ThruLidlessEye
They finally made one of these that I can just call Good without a big asterisk.
Battle Priestess Kirin is without a doubt the best playable character Inti has made in the past decade. It really feels like Inti has put all the lessons they've learned from previous games together in a way that truly clicks. Mega Man Zero and ZX were great games but after enough entries a sort of mechanical conundrum started to rear its head: how do you balance the melee and ranged attacks in this kind of action game so that they're both useful? Inti games for the past decade have been largely focused not only on ranged weapons, but specifically on making those ranged weapons an abstracted element of a larger "damage economy", where some other ability needs to be utilized to "cash in" the ranged damage. In Gunvolt 3 we have the fetters and homing attack functioning quite close to an improved version of Mighty no. 9's combat, or an inverted version of Copen's abilities in the previous game (the bullets make the dash home, instead of the dash making the bullets home). By comparison, GV's own mechanics are so utterly lacking in tactility that it's not really surprising that he's been relegated to a situational super-form.
The presentation here is absolutely top notch. The original two Gunvolt games on 3DS had a certain sense of style, but they felt a bit unpolished. Comparing Inti's GBA games to the 3DS successors is interesting; what was gained in resolution and color depth was lost in the snappy feel necessary for a fast paced action game. The framerate was cut in half, and every section of every level was split apart by loading screens. While the ports to more modern systems remedied some of this, blowing those 3DS games up to the size of a modern living room TV is kind of hysterical. It wasn't until LAiX, more than 5 years after the original game, more than 2 years after the launch of the Switch (which has seemed to be the preferred platform for these games), that we saw a game in this style that properly utilized HD displays at all. Everything in Gunvolt 3, the illustrations, the animations, the little aesthetic flourishes, the sound design, the alterations made to the victory jingles and menu transitions, oozes character. The load-times are faster, the screen is less crunched, the action is more intelligible, immediate, and satisfying than ever before.
The story is at its best where it ties into the gameplay. The finale is made particularly effective by the way that it twists a couple particular elements of the changes made to both the player character and the boss fights in this entry. Previous games in the series have always allowed the player to talk to characters outside of missions (which also has a small mechanical benefit related to some random chance elements), though those games were typically preoccupied with talking to a singular moe blob; here the player amasses quite a crew to converse with throughout the game, and while their personalities are trope laden archetypes and their quips are a bit memetic (someone in this game says "doggo"), its generally charming and fun. Keeping in mind how the previous games ended up handling Zonda, I shuddered when Gunvolt 3 introduced Shiron, an epic pro gamer femboy who desperately wants to be a manly man, though luckily these worries were largely unwarranted.
Otherwise, the narrative is often somewhat uncomfortable or overly topical. Inti Creates have never really shied away from being political, or at least from presenting a political aesthetic, but (and I don't know enough about the behind the scenes of these games to place the blame on the original writers or the localization) as Gunvolt has gone on a lot of the dialogue has felt more and more like someone imagining what they would have said in a twitter argument that happened too long ago for them to reasonably reply to. Characters debate about all kinds of topics ranging from the ethics of online shopping to whether there truly is such a thing as a benevolent dictator. There's a ridiculous amount of corporate and nationalist apologia; Sumeragi are the good guys now, walling themselves off from the rest of the world, and the second chunk of the game is framed as protecting cultural artifacts from being looted by invaders from a rival nation. The bad guys' plan is to rewrite reality by using a media tower as a catalyst for a sleeping infant god's power. LA:iX already entered this territory with its oppression role-reversal plot, but in the final confrontation Gunvolt 3 goes full-on liberal "both sides" rhetoric.
I should note that I don't actually think games like Mega Man Zero were really trying to convey anything particularly radical, or even any political idea at all. Its conflict of vaguely French revolutionaries against genocidal old gods is rather obviously just an aesthetic support for the real conflict of those games, a conflict which happened outside of the plot, their only real "radical" ideas being the significant shift in the direction of Mega Man. Zero may as well have been an original IP; by the end of the third game the title character is our one thread keeping the games tethered to the larger franchise, and even then it's only in name and spirit. Zero is the only sub-series where the words "Mega Man" are not diegetically spoken a single time by any character.
Gunvolt 3 is also a significant shift for its own series. It takes place after a significant timeskip, it sheds almost the entirety of its original cast, and what series staples do return are almost completely unrecognizable; GV himself is literally a dog now, and we just kind of have to roll with it. It's so utterly disconnected from the rest of Gunvolt in both story and mechanics that saying it feels like a spin-off doesn't do it justice, it feels like a completely different game got retrofitted with just enough of an existing IP that the layman wouldn't notice. Though perhaps the strangest thing about this is that it isn't actually much of a shock, because the Gunvolt series has always had almost no meaningful over-arching elements keeping it together. There's no way to know what to expect each time Inti unveils another one of these, because every time they throw out the baby with the bathwater, and we're just hoping each time that the new baby is a good one. At this point I'd like to think that they've spent enough time re-inventing the wheel that they might try their hands at making the rest of the car, but I'm not confident.
