly open ended but dissimilarly not so focused on battles. I know many people who disliked Sword and Shield walked away from Legends feeling pretty positively about it, so these last few releases may bode well for the future of the franchise so long as GameFreak can please, please get someone else to help them make the game.
So with these 18 missions, there is no level scaling. This can be a bit of a double edged sword. With this format, the world definitely feels more alive, particularly wild Pokemon encounters way outside the average level of your team. You can also challenge yourself by taking on higher level bosses earlier. This was my experience with the game, going after the highest level gym fourth, the highest level Team Star boss third, and the highest level Titan third as well. Hilariously, I would often ignore the victory road storyline until I reached the obedience level cap that demanded I drag my ass to the nearest gym so that my character would stop trying to roleplay as the average pitbull owner. The world was not accommodating me, and I liked that, even though I knew where it was leading. Eventually, I had to go back and blitz through those lower level missions I had ignored. I quickly decided to only use Pokemon around the same levels as those missions, which made for a more enjoyable experience. However, I know most players won’t think about self-policing that way. Games are meant to be beaten, so people don’t even think twice about doing the most optimal, low risk task in order to destroy any semblance of fun. A Quick Ball at one overleveled wild pokemon that may not even obey, four gym badges in, and then you go back and stomp the entire rest of the game. I can’t help but feel that a lot of people will be robbing themselves of something much more memorable, but GameFreak designed the game this way. They’ve always let you play Pokemon in just about the most boring way possible, just look at all those starters with four STAB moves twenty levels higher than the nearest boss.
SPEAKING OF GameFreak and boring design decisions, let’s talk about SET MODE and how everyone who defends its removal with “Just press B lmao” is brain damaged. Yes, Set Mode is no longer available, a totally baffling decision. Like I stated above, people don’t even think about just how boringly they can play games if it’s less stressful to win by being boring, not even necessarily accomplishing things more expediently. I have played plenty of ROMhacks, and I can tell you that even the toughest hacks eventually lose their luster if you stick with Shift Mode. Knowing what your opponent is sending out and being able to swap to another Pokemon at no risk to you is objectively the best decision you can make. Developers usually put some degree of separation between easier options that allow anyone to beat the game and tougher options they think will be more fun. These are usually called “difficulty modes'' for the uninitiated. Many people considered Set Mode to be a difficulty option, and indeed people who defend the often braindead difficulty curve of the games tell you to just turn on Set Mode. I can only speculate, but I’m sure that those same people are now defending Set Mode’s removal by telling others to “just press B”
The problem is that most people don't even think about how much Shift Mode affects the experience, or how GameFreak removing Set further removes the singleplayer experience from the multiplayer experience completely unnecessarily. They already have VGC, a double battle format, as their main competitive option, something the singleplayer does virtually nothing to garner interest for. Now they’ve gutted yet another way to have singleplayer battles to remotely reflect multiplayer battles. Imagine the frustration a kid will feel when all the power granted to him by Shift is gone the moment he battles a friend, having no means of understanding that’s an intended part of the game. Yeah, I can just press B, in fact, I did press B. Every time. The whole game. Nor did I use items in battle, and it was better for it. These games don’t need ROMhack level difficulty to be interesting. The games are fundamentally expressive enough for you to find a lot of your own fun. The problem is that GameFreak is pretty hellbent on making that expressiveness less palatable. You are presented with an optimal decision constantly, and you have to deny it. Your brain interprets denying the switch as an objectively bad decision nearly every time you see the prompt. You're talking about one decision, turning the game to Set Mode, versus hundreds, denying shift every time you're given the option. Passive versus active. Imagine if you had to hit LB in Halo every time you met an Elite's line of sight in order to activate its good AI. Nobody would find that acceptable except for Pokemon fans. You also get to know what pokemon is coming next which OBJECTIVELY removes part of the game's ability to surprise on a first playthrough. Go ahead and tell me to play blindfolded next.
There’s the biggest issue with the gameplay experience of SV. You need to have the self-discipline to make the game more enjoyable. This isn’t going to apply to everyone, and of course Pokemon games have never been hard, but there are people out there who will walk through the latter half of the game dozens of levels higher than the opponents they need to beat in order to progress due to the openness of the game. Players who aren’t just kids with overleveled starters, doing this completely by accident. There are some solutions to this. One might be having moderate scaling based on your progression, with certain opponents having higher minimum and maximum levels for their pokemon. That leaves the game fairly open without giving you as much exp.
Further muddying the divide between singleplayer and multiplayer is the TMs. It seems like GameFreak just can’t decide whether or not their decision to make these items infinite use in Gen 5 was good or not. Here, they are back to single use, but you can make new TMs at any time by using materials from wild Pokemon. This is a pretty new thing for Pokemon that brings it a little closer to a traditional RPG. I found it to be a pretty neat idea for singleplayer but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Most people have severe loss aversion. As such TMs before Gen 5 were notorious for being nothing but bag space from those suffering from analysis paralysis. With them becoming unlimited in their use, they could act as much better rewards for exploration or progression, and do more than sit in your bag until you were ready for multiplayer. Here, you might have had the best of both worlds; You have more decision-making added to your playthrough, asking yourself if it’s going to be worth it to teach this Pokemon a certain move without it feeling like a total loss. Except it’s still kind of a grind to acquire these once you want to jump to multiplayer, not nearly the grind it used to be, but it’s just going to feel like unnecessary extra time once we all move past the main campaign. Among all the ways GameFreak has tried to make transitioning to viable competitive teams more smooth, they still find ways to make it a little bit silly. However, this may be a compensatory measure for a lack of move tutors in the game, as the list of TMs is substantial. You can ask yourself whether or not those were worth it to grind for as well, or whether or not you should just boot up Showdown. It seems like GameFreak wants you to earn that optimal team, and in this case, it’s certainly among the easier grinds for moves.
The way these TMs are displayed in the menu where you craft them is pretty subpar though. It reminds me of how modern digital storefronts just show you a thumbnail of the game’s box art, that either doesn’t have the title visible or has it displayed with an illegible font. No font here or anything, but I wish there was. You just have a zoomed in picture of the move in action. You can sort by type but there was no reason the UI had to be so unintuitive.
Quality of life features have always been a mixed bag with Pokemon. Here, for example you can still reset EVs for your team, but not with the same ease you could after Sword and Shield’s DLC. I guess GameFreak considers that feature a premium service. You can, however, have your Pokemon relearn any moves they previously knew at any time, including TMs they had, should they have been deleted. This carries over from Legends, I believe. This is honestly a great change, and helps open up team building for the whole game. While I can see the appeal of more committal decision-making previous games had, even going down to how the much maligned HMs affected team building, I much prefer this system. This is one feature that makes the games easier at basically no expense to their ability to craft interesting encounters, even if they don’t choose to make those encounters. With this set up, you can basically go about every major mission with a completely new team made up of each area’s surrounding Pokemon, which is exactly how I plan to play it next.
The major battles seem to have finally gone back to having decent coverage and preparation for certain Pokemon you plan to sweep with. I’ve always felt like type specialists should really ease off on just how much they specialize in their type by the late game. Players should understand type matchups by that point, and in fact they can even see what types are effective against what Pokemon at all times now. I absolutely never understood the criticism when bosses didn’t have a full team consisting of their preferred type, this should almost always be considered a good thing. Even if cases like Flint in Diamond and Pearl only got that way from desperation. Both the Team Star and Titan Pokemon quest lines involve taking down boss Pokemon with health bars equivalent to that of the Tera Raid you encounter on the overworld. Each Team Star boss has a magic car of their respective type that you fight. Interestingly, the game never tells you this car has taken on their type, but it’s easy to surmise. Go ahead and spam that same super effective move, kiddo.
Each quest line provides a lower stakes adventure for you that eventually opens up to a typical storyline where you save the world, but I liked the ride getting there. Operation Starfall involves you running through each base before engaging in a boss battle. The base raids have you run through on auto-battle mode in a “race” to KO thirty Pokemon. This timer is all too generous, and in most cases all you need to beat these challenges within 2-3 minutes is a slight level advantage and type advantage, as that is all that goes into determining whether or not you even take damage in an auto-battle. However, if you go in underleveled, you might find these moderately interesting, as you have to select who among your three chosen Pokemon you send out at what time to deal with what enemies are throwing out. Dual types on both sides mean that certain Pokemon may be more vulnerable than you thought going in.
There’s an adorable little anti-bullying message for the kids in this storyline. It didn’t do much for me but I appreciated the effort. The game is sadly afraid to fully commit to the premise of Team Star becoming the bullies they hated. They did nothing but act truant, they are completely innocent and have nothing to apologize or be held accountable for. GameFreak seems to have settled into the villainous teams no longer being the world ending threat for each game, which I think is a better tone to set for something as laid back as Pokemon. That being said, I’m sure people will eventually want to go back to something more threatening than kids playing hooky. For the time being though, I don’t mind it in concept. This is still the weakest part of the game thanks to the poorer structure of its storytelling that seems unshakable in these Ohmori-directed games.
Secondly, there’s the Titan Pokemon storyline. This is a more intimately character driven story, and I think it shows that GameFreak’s storytelling abilities CAN get better. They’re still nothing special, but this is an improvement over Sun and Moon and a huge improvement over Sword and Shield. While I may have enjoyed certain aspects of SM’s story more, SV is clearly more competent at actually presenting its story. SM’s story is highly intrusive and you are often made to feel like a bit player in it. You just want to get through your island trial but you’ve got to mend this broken family first. It made subsequent playthroughs of the game much harder to stomach than any of its predecessors. Sword and Shield could win an award for being just as intrusive as SM while having absolutely nothing going on in its plot. In SV, you have to go out and pursue these story segments when you feel like it, and you feel like a much more active presence in the story yourself. Arven, the principal role of the Titan’s story, has a very down-to-earth struggle to heal his wounded friend. Something the player is made to relate to, as this quest is used to power up your lizard bike buddy. I wasn’t a fan of either box legendary’s design this time, but it’s hard not to be at least a little endeared to Koraidon after spending so much time with it and watching it regain its strength before finally coming through in a (scripted) battle sequence. If ever there was a time where “Pokemon held on so wouldn’t feel sad” felt appropriate, this would be it.
Lastly there’s Victory Road. This is the traditional run through eight gyms you expect from Pokemon. These gyms, like most of the boss fights, might surprise you with decent coverage, but they have a disappointing flaw. They use Terastalyzation to change the type of one of their nonconforming team members to the type they specialize in. So you can safely spam that STAB super effective move if you want. Go right ahead. The Elite Four and champion is comparatively more challenging because they just Terastalyze to their own specialized STAB that the Pokemon already has, giving them a free boost. Just a very boring use of the mechanic.
You also have your rival, Nemona, checking in on your progress throughout the way. Framing for rivals is pretty important, and I think SV succeeds here. Many people mistakenly focus on a lack of “asshole” rivals in newer games, even though we have examples like Gladion and Bede. I think the problem is that rivals should feel like people you really want to bring down and the games have often struggled with this. Bede is basically broken and never comes off as anything but pathetic. For comparison, Blue has an awful team, you beat the hell out of him every time you see him, but he never takes you seriously even when he loses, and he’s always one step ahead of you in the story. When you get to the League and find out this little shit you’ve slapped throughout the game actually beat you to being champion, you want to teach him a lesson. Like I said, framing is important.
Nemona is a friendlier rival, and she’s built up by the story as highly competent, the best of the best. She’s testing you, she’s holding back in fights against you until the very end of the game. So even though she loses every time, bringing her down remains a credible goal throughout the game. She does use the starter weak to yours, which many players have taken umbrage with through the years. I agree with this as an issue to an extent. It is probably better to teach players about type matchups by giving them something to wail on that they’re strong against. A rival with the starter that counters yours means that you won’t even get to start with STAB moves. I see the logic, but I also think it harms the feeling of you as an underdog overcoming the odds. That being said, the games have become so adamant about worshiping at your feet that I’m not sure if GameFreak even wants to give players that impression. Anyway, it would have been much better if Nemona used Terastalyzation to change her starter’s type to one that countered your own. That would have been the best of both worlds right there.
A persistent problem with some of these Ohmori-directed games compared to Masuda-directed games, even “post-decline” so to speak, is that they’re totally in love with their own characters. It’s like Ohmori is straight up limerent for characters he has full control over, so it’s weird that it feels like they don’t love him back. They spend just a little too much time on “quirky” traits for these characters that come off as shallow and insincere. Perhaps the poor production value is to blame for that. Characters are still completely silent and move like automatons on an axis. There is a rap battle in this game, a fucking rap battle, and it manages to be more lifeless than it is cringeworthy. That’s got to be an achievement. Hip-hop in children’s media is almost always pure, organic cringe, but here it’s just befuddling. The game can really fall flat here with the Team Star members. It wants to sell you on their personalities and friendships, and I guess it’s a better effort than Ohmor’s other work, but not enough to get me to read most of their dialogue. I got the gist, their ending was kind of cute. Each member did not need their own flashback. Especially when each flashback is not about their individual problems but more about what each of them did to bring Team Star to life, not ideologically, but in terms of presentation. Like a fucking friendsgiving.
Enough story bullshit though, what the hell is so good about this game that I basically enjoyed it despite everything? Well, the world is densely populated with Pokemon to find, team building is intuitive, routes feel expansive, the game is truly not lying about it being open. I genuinely like the idea of feeling blocked off by high levels and either needing to find somewhere else to go or toughing it out up a dangerous trail. Picking up items no longer stops you in your tracks. If you do want to challenge yourself, you still can. I genuinely liked Arven’s storyline. The weakest link as far as the quests go isn’t dragging things down too horribly, as the boss fights were a good time. The movement options opening up over the course of the game feels empowering. I got to see Sudowoodo and Toedscool book it from me hilariously. Ditto and Zorua never appear on the overworld because they’re always disguised as other Pokemon. When the world feels alive for a bit, when you come across an old favorite roaming in the wild, something about the game genuinely sings for a moment.
That is the thing though, the game is basically a series of boss fights. Your mandatory battles are the gym leaders, E4, Champion, Nemona a few times, each team star boss, the titans, a few wild pokemon in Area Zero, and your game’s respective professor. Probably about thirty battles. You can run by every trainer, they’re all optional. Like a lot of decisions for this game, it’s a double edged sword. I’m rarely jumping into anything I’m not asking for beyond accidental wild encounters. Going about each open area to find every trainer and get your TM/item gift can be fun, but you can’t replace the feeling of overcoming a harder fight you were completely caught off guard by. You run into a trainer you didn’t want to see, your lead goes down, but a Pokemon you thought very little of pulled through and helped you to keep going. It’s a feeling that’s lost here even on the more perilous routes. Even knowing there were a few trainers who very nearly kicked my ass, I still know I asked for that ass kicking.
This might be a sharp step down from Legends. To my knowledge, that game tried to mix up the mission structure with modified tasks focused on capturing Pokemon. There’s no progression within any of the main storylines that doesn’t just involve battling here. The best you get as a pace breaker is gym “puzzles” that barely qualify as such. I understand that SV and Legends were developed at the same time, but it’s just odd that this open world game doesn’t have any side missions to tackle. You have Tera Raid battles. Okay, fine I guess. What about something like Totem Battles from SM? Double battle focused side quests? Triple and rotation? Oh sorry, GameFreak doesn’t want you to remember those. A sidequest that’s all inverse battles? Restricted quests with rental Pokemon? Rewards for quests like rare Pokemon or rare Tera types?
At the end of the day, the huge world is really neat to go through for the first time. Discovering every ecosystem and every Pokemon that dwells in it, but I’m unsure if this would hold up on subsequent playthroughs. That’s all there is to do here except fight the bosses. Pokemon’s formula is still the most sustainable solid gold in all of video games. Even at its worst it’s still probably mindlessly enjoyable, but even with all the expressiveness the games give you, the developers always seem confused over whether or not they want to give you anything interesting to express yourself to. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a pain to get through that intro again. My god, that had to have been nearly two hours before I felt like I could do anything.
SPEAKING OF slow as fuck. This game is Shuckle slow. I thought it was the PC at first, but apparently reports are coming out that the Switch version has the same performance issues. Stuttering framerate, major pop-in, outright freezing, long load times. All the stars are here. Not to mention, this battle engine seems like it’s giving Gen 4 a run for its money with the lulls between text boxes and animations. By the way, YOU CAN’T TURN OFF ANIMATIONS ANYMORE. Yeah, it looks like GameFreak took those comments about their animation work in SwSh to heart. They were so proud of their work this time that they wanted you to see all of their high quality animations forever. All at a stunning 21 fps. The lack of interiors to buildings sure is disappointing but damn you have to wonder how much worse the game would have run if they were present. In fact there appears to be MORE issues on the official console release of the game than the day -10 PC version.
