Talon
7 reviews liked by Talon
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
This review contains spoilers
For all the lip service paid to Game of Thrones through the marketing, aesthetic, and tone of Final Fantasy XVI, there is very little DNA shared between the two at their respective cores. While the bevy of options to explore the lore entries written for the game are interesting reads, they are seldom needed to understand the events of the game’s world. Conflicts happen isolated from one another, ever following the protagonist and bending to the needs of his story. This is not a knock on the game’s story, but it is emblematic of the fact that it is exactly what the title claims. For better and for worse, the latest entry in the series that refuses to stagnate is much more Final Fantasy than its creators and online discourse would lead you to believe. While at several points the attempts to forge a new identity clash with the story’s tendency to err toward series tropes, the end product nonetheless succeeds in almost all of what it sets out to do. The fact is that one will be far more satisfied with this game by expecting a reaffirmation of what is a known love rather than a reinvention.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.
I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.
smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game
if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.
this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.
there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.
cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design
bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude
smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game
if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.
this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.
there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.
cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design
bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude
Resident Evil 4
2023
To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
In awe at this strong culmination of all the lessons, understandings, and ways Takumi has grown in his writing and directing. That was my first thought when going through the first two cases, a sort of magical expertise in having perfected a lot of the mechanics of mystery and characterization, as well as how the themes developed to the end. And while he still hasn't 'quite' found his footing on pacing all of those just as perfectly, the way each case gave a fresh introduction of stuff we've all seen before, alongside characters that went through familiar but stronger arcs vs. the rest of AA, was enough to just seal the heavy tears I had during the ending suite.
To an extent I don't even need the sequel really, I feel like there were so many wonderful character mysteries and characterization all interwoven together. That interrogation of justice, defense, and honesty by Naruhodo, to what the law really means, and then a complete breakdown of how a disgusting flawed system of 'justice' ends up becoming a weapon used by the people hurt by it to their own ends, even the most vengeful ones. The profuse personality emanating from Sholmes, who quickly jumped to the top of my husband list, to the earnest dialogue given by Iris and the defendants. I think the part that nails that feeling most is that when the jury was first put in the player's face I felt like it was irritating, but by the final case I was jumping at my seat to the next summation and interrogation because Takumi just pulls out every drawer from the cabinet to give each one heart!!!
I do still welcome what the sequel will bring for me, but I think even on its own, this is the best journey I've had with the series as a whole and I'll not soon forget it.
To an extent I don't even need the sequel really, I feel like there were so many wonderful character mysteries and characterization all interwoven together. That interrogation of justice, defense, and honesty by Naruhodo, to what the law really means, and then a complete breakdown of how a disgusting flawed system of 'justice' ends up becoming a weapon used by the people hurt by it to their own ends, even the most vengeful ones. The profuse personality emanating from Sholmes, who quickly jumped to the top of my husband list, to the earnest dialogue given by Iris and the defendants. I think the part that nails that feeling most is that when the jury was first put in the player's face I felt like it was irritating, but by the final case I was jumping at my seat to the next summation and interrogation because Takumi just pulls out every drawer from the cabinet to give each one heart!!!
I do still welcome what the sequel will bring for me, but I think even on its own, this is the best journey I've had with the series as a whole and I'll not soon forget it.
I really want to like this game. It has the classic Ratchet gameplay that I've always loved since I was young, and Rift Apart's base combat is among the best in the series. The game is also a graphical showpiece for the PS5. Demon's Souls and Returnal look fantastic, but this game's graphics are on another level. The variety of locations really sells that graphical power, as you travel from bustling cities to bright mining facilities. Jumping between these locations with the new rifts is the first time I've been sold on this generation as a sizeable leap from the last. These aspects of the game do a good job of distracting you from several major flaws that are present throughout its entirety. Many of these issues aren't unique to this game, but a few of them are, and they really make me worried about the future of the series.
The biggest flaw is the enemy variety. This is at its worst with the bosses, but the regular enemies are guilty of this too. I couldn't tell you when I first realized I was fighting the same giant robot boss for the the fourth or fifth time because it happens so many times that I lost count. If you take out all the variants of bosses, there are only around 5 unique bosses in this game. The worst part is that none of these bosses are particularly fun to fight. It's so disappointing that a game so beautiful is stuck throwing the same robot and T Rex at you over and over again. In a game with such diverse worlds to explore, the bosses should reflect those worlds in some way. The regular enemies stoke similar feelings in me. I understand that this is a universe with an iron fisted emperor, but that isn't an excuse to make 3/4 of the enemies boring orange dome robots. This is one of the longer Ratchet games, and the lack of enemy variety really hurts when you're getting to the end of the second act. It all feels like they were playing it too safe with the enemies, and that feeling extends to every other issue I have with the game.
