ThruLidlessEye
2023
Really stellar presentation, nails its visual style, the music is a little subdued at times but it generally fits the game's pace. The character interactions are fun, exploring the levels is rewarding. The more "discrete" aspects of the player character's moveset (attacking, jumping, ground-pounding, gliding) all feel pretty good, but anything that starts to rely more on physics or momentum (rolling, swimming) feels too unpredictable. It's a blast until just before the end, where the game completely shifts gears from loose, exploratory platforming to a linear gauntlet; parts of the final area feel like those "Mario in First Person" videos
2022
For some reason the PC controls seem worse than the Switch controls, and this seems to be PC exclusive, which is unfortunate.
Not even the second best Tony Hawk, let alone the second best video game ever, yet that's what Metacritic might still have one believe after all these years. Because of the clear, virtually inarguable improvements made in future installments, this game perhaps more than any other in the top games of all time on Metacritic reveals something. Many of the games on that list are from the late 1990's, and they are there not because they're truly great games (even though in many cases they are also that), they are there because they are some of the first popular video games to have realistically proportioned human figures in addition to accessible gameplay.
I played this through for the first time in over 2 years. It's fine. I beat it in 34 minutes and got an A rank. It's a nice little rubik's cube of a game, but it's really silly as a standalone product. The story means almost nothing outside of the context of the two games it's bridging the gap between, and the gameplay is nothing revolutionary. The visuals haven't aged very well: it looks like what it is, a 360/PS3 game with an absurd amount of glossy lighting effects covering up relatively simple characters and environments.
2020
I think if I was a kid I just wouldn't need other video games. I love to just boot this up and search something random and see what comes up. One time I played a Call of Duty: Zombies-style horde FPS where all the enemies were Sonic.exe. The very first time I got to the homepage the first thing I saw was a Captain Toad fangame. My only complaint is that even though there's a lot of creativity and effort on display in a lot of the games made in Dreams, I don't think I've played a single one that actually felt good to control.
2006
I played through Sonic's story and didn't think it was "that bad". To some extent I understand that I was probably a bit lucky in managing to avoid some common glitches (for example, I never got stuck to a wall as Knuckles, which seems to happen to many players). The control isn't perfect but most of the technical problems I had were related to the UI or the loading times, in this regard the Test of Intelligence in particular stands out as a low point. Radical Train was probably the Action Stage that gave me the most trouble, the time limit feels too restrictive in the later sections. Shadow and Silver's stories are unbearable, I will not be finishing them.
2003
I have a lot of nostalgia for this game's music and aesthetic but it is just terrible to play. The fact that this came out a half decade after Sonic Adventure is embarrassing.
2017
I think this is the most recent "traditional" arcade game I've played on a cabinet, before this it was Time Crisis 4, which is a full decade older, yikes!
I'm young enough that arcades have basically never been a thing for as long as I've been alive. I mean, yeah, they exist somewhere, they'll probably never completely die out. But the stories of people huddling around a fighting game or beat-em-up cabinet are just that, stories, and the arcades near me don't even have any games in those genres. Most of them don't even have pinball anymore, you have to go to a separate, pinball specific place.
When I was a kid you could still find arcade games all over the place, at the roller-skating rink, at the movie theater, the golf course, the grocery store, the dentist's office. Though, they were always off to the side, unattended, gathering dust. I played Pacman, Galaga, Time Crisis, Gauntlet, Crazy Taxi, Daytona, Hydro Thunder, Cruis'n USA, and almost always did so alone. The arcade I've heard described by older generations of game enthusiasts, the arcade I've seen in documentaries and old news broadcasts, seemed like a place with its own culture, it seemed like a place where strangers could find a shared experience.
The most common place to find arcade games in use in the early 00's, and to find the machines at all today, was and is in "family entertainment centers". Even here the machines are often neglected, they don't give any tickets and each credit is usually more expensive than the children's gambling machines. In a place like this you reserve a time-slot, a table, a lane, course or track for whatever amusement you've signed your group up for; even though the arcade is separate from this, you would still never play with a stranger, and those strangers are probably playing for prizes instead of fun anyway.
When talking about the apparent death of the arcade, people often point to the technical aspect. Video games require computing power, and for a long time that power came at enough of a cost that it made more sense for a business to buy separate machines for individual games and rent out playtime for change. Even if you could play at home, for a long time the games were both more expensive and technically inferior to what the arcade had. By the late 90's, home consoles had gotten powerful enough that they could offer an experience more or less on-par with arcades, and today home video gaming has completely outpaced arcade games. People used to have to settle for a worse version of Pacman at home, now I can just buy what is probably an objectively better version of Cruis'n Blast, at almost certainly a better price than continuing to shell out credits, for a handheld system that I can play anywhere.
But I think that only gets to half of the issue. While the internet and online gaming have made home video games more social, made it more easy to find strangers to play even the most obscure games with, cultural shifts have made playing video games in public one of the most awkward, lonely things you can do. You don't go to an arcade to play games, you go there to spend time with friends and family. If you go to an arcade specifically to play games, that's a little strange; if you play arcade games to get a high score, you are actually a freak.
I went to the arcade expecting to hover over my brothers' shoulders and challenge them to skee-ball. I had already looked at the websites for all the arcades in town and thought I had deduced that none of them had anything worth playing. I felt kind of stupid seeing something I was excited to try, I insisted someone else play it first. The cabinet prompted me to look up for a photo, a voice from behind commented that I had a good "smug rival" sort of expression, I clarified that I was just squinting weirdly because of all the RGB strobe lights both on the machine and hanging from the ceiling.
I played Cruis'n USA on a busted old cabinet in a dentist's office when I was a kid. I have no idea what exactly was wrong with the screen on that thing, but imagine playing that game in Game-Boy green monochrome. In the context of a Switch game, Cruis'n Blast's garish colors have a sort of charm to them simply because nothing else in console games is quite like it. In the context of an FEC, the game blends right in with everything else. Pop music shakes the building, every wall is lined with TV's tuned to whatever sports are playing. Cruis'n Blast was built to be just one corner of a TikTok video. Older arcade games had an attract mode to sell the game, here it feels like the game only exists as a formality to sell the attract mode.
Did I have fun? I don't know. I used to play loud music to fall asleep, overstimulation used to be the only way I could really relax. Whenever I start a new job there's a period of auditory shock, like the noise profile on my brain's filter no longer matches what I'm hearing. For the first few days, or weeks, I can barely sleep because I can still hear trucks and tools whirring, keyboards clacking, lights buzzing in my head. Cruis'n Blast is kinda like that, a noise washed over me, and it has passed.
I'm young enough that arcades have basically never been a thing for as long as I've been alive. I mean, yeah, they exist somewhere, they'll probably never completely die out. But the stories of people huddling around a fighting game or beat-em-up cabinet are just that, stories, and the arcades near me don't even have any games in those genres. Most of them don't even have pinball anymore, you have to go to a separate, pinball specific place.
When I was a kid you could still find arcade games all over the place, at the roller-skating rink, at the movie theater, the golf course, the grocery store, the dentist's office. Though, they were always off to the side, unattended, gathering dust. I played Pacman, Galaga, Time Crisis, Gauntlet, Crazy Taxi, Daytona, Hydro Thunder, Cruis'n USA, and almost always did so alone. The arcade I've heard described by older generations of game enthusiasts, the arcade I've seen in documentaries and old news broadcasts, seemed like a place with its own culture, it seemed like a place where strangers could find a shared experience.
The most common place to find arcade games in use in the early 00's, and to find the machines at all today, was and is in "family entertainment centers". Even here the machines are often neglected, they don't give any tickets and each credit is usually more expensive than the children's gambling machines. In a place like this you reserve a time-slot, a table, a lane, course or track for whatever amusement you've signed your group up for; even though the arcade is separate from this, you would still never play with a stranger, and those strangers are probably playing for prizes instead of fun anyway.
When talking about the apparent death of the arcade, people often point to the technical aspect. Video games require computing power, and for a long time that power came at enough of a cost that it made more sense for a business to buy separate machines for individual games and rent out playtime for change. Even if you could play at home, for a long time the games were both more expensive and technically inferior to what the arcade had. By the late 90's, home consoles had gotten powerful enough that they could offer an experience more or less on-par with arcades, and today home video gaming has completely outpaced arcade games. People used to have to settle for a worse version of Pacman at home, now I can just buy what is probably an objectively better version of Cruis'n Blast, at almost certainly a better price than continuing to shell out credits, for a handheld system that I can play anywhere.
But I think that only gets to half of the issue. While the internet and online gaming have made home video games more social, made it more easy to find strangers to play even the most obscure games with, cultural shifts have made playing video games in public one of the most awkward, lonely things you can do. You don't go to an arcade to play games, you go there to spend time with friends and family. If you go to an arcade specifically to play games, that's a little strange; if you play arcade games to get a high score, you are actually a freak.
