7418 Reviews liked by Vee
Ikusaaaaaaan!
2016
Recommended by Cold_comfort
Impenetrable congestions of bullets covering the screen in bewitching sync with music. Ridiculous speed of action pumped by staggering motion design. Brilliant in its straightforwardness mechanical core which endows player with power and acumen. The structure that rewards great play but provides enough leeway for blunders. The most over-the-top shmup ever made. Stirring creative goals if I ever turn to make a game myself.
Impenetrable congestions of bullets covering the screen in bewitching sync with music. Ridiculous speed of action pumped by staggering motion design. Brilliant in its straightforwardness mechanical core which endows player with power and acumen. The structure that rewards great play but provides enough leeway for blunders. The most over-the-top shmup ever made. Stirring creative goals if I ever turn to make a game myself.
This review contains spoilers
Smackdown vs Raw 2009 introduced a mode called Road to Wrestlemania (RTWM) which was a more direct version of what was known as Season mode in many prior titles and 24/7 mode in SVR 2008. Where those games allowed a wide choice of most of the roster, there was hardly a reason to play it more than once as each character would be playing through the same storylines on each playthrough. SVR 09 tried to give each run a more personal taste, by slashing the choices down to 5 storylines 12 weeks in length each, specifically tailored to the featured characters. I have decided to embark on a fruitless task of individually scoring each individual story to encourage me to go through them again for maybe the 22nd time.
Triple H: My man Haitch has his RTWM revolve around one singular decision that splits the path in two ways, reform the defining team of the Attitude Era D-Generation X or the most powerful force of the Ruthless Aggression era by reuniting Evolution? Too bad the path there is clogged with 6 WEEKS of matches against Mr. Kennedy, Edge, or Mr. Kennedy and Edge only broken up by one match vs Randy Orton and one filler match vs Shelton Benjamin. Like seriously, if I ever see Mr. Kennedy again it might be too soon. After a couple tag matches with Shawn Michaels and Randy Orton you make the decision of which to reunite with in a very hands-on manner as the guest referee of a title match between the two. I should mention though you’ve hit about the 10 week mark now so you spend nearly no time with your chosen team. Pick DX and you earn a comical few scenes as in a mock press conference Triple H is pegged as Shawn’s first title defense at Wrestlemania, they goof, they gaff, they slime Evolution, then beat him at the PPV, game over. Side with Randy and perhaps to your dismay you never get the full Evolution experience. One week Ric Flair isn’t there, the next Batista is MIA, H weasels his way into the WM title rematch between Randy and Shawn then you win it. The choice is compelling and the DX reunion is mildly amusing, but you only really have a couple weeks on your chosen path, hardly bearing any consequences for your decision. 3/10
CM Punk: The only RTWM that ECW ever got, Punk’s story starts with an Extreme Rules match against ECW champion Tommy Dreamer who gets a little boo-boo on his ribs and gets stretchered out after you beat him for the title. After seeing this, ECW legend and commentator Tazz decides Extreme Rules matches are da pits brudda, and goes on a crusade against the Extreme in Extreme Championship Wrestling with Stephanie McMahon who strips Punk of his newly won ECW championship and hold it up in a tournament, a tournament that Tommy Dreamer encourages you to get intentionally disqualified from as he still believes in ECW’s hardcore spirit and doesn’t blame Punk for his injury. Steph and Tazz keep you busy with a match at No Way Out against Big Daddy V so you can’t get involved in the tournament final where Elijah Burke is crowned champion. Before ECW can even go on the air two nights later Punk has already stolen the title belt and holds it up in a Last Man Standing match but before Punk can win Tazz runs in from the announcer’s desk uses his patented Tazzmission to Tazz-choke out Punk leaving him down for the Tazz-10-count and Tazz-award the Tazzbelt to Burke. After earning another title shot and winning the belt the next week Burke and Tazz challenge Punk and Tommy Dreamer to a match at Wrestlemania and Steph gives you the choice of Extreme Rules, Steel Cage, or a Table match. After winning that Punk follows up with an immediate offer for a title match with Dreamer in the same stip you chose for the tag match, win that, confetti rains, game over. Punk’s RTWM is a straight line unlike Triple H with no branching choice but ultimately is more satisfying, especially since Tazz is both on commentary and involved in the story so even on commentary Tazz is trying to push his motivations as much as he can. It also gives you the opportunity to dive a little more into the ECW side of the game with flaming tables and other “extreme” features. 6/10
The Undertaker: This one, one of two Smackdown representing RTWMs starts with what seems like a throwaway match against Santino Marella, until the next week when Finlay teases Santino about his ass whooping leading to Santino betting Finlay can’t last as long as he did against Taker, which the game challenges you to prove him right. It can prove difficult if you don’t know it’s coming given the length of Taker’s special moves and the Tombstone Piledriver’s notorious penchant for rope breaks in video games, but succeed and you unlock Hornswoggle as a goddamn summon in exhibition modes. I haven’t mentioned unlockables so far, but that needed special attention. Moving on, either beating Santino and Finlay is so impressive you immediately get title matches, or maybe because you’re just The Undertaker but next week you get a match with The Great Khali for the World Heavyweight Championship, which Santino runs in on for the DQ, shortly followed by Finlay who do no damage to Taker until Santino realizes Taker has a weak spot between the legs just like any other man, leaving The Undertaker laid out at the end of the show. Next Smackdown Santino and Finlay proclaim themselves “The Nu School” and promise “THE MAN” is coming to end Taker’s Wrestlemania undefeated streak. Undertaker does his lights off, lights on teleportation schtick only to be met with a spear from Edge, but they make clear Edge is not “THE MAN”. At the Royal Rumble, Nu School challenges Taker to a match and emerge with The Urn, which in WWE lore has varied between Undertaker’s arcane focus and kryptonite, this time playing the role of kryptonite. Taker is laid out again and the Nu School escape. They reveal on Smackdown The Urn was a gift from “THE MAN” and they have another one too, Kane is under their control due to The Urn. Santino introduces him as “a man you beat three times at Wrestlemania", like that’s supposed to be a threat on The Undertaker’s Road to Wrestlemania? No worries, drop him on his head twice and everything is a-okay (great message). The identity of “THE MAN” is finally revealed at No Way Out as The Boogeyman, which rules, and pokes Kane with his magic red smoke emitting stick which seals Kane’s consciousness or something rad like that probably. Undertaker is given the opportunity to Earn The Urn back in a ladder match against your choice of Santino or Finlay (Finlay is a badass and I’m scared of him so the part here will be played by Santino). Upon victory Undertaker just gives it back, but then the lights go out and it shoots a ray of light into Santino’s face! The effects of The Urn Blast is revealed next week as he turns into a zombie live on The CW! Undertaker uses spooky powers to allow Rey Mysterio to beat his zombified minion then releases him from his captivity only to meet the same fate as Kane by the hands of The Boogeyman. In yet another match with the surviving member of Nu School Boogeyman manages to get his stick on Taker, with no effect, then it’s off to Wrestlemania. Quick detour to a cutscene of Taker kneeling in the ring shooting electricity (OK?), then defend the Wrestlemania undefeated streak of The Undertaker in Hell in a Cell. Boogeyman is chokeslammed into a casket which is struck by a bolt of lightning and disappears presumably sending “THE MAN” straight to hell or Arkansas or somewhere reasonably as terrible. You can probably tell I’ve written much more of the week-to-week happenings than I did for the other two above, for good reason as it’s much more eventful than those others. Besides the dull stretch between the Royal Rumble and No Way Out where truly nothing of consequence happens there was always something to mention. Even delivered through 9 of 12 matches involving Finlay or Santino in some form seeing a huge missed opportunity in the Boogeyman-Undertaker feud that never was is good amount of fun to see play out. 9/10