The more I think about the story in this game, the more it baffles me. It's a feeling similar to what I felt when I played the PS4 remake of the original game. It messes with a formula so simple that I was essentially rewriting events from the game in my head as they happened. It's so easy to see a world in which the story in this game could have been good, but not even the dimensionator could materialize it. Ratchet and Clank has always relied on the same basic themes of bonds the importance of friendship rather than the concept of "destiny". Rivet is introduced as an alternate universe version of Ratchet. She never met her universe's version of Clank, and there are so many interesting ways to take that plot point. You could explore how Rivet's life is a lot harder, but that she pushes through it anyway because of her unique ambitions. You could also go the opposite way, and show how empty her life is because of her solitary adventures. While Ratchet faces off against the buffoon that is Doctor Nefarious, Rivet lives in fear of the much more threatening Emperor Nefarious. I always think about the attic scene in Uncharted 4 when it comes to characterization in a video game. That scene shows a side of Nathan Drake that is almost entirely absent from the rest of the series. It's only when he's alone that these feelings get fleshed out. Rivet never gets a moment like this. You never get to see how Rivet lives, or what she believes, or what her deeper ambitions are. Her characterization reminds me too much of Ratchet's in the PS4 remake. She's just good because she's good and that's that. She doubts the honesty of Clank for like, one level, and then believes him instantly. Wouldn't someone like Rivet be a little more on edge when it comes to trusting anyone? This point is more of an issue with the overall plot. Ratchet and Rivet come in contact very early in the game, and this hurts their characterization and gameplay immensely. Once Ratchet and Rivet contact each other, all characterization is thrown out the window. The story becomes a checklist where characters are driven by the plot instead of the other way around. Before that happens, I was actually getting invested in Rivet and Clank's relationship. It reminded me a lot of the original Ratchet and Clank, and that made me love this series in a way I haven't since A Crack in Time. The story is at its worst when it comes to Kit, Clank's alternate dimension counterpart. First of all, I think this type of character shouldn't have been in the game at all. I think any way you slice it, Rivet would have been much more interesting without Kit. It feels like Kit herself doesn't even want to be in the story, as she continues to bring up this manufactured drama that ends in a pining to go back to her home planet. It reminds me of bad movie writing, and that makes sense when you look at the writers for this game. I love that two women were the lead writers, but it's incredibly evident from their portfolio and their work on this game that they tried to make their own bad comic book movie here. This is all ignoring the lack of character this universe has been plagued with since Deadlocked. A Crack in Time is my favorite game in the series, but even that game is missing the grime that the PS2 Ratchet games had. That was a world where everyone looked out for themselves, and people had motivations beyond "I'm good" and "I'm evil". I'm not saying Chairman Drek is a revelation when it comes to character writing, but he runs circles around Emperor Nefarious. As a final side not, I feel like Doctor Nefarious has stumbled his way into being the iconic Ratchet and Clank villain. To me, he's one of the weaker villains in the series, and he just happens to be in two of the strongest games. It truly annoys me how Insomniac insists on putting him in like every Ratchet game now.
I'd like to end this on a more positive note, and talk about Blizar Prime. Blizar Prime is one of the best levels in the entire series, and I would almost say sells the game by itself. A mining planet destroyed by machinery gone haywire, Rivet has to swap between the blasted off remains and an universe where it hasn't been destroyed. Seeing a planet enveloped by the void of space come back to life buzzing with energy is jaw dropping in a way few games are. There are levels like this in games like Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2, but this one is on another level when it comes to true childlike wonder. It's moments like these that make Rift Apart worth it even with its flaws. The pure joy of shooting a giant laser through a crowd of robots is enough to almost outweigh any negatives.
The biggest flaw is the enemy variety. This is at its worst with the bosses, but the regular enemies are guilty of this too. I couldn't tell you when I first realized I was fighting the same giant robot boss for the the fourth or fifth time because it happens so many times that I lost count. If you take out all the variants of bosses, there are only around 5 unique bosses in this game. The worst part is that none of these bosses are particularly fun to fight. It's so disappointing that a game so beautiful is stuck throwing the same robot and T Rex at you over and over again. In a game with such diverse worlds to explore, the bosses should reflect those worlds in some way. The regular enemies stoke similar feelings in me. I understand that this is a universe with an iron fisted emperor, but that isn't an excuse to make 3/4 of the enemies boring orange dome robots. This is one of the longer Ratchet games, and the lack of enemy variety really hurts when you're getting to the end of the second act. It all feels like they were playing it too safe with the enemies, and that feeling extends to every other issue I have with the game.