I went to the arcade expecting to hover over my brothers' shoulders and challenge them to skee-ball. I had already looked at the websites for all the arcades in town and thought I had deduced that none of them had anything worth playing. I felt kind of stupid seeing something I was excited to try, I insisted someone else play it first. The cabinet prompted me to look up for a photo, a voice from behind commented that I had a good "smug rival" sort of expression, I clarified that I was just squinting weirdly because of all the RGB strobe lights both on the machine and hanging from the ceiling.
I played Cruis'n USA on a busted old cabinet in a dentist's office when I was a kid. I have no idea what exactly was wrong with the screen on that thing, but imagine playing that game in Game-Boy green monochrome. In the context of a Switch game, Cruis'n Blast's garish colors have a sort of charm to them simply because nothing else in console games is quite like it. In the context of an FEC, the game blends right in with everything else. Pop music shakes the building, every wall is lined with TV's tuned to whatever sports are playing. Cruis'n Blast was built to be just one corner of a TikTok video. Older arcade games had an attract mode to sell the game, here it feels like the game only exists as a formality to sell the attract mode.
Did I have fun? I don't know. I used to play loud music to fall asleep, overstimulation used to be the only way I could really relax. Whenever I start a new job there's a period of auditory shock, like the noise profile on my brain's filter no longer matches what I'm hearing. For the first few days, or weeks, I can barely sleep because I can still hear trucks and tools whirring, keyboards clacking, lights buzzing in my head. Cruis'n Blast is kinda like that, a noise washed over me, and it has passed.
2015
Looks fine, feels surprisingly cheap. The aesthetic and clothing designs are interesting enough that they might have felt neat in a better game. The plot is trite, the combat is hollow, every character besides the protagonist is stiff. Small set-piece moments feel cool (chasing the werewolf through town in particular) but the regular gameplay is completely lifeless.
Recore is a game that I regret not playing sooner, maybe more than any other game, though perhaps it's a good thing I didn't.
Recore came out in 2016, but it may as well not existed until late 2018. It performs terribly on Xbox, even the One X experiences crashes. It launched with less content and missing features (which have since been added into the Definitive Edition). For the first two years, the PC version was only available by way of jumping through the hoops of the Windows store.
I will say, flat out, I can only recommend playing this game on PC, through Steam, using a controller. You should not play this on Xbox, you should not buy this through the Windows store, and while M+KB is playable it isn't ideal.
Because of the game's reputation, I felt compelled to check out reviews of Recore, to find out why people didn't like it even after the Definitive Edition on Steam addressed a lot of problems I had heard of in the past. Part of the answer is, for critics at least, the Definitive Edition was too little too late, and the game's reputation was set in stone. The Definitive Edition doesn't even have a Metacritic score.
As for analyses by average users and amateur games journalists (fancy talk for "youtubers") I'm surprised by two things:
1: People compare Recore to other games a lot, which is not a problem on its own, but...
2: I've seen almost nobody Recore to the previous games from its leading creatives.
Recore is probably the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Keiji Inafune and Armature's prototype for a Mega Man X/Maverick Hunter first person shooter. After Inafune left Capcom, they probably still wanted to work together, but needed to find a way to actually get the money. Recore being a Microsoft Studios game was probably the only way that it was going to happen, but I feel like in a lot of ways this held the game back. I'll get back to this later, but what I'm trying to address right now is that, well...
I don't mean this in a condescending way, because it's mostly the fault of how the game was marketed and who it was available to during its launch window, but I honestly kind of think that the average Xbox fan probably lacks the "gaming vocabulary" to even parse what this game is. This game has a lot going on, it's a third person, action adventure, looter shooter, character action, open world, collectathon platformer, and that probably doesn't even cover everything. If someone doesn't even have the baseline "oh its third person Metroid Prime with a Mega Man X air-dash" the first time they boot up the game, they are going to be completely lost. A lot of the negativity surrounding the game is rooted in not even realizing that it's a collectathon until the very end, but I digress.
This is very much a game made by the people who made Metroid Prime. I swear, some of the UI and Menu sound effects are just straight up ripped from that game. Playing this right after finishing Metroid Prime was very natural, for a number of reasons.
My main problem with Metroid Prime was the combat encounters toward the end, which relied mostly on multiplying enemies that could only be defeated by color-coded weapons. Recore's entire combat system is built around this same color-matching mechanic, but there are a number of ways that they make it work for the length of an entire game. They also have streamlined things in a number of ways: switching beam colors no longer requires waiting through an animation, it's instant. Using the wrong color of beam won't completely negate damage, only result in weaker attacks.
In Metroid Prime, rapid fire, charged attacks, jumping, and dodging were all done with only 2 buttons, the resulting action being context dependent on whether A was being tapped or held, and on whether the control stick was being tilted. Here, all four actions have their own separate button. One of the most frustrating things about fighting the multi-colored fission metroids (and, to a lesser extent, the game's combat in general) was changing lock-on targets; in Recore, you just point the right stick in the direction of the enemy you want to switch to.
This is very much a game from Keiji Inafune. The technology of the game's setting, especially things like the E-Tower and Pylon 512 definitely evoke the same kind of feeling as Model W or any number of structures and machines from the Inti Creates Mega Man games. The game's platforming and movement are based primarily on dashes and air-dashes. Honestly, one of my biggest complaints about the game is that when you jump out of a dash you don't keep your momentum, something characteristic of Mega Man dashing physics as far back as the SNES. Dashing is even on the rightmost face button, just like in Mega Man X on SNES. The main character is named Joule, a name she shares with a major supporting character from Inti Creates' 2014 game Azure Striker Gunvolt.
Some people complain that the story of this game is too serious, too existentially threatening for a game featuring a girl and her robot dog fighting an evil Bionicle, but this is Keiji Inafune. Mega Man Zero 2 is the only video game I am aware of that is (well, was, I think they raised it for the Legacy Collection) rated E for Everyone, and also contains the phrase "concentration camps". This is expected from the kinds of settings Comcept conceptualizes.
If an enemy is low on health, they can be killed with a deathblow mini-game that will yield both a special kind of XP for your robot buddies, and a health refill. If you can kill small enemies or deplete segments of larger enemies fast enough, you can rack up a combo. If you have a combo of 10 or higher, you can expend 10 combo points to deathblow the enemy instantly, bypassing the mini-game. The final dungeon of the game has some really interesting uses of these mechanics: there are areas where you will constantly lose health, but there will either be small bug enemies that you can use to make your combo meter skyrocket, or landmine enemies that can be instantly deathblowed at any time.
Some players don't like that the final area of the game requires them to use the mechanics of the game in such advanced ways, but most people who play this game seemingly can't even get the basics down. From the beginning of the game, the player can use their robot dog to dig for items; the main story even requires it at multiple points. The achievement for digging 20 times is more rare than the achievement for entering the final level. The achievement for gliding for 20 seconds, something which will definitely happen if a player glides in the overworld at all, is more rare than the achievement for finishing the main story.
This final area, the E-Tower, is important to the story because its part of a terraforming system. Once you start progressing through the tower, a previously visited area of the game, Shifting Sands, now has a dynamic weather system because of the E-Tower's antics. Storms will periodically occur and (as the name of the area implies) shift the sand around, making new areas accessible. Only about 1 in 5 players who enters the final level finds this content at all.
Anyway, I feel like this is becoming a ramble, even by my standards, so let me try to boil it down.
What do I like about this game?
I like the exploration, I like using the different robots to traverse new areas, to find new dungeons. It's similar to finding shrines in Breath of the Wild, the FL1R and T8NK robots are even comparable to the sail-cloth and motorcycle from that game. Climbing up rock formations gathering crafting materials reminds me a lot of gathering items in a game like Xenoblade X, but without the demoralizing intimidation of that game's sheer scale.
I wish I had realized sooner that the map icons show you what kind of dungeon each one is, because I would have tackled more of the Traversal Dungeons (the platforming focused ones) sooner if I had known how to distinguish them (they're the ones with the triangular hazard icon). This is no Bowser's Fury by any stretch but the platforming is really fun and fluid. It's especially fun with the spider robot, grappling onto a rail, clanking around on it, air-dashing to reach the next one.
The combat takes a little while to really get going, but once you get used to it, and especially once you get the different firing modes in the DLC area, it's a really engaging loop. Some of the encounters are a little tough, but there isn't really anything that gets ridiculous, outside of maybe the final boss. It's a really busy encounter, but I still got through it on my first try.
I really like the setting, it reminds me of the Lego Mindstorms Stormrunner flash game. A desert planet, industrial robots, it's just neat.
What don't I like?