John Cena: The second of three on the Monday Night Raw side, Cena kicks off with a promo revealing the annual Tribute to the Troops show is next week, and claims to have met good friends the year before, specifically dedicating his next match to Tony. Tony is an original character and if I’m not mistaken is the only time one ever appeared in Road to Wrestlemania, barring the routes in the three games after this built around a character you create yourself. Cena makes quick work of MVP at the show, then Tony makes his first appearance to celebrate with him. On Raw, MVP admits his defeat but claims he had sand in his eye, which means the match should’ve been stopped and takes umbrage with the soldiers in attendance treating Cena as a hero. MVP declares he is officially defecting from the United States because he’s “tired of being treated like less than the best”. After a win over William Regal, JR declares on commentary that as long as Cena remains a US citizen, we’ll be fine. Cena has a match with Umaga at the Royal Rumble, it’s unclear why neither of these two would enter the rumble instead and potentially earn a title shot but, in any case, Regal seems to be hanging around with Umaga or as Regal pronounces it, “Youmainga”. Regal also accompanies Umaga to the Royal Rumble, the reason, as he tells Cena through voicemail, being somebody needs to keep the Samoan Bulldozer under control. MVP eventually interrupts the match and he, Regal, and Umaga engage in a three-on-one beatdown to Cena. Now it’s finally time to officially meet my favorite fictional faction in WWE video games as William Regal plants a flag in the ring on Raw and claims it in the name of Better-Than-U-Topia as Secretary of Foreign Affairs alongside Secretary of Defense Umaga and their President, MVP. Hell. Yeah. But Cena doesn’t have time to even lick his wounds from the Rumble because he’s scheduled for a match with none other than GOD DAMN IT MR. KENNEDY WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE. In a nice touch though the Better-Than-U-Topia flag remains attached to the ringpost. It’s the little things. It’s a quick week next as Cena runs in way too late to save Jeff Hardy from a BTUT beatdown but actually fends all three of them off. In what initially looks to just be a filler week with a tag match against BTUT has the wrinkle of Cena’s friend Tony hobbled and using a crutch as some unspecified injury has allowed him to come home from the military. Cena invites him to chill in his locker room so they can chat when the job’s done, but in the span of maybe 40 seconds the match ends (you hear the bell on the TV Tony is watching), MVP beats Tony up, books it full sprint out of the room, and just after Cena has already made it back to his locker room. Maybe you can’t see Cena cause he’s so damn fast. Cena has a Gauntlet match (where each beaten opponent is immediately replaced by a new one until there’s none left) against BTUT at No Way Out. Prior, Regal visits Cena to inform him of extra concessions for Cena since the match is taking place in BTUT, as you remember they planted a flag and claimed the ring. #1: Cena needs a 5-count to win by pinfall. #2: Cena can’t use rope breaks to get out of a pin. #3: Only Cena can be disqualified for a 10-count when out of the ring. Oh, and also MVP blindsides him with a beauty of a spear forcing Cena to go in already injured. This would have been better served for the finale though since Cena wins! BTUT is left with no ground left to stand on after that, even with the post-match assault they lay down afterwards. They lost with all those advantages and there’s still 27 days left before Wrestlemania so it’s all filler from here. Spend a few weeks engaging in simple storyless assaults against a BTUT member, and in case it wasn’t clear we’re just wasting time at this point the Raw before Wrestlemania I HAVE TO FIGHT MR KENNEDY AGAIN GET OUT OF HERE this is just a one off match for nothing it could be anyone on the whole roster just do Carlito or Chavo Guerrero please! And Wrestlemania is just a 15-minute ironman match with MVP, I still did it for you but all that really happens is Tony shows up at the end and hits MVP with a terrible punch. Going into this I was excited but the memories were better. I’d have liked to see MVP, Regal, and Umaga interact more with each other and the lack of that makes me wish they did this group on TV instead where they’d get the time to do so. After No Way Out they wring out 4 more weeks when there’s just nothing left in it, but between the boring start and end is a solid chuck of some pretty entertaining stuff at least. I hate the USA, BTUT forever. 7/10
Chris Jericho: Our beloved Lionheart Y2J’s story begins fairly by the numbers with a simple match meant to earn your way into a 4-man match for a shot at the championship, but after winning somebody steals Jericho’s gimmick and types “WHO WILL SAVE THE SAVIOR? TERMINATE JERICHO” in hacker text on the big screen. Now Jericho is on a mission to find who put up that text and for reasons beyond my understanding his first suspect is our old friend from Taker’s RTWM Finlay, but apparently he had been milling around in the production area at the time…Jericho puts him in his submission move the Walls of Jericho until he agrees to talk, revealing he was given an envelope full of money to play a DVD after Jericho’s match. Y2J has more business to attend to though as he still has the 4-way he qualified for, he just has to beat Randy Orton, Shawn Michaels, and mR. KENNEDY C’MON this roster isn't that small just pick anybody else please! Our last protagonist John Cena is living in a better timeline now, as the reigning WWE champion and Jericho earns a match with him at the Royal Rumble. After a tune-up match with Michaels, the jumbo tron lights up again with a new message, this time reading “y2j_terminated@royal.rumble VIRUS DEPLOYING”. As promised, Jericho’s match at the Rumble is interrupted by a masked man with a pipe, beating him down and leaving as another message is displayed, “end_savior.exe championship_dreams>>>>shutdown”. In a mostly filler week, Jericho is hurt but promises to find his assailant, despite assurances from Shane McMahon WWE is commencing an investigation. Next week we’re presented with a suspect list and given our choice between six people to question! I already know my decision of course, my cockroach of a mortal enemy Mr. Kennedy. I know he’s out to get me so I’m not gonna let him waste anymore of my time. Jericho goes straight to his locker room to confront him, but Kennedy is actually just making his way there. Jericho finds the same mask his attacker was wearing in Kennedy’s bag to which he replies “I’m from Green Bay genius, it gets cold there” hurr hurr hurr I bet it does you snake. Jericho teams with Michaels against Mr. Kennedy and Randy Orton so I wipe the floor with that mouthy tool and mark him a prime suspect. Next I target Randy Orton, because anybody who associates with Mr. Kennedy is my Mr. Enemy. Jericho’s angle is the masked man wore camo pants and Orton has a military past, kinda weak, I was more suspicious of the vile smugness of him after he relays that Shane cleared him of any wrongdoing. Either way Shane claims he found someone with no alibi, and sends Jericho to the ring to face him, but Umaga is a good twice as big as our perp so obviously Shane has it out for us too. Y2J marks Orton a prime suspect on the grounds of “he had no good answers” and we move to a new week. I decide Shane seems to be against me too for some reason and choose him as the next interrogation target. He claims he’s just here to help and wasn’t even at the Royal Rumble. Jericho crosses him off the list, so I decide maybe Finlay didn’t give me the whole story and mark him next. Finlay, fresh off a win, is accosted by Jericho backstage and gives him one more good talking to. He’s very forthright with Chris saying he’s in absolutely no hurry to get on Jericho’s bad side again and has been avoiding him as much as possible. Jericho