Not to mention, we are so far beyond Pokemon’s current battle presentation at this point. Tell me the necessity for all these text boxes and animations playing out separate from one another. Persona 5 was able to communicate relevant information on screen in a very timely manner. At one point, I realized that things like Leftovers recovery, poison damage, or sandstorm damage occurred at the same time as the prompt displaying your team receiving exp and I’m like HOLY SHIT IMAGINE THAT. How the hell are those five-hit moves still the way they are? Pick up the pace. Also I don’t need to see a text prompt telling me that the move hit three times AFTER the Pokemon I hit it with already fainted. Display the information on screen as it’s happening, it CANNOT be that hard. Move makes contact, visual indicators for CRITICAL HIT and SUPER EFFECTIVE pop up at the same time the health bar is going down and maybe even slap on a KO on top of that. Like I need an extra prompt to see my Pokemon’s HP reaching zero. Jesus Christ. Cut down on this dead air. POKEMON USED MOVE - ANIMATION - it’s SUPER EFFECTIVE - FAINTING ANIMATION - POKEMON FAINTED - USE NEXT POKEMON? Dead air between every single one of those prompts and animations.
There have been a FEW improvements to the presentation. The Pokemon models really are updated this time. Tropius and others are at last free from Sky Battle hell. Charizard has its caveman brow back. Pokemon now have actual interiors to their mouths and their eyes are modeled rather than just being painted on. Pokemon are more properly scaled to get a sense of their size. This is a huge boon for making the world feel more lively, with some monsters being so small you have no idea you’re running into them. Just pray you’re not caught in a crowd because it will be a constant stop and go. The scaling is handled a little strangely in battle. In the open routes, you control the camera during battle, so you can move it to get a better view of things. During important battles, the camera is fixed, and many Pokemon on your side are viewed from such angles that you basically never see them during fights.
Many Pokemon have cute overworld animations, and most have sleeping animations. Near inexplicably, none of these sleeping animations make it into battle. Pokemon don’t even close their eyes when sleeping in battle anymore. I thought the removal of such a thing was a result of the aforementioned modeled eyes, but they close their eyes in the overworld. What the hell did they mean by this?
Among the most important parts of presentation in a Pokemon game would be character design. This is just about as subjective as it gets. Everyone has wildly different favorite Pokemon. I’m of the mind that Gen 3 had the most consistently decent designs across the board despite having very few of my personal favorites. By contrast, I consider Gens 5 and 7 to have some odd choices for designs, yet they have way more of my favorites, so maybe there’s something to be said about polarizing design philosophies yielding stronger results. You can still go too far with that polarization though, as Gen 8 was what I considered to be a clear low point in design quality. Little did I know that Gen 9 was just around the corner to give it a run for its money. Running the math, I liked about 4/10 new designs on average.
The starters in particular are still leaning a little too hard into these fixed character archetypes. I’ve always felt that starters are better off feeling more general in personality. The best one, Skeledirge, is saved by virtue of still feeling like an animal first and a guy second. Even then, it is trying to balance things like emulating the relationship between the crocodile and the Egyptian plover bird, Dia de Los Muertos, and being a vocalist. That’s a lot at once and the design is made weaker for it. At least it was spared the humiliating fate of Quaxly, becoming a large-rumped duckperson with giant sausage toes instead of its first form’s webbed feet. Still, it’s nice to see “animal + element = Pokemon” is going strong all these years later with designs like Killowattrel and Mabosstif. Other designs like Ceruledge and Armorouge just throw caution to the wind and go all in on being as cool as possible, your expectations of Pokemon designs be damned, and they did this to great success. Those designs are cool and you have no inner child if you say otherwise.
My friend Steve is a noted crab hater. The man just hates crabs. He hates Klawf and he hates any crabs reading this review. I however, think Klawf is an immensely welcome addition with its horrifying eyes that follow you wherever you go. Among all the new designs, Klawf is the one that most feels like an unpredictable, dangerous animal, that cannot feel anything resembling love or affection. Its silliness actually lends itself very well to that sense of unease around it. Klawf will never be my “bro” and that’s beautiful.
Bug types seem like they got the short end of the stick in this generation. Rather than drawing them out first, these designs look like they were modeled in Blender with thirty minutes of work before calling it a day. There’s a great looking snail Pokemon, but it’s not a Bug type. There’s at least Slither Wing, but that’s just comfy pajama Volcarona.
It’s tough to really assess what exactly the design language behind each new generation is. There are several different designers, after all. There is a clearer throughline for things like the ancient and future variants of existing Pokemon, though. Ancient Pokemon clearly got the better roll here. They have some thematic consistency with more spikes and tails, but they don’t feel needlessly uniform. The future variants fell flat on their faces. They’re all robots. Some just look like a robotic sheen slapped on an existing design. I’m not usually one to complain when Pokemon do not always reflect their types, but these completely fail to visually communicate their general lack of Steel typing. In the future, all these Pokemon become robots that exhibit the exact same animal behavior. Dumb. Don’t give me any BS about cyborgs. These are robots, get out of my face.
Of all the complaints Sword and Shield received, character design wasn’t really one of them. Many have observed a change in human design philosophy over the years to favor a more “cosplay” style of dress, but it’s more like a passive acknowledgment rather than a straight criticism. So what exactly is going on with this sudden change for SV? Characters look almost doll-like, and no longer reflect their official artwork nearly as accurately as the past three entries on Switch. This velvety texturing of skin and clothing along with the glossy eyeballs only serve to make the animations look more unnatural and automaton-esque. Certain characters clash just standing next to each other. Geeta’s eyes are three times the size of other characters. Also bitch is the goddamn big boss of the league and uses a fucking Gogoat holy shit.
Player character designs have remained a pretty important part of each new game’s identity, but Scarlet and Violet seems like the first time the developers chose to make the player characters as blank as humanly possible. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just another notable change. The default male and female designs used for promotion were previously distinct, but now really feel like identical twins. It’s both fitting and strange that the school uniforms are the context through which this blandness is achieved. Of course this was the golden opportunity to scale back the importance of a default trainer to identify, given that you’re uniformed at all times. But you’re uniformed at all times, so you don’t even have anything close to the range of fashion customization available to you in XY, SM, and SwSh. You do however have a greater number of options for your head, and both genders share those options. So you can really live out that discord moderator dream. I however, was content to just give my guy a signature jewfro and call it a day.
Strangest of all is the absolutely hideous crop of random NPCs. Many of them are adults dressed in school uniforms. I suppose framing the school as something more like a college for Pokemon enthusiasts is meant to lend itself to the franchise being all-inclusive to everyone everywhere. The result is instead a bunch of creepy looking adults waiting around for you in the dead of night. Also some very broad shouldered women. Why the hell are they so broad? Are they okay? They look like they’re in pain.
However, there is this character named Rika, an Elite Four member. This character is unreasonably sexual. Only Anabel’s Sun and Moon design compares. Designs like these are so beyond degenerate in appearance and I need this stop before they destroy my life.
I have many, many negative thoughts on the state of pokemon, on the directions it’s taken, and even the very idea of calling this game a step in the right direction. How many steps in the right direction are we going to have? How many indicators of great things to come will we need before we’re ready to properly judge the here and now? It’s undeniable though, that my curiosity about this series is back, and Scarlet offered enough novelty that I’m interested in replaying just to see how much further I can push it. There may come a day where GameFreak strips me of any ability to create something fun out of Pokemon, but it hasn’t come yet. If nothing else, it has the absolute craziest ending to a Pokemon game ever, complete with Ed Sheeran coming out of nowhere to scare the living shit out of me.
Please get someone else to make the games.
I never cared about the “dex cut” that occurred in Sword and Shield, to be clear. I have never once transferred old Pokemon to new games, and frequently wipe the slate clean on save files. Cycling Pokemon in and out was an inevitability as the catalog of monsters grew larger and larger. I found it immensely unfortunate that this potentially reasonable development decision became the chief criticism of GameFreak’s work when there was so much more to complain about. Of course, there were many people arguing the point with more nuance, pointing out how the production value and content density/quality of the game was clearly not compensating for the dex cut, but sadly the waters were already muddied. Those darn entitled gamers were at it again, bullying the hardworking developers. All the bitching was to no avail, as Sword and Shield obliterated sales charts, and it seemed like GameFreak would never have any reason to improve or reassess their insane yearly churn out of games.
So what drew me back in here? Well for one, I was gifted an early copy of the game for my Nintendo PC, so the opportunity cost was literally just my time. Secondly, this game swerves off hard from Sword and Shield’s literal straight line region and Sun and Moon’s tiny unfinished areas. It’s a full-on open world with 18 main quest missions that can be completed in any order. For me, this is the final nail in the Cofagrigus for any excuse over the main campaigns being lacking in order to quickly shuffle players along to the multiplayer. Pokemon is supposed to be an adventure, and for more reasons than just that open world, Scarlet and Violet occasionally succeeded in bringing that feeling back to the franchise for me. They got there stumbling all over themselves but they sort of did it. Please bear in mind that my experience does not involve much engagement with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which to my understanding is similarly open ended but dissimilarly not so focused on battles. I know many people who disliked Sword and Shield walked away from Legends feeling pretty positively about it, so these last few releases may bode well for the future of the franchise so long as GameFreak can please, please get someone else to help them make the game.
So with these 18 missions, there is no level scaling. This can be a bit of a double edged sword. With this format, the world definitely feels more alive, particularly wild Pokemon encounters way outside the average level of your team. You can also challenge yourself by taking on higher level bosses earlier. This was my experience with the game, going after the highest level gym fourth, the highest level Team Star boss third, and the highest level Titan third as well. Hilariously, I would often ignore the victory road storyline until I reached the obedience level cap that demanded I drag my ass to the nearest gym so that my character would stop trying to roleplay as the average pitbull owner. The world was not accommodating me, and I liked that, even though I knew where it was leading. Eventually, I had to go back and blitz through those lower level missions I had ignored. I quickly decided to only use Pokemon around the same levels as those missions, which made for a more enjoyable experience. However, I know most players won’t think about self-policing that way. Games are meant to be beaten, so people don’t even think twice about doing the most optimal, low risk task in order to destroy any semblance of fun. A Quick Ball at one overleveled wild pokemon that may not even obey, four gym badges in, and then you go back and stomp the entire rest of the game. I can’t help but feel that a lot of people will be robbing themselves of something much more memorable, but GameFreak designed the game this way. They’ve always let you play Pokemon in just about the most boring way possible, just look at all those starters with four STAB moves twenty levels higher than the nearest boss.
SPEAKING OF GameFreak and boring design decisions, let’s talk about SET MODE and how everyone who defends its removal with “Just press B lmao” is brain damaged. Yes, Set Mode is no longer available, a totally baffling decision. Like I stated above, people don’t even think about just how boringly they can play games if it’s less stressful to win by being boring, not even necessarily accomplishing things more expediently. I have played plenty of ROMhacks, and I can tell you that even the toughest hacks eventually lose their luster if you stick with Shift Mode. Knowing what your opponent is sending out and being able to swap to another Pokemon at no risk to you is objectively the best decision you can make. Developers usually put some degree of separation between easier options that allow anyone to beat the game and tougher options they think will be more fun. These are usually called “difficulty modes'' for the uninitiated. Many people considered Set Mode to be a difficulty option, and indeed people who defend the often braindead difficulty curve of the games tell you to just turn on Set Mode. I can only speculate, but I’m sure that those same people are now defending Set Mode’s removal by telling others to “just press B”
The problem is that most people don't even think about how much Shift Mode affects the experience, or how GameFreak removing Set further removes the singleplayer experience from the multiplayer experience completely unnecessarily. They already have VGC, a double battle format, as their main competitive option, something the singleplayer does virtually nothing to garner interest for. Now they’ve gutted yet another way to have singleplayer battles to remotely reflect multiplayer battles. Imagine the frustration a kid will feel when all the power granted to him by Shift is gone the moment he battles a friend, having no means of understanding that’s an intended part of the game. Yeah, I can just press B, in fact, I did press B. Every time. The whole game. Nor did I use items in battle, and it was better for it. These games don’t need ROMhack level difficulty to be interesting. The games are fundamentally expressive enough for you to find a lot of your own fun. The problem is that GameFreak is pretty hellbent on making that expressiveness less palatable. You are presented with an optimal decision constantly, and you have to deny it. Your brain interprets denying the switch as an objectively bad decision nearly every time you see the prompt. You're talking about one decision, turning the game to Set Mode, versus hundreds, denying shift every time you're given the option. Passive versus active. Imagine if you had to hit LB in Halo every time you met an Elite's line of sight in order to activate its good AI. Nobody would find that acceptable except for Pokemon fans. You also get to know what pokemon is coming next which OBJECTIVELY removes part of the game's ability to surprise on a first playthrough. Go ahead and tell me to play blindfolded next.
There’s the biggest issue with the gameplay experience of SV. You need to have the self-discipline to make the game more enjoyable. This isn’t going to apply to everyone, and of course Pokemon games have never been hard, but there are people out there who will walk through the latter half of the game dozens of levels higher than the opponents they need to beat in order to progress due to the openness of the game. Players who aren’t just kids with overleveled starters, doing this completely by accident. There are some solutions to this. One might be having moderate scaling based on your progression, with certain opponents having higher minimum and maximum levels for their pokemon. That leaves the game fairly open without giving you as much exp.
Further muddying the divide between singleplayer and multiplayer is the TMs. It seems like GameFreak just can’t decide whether or not their decision to make these items infinite use in Gen 5 was good or not. Here, they are back to single use, but you can make new TMs at any time by using materials from wild Pokemon. This is a pretty new thing for Pokemon that brings it a little closer to a traditional RPG. I found it to be a pretty neat idea for singleplayer but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Most people have severe loss aversion. As such TMs before Gen 5 were notorious for being nothing but bag space from those suffering from analysis paralysis. With them becoming unlimited in their use, they could act as much better rewards for exploration or progression, and do more than sit in your bag until you were ready for multiplayer. Here, you might have had the best of both worlds; You have more decision-making added to your playthrough, asking yourself if it’s going to be worth it to teach this Pokemon a certain move without it feeling like a total loss. Except it’s still kind of a grind to acquire these once you want to jump to multiplayer, not nearly the grind it used to be, but it’s just going to feel like unnecessary extra time once we all move past the main campaign. Among all the ways GameFreak has tried to make transitioning to viable competitive teams more smooth, they still find ways to make it a little bit silly. However, this may be a compensatory measure for a lack of move tutors in the game, as the list of TMs is substantial. You can ask yourself whether or not those were worth it to grind for as well, or whether or not you should just boot up Showdown. It seems like GameFreak wants you to earn that optimal team, and in this case, it’s certainly among the easier grinds for moves.
The way these TMs are displayed in the menu where you craft them is pretty subpar though. It reminds me of how modern digital storefronts just show you a thumbnail of the game’s box art, that either doesn’t have the title visible or has it displayed with an illegible font. No font here or anything, but I wish there was. You just have a zoomed in picture of the move in action. You can sort by type but there was no reason the UI had to be so unintuitive.
Quality of life features have always been a mixed bag with Pokemon. Here, for example you can still reset EVs for your team, but not with the same ease you could after Sword and Shield’s DLC. I guess GameFreak considers that feature a premium service. You can, however, have your Pokemon relearn any moves they previously knew at any time, including TMs they had, should they have been deleted. This carries over from Legends, I believe. This is honestly a great change, and helps open up team building for the whole game. While I can see the appeal of more committal decision-making previous games had, even going down to how the much maligned HMs affected team building, I much prefer this system. This is one feature that makes the games easier at basically no expense to their ability to craft interesting encounters, even if they don’t choose to make those encounters. With this set up, you can basically go about every major mission with a completely new team made up of each area’s surrounding Pokemon, which is exactly how I plan to play it next.
The major battles seem to have finally gone back to having decent coverage and preparation for certain Pokemon you plan to sweep with. I’ve always felt like type specialists should really ease off on just how much they specialize in their type by the late game. Players should understand type matchups by that point, and in fact they can even see what types are effective against what Pokemon at all times now. I absolutely never understood the criticism when bosses didn’t have a full team consisting of their preferred type, this should almost always be considered a good thing. Even if cases like Flint in Diamond and Pearl only got that way from desperation. Both the Team Star and Titan Pokemon quest lines involve taking down boss Pokemon with health bars equivalent to that of the Tera Raid you encounter on the overworld. Each Team Star boss has a magic car of their respective type that you fight. Interestingly, the game never tells you this car has taken on their type, but it’s easy to surmise. Go ahead and spam that same super effective move, kiddo.
Each quest line provides a lower stakes adventure for you that eventually opens up to a typical storyline where you save the world, but I liked the ride getting there. Operation Starfall involves you running through each base before engaging in a boss battle. The base raids have you run through on auto-battle mode in a “race” to KO thirty Pokemon. This timer is all too generous, and in most cases all you need to beat these challenges within 2-3 minutes is a slight level advantage and type advantage, as that is all that goes into determining whether or not you even take damage in an auto-battle. However, if you go in underleveled, you might find these moderately interesting, as you have to select who among your three chosen Pokemon you send out at what time to deal with what enemies are throwing out. Dual types on both sides mean that certain Pokemon may be more vulnerable than you thought going in.