The presentation in general is a bit off, but the soundtrack is the most glaring. There may as well only be two types of song in the game. The first is droning orchestral swells, boring film score type tracks to let you know the things that are happening are very important and dramatic. The second is rhythmic bass heavy tracks, sometimes in an unusual time signature, to let you know that things are tense. Mega Man and Metroid are both known for their incredible soundtracks; I played Recore for almost 20 hours these past few weeks and don't remember a single melody, though I will admit that around the 15 hour mark I started playing with a podcast in the background, because the game audio just wasn't that important to my experience. The soundtrack was composed by a guy who mostly has worked on the sound of FPS games and movie tie-ins. I don't mean to say that this music is bad, or even that this was the result of his individual creative choice, but I do think that this music was a poor fit for this game, and I have a hard time imagining that it was anything other than a Microsoft decision.
And as much as I love the setting, I do wish there was more variety. If there was a sequel I'd hope that it would be set either on a different planet, or after enough terraforming has happened to give Far Eden some different climates, biomes, etc. But of course, a sequel to this game will probably not happen, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be made by Armature and Comcept.
In conclusion:
Recore is the best thing Keiji Inafune has been attached to since leaving Capcom, and I hope that's not in spite of his involvement.
Recore is basically the only real video game Armature has even made (everything else is ports, VR shit, and a now defunct online shooter), and that's a shame, I'd love to see more.
Recore is probably the best Microsoft Studios game that isn't a 2D platformer.
Recore is not in my top ten games of the past decade, but if I listed my top fifty, it might be somewhere in the thirties or so.
Recore isn't great, at one point it probably wasn't even good, but it is now. I'd say give it a chance. I went in out of morbid curiosity, I expected to hate it, but if you can play it on its own terms its genuinely a great time.
Recore came out in 2016, but it may as well not existed until late 2018. It performs terribly on Xbox, even the One X experiences crashes. It launched with less content and missing features (which have since been added into the Definitive Edition). For the first two years, the PC version was only available by way of jumping through the hoops of the Windows store.
I will say, flat out, I can only recommend playing this game on PC, through Steam, using a controller. You should not play this on Xbox, you should not buy this through the Windows store, and while M+KB is playable it isn't ideal.
Because of the game's reputation, I felt compelled to check out reviews of Recore, to find out why people didn't like it even after the Definitive Edition on Steam addressed a lot of problems I had heard of in the past. Part of the answer is, for critics at least, the Definitive Edition was too little too late, and the game's reputation was set in stone. The Definitive Edition doesn't even have a Metacritic score.
As for analyses by average users and amateur games journalists (fancy talk for "youtubers") I'm surprised by two things:
1: People compare Recore to other games a lot, which is not a problem on its own, but...
2: I've seen almost nobody Recore to the previous games from its leading creatives.
Recore is probably the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Keiji Inafune and Armature's prototype for a Mega Man X/Maverick Hunter first person shooter. After Inafune left Capcom, they probably still wanted to work together, but needed to find a way to actually get the money. Recore being a Microsoft Studios game was probably the only way that it was going to happen, but I feel like in a lot of ways this held the game back. I'll get back to this later, but what I'm trying to address right now is that, well...
I don't mean this in a condescending way, because it's mostly the fault of how the game was marketed and who it was available to during its launch window, but I honestly kind of think that the average Xbox fan probably lacks the "gaming vocabulary" to even parse what this game is. This game has a lot going on, it's a third person, action adventure, looter shooter, character action, open world, collectathon platformer, and that probably doesn't even cover everything. If someone doesn't even have the baseline "oh its third person Metroid Prime with a Mega Man X air-dash" the first time they boot up the game, they are going to be completely lost. A lot of the negativity surrounding the game is rooted in not even realizing that it's a collectathon until the very end, but I digress.
This is very much a game made by the people who made Metroid Prime. I swear, some of the UI and Menu sound effects are just straight up ripped from that game. Playing this right after finishing Metroid Prime was very natural, for a number of reasons.
My main problem with Metroid Prime was the combat encounters toward the end, which relied mostly on multiplying enemies that could only be defeated by color-coded weapons. Recore's entire combat system is built around this same color-matching mechanic, but there are a number of ways that they make it work for the length of an entire game. They also have streamlined things in a number of ways: switching beam colors no longer requires waiting through an animation, it's instant. Using the wrong color of beam won't completely negate damage, only result in weaker attacks.
In Metroid Prime, rapid fire, charged attacks, jumping, and dodging were all done with only 2 buttons, the resulting action being context dependent on whether A was being tapped or held, and on whether the control stick was being tilted. Here, all four actions have their own separate button. One of the most frustrating things about fighting the multi-colored fission metroids (and, to a lesser extent, the game's combat in general) was changing lock-on targets; in Recore, you just point the right stick in the direction of the enemy you want to switch to.
This is very much a game from Keiji Inafune. The technology of the game's setting, especially things like the E-Tower and Pylon 512 definitely evoke the same kind of feeling as Model W or any number of structures and machines from the Inti Creates Mega Man games. The game's platforming and movement are based primarily on dashes and air-dashes. Honestly, one of my biggest complaints about the game is that when you jump out of a dash you don't keep your momentum, something characteristic of Mega Man dashing physics as far back as the SNES. Dashing is even on the rightmost face button, just like in Mega Man X on SNES. The main character is named Joule, a name she shares with a major supporting character from Inti Creates' 2014 game Azure Striker Gunvolt.
Some people complain that the story of this game is too serious, too existentially threatening for a game featuring a girl and her robot dog fighting an evil Bionicle, but this is Keiji Inafune. Mega Man Zero 2 is the only video game I am aware of that is (well, was, I think they raised it for the Legacy Collection) rated E for Everyone, and also contains the phrase "concentration camps". This is expected from the kinds of settings Comcept conceptualizes.
If an enemy is low on health, they can be killed with a deathblow mini-game that will yield both a special kind of XP for your robot buddies, and a health refill. If you can kill small enemies or deplete segments of larger enemies fast enough, you can rack up a combo. If you have a combo of 10 or higher, you can expend 10 combo points to deathblow the enemy instantly, bypassing the mini-game. The final dungeon of the game has some really interesting uses of these mechanics: there are areas where you will constantly lose health, but there will either be small bug enemies that you can use to make your combo meter skyrocket, or landmine enemies that can be instantly deathblowed at any time.
Some players don't like that the final area of the game requires them to use the mechanics of the game in such advanced ways, but most people who play this game seemingly can't even get the basics down. From the beginning of the game, the player can use their robot dog to dig for items; the main story even requires it at multiple points. The achievement for digging 20 times is more rare than the achievement for entering the final level. The achievement for gliding for 20 seconds, something which will definitely happen if a player glides in the overworld at all, is more rare than the achievement for finishing the main story.
This final area, the E-Tower, is important to the story because its part of a terraforming system. Once you start progressing through the tower, a previously visited area of the game, Shifting Sands, now has a dynamic weather system because of the E-Tower's antics. Storms will periodically occur and (as the name of the area implies) shift the sand around, making new areas accessible. Only about 1 in 5 players who enters the final level finds this content at all.
Anyway, I feel like this is becoming a ramble, even by my standards, so let me try to boil it down.
What do I like about this game?
I like the exploration, I like using the different robots to traverse new areas, to find new dungeons. It's similar to finding shrines in Breath of the Wild, the FL1R and T8NK robots are even comparable to the sail-cloth and motorcycle from that game. Climbing up rock formations gathering crafting materials reminds me a lot of gathering items in a game like Xenoblade X, but without the demoralizing intimidation of that game's sheer scale.
I wish I had realized sooner that the map icons show you what kind of dungeon each one is, because I would have tackled more of the Traversal Dungeons (the platforming focused ones) sooner if I had known how to distinguish them (they're the ones with the triangular hazard icon). This is no Bowser's Fury by any stretch but the platforming is really fun and fluid. It's especially fun with the spider robot, grappling onto a rail, clanking around on it, air-dashing to reach the next one.
The combat takes a little while to really get going, but once you get used to it, and especially once you get the different firing modes in the DLC area, it's a really engaging loop. Some of the encounters are a little tough, but there isn't really anything that gets ridiculous, outside of maybe the final boss. It's a really busy encounter, but I still got through it on my first try.
I really like the setting, it reminds me of the Lego Mindstorms Stormrunner flash game. A desert planet, industrial robots, it's just neat.
What don't I like?
The presentation in general is a bit off, but the soundtrack is the most glaring. There may as well only be two types of song in the game. The first is droning orchestral swells, boring film score type tracks to let you know the things that are happening are very important and dramatic. The second is rhythmic bass heavy tracks, sometimes in an unusual time signature, to let you know that things are tense. Mega Man and Metroid are both known for their incredible soundtracks; I played Recore for almost 20 hours these past few weeks and don't remember a single melody, though I will admit that around the 15 hour mark I started playing with a podcast in the background, because the game audio just wasn't that important to my experience. The soundtrack was composed by a guy who mostly has worked on the sound of FPS games and movie tie-ins. I don't mean to say that this music is bad, or even that this was the result of his individual creative choice, but I do think that this music was a poor fit for this game, and I have a hard time imagining that it was anything other than a Microsoft decision.