Ironically, while being such a deviation for Gunvolt, the game is also a return to form for Inti Creates overall. From it's renewed focus on melee combat, to it's boss selection structure, to its wider assortment of more talkative teammates, to its revamped gacha-esque upgrade system that has more in common with cyber elves than the crafting in previous entries, Gunvolt 3 is the closest Inti Creates has gotten to making a true successor to their 00's Mega Man games. Whether you're a fan of those games, or just interested in The Apex of 2D Action, if you check out just one of these games, make this the one.
Battle Priestess Kirin is without a doubt the best playable character Inti has made in the past decade. It really feels like Inti has put all the lessons they've learned from previous games together in a way that truly clicks. Mega Man Zero and ZX were great games but after enough entries a sort of mechanical conundrum started to rear its head: how do you balance the melee and ranged attacks in this kind of action game so that they're both useful? Inti games for the past decade have been largely focused not only on ranged weapons, but specifically on making those ranged weapons an abstracted element of a larger "damage economy", where some other ability needs to be utilized to "cash in" the ranged damage. In Gunvolt 3 we have the fetters and homing attack functioning quite close to an improved version of Mighty no. 9's combat, or an inverted version of Copen's abilities in the previous game (the bullets make the dash home, instead of the dash making the bullets home). By comparison, GV's own mechanics are so utterly lacking in tactility that it's not really surprising that he's been relegated to a situational super-form.
The presentation here is absolutely top notch. The original two Gunvolt games on 3DS had a certain sense of style, but they felt a bit unpolished. Comparing Inti's GBA games to the 3DS successors is interesting; what was gained in resolution and color depth was lost in the snappy feel necessary for a fast paced action game. The framerate was cut in half, and every section of every level was split apart by loading screens. While the ports to more modern systems remedied some of this, blowing those 3DS games up to the size of a modern living room TV is kind of hysterical. It wasn't until LAiX, more than 5 years after the original game, more than 2 years after the launch of the Switch (which has seemed to be the preferred platform for these games), that we saw a game in this style that properly utilized HD displays at all. Everything in Gunvolt 3, the illustrations, the animations, the little aesthetic flourishes, the sound design, the alterations made to the victory jingles and menu transitions, oozes character. The load-times are faster, the screen is less crunched, the action is more intelligible, immediate, and satisfying than ever before.
The story is at its best where it ties into the gameplay. The finale is made particularly effective by the way that it twists a couple particular elements of the changes made to both the player character and the boss fights in this entry. Previous games in the series have always allowed the player to talk to characters outside of missions (which also has a small mechanical benefit related to some random chance elements), though those games were typically preoccupied with talking to a singular moe blob; here the player amasses quite a crew to converse with throughout the game, and while their personalities are trope laden archetypes and their quips are a bit memetic (someone in this game says "doggo"), its generally charming and fun. Keeping in mind how the previous games ended up handling Zonda, I shuddered when Gunvolt 3 introduced Shiron, an epic pro gamer femboy who desperately wants to be a manly man, though luckily these worries were largely unwarranted.
Otherwise, the narrative is often somewhat uncomfortable or overly topical. Inti Creates have never really shied away from being political, or at least from presenting a political aesthetic, but (and I don't know enough about the behind the scenes of these games to place the blame on the original writers or the localization) as Gunvolt has gone on a lot of the dialogue has felt more and more like someone imagining what they would have said in a twitter argument that happened too long ago for them to reasonably reply to. Characters debate about all kinds of topics ranging from the ethics of online shopping to whether there truly is such a thing as a benevolent dictator. There's a ridiculous amount of corporate and nationalist apologia; Sumeragi are the good guys now, walling themselves off from the rest of the world, and the second chunk of the game is framed as protecting cultural artifacts from being looted by invaders from a rival nation. The bad guys' plan is to rewrite reality by using a media tower as a catalyst for a sleeping infant god's power. LA:iX already entered this territory with its oppression role-reversal plot, but in the final confrontation Gunvolt 3 goes full-on liberal "both sides" rhetoric.
I should note that I don't actually think games like Mega Man Zero were really trying to convey anything particularly radical, or even any political idea at all. Its conflict of vaguely French revolutionaries against genocidal old gods is rather obviously just an aesthetic support for the real conflict of those games, a conflict which happened outside of the plot, their only real "radical" ideas being the significant shift in the direction of Mega Man. Zero may as well have been an original IP; by the end of the third game the title character is our one thread keeping the games tethered to the larger franchise, and even then it's only in name and spirit. Zero is the only sub-series where the words "Mega Man" are not diegetically spoken a single time by any character.
Gunvolt 3 is also a significant shift for its own series. It takes place after a significant timeskip, it sheds almost the entirety of its original cast, and what series staples do return are almost completely unrecognizable; GV himself is literally a dog now, and we just kind of have to roll with it. It's so utterly disconnected from the rest of Gunvolt in both story and mechanics that saying it feels like a spin-off doesn't do it justice, it feels like a completely different game got retrofitted with just enough of an existing IP that the layman wouldn't notice. Though perhaps the strangest thing about this is that it isn't actually much of a shock, because the Gunvolt series has always had almost no meaningful over-arching elements keeping it together. There's no way to know what to expect each time Inti unveils another one of these, because every time they throw out the baby with the bathwater, and we're just hoping each time that the new baby is a good one. At this point I'd like to think that they've spent enough time re-inventing the wheel that they might try their hands at making the rest of the car, but I'm not confident.