The more I think about the story in this game, the more it baffles me. It's a feeling similar to what I felt when I played the PS4 remake of the original game. It messes with a formula so simple that I was essentially rewriting events from the game in my head as they happened. It's so easy to see a world in which the story in this game could have been good, but not even the dimensionator could materialize it. Ratchet and Clank has always relied on the same basic themes of bonds the importance of friendship rather than the concept of "destiny". Rivet is introduced as an alternate universe version of Ratchet. She never met her universe's version of Clank, and there are so many interesting ways to take that plot point. You could explore how Rivet's life is a lot harder, but that she pushes through it anyway because of her unique ambitions. You could also go the opposite way, and show how empty her life is because of her solitary adventures. While Ratchet faces off against the buffoon that is Doctor Nefarious, Rivet lives in fear of the much more threatening Emperor Nefarious. I always think about the attic scene in Uncharted 4 when it comes to characterization in a video game. That scene shows a side of Nathan Drake that is almost entirely absent from the rest of the series. It's only when he's alone that these feelings get fleshed out. Rivet never gets a moment like this. You never get to see how Rivet lives, or what she believes, or what her deeper ambitions are. Her characterization reminds me too much of Ratchet's in the PS4 remake. She's just good because she's good and that's that. She doubts the honesty of Clank for like, one level, and then believes him instantly. Wouldn't someone like Rivet be a little more on edge when it comes to trusting anyone? This point is more of an issue with the overall plot. Ratchet and Rivet come in contact very early in the game, and this hurts their characterization and gameplay immensely. Once Ratchet and Rivet contact each other, all characterization is thrown out the window. The story becomes a checklist where characters are driven by the plot instead of the other way around. Before that happens, I was actually getting invested in Rivet and Clank's relationship. It reminded me a lot of the original Ratchet and Clank, and that made me love this series in a way I haven't since A Crack in Time. The story is at its worst when it comes to Kit, Clank's alternate dimension counterpart. First of all, I think this type of character shouldn't have been in the game at all. I think any way you slice it, Rivet would have been much more interesting without Kit. It feels like Kit herself doesn't even want to be in the story, as she continues to bring up this manufactured drama that ends in a pining to go back to her home planet. It reminds me of bad movie writing, and that makes sense when you look at the writers for this game. I love that two women were the lead writers, but it's incredibly evident from their portfolio and their work on this game that they tried to make their own bad comic book movie here. This is all ignoring the lack of character this universe has been plagued with since Deadlocked. A Crack in Time is my favorite game in the series, but even that game is missing the grime that the PS2 Ratchet games had. That was a world where everyone looked out for themselves, and people had motivations beyond "I'm good" and "I'm evil". I'm not saying Chairman Drek is a revelation when it comes to character writing, but he runs circles around Emperor Nefarious. As a final side not, I feel like Doctor Nefarious has stumbled his way into being the iconic Ratchet and Clank villain. To me, he's one of the weaker villains in the series, and he just happens to be in two of the strongest games. It truly annoys me how Insomniac insists on putting him in like every Ratchet game now.
I'd like to end this on a more positive note, and talk about Blizar Prime. Blizar Prime is one of the best levels in the entire series, and I would almost say sells the game by itself. A mining planet destroyed by machinery gone haywire, Rivet has to swap between the blasted off remains and an universe where it hasn't been destroyed. Seeing a planet enveloped by the void of space come back to life buzzing with energy is jaw dropping in a way few games are. There are levels like this in games like Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2, but this one is on another level when it comes to true childlike wonder. It's moments like these that make Rift Apart worth it even with its flaws. The pure joy of shooting a giant laser through a crowd of robots is enough to almost outweigh any negatives.
Right off the bat, I must point out this game's biggest flaw: its pricing. One Famicom Detective Club (FDC) game is $35, or £50/$60 for both, and in Europe you cannot buy them separately. For a remake of a Famicom adventure game/visual novel that took me under six hours to complete with virtually zero replayability, this pricing is just unacceptable, and I can't recommend this game to anyone if the price stays this way.