decides he believes him since Finlay is a liar, but not a good one. Beating Jeff Hardy seemed to trigger the messages, so I go to see what he says for himself. Hardy says he was backstage during Jericho’s match and even rooting for him so he couldn’t have done it. Shane just happens to stroll by and puts the two of them against each other in a match. The masked man actually appears during the match, clearly proving it’s not Hardy, and Jericho loses him in a chase backstage. I never got the chance to question Shawn, but it doesn’t matter as the final choice of who to accuse is between Orton and Kennedy. I have no reason to hesitate, Mr. Kennedy is my greatest rival and I know he wants to get rid of me just as much as I want to spray that insect with pesticide. Jericho and Kennedy brawl but a new message appears reading “IVALID SELECTION PASSWORD INCORRECT” and a masked man hits Jericho from behind with another pipe. It must be a mercenary Kennedy hired or something! Jericho is told to take the night off, but he’s peeved that Orton is getting a title shot when Jericho himself has never gotten a rematch after the masked man ruined his shot at Royal Rumble so he runs in to get the match thrown out by DQ. Cena’s a fighting champion though so he’s ticked off at the run-in and just the shenanigans involving masked men in general so he calls out Jericho next week to tell him off about it. Shane sets up a match between them that night which a masked man runs in on again. Suddenly a second masked man joins the fight but Cena helps send them both packing. The next week a lone masked man stands in the ring to call out Y2J, only for Chris to be blindsided by the second masked man, who dramatically pause to finally remove their masks revealing Randy Orton and that BLOND RAT MR. KENNEDY I almost bought that he was innocent. Cena makes the save again and Jericho teams up with him for some payback against Orton and Kennedy. A WWE Championship 4-way match is set for Wrestlemania and I get one more chance to have Kennedy all to myself and really put the boots to that slimy loudmouth before Randy and Cena also get involved and it turns into a big brawl. Jericho gets one particularly satisfying shot at Kennedy by donning the same masked man disguise and suplexing Kennedy on the floor backstage before winning big in the Main Event to close the story. I forgot much more of this story than I thought I did so I was pretty engaged overall. It’s no LA Noire but the mystery is interesting and the short few weeks of conducting your own investigation is fun way of giving Jericho’s path a small bit of non-linearity even if there’s no real consequences for going about it any certain way. The match variety is nice too, it never feels like you’re doing the same match you just did the show before. Jericho has also gotten attention for coming off pretty genuine in his voiceover in these story-based modes so it has that going for it as well. 9/10
Batista/Rey Mysterio: This one is very unique for this game in that you have the option to play this story with a friend, each of you taking control of Batista or Rey for the whole duration. I have to write this one differently though because there isn’t some wacky twist to the story with some all-time silly wrestlecrap to have fun recapping but instead this particular story can diverge in just too many ways to cover, it would be even longer than the other sections I’ve already written. See typically in a RTWM it’s win or retry on the matches, but there are several points where the path can split based on win or loss and then double that because there’s two characters that can take those paths. Even though I can’t go in-depth with it, I promise this story can be very enjoyable with a competitive friend who’s a good sport. Rack the difficulty up to make it a genuine challenge and see where the roads lead based on the results of your matches. Retain or lose the tag titles? That’s two different paths. Based on which of you wins the Royal Rumble that’s two different paths. The one of you that doesn’t win that rumble gets a title match later, and that causes another split based on if you win or lose it, along with different finales based on which of you wins at Wrestlemania. It’s by far the most replayable in the entire game, and there’s a lot of potential to see new things and build a story unique from the last person you played it with. Batista and Rey Mysterio team up to really show the potential of this mode and even though it’s not the funniest, it is the coolest. (Also it’s on Smackdown so there’s no need to keep an eye over your shoulder for that weasel Mr. Kennedy) 10/10
I played Road to Wrestlemania mode in all the Smacdown vs. Raw games frequently especially with their portability on a PSP, but I only recently went out and bought the PS3 version of this game and writing something about it was my inspiration to give them all another shot and this turned into a mildly fun project. I don’t know when or if, but maybe keep an eye out for me doing this all over again in Smackdown vs. Raw 2010.
Triple H: My man Haitch has his RTWM revolve around one singular decision that splits the path in two ways, reform the defining team of the Attitude Era D-Generation X or the most powerful force of the Ruthless Aggression era by reuniting Evolution? Too bad the path there is clogged with 6 WEEKS of matches against Mr. Kennedy, Edge, or Mr. Kennedy and Edge only broken up by one match vs Randy Orton and one filler match vs Shelton Benjamin. Like seriously, if I ever see Mr. Kennedy again it might be too soon. After a couple tag matches with Shawn Michaels and Randy Orton you make the decision of which to reunite with in a very hands-on manner as the guest referee of a title match between the two. I should mention though you’ve hit about the 10 week mark now so you spend nearly no time with your chosen team. Pick DX and you earn a comical few scenes as in a mock press conference Triple H is pegged as Shawn’s first title defense at Wrestlemania, they goof, they gaff, they slime Evolution, then beat him at the PPV, game over. Side with Randy and perhaps to your dismay you never get the full Evolution experience. One week Ric Flair isn’t there, the next Batista is MIA, H weasels his way into the WM title rematch between Randy and Shawn then you win it. The choice is compelling and the DX reunion is mildly amusing, but you only really have a couple weeks on your chosen path, hardly bearing any consequences for your decision. 3/10
CM Punk: The only RTWM that ECW ever got, Punk’s story starts with an Extreme Rules match against ECW champion Tommy Dreamer who gets a little boo-boo on his ribs and gets stretchered out after you beat him for the title. After seeing this, ECW legend and commentator Tazz decides Extreme Rules matches are da pits brudda, and goes on a crusade against the Extreme in Extreme Championship Wrestling with Stephanie McMahon who strips Punk of his newly won ECW championship and hold it up in a tournament, a tournament that Tommy Dreamer encourages you to get intentionally disqualified from as he still believes in ECW’s hardcore spirit and doesn’t blame Punk for his injury. Steph and Tazz keep you busy with a match at No Way Out against Big Daddy V so you can’t get involved in the tournament final where Elijah Burke is crowned champion. Before ECW can even go on the air two nights later Punk has already stolen the title belt and holds it up in a Last Man Standing match but before Punk can win Tazz runs in from the announcer’s desk uses his patented Tazzmission to Tazz-choke out Punk leaving him down for the Tazz-10-count and Tazz-award the Tazzbelt to Burke. After earning another title shot and winning the belt the next week Burke and Tazz challenge Punk and Tommy Dreamer to a match at Wrestlemania and Steph gives you the choice of Extreme Rules, Steel Cage, or a Table match. After winning that Punk follows up with an immediate offer for a title match with Dreamer in the same stip you chose for the tag match, win that, confetti rains, game over. Punk’s RTWM is a straight line unlike Triple H with no branching choice but ultimately is more satisfying, especially since Tazz is both on commentary and involved in the story so even on commentary Tazz is trying to push his motivations as much as he can. It also gives you the opportunity to dive a little more into the ECW side of the game with flaming tables and other “extreme” features. 6/10