Ironically, while being such a deviation for Gunvolt, the game is also a return to form for Inti Creates overall. From it's renewed focus on melee combat, to it's boss selection structure, to its wider assortment of more talkative teammates, to its revamped gacha-esque upgrade system that has more in common with cyber elves than the crafting in previous entries, Gunvolt 3 is the closest Inti Creates has gotten to making a true successor to their 00's Mega Man games. Whether you're a fan of those games, or just interested in The Apex of 2D Action, if you check out just one of these games, make this the one.
2023
I don't know if it's quite fair to Pizza Tower to say that it's a rebuttal to Wario Land: Shake It's style-over-substance approach to iterating on Wario Land 4, because Pizza Tower is definitely not lacking in style. Shake It not only relegated most of Land 4's more expressive abilities to discrete level design widgets, in "upgrading" the visuals to Production I.G.'s professional hand-drawn animation the game completely lost its snappy flow. Pizza Tower not only incorporates the more situational maneuvers of Wario's toolkit into the core moveset, it offers wonderfully expressive animation without making a trade for the game's tactility. This game provides a logical evolution for Wario in the same way that Spark 2 finally offered a logical evolution for 3D Sonic.
Even on repeat playthroughs, with a better understanding of both Peppino's movement and the enemy's patterns, I do not like the boss fights in this game at all. The platforming is loose, hectic, and pretty forgiving, the only punishment in typical circumstances is a decreased score. Conversely, the boss fights demand a level of precision and concentration found nowhere else in the rest of the game, they all have too much health and drag on, their mechanical gimmicks don't mesh well with the game's core, they often rely on cheap tricks (the second half of The Vigilante's fight being in silhouette is particularly frustrating), and they must be overcome in order to progress and access more of the actual fun parts of the game.
Even on repeat playthroughs, with a better understanding of both Peppino's movement and the enemy's patterns, I do not like the boss fights in this game at all. The platforming is loose, hectic, and pretty forgiving, the only punishment in typical circumstances is a decreased score. Conversely, the boss fights demand a level of precision and concentration found nowhere else in the rest of the game, they all have too much health and drag on, their mechanical gimmicks don't mesh well with the game's core, they often rely on cheap tricks (the second half of The Vigilante's fight being in silhouette is particularly frustrating), and they must be overcome in order to progress and access more of the actual fun parts of the game.
1990
I've played a good bit of Mega Man 3 throughout the years. I played through this game on a Samsung Juke cellphone. Even on more ergonomic platforms it's always been a bit strange to me that this is generally considered tied with Mega Man 2 as possibly the best in the series.
There are some nice tunes here, most of the soundtrack is catchy at least, but in general I find the sound design more blaring, ear piercing. Most of the soundtrack feels more rhythmically frantic, more mechanical than previous entries; many songs sound to me like rejected versions of the Mortal Kombat theme.
Visually it's as good as ever, I genuinely wonder how exactly they did some of the effects in this game given the hardware (not in the sense that they seem "impossible", just unusual enough to be of interest). The wriggling serpents of Snake Man's stage whose segmented bodies make up the shifting terrain, the countless tiny eggs of Gemini Man's stage which each hatch into a tiny tadpole.
The major gameplay addition is the ability for Mega Man to do a sliding maneuver. Something that's always frustrated me is the sheer number of critics who seem to bring up Mega Man's inability to duck at any chance they get, which is annoying for a number of reasons, but chiefly here is the fact that the slide accomplishes the same purpose as ducking in a more interesting way. The amount of vertical space the character takes up is reduced, but only for a moment, and it comes with a required horizontal motion. The slide does have somewhat limited practical use, the most obvious situations for it are portions where the player must slide under low ceilings, and a couple of the non-Robot Master boss fights.
Break Man/Proto Man in particular is perhaps the most boring, though he seems to mostly exist purely as a skill check to see if the player understands the dash. The Yellow Devil fight in this game actually seems possible, due to the fact that the second from the bottom row of his blocks no longer have to be narrowly leapt over.
The stages themselves aren't anything worth complaining too much about but the bosses are odd. This game starts a trend that more or less continues throughout the rest of the Classic and X series of Mega Man games: almost none of the Robot Master weaknesses are things that the player could naturally infer, it's now pure trial and error unless you look up a guide. After beating the main 8 stages you have to go through 4 remixes of those levels and fight 8 visually identical bosses that all use movesets of Mega Man 2 bosses. Naturally, figuring out the weaknesses of these bosses is even stranger.
The platforms items from the previous games have been replaced by Rush Coil, Jet, and Marine. Rush coil is fine enough, a situational high bounce with limited use. Jet and Marine are terribly uninteresting. Marine is only useful, or even required, in a couple of areas. Jet literally just lets the player fly around whichever way they please. Between this change and the generally less impressive Robot Master weapons, there doesn't really feel like any reason to experiment; every tool you are given has a more clear time and place than in the second game.