And as much as I love the setting, I do wish there was more variety. If there was a sequel I'd hope that it would be set either on a different planet, or after enough terraforming has happened to give Far Eden some different climates, biomes, etc. But of course, a sequel to this game will probably not happen, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be made by Armature and Comcept.
In conclusion:
Recore is the best thing Keiji Inafune has been attached to since leaving Capcom, and I hope that's not in spite of his involvement.
Recore is basically the only real video game Armature has even made (everything else is ports, VR shit, and a now defunct online shooter), and that's a shame, I'd love to see more.
Recore is probably the best Microsoft Studios game that isn't a 2D platformer.
Recore is not in my top ten games of the past decade, but if I listed my top fifty, it might be somewhere in the thirties or so.
Recore isn't great, at one point it probably wasn't even good, but it is now. I'd say give it a chance. I went in out of morbid curiosity, I expected to hate it, but if you can play it on its own terms its genuinely a great time.
2002
Metroid Prime is damn near the only console-exclusive first person shooter that matters. Certainly the only one out of its contemporaries.
When playing a console shooter I can never shake the feeling that such games are built around limitation. An analogue stick, by nature, isn't as accurate as a mouse. Though many games today have tuned their camera movement and auto-aim to better make first person games engaging on console, games from Metroid Prime's generation lacked this refinement. Most console shooters from this era were slower, shootouts took place in more confined spaces; everything about them was scaled down, but it was still basically just Doom. They kept the arcade structure, they attempted simple, visceral power fantasy, and they failed to deliver because they took out what made games like Doom satisfying: high player speed, low time-to-kill.
On its surface, Metroid Prime elicits immediate comparison to Halo (especially by the third game, but I digress), a comparison I can't help but be at least a little insulted by on the game's behalf. Metroid Prime and Halo are both console exclusive first person shooters, they both take place in space, they both star a human in a metal suit, you fight aliens, there is a kind of alien called an "Elite", your life meter is blue. The similarities end here.
Halo sees encounters play out largely as shootouts with humanoids, Metroid Prime's encounters rarely feature shootouts like this until the latter half of the game. Most of Halo's enemies boil down to "a guy that shoots back", an enemy archetype more commonly seen in standard military shooters than in the sci-fi setting. Metroid Prime's enemy variety is much more comparable to Doom, a mix of humanoids and creatures who move and attack in a number of distinct ways. Insects that spawn continuously until their nests are destroyed, ghosts that seem to teleport around (but can be followed with the X-ray visor), animals that will ram you but have vulnerable backsides, and even creatures that may be worth keeping alive, like the plazmites that keep rooms well-lit.
Master Chief can hold hundreds of rounds for his assault rifle, and it often takes unloading nearly a full magazine to defeat even some basic enemies. Samus has unlimited ammunition for her beam weapons, and it rarely takes more than a couple charged shots to kill anything that isn't a boss. You can only hold two weapons in Halo, and have to drop one to pick up anything new. In Metroid Prime, your arsenal only grows. Ironically, while Halo seems to go for a more arcade-like FPS structure, linear missions, hit-scan weaponry, and lack of ADS, its ammo economy is so much more complicated and limiting than Metroid's, or even Doom's, that I literally could not care less what weapon is best for any situation.
Metroid Prime often lets the player decide what the best weapon is, depending on their priorities. A regular space pirate can be defeated with 2 missiles, or a single charged blast. The charged blast conserves ammo, but takes time. A missile can be shot instantly, and will likely stun the enemy long enough for the second missile to be fired uninterrupted. Some enemies will use some unusual attack on death as a last resort: flying pirates will attempt to dive bomb into the player, sentry drones will unleash a self-destructive EMP blast that will cloud the player's vision. Defeating either of these enemies with super missiles will consume more ammunition than using regular missiles (5, instead of 3) but will kill them instantly, meaning they won't be able to use their last ditch efforts.
Halo takes place in repeating identical corridors and hallways, and featureless gunmetal barricades littering fields and canyons. I don't know what anything in Halo's environment is for, and it doesn't care to tell me. In Metroid Prime, nearly anything the player sees can be scanned, and virtually any question the player might have can be answered. Everything in Metroid Prime's world is detailed, purposeful. The Tallon Overworld is a natural place overgrown with plants, but also holds the half-submerged remains of the ship from the game's opening. The Chozo Ruins hold both the dusty remnants of a lived in place, and the hidden spiritually significant temples. The Magmoor Caverns hold natural lava deposits and industrial zones. Phendrana Drifts is a multifaceted zone containing caves, temples, and the space pirate laboratory. The Phazon Mines are a slow descent from the surface level research facilities to the corrupted tunnels containing the mysterious substance. Metroid tells a story with its environment, and tells us its lore through interaction with objects in the environment. Halo tells a story with cutscenes and dialogue, and doesn't tell us its lore unless we have the time to seek out supplementary materials.
Aside from Halo, it's difficult to talk about Metroid Prime without comparing it to other games. Although, in the case of some of these comparisons Metroid Prime either did it first, did it better, or both. Even beyond its environment storytelling and lore drip-fed via item descriptions, the world of Metroid Prime closely resembles the structure of the original Dark Souls (or rather, the other way around). The player is often moving in small or large spirals, a swooping curved motion through dense interconnected spaces. The sigh of relief at finding either a save point or an elevator leading back to a more familiar place.
Another way that the game is similar to Dark Souls is how infrequently the player will encounter any apparent loading. Both games handle the problem in pretty much the same way: areas are loaded in and out as the player traverses the level, with elevators and small corridors ostensibly serving as disguised loading areas. What's especially remarkable in Metroid Prime's case is that this is a game from 2002. Plenty of games from that console generation used obvious, time consuming load screens between areas and sluggish game save menus; even if you played a game like Mega Man X7 on modern hardware, the fact that the load times are shorter won't solve how little respect that game's menus have for the player. Even if on original hardware doors in Metroid Prime would occasionally briefly refuse to open (because the level on the other side hadn't finished loading yet), that the game could be played this seamlessly was almost unheard of at the time.
Playing this game made me realize why I sometimes (if rarely) prefer to play shooters with a controller, and it isn't just down to the lower level of precision required. Aiming is a complicated idea in gameplay, it blurs the lines between camera control, character movement, and combat action. In Metroid Prime, aiming is tied much more firmly to combat specific actions; the Gamecube version of the game doesn't even let you aim with a stick unless you are standing still and holding down a toggle button. Movement and camera control are tightly woven together, but pointing your weapon at something is a discrete action, and one that the game usually has no problem doing for you with the lock-on function. Compared to more standard dual-stick FPS controls, this doesn't feel like a compromised imitation of mouse aiming, it feels like it was designed with the limitations of a controller in mind.
The soundtrack and sound design of the game is phenomenal, near perfection. Every song is memorable, and most songs have slight variations on them for when the player enters the different areas of a particular level (the sample-and-hold synth of later Phendrana areas being a personal favorite of mine). In addition to the boss themes, there are unique pieces of music for certain types of recurring combat encounters, such as those with the space pirates. The sounds made when using the different visors, the beeps and whines of sentry drones, the shouts and screams of the space pirates, the roars and chirps of the animals. And, goddamn, when you start solving a puzzle and the music cuts out and it slowly replaced by an electronic track with those smooth high hats, you know you're doing something right. They knew just how to tickle your brain.
I never really had much a problem with backtracking, though that may be because I've played this game about once every 3 or 4 years since around the time it came out, so I probably have a well enough working memory of the game to avoid certain pitfalls new player might find themselves in. For one thing, I don't mind spending time in areas of Tallon IV that I've already been to, because those areas are fantastic places to be in. Perhaps of more practical importance is that whenever you have a reason to go somewhere you've been before, there is almost always something new for you to find there, whether that be remixed enemy locations, or previously unreachable paths and upgrades. Returning to Phendrana in the late game to get chozo artifacts is a particularly enjoyable romp; even though by then you will have explored more or less the entire level, at this late stage of the game you will finally have the plasma beam and will be able to melt the ice blocking various upgrades.
I think, for me personally, the game's biggest weakness is the particular variety of enemies nearing the game's conclusion. The gimmick of both of the final two areas, as well as the game's final boss, is color-coded enemies, new versions of space pirates and metroids that can only be defeated with the beam weapon of corresponding hue. The fission metroids in particular combine this with the ability to split apart into two enemies. This creates a sense of urgency that doesn't particularly fit well with the Wii version's motion-based weapon switching, though even in the original it just wasn't a very interesting mechanic. Were it up to me, I would have had fission metroids act more like pain elementals in Doom: a larger creature with a bit more health that spawns the weaker normal metroids until defeated.
Additionally, I never found any of the combo weapons aside from the super missiles to be worth using. There aren't really clear practical uses for any of them, which I assume is a side effect of them being completely optional. They all use much more ammo than they seem to be worth, meanwhile super missiles can kill one of the later bosses in only three hits.
Perhaps the worst thing of all about Metroid Prime is that there aren't more games like it.