The Undertaker: This one, one of two Smackdown representing RTWMs starts with what seems like a throwaway match against Santino Marella, until the next week when Finlay teases Santino about his ass whooping leading to Santino betting Finlay can’t last as long as he did against Taker, which the game challenges you to prove him right. It can prove difficult if you don’t know it’s coming given the length of Taker’s special moves and the Tombstone Piledriver’s notorious penchant for rope breaks in video games, but succeed and you unlock Hornswoggle as a goddamn summon in exhibition modes. I haven’t mentioned unlockables so far, but that needed special attention. Moving on, either beating Santino and Finlay is so impressive you immediately get title matches, or maybe because you’re just The Undertaker but next week you get a match with The Great Khali for the World Heavyweight Championship, which Santino runs in on for the DQ, shortly followed by Finlay who do no damage to Taker until Santino realizes Taker has a weak spot between the legs just like any other man, leaving The Undertaker laid out at the end of the show. Next Smackdown Santino and Finlay proclaim themselves “The Nu School” and promise “THE MAN” is coming to end Taker’s Wrestlemania undefeated streak. Undertaker does his lights off, lights on teleportation schtick only to be met with a spear from Edge, but they make clear Edge is not “THE MAN”. At the Royal Rumble, Nu School challenges Taker to a match and emerge with The Urn, which in WWE lore has varied between Undertaker’s arcane focus and kryptonite, this time playing the role of kryptonite. Taker is laid out again and the Nu School escape. They reveal on Smackdown The Urn was a gift from “THE MAN” and they have another one too, Kane is under their control due to The Urn. Santino introduces him as “a man you beat three times at Wrestlemania", like that’s supposed to be a threat on The Undertaker’s Road to Wrestlemania? No worries, drop him on his head twice and everything is a-okay (great message). The identity of “THE MAN” is finally revealed at No Way Out as The Boogeyman, which rules, and pokes Kane with his magic red smoke emitting stick which seals Kane’s consciousness or something rad like that probably. Undertaker is given the opportunity to Earn The Urn back in a ladder match against your choice of Santino or Finlay (Finlay is a badass and I’m scared of him so the part here will be played by Santino). Upon victory Undertaker just gives it back, but then the lights go out and it shoots a ray of light into Santino’s face! The effects of The Urn Blast is revealed next week as he turns into a zombie live on The CW! Undertaker uses spooky powers to allow Rey Mysterio to beat his zombified minion then releases him from his captivity only to meet the same fate as Kane by the hands of The Boogeyman. In yet another match with the surviving member of Nu School Boogeyman manages to get his stick on Taker, with no effect, then it’s off to Wrestlemania. Quick detour to a cutscene of Taker kneeling in the ring shooting electricity (OK?), then defend the Wrestlemania undefeated streak of The Undertaker in Hell in a Cell. Boogeyman is chokeslammed into a casket which is struck by a bolt of lightning and disappears presumably sending “THE MAN” straight to hell or Arkansas or somewhere reasonably as terrible. You can probably tell I’ve written much more of the week-to-week happenings than I did for the other two above, for good reason as it’s much more eventful than those others. Besides the dull stretch between the Royal Rumble and No Way Out where truly nothing of consequence happens there was always something to mention. Even delivered through 9 of 12 matches involving Finlay or Santino in some form seeing a huge missed opportunity in the Boogeyman-Undertaker feud that never was is good amount of fun to see play out. 9/10
John Cena: The second of three on the Monday Night Raw side, Cena kicks off with a promo revealing the annual Tribute to the Troops show is next week, and claims to have met good friends the year before, specifically dedicating his next match to Tony. Tony is an original character and if I’m not mistaken is the only time one ever appeared in Road to Wrestlemania, barring the routes in the three games after this built around a character you create yourself. Cena makes quick work of MVP at the show, then Tony makes his first appearance to celebrate with him. On Raw, MVP admits his defeat but claims he had sand in his eye, which means the match should’ve been stopped and takes umbrage with the soldiers in attendance treating Cena as a hero. MVP declares he is officially defecting from the United States because he’s “tired of being treated like less than the best”. After a win over William Regal, JR declares on commentary that as long as Cena remains a US citizen, we’ll be fine. Cena has a match with Umaga at the Royal Rumble, it’s unclear why neither of these two would enter the rumble instead and potentially earn a title shot but, in any case, Regal seems to be hanging around with Umaga or as Regal pronounces it, “Youmainga”. Regal also accompanies Umaga to the Royal Rumble, the reason, as he tells Cena through voicemail, being somebody needs to keep the Samoan Bulldozer under control. MVP eventually interrupts the match and he, Regal, and Umaga engage in a three-on-one beatdown to Cena. Now it’s finally time to officially meet my favorite fictional faction in WWE video games as William Regal plants a flag in the ring on Raw and claims it in the name of Better-Than-U-Topia as Secretary of Foreign Affairs alongside Secretary of Defense Umaga and their President, MVP. Hell. Yeah. But Cena doesn’t have time to even lick his wounds from the Rumble because he’s scheduled for a match with none other than GOD DAMN IT MR. KENNEDY WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE. In a nice touch though the Better-Than-U-Topia flag remains attached to the ringpost. It’s the little things. It’s a quick week next as Cena runs in way too late to save Jeff Hardy from a BTUT beatdown but actually fends all three of them off. In what initially looks to just be a filler week with a tag match against BTUT has the wrinkle of Cena’s friend Tony hobbled and using a crutch as some unspecified injury has allowed him to come home from the military. Cena invites him to chill in his locker room so they can chat when the job’s done, but in the span of maybe 40 seconds the match ends (you hear the bell on the TV Tony is watching), MVP beats Tony up, books it full sprint out of the room, and just after Cena has already made it back to his locker room. Maybe you can’t see Cena cause he’s so damn fast. Cena has a Gauntlet match (where each beaten opponent is immediately replaced by a new one until there’s none left) against BTUT at No Way Out. Prior, Regal visits Cena to inform him of extra concessions for Cena since the match is taking place in BTUT, as you remember they planted a flag and claimed the ring. #1: Cena needs a 5-count to win by pinfall. #2: Cena can’t use rope breaks to get out of a pin. #3: Only Cena can be disqualified for a 10-count when out of the ring. Oh, and also MVP blindsides him with a beauty of a spear forcing Cena to go in already injured. This would have been better served for the finale though since Cena wins! BTUT is left with no ground left to stand on after that, even with the post-match assault they lay down afterwards. They lost with all those advantages and there’s still 27 days left before Wrestlemania so it’s all filler from here. Spend a few weeks engaging in simple storyless assaults against a BTUT member, and in case it wasn’t clear we’re just wasting time at this point the Raw before Wrestlemania I HAVE TO FIGHT MR KENNEDY AGAIN GET OUT OF HERE this is just a one off match for nothing it could be anyone on the whole roster just do Carlito or Chavo Guerrero please! And Wrestlemania is just a 15-minute ironman match with MVP, I still did it for you but all that really happens is Tony shows up at the end and hits MVP with a terrible punch. Going into this I was excited but the memories were better. I’d have liked to see MVP, Regal, and Umaga interact more with each other and the lack of that makes me wish they did this group on TV instead where they’d get the time to do so. After No Way Out they wring out 4 more weeks when there’s just nothing left in it, but between the boring start and end is a solid chuck of some pretty entertaining stuff at least. I hate the USA, BTUT forever. 7/10