The main factor that I think makes or breaks this game is whether or not a person appreciates the sort of philosophical shift that happened in the creation of this game, namely the fact that much of the Mega Man 1/2 team (including the original designer) did not work on this game. With the original Mega Man, Akira Kitamura practiced some restraint, doing the math to find what length the levels had to be so that an experienced player could play through the game in about an hour. Mega Man 2 was a bit longer, Mega Man 3 is nearly twice as long as the first game, and about a quarter of that length is recycled padding. In short, Mega Man 3 seems to have recontextualized the idea of a Mega Man sequel as less of a refinement, and more as simple iterative content.
I could only see this game as Mega Man 2's equal if one holds quantity in as high regard as quality.
There are some nice tunes here, most of the soundtrack is catchy at least, but in general I find the sound design more blaring, ear piercing. Most of the soundtrack feels more rhythmically frantic, more mechanical than previous entries; many songs sound to me like rejected versions of the Mortal Kombat theme.
Visually it's as good as ever, I genuinely wonder how exactly they did some of the effects in this game given the hardware (not in the sense that they seem "impossible", just unusual enough to be of interest). The wriggling serpents of Snake Man's stage whose segmented bodies make up the shifting terrain, the countless tiny eggs of Gemini Man's stage which each hatch into a tiny tadpole.
The major gameplay addition is the ability for Mega Man to do a sliding maneuver. Something that's always frustrated me is the sheer number of critics who seem to bring up Mega Man's inability to duck at any chance they get, which is annoying for a number of reasons, but chiefly here is the fact that the slide accomplishes the same purpose as ducking in a more interesting way. The amount of vertical space the character takes up is reduced, but only for a moment, and it comes with a required horizontal motion. The slide does have somewhat limited practical use, the most obvious situations for it are portions where the player must slide under low ceilings, and a couple of the non-Robot Master boss fights.
Break Man/Proto Man in particular is perhaps the most boring, though he seems to mostly exist purely as a skill check to see if the player understands the dash. The Yellow Devil fight in this game actually seems possible, due to the fact that the second from the bottom row of his blocks no longer have to be narrowly leapt over.
The stages themselves aren't anything worth complaining too much about but the bosses are odd. This game starts a trend that more or less continues throughout the rest of the Classic and X series of Mega Man games: almost none of the Robot Master weaknesses are things that the player could naturally infer, it's now pure trial and error unless you look up a guide. After beating the main 8 stages you have to go through 4 remixes of those levels and fight 8 visually identical bosses that all use movesets of Mega Man 2 bosses. Naturally, figuring out the weaknesses of these bosses is even stranger.
The platforms items from the previous games have been replaced by Rush Coil, Jet, and Marine. Rush coil is fine enough, a situational high bounce with limited use. Jet and Marine are terribly uninteresting. Marine is only useful, or even required, in a couple of areas. Jet literally just lets the player fly around whichever way they please. Between this change and the generally less impressive Robot Master weapons, there doesn't really feel like any reason to experiment; every tool you are given has a more clear time and place than in the second game.
The main factor that I think makes or breaks this game is whether or not a person appreciates the sort of philosophical shift that happened in the creation of this game, namely the fact that much of the Mega Man 1/2 team (including the original designer) did not work on this game. With the original Mega Man, Akira Kitamura practiced some restraint, doing the math to find what length the levels had to be so that an experienced player could play through the game in about an hour. Mega Man 2 was a bit longer, Mega Man 3 is nearly twice as long as the first game, and about a quarter of that length is recycled padding. In short, Mega Man 3 seems to have recontextualized the idea of a Mega Man sequel as less of a refinement, and more as simple iterative content.
I could only see this game as Mega Man 2's equal if one holds quantity in as high regard as quality.
2022
2022 Year of the Scrimblo
Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is a perfect toy.
A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.
This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.
Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.
This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.
There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.
And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!
A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.
This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.
Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.
This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.
There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.
And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!
I wasn't bothered by FFXVI's side-quests in the way that some people were, and I could tell just from seeing that the concept was going into another Fallen ruin that this was basically just going to be a budget DLC. Something that they could put together quick enough to have it ready for the trailer, so people would buy the season pass with something new to play now, while mostly anticipating Leviathan. Despite going in with this expectation, I was still sort of shocked by how... nothing... this is?
The main appeal here is the new boss, with a few other new fights along the approach. The rest of the DLC is basically an hour of remixed assets from the base game, and an hour of literally just walking through the Rosaria overworld, with a fight in the deadlands (i.e. a battle where literally the only thing you can do is basic sword swings) between these two segments. If it weren't for the boss, this wouldn't just be a normal sidequest, it would be a low-tier sidequest. The base game already having this dungeon's entrance modeled and the towers in its skyboxes really just makes it feel like this was haphazardly cut to meet a deadline.
Playing this to get back into FFXVI after having finished it months ago wasn't bad, but I think someone buying this before finishing the game, finally unlocking this, and playing it as part of their normal playthrough is a sort of hilarious concept.