There’s an adorable little anti-bullying message for the kids in this storyline. It didn’t do much for me but I appreciated the effort. The game is sadly afraid to fully commit to the premise of Team Star becoming the bullies they hated. They did nothing but act truant, they are completely innocent and have nothing to apologize or be held accountable for. GameFreak seems to have settled into the villainous teams no longer being the world ending threat for each game, which I think is a better tone to set for something as laid back as Pokemon. That being said, I’m sure people will eventually want to go back to something more threatening than kids playing hooky. For the time being though, I don’t mind it in concept. This is still the weakest part of the game thanks to the poorer structure of its storytelling that seems unshakable in these Ohmori-directed games.
Secondly, there’s the Titan Pokemon storyline. This is a more intimately character driven story, and I think it shows that GameFreak’s storytelling abilities CAN get better. They’re still nothing special, but this is an improvement over Sun and Moon and a huge improvement over Sword and Shield. While I may have enjoyed certain aspects of SM’s story more, SV is clearly more competent at actually presenting its story. SM’s story is highly intrusive and you are often made to feel like a bit player in it. You just want to get through your island trial but you’ve got to mend this broken family first. It made subsequent playthroughs of the game much harder to stomach than any of its predecessors. Sword and Shield could win an award for being just as intrusive as SM while having absolutely nothing going on in its plot. In SV, you have to go out and pursue these story segments when you feel like it, and you feel like a much more active presence in the story yourself. Arven, the principal role of the Titan’s story, has a very down-to-earth struggle to heal his wounded friend. Something the player is made to relate to, as this quest is used to power up your lizard bike buddy. I wasn’t a fan of either box legendary’s design this time, but it’s hard not to be at least a little endeared to Koraidon after spending so much time with it and watching it regain its strength before finally coming through in a (scripted) battle sequence. If ever there was a time where “Pokemon held on so wouldn’t feel sad” felt appropriate, this would be it.
Lastly there’s Victory Road. This is the traditional run through eight gyms you expect from Pokemon. These gyms, like most of the boss fights, might surprise you with decent coverage, but they have a disappointing flaw. They use Terastalyzation to change the type of one of their nonconforming team members to the type they specialize in. So you can safely spam that STAB super effective move if you want. Go right ahead. The Elite Four and champion is comparatively more challenging because they just Terastalyze to their own specialized STAB that the Pokemon already has, giving them a free boost. Just a very boring use of the mechanic.
You also have your rival, Nemona, checking in on your progress throughout the way. Framing for rivals is pretty important, and I think SV succeeds here. Many people mistakenly focus on a lack of “asshole” rivals in newer games, even though we have examples like Gladion and Bede. I think the problem is that rivals should feel like people you really want to bring down and the games have often struggled with this. Bede is basically broken and never comes off as anything but pathetic. For comparison, Blue has an awful team, you beat the hell out of him every time you see him, but he never takes you seriously even when he loses, and he’s always one step ahead of you in the story. When you get to the League and find out this little shit you’ve slapped throughout the game actually beat you to being champion, you want to teach him a lesson. Like I said, framing is important.
Nemona is a friendlier rival, and she’s built up by the story as highly competent, the best of the best. She’s testing you, she’s holding back in fights against you until the very end of the game. So even though she loses every time, bringing her down remains a credible goal throughout the game. She does use the starter weak to yours, which many players have taken umbrage with through the years. I agree with this as an issue to an extent. It is probably better to teach players about type matchups by giving them something to wail on that they’re strong against. A rival with the starter that counters yours means that you won’t even get to start with STAB moves. I see the logic, but I also think it harms the feeling of you as an underdog overcoming the odds. That being said, the games have become so adamant about worshiping at your feet that I’m not sure if GameFreak even wants to give players that impression. Anyway, it would have been much better if Nemona used Terastalyzation to change her starter’s type to one that countered your own. That would have been the best of both worlds right there.
A persistent problem with some of these Ohmori-directed games compared to Masuda-directed games, even “post-decline” so to speak, is that they’re totally in love with their own characters. It’s like Ohmori is straight up limerent for characters he has full control over, so it’s weird that it feels like they don’t love him back. They spend just a little too much time on “quirky” traits for these characters that come off as shallow and insincere. Perhaps the poor production value is to blame for that. Characters are still completely silent and move like automatons on an axis. There is a rap battle in this game, a fucking rap battle, and it manages to be more lifeless than it is cringeworthy. That’s got to be an achievement. Hip-hop in children’s media is almost always pure, organic cringe, but here it’s just befuddling. The game can really fall flat here with the Team Star members. It wants to sell you on their personalities and friendships, and I guess it’s a better effort than Ohmor’s other work, but not enough to get me to read most of their dialogue. I got the gist, their ending was kind of cute. Each member did not need their own flashback. Especially when each flashback is not about their individual problems but more about what each of them did to bring Team Star to life, not ideologically, but in terms of presentation. Like a fucking friendsgiving.
Enough story bullshit though, what the hell is so good about this game that I basically enjoyed it despite everything? Well, the world is densely populated with Pokemon to find, team building is intuitive, routes feel expansive, the game is truly not lying about it being open. I genuinely like the idea of feeling blocked off by high levels and either needing to find somewhere else to go or toughing it out up a dangerous trail. Picking up items no longer stops you in your tracks. If you do want to challenge yourself, you still can. I genuinely liked Arven’s storyline. The weakest link as far as the quests go isn’t dragging things down too horribly, as the boss fights were a good time. The movement options opening up over the course of the game feels empowering. I got to see Sudowoodo and Toedscool book it from me hilariously. Ditto and Zorua never appear on the overworld because they’re always disguised as other Pokemon. When the world feels alive for a bit, when you come across an old favorite roaming in the wild, something about the game genuinely sings for a moment.
That is the thing though, the game is basically a series of boss fights. Your mandatory battles are the gym leaders, E4, Champion, Nemona a few times, each team star boss, the titans, a few wild pokemon in Area Zero, and your game’s respective professor. Probably about thirty battles. You can run by every trainer, they’re all optional. Like a lot of decisions for this game, it’s a double edged sword. I’m rarely jumping into anything I’m not asking for beyond accidental wild encounters. Going about each open area to find every trainer and get your TM/item gift can be fun, but you can’t replace the feeling of overcoming a harder fight you were completely caught off guard by. You run into a trainer you didn’t want to see, your lead goes down, but a Pokemon you thought very little of pulled through and helped you to keep going. It’s a feeling that’s lost here even on the more perilous routes. Even knowing there were a few trainers who very nearly kicked my ass, I still know I asked for that ass kicking.
This might be a sharp step down from Legends. To my knowledge, that game tried to mix up the mission structure with modified tasks focused on capturing Pokemon. There’s no progression within any of the main storylines that doesn’t just involve battling here. The best you get as a pace breaker is gym “puzzles” that barely qualify as such. I understand that SV and Legends were developed at the same time, but it’s just odd that this open world game doesn’t have any side missions to tackle. You have Tera Raid battles. Okay, fine I guess. What about something like Totem Battles from SM? Double battle focused side quests? Triple and rotation? Oh sorry, GameFreak doesn’t want you to remember those. A sidequest that’s all inverse battles? Restricted quests with rental Pokemon? Rewards for quests like rare Pokemon or rare Tera types?
At the end of the day, the huge world is really neat to go through for the first time. Discovering every ecosystem and every Pokemon that dwells in it, but I’m unsure if this would hold up on subsequent playthroughs. That’s all there is to do here except fight the bosses. Pokemon’s formula is still the most sustainable solid gold in all of video games. Even at its worst it’s still probably mindlessly enjoyable, but even with all the expressiveness the games give you, the developers always seem confused over whether or not they want to give you anything interesting to express yourself to. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a pain to get through that intro again. My god, that had to have been nearly two hours before I felt like I could do anything.
SPEAKING OF slow as fuck. This game is Shuckle slow. I thought it was the PC at first, but apparently reports are coming out that the Switch version has the same performance issues. Stuttering framerate, major pop-in, outright freezing, long load times. All the stars are here. Not to mention, this battle engine seems like it’s giving Gen 4 a run for its money with the lulls between text boxes and animations. By the way, YOU CAN’T TURN OFF ANIMATIONS ANYMORE. Yeah, it looks like GameFreak took those comments about their animation work in SwSh to heart. They were so proud of their work this time that they wanted you to see all of their high quality animations forever. All at a stunning 21 fps. The lack of interiors to buildings sure is disappointing but damn you have to wonder how much worse the game would have run if they were present. In fact there appears to be MORE issues on the official console release of the game than the day -10 PC version.
Not to mention, we are so far beyond Pokemon’s current battle presentation at this point. Tell me the necessity for all these text boxes and animations playing out separate from one another. Persona 5 was able to communicate relevant information on screen in a very timely manner. At one point, I realized that things like Leftovers recovery, poison damage, or sandstorm damage occurred at the same time as the prompt displaying your team receiving exp and I’m like HOLY SHIT IMAGINE THAT. How the hell are those five-hit moves still the way they are? Pick up the pace. Also I don’t need to see a text prompt telling me that the move hit three times AFTER the Pokemon I hit it with already fainted. Display the information on screen as it’s happening, it CANNOT be that hard. Move makes contact, visual indicators for CRITICAL HIT and SUPER EFFECTIVE pop up at the same time the health bar is going down and maybe even slap on a KO on top of that. Like I need an extra prompt to see my Pokemon’s HP reaching zero. Jesus Christ. Cut down on this dead air. POKEMON USED MOVE - ANIMATION - it’s SUPER EFFECTIVE - FAINTING ANIMATION - POKEMON FAINTED - USE NEXT POKEMON? Dead air between every single one of those prompts and animations.
There have been a FEW improvements to the presentation. The Pokemon models really are updated this time. Tropius and others are at last free from Sky Battle hell. Charizard has its caveman brow back. Pokemon now have actual interiors to their mouths and their eyes are modeled rather than just being painted on. Pokemon are more properly scaled to get a sense of their size. This is a huge boon for making the world feel more lively, with some monsters being so small you have no idea you’re running into them. Just pray you’re not caught in a crowd because it will be a constant stop and go. The scaling is handled a little strangely in battle. In the open routes, you control the camera during battle, so you can move it to get a better view of things. During important battles, the camera is fixed, and many Pokemon on your side are viewed from such angles that you basically never see them during fights.
Many Pokemon have cute overworld animations, and most have sleeping animations. Near inexplicably, none of these sleeping animations make it into battle. Pokemon don’t even close their eyes when sleeping in battle anymore. I thought the removal of such a thing was a result of the aforementioned modeled eyes, but they close their eyes in the overworld. What the hell did they mean by this?
Among the most important parts of presentation in a Pokemon game would be character design. This is just about as subjective as it gets. Everyone has wildly different favorite Pokemon. I’m of the mind that Gen 3 had the most consistently decent designs across the board despite having very few of my personal favorites. By contrast, I consider Gens 5 and 7 to have some odd choices for designs, yet they have way more of my favorites, so maybe there’s something to be said about polarizing design philosophies yielding stronger results. You can still go too far with that polarization though, as Gen 8 was what I considered to be a clear low point in design quality. Little did I know that Gen 9 was just around the corner to give it a run for its money. Running the math, I liked about 4/10 new designs on average.
The starters in particular are still leaning a little too hard into these fixed character archetypes. I’ve always felt that starters are better off feeling more general in personality. The best one, Skeledirge, is saved by virtue of still feeling like an animal first and a guy second. Even then, it is trying to balance things like emulating the relationship between the crocodile and the Egyptian plover bird, Dia de Los Muertos, and being a vocalist. That’s a lot at once and the design is made weaker for it. At least it was spared the humiliating fate of Quaxly, becoming a large-rumped duckperson with giant sausage toes instead of its first form’s webbed feet. Still, it’s nice to see “animal + element = Pokemon” is going strong all these years later with designs like Killowattrel and Mabosstif. Other designs like Ceruledge and Armorouge just throw caution to the wind and go all in on being as cool as possible, your expectations of Pokemon designs be damned, and they did this to great success. Those designs are cool and you have no inner child if you say otherwise.
My friend Steve is a noted crab hater. The man just hates crabs. He hates Klawf and he hates any crabs reading this review. I however, think Klawf is an immensely welcome addition with its horrifying eyes that follow you wherever you go. Among all the new designs, Klawf is the one that most feels like an unpredictable, dangerous animal, that cannot feel anything resembling love or affection. Its silliness actually lends itself very well to that sense of unease around it. Klawf will never be my “bro” and that’s beautiful.
Bug types seem like they got the short end of the stick in this generation. Rather than drawing them out first, these designs look like they were modeled in Blender with thirty minutes of work before calling it a day. There’s a great looking snail Pokemon, but it’s not a Bug type. There’s at least Slither Wing, but that’s just comfy pajama Volcarona.
It’s tough to really assess what exactly the design language behind each new generation is. There are several different designers, after all. There is a clearer throughline for things like the ancient and future variants of existing Pokemon, though. Ancient Pokemon clearly got the better roll here. They have some thematic consistency with more spikes and tails, but they don’t feel needlessly uniform. The future variants fell flat on their faces. They’re all robots. Some just look like a robotic sheen slapped on an existing design. I’m not usually one to complain when Pokemon do not always reflect their types, but these completely fail to visually communicate their general lack of Steel typing. In the future, all these Pokemon become robots that exhibit the exact same animal behavior. Dumb. Don’t give me any BS about cyborgs. These are robots, get out of my face.
Of all the complaints Sword and Shield received, character design wasn’t really one of them. Many have observed a change in human design philosophy over the years to favor a more “cosplay” style of dress, but it’s more like a passive acknowledgment rather than a straight criticism. So what exactly is going on with this sudden change for SV? Characters look almost doll-like, and no longer reflect their official artwork nearly as accurately as the past three entries on Switch. This velvety texturing of skin and clothing along with the glossy eyeballs only serve to make the animations look more unnatural and automaton-esque. Certain characters clash just standing next to each other. Geeta’s eyes are three times the size of other characters. Also bitch is the goddamn big boss of the league and uses a fucking Gogoat holy shit.
Player character designs have remained a pretty important part of each new game’s identity, but Scarlet and Violet seems like the first time the developers chose to make the player characters as blank as humanly possible. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just another notable change. The default male and female designs used for promotion were previously distinct, but now really feel like identical twins. It’s both fitting and strange that the school uniforms are the context through which this blandness is achieved. Of course this was the golden opportunity to scale back the importance of a default trainer to identify, given that you’re uniformed at all times. But you’re uniformed at all times, so you don’t even have anything close to the range of fashion customization available to you in XY, SM, and SwSh. You do however have a greater number of options for your head, and both genders share those options. So you can really live out that discord moderator dream. I however, was content to just give my guy a signature jewfro and call it a day.
Strangest of all is the absolutely hideous crop of random NPCs. Many of them are adults dressed in school uniforms. I suppose framing the school as something more like a college for Pokemon enthusiasts is meant to lend itself to the franchise being all-inclusive to everyone everywhere. The result is instead a bunch of creepy looking adults waiting around for you in the dead of night. Also some very broad shouldered women. Why the hell are they so broad? Are they okay? They look like they’re in pain.
However, there is this character named Rika, an Elite Four member. This character is unreasonably sexual. Only Anabel’s Sun and Moon design compares. Designs like these are so beyond degenerate in appearance and I need this stop before they destroy my life.
I have many, many negative thoughts on the state of pokemon, on the directions it’s taken, and even the very idea of calling this game a step in the right direction. How many steps in the right direction are we going to have? How many indicators of great things to come will we need before we’re ready to properly judge the here and now? It’s undeniable though, that my curiosity about this series is back, and Scarlet offered enough novelty that I’m interested in replaying just to see how much further I can push it. There may come a day where GameFreak strips me of any ability to create something fun out of Pokemon, but it hasn’t come yet. If nothing else, it has the absolute craziest ending to a Pokemon game ever, complete with Ed Sheeran coming out of nowhere to scare the living shit out of me.
Please get someone else to make the games.
2001
At one point I was confident that I would be walking away from the first Pikmin game appreciating it far more than I genuinely enjoyed it. Despite having a Gamecube as far back as its original release, I never touched the series until I played Pikmin 3 on Wii U. That game scratched an arcadey itch for me. I played through it several times, optimizing my strategies further and further. Optimization in games can be a double edged sword, because players will instinctively look for the most expedient means of completion rather than the most fun, so a game that’s all about optimization needs to be as tightly designed as it gets. The third Pikmin game was a resounding success for me, being one of the most addictive and replayable experiences I’ve ever had with a game relative to the game’s actual length.
Much of the criticism I saw for 3 online was targeted at its difficulty. Apparently it just wasn’t as tough as the first two games. I could see that, I never saw Pikmin 3 as particularly trying even if it rewarded knowledge and skill. Only, when I finally went ahead and played the original Pikmin, it seemed less like 3’s easiness was a result from a genuine drop in difficulty and more like a heavy increase of intuitiveness. The game behaves how you expect it to. Your active Pikmin type can be swapped on the fly, they are withdrawn from the same onion, captains tell you when they reach their destination should you split up and multitask, you can bumrush enemies without wondering if the Pikmin are actually all attacking, all Pikmin types can carry bombs, Pikmin don’t stop to perform tasks you never asked them to do, nor do they automatically return to you should they lock onto a task after you dismiss them, when you obviously dismissed them because you didn’t want them following you.