When playing a console shooter I can never shake the feeling that such games are built around limitation. An analogue stick, by nature, isn't as accurate as a mouse. Though many games today have tuned their camera movement and auto-aim to better make first person games engaging on console, games from Metroid Prime's generation lacked this refinement. Most console shooters from this era were slower, shootouts took place in more confined spaces; everything about them was scaled down, but it was still basically just Doom. They kept the arcade structure, they attempted simple, visceral power fantasy, and they failed to deliver because they took out what made games like Doom satisfying: high player speed, low time-to-kill.
On its surface, Metroid Prime elicits immediate comparison to Halo (especially by the third game, but I digress), a comparison I can't help but be at least a little insulted by on the game's behalf. Metroid Prime and Halo are both console exclusive first person shooters, they both take place in space, they both star a human in a metal suit, you fight aliens, there is a kind of alien called an "Elite", your life meter is blue. The similarities end here.
Halo sees encounters play out largely as shootouts with humanoids, Metroid Prime's encounters rarely feature shootouts like this until the latter half of the game. Most of Halo's enemies boil down to "a guy that shoots back", an enemy archetype more commonly seen in standard military shooters than in the sci-fi setting. Metroid Prime's enemy variety is much more comparable to Doom, a mix of humanoids and creatures who move and attack in a number of distinct ways. Insects that spawn continuously until their nests are destroyed, ghosts that seem to teleport around (but can be followed with the X-ray visor), animals that will ram you but have vulnerable backsides, and even creatures that may be worth keeping alive, like the plazmites that keep rooms well-lit.
Master Chief can hold hundreds of rounds for his assault rifle, and it often takes unloading nearly a full magazine to defeat even some basic enemies. Samus has unlimited ammunition for her beam weapons, and it rarely takes more than a couple charged shots to kill anything that isn't a boss. You can only hold two weapons in Halo, and have to drop one to pick up anything new. In Metroid Prime, your arsenal only grows. Ironically, while Halo seems to go for a more arcade-like FPS structure, linear missions, hit-scan weaponry, and lack of ADS, its ammo economy is so much more complicated and limiting than Metroid's, or even Doom's, that I literally could not care less what weapon is best for any situation.
Metroid Prime often lets the player decide what the best weapon is, depending on their priorities. A regular space pirate can be defeated with 2 missiles, or a single charged blast. The charged blast conserves ammo, but takes time. A missile can be shot instantly, and will likely stun the enemy long enough for the second missile to be fired uninterrupted. Some enemies will use some unusual attack on death as a last resort: flying pirates will attempt to dive bomb into the player, sentry drones will unleash a self-destructive EMP blast that will cloud the player's vision. Defeating either of these enemies with super missiles will consume more ammunition than using regular missiles (5, instead of 3) but will kill them instantly, meaning they won't be able to use their last ditch efforts.
Halo takes place in repeating identical corridors and hallways, and featureless gunmetal barricades littering fields and canyons. I don't know what anything in Halo's environment is for, and it doesn't care to tell me. In Metroid Prime, nearly anything the player sees can be scanned, and virtually any question the player might have can be answered. Everything in Metroid Prime's world is detailed, purposeful. The Tallon Overworld is a natural place overgrown with plants, but also holds the half-submerged remains of the ship from the game's opening. The Chozo Ruins hold both the dusty remnants of a lived in place, and the hidden spiritually significant temples. The Magmoor Caverns hold natural lava deposits and industrial zones. Phendrana Drifts is a multifaceted zone containing caves, temples, and the space pirate laboratory. The Phazon Mines are a slow descent from the surface level research facilities to the corrupted tunnels containing the mysterious substance. Metroid tells a story with its environment, and tells us its lore through interaction with objects in the environment. Halo tells a story with cutscenes and dialogue, and doesn't tell us its lore unless we have the time to seek out supplementary materials.
Aside from Halo, it's difficult to talk about Metroid Prime without comparing it to other games. Although, in the case of some of these comparisons Metroid Prime either did it first, did it better, or both. Even beyond its environment storytelling and lore drip-fed via item descriptions, the world of Metroid Prime closely resembles the structure of the original Dark Souls (or rather, the other way around). The player is often moving in small or large spirals, a swooping curved motion through dense interconnected spaces. The sigh of relief at finding either a save point or an elevator leading back to a more familiar place.
Another way that the game is similar to Dark Souls is how infrequently the player will encounter any apparent loading. Both games handle the problem in pretty much the same way: areas are loaded in and out as the player traverses the level, with elevators and small corridors ostensibly serving as disguised loading areas. What's especially remarkable in Metroid Prime's case is that this is a game from 2002. Plenty of games from that console generation used obvious, time consuming load screens between areas and sluggish game save menus; even if you played a game like Mega Man X7 on modern hardware, the fact that the load times are shorter won't solve how little respect that game's menus have for the player. Even if on original hardware doors in Metroid Prime would occasionally briefly refuse to open (because the level on the other side hadn't finished loading yet), that the game could be played this seamlessly was almost unheard of at the time.
Playing this game made me realize why I sometimes (if rarely) prefer to play shooters with a controller, and it isn't just down to the lower level of precision required. Aiming is a complicated idea in gameplay, it blurs the lines between camera control, character movement, and combat action. In Metroid Prime, aiming is tied much more firmly to combat specific actions; the Gamecube version of the game doesn't even let you aim with a stick unless you are standing still and holding down a toggle button. Movement and camera control are tightly woven together, but pointing your weapon at something is a discrete action, and one that the game usually has no problem doing for you with the lock-on function. Compared to more standard dual-stick FPS controls, this doesn't feel like a compromised imitation of mouse aiming, it feels like it was designed with the limitations of a controller in mind.
The soundtrack and sound design of the game is phenomenal, near perfection. Every song is memorable, and most songs have slight variations on them for when the player enters the different areas of a particular level (the sample-and-hold synth of later Phendrana areas being a personal favorite of mine). In addition to the boss themes, there are unique pieces of music for certain types of recurring combat encounters, such as those with the space pirates. The sounds made when using the different visors, the beeps and whines of sentry drones, the shouts and screams of the space pirates, the roars and chirps of the animals. And, goddamn, when you start solving a puzzle and the music cuts out and it slowly replaced by an electronic track with those smooth high hats, you know you're doing something right. They knew just how to tickle your brain.
I never really had much a problem with backtracking, though that may be because I've played this game about once every 3 or 4 years since around the time it came out, so I probably have a well enough working memory of the game to avoid certain pitfalls new player might find themselves in. For one thing, I don't mind spending time in areas of Tallon IV that I've already been to, because those areas are fantastic places to be in. Perhaps of more practical importance is that whenever you have a reason to go somewhere you've been before, there is almost always something new for you to find there, whether that be remixed enemy locations, or previously unreachable paths and upgrades. Returning to Phendrana in the late game to get chozo artifacts is a particularly enjoyable romp; even though by then you will have explored more or less the entire level, at this late stage of the game you will finally have the plasma beam and will be able to melt the ice blocking various upgrades.
I think, for me personally, the game's biggest weakness is the particular variety of enemies nearing the game's conclusion. The gimmick of both of the final two areas, as well as the game's final boss, is color-coded enemies, new versions of space pirates and metroids that can only be defeated with the beam weapon of corresponding hue. The fission metroids in particular combine this with the ability to split apart into two enemies. This creates a sense of urgency that doesn't particularly fit well with the Wii version's motion-based weapon switching, though even in the original it just wasn't a very interesting mechanic. Were it up to me, I would have had fission metroids act more like pain elementals in Doom: a larger creature with a bit more health that spawns the weaker normal metroids until defeated.
Additionally, I never found any of the combo weapons aside from the super missiles to be worth using. There aren't really clear practical uses for any of them, which I assume is a side effect of them being completely optional. They all use much more ammo than they seem to be worth, meanwhile super missiles can kill one of the later bosses in only three hits.
Perhaps the worst thing of all about Metroid Prime is that there aren't more games like it.
GBA Kirby has the absolute best platforming physics the series has ever had and even if Amazing Mirror is better simply by virtue of actually being a new game this one is still always fantastic to just pick up and play sometimes.
What does it mean to be the highest rated game of all time on Metacritic, why does it matter, and why has no game overtaken it? Ocarina of Time has many things in common with other games in Metacritic's top 10. Compared to the rest of the list, both Super Mario Galaxy games seem out of place until you consider the consistency, the more sensible nature of its world compared to other Mario titles. Why does Mario collect stars, why can penguins and bees talk? Because they're in space, that simple aesthetic theme is enough to tie everything together. Arcade action focused titles like Soul Calibur and Tony Hawk 2 seem out of place not just because they have today been utterly supplanted by sequels, but because they seem to "gamey" to stand among the rest, but there is something obvious about them; having come out so close to Ocarina of Time they are also among some of the earliest 3D games to feature realistically proportioned 3D human figures, in full 3D environments, with a playstyle and control scheme that was accessible for the time. As for what it means, we all know at this point that salaries and bonuses can be made conditional based on a product's Metacritic score, it's not a stretch then to the say that this score is every bit as representative of what the industry wishes to see in games as it is of the critic or consumer.