The main appeal here is the new boss, with a few other new fights along the approach. The rest of the DLC is basically an hour of remixed assets from the base game, and an hour of literally just walking through the Rosaria overworld, with a fight in the deadlands (i.e. a battle where literally the only thing you can do is basic sword swings) between these two segments. If it weren't for the boss, this wouldn't just be a normal sidequest, it would be a low-tier sidequest. The base game already having this dungeon's entrance modeled and the towers in its skyboxes really just makes it feel like this was haphazardly cut to meet a deadline.
Playing this to get back into FFXVI after having finished it months ago wasn't bad, but I think someone buying this before finishing the game, finally unlocking this, and playing it as part of their normal playthrough is a sort of hilarious concept.
2016
The gameplay left a first impression that had me pacing around my apartment with my head in my hands wondering why nobody talks about this game. My second session mostly consisted of watching the live action TV show portion, which is for some reason presented via streaming instead of being stored as local video files, buffer and eventually tell me my internet was too bad to watch it.
2007
All the complaints people have about Super Mario 64, the movement, the camera, the repetitive objectives, are at least doubly worse here. The way that new objectives unlock feels completely random and unpredictable. The story and, sigh... "lore" are honestly pretty good, but at a certain point I feel like this works against the game, dispelling a certain kind of imagination I would have preferred kept intact.
Star Bits do NOT taste like HONEY, they taste like FRUIT you IDIOT!
Star Bits do NOT taste like HONEY, they taste like FRUIT you IDIOT!
2023
In Pokemon if you want to heal in town you go to a hospital and your party heals for free; to heal outside of town you need to buy a very cheap item with money that you earn from every battle.
In Cassette Beasts to heal in town you need to give the doctor 10 pieces of wood, or 20 pieces of plastic for a healing item you can use wherever you want, or you can rest at a campfire if you spend 5 pieces of shit. Fuck off.
Tap the B button to spend half your stamina bar for a split second movement speed increase. Systems are not mechanics, economies are not fun. Complete waste of time.
Just like Pokemon, there is nothing to be gained from actually playing it that you can't get from listening to the OST and looking at concept art.
In Cassette Beasts to heal in town you need to give the doctor 10 pieces of wood, or 20 pieces of plastic for a healing item you can use wherever you want, or you can rest at a campfire if you spend 5 pieces of shit. Fuck off.
Tap the B button to spend half your stamina bar for a split second movement speed increase. Systems are not mechanics, economies are not fun. Complete waste of time.
Just like Pokemon, there is nothing to be gained from actually playing it that you can't get from listening to the OST and looking at concept art.
2012
My first experience with this game was booting it up on Steam in like 2018 and saying "Hey! That looks pretty good!" before being treated to the most half-assed tutorial I've ever played, dropped into the first level with no idea what I was supposed to do, closing the game, and not touching it again until now. I should have let it stay that way, never meet your heroes, etc. "Style over substance" is still overselling it because that style only extends as far as the game's assets.
2021
It's like if Tunic was a real video game. I'll admit I haven't played Hades yet, but so far this is literally the only "isometric souls-like" to be literally any good.
better than re4
I sure picked up some garbage, huh?
The game is successful at replicating the experience of being a kid alone in a theme park, perhaps more accurately than Universal may have liked. The obtuse inner workings and unclear objectives of the game, combined with the disorienting fixed camera angles, come together to vividly remind me of the time me and my little brother got separated from our grandpa at Silver Dollar City's Geyser Gulch. Waterworld consists of 5 FMV's, each mere seconds long, each showing the same animated scene from different angles, truly serving up the classic amusement park experience of "uh, that's it?" Seemingly random crowds and wandering NPC's will block you as you aimlessly stumble around, and at any given moment at least half of the rides will be unavailable because of the long lines. There's even an NPC a few hundred yards into the park who tells you that you should have grabbed a map while you were at the entrance, and now you need to go back.
I've seen videos wherein people note a lack of "design" but I think the logic here was pretty clear. If you're making a game about a theme park, you want the rides to be the big exciting set-pieces; if you want to convey the scale of the park, to have a large detailed environment, how do you accomplish that while leaving enough space on the disc for the stuff that really counts? You make it pre-rendered, of course, and because it's pre-rendered that means you can use the rest of your rendering budget on character models and sprites to give the (paper thin) impression of bustling crowds. Why do you pick up trash? For the same reason barrels and rupees spontaneously rise from the sea in Wind Waker, to give the player something to do during what would otherwise be mere traversal. Why are the objectives so obscure? Why are the mini-games so hard? Why is the layout of the park so indecipherable? Why are half the rides too crowded to access at any given time? Why, it's the oldest trick in the book, it's just to pad the game out and make it take longer to beat.