All these things and more, are what initially came to define the differences between the past and future of Pikmin far more than any immediate disparity in danger. Of particular note is the need to dismiss Pikmin in order to select what type you want to use. Even worse is when you have a group of yellow pikmin carrying bombs. When you drop a bomb, the yellow returns to your party, so you need to dismiss again if you don’t want to accidentally use a bombless yellow. Not only is this means of selecting pikmin needlessly obtuse, as the sequels would show, it’s not even going to work how you need it to, as the pikmin groups may not separate far enough away from each other, and you’ll have to delicately whistle so as to not mix and match. Instead of feeling some remorse for the yellows or blues I would set on fire when they joined my band of reds, I’d merely nod my head up and down muttering about how the little bastards get what they fucking deserve. By the end of Pikmin 1, I had dehumanized my forces enough that I could effectively lead an army to defend Stalingrad.
However, there comes a point where you need to stop resenting a trailblazer for not sticking every landing. At the end of the day, several of my problems were mitigated by just gitting gud. Some frustration is to be expected when you’re stuck on a foregin planet and your only allies are creatures at the bottom of the food chain. Not to mention, you’re on a time limit, 30 days to collect 30 ship parts. Many people are turned off by this mechanic, but with a ratio like that, it’s not difficult to understand when you’re running behind. If you didn’t grab a part that day then you’d best reset, it’s that simple. The pressure put upon the player to perform and manage time effectively for both the day and the adventure as a whole feels totally unique amongst most video games, especially something from Nintendo. As you stumble through your first time playing, the sense of relief when you start getting ahead of schedule and accrue buffer days is rarely replicated elsewhere in games.
Each area can feel overwhelming at first, you can have Pikmin populations wiped out and feel forced to either reset or spend a decent chunk of your day building back up. You chip away until what once felt daunting is now just another stepping stone on your journey. Ship parts that are easy to acquire leave breadcrumbs to more treacherously guarded parts. You learn to multitask and plan for the next expedition where everything goes 80% according to plan and you’re forced to improvise that last 20%. Or maybe the ratio is way more skewed towards playing it by ear but you have yourself a lucky day, as luck is just opportunity plus preparedness. The game strikes a balance between making you feel rewarded for pulling off a plan smoothly and pulling the rug out from under you to make sure things will probably go wrong on a few tasks. It provides a lot of wiggle room here, more than you think. You can complete this game battered and bruised, but knowing exactly how you’ll improve should you want to play again. As I continued bettering myself, I realized that, despite my frustrations, the first Pikmin game still had nearly all the replayability of Pikmin 3.
I’m very glad I went to the Distant Spring, the largest and most daunting area in the game, as soon as possible with only a small number of parts grabbed in other areas. The pressure put on me here demanded I deepen my understanding of the game. The map here can be confusing, puzzles that would be simple are made more frustrating by enemies who synergize to ruin your day. If you don’t know how to pick your battles, learn enemy movements, and bring the right pikmin at the right time, you’re in for a world of hurt. One enemy will just blow your pikmin away right into another enemy’s mouth. One, basically innocuous enemy will pick up your pikmin and replant them, but focusing on it would be a mistake. It’s just taking advantage of your loss aversion, making you risk thirty pikmin trying to save two from nonlethal damage. By the time I had wrapped up my business in the Distant Spring, it had gone from so overwhelming that I had to take a break soon after landing to my absolute favorite area in the game.
Returning to the Forest Navel later ended up being a huge boon for my enjoyment of the game. While I still think the area has a few too many walls that require the cumbersome bomb rock juggling, it’s still a great level in its own right. The danger and dread of this place increases as you descend a little lower, a great bit of atmosphere. The unique enemies certainly make an impact. A giant mushroom that will turn your pikmin against each other if you don’t kill it fast enough, and a huge, ball-shaped spider that drops in on you out of nowhere. Both of these can devastate your forces if you go in unprepared. The latter tricks you into stringing along some reds, as there is fire outside its arena, when only yellows will do the trick against it. Hilariously, yellows will carry out a thankless job here, as you’ll have to bring in the reds in order to walk your spoils out of the arena. Meanwhile the former is a great lesson in how to play assertively, as tossing pikmin at this mushroom rather than rushing it with the full force of 100 reds will usually result in failure. This whole area more than any other really wants you to clear it of enemies before you start toting things around. It rewards you for being observant, as this cave is fairly dark, and there could be something waiting to screw over your perfect plan. Fuck those frogs. Little shits take forever to kill and can obliterate your pikmin. The tediousness with which you have to safely and effectively dispatch them makes them the only enemy type in the game I would say drags down the overall quality of the lineup.
Rolling back even further there’s the Forest of Hope. This area is designed for you to return with blue pikmin in order to fight its bosses. It’s also pretty brilliantly composed using very few enemy types. As you progress through here, the space available to you grows tighter. This will encourage you to use the c-stick to navigate around or swarm enemies in order to speed up tasks. One of many examples where there is a lack of tutorializing, trusting you to just read the prompt and find out when to put mechanics into practice. Enough of an explanation that the game isn’t leaving you hanging but not distracting you with segments that feel too safe or boring. There’s no time for that kind of thing when the clock is ticking and you’ve only got 13 minutes to figure out how to spend your time. You’ll also be fighting the best-named enemy in all of video games here, the Burrowing Snagret. Rev up those yellows because it’s time for their weekly mass sacrifice.
Speaking of, the game was not content with the yellow pikmin getting off with just a few purgings. Emperor Bulblax, the game’s final boss, can be stunned with bomb rocks. Now, you can technically pull this off without feeding him your precious yellow pikmin supply, but at this point I had begun to feel yellow pikmin simply did not have a right to life when they decided to hoard the bomb rock reserves. Plus I’m about to leave this planet anyway, so I don’t really care how many innocent pikmin have to die to accomplish that or whether or not I’m creating a horrifying power vacuum by eliminating Bulbmmar Borbdaffi now that he’s committed the cardinal sin of making bulborbs literate.
It’s actually somewhat rare for my appreciation of a game to turn to genuine enjoyment. While I think the original Pikmin makes a few mechanical choices that turn the game into a more cumbersome experience than it should have been, it’s still a well crafted experience where your constant decision making has its consequences felt on both a micro and macro scale. I think I walked away from it really understanding the appeal of the more daunting, demanding progenitor of the franchise compared to its more leisurely successor. So much so that I’m pretty sure my next play through is right around the corner, because a game where your improvement is felt so tangibly can always be understood a little more.
Much of the criticism I saw for 3 online was targeted at its difficulty. Apparently it just wasn’t as tough as the first two games. I could see that, I never saw Pikmin 3 as particularly trying even if it rewarded knowledge and skill. Only, when I finally went ahead and played the original Pikmin, it seemed less like 3’s easiness was a result from a genuine drop in difficulty and more like a heavy increase of intuitiveness. The game behaves how you expect it to. Your active Pikmin type can be swapped on the fly, they are withdrawn from the same onion, captains tell you when they reach their destination should you split up and multitask, you can bumrush enemies without wondering if the Pikmin are actually all attacking, all Pikmin types can carry bombs, Pikmin don’t stop to perform tasks you never asked them to do, nor do they automatically return to you should they lock onto a task after you dismiss them, when you obviously dismissed them because you didn’t want them following you.
All these things and more, are what initially came to define the differences between the past and future of Pikmin far more than any immediate disparity in danger. Of particular note is the need to dismiss Pikmin in order to select what type you want to use. Even worse is when you have a group of yellow pikmin carrying bombs. When you drop a bomb, the yellow returns to your party, so you need to dismiss again if you don’t want to accidentally use a bombless yellow. Not only is this means of selecting pikmin needlessly obtuse, as the sequels would show, it’s not even going to work how you need it to, as the pikmin groups may not separate far enough away from each other, and you’ll have to delicately whistle so as to not mix and match. Instead of feeling some remorse for the yellows or blues I would set on fire when they joined my band of reds, I’d merely nod my head up and down muttering about how the little bastards get what they fucking deserve. By the end of Pikmin 1, I had dehumanized my forces enough that I could effectively lead an army to defend Stalingrad.
However, there comes a point where you need to stop resenting a trailblazer for not sticking every landing. At the end of the day, several of my problems were mitigated by just gitting gud. Some frustration is to be expected when you’re stuck on a foregin planet and your only allies are creatures at the bottom of the food chain. Not to mention, you’re on a time limit, 30 days to collect 30 ship parts. Many people are turned off by this mechanic, but with a ratio like that, it’s not difficult to understand when you’re running behind. If you didn’t grab a part that day then you’d best reset, it’s that simple. The pressure put upon the player to perform and manage time effectively for both the day and the adventure as a whole feels totally unique amongst most video games, especially something from Nintendo. As you stumble through your first time playing, the sense of relief when you start getting ahead of schedule and accrue buffer days is rarely replicated elsewhere in games.
Each area can feel overwhelming at first, you can have Pikmin populations wiped out and feel forced to either reset or spend a decent chunk of your day building back up. You chip away until what once felt daunting is now just another stepping stone on your journey. Ship parts that are easy to acquire leave breadcrumbs to more treacherously guarded parts. You learn to multitask and plan for the next expedition where everything goes 80% according to plan and you’re forced to improvise that last 20%. Or maybe the ratio is way more skewed towards playing it by ear but you have yourself a lucky day, as luck is just opportunity plus preparedness. The game strikes a balance between making you feel rewarded for pulling off a plan smoothly and pulling the rug out from under you to make sure things will probably go wrong on a few tasks. It provides a lot of wiggle room here, more than you think. You can complete this game battered and bruised, but knowing exactly how you’ll improve should you want to play again. As I continued bettering myself, I realized that, despite my frustrations, the first Pikmin game still had nearly all the replayability of Pikmin 3.
I’m very glad I went to the Distant Spring, the largest and most daunting area in the game, as soon as possible with only a small number of parts grabbed in other areas. The pressure put on me here demanded I deepen my understanding of the game. The map here can be confusing, puzzles that would be simple are made more frustrating by enemies who synergize to ruin your day. If you don’t know how to pick your battles, learn enemy movements, and bring the right pikmin at the right time, you’re in for a world of hurt. One enemy will just blow your pikmin away right into another enemy’s mouth. One, basically innocuous enemy will pick up your pikmin and replant them, but focusing on it would be a mistake. It’s just taking advantage of your loss aversion, making you risk thirty pikmin trying to save two from nonlethal damage. By the time I had wrapped up my business in the Distant Spring, it had gone from so overwhelming that I had to take a break soon after landing to my absolute favorite area in the game.
Returning to the Forest Navel later ended up being a huge boon for my enjoyment of the game. While I still think the area has a few too many walls that require the cumbersome bomb rock juggling, it’s still a great level in its own right. The danger and dread of this place increases as you descend a little lower, a great bit of atmosphere. The unique enemies certainly make an impact. A giant mushroom that will turn your pikmin against each other if you don’t kill it fast enough, and a huge, ball-shaped spider that drops in on you out of nowhere. Both of these can devastate your forces if you go in unprepared. The latter tricks you into stringing along some reds, as there is fire outside its arena, when only yellows will do the trick against it. Hilariously, yellows will carry out a thankless job here, as you’ll have to bring in the reds in order to walk your spoils out of the arena. Meanwhile the former is a great lesson in how to play assertively, as tossing pikmin at this mushroom rather than rushing it with the full force of 100 reds will usually result in failure. This whole area more than any other really wants you to clear it of enemies before you start toting things around. It rewards you for being observant, as this cave is fairly dark, and there could be something waiting to screw over your perfect plan. Fuck those frogs. Little shits take forever to kill and can obliterate your pikmin. The tediousness with which you have to safely and effectively dispatch them makes them the only enemy type in the game I would say drags down the overall quality of the lineup.
Rolling back even further there’s the Forest of Hope. This area is designed for you to return with blue pikmin in order to fight its bosses. It’s also pretty brilliantly composed using very few enemy types. As you progress through here, the space available to you grows tighter. This will encourage you to use the c-stick to navigate around or swarm enemies in order to speed up tasks. One of many examples where there is a lack of tutorializing, trusting you to just read the prompt and find out when to put mechanics into practice. Enough of an explanation that the game isn’t leaving you hanging but not distracting you with segments that feel too safe or boring. There’s no time for that kind of thing when the clock is ticking and you’ve only got 13 minutes to figure out how to spend your time. You’ll also be fighting the best-named enemy in all of video games here, the Burrowing Snagret. Rev up those yellows because it’s time for their weekly mass sacrifice.
Speaking of, the game was not content with the yellow pikmin getting off with just a few purgings. Emperor Bulblax, the game’s final boss, can be stunned with bomb rocks. Now, you can technically pull this off without feeding him your precious yellow pikmin supply, but at this point I had begun to feel yellow pikmin simply did not have a right to life when they decided to hoard the bomb rock reserves. Plus I’m about to leave this planet anyway, so I don’t really care how many innocent pikmin have to die to accomplish that or whether or not I’m creating a horrifying power vacuum by eliminating Bulbmmar Borbdaffi now that he’s committed the cardinal sin of making bulborbs literate.
It’s actually somewhat rare for my appreciation of a game to turn to genuine enjoyment. While I think the original Pikmin makes a few mechanical choices that turn the game into a more cumbersome experience than it should have been, it’s still a well crafted experience where your constant decision making has its consequences felt on both a micro and macro scale. I think I walked away from it really understanding the appeal of the more daunting, demanding progenitor of the franchise compared to its more leisurely successor. So much so that I’m pretty sure my next play through is right around the corner, because a game where your improvement is felt so tangibly can always be understood a little more.
2022
Overwatch is a highly accessible game that requires heavy coordination to perform well in. Games with low skill floors and high skill ceilings are nothing new, but Overwatch doesn't just ask that you learn to play inventively, it asks that you do that with team members who each have their own idea of what's either fun or effective. Your character choice deliberately lacks versatility, your most important asset is your ability to switch, which is just asking that you limit yourself in some other way. This was later exacerbated by team compositions forcing roles. Watch in awe as Overwatch 2 goes even further beyond by removing one of the tanks from play. Any independence you thought you had has now evaporated. I hope you have friends to play this game with because otherwise you will forever be beholden to the whims of strangers. Their frustrations mixing and juxtaposing with your own, all of them needing to shove down their burning need to call each other poopy puffers packing extra chromosomes. An exercise in either impotent rage or bottled emotions leading to an ulcer.
Except I do play this game with friends. I only ever played with friends, and this game is still miserable. Here I was, six years later with Overwatch 2, playing with the same pals I played with years ago, wondering how I ever found this fun. It's amazing that Blizzard hasn't had the inspired idea to add in elevator music for all the countless times you'll find yourself just waiting for your team to respawn so you might have half a hope of having fun. Sit there. Wait. Run in. Coordinate ult spam. If they don't ult spam back you probably win. Maps are designed with all heroes in mind, so the same heroes are good in the same game modes across all its maps. Just wait for the next patch so the next hero can have their turn as a meta pick. Play meta even at your incompetent baby level so as to not upset the strangers then once in a while win with Mei on attack and enjoy a modest rush of dopamine.
Perhaps more baffling than Blizzard's balance decisions over the years is Overwatch 2's business model. As an OW1 player, I'm not strongly affected by 2 yet, nor do I plan to stick around and see how it looks in the future. However, there have been several decisions made that are little more than shallow trend chasing and potentially disastrous. As stated above, your ability to switch to a different hero is paramount to the gameplay experience. So why are heroes going to be locked behind battlepass progress going forward? Did a diehard Genji main convinced everyone needs to solo from now on make this decision? You need to have access to all the heroes. If your opponent has access to more heroes, they have the advantage. Especially true given that Overwatch favored counterpicking over counterplaying as time went on.
You have to assume that the majority of dedicated players are carryovers from Overwatch 1. How many of them would be interested in buying voice lines and emotes with real money at this point? They probably have most of the skins they want, and have long since gotten over the entire concept of cosmetics. New players don't even get a taste of progress to entice them into buying. No random sampling of that content, just in-game currency. Currency that Blizzard obviously doesn't want going to skins, they want real money.
Also its launch was a technical disaster what the hell what in the goddamn
That's it I'm fucking done I'm gonna fucking say it I'm gonna say the M word
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
Except I do play this game with friends. I only ever played with friends, and this game is still miserable. Here I was, six years later with Overwatch 2, playing with the same pals I played with years ago, wondering how I ever found this fun. It's amazing that Blizzard hasn't had the inspired idea to add in elevator music for all the countless times you'll find yourself just waiting for your team to respawn so you might have half a hope of having fun. Sit there. Wait. Run in. Coordinate ult spam. If they don't ult spam back you probably win. Maps are designed with all heroes in mind, so the same heroes are good in the same game modes across all its maps. Just wait for the next patch so the next hero can have their turn as a meta pick. Play meta even at your incompetent baby level so as to not upset the strangers then once in a while win with Mei on attack and enjoy a modest rush of dopamine.