Nevertheless, The Girl Who Stands Behind is pretty good. The best point of comparison I can make is that it feels like a long and loose Ace Attorney case, the ones that have nothing to do with any overarching plots. There is almost nothing in terms of character building for the protagonist, and the little that was there felt shoehorned in. This is the second FDC game, which I played first by recommendation of the one review that I read before buying, meaning that there might be better foundations laid out in the The Missing Heir, but I wouldn't count on it. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, since the game was intent on feeling like a one-off episode, and it executed that well.
The story was intriguing, and it had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing for the almost one sitting I played it in. It’s about a dead high school girl and a rumour about a ghost in said school, with a more serious tone than the light-hearted Ace Attorney series. I was promised a bit of horror by that one review I read, but it didn’t really deliver until the very end, and even then, it was very tame. It’s very linear, meaning that you won’t have to piece together the puzzle yourself, but the game does a good job of addressing deductions the player might have made, eliminating most of the annoying dramatic irony that comes with detective media like this.
In terms of its success as a remake, it’s excellent from a presentation standpoint. The new art direction is great, with a fair amount of charm that complements the story well. The characters are expressive, and the backgrounds are intricate. I’m told that it’s even prettier in the first game, which is set in the countryside, where this one is in the city. It’s fully animated and voice acted too, making it feel like a step above something like the older Ace Attorney games. The rearranged music was surprisingly nice, with options for the Famicom versions too if you want a more authentic experience.
FDC’s remade presentation brushed up well, but what doesn’t hold up so well today is the adventure gameplay. One of the reasons I played this one first was because I was told its gameplay is less obtuse than the first game, and if this is “less obtuse” I shudder to think about what The Missing Heir is like. You have to pixel peep for the inanest things. You have to exhaust every dialogue option for a character multiple times even if their only response is “…”. It’s just not elegant in the slightest, and even though I got through it easy enough, I found myself eyerolling at some of the ways to progress. It’s a shame that the gameplay was largely untouched considering the effort that went into remaking the presentation.
Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is well done remake and a fantastic homage to detective media that fans of Ace Attorney will enjoy, although you’ll need to have some patience for its outdated gameplay. Like I said before though, I can’t recommend that anyone buys this until the price has been slashed by at least 50%, or you’ll come away from its short runtime feeling very unsatisfied. That being said, it’s time for me to go buy and play The Missing Heir.
Nevertheless, The Girl Who Stands Behind is pretty good. The best point of comparison I can make is that it feels like a long and loose Ace Attorney case, the ones that have nothing to do with any overarching plots. There is almost nothing in terms of character building for the protagonist, and the little that was there felt shoehorned in. This is the second FDC game, which I played first by recommendation of the one review that I read before buying, meaning that there might be better foundations laid out in the The Missing Heir, but I wouldn't count on it. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, since the game was intent on feeling like a one-off episode, and it executed that well.
The story was intriguing, and it had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing for the almost one sitting I played it in. It’s about a dead high school girl and a rumour about a ghost in said school, with a more serious tone than the light-hearted Ace Attorney series. I was promised a bit of horror by that one review I read, but it didn’t really deliver until the very end, and even then, it was very tame. It’s very linear, meaning that you won’t have to piece together the puzzle yourself, but the game does a good job of addressing deductions the player might have made, eliminating most of the annoying dramatic irony that comes with detective media like this.
In terms of its success as a remake, it’s excellent from a presentation standpoint. The new art direction is great, with a fair amount of charm that complements the story well. The characters are expressive, and the backgrounds are intricate. I’m told that it’s even prettier in the first game, which is set in the countryside, where this one is in the city. It’s fully animated and voice acted too, making it feel like a step above something like the older Ace Attorney games. The rearranged music was surprisingly nice, with options for the Famicom versions too if you want a more authentic experience.
FDC’s remade presentation brushed up well, but what doesn’t hold up so well today is the adventure gameplay. One of the reasons I played this one first was because I was told its gameplay is less obtuse than the first game, and if this is “less obtuse” I shudder to think about what The Missing Heir is like. You have to pixel peep for the inanest things. You have to exhaust every dialogue option for a character multiple times even if their only response is “…”. It’s just not elegant in the slightest, and even though I got through it easy enough, I found myself eyerolling at some of the ways to progress. It’s a shame that the gameplay was largely untouched considering the effort that went into remaking the presentation.
Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is well done remake and a fantastic homage to detective media that fans of Ace Attorney will enjoy, although you’ll need to have some patience for its outdated gameplay. Like I said before though, I can’t recommend that anyone buys this until the price has been slashed by at least 50%, or you’ll come away from its short runtime feeling very unsatisfied. That being said, it’s time for me to go buy and play The Missing Heir.
Quake
1996
engine to play Arcane Dimensions with tbh