One of the game's 8 major objectives is passing a movie trivia quiz given by Winnie Woodpecker. Every other question is about some completely inconsequential detail of a movie nobody cares about; I have never heard a single human being talk about the film "Backdraft", I have never seen a single person online talk about it outside of the context of this game. The rest are at least about movies that people have actually seen, but the specific aspects you're being quizzed on are so minute that I think literally nobody will get through this without some trial an error. The only text guide I could find for this game was no help, it literally just says "the questions repeat, so just write the correct answer down". I failed this quiz over a dozen times and rarely if ever saw a repeat question, there must be hundreds of them. When you fail, the way that Winnie says "you need to watch more movies" in a peculiar tone of voice. You would think it's like when a friend says "you need to check this out", but it's not, it's much more muted, clerical, a simple requirement. It doesn't feel like part of the "game", it feels like an oldschool PC game's copy protection asking me to find the 17th letter on the 13th page of a manual that I don't have.
This game came out barely a month after the GameCube's launch, and it sure feels like it. Between the muddy, flat textures, simple models, and eye-piercing "graphic design is my passion" text, it feels more like Nintendo 64 backwash than a new generation. The anime-styled character models of the player and NPC's are probably the most visually appealing aspect of the game. The characters are in this style because this was developed in Japan by a studio that seemingly only made this game and nothing else (though a look at MobyGames shows some number of the development staff went on to do things like environments and animations for companies like Square Enix and Hudson). Universal Studios Japan opened near the beginning of the same year that this came out. The game prominently features on both it's box and in-game a disclaimer that the game is not necessarily an accurate representation of the park, and it seems that this is because the selection of attractions more closely resembles the Japan location. Knowing that this a third party game released so early in the system's life, and a tie-in game likely meant to coincide with the opening of the park, I imagine the unimpressive presentation is a consequence of these factors.
The main attractions, the mini-games, aren't that bad, but they aren't that good. Back to the Future controls fine enough and is a visual spectacle, but it does still feel like it could have been done on N64, and the time limit is too strict (I have no idea how someone could get the higher rank on this, it requires having a full 30 seconds left over). Someone else on here said ET is worse than ET on 2600, which is a little mean. The trick (as explained by a random NPC in the park) is to always land your bike's back tire, meaning you should never ever tilt the analogue stick to the right; once you know this, it's fine. Jurassic Park is a mediocre rail shooter. Like BttF you don't have much room for error, and while the reticle is accurate for targeting your homing missiles, it doesn't line up with your rapid fire shots at all.
Backdraft might be the longest and most fully featured mini-game of the bunch (this attraction is still open in the real-life park in Japan, was that movie just a massive hit over there or what?), and in some ways it's pretty cool. It's like a firefighting take on Luigi's Mansion, though the control scheme is nowhere near as intuitive. You shoot with the A button, and while shooting you rotate with the analogue stick and move with the D-pad, though this is mostly workable. The main issue is one common in games with fixed camera angles: when the screen transitions, your character's movement direction won't change, they'll continue to move according to their rotation relative to the previous camera angle until you completely release the stick, at which point the directions are realigned with the camera. If you've played something like one of the old Devil May Cry's or Resident Evil's from this era without tank controls, you know what to expect here.
Jaws isn't particularly great, but at least if you've read the manual it's pretty easy. Most videos I've seen of the game show the player throwing barrels at the shark, but you're actually supposed to throw the boxes at the boat's cabin to break them. Inside the boxes are various items, the most valuable of which is a stick of dynamite that can take out half of the shark's health in a single hit; there's also a bottle item that doesn't do much damage but appears to have unlimited ammo. I haven't done the Wild Wild Wild West mini-game yet, though I think my patience with the game may have reached its limit.
The last of the main 8 challenges is collected hidden letters throughout the park, eventually spelling out "Universal Studios". Between these, the random trash you can pick up for points, and just trying to figure out where you character ended up on-screen between each camera angle transition, there's a good bit of pixel hunting. It's rarely much worse than looking for items in games like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy on PS1, but it's not particularly fun.
I was surprised going back to this how, uh, not impossible it was. As a kid I could barely make any progress in this at all, I thought the mini-games were impossible, I thought the caps were so expensive that I could never reasonably afford them. As an adult the game is certainly not good, it's tedious, it's boring, but it is playable. I thought there was almost literally no reason to talk to NPC's, though there is a sidequest you can find where a character has lost her phone. You can find it ringing on a bench and bring it back to her. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any other moments like this in the game, but it is at least interesting that there are any little touches like this at all.
The game is successful at replicating the experience of being a kid alone in a theme park, perhaps more accurately than Universal may have liked. The obtuse inner workings and unclear objectives of the game, combined with the disorienting fixed camera angles, come together to vividly remind me of the time me and my little brother got separated from our grandpa at Silver Dollar City's Geyser Gulch. Waterworld consists of 5 FMV's, each mere seconds long, each showing the same animated scene from different angles, truly serving up the classic amusement park experience of "uh, that's it?" Seemingly random crowds and wandering NPC's will block you as you aimlessly stumble around, and at any given moment at least half of the rides will be unavailable because of the long lines. There's even an NPC a few hundred yards into the park who tells you that you should have grabbed a map while you were at the entrance, and now you need to go back.