Perhaps more baffling than Blizzard's balance decisions over the years is Overwatch 2's business model. As an OW1 player, I'm not strongly affected by 2 yet, nor do I plan to stick around and see how it looks in the future. However, there have been several decisions made that are little more than shallow trend chasing and potentially disastrous. As stated above, your ability to switch to a different hero is paramount to the gameplay experience. So why are heroes going to be locked behind battlepass progress going forward? Did a diehard Genji main convinced everyone needs to solo from now on make this decision? You need to have access to all the heroes. If your opponent has access to more heroes, they have the advantage. Especially true given that Overwatch favored counterpicking over counterplaying as time went on.
You have to assume that the majority of dedicated players are carryovers from Overwatch 1. How many of them would be interested in buying voice lines and emotes with real money at this point? They probably have most of the skins they want, and have long since gotten over the entire concept of cosmetics. New players don't even get a taste of progress to entice them into buying. No random sampling of that content, just in-game currency. Currency that Blizzard obviously doesn't want going to skins, they want real money.
Also its launch was a technical disaster what the hell what in the goddamn
That's it I'm fucking done I'm gonna fucking say it I'm gonna say the M word
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
MCCREE
This review contains spoilers
You should probably consult the internet a bit as you start your playthrough of Xenoblade 2, and sadly that means you might have a few things accidentally spoiled. I hope that doesn’t turn you off from giving this game a try if you’re interested. If you want a quick summary, yeah I think it’s worth playing but it’s got issues.
I think people are more likely to remember how something made them feel than what was actually said or done, and Xenoblade 2 really wants you to feel a whole cheese board of emotions. It’s too bad then, that a lot of people play this game and walk away feeling all the wrong things. Interestingly though, it’s hard to find people who feel anything but strongly about this game. Xenoblade 2 does itself no favors here, it is such a bizarre hodgepodge of unrestricted ideas somehow made under the umbrella of a huge corporation, and the results were often mixed. It’s no wonder the result is so polarizing. I’m not exactly balanced in my assessment either. Xenoblade 2 made me feel all sorts of things. Some good, some bad, but I’m glad I gave it a shot.
Despite being well known for getting good 20 hours in, Xenoblade 2 wastes little time just throwing you into things. I was initially thankful for this brisk introduction. In it we immediately establish the main goal and the greater scope of the conflict. Although once I started having all these terms dropped on me like drivers, blades, Aegis, Mor Adain, Fonsett, Alrest, titan etc I quickly felt overwhelmed. Rex is familiar with all of this, but I’m not. My protagonist mercifully started asking more questions in chapter 2 but chapter 1 is a lot to take in.
Most refreshingly, our main villains are set in stone right from the word go. While others will join in later, Malos and Jin are locked in here and stay that way for the whole game, so your lead antagonists continue to receive a ton of attention rather than being discarded and replaced by someone far less interesting. Malos’ cocky, brutish attitude is typically suited for a secondary rival or early game antagonist. Instead, this guy is the carrot at the end of the stick for your whole playthrough, and he only gets better with time. It makes for a much more memorable villain whose personality could have easily fit for the hero of a different story if he wasn’t also a suicidal drama queen.
After chapter 1 is finished, the game really starts to lay it on thick with the tutorials. Much has been said about these blurbs of text. I am of the opinion that, while they eventually come together to form a pretty solid combat system, it spends a lot of time stumbling when getting you there. Not only are these tutorials sometimes lacking in information, there is not a means of reviewing them within the game itself. So you’d better fire up that search engine if it’s been a while since you last played. This is a pretty egregious oversight in a game that’s desperately trying to cram in mechanics and display them on screen. Stranger still, the game allows you to rewatch any of its cutscenes through a theater mode, but not its tutorials through any other menu. They also come with no visual guide, they’re just text popping up on screen and as soon as you press continue, they’re gone. Most damning of all, all these quality of life features were in Xenoblade 1.
In combat itself, you’ll be spending a lot of time flicking the control stick to cancel your auto-attack and build up arts, and eventually string together blade combos. Understandably, Rex’s main weapon is among the best in the game at quickly building these arts up. To the point that it will often overshadow any alternatives. I’d advise against gluing yourself to this weapon though. Weapon classes I had dismissed initially ended up being far more useful than I had given them credit for. Katanas, lances, and Brighid’s whips all immediately stuck out to me as fun to use, but Roc’s scythes, bit balls, and even Poppi’s various weapons can be great in their own right depending on the arts and animations they’re tied to. Even the hammer, which I later found out is considered to be the game’s worst weapon type, had its uses for me, being tied to a pretty dependable tank blade that helped me out during harder boss fights. You might not want to rely on flicking that control stick either, because timing your arts to the stronger auto-attacks will make things go much faster.
The auto-attack, arts, and specials form the trifecta of your combat options. At first I wasn’t sure why they chose not to implement anything like item usage or being able to more directly control other party members. I also didn’t like not being able to auto-attack while moving, which was possible in Xenoblade 1. I did however come around to Xenoblade 2’s way of doing things. With nine arts, twelve specials, and a branching tree of party member specials at your disposal, you certainly have quantity on your side over Xenoblade 1. You may not notice this at first, since the game does a pretty poor job of making you comfortable with how to play effectively. Xenoblade 1 gave me the ability to topple in the prologue, Xenoblade 2 gives it to me in chapter 3 alongside the ability to juggle three blades. Eventually you’ll find that the game allows you to play in a plethora of ways within the confines of setting up blade combos that lead into chain attacks, so player’s have many means of expressing themselves across a range of arts, animations, and passive abilities. With an understanding of secondary effects that specials provide, your decision making becomes even more complex. As an example, some provide passive damage after completion and some both deal damage and heal the party.
Don’t dismiss those descriptions, they’re actually important. Read the skill trees. Every blade has passive abilities and most specials have secondary effects. You should also be opening that affinity tree regularly, because these upgraded/new abilities don’t take effect until you see them on that page. You could go the entire game wondering why a blade is shit despite your frequent use of it and not know why. You would think that someone would be checking menus pretty frequently in an RPG, but Xenoblade 2 has so many of them that I have seen several people fail to remember important information like this. These special effects are so widespread that the game passively reminds me of Pokemon, and makes me wonder how a multiplayer feature could be implemented in Xenoblade.
Unfortunately, unless you know what you’re looking for, you could stumble through the entire game not really clicking with the combat. While there are a few challenging fights, they don’t push back against the player nearly enough to force them to reevaluate how they’re playing. So if you’re playing wrong, you may never realize it. You’ll just not have fun but not realize why. You’d be well within your rights to blame the game for this. The combat is legitimately good, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Boss fights are generally what’s going to keep you most engaged here. Of particular praise are the fights against multiple opponents whose abilities coordinate well with one another. The Malos and Jin fight in chapter 7 is an impressive display of the combat system’s strengths. After getting my ass kicked for what felt like hours, I managed to time an evasion skill consistently to dodge an unbelievably annoying blowdown effect that dealt massive damage on top of that.
During this first half is when you build up blade combos and attach elemental orbs and debuffs to bosses. These orbs will float around the boss, and can be destroyed during a chain attack to deal massive damage. You’ll also be fishing for driver combos but many bosses have high break resistance. Chain attacks themselves give you the ability to select from each party member’s list of blades to use special moves in sequence, with elemental attacks opposite to the orbs attached to the boss being more effective. Something I’ll definitely praise here is the status effects actually having an effect on the bosses, especially when they lock the big guy’s out of certain abilities. Dark elemental orbs are consistently the most helpful since they suppress a boss’ ability to call for help.
The second half of boss fights can hardly be considered a “half” at all. Bosses will usually enter an enraged state at some point. With it they will either break out a super powerful move or start spamming their most frustrating attacks. The game doesn’t seem to expect you to actually deal with these over just executing a chain attack and obliterating the last half of the boss’ HP. If you do end up dealing with a boss’ super move, then your best course of action is usually to just run off to the side and pick up your teammates if they fall. It’s not very intuitive and without a chain attack you’re probably just delaying the inevitable, but you do have a chance to recover. I’m unsure if my disappointment at a lack of a more definitive second phase is more a result of the game dangling something like it in front of me than its lack of existence outright. The boss is really just the first half of the HP bar, and getting them down to the second half without having the correct chain attack ready will be followed by the game informing you that you’ve failed its test. While a more robust moveset for bosses would have been appreciated, it is undeniably cathartic to decimate a health bar you had merely been chipping at until that point.
Xenoblade is more than its combat. Monolithsoft has also constructed a pretty expansive world once again. It’s impressive to see how much they’re willing to push Nintendo’s lackluster hardware to its limits. While I didn’t always feel incentivized to explore this world in depth, I still found its scope to be impressive. Xenoblade 1 offered a greater sense of progression through the Bionis, crawling up its body, onto the giant swords clashing, and finally onto the Mechonis. Xenoblade 2’s maps are more disparate by comparison. However, it trades that continuity in for crazier titan biology. There’s a lot of mind paid to how exactly traversable land would work on the titans. Gormott for example starts out very narrow since a large portion of the titan is made up of stoney giraffe neck. Or Uraya, where you spend a fair amount of time inside the titan, has natural lighting coming from a translucent exterior.
Helping a sense of discovery is a huge variety of fauna inhabiting each new area. It would not be a Xenoblade game if you didn’t run into an open area with triumphant music blaring just before the sudden interjection of an electric guitar introduces you to a level 90 monster who proceeds to one-shot your level 5 northerner bong and his friends or varying cup sizes.
Stunting some sense of exploration is the field skills. These are special abilities each blade has that enables certain means of traversal for gated areas. On top of these often making me just shrug off the idea of exploring if I had to do a bit of grinding to upgrade how adept some of the blades were, this system jarred with the gacha elements of unlocking blades. Common blades will have a random set of abilities, so I was left pretty indifferent to most of these field skill checks on the basis of it feeling a bit out of my hands. You also cannot switch equipped blades if you are climbing, which is fucking annoying.
The blades themselves are unlocked through a gacha system. You are constantly accumulating core crystals through salvaging or through murdering large sky lobsters. These crystals awaken blades (somewhat) randomly. Nondescript common blades have random weapons and passive abilities. Rare blades have these things set from the start. For those who don’t want to engage with this system much, you will have a safety net of three “pity blades” that you’re guaranteed to pull even if you have the absolute worst luck in the world. There are also a handful of blades you can obtain through sidequests and three additional ones you get through the main story, those being Wulfric, Aegeon, and Roc. The latter two are considered story-important blades but the poor guys don’t even get blade quests, whereas Wulfric does.
This system has been a point of contention for many players. Obviously they want to use the rare blades with unique designs, personalities, heart-to-hearts, and side quests. They wonder why they couldn’t just obtain all the blades through optional quests. Why make them sift through the garbage of common blades when the real content is with the rares? Well, commons can often overshadow rares in usefulness, particularly if you’re pulling them from rare or legendary core crystals. It’s much easier to fit commons into your game plan as the rares have stricter means of implementation. However, rares are always going to be easier for you to identify in the menu. Since their skills and passives are always the same, you won’t have trouble remembering what they do. While you can only have a limited number of blades on each driver, there’s probably going to be enough clutter for you to struggle remembering who’s your most useful common blade. A means of making this a little easier would be to eliminate the need for “organize by driver” in the menu, and color code common blades based on who awakened them. You can thankfully lock favorite blades, but even then, you might have quite a few favorites.
So the gacha system is a mixed bag. I never found myself wishing I had a particular rare blade, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t favor rare blades due to information retention with them just being that much easier. There’s no feeling quite like being lucky though, and pulling an ultra rare blade brings a unique kind of excitement to the experience. It’s one of those aspects of the game that shows the developers must have been thinking about all the different ways a player can have fun in the first place, and decided to just stuff as many of them as possible into Xenoblade 2, perhaps at the expense of something else. While I don’t think the game greatly suffers mechanically from the gacha system, it can still overwhelm a player to the point of causing disinterest thanks to messier implementation and presentation.
The game should be teaching you how important its content and mechanics are rather than just telling you they exist. Stacks of items that can be exchanged for something good and you’ll never know. A grindy minigame required to improve Poppi can be mitigated by converting its prizes into core crystals. Did you know that? Did you know Adenine’s ability straight up doubles damage to enemies’ elemental weaknesses for ALL forms of damage? Did you know the “strength” stat doesn’t necessarily reflect damage, as drivers and blades have distinct strength from one another? Did you know that blades increase their strength stat when you fill out their affinity chart? Did you know Brighid does increased damage after evading attacks? Did you know every weapon has an optimal attack range that gives you a 15% damage boost? Did you know stat buffs that blades give to drivers persist when that blade is inactive? Did you know you can switch blades to other drivers with overdrive? Or that you can lock blades to make sure you don’t delete them? Did you know that some of those informant NPCs actually have useful things to share? Did you know that female party members focus on blade combos while male party members will focus on driver combos? This is why you’ll probably end up spoiling a bit of the game’s surprises when you go off to do a little digging for information. There’s so much information to go through that you will inevitably see some off-hand mention of important plot details you probably didn’t want to see. In my case I still enjoyed most of the plot, but it’s disappointing the game could not convey its information with enough organization for you to not bother with consulting the internet on it. There were times I genuinely had a blast taking down a tough enemy but that’s only because I took the time to check third party sources.
Alright I can’t be fucked to talk about just the mechanics anymore. A few pages of digression later, I’m going back to blogging about how I felt playing through chapter-by-chapter. The story is a huge part of this game, seeing more of it is the main incentive for progression, and it’s what most people talk about regarding the game years down the line. Although admittedly there’s more genuine gameplay discussion persisting than what I typically see for games like this. Nearly a fifth of the mandatory game is just the cutscenes. There’s 14 hours of this shit, brother. There’s still going to be gameplay stuff as you scroll but it’s more of a mix.
Like its predecessor, Xenoblade 2 opted to go for a UK localization. This lends itself well to the different regions you will be visiting, and allows each area to feel even more culturally distinct due to the high density of accents within the UK. Australians also join in on the fun here to voice the Urayans. It was very bold of the localization team to allow Australians into the recording booth with no regard for their own safety, so credit to them there. Indol is also populated by American accents (supposedly, they’re either slipping all over the place or Amalthus is going for some kind of Mid-Atlantic thing), and since this nation handles the distribution of blades, blades also have American accents. At least that’s what I think they were going for.
Sadly, I chose not to engage with the dub for most of my playthrough. It’s a real bummer, because I love Xenoblade 1’s dub, and the same dialectal charm was readable in the subtitles while I listened to the Japanese audio. Rewatching all of the cutscenes with the dub, I still feel I made the right decision by switching around the Chapter 3 mark. There are legitimately great performances in the English version, it’s true. Simon Thorp absolutely kills it as Vandham and Sean Barret’s choice to not make his voice a nasally scratch once Gramps shrinks down is welcome. While Mitsuki Saiga’s Morag/Meleph is one of the best pitched down female performances I’ve heard, you can still tell that it’s not her natural register, and I think I prefer Kirsty Mitchell’s choice to speak normally. Skye Bennett sometimes falls victim to what I can only think was not knowing the context of some of her lines, making delivery here and there sound off, but other times she sounds pleasantly natural in many of the game’s casual conversations. There’s a stellar, hammy performance from Bana, and while Malos can sound wooden in a few lines he really lets loose by the end.
But Al Weaver’s Rex is just too inconsistent for me to stick with. I am usually pretty forgiving of dubs, some might even call me an apologist, but this is often not an acceptable performance. I can work with sub and dub, but I know people who just prefer to ride with the dub no matter what. This performance, especially the opening chapters, is sometimes so bad that it will legitimately prevent me from recommending this game to people. I don’t know if the guy was worried about waking up the neighbors when raising his voice but he cannot scream to save his life. The first fight with Malos is accompanied by utterly unconvincing shouts that will immediately turn you off to your lead character. Worse still is the climax of chapter 3, where your alternative to Hiro Shimono’s anguished cries is a set of mild exclamations reminiscent of that time you came back from the store and realized you forgot milk or something idk. I don’t care if it’s the actor or director who was to blame, the result is sub par performance. So it was Japanese audio for me, which is fine given that most important cutscenes actually align their lip synching with the original dialogue. The most egregious example in the game might be when Rex says, “Thank you” in the Japanese version, literally the English phrase, “Thank you”, but the dub felt the need to change it to “I could get used to this!” with the grace of a square peg in a round hole.
Also suffering from weaker performances in the dub are most of the optional rare blades. I don’t really have anything else to say. They’re bad. What, you think I’m gonna pull a punch for fucking Theory and Praxis? No. I’m typing this paragraph after I’ve finished literally everything else.
Like I said previously, chapter 3 is where the combat opens up for you a lot more. You’ll meet Vandham who joins your party and tells you he’s not going to awaken any core crystals because he only needs Roc and he’s definitely not going to die. This chapter ends with what might be your first genuine roadblock in the game. Malos Metsu and Akhos Sheisty link up for a battle that begs you to do so damn prep work. Thankfully both hubs you visit in this timeframe have many items that’ll help you out. This is where I found my most preferred pouch item in the game that charged my specials faster and ensured those lazy bums in my party actually had their shit together when I needed a blade combo.