I read a post some time ago which read something to the effect of "how can we know whether we have a Citizen Kane of video games when we aren't even sure if we have a Citizen Kane of film?" I hate this perspective. Trying to remove the film from the real space that it occupies requires an assertion that I think anyone truly serious about film or art as a whole wouldn't dare make; it assumes a completely outdated classicist notion that there is simply a singular most true form of a particular medium. Citizen Kane is not a blueprint or a formula, and neither would the equivalent game be. It misses the trees for the forest. The significance of an influential work rarely lies in its whole rather than its parts, its individual effects and techniques. It barely matters if the whole is good, if it has aged well, if it was the first to pioneer these techniques (as both Kane and Ocarina surely were not). What matters is that it is a substantial source of inspiration from which the ongoing, repeated, shared art-ideology and understanding surrounding these techniques has been proliferated. Even logically the quote is obviously self-defeating on its face; Citizen Kane is a real movie that exists, and you have just twice used its name as shorthand for some concept, and that concept is the actual importance of the work.
Ocarina of Time's broad appeal is no surprise. While it largely skews towards a male audience (despite Link's appearance apparently being a deliberate attempt to attract more female players), it is an unmistakably all-ages power fantasy. For a child, the whimsy of the fantasy setting offers the initial draw, and the premise of growing up right away and being able to solve all the world's problems heightens things further. For an adult, the early portions of the game offer a return to a time when most people seemed good-natured, when problems seemed simple and rooted in singular evil-doers. From this perspective the latter half of the game takes on the form of a nostalgic retrofuture. The game goes on, you don't get quite as many new abilities as you once did. Songs stop giving you new powers, they just take you to places you've already been. The child player tries their best to hurtle towards the heroic finale, frustrated when they get stuck, disappointed when Link has to go back to being a kid. The adult relishes every minute of bombchu bowling, target practice, fishing, slowly exhausting each optional moment of retreat before truly running out of things to do and begrudgingly allowing the fantasy to end.
It's interesting how this game and others on the Nintendo 64 simply hang on an end screen after the credits, doing nothing more until the player hits either power or reset. Beating the game is not tracked, you don't get a new game plus, you don't get a little icon on the file select, you don't get to go back into a game-world without threat. On a technical level it's sort of obvious why, how did games end before save files even exist, after all? In Super Mario 64 the reward for doing everything isn't really the extra lives or the sparkly triple jump; as Yoshi says himself, the real reward is simply being able to freely play and explore the levels without worrying about things like progression or failure. When you beat Ocarina of Time you will simply be spat back into the world, and Ganon's tower still forever looms over Hyrule while you race your horse and sell masks. Structurally, seeing the credits is just a formality, a thing that you do more or less on the side for narrative payoff.
But just how strong is that narrative, really? I don't know, maybe my perspective on this is too warped for me to approach it honestly. Some of my very earliest memories are of watching my dad play this game, it is perhaps the single most fundamental piece of media to my early understanding of fantasy settings. I saw Gorons and Zoras before I knew what dwarves and elves were. The menu sounds are drilled into my ears, barely registering as a sound, tasting like water. I remember Volvagia looking like some bizarre writhing cheeto. I remember seeing the at-the-time incomprehensible whirling perspective of Hyrule Castle Town's ruins, a distorted extreme image of pure decay at vacuum pressure. I remember wondering what the materials of this world, its fabrics and glass, could possibly feel like. I remember thinking Ganon's tower having an almost sci-fi appearance, its shape and textures not unlike some of the imperial structures in Star Wars Rogue Squadron. I remember not being allowed to play the game until it came out on Wii virtual console because the great fairy was simply too risqué. Ocarina of Time has always been a simple fact of life.
Today the game's obstacles and encounters feel alarmingly simple, I feel like I'm spending most of my time with the game on autopilot. It's not just how much of the game I go through without really thinking about it, but how much of the game's systems feel as though they exist to aid in that very abandonment of thought. The shift to 3D aside, Ocarina often feels like a watered down version of Zelda, complete with training wheels (this is also not a terrible way to describe the way that Link handles here, but well get to that). As a kid, a game having these skeuomorphic onscreen representations of the buttons seemed almost monolithic; I remember the first time I saw the HUD in Minish Cap it felt sort of "high tech". Today I realize that I've have not even once played Ocarina with a Nintendo 64 controller, the onscreen prompts have never matched the buttons of the controller I actually use, I have always had to put together my own abstract mental index of what buttons are actually going to do what.
For all the pretense of adventure and exploration, the game's core progression is a rather tightly choreographed affair. There is little room for creativity and what little player expression is available through mechanical complexity doesn't actually offer any meaningful benefit or skill curve. You either know what to do, or you don't. It always struck me as odd that Nintendo made a big deal about Skyward Sword finally giving the player the ability control the direction of their sword swings, considering that this has literally always been a feature of 3D Zelda. A lone button press will perform a horizontal swing, either tilting the stick or locking on will result in vertical swings, and both at once will have Link stab (this is particularly interesting as it's basically the exact same concept and input as Devil May Cry's classic Stinger move). But again, none of these options in combat have any real meaning. In fact, the best thing to do in many situations is something completely unintended. In combat you should ideally perform a jumping slash and then follow it up with crouching stabs (the jump attack does the most damage, the crouching stab has no damage value and will just reuse the value from the previous attack). Similarly, the fastest way to get around the world is to lock the camera in place and walk backwards.
Something shocking about this game is just how non-threatening most combat encounters are. Wind Waker has the player fighting armed humanoid combatants pretty much as soon as they can hold a sword; Ocarina waits to offer a similar fight until about halfway through the second dungeon. The first enemy you find is just a stick, many enemies are obstacles that will only affect you if you don't bother to clear your path beforehand. Danger is generally extremely easy to avoid, and the Big Goron sword (a reward for a relatively easy trading quest) does so much damage that it trivializes almost any fight that can be fought with a blade. I do want to be clear that I don't mind this, frankly I wish games were a bit more content to be spaces first and gauntlets second when appropriate.
I was disappointed by just how little flavor text there is in the game, your mileage may vary in the sense that you may appreciate how little structural fat there is. Almost every piece of dialogue is some kind of direct gameplay hint, either tutorializing a mechanic, telling you where to go next, or hinting at a sidequest. The trading quest is a breath of fresh air not only because it has the player doing a lot more simple traversal, but also because it's one of the few points in the game where characters reveal things about themselves (though it's mostly just about family relations) other than what they think Link ought to go do. Just like the original Legend of Zelda, many of these gameplay hints are just barely obfuscated presumably either to try and retain immersion or to avoid admitting that the game just gives you all the quiz answers. The game won't tell you to use the eye of truth, it will just gesture towards the idea of "seeing what is true". It won't tell you to use bombs, it will tell you to use the "special Goron crop".
The titular ocarina, the music mechanic, is weird. After getting half a dozen songs that give the player simple but generally creative and unique abilities, the rest of the songs in the game are just fast travel spells. Playing a musical instrument is an interesting idea but in practice it has some tonal side effects. For example, being able to warp to Kakariko Village is useful for a number of sidequests, whether it's part of the trading sequence or you're just picking up a skulltula reward; these are low-stakes, comfy parts of the play session. The song that you use to fast travel here is associated with the Shadow Temple in the town's graveyard, so each time you travel here you have to play the most dour theme in the game. The opposite happens at the very end of the game, where any time you return to Ganon's tower you'll do so by playing one of the game's most lighthearted preludes to return to the nearby Temple of Time.
Epona is terrible. She gets stuck on every little corner of geometry and decides to just not jump fences half the time. I did the trading quest without her because she just isn't reliable enough to trust when the clock is ticking. People always make a big deal about how the horses in today's games aren't as directly controllable, they have a mind of their own like a real horse; between Epona and Super Mario 64's "fish that actually swim away", I'm starting to think that the entire industry has been playing catch-up with Nintendo's advanced animal AI.
I gave this game probably the best shot it's ever had on this playthrough, having gone through the PC port, finally playin the game with a framerate higher than film. An online friend of mine has said that this game has "perfect" movement. I don't agree in the slightest but what is interesting about the port is that playing the game with decent performance, for the first time ever Ocarina of Time actually has appreciable movement and discernable gamefeel at all. On the original code the frames last so long enough that it's hard to judge what's happening between them, the illusion of motion honestly frequently breaks, and small adjustments are a complete gamble. At a higher framerate you realize that Link is actually only able to smoothly make rather wide turns or completely rotate in an instant, and it's exponentially worse when walking underwater with the iron boots. Because of the apparent issues with literally every official port of the game since the original, this is the first time I've played the game without an over-sensitive analogue stick. All these years later it's still absurd to me that the normal way of using Z-targeting as it appears in all other Zelda games is an option that you have to toggle.