I've seen videos wherein people note a lack of "design" but I think the logic here was pretty clear. If you're making a game about a theme park, you want the rides to be the big exciting set-pieces; if you want to convey the scale of the park, to have a large detailed environment, how do you accomplish that while leaving enough space on the disc for the stuff that really counts? You make it pre-rendered, of course, and because it's pre-rendered that means you can use the rest of your rendering budget on character models and sprites to give the (paper thin) impression of bustling crowds. Why do you pick up trash? For the same reason barrels and rupees spontaneously rise from the sea in Wind Waker, to give the player something to do during what would otherwise be mere traversal. Why are the objectives so obscure? Why are the mini-games so hard? Why is the layout of the park so indecipherable? Why are half the rides too crowded to access at any given time? Why, it's the oldest trick in the book, it's just to pad the game out and make it take longer to beat.
One of the game's 8 major objectives is passing a movie trivia quiz given by Winnie Woodpecker. Every other question is about some completely inconsequential detail of a movie nobody cares about; I have never heard a single human being talk about the film "Backdraft", I have never seen a single person online talk about it outside of the context of this game. The rest are at least about movies that people have actually seen, but the specific aspects you're being quizzed on are so minute that I think literally nobody will get through this without some trial an error. The only text guide I could find for this game was no help, it literally just says "the questions repeat, so just write the correct answer down". I failed this quiz over a dozen times and rarely if ever saw a repeat question, there must be hundreds of them. When you fail, the way that Winnie says "you need to watch more movies" in a peculiar tone of voice. You would think it's like when a friend says "you need to check this out", but it's not, it's much more muted, clerical, a simple requirement. It doesn't feel like part of the "game", it feels like an oldschool PC game's copy protection asking me to find the 17th letter on the 13th page of a manual that I don't have.
This game came out barely a month after the GameCube's launch, and it sure feels like it. Between the muddy, flat textures, simple models, and eye-piercing "graphic design is my passion" text, it feels more like Nintendo 64 backwash than a new generation. The anime-styled character models of the player and NPC's are probably the most visually appealing aspect of the game. The characters are in this style because this was developed in Japan by a studio that seemingly only made this game and nothing else (though a look at MobyGames shows some number of the development staff went on to do things like environments and animations for companies like Square Enix and Hudson). Universal Studios Japan opened near the beginning of the same year that this came out. The game prominently features on both it's box and in-game a disclaimer that the game is not necessarily an accurate representation of the park, and it seems that this is because the selection of attractions more closely resembles the Japan location. Knowing that this a third party game released so early in the system's life, and a tie-in game likely meant to coincide with the opening of the park, I imagine the unimpressive presentation is a consequence of these factors.
The main attractions, the mini-games, aren't that bad, but they aren't that good. Back to the Future controls fine enough and is a visual spectacle, but it does still feel like it could have been done on N64, and the time limit is too strict (I have no idea how someone could get the higher rank on this, it requires having a full 30 seconds left over). Someone else on here said ET is worse than ET on 2600, which is a little mean. The trick (as explained by a random NPC in the park) is to always land your bike's back tire, meaning you should never ever tilt the analogue stick to the right; once you know this, it's fine. Jurassic Park is a mediocre rail shooter. Like BttF you don't have much room for error, and while the reticle is accurate for targeting your homing missiles, it doesn't line up with your rapid fire shots at all.
Backdraft might be the longest and most fully featured mini-game of the bunch (this attraction is still open in the real-life park in Japan, was that movie just a massive hit over there or what?), and in some ways it's pretty cool. It's like a firefighting take on Luigi's Mansion, though the control scheme is nowhere near as intuitive. You shoot with the A button, and while shooting you rotate with the analogue stick and move with the D-pad, though this is mostly workable. The main issue is one common in games with fixed camera angles: when the screen transitions, your character's movement direction won't change, they'll continue to move according to their rotation relative to the previous camera angle until you completely release the stick, at which point the directions are realigned with the camera. If you've played something like one of the old Devil May Cry's or Resident Evil's from this era without tank controls, you know what to expect here.
Jaws isn't particularly great, but at least if you've read the manual it's pretty easy. Most videos I've seen of the game show the player throwing barrels at the shark, but you're actually supposed to throw the boxes at the boat's cabin to break them. Inside the boxes are various items, the most valuable of which is a stick of dynamite that can take out half of the shark's health in a single hit; there's also a bottle item that doesn't do much damage but appears to have unlimited ammo. I haven't done the Wild Wild Wild West mini-game yet, though I think my patience with the game may have reached its limit.
The last of the main 8 challenges is collected hidden letters throughout the park, eventually spelling out "Universal Studios". Between these, the random trash you can pick up for points, and just trying to figure out where you character ended up on-screen between each camera angle transition, there's a good bit of pixel hunting. It's rarely much worse than looking for items in games like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy on PS1, but it's not particularly fun.
I was surprised going back to this how, uh, not impossible it was. As a kid I could barely make any progress in this at all, I thought the mini-games were impossible, I thought the caps were so expensive that I could never reasonably afford them. As an adult the game is certainly not good, it's tedious, it's boring, but it is playable. I thought there was almost literally no reason to talk to NPC's, though there is a sidequest you can find where a character has lost her phone. You can find it ringing on a bench and bring it back to her. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any other moments like this in the game, but it is at least interesting that there are any little touches like this at all.