Chapter 3’s scripted but exciting ending is followed by the pure silliness of chapter 4. As much as I genuinely enjoyed some of the ridiculousness of this segment, this is where the map design began to wear on me. The factory is just miserable to walk around, and you’re stuck with just Rex and Nia as party members as frantic music blasts your brain. It’s almost worth it to see Bana and Muimui front flip down a slide into a giant robot though. Chapter 4 is often maligned for frequently dipping into farce territory, especially after the dramatic chapter 3. Much of its plot is focused squarely on the comedic nopon characters, which might make the whole thing feel like a waste of time. It did however manage to elicit a few laughs from me. Scenes like the obviously evil nopon masquerading as a friend, being shown in a flashback in a shitty disguise. Our heroes are oblivious to the incoming betrayal.
The end of the chapter sees us graced with Morag as a party member. You’ll have to die if you want her to be of any use though, deflating the triumphant tone of the scene. She comes in unequipped when the rest of your party is probably hopped up on pouch items. With Brighid and a mega lance equipped, she’s probably one of the most fun party members in the game, and she was typically the one I’d choose to play as if I wasn’t on Rex.
Fan la Norne arrives at the tail end here to save the day. Although her introduction feels incredibly convenient, and most everything about her falls under plot points you wish someone would ask a few more questions about, she does make sense here when you consider what Zeke’s original intention was when bothering you throughout the story so far.
Chapter 5 takes you to the Leftherian Archipelago, which might be my favorite location in the game. This is where it started really becoming clear that the world was not simply designed to be big for no reason. For those interested, they’ll find that the map is very deliberately designed with many eye catches that invite you to test whether or not you can make it to them. Usually, if you can see it, you can get there, so long as it isn’t obviously just a piece of the titan’s body. Heart-to-Hearts, sidequests, and novelty items hide away in all corners of the map. These are strewn about in every location. Character moments most players will never see. The randomness of what characters you’ll even have in your playthrough ensures that many players who take an interest in this content are going to have very different experiences. The archipelago is also pretty forgiving with its cloud sea, letting you swim around to your heart’s content.
You’ll run into Zeke for his last boss fight here. He actually managed to kick my ass a few times. Compounding this with the Patroka and Mikhail fight, this is the point when I started feeling the pressure to slap orbs on during the first half of boss fights, because the less I have to deal with enraged attack spamming, the better.
Next you’ll finally meet Amalthus, the much anticipated man who climbed a big tree. I assure you he is definitely not a villain. Really the game makes no secret of Amalthus being up to no good. Beneath Indol’s impressive architecture is a destitute city down below. It’s like San Fran with less public defecation and probably more anal sex. Indol also controls the distribution of blades, which implies some measure of war profiteering. Fan La Norne is notably the only blade in the game who doesn’t even remember her own name, and Pyra and Mythra quickly make note of her damaged core crystal. This is something about that situation that I really enjoyed. It’s never directly stated why Fan/Haze is impaired so, but it’s obvious in retrospect. Just in case that subtlety was too much for you though, the game just hits you in the face with Amalthus and Malos being seen as interchangeable in a vision by Rex.
Oh and then Fan dies. That was a bit short lived. However that did take us to the Judicium Titan, a pretty substantial addition to the location lineup that you barely spend any mandatory time in. The place is up its ass with high level monsters but if you’re willing to scrounge around you’ll probably find some pretty great stuff. Just another interesting part of the developers’ thought process in willingly stuffing in content many players will never see.
In Chapter 6, Nia is revealed to be a huge asshole who let Vandham die, and Rex is further confirmed to be an idiot who would be getting everyone around him killed if he wasn’t continually bailed out by others. The chickens have truly come home to roost. Jin’s nihilism is put into words succinctly here. Rex is looking for answers, but Jin assures him there are none. Now, Rex has watched a couple of Jordan B. Peterson videos, but he’s just not well versed enough to lecture Jin on his unwashed penis. Between all that, you’re treated to Tantal, a kingdom with a nice amount of verticality that’s surprisingly easy to navigate given that it’s nothing but snow and blizzards. The capitol city’s accompanying music happens to be performed by an Irish choir. So even though the UK-based localization team likely tried their hardest to keep the Irish away from this game, the Japanese composer opened the backdoor for them anyway.
You’re gonna get a nice preview of Aegis-free gameplay here, and unsurprisingly it can be a rough transition when they’ve likely formed the backbone of your party setup, and Rex looks like a nonce holding big meaty scythes. You’re also hit with a pretty tough fight against Torna here, so either accept that you’re targeting Mikhail or equip some anti-taunt items to crush Patroka and her weather machine.
Chapter 7 has you needing to rely on a team entirely sans Aegis. Morag remained my preference here but Rex can still be a big help when it comes to driver combos since he has Roc’s smash art. The cave here was my first time realizing I was definitely obstructed by a field skill check, and where my aforementioned problems with them fully solidified even in this pretty minor context.
Nia and Zeke both receive a healthy amount of development in this segment. While Nia is the main focus here, I think it’s Zeke whom I appreciated more in retrospect. Such an initially goofy character ending up so closely tied to, almost grounding, one of the lead villains, could easily fall apart tonally but the transition happens so smoothly that you barely notice. Pandoria had been a nonentity up to this point, but enough of a foundation was there that her relationship with Zeke became all the sweeter. It’s also a nice way to further explore another facet of Jin’s fate. Amalthus is responsible for Jin’s current predicament, the latter having turned into a suicidal, genocidal monster carrying a piece of his lost love with him as an eternal reminder of his terrible lot in life. Meanwhile Zeke is also a product of Amalthus’ actions, and basically got to see the man at his absolute best, with Zeke proceeding to pay that kindness forward for the rest of his life, carrying a piece of his loved one as a reminder of how fortunate he is.
Nia is thankfully spared the need for her backstory to do all the heavy lifting for her big reveal. The game had done its due diligence to hint at her true nature and more or less revealed it in the previous chapter when she saved Niall. Now all that was needed was clarification. The truth was right in front of the player the whole time. Every member of Torna was a blade, Nia was part of Torna at the start of the game. Pretty simple. Dromarch is the character I feel got most shortchanged by the story, with the least amount of focus within the main cast, but this backstory provides such a strong thread for why he’d dote on Nia the way he does, being pretty much all she had and the only reminder of her surrogate family. I ended up way more endeared to this tertiary character than I had any right to be.
So Nia comes out of the blade closet, proudly displaying her smoothed-minge, and loudly declares “trans rights” before owning the robed chuds. After her confession of love to Rex, he sadly reveals to her that he is super straight. Addam is proud that his child has typed "Amen" rather than ignoring fast, and grants Rex the rank of Nitro Dubs. It’s a legitimately nice scene for Rex though. He’s a character who’s lacked some agency up until this point, and while his purpose is still kept very general, going from “Not wanting to die” as a goal to “Inspiring others to live” is a marked step up for him.
This theme is pushed further in the subsequent Malos and Jin fights. Jesus Christ, use a Wind orb as soon as possible and spam evasion with Morag because otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time. That aside though, Rex’s existentialism is now on full blast here. Like Jin and Malos, Pyra and Mythra were curious enough about their existence to want answers from God, but ultimately they just wanted death. None of these people asked to be born, and definitely not as weapons of mass destruction, or in Pyra’s case a proxy for that weapon. Pyra was never sure that Elysium would give Rex a solution, but she was pretty sure she could kys herself after her dad gave her validation that she never should’ve existed. All of these people want to know why the world is so horrible, hoping that the answer will be “no reason lol” so they can embrace oblivion. Rex is now trying to find out why the world is so incredible. He sees now that just not wanting himself or others to die wasn’t enough, it put him completely at odds with Pyra and Mythra, who wanted nothing more than to do a sick flip off the Golden Gate Bridge. He accepts responsibility for life and asks them to join him in the struggle to find meaning, with the ultimate goal of spreading that meaning to others.
I had wrestled with whether or not I was going to end up disliking Rex. His predecessor, Shulk, is pretty widely praised. A fair amount of people claim Shulk as their absolute favorite protagonist of any game ever, and I can see why. Rex by comparison seems like the exact opposite of Shulk. Shulk is mature, laser focused, analytical to a fault, deeply considerate of all his actions and responsibilities, seemingly quick to anger but deeply empathetic, and pretty pessimistic about damn near everything without being histrionic about it. Rex is immature, perhaps even petulant, lacking any clear direction, impulsive, seemingly very friendly but pretty cavalier with other’s feelings when it counts, which feeds into how he’s saccharine in his optimism to the point of not understanding why someone would see things differently.
By this point though, Rex had won me over. I still don’t think he’s quite as good as Shulk, but Rex makes a strong case for himself. Rex is just a kid, his only precocious trait is having a day job. He acts exactly how you’d expect a kid to act. He’s not a chosen vessel of God destined for greatness the way Shulk is, Rex is here entirely by coincidence and is just trying to get by. There’s a vulnerability to him that doesn’t always make him likable, but him clearly not being an ideal choice to be the lead of this story is exactly why I appreciated the willingness to take a chance on such a departure from previous outings. I can’t quite remember when the line drops, but I’d say his best one is, “You’re the one who won’t change, that’s why you hate others who try to”.
Chapter 8, 9, and 10 are quite a bit shorter, but there’s still plenty of time dedicated to important character moments. The first part of chapter 8 is begging you to use Pneuma as much as humanly possible. Contrasting with other instances of coming to grips with gameplay mechanics, this is actually pretty organic. Yes you had a mandatory victory tutorial fight before this, but the actual enemies here encourage you to not let this new power sit idle until a boss fight hits. If you just wait to use Pneuma, you’ll be swarmed by enemies that do serious damage, and Jin won’t be able to compensate despite being overpowered himself. I never felt a mechanic in the game slide into play as easily as this one. There was nothing like this for canceling attacks, driver combos, blade combos, chain attacks, weapon switching, pouch items, or understanding the nuances of secondary effects. So I actually enjoyed this learning experience a lot.
Rex also gains the ability to make use of everyone’s blade here, so you probably won’t see a reason to play as someone else for the rest of the game. I still had a pretty good time when I switched to Zeke for most of Chapter 9 though.
Your trek up the World Tree takes an appropriately long amount of time. The environment is far more uniform and claustrophobic, but I think that actually works pretty well for conveying just how high this thing can get. You go from the land beneath the clouds all the way to outer space. It’s a grueling process. The end has to be around the corner. The whole outside world is coming apart, but you have to press on. You’re almost there. You’re probably at this for over an hour. Running up this same environment.
Pit stops along the way vary in quality here. The pacing of this section is a little off-putting. You’ll find that pretty long cutscenes are spaced just a few feet apart. Which begs the question of why they were even separated. This red light green light serves to make your run up the tree all the more painful, and not in the way I was previously willing to praise. I am willing to praise some of the backstory we get on Amalthus, even if I feel it’s coming a bit late, but where and when all this is dropped on you is not to my liking.
Fairing even worse is Torna. Mikhail’s backstory is up first, with a quick explanation as to why he’s been able to resist Fan La Norne’s blade nullification abilities. He’s a blade eater like Zeke and Amalthus. He’s also about 500 years old and traveled with Jin and Addam’s original group. Then he dies. This is way too much at once. Yes I know he appears as a child in an earlier scene. Yes it’s reasonable to assume Amalthus has been conducting these experiments for a long time in preparation for performing them on himself. Even still we have to have Amalthus point blank describe Mikhail as a refugee from the Aegis War when there were no prior indications within the mandatory story that this is important information. Then you have to stack Mikhail's change of heart on top of that. Again there’s enough information here for me to feel like this is something that can logically happen, but this character has not earned this sendoff. The story has not reflected on the details leading up to these big reveals.
Akhos and Patroka get it even worse. Shoehorned in flashbacks just before their deaths that shed very little light on them other than having a relationship of any kind prior to meeting Jin. They both die unceremoniously. I can say that I liked Torna as a villain group that seemed to be genuine friends with one another, particularly with how they humanize Malos when he speaks endearingly to them. However, you could not make me feel sympathy for Patroka and definitely not for Akhos. They may not be as bad as Malos but it goes to show just how far charisma can take you.
With the detours over. You finally finish your arduous journey to the top of World Tree, and it hits like a truck. You know it’s going to be bad. You know Amalthus found nothing when he made it to the top. It’s still painful to see the characters slapped with this reality.
Both Malos McMetsu von Logos and Rex get their time to speak with God. Rex’s dream sequence was another example of the character sticking out to me in ways that I appreciate and am vexed by. His fleeing from his phantom friends and weeping in front of his harem might be seen as immature, but it’s legitimately pretty sad to see that, here at the end of the world, the greatest fear at the forefront of his mind is that he let everyone down. That after endeavoring to inspire others, he caused them to fall further into despair.
Interestingly, there’s no real right or wrong reaction for Rex to have in these visions. The Architect is just seeing what kinds of people have walked in here with his daughter. What proceeds is a pretty lengthy scene tying this game into Xenoblade 1. As someone who played that game, it’s difficult to judge this scene in the vacuum of the mostly standalone Xenoblade 2. Is this extensive explanation of the world’s backstory, with an insane sci-fi backdrop from millions of years ago, necessary in making sense of God being a depressed shut-in? It felt like my time investment was greatly rewarded as a fan of both games, but I’m not sure how a fan who only played 2 would feel.
Regardless, the conversation ends with Rex restoring some of the Architect’s faith in humanity. The game is surprisingly not that judgmental in its messaging. You would expect something as simple as bad guy nihilism vs good guy existentialism to be up its ass with platitudes, but it doesn’t spend that much time pontificating over it. Whether Rex has successfully found his own meaning in life or properly serves the Architect's original vision of a higher good and a better world isn’t really a debate here. I can’t say how intentional it is on a writer’s part, but I like how there’s both a religious and secular angle to look at it.
Outside of these cutscenes chapter 10 is pretty brief. You have a hallway of enemies that drop very powerful chips to beef up any blades you have lagging behind. At this point though, I had QT Pi so I could obliterate pretty much anything. The final boss has a notable frustration to it if you’re expecting someone other than yourself to heal. Malos will drift far away to wind up stronger attacks, and when an enemy dips out of range, your party members won’t perform specials. This includes specials that only heal the party. It’s a very odd bit of programming for the AI.
Slapping dark orbs continues to be the best plan of action for boss fights that summon support. I wish there was a bit more going on in the micromanagement of this fight. It might even be preferable to ignore the summoned enemies and just smack the artifice until it dies. As a test of your understanding of the game’s mechanics, Chapter 7 and Chapter 9 did a far better job. Not that the final boss is a total chump, I just didn’t find the strategies needed to take him on nearly as interesting. It did force me to use a shield hammer though, which is kind of impressive. Down to the very end I was reassessing my party lineup and trying to find new ways to get mileage out of the blades I had accrued.
With the ending upon us, we bid goodbye to Malos. After having lost all his friends and becoming honest with himself, showing some remorse for the path his life took, he receives the tearful, sympathetic goodbye we wish we could have given fucking Pol Pot. Following that we say “goodbye” to Pneuma. The scene where Rex pleads with Poppi to just go grab Pneuma for him leading to the little robot starting to cry was strangely raw in a way I admired. Making a kid feel terrible for doing what they promised to do, and not really understanding why the hell the kid won’t do what you want them to do instead. There are a lot of people who have been on both ends of this situation, but without the rocket boots or the exploding space station. Of course Rex doesn’t ask Roc to go save Pneuma instead, but I guess he’s already accepted that he shouldn’t bother to try by the time that might be up for consideration.
The logistics of the final scene have no explanation. Why are Pyra and Mythra alive? How’d they get off the station? Why are they separate blades now? There’s not much to draw from that helps you rationalize it. There’s nothing notable that’s preventing you from accepting it. Klaus did it. It’s magic. They’re the most powerful thing in existence. Fuck you the writers wanted a happy ending. It’s a tough call to make. Maybe something more ambiguous or bittersweet would be more memorable or poignant, but your players have invested a lot of time into this game. We’re talking 70 hours here, not 10-15. It’s more than just a canvas for a creative’s artistic vision, it’s the player’s outlet for fun and relaxation. Will they feel cheated if their favorite characters aren’t clearly alive and happy by the end? Is this ending tonally appropriate? Have we given Rex too much at this point and is there any way to go back and take something away?
I think it ties into people remembering how something made them feel much clearer than what was actually experienced. Maybe, objectively, the writing would be more sensible if Pneuma stayed on that station. But I think Takahashi and his team really had to consider what emotions Xenoblade 2 was supposed to make the player experience. Looking back, it seems like a lot of people see this as a comfort game. It’s a lengthy adventure with a lot of time spent getting to know its characters and seeing them become friends. There’s another angle to the game though, and it’s stated outright. Living life means taking the good with the bad. Have you just given the player the good with the good here? Has the game betrayed its theme? I really don’t envy the person who had to make this call. At the end of the day, the whys and hows don’t seem to outweigh the feeling this ending gives people, so I don’t resent it for going in this direction. Shit, I’ve been staring at this finished review for days wondering if I should go with the more memorable 3.5/5 or the comforting 4/5.