Chris Jericho: Our beloved Lionheart Y2J’s story begins fairly by the numbers with a simple match meant to earn your way into a 4-man match for a shot at the championship, but after winning somebody steals Jericho’s gimmick and types “WHO WILL SAVE THE SAVIOR? TERMINATE JERICHO” in hacker text on the big screen. Now Jericho is on a mission to find who put up that text and for reasons beyond my understanding his first suspect is our old friend from Taker’s RTWM Finlay, but apparently he had been milling around in the production area at the time…Jericho puts him in his submission move the Walls of Jericho until he agrees to talk, revealing he was given an envelope full of money to play a DVD after Jericho’s match. Y2J has more business to attend to though as he still has the 4-way he qualified for, he just has to beat Randy Orton, Shawn Michaels, and mR. KENNEDY C’MON this roster isn't that small just pick anybody else please! Our last protagonist John Cena is living in a better timeline now, as the reigning WWE champion and Jericho earns a match with him at the Royal Rumble. After a tune-up match with Michaels, the jumbo tron lights up again with a new message, this time reading “y2j_terminated@royal.rumble VIRUS DEPLOYING”. As promised, Jericho’s match at the Rumble is interrupted by a masked man with a pipe, beating him down and leaving as another message is displayed, “end_savior.exe championship_dreams>>>>shutdown”. In a mostly filler week, Jericho is hurt but promises to find his assailant, despite assurances from Shane McMahon WWE is commencing an investigation. Next week we’re presented with a suspect list and given our choice between six people to question! I already know my decision of course, my cockroach of a mortal enemy Mr. Kennedy. I know he’s out to get me so I’m not gonna let him waste anymore of my time. Jericho goes straight to his locker room to confront him, but Kennedy is actually just making his way there. Jericho finds the same mask his attacker was wearing in Kennedy’s bag to which he replies “I’m from Green Bay genius, it gets cold there” hurr hurr hurr I bet it does you snake. Jericho teams with Michaels against Mr. Kennedy and Randy Orton so I wipe the floor with that mouthy tool and mark him a prime suspect. Next I target Randy Orton, because anybody who associates with Mr. Kennedy is my Mr. Enemy. Jericho’s angle is the masked man wore camo pants and Orton has a military past, kinda weak, I was more suspicious of the vile smugness of him after he relays that Shane cleared him of any wrongdoing. Either way Shane claims he found someone with no alibi, and sends Jericho to the ring to face him, but Umaga is a good twice as big as our perp so obviously Shane has it out for us too. Y2J marks Orton a prime suspect on the grounds of “he had no good answers” and we move to a new week. I decide Shane seems to be against me too for some reason and choose him as the next interrogation target. He claims he’s just here to help and wasn’t even at the Royal Rumble. Jericho crosses him off the list, so I decide maybe Finlay didn’t give me the whole story and mark him next. Finlay, fresh off a win, is accosted by Jericho backstage and gives him one more good talking to. He’s very forthright with Chris saying he’s in absolutely no hurry to get on Jericho’s bad side again and has been avoiding him as much as possible. Jericho decides he believes him since Finlay is a liar, but not a good one. Beating Jeff Hardy seemed to trigger the messages, so I go to see what he says for himself. Hardy says he was backstage during Jericho’s match and even rooting for him so he couldn’t have done it. Shane just happens to stroll by and puts the two of them against each other in a match. The masked man actually appears during the match, clearly proving it’s not Hardy, and Jericho loses him in a chase backstage. I never got the chance to question Shawn, but it doesn’t matter as the final choice of who to accuse is between Orton and Kennedy. I have no reason to hesitate, Mr. Kennedy is my greatest rival and I know he wants to get rid of me just as much as I want to spray that insect with pesticide. Jericho and Kennedy brawl but a new message appears reading “IVALID SELECTION PASSWORD INCORRECT” and a masked man hits Jericho from behind with another pipe. It must be a mercenary Kennedy hired or something! Jericho is told to take the night off, but he’s peeved that Orton is getting a title shot when Jericho himself has never gotten a rematch after the masked man ruined his shot at Royal Rumble so he runs in to get the match thrown out by DQ. Cena’s a fighting champion though so he’s ticked off at the run-in and just the shenanigans involving masked men in general so he calls out Jericho next week to tell him off about it. Shane sets up a match between them that night which a masked man runs in on again. Suddenly a second masked man joins the fight but Cena helps send them both packing. The next week a lone masked man stands in the ring to call out Y2J, only for Chris to be blindsided by the second masked man, who dramatically pause to finally remove their masks revealing Randy Orton and that BLOND RAT MR. KENNEDY I almost bought that he was innocent. Cena makes the save again and Jericho teams up with him for some payback against Orton and Kennedy. A WWE Championship 4-way match is set for Wrestlemania and I get one more chance to have Kennedy all to myself and really put the boots to that slimy loudmouth before Randy and Cena also get involved and it turns into a big brawl. Jericho gets one particularly satisfying shot at Kennedy by donning the same masked man disguise and suplexing Kennedy on the floor backstage before winning big in the Main Event to close the story. I forgot much more of this story than I thought I did so I was pretty engaged overall. It’s no LA Noire but the mystery is interesting and the short few weeks of conducting your own investigation is fun way of giving Jericho’s path a small bit of non-linearity even if there’s no real consequences for going about it any certain way. The match variety is nice too, it never feels like you’re doing the same match you just did the show before. Jericho has also gotten attention for coming off pretty genuine in his voiceover in these story-based modes so it has that going for it as well. 9/10
Batista/Rey Mysterio: This one is very unique for this game in that you have the option to play this story with a friend, each of you taking control of Batista or Rey for the whole duration. I have to write this one differently though because there isn’t some wacky twist to the story with some all-time silly wrestlecrap to have fun recapping but instead this particular story can diverge in just too many ways to cover, it would be even longer than the other sections I’ve already written. See typically in a RTWM it’s win or retry on the matches, but there are several points where the path can split based on win or loss and then double that because there’s two characters that can take those paths. Even though I can’t go in-depth with it, I promise this story can be very enjoyable with a competitive friend who’s a good sport. Rack the difficulty up to make it a genuine challenge and see where the roads lead based on the results of your matches. Retain or lose the tag titles? That’s two different paths. Based on which of you wins the Royal Rumble that’s two different paths. The one of you that doesn’t win that rumble gets a title match later, and that causes another split based on if you win or lose it, along with different finales based on which of you wins at Wrestlemania. It’s by far the most replayable in the entire game, and there’s a lot of potential to see new things and build a story unique from the last person you played it with. Batista and Rey Mysterio team up to really show the potential of this mode and even though it’s not the funniest, it is the coolest. (Also it’s on Smackdown so there’s no need to keep an eye over your shoulder for that weasel Mr. Kennedy) 10/10
I played Road to Wrestlemania mode in all the Smacdown vs. Raw games frequently especially with their portability on a PSP, but I only recently went out and bought the PS3 version of this game and writing something about it was my inspiration to give them all another shot and this turned into a mildly fun project. I don’t know when or if, but maybe keep an eye out for me doing this all over again in Smackdown vs. Raw 2010.