Majora's Mask is better in basically every way besides that fact that there's still not really a good way to play it with good framerate. It's structure is better, the way it handles its story and ending is better, its character dialogue has so much more flavor that I barely even see the Ocarina of Time versions of the NPC's as the "original" or "canon" versions of the characters. By Comparison Ocarina almost feels like some kind of shallow fanmade romhack. And Majora's Mask has monkeys. I like monkey a lot.
I read a post some time ago which read something to the effect of "how can we know whether we have a Citizen Kane of video games when we aren't even sure if we have a Citizen Kane of film?" I hate this perspective. Trying to remove the film from the real space that it occupies requires an assertion that I think anyone truly serious about film or art as a whole wouldn't dare make; it assumes a completely outdated classicist notion that there is simply a singular most true form of a particular medium. Citizen Kane is not a blueprint or a formula, and neither would the equivalent game be. It misses the trees for the forest. The significance of an influential work rarely lies in its whole rather than its parts, its individual effects and techniques. It barely matters if the whole is good, if it has aged well, if it was the first to pioneer these techniques (as both Kane and Ocarina surely were not). What matters is that it is a substantial source of inspiration from which the ongoing, repeated, shared art-ideology and understanding surrounding these techniques has been proliferated. Even logically the quote is obviously self-defeating on its face; Citizen Kane is a real movie that exists, and you have just twice used its name as shorthand for some concept, and that concept is the actual importance of the work.
Ocarina of Time's broad appeal is no surprise. While it largely skews towards a male audience (despite Link's appearance apparently being a deliberate attempt to attract more female players), it is an unmistakably all-ages power fantasy. For a child, the whimsy of the fantasy setting offers the initial draw, and the premise of growing up right away and being able to solve all the world's problems heightens things further. For an adult, the early portions of the game offer a return to a time when most people seemed good-natured, when problems seemed simple and rooted in singular evil-doers. From this perspective the latter half of the game takes on the form of a nostalgic retrofuture. The game goes on, you don't get quite as many new abilities as you once did. Songs stop giving you new powers, they just take you to places you've already been. The child player tries their best to hurtle towards the heroic finale, frustrated when they get stuck, disappointed when Link has to go back to being a kid. The adult relishes every minute of bombchu bowling, target practice, fishing, slowly exhausting each optional moment of retreat before truly running out of things to do and begrudgingly allowing the fantasy to end.
It's interesting how this game and others on the Nintendo 64 simply hang on an end screen after the credits, doing nothing more until the player hits either power or reset. Beating the game is not tracked, you don't get a new game plus, you don't get a little icon on the file select, you don't get to go back into a game-world without threat. On a technical level it's sort of obvious why, how did games end before save files even exist, after all? In Super Mario 64 the reward for doing everything isn't really the extra lives or the sparkly triple jump; as Yoshi says himself, the real reward is simply being able to freely play and explore the levels without worrying about things like progression or failure. When you beat Ocarina of Time you will simply be spat back into the world, and Ganon's tower still forever looms over Hyrule while you race your horse and sell masks. Structurally, seeing the credits is just a formality, a thing that you do more or less on the side for narrative payoff.
But just how strong is that narrative, really? I don't know, maybe my perspective on this is too warped for me to approach it honestly. Some of my very earliest memories are of watching my dad play this game, it is perhaps the single most fundamental piece of media to my early understanding of fantasy settings. I saw Gorons and Zoras before I knew what dwarves and elves were. The menu sounds are drilled into my ears, barely registering as a sound, tasting like water. I remember Volvagia looking like some bizarre writhing cheeto. I remember seeing the at-the-time incomprehensible whirling perspective of Hyrule Castle Town's ruins, a distorted extreme image of pure decay at vacuum pressure. I remember wondering what the materials of this world, its fabrics and glass, could possibly feel like. I remember thinking Ganon's tower having an almost sci-fi appearance, its shape and textures not unlike some of the imperial structures in Star Wars Rogue Squadron. I remember not being allowed to play the game until it came out on Wii virtual console because the great fairy was simply too risqué. Ocarina of Time has always been a simple fact of life.
Today the game's obstacles and encounters feel alarmingly simple, I feel like I'm spending most of my time with the game on autopilot. It's not just how much of the game I go through without really thinking about it, but how much of the game's systems feel as though they exist to aid in that very abandonment of thought. The shift to 3D aside, Ocarina often feels like a watered down version of Zelda, complete with training wheels (this is also not a terrible way to describe the way that Link handles here, but well get to that). As a kid, a game having these skeuomorphic onscreen representations of the buttons seemed almost monolithic; I remember the first time I saw the HUD in Minish Cap it felt sort of "high tech". Today I realize that I've have not even once played Ocarina with a Nintendo 64 controller, the onscreen prompts have never matched the buttons of the controller I actually use, I have always had to put together my own abstract mental index of what buttons are actually going to do what.
For all the pretense of adventure and exploration, the game's core progression is a rather tightly choreographed affair. There is little room for creativity and what little player expression is available through mechanical complexity doesn't actually offer any meaningful benefit or skill curve. You either know what to do, or you don't. It always struck me as odd that Nintendo made a big deal about Skyward Sword finally giving the player the ability control the direction of their sword swings, considering that this has literally always been a feature of 3D Zelda. A lone button press will perform a horizontal swing, either tilting the stick or locking on will result in vertical swings, and both at once will have Link stab (this is particularly interesting as it's basically the exact same concept and input as Devil May Cry's classic Stinger move). But again, none of these options in combat have any real meaning. In fact, the best thing to do in many situations is something completely unintended. In combat you should ideally perform a jumping slash and then follow it up with crouching stabs (the jump attack does the most damage, the crouching stab has no damage value and will just reuse the value from the previous attack). Similarly, the fastest way to get around the world is to lock the camera in place and walk backwards.
Something shocking about this game is just how non-threatening most combat encounters are. Wind Waker has the player fighting armed humanoid combatants pretty much as soon as they can hold a sword; Ocarina waits to offer a similar fight until about halfway through the second dungeon. The first enemy you find is just a stick, many enemies are obstacles that will only affect you if you don't bother to clear your path beforehand. Danger is generally extremely easy to avoid, and the Big Goron sword (a reward for a relatively easy trading quest) does so much damage that it trivializes almost any fight that can be fought with a blade. I do want to be clear that I don't mind this, frankly I wish games were a bit more content to be spaces first and gauntlets second when appropriate.
I was disappointed by just how little flavor text there is in the game, your mileage may vary in the sense that you may appreciate how little structural fat there is. Almost every piece of dialogue is some kind of direct gameplay hint, either tutorializing a mechanic, telling you where to go next, or hinting at a sidequest. The trading quest is a breath of fresh air not only because it has the player doing a lot more simple traversal, but also because it's one of the few points in the game where characters reveal things about themselves (though it's mostly just about family relations) other than what they think Link ought to go do. Just like the original Legend of Zelda, many of these gameplay hints are just barely obfuscated presumably either to try and retain immersion or to avoid admitting that the game just gives you all the quiz answers. The game won't tell you to use the eye of truth, it will just gesture towards the idea of "seeing what is true". It won't tell you to use bombs, it will tell you to use the "special Goron crop".
The titular ocarina, the music mechanic, is weird. After getting half a dozen songs that give the player simple but generally creative and unique abilities, the rest of the songs in the game are just fast travel spells. Playing a musical instrument is an interesting idea but in practice it has some tonal side effects. For example, being able to warp to Kakariko Village is useful for a number of sidequests, whether it's part of the trading sequence or you're just picking up a skulltula reward; these are low-stakes, comfy parts of the play session. The song that you use to fast travel here is associated with the Shadow Temple in the town's graveyard, so each time you travel here you have to play the most dour theme in the game. The opposite happens at the very end of the game, where any time you return to Ganon's tower you'll do so by playing one of the game's most lighthearted preludes to return to the nearby Temple of Time.
Epona is terrible. She gets stuck on every little corner of geometry and decides to just not jump fences half the time. I did the trading quest without her because she just isn't reliable enough to trust when the clock is ticking. People always make a big deal about how the horses in today's games aren't as directly controllable, they have a mind of their own like a real horse; between Epona and Super Mario 64's "fish that actually swim away", I'm starting to think that the entire industry has been playing catch-up with Nintendo's advanced animal AI.
I gave this game probably the best shot it's ever had on this playthrough, having gone through the PC port, finally playin the game with a framerate higher than film. An online friend of mine has said that this game has "perfect" movement. I don't agree in the slightest but what is interesting about the port is that playing the game with decent performance, for the first time ever Ocarina of Time actually has appreciable movement and discernable gamefeel at all. On the original code the frames last so long enough that it's hard to judge what's happening between them, the illusion of motion honestly frequently breaks, and small adjustments are a complete gamble. At a higher framerate you realize that Link is actually only able to smoothly make rather wide turns or completely rotate in an instant, and it's exponentially worse when walking underwater with the iron boots. Because of the apparent issues with literally every official port of the game since the original, this is the first time I've played the game without an over-sensitive analogue stick. All these years later it's still absurd to me that the normal way of using Z-targeting as it appears in all other Zelda games is an option that you have to toggle.