So what did Xenoblade 2 make me feel? Well there was some frustration and boredom in there, but also a lot of appreciation. I’m glad a game like this exists. Games where the developers are just told to play to their strengths and express themselves like a tapestry of finger paintings. A heavily story driven experience with tons of cutscenes, but also bursting at the seams with gameplay mechanics and a desire for players to express themselves in turn through the game’s combat and exploration. This is a video game on overdrive that somehow has little regard for what the market says should be successful yet painstakingly tries to ensure everyone who plays it finds something they will like. It’s a big, beautiful mess, and while I didn’t always love it, I want more like it.
idk my friend Frank doesn't think a 7/10 is good because C's get you beaten by a pot lid so here's an 8
I think people are more likely to remember how something made them feel than what was actually said or done, and Xenoblade 2 really wants you to feel a whole cheese board of emotions. It’s too bad then, that a lot of people play this game and walk away feeling all the wrong things. Interestingly though, it’s hard to find people who feel anything but strongly about this game. Xenoblade 2 does itself no favors here, it is such a bizarre hodgepodge of unrestricted ideas somehow made under the umbrella of a huge corporation, and the results were often mixed. It’s no wonder the result is so polarizing. I’m not exactly balanced in my assessment either. Xenoblade 2 made me feel all sorts of things. Some good, some bad, but I’m glad I gave it a shot.
Despite being well known for getting good 20 hours in, Xenoblade 2 wastes little time just throwing you into things. I was initially thankful for this brisk introduction. In it we immediately establish the main goal and the greater scope of the conflict. Although once I started having all these terms dropped on me like drivers, blades, Aegis, Mor Adain, Fonsett, Alrest, titan etc I quickly felt overwhelmed. Rex is familiar with all of this, but I’m not. My protagonist mercifully started asking more questions in chapter 2 but chapter 1 is a lot to take in.
Most refreshingly, our main villains are set in stone right from the word go. While others will join in later, Malos and Jin are locked in here and stay that way for the whole game, so your lead antagonists continue to receive a ton of attention rather than being discarded and replaced by someone far less interesting. Malos’ cocky, brutish attitude is typically suited for a secondary rival or early game antagonist. Instead, this guy is the carrot at the end of the stick for your whole playthrough, and he only gets better with time. It makes for a much more memorable villain whose personality could have easily fit for the hero of a different story if he wasn’t also a suicidal drama queen.
After chapter 1 is finished, the game really starts to lay it on thick with the tutorials. Much has been said about these blurbs of text. I am of the opinion that, while they eventually come together to form a pretty solid combat system, it spends a lot of time stumbling when getting you there. Not only are these tutorials sometimes lacking in information, there is not a means of reviewing them within the game itself. So you’d better fire up that search engine if it’s been a while since you last played. This is a pretty egregious oversight in a game that’s desperately trying to cram in mechanics and display them on screen. Stranger still, the game allows you to rewatch any of its cutscenes through a theater mode, but not its tutorials through any other menu. They also come with no visual guide, they’re just text popping up on screen and as soon as you press continue, they’re gone. Most damning of all, all these quality of life features were in Xenoblade 1.
In combat itself, you’ll be spending a lot of time flicking the control stick to cancel your auto-attack and build up arts, and eventually string together blade combos. Understandably, Rex’s main weapon is among the best in the game at quickly building these arts up. To the point that it will often overshadow any alternatives. I’d advise against gluing yourself to this weapon though. Weapon classes I had dismissed initially ended up being far more useful than I had given them credit for. Katanas, lances, and Brighid’s whips all immediately stuck out to me as fun to use, but Roc’s scythes, bit balls, and even Poppi’s various weapons can be great in their own right depending on the arts and animations they’re tied to. Even the hammer, which I later found out is considered to be the game’s worst weapon type, had its uses for me, being tied to a pretty dependable tank blade that helped me out during harder boss fights. You might not want to rely on flicking that control stick either, because timing your arts to the stronger auto-attacks will make things go much faster.
The auto-attack, arts, and specials form the trifecta of your combat options. At first I wasn’t sure why they chose not to implement anything like item usage or being able to more directly control other party members. I also didn’t like not being able to auto-attack while moving, which was possible in Xenoblade 1. I did however come around to Xenoblade 2’s way of doing things. With nine arts, twelve specials, and a branching tree of party member specials at your disposal, you certainly have quantity on your side over Xenoblade 1. You may not notice this at first, since the game does a pretty poor job of making you comfortable with how to play effectively. Xenoblade 1 gave me the ability to topple in the prologue, Xenoblade 2 gives it to me in chapter 3 alongside the ability to juggle three blades. Eventually you’ll find that the game allows you to play in a plethora of ways within the confines of setting up blade combos that lead into chain attacks, so player’s have many means of expressing themselves across a range of arts, animations, and passive abilities. With an understanding of secondary effects that specials provide, your decision making becomes even more complex. As an example, some provide passive damage after completion and some both deal damage and heal the party.
Don’t dismiss those descriptions, they’re actually important. Read the skill trees. Every blade has passive abilities and most specials have secondary effects. You should also be opening that affinity tree regularly, because these upgraded/new abilities don’t take effect until you see them on that page. You could go the entire game wondering why a blade is shit despite your frequent use of it and not know why. You would think that someone would be checking menus pretty frequently in an RPG, but Xenoblade 2 has so many of them that I have seen several people fail to remember important information like this. These special effects are so widespread that the game passively reminds me of Pokemon, and makes me wonder how a multiplayer feature could be implemented in Xenoblade.
Unfortunately, unless you know what you’re looking for, you could stumble through the entire game not really clicking with the combat. While there are a few challenging fights, they don’t push back against the player nearly enough to force them to reevaluate how they’re playing. So if you’re playing wrong, you may never realize it. You’ll just not have fun but not realize why. You’d be well within your rights to blame the game for this. The combat is legitimately good, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Boss fights are generally what’s going to keep you most engaged here. Of particular praise are the fights against multiple opponents whose abilities coordinate well with one another. The Malos and Jin fight in chapter 7 is an impressive display of the combat system’s strengths. After getting my ass kicked for what felt like hours, I managed to time an evasion skill consistently to dodge an unbelievably annoying blowdown effect that dealt massive damage on top of that.
During this first half is when you build up blade combos and attach elemental orbs and debuffs to bosses. These orbs will float around the boss, and can be destroyed during a chain attack to deal massive damage. You’ll also be fishing for driver combos but many bosses have high break resistance. Chain attacks themselves give you the ability to select from each party member’s list of blades to use special moves in sequence, with elemental attacks opposite to the orbs attached to the boss being more effective. Something I’ll definitely praise here is the status effects actually having an effect on the bosses, especially when they lock the big guy’s out of certain abilities. Dark elemental orbs are consistently the most helpful since they suppress a boss’ ability to call for help.
The second half of boss fights can hardly be considered a “half” at all. Bosses will usually enter an enraged state at some point. With it they will either break out a super powerful move or start spamming their most frustrating attacks. The game doesn’t seem to expect you to actually deal with these over just executing a chain attack and obliterating the last half of the boss’ HP. If you do end up dealing with a boss’ super move, then your best course of action is usually to just run off to the side and pick up your teammates if they fall. It’s not very intuitive and without a chain attack you’re probably just delaying the inevitable, but you do have a chance to recover. I’m unsure if my disappointment at a lack of a more definitive second phase is more a result of the game dangling something like it in front of me than its lack of existence outright. The boss is really just the first half of the HP bar, and getting them down to the second half without having the correct chain attack ready will be followed by the game informing you that you’ve failed its test. While a more robust moveset for bosses would have been appreciated, it is undeniably cathartic to decimate a health bar you had merely been chipping at until that point.
Xenoblade is more than its combat. Monolithsoft has also constructed a pretty expansive world once again. It’s impressive to see how much they’re willing to push Nintendo’s lackluster hardware to its limits. While I didn’t always feel incentivized to explore this world in depth, I still found its scope to be impressive. Xenoblade 1 offered a greater sense of progression through the Bionis, crawling up its body, onto the giant swords clashing, and finally onto the Mechonis. Xenoblade 2’s maps are more disparate by comparison. However, it trades that continuity in for crazier titan biology. There’s a lot of mind paid to how exactly traversable land would work on the titans. Gormott for example starts out very narrow since a large portion of the titan is made up of stoney giraffe neck. Or Uraya, where you spend a fair amount of time inside the titan, has natural lighting coming from a translucent exterior.
Helping a sense of discovery is a huge variety of fauna inhabiting each new area. It would not be a Xenoblade game if you didn’t run into an open area with triumphant music blaring just before the sudden interjection of an electric guitar introduces you to a level 90 monster who proceeds to one-shot your level 5 northerner bong and his friends or varying cup sizes.
Stunting some sense of exploration is the field skills. These are special abilities each blade has that enables certain means of traversal for gated areas. On top of these often making me just shrug off the idea of exploring if I had to do a bit of grinding to upgrade how adept some of the blades were, this system jarred with the gacha elements of unlocking blades. Common blades will have a random set of abilities, so I was left pretty indifferent to most of these field skill checks on the basis of it feeling a bit out of my hands. You also cannot switch equipped blades if you are climbing, which is fucking annoying.
The blades themselves are unlocked through a gacha system. You are constantly accumulating core crystals through salvaging or through murdering large sky lobsters. These crystals awaken blades (somewhat) randomly. Nondescript common blades have random weapons and passive abilities. Rare blades have these things set from the start. For those who don’t want to engage with this system much, you will have a safety net of three “pity blades” that you’re guaranteed to pull even if you have the absolute worst luck in the world. There are also a handful of blades you can obtain through sidequests and three additional ones you get through the main story, those being Wulfric, Aegeon, and Roc. The latter two are considered story-important blades but the poor guys don’t even get blade quests, whereas Wulfric does.
This system has been a point of contention for many players. Obviously they want to use the rare blades with unique designs, personalities, heart-to-hearts, and side quests. They wonder why they couldn’t just obtain all the blades through optional quests. Why make them sift through the garbage of common blades when the real content is with the rares? Well, commons can often overshadow rares in usefulness, particularly if you’re pulling them from rare or legendary core crystals. It’s much easier to fit commons into your game plan as the rares have stricter means of implementation. However, rares are always going to be easier for you to identify in the menu. Since their skills and passives are always the same, you won’t have trouble remembering what they do. While you can only have a limited number of blades on each driver, there’s probably going to be enough clutter for you to struggle remembering who’s your most useful common blade. A means of making this a little easier would be to eliminate the need for “organize by driver” in the menu, and color code common blades based on who awakened them. You can thankfully lock favorite blades, but even then, you might have quite a few favorites.
So the gacha system is a mixed bag. I never found myself wishing I had a particular rare blade, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t favor rare blades due to information retention with them just being that much easier. There’s no feeling quite like being lucky though, and pulling an ultra rare blade brings a unique kind of excitement to the experience. It’s one of those aspects of the game that shows the developers must have been thinking about all the different ways a player can have fun in the first place, and decided to just stuff as many of them as possible into Xenoblade 2, perhaps at the expense of something else. While I don’t think the game greatly suffers mechanically from the gacha system, it can still overwhelm a player to the point of causing disinterest thanks to messier implementation and presentation.
The game should be teaching you how important its content and mechanics are rather than just telling you they exist. Stacks of items that can be exchanged for something good and you’ll never know. A grindy minigame required to improve Poppi can be mitigated by converting its prizes into core crystals. Did you know that? Did you know Adenine’s ability straight up doubles damage to enemies’ elemental weaknesses for ALL forms of damage? Did you know the “strength” stat doesn’t necessarily reflect damage, as drivers and blades have distinct strength from one another? Did you know that blades increase their strength stat when you fill out their affinity chart? Did you know Brighid does increased damage after evading attacks? Did you know every weapon has an optimal attack range that gives you a 15% damage boost? Did you know stat buffs that blades give to drivers persist when that blade is inactive? Did you know you can switch blades to other drivers with overdrive? Or that you can lock blades to make sure you don’t delete them? Did you know that some of those informant NPCs actually have useful things to share? Did you know that female party members focus on blade combos while male party members will focus on driver combos? This is why you’ll probably end up spoiling a bit of the game’s surprises when you go off to do a little digging for information. There’s so much information to go through that you will inevitably see some off-hand mention of important plot details you probably didn’t want to see. In my case I still enjoyed most of the plot, but it’s disappointing the game could not convey its information with enough organization for you to not bother with consulting the internet on it. There were times I genuinely had a blast taking down a tough enemy but that’s only because I took the time to check third party sources.
Alright I can’t be fucked to talk about just the mechanics anymore. A few pages of digression later, I’m going back to blogging about how I felt playing through chapter-by-chapter. The story is a huge part of this game, seeing more of it is the main incentive for progression, and it’s what most people talk about regarding the game years down the line. Although admittedly there’s more genuine gameplay discussion persisting than what I typically see for games like this. Nearly a fifth of the mandatory game is just the cutscenes. There’s 14 hours of this shit, brother. There’s still going to be gameplay stuff as you scroll but it’s more of a mix.
Like its predecessor, Xenoblade 2 opted to go for a UK localization. This lends itself well to the different regions you will be visiting, and allows each area to feel even more culturally distinct due to the high density of accents within the UK. Australians also join in on the fun here to voice the Urayans. It was very bold of the localization team to allow Australians into the recording booth with no regard for their own safety, so credit to them there. Indol is also populated by American accents (supposedly, they’re either slipping all over the place or Amalthus is going for some kind of Mid-Atlantic thing), and since this nation handles the distribution of blades, blades also have American accents. At least that’s what I think they were going for.
Sadly, I chose not to engage with the dub for most of my playthrough. It’s a real bummer, because I love Xenoblade 1’s dub, and the same dialectal charm was readable in the subtitles while I listened to the Japanese audio. Rewatching all of the cutscenes with the dub, I still feel I made the right decision by switching around the Chapter 3 mark. There are legitimately great performances in the English version, it’s true. Simon Thorp absolutely kills it as Vandham and Sean Barret’s choice to not make his voice a nasally scratch once Gramps shrinks down is welcome. While Mitsuki Saiga’s Morag/Meleph is one of the best pitched down female performances I’ve heard, you can still tell that it’s not her natural register, and I think I prefer Kirsty Mitchell’s choice to speak normally. Skye Bennett sometimes falls victim to what I can only think was not knowing the context of some of her lines, making delivery here and there sound off, but other times she sounds pleasantly natural in many of the game’s casual conversations. There’s a stellar, hammy performance from Bana, and while Malos can sound wooden in a few lines he really lets loose by the end.
But Al Weaver’s Rex is just too inconsistent for me to stick with. I am usually pretty forgiving of dubs, some might even call me an apologist, but this is often not an acceptable performance. I can work with sub and dub, but I know people who just prefer to ride with the dub no matter what. This performance, especially the opening chapters, is sometimes so bad that it will legitimately prevent me from recommending this game to people. I don’t know if the guy was worried about waking up the neighbors when raising his voice but he cannot scream to save his life. The first fight with Malos is accompanied by utterly unconvincing shouts that will immediately turn you off to your lead character. Worse still is the climax of chapter 3, where your alternative to Hiro Shimono’s anguished cries is a set of mild exclamations reminiscent of that time you came back from the store and realized you forgot milk or something idk. I don’t care if it’s the actor or director who was to blame, the result is sub par performance. So it was Japanese audio for me, which is fine given that most important cutscenes actually align their lip synching with the original dialogue. The most egregious example in the game might be when Rex says, “Thank you” in the Japanese version, literally the English phrase, “Thank you”, but the dub felt the need to change it to “I could get used to this!” with the grace of a square peg in a round hole.
Also suffering from weaker performances in the dub are most of the optional rare blades. I don’t really have anything else to say. They’re bad. What, you think I’m gonna pull a punch for fucking Theory and Praxis? No. I’m typing this paragraph after I’ve finished literally everything else.
Like I said previously, chapter 3 is where the combat opens up for you a lot more. You’ll meet Vandham who joins your party and tells you he’s not going to awaken any core crystals because he only needs Roc and he’s definitely not going to die. This chapter ends with what might be your first genuine roadblock in the game. Malos Metsu and Akhos Sheisty link up for a battle that begs you to do so damn prep work. Thankfully both hubs you visit in this timeframe have many items that’ll help you out. This is where I found my most preferred pouch item in the game that charged my specials faster and ensured those lazy bums in my party actually had their shit together when I needed a blade combo.
Chapter 3’s scripted but exciting ending is followed by the pure silliness of chapter 4. As much as I genuinely enjoyed some of the ridiculousness of this segment, this is where the map design began to wear on me. The factory is just miserable to walk around, and you’re stuck with just Rex and Nia as party members as frantic music blasts your brain. It’s almost worth it to see Bana and Muimui front flip down a slide into a giant robot though. Chapter 4 is often maligned for frequently dipping into farce territory, especially after the dramatic chapter 3. Much of its plot is focused squarely on the comedic nopon characters, which might make the whole thing feel like a waste of time. It did however manage to elicit a few laughs from me. Scenes like the obviously evil nopon masquerading as a friend, being shown in a flashback in a shitty disguise. Our heroes are oblivious to the incoming betrayal.