Def Jam: Icon
2007
I remember when this game came out, I would create a character that looked like Eminem and just beat his ass for hours.
Pokémon Showdown
2011
one time i matched against this guy and he disconnected from the battle so i hid the room so he couldnt rejoin it and won by timer
After Devil May Cry 3 brought about the franchise's redemption arc with its incredibly solid gameplay, a tightly woven narrative, and catchy 2005 vibe music, the question must have arisen as to "where do we go from here?"
And while many would hope the answer would be up, Devil May Cry 4 would ultimately wind up being quite the disappointment as the follow up to my personal favorite of the series.
From the very start of the game there was this awkward emptiness I felt, and it was a feeling that only grew the more I played the game.
Starting with Nero. Nero is not a bad character by any means, in fact I quite enjoy his banter with the various antagonists the game throws his way and he generally exudes a youthful arrogance that reminds me a lot of Dante in DMC3. However it is his motivation that I find lacking, and not in that the motivation is inherently bad but rather, it's very standard and tied to the weakest character in the game.
His undying love for Kyrie, while wholesome and also providing great emotional scenes comes across as very plain for this franchise. It doesn't help that Kyrie herself receives very little characterization outside of "being a nice girl who loves Nero and her brother and is nice." Easily my least favorite (non-DMC2) female protagonist in the series so far, exuding none of the confidence that characters like Trish or Lady have in spades.
It just results in the story feeling rather weak, which given its inherent vibes reminding me a lot of Final Fantasy (but less interesting), resulted in me kind of shutting my brain off at most points.
The game starts with this interesting hook with Dante showing up out of nowhere and killing Sanctus, the leader of a Sparda worshipping cult, which causes Nero to fight him, but eventually it tappers off into an uninteresting conspiracy by the cult to bring life to this giant statue called The Savior.
Hell, by the time Dante becomes the central protagonist, the story kind of just takes a backseat so he can crack his funny pizza man jokes, and only really comes back into play at the very end.
Not that the plot is the most important aspect or even the biggest problem in this game, but rather a piece in a larger set of issues that pervades every corner of DMC4.
The gameplay is incredibly solid, Nero controls very well and I love his mechanics. His affinity for air combat allows him to easily juggle an enemy possibly even indefinitely if you know how to do jump cancelling. His revving of his motorcycle sword (which is fucking awesome in the exact same way as a Gunblade) allows for him to charge up a meter that allows for some useful moves, however it can take time to do so and leaves Nero defenseless... unless you know how to Instant Rev, which if you time after a hit just right, you can instantly fill up one bar of meter(eventually able to upgrade this to the entire meter). However, these moves are honestly limited in their actual usefulness I've found, and it's just more effective to just utilize your regular combos.
Dante is easily my favorite character to utilize in the game, finally having Style Switching which is a major improvement from DMC3. I loved utilizing Swordmaster and Gunslinger for those banging combos, even finding out that Swordmaster has a literal auto-combo that results in Dante swinging his sword like a baseball bat. However Dante's weapon selection is... not great unfortunately. I loved using Rebellion, but Gilgamesh wasn't as fun to utilize as Beowulf in DMC3, and while I liked Lucifer, I simply found that Rebellion was generally the more efficient of the bunch in regards to the sheer amount of combos it has. Same with the guns really, but honestly Ebony & Ivory have always been perfect to use so I have no complaints there.
The problem with the gameplay is honestly the levels themselves. They are very... standard. For comparison, in Devil May Cry 1, the Mallet Island Castle has this dark, creeping vibe that sticks to the player. It is very much drenched in its horror aesthetic as it feels like a genuine location that's been lived in, and serves to show the imposing and oppressive nature that the game and its narrative have.
DMC4 on the other hand is a Super Mario/Sonic game in regards to its levels. You've got your town level, you have your mineshaft level, you have your frozen castle level, you have your hidden factory level, your jungle level, and your holy castle level. These locations are already very uninspired by just being tropes that I could find on TV Tropes if I wanted, but what makes it worse is that you go through all of these locations twice only backwards with Dante.
Of course, this isn't news to anyone who has played the game and contributes to the one, very openly talked about aspect of DMC4:
It's fucking unfinished.
From the fucking stupid as fuck dice mini game (that you do twice for the record, and the second time is tied to the fucking boss rush), to The Savior boss fight just being an utter clusterfuck, the final boss being almost as bad as a DMC2 fight, the game starts strong but shits the bed so fucking hard by the end that when I realized Vergil was just going to go through the exact same campaign, I immediately dropped it to play him in Bloody Palace instead.
The boss fights themselves, minus the snake dragon lady, Credo and Agnus don't even feel designed around Nero's toolkit and fighting them with him just feels unpleasant, where once you fight them with Dante it feels incredibly satisfying by comparison. Maybe this was to show the experience gap between the two, but personally I don't think there's any narrative reason for it.
The music didn't vibe with me as much as DMC3's or even DMC1, which isn't to say I hated DMC4's soundtrack but rather that in comparison it just wasn't that memorable, which y'know, fits the entire game now that I think about it.
DMC4, outside of its combat, is not memorable.
The demons you fight as bosses are all inconsequential randos who have barely anything to do with the plot, the plot itself is very plain, the main antagonist is boring and generic Super Pope, it's all just very forgettable.
It's another one of those games I wish I could love but I just can't, and that is disappointing.
I doubt I'll ever play the story mode of this game ever again, but Bloody Palace will always be there and I will definitely come back to it just for the fun that that mode brings.
The time had come, but this game didn't.
And while many would hope the answer would be up, Devil May Cry 4 would ultimately wind up being quite the disappointment as the follow up to my personal favorite of the series.
From the very start of the game there was this awkward emptiness I felt, and it was a feeling that only grew the more I played the game.
Starting with Nero. Nero is not a bad character by any means, in fact I quite enjoy his banter with the various antagonists the game throws his way and he generally exudes a youthful arrogance that reminds me a lot of Dante in DMC3. However it is his motivation that I find lacking, and not in that the motivation is inherently bad but rather, it's very standard and tied to the weakest character in the game.
His undying love for Kyrie, while wholesome and also providing great emotional scenes comes across as very plain for this franchise. It doesn't help that Kyrie herself receives very little characterization outside of "being a nice girl who loves Nero and her brother and is nice." Easily my least favorite (non-DMC2) female protagonist in the series so far, exuding none of the confidence that characters like Trish or Lady have in spades.
It just results in the story feeling rather weak, which given its inherent vibes reminding me a lot of Final Fantasy (but less interesting), resulted in me kind of shutting my brain off at most points.