Majora's Mask is better in basically every way besides that fact that there's still not really a good way to play it with good framerate. It's structure is better, the way it handles its story and ending is better, its character dialogue has so much more flavor that I barely even see the Ocarina of Time versions of the NPC's as the "original" or "canon" versions of the characters. By Comparison Ocarina almost feels like some kind of shallow fanmade romhack. And Majora's Mask has monkeys. I like monkey a lot.
This game spent hardly a couple years on shelves before getting pulled due to a publisher deal expiring, and it's a shame. This isn't Platinum's best, but it's probably the most no-frills version of their typical style of game, the most accessible "real" Platinum action game for someone not already familiar with the genre. It would be an instant recommendation for anyone looking to try this sort of thing for the first time, but sadly, it no longer "really" exists. It feels great to play, it isn't the prettiest game in the world but it's usually moving fast enough for that to matter very little. The PC version could have used more settings: it tops out at 1080p and seems to only support barely half a dozen different resolutions.
2011
Sonic Generations doesn't have enough paint to cover its empty, atemporal, white void.
Right off the bat: Sonic the Hedgehog cannot get away with a "bad guy interrupts lunch" plot. You can do that in a game like New Super Mario Bros. which openly is not even trying to have a story, but even Sonic Generations' rather barebones narrative has a cutscene with a full voice-acted conversation after every zone.
When you load a game from the main menu, sonic jumps out of the logo and free-falls down; if this seamlessly led into the level select, this would be a neat effect, but the game cuts to a loading screen instead. This is particularly ludicrous on modern machines since the loading screen lasts less than a second and a smooth transition would probably be easily achievable if it weren't for the fact we're dealing with PS360 code. The same thing happens when switching between Classic and Modern Sonic. There's just a lot of weird little things like this that make navigating the game feel clunky.
Classic Sonic feels bad. It's not as simple as "it's not like the old games" which I know had been a conversation back when Sonic 4 came out. Maybe they don't need to be exactly the same, but there were certain things that were possible in the Genesis games that were just good: for example, you can't spin-dash and then immediately jump to clear a large gap. Some of this feels like it's to prevent short-term "sequence breaking" or clipping out-of-bounds considering how limited and on-rails a lot of the game is, but a lot of it just doesn't feel good in general. Every physics movement, from Sonic's jump arc to the way that rings bounce, feels like they just stuck with the untuned default options of whatever engine they used.
I really hate to bring up something this nitpicky but inconsistencies like this have been bugging me since Sonic 1. Why are certain obstacles instant death? There are these spike balls in some of the underwater sections that just kill you in one hit no matter what. Why is literally anything other than a bottomless pit a one hit kill? The game is even pretty lenient in other aspects, for example it's completely possible to survive getting crushed. It just doesn't make sense.
Why does Modern Sonic have 2D sections at all? The two characters aren't differentiated enough. The moments where Modern Sonic is actually allowed to be Modern Sonic are probably the best parts of the game, but just like with every other 3D Sonic, the best part of the game is buried under hours of filler.
The selection of zones chosen for the game is bizarre, I'm not surprised that they were apparently chosen by a poll. 4 of the 9 zones are city levels, 3 of them are basically green hill variants. I get that they picked one level from every major game from beginning to then-present, but it's also weird how almost half of this game's levels are taken from Adventure-style Sonic games, despite neither the Classic nor Modern versions of the stages really providing this gameplay. City Escape is probably the most true to the original, but I don't understand how there are people who compare this to a greatest hits collection, at least not in terms of gameplay. To me it just reveals that this is a surface level celebration from a company that still doesn't really get what's good about these old games, and still won't another decade later.
Playing this so soon after Chorvs had me feeling a lot of the same ways that I did with that game. Both games give the player a number of tools, but neither game really gives the player engaging ways to try to experiment and learn them. You never have any space to truly play, you are never given any room for creativity. The level design is so strictly railroaded that half the time when I would try to jump to what I assumed was an alternate path I would just fall into a pit, or perhaps even more insulting, hit an invisible wall and continue being directed down the same rollercoaster ride. The entire game is a sequence of checks where you use the one correct move at the one correct time in the one correct way, or you get shunted down to the bottom path.
And on the subject of the branching paths, I don't like the way they're often handled. Many of the "bottom" and "top" paths are moreso "foreground" and "background" paths, with background paths typically being visible from the foreground. This just makes the play area visually muddy, with the player no longer being able to rely on gut reactions to fast moving obstacles. Given that the foreground areas tend to seem like bottom-path equivalents, at absolute best this seems like an intentional punishment.
The most fun I had with Sonic Generations was singing City Escape to myself during levels that weren't City Escape.
There have definitely been way worse Sonic games, the poor rat has had some serious duds. That said, with all the hype around it, if this is supposed to be anything close to the peak of what the past couple decades of Sonic have had to offer, I can't blame anyone who walked away from this saying "Sonic was never good".
Right off the bat: Sonic the Hedgehog cannot get away with a "bad guy interrupts lunch" plot. You can do that in a game like New Super Mario Bros. which openly is not even trying to have a story, but even Sonic Generations' rather barebones narrative has a cutscene with a full voice-acted conversation after every zone.
When you load a game from the main menu, sonic jumps out of the logo and free-falls down; if this seamlessly led into the level select, this would be a neat effect, but the game cuts to a loading screen instead. This is particularly ludicrous on modern machines since the loading screen lasts less than a second and a smooth transition would probably be easily achievable if it weren't for the fact we're dealing with PS360 code. The same thing happens when switching between Classic and Modern Sonic. There's just a lot of weird little things like this that make navigating the game feel clunky.
Classic Sonic feels bad. It's not as simple as "it's not like the old games" which I know had been a conversation back when Sonic 4 came out. Maybe they don't need to be exactly the same, but there were certain things that were possible in the Genesis games that were just good: for example, you can't spin-dash and then immediately jump to clear a large gap. Some of this feels like it's to prevent short-term "sequence breaking" or clipping out-of-bounds considering how limited and on-rails a lot of the game is, but a lot of it just doesn't feel good in general. Every physics movement, from Sonic's jump arc to the way that rings bounce, feels like they just stuck with the untuned default options of whatever engine they used.
I really hate to bring up something this nitpicky but inconsistencies like this have been bugging me since Sonic 1. Why are certain obstacles instant death? There are these spike balls in some of the underwater sections that just kill you in one hit no matter what. Why is literally anything other than a bottomless pit a one hit kill? The game is even pretty lenient in other aspects, for example it's completely possible to survive getting crushed. It just doesn't make sense.
Why does Modern Sonic have 2D sections at all? The two characters aren't differentiated enough. The moments where Modern Sonic is actually allowed to be Modern Sonic are probably the best parts of the game, but just like with every other 3D Sonic, the best part of the game is buried under hours of filler.
The selection of zones chosen for the game is bizarre, I'm not surprised that they were apparently chosen by a poll. 4 of the 9 zones are city levels, 3 of them are basically green hill variants. I get that they picked one level from every major game from beginning to then-present, but it's also weird how almost half of this game's levels are taken from Adventure-style Sonic games, despite neither the Classic nor Modern versions of the stages really providing this gameplay. City Escape is probably the most true to the original, but I don't understand how there are people who compare this to a greatest hits collection, at least not in terms of gameplay. To me it just reveals that this is a surface level celebration from a company that still doesn't really get what's good about these old games, and still won't another decade later.
Playing this so soon after Chorvs had me feeling a lot of the same ways that I did with that game. Both games give the player a number of tools, but neither game really gives the player engaging ways to try to experiment and learn them. You never have any space to truly play, you are never given any room for creativity. The level design is so strictly railroaded that half the time when I would try to jump to what I assumed was an alternate path I would just fall into a pit, or perhaps even more insulting, hit an invisible wall and continue being directed down the same rollercoaster ride. The entire game is a sequence of checks where you use the one correct move at the one correct time in the one correct way, or you get shunted down to the bottom path.
And on the subject of the branching paths, I don't like the way they're often handled. Many of the "bottom" and "top" paths are moreso "foreground" and "background" paths, with background paths typically being visible from the foreground. This just makes the play area visually muddy, with the player no longer being able to rely on gut reactions to fast moving obstacles. Given that the foreground areas tend to seem like bottom-path equivalents, at absolute best this seems like an intentional punishment.
The most fun I had with Sonic Generations was singing City Escape to myself during levels that weren't City Escape.
There have definitely been way worse Sonic games, the poor rat has had some serious duds. That said, with all the hype around it, if this is supposed to be anything close to the peak of what the past couple decades of Sonic have had to offer, I can't blame anyone who walked away from this saying "Sonic was never good".