The end of the chapter sees us graced with Morag as a party member. You’ll have to die if you want her to be of any use though, deflating the triumphant tone of the scene. She comes in unequipped when the rest of your party is probably hopped up on pouch items. With Brighid and a mega lance equipped, she’s probably one of the most fun party members in the game, and she was typically the one I’d choose to play as if I wasn’t on Rex.
Fan la Norne arrives at the tail end here to save the day. Although her introduction feels incredibly convenient, and most everything about her falls under plot points you wish someone would ask a few more questions about, she does make sense here when you consider what Zeke’s original intention was when bothering you throughout the story so far.
Chapter 5 takes you to the Leftherian Archipelago, which might be my favorite location in the game. This is where it started really becoming clear that the world was not simply designed to be big for no reason. For those interested, they’ll find that the map is very deliberately designed with many eye catches that invite you to test whether or not you can make it to them. Usually, if you can see it, you can get there, so long as it isn’t obviously just a piece of the titan’s body. Heart-to-Hearts, sidequests, and novelty items hide away in all corners of the map. These are strewn about in every location. Character moments most players will never see. The randomness of what characters you’ll even have in your playthrough ensures that many players who take an interest in this content are going to have very different experiences. The archipelago is also pretty forgiving with its cloud sea, letting you swim around to your heart’s content.
You’ll run into Zeke for his last boss fight here. He actually managed to kick my ass a few times. Compounding this with the Patroka and Mikhail fight, this is the point when I started feeling the pressure to slap orbs on during the first half of boss fights, because the less I have to deal with enraged attack spamming, the better.
Next you’ll finally meet Amalthus, the much anticipated man who climbed a big tree. I assure you he is definitely not a villain. Really the game makes no secret of Amalthus being up to no good. Beneath Indol’s impressive architecture is a destitute city down below. It’s like San Fran with less public defecation and probably more anal sex. Indol also controls the distribution of blades, which implies some measure of war profiteering. Fan La Norne is notably the only blade in the game who doesn’t even remember her own name, and Pyra and Mythra quickly make note of her damaged core crystal. This is something about that situation that I really enjoyed. It’s never directly stated why Fan/Haze is impaired so, but it’s obvious in retrospect. Just in case that subtlety was too much for you though, the game just hits you in the face with Amalthus and Malos being seen as interchangeable in a vision by Rex.
Oh and then Fan dies. That was a bit short lived. However that did take us to the Judicium Titan, a pretty substantial addition to the location lineup that you barely spend any mandatory time in. The place is up its ass with high level monsters but if you’re willing to scrounge around you’ll probably find some pretty great stuff. Just another interesting part of the developers’ thought process in willingly stuffing in content many players will never see.
In Chapter 6, Nia is revealed to be a huge asshole who let Vandham die, and Rex is further confirmed to be an idiot who would be getting everyone around him killed if he wasn’t continually bailed out by others. The chickens have truly come home to roost. Jin’s nihilism is put into words succinctly here. Rex is looking for answers, but Jin assures him there are none. Now, Rex has watched a couple of Jordan B. Peterson videos, but he’s just not well versed enough to lecture Jin on his unwashed penis. Between all that, you’re treated to Tantal, a kingdom with a nice amount of verticality that’s surprisingly easy to navigate given that it’s nothing but snow and blizzards. The capitol city’s accompanying music happens to be performed by an Irish choir. So even though the UK-based localization team likely tried their hardest to keep the Irish away from this game, the Japanese composer opened the backdoor for them anyway.
You’re gonna get a nice preview of Aegis-free gameplay here, and unsurprisingly it can be a rough transition when they’ve likely formed the backbone of your party setup, and Rex looks like a nonce holding big meaty scythes. You’re also hit with a pretty tough fight against Torna here, so either accept that you’re targeting Mikhail or equip some anti-taunt items to crush Patroka and her weather machine.
Chapter 7 has you needing to rely on a team entirely sans Aegis. Morag remained my preference here but Rex can still be a big help when it comes to driver combos since he has Roc’s smash art. The cave here was my first time realizing I was definitely obstructed by a field skill check, and where my aforementioned problems with them fully solidified even in this pretty minor context.
Nia and Zeke both receive a healthy amount of development in this segment. While Nia is the main focus here, I think it’s Zeke whom I appreciated more in retrospect. Such an initially goofy character ending up so closely tied to, almost grounding, one of the lead villains, could easily fall apart tonally but the transition happens so smoothly that you barely notice. Pandoria had been a nonentity up to this point, but enough of a foundation was there that her relationship with Zeke became all the sweeter. It’s also a nice way to further explore another facet of Jin’s fate. Amalthus is responsible for Jin’s current predicament, the latter having turned into a suicidal, genocidal monster carrying a piece of his lost love with him as an eternal reminder of his terrible lot in life. Meanwhile Zeke is also a product of Amalthus’ actions, and basically got to see the man at his absolute best, with Zeke proceeding to pay that kindness forward for the rest of his life, carrying a piece of his loved one as a reminder of how fortunate he is.
Nia is thankfully spared the need for her backstory to do all the heavy lifting for her big reveal. The game had done its due diligence to hint at her true nature and more or less revealed it in the previous chapter when she saved Niall. Now all that was needed was clarification. The truth was right in front of the player the whole time. Every member of Torna was a blade, Nia was part of Torna at the start of the game. Pretty simple. Dromarch is the character I feel got most shortchanged by the story, with the least amount of focus within the main cast, but this backstory provides such a strong thread for why he’d dote on Nia the way he does, being pretty much all she had and the only reminder of her surrogate family. I ended up way more endeared to this tertiary character than I had any right to be.
So Nia comes out of the blade closet, proudly displaying her smoothed-minge, and loudly declares “trans rights” before owning the robed chuds. After her confession of love to Rex, he sadly reveals to her that he is super straight. Addam is proud that his child has typed "Amen" rather than ignoring fast, and grants Rex the rank of Nitro Dubs. It’s a legitimately nice scene for Rex though. He’s a character who’s lacked some agency up until this point, and while his purpose is still kept very general, going from “Not wanting to die” as a goal to “Inspiring others to live” is a marked step up for him.
This theme is pushed further in the subsequent Malos and Jin fights. Jesus Christ, use a Wind orb as soon as possible and spam evasion with Morag because otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time. That aside though, Rex’s existentialism is now on full blast here. Like Jin and Malos, Pyra and Mythra were curious enough about their existence to want answers from God, but ultimately they just wanted death. None of these people asked to be born, and definitely not as weapons of mass destruction, or in Pyra’s case a proxy for that weapon. Pyra was never sure that Elysium would give Rex a solution, but she was pretty sure she could kys herself after her dad gave her validation that she never should’ve existed. All of these people want to know why the world is so horrible, hoping that the answer will be “no reason lol” so they can embrace oblivion. Rex is now trying to find out why the world is so incredible. He sees now that just not wanting himself or others to die wasn’t enough, it put him completely at odds with Pyra and Mythra, who wanted nothing more than to do a sick flip off the Golden Gate Bridge. He accepts responsibility for life and asks them to join him in the struggle to find meaning, with the ultimate goal of spreading that meaning to others.
I had wrestled with whether or not I was going to end up disliking Rex. His predecessor, Shulk, is pretty widely praised. A fair amount of people claim Shulk as their absolute favorite protagonist of any game ever, and I can see why. Rex by comparison seems like the exact opposite of Shulk. Shulk is mature, laser focused, analytical to a fault, deeply considerate of all his actions and responsibilities, seemingly quick to anger but deeply empathetic, and pretty pessimistic about damn near everything without being histrionic about it. Rex is immature, perhaps even petulant, lacking any clear direction, impulsive, seemingly very friendly but pretty cavalier with other’s feelings when it counts, which feeds into how he’s saccharine in his optimism to the point of not understanding why someone would see things differently.
By this point though, Rex had won me over. I still don’t think he’s quite as good as Shulk, but Rex makes a strong case for himself. Rex is just a kid, his only precocious trait is having a day job. He acts exactly how you’d expect a kid to act. He’s not a chosen vessel of God destined for greatness the way Shulk is, Rex is here entirely by coincidence and is just trying to get by. There’s a vulnerability to him that doesn’t always make him likable, but him clearly not being an ideal choice to be the lead of this story is exactly why I appreciated the willingness to take a chance on such a departure from previous outings. I can’t quite remember when the line drops, but I’d say his best one is, “You’re the one who won’t change, that’s why you hate others who try to”.
Chapter 8, 9, and 10 are quite a bit shorter, but there’s still plenty of time dedicated to important character moments. The first part of chapter 8 is begging you to use Pneuma as much as humanly possible. Contrasting with other instances of coming to grips with gameplay mechanics, this is actually pretty organic. Yes you had a mandatory victory tutorial fight before this, but the actual enemies here encourage you to not let this new power sit idle until a boss fight hits. If you just wait to use Pneuma, you’ll be swarmed by enemies that do serious damage, and Jin won’t be able to compensate despite being overpowered himself. I never felt a mechanic in the game slide into play as easily as this one. There was nothing like this for canceling attacks, driver combos, blade combos, chain attacks, weapon switching, pouch items, or understanding the nuances of secondary effects. So I actually enjoyed this learning experience a lot.
Rex also gains the ability to make use of everyone’s blade here, so you probably won’t see a reason to play as someone else for the rest of the game. I still had a pretty good time when I switched to Zeke for most of Chapter 9 though.
Your trek up the World Tree takes an appropriately long amount of time. The environment is far more uniform and claustrophobic, but I think that actually works pretty well for conveying just how high this thing can get. You go from the land beneath the clouds all the way to outer space. It’s a grueling process. The end has to be around the corner. The whole outside world is coming apart, but you have to press on. You’re almost there. You’re probably at this for over an hour. Running up this same environment.
Pit stops along the way vary in quality here. The pacing of this section is a little off-putting. You’ll find that pretty long cutscenes are spaced just a few feet apart. Which begs the question of why they were even separated. This red light green light serves to make your run up the tree all the more painful, and not in the way I was previously willing to praise. I am willing to praise some of the backstory we get on Amalthus, even if I feel it’s coming a bit late, but where and when all this is dropped on you is not to my liking.
Fairing even worse is Torna. Mikhail’s backstory is up first, with a quick explanation as to why he’s been able to resist Fan La Norne’s blade nullification abilities. He’s a blade eater like Zeke and Amalthus. He’s also about 500 years old and traveled with Jin and Addam’s original group. Then he dies. This is way too much at once. Yes I know he appears as a child in an earlier scene. Yes it’s reasonable to assume Amalthus has been conducting these experiments for a long time in preparation for performing them on himself. Even still we have to have Amalthus point blank describe Mikhail as a refugee from the Aegis War when there were no prior indications within the mandatory story that this is important information. Then you have to stack Mikhail's change of heart on top of that. Again there’s enough information here for me to feel like this is something that can logically happen, but this character has not earned this sendoff. The story has not reflected on the details leading up to these big reveals.
Akhos and Patroka get it even worse. Shoehorned in flashbacks just before their deaths that shed very little light on them other than having a relationship of any kind prior to meeting Jin. They both die unceremoniously. I can say that I liked Torna as a villain group that seemed to be genuine friends with one another, particularly with how they humanize Malos when he speaks endearingly to them. However, you could not make me feel sympathy for Patroka and definitely not for Akhos. They may not be as bad as Malos but it goes to show just how far charisma can take you.
With the detours over. You finally finish your arduous journey to the top of World Tree, and it hits like a truck. You know it’s going to be bad. You know Amalthus found nothing when he made it to the top. It’s still painful to see the characters slapped with this reality.
Both Malos McMetsu von Logos and Rex get their time to speak with God. Rex’s dream sequence was another example of the character sticking out to me in ways that I appreciate and am vexed by. His fleeing from his phantom friends and weeping in front of his harem might be seen as immature, but it’s legitimately pretty sad to see that, here at the end of the world, the greatest fear at the forefront of his mind is that he let everyone down. That after endeavoring to inspire others, he caused them to fall further into despair.
Interestingly, there’s no real right or wrong reaction for Rex to have in these visions. The Architect is just seeing what kinds of people have walked in here with his daughter. What proceeds is a pretty lengthy scene tying this game into Xenoblade 1. As someone who played that game, it’s difficult to judge this scene in the vacuum of the mostly standalone Xenoblade 2. Is this extensive explanation of the world’s backstory, with an insane sci-fi backdrop from millions of years ago, necessary in making sense of God being a depressed shut-in? It felt like my time investment was greatly rewarded as a fan of both games, but I’m not sure how a fan who only played 2 would feel.
Regardless, the conversation ends with Rex restoring some of the Architect’s faith in humanity. The game is surprisingly not that judgmental in its messaging. You would expect something as simple as bad guy nihilism vs good guy existentialism to be up its ass with platitudes, but it doesn’t spend that much time pontificating over it. Whether Rex has successfully found his own meaning in life or properly serves the Architect's original vision of a higher good and a better world isn’t really a debate here. I can’t say how intentional it is on a writer’s part, but I like how there’s both a religious and secular angle to look at it.
Outside of these cutscenes chapter 10 is pretty brief. You have a hallway of enemies that drop very powerful chips to beef up any blades you have lagging behind. At this point though, I had QT Pi so I could obliterate pretty much anything. The final boss has a notable frustration to it if you’re expecting someone other than yourself to heal. Malos will drift far away to wind up stronger attacks, and when an enemy dips out of range, your party members won’t perform specials. This includes specials that only heal the party. It’s a very odd bit of programming for the AI.
Slapping dark orbs continues to be the best plan of action for boss fights that summon support. I wish there was a bit more going on in the micromanagement of this fight. It might even be preferable to ignore the summoned enemies and just smack the artifice until it dies. As a test of your understanding of the game’s mechanics, Chapter 7 and Chapter 9 did a far better job. Not that the final boss is a total chump, I just didn’t find the strategies needed to take him on nearly as interesting. It did force me to use a shield hammer though, which is kind of impressive. Down to the very end I was reassessing my party lineup and trying to find new ways to get mileage out of the blades I had accrued.
With the ending upon us, we bid goodbye to Malos. After having lost all his friends and becoming honest with himself, showing some remorse for the path his life took, he receives the tearful, sympathetic goodbye we wish we could have given fucking Pol Pot. Following that we say “goodbye” to Pneuma. The scene where Rex pleads with Poppi to just go grab Pneuma for him leading to the little robot starting to cry was strangely raw in a way I admired. Making a kid feel terrible for doing what they promised to do, and not really understanding why the hell the kid won’t do what you want them to do instead. There are a lot of people who have been on both ends of this situation, but without the rocket boots or the exploding space station. Of course Rex doesn’t ask Roc to go save Pneuma instead, but I guess he’s already accepted that he shouldn’t bother to try by the time that might be up for consideration.
The logistics of the final scene have no explanation. Why are Pyra and Mythra alive? How’d they get off the station? Why are they separate blades now? There’s not much to draw from that helps you rationalize it. There’s nothing notable that’s preventing you from accepting it. Klaus did it. It’s magic. They’re the most powerful thing in existence. Fuck you the writers wanted a happy ending. It’s a tough call to make. Maybe something more ambiguous or bittersweet would be more memorable or poignant, but your players have invested a lot of time into this game. We’re talking 70 hours here, not 10-15. It’s more than just a canvas for a creative’s artistic vision, it’s the player’s outlet for fun and relaxation. Will they feel cheated if their favorite characters aren’t clearly alive and happy by the end? Is this ending tonally appropriate? Have we given Rex too much at this point and is there any way to go back and take something away?
I think it ties into people remembering how something made them feel much clearer than what was actually experienced. Maybe, objectively, the writing would be more sensible if Pneuma stayed on that station. But I think Takahashi and his team really had to consider what emotions Xenoblade 2 was supposed to make the player experience. Looking back, it seems like a lot of people see this as a comfort game. It’s a lengthy adventure with a lot of time spent getting to know its characters and seeing them become friends. There’s another angle to the game though, and it’s stated outright. Living life means taking the good with the bad. Have you just given the player the good with the good here? Has the game betrayed its theme? I really don’t envy the person who had to make this call. At the end of the day, the whys and hows don’t seem to outweigh the feeling this ending gives people, so I don’t resent it for going in this direction. Shit, I’ve been staring at this finished review for days wondering if I should go with the more memorable 3.5/5 or the comforting 4/5.
So what did Xenoblade 2 make me feel? Well there was some frustration and boredom in there, but also a lot of appreciation. I’m glad a game like this exists. Games where the developers are just told to play to their strengths and express themselves like a tapestry of finger paintings. A heavily story driven experience with tons of cutscenes, but also bursting at the seams with gameplay mechanics and a desire for players to express themselves in turn through the game’s combat and exploration. This is a video game on overdrive that somehow has little regard for what the market says should be successful yet painstakingly tries to ensure everyone who plays it finds something they will like. It’s a big, beautiful mess, and while I didn’t always love it, I want more like it.
idk my friend Frank doesn't think a 7/10 is good because C's get you beaten by a pot lid so here's an 8