The game starts with this interesting hook with Dante showing up out of nowhere and killing Sanctus, the leader of a Sparda worshipping cult, which causes Nero to fight him, but eventually it tappers off into an uninteresting conspiracy by the cult to bring life to this giant statue called The Savior.
Hell, by the time Dante becomes the central protagonist, the story kind of just takes a backseat so he can crack his funny pizza man jokes, and only really comes back into play at the very end.
Not that the plot is the most important aspect or even the biggest problem in this game, but rather a piece in a larger set of issues that pervades every corner of DMC4.
The gameplay is incredibly solid, Nero controls very well and I love his mechanics. His affinity for air combat allows him to easily juggle an enemy possibly even indefinitely if you know how to do jump cancelling. His revving of his motorcycle sword (which is fucking awesome in the exact same way as a Gunblade) allows for him to charge up a meter that allows for some useful moves, however it can take time to do so and leaves Nero defenseless... unless you know how to Instant Rev, which if you time after a hit just right, you can instantly fill up one bar of meter(eventually able to upgrade this to the entire meter). However, these moves are honestly limited in their actual usefulness I've found, and it's just more effective to just utilize your regular combos.
Dante is easily my favorite character to utilize in the game, finally having Style Switching which is a major improvement from DMC3. I loved utilizing Swordmaster and Gunslinger for those banging combos, even finding out that Swordmaster has a literal auto-combo that results in Dante swinging his sword like a baseball bat. However Dante's weapon selection is... not great unfortunately. I loved using Rebellion, but Gilgamesh wasn't as fun to utilize as Beowulf in DMC3, and while I liked Lucifer, I simply found that Rebellion was generally the more efficient of the bunch in regards to the sheer amount of combos it has. Same with the guns really, but honestly Ebony & Ivory have always been perfect to use so I have no complaints there.
The problem with the gameplay is honestly the levels themselves. They are very... standard. For comparison, in Devil May Cry 1, the Mallet Island Castle has this dark, creeping vibe that sticks to the player. It is very much drenched in its horror aesthetic as it feels like a genuine location that's been lived in, and serves to show the imposing and oppressive nature that the game and its narrative have.
DMC4 on the other hand is a Super Mario/Sonic game in regards to its levels. You've got your town level, you have your mineshaft level, you have your frozen castle level, you have your hidden factory level, your jungle level, and your holy castle level. These locations are already very uninspired by just being tropes that I could find on TV Tropes if I wanted, but what makes it worse is that you go through all of these locations twice only backwards with Dante.
Of course, this isn't news to anyone who has played the game and contributes to the one, very openly talked about aspect of DMC4:
It's fucking unfinished.
From the fucking stupid as fuck dice mini game (that you do twice for the record, and the second time is tied to the fucking boss rush), to The Savior boss fight just being an utter clusterfuck, the final boss being almost as bad as a DMC2 fight, the game starts strong but shits the bed so fucking hard by the end that when I realized Vergil was just going to go through the exact same campaign, I immediately dropped it to play him in Bloody Palace instead.
The boss fights themselves, minus the snake dragon lady, Credo and Agnus don't even feel designed around Nero's toolkit and fighting them with him just feels unpleasant, where once you fight them with Dante it feels incredibly satisfying by comparison. Maybe this was to show the experience gap between the two, but personally I don't think there's any narrative reason for it.
The music didn't vibe with me as much as DMC3's or even DMC1, which isn't to say I hated DMC4's soundtrack but rather that in comparison it just wasn't that memorable, which y'know, fits the entire game now that I think about it.
DMC4, outside of its combat, is not memorable.
The demons you fight as bosses are all inconsequential randos who have barely anything to do with the plot, the plot itself is very plain, the main antagonist is boring and generic Super Pope, it's all just very forgettable.
It's another one of those games I wish I could love but I just can't, and that is disappointing.
I doubt I'll ever play the story mode of this game ever again, but Bloody Palace will always be there and I will definitely come back to it just for the fun that that mode brings.
The time had come, but this game didn't.
bit Dungeon III
2019
From it's origins as a basic dungeon-crawler with as much variety as a salt shaker to a weird Zelda-style click-em-up, Bit Dungeon 3 sets its sights on the Souls games for inspiration this time around, and the result is certainly their most mechanically sound yet...and that's not saying much.
The vagueness of the narrative makes the progression feel directionless and confusing, but fortunately the overworld is so small that it's only a matter of time before you figure out what to do through simple exploration. Kill the bosses in the dungeons, and then kill the final boss. Then do it again, because as with all the Bit Dungeon games, the main appeal is in doing an ungodly amount of New Game Pluses, as there sure as shit isn't much satisfaction just from beating the final boss and being treated to an abrupt credits roll.
The enemies are vast in number in the overworld, attacking in groups of 5-10 and usually shadowed by a larger miniboss enemy, but once you're levelled a bit they shouldn't take much effort to kill. Hell, the overworld segments are more akin to musou-style games, just with campfires.
Random loot drops keep things fresh, unless you're maining a mage, as staffs for whatever reason are kept firmly out of the loot pool until 3 bosses in, making about 50% of all drops (weapons such as swords, axes, bows, etc.) useless. At least the rare armour sets look very cool, and lend themselves to a decent variety of builds - though perhaps I'm just this impressed because of how mediocre the last two games were.
This being said, magic is still completely broken, as the main form of projectile attack it would appear enemies have no visible counter. I tore through most of the bosses just by spamming projectiles and dumping most of my stat points into intelligence, ending fights absurdly quickly. I doubt the effectiveness of melee at all to be honest, as whenever I was engaged at close range I'd find my self stunlocked and losing almost half my health per combo from enemies with attack ranges far larger than their sprites would suggest.
What brings most of the experience down, though, are the bugs. So many bugs. Quest items would simply not spawn, I'd attack NPCs when I was simply trying to talk, important dialogue would skip, inputs wouldn't always register, the list goes on. This game has under gone a lot of patches since its launch 3 years ago, hell, this January alone saw a total rebalance. I tried this for the first time about a year ago, and it was a brutally impossible, broken and unfair disaster, and I'm glad it's been adjusted, but it's clear there's a broken base somewhere as the balance remains poor, as do the bugs.
I also question the permadeath. It's a franchise staple and a playthrough isn't too long, but having it so that dying a second time without getting your old soul back is permadeath is a little cruel in a soulslike...but even more so when invasions are a factor. I opted out, but I can't imagine the invasion element is any fun - especially given reports from players that a high-level player can just trounce a new player and wipe them out at the starting gate.
I concede that this is probably the best Bit Dungeon game so far, but I still can't really recommend it unless you really want a short, janky, new-game-plus-heavy, kinda-soulslike, kinda-musou hybrid that sounds worse and worse the more I try to add descriptors to it.
Oh, there's a horse? Sometimes? He's cool. Get it for the horse.
The vagueness of the narrative makes the progression feel directionless and confusing, but fortunately the overworld is so small that it's only a matter of time before you figure out what to do through simple exploration. Kill the bosses in the dungeons, and then kill the final boss. Then do it again, because as with all the Bit Dungeon games, the main appeal is in doing an ungodly amount of New Game Pluses, as there sure as shit isn't much satisfaction just from beating the final boss and being treated to an abrupt credits roll.