2019
Just some thoughts.
There are some parallels, mechanically speaking, with the opening area of Breath of the Wild. Relatively small area, get new abilities, go to the top of a cold mountain (which will negatively affect your stamina), glide around. The smaller scope of this game, however, allows it to actually express anything meaningful with both these same base mechanics and the character interactions.
An indie game about personal struggle symbolized by a mountain trek? Where have I heard this one before? As much as I might find the general narrative concept a bit hokey and overdone at this point, the mechanical payoff here is excellent. It both allows for a more thorough engagement with gliding that any point in the game before, as well as allowing the player to get new views of the island and potentially see things they had missed. Plus, it delivers on a kind of personal childhood dream (what if at the end of Mario 64, instead of just flying away in a cutscene, the player actually controlled Mario as he flew back to the castle?).
As much as I find the character interactions charming for the mostpart, I do find it somewhat interesting how a game that some might describe as a "walking sim" (something I would only do begrudgingly) has such a wide range of ways to interact with the world. Digging, fishing, racing... Is there mining in this game? I found a pickaxe, though I never actually used it for anything. Weirdest of all is the amount of money in the game. It seems almost antithetical to the character of "walking sims" to have Numbers Go Up.
In general, despite its immediate presentation promising a quick, pleasant jaunt, the game has a surprising amount of stuff going on with it; this might lend it more replayability than others in its genre, but on a first playthrough it does seem almost overwhelming compared to the expectation it likely conjures up at a glance. More than a quarter of players have gotten the platinum trophy on the PS4 version. I don't think I have the platinum trophy for any game, and I certainly don't think this game's mood beckons me to treat it like a checklist.
A platformer that only gives you minimal control over the camera? Sign me up! This is completely serious. I am so tired of platformers expecting me to handle the camera myself. Lookin' at you, Mario Odyssey/Bowser's Fury. You should never have to break out the claw grip for a game that isn't Dark Souls.
I like birds. I like other animals too. There are some good animals in this game. This is a good game. I like bird.
There are some parallels, mechanically speaking, with the opening area of Breath of the Wild. Relatively small area, get new abilities, go to the top of a cold mountain (which will negatively affect your stamina), glide around. The smaller scope of this game, however, allows it to actually express anything meaningful with both these same base mechanics and the character interactions.
An indie game about personal struggle symbolized by a mountain trek? Where have I heard this one before? As much as I might find the general narrative concept a bit hokey and overdone at this point, the mechanical payoff here is excellent. It both allows for a more thorough engagement with gliding that any point in the game before, as well as allowing the player to get new views of the island and potentially see things they had missed. Plus, it delivers on a kind of personal childhood dream (what if at the end of Mario 64, instead of just flying away in a cutscene, the player actually controlled Mario as he flew back to the castle?).
As much as I find the character interactions charming for the mostpart, I do find it somewhat interesting how a game that some might describe as a "walking sim" (something I would only do begrudgingly) has such a wide range of ways to interact with the world. Digging, fishing, racing... Is there mining in this game? I found a pickaxe, though I never actually used it for anything. Weirdest of all is the amount of money in the game. It seems almost antithetical to the character of "walking sims" to have Numbers Go Up.
In general, despite its immediate presentation promising a quick, pleasant jaunt, the game has a surprising amount of stuff going on with it; this might lend it more replayability than others in its genre, but on a first playthrough it does seem almost overwhelming compared to the expectation it likely conjures up at a glance. More than a quarter of players have gotten the platinum trophy on the PS4 version. I don't think I have the platinum trophy for any game, and I certainly don't think this game's mood beckons me to treat it like a checklist.
A platformer that only gives you minimal control over the camera? Sign me up! This is completely serious. I am so tired of platformers expecting me to handle the camera myself. Lookin' at you, Mario Odyssey/Bowser's Fury. You should never have to break out the claw grip for a game that isn't Dark Souls.
I like birds. I like other animals too. There are some good animals in this game. This is a good game. I like bird.
2022
Considering the games asking price (which is low enough that it practically forces consideration), what you get here in terms of content and style is a steal. As far as what the game is, it's enjoyable but leaves something to be desired. Depth perception is a near constant issue, made worse by how much of the platforming takes place over bottomless pits. The music, while fine, is kind of one-note, the only exception being some corny Toby Fox-esque clown music, and you can't even tune that song out because it's in a level with a rhythm gimmick (think beep blocks). Even after beating the game, the conditions for acquiring the hidden collectables required to unlock the true ending are nebulous; I assume you need to collect all the origami cranes, but one of the levels has more than 500 of them, and I don't feel eager to trawl through the whole space. The look and feel of the game is generally fine, the levels' visual theming is aesthetically pleasing, the character and enemy designs are good, it's well paced, and what core gameplay issues do exist are not particularly egregious. I had a good time with it, but the experience is straightforward enough that I don't see myself getting much more out of it.