The enemies are vast in number in the overworld, attacking in groups of 5-10 and usually shadowed by a larger miniboss enemy, but once you're levelled a bit they shouldn't take much effort to kill. Hell, the overworld segments are more akin to musou-style games, just with campfires.
Random loot drops keep things fresh, unless you're maining a mage, as staffs for whatever reason are kept firmly out of the loot pool until 3 bosses in, making about 50% of all drops (weapons such as swords, axes, bows, etc.) useless. At least the rare armour sets look very cool, and lend themselves to a decent variety of builds - though perhaps I'm just this impressed because of how mediocre the last two games were.
This being said, magic is still completely broken, as the main form of projectile attack it would appear enemies have no visible counter. I tore through most of the bosses just by spamming projectiles and dumping most of my stat points into intelligence, ending fights absurdly quickly. I doubt the effectiveness of melee at all to be honest, as whenever I was engaged at close range I'd find my self stunlocked and losing almost half my health per combo from enemies with attack ranges far larger than their sprites would suggest.
What brings most of the experience down, though, are the bugs. So many bugs. Quest items would simply not spawn, I'd attack NPCs when I was simply trying to talk, important dialogue would skip, inputs wouldn't always register, the list goes on. This game has under gone a lot of patches since its launch 3 years ago, hell, this January alone saw a total rebalance. I tried this for the first time about a year ago, and it was a brutally impossible, broken and unfair disaster, and I'm glad it's been adjusted, but it's clear there's a broken base somewhere as the balance remains poor, as do the bugs.
I also question the permadeath. It's a franchise staple and a playthrough isn't too long, but having it so that dying a second time without getting your old soul back is permadeath is a little cruel in a soulslike...but even more so when invasions are a factor. I opted out, but I can't imagine the invasion element is any fun - especially given reports from players that a high-level player can just trounce a new player and wipe them out at the starting gate.
I concede that this is probably the best Bit Dungeon game so far, but I still can't really recommend it unless you really want a short, janky, new-game-plus-heavy, kinda-soulslike, kinda-musou hybrid that sounds worse and worse the more I try to add descriptors to it.
Oh, there's a horse? Sometimes? He's cool. Get it for the horse.
Devil May Cry 5
2019
I don’t want to talk TOO much about the part of Devil May Cry 5 where you PLAY it because, let’s be real here, you know, right? I’m late to this party. We all KNOW that this is simply one of the finest video game action achievements, the culmination of fifteen years of promise since DMC3 set us down this road. One of the few games with a modern AAA level of fidelity that by and large emulates the quick, snappy responsiveness of the PS2 era that grandfathered it. We’re all maybe a little sad to see the puzzle elements fully reduced to an aesthetic touch and the challenge dressing on levels discarded entirely (is this the first DMC without a stage where your health constantly reduces in the main progression path?), but we’re also all well aware that these things along with the discarding of all gimmick enemies betrays an absolute confidence in the core experience, a confidence well-earned. We all know this is Dante’s most perfectly tuned, well-balanced move set, without a chink in its armor; we all know that the addition of devil arms lends a feeling of completeness to Nero that finally makes him feel like he competes with the big boys in potential along with a truly unique layer of strategy that expands upon his already technical skill set; I’m sure you’re all as impressed as I am at how weirdly intuitive V is to play as, a stealth highlight of a campaign that was truly joyful, near frictionless.
Everybody KNOWS this stuff. We’ve all played DMC5, we’ve all talked about it, the game is simply sick as fuck. We all love Pull My Devil Trigger, it’s the best song ever made, this is just true! It’s Just True. So I don’t feel like writing about that stuff any more than I have, other people have surely done it better. I try not to read reviews before I’ve finished writing my own, but I’m sure people have done it better right here on Backloggd. I’d rather talk about the way this series has very organically transitioned from something I laugh along with, that’s maybe a lot smarter about its application of gothic theming than I would have expected, to something that’s emotionally invested me on the level I care about, like, I dunno, Naruto or whatever, to something that I think has, over time, crafted a genuinely touching story of a family wounded by trauma and their ability or inability to overcome a great social and generational violence. I don’t think this has been there the whole time, but by allowing the series’ now-regular main credited writer since DMC3, Bingo Morihashi, a consistent creative voice in the franchise, he’s taken characters who have been portrayed disparately across two decades and used these gaps and these disparities as a tool to demonstrate the ways that time and experience do and don’t change us, especially when we’re molded by intense experiences early in life. I think this has been happening for a long time in this series, but DMC5 gives the context necessary to fully solidify it as a feat of characterization.
I don’t think that either of the twists in this game are particularly shocking if you’re paying attention to anything anyone says or does in DMC4 or this game but I am gonna toss out that there are a couple of big bombs in this game and I’m gonna talk pretty openly about them, and as I’ve mentioned I think the writing in this is pretty fuckin sick so if you care about that, now’s the time to duck out!
Devil May Cry 5 is a game about The Boys. Everybody tends to take their turn in the limelight in this series but as is often the case in this genre of story a lot of the time they just kind of hang out after their story is done? Like, there’s not really a good reason for Trish and Lady to be in DMC4 and 5 from a narrative perspective and they don’t really grow as characters, we’re just happy to see them because they’re Cool, right? Vergil didn’t even get to like, BE in DMC4 he only got to be a bonus character in a RE-RELEASE of it seven years later lmao. DMC5 is unique in the series in that it’s the first time we get a story that gets to focus entirely on characters we already know and whose schtick we’ve already seen and, importantly, whose schticks have not changed in a meaningful way. And this is ultimately the problem, right? The crux of this story, and in some ways, ultimately, the crux of every Devil May Cry story, is that Dante and Vergil refuse to change. They’re unable to do it on their own, and they don’t have anyone willing to force them. But they have to change, or they’re going to die. They’re going to kill EACH OTHER, and Nero is probably going to kill like a million more people, but they’re going to kill each other too, and that’s like, that’s sad, right? It sucks. These are Our Boys. Let’s talk about them.
I’ve alluded earlier and in my DMC4 review that Dante is a character who is something of a chameleon in this series – he wears a lot of different hats. He can kind of be whatever he needs to be, symbolically. A romantic hero, a gothic one, a gay icon, a harlequin. And it works, he’s a complicated guy, aided by the fact that he’s the character who most often straddles the fourth wall, playing most directly to the audience. But no matter what Dante is in a given moment there’s something he always is, unerringly: closed off. Dante’s most consistent trait, more than loving pizza, more than being a loud mouth, more than thinking violence is sexy, is being unwilling to let other people in on his own turmoil. He doesn’t lack for it! When your dad is Cool Satan and your mom dies saving you from demons when you’re only a wee lad, right in front of your eyes, as your house burns around you, surely that would fuck you up. Dante is kind of an asshole but he IS an innately kind person; he’s made it his mission to hunt demons and he does it mostly altruistically (he is clearly not raking in the bucks at any point in the timeline we meet him on) and throughout the series he’s looking out for other people, trying to do right by them even if it’s often in a paternalistic, self-sacrificial way.
But while he’s happy to be there for other people, emotionally and more often physically, he’s loathe to let anyone be there for him. After Vergil rejects his offer of family Dante essentially shuts down and he’s on a downward path for the rest of his life. We see it at the end of the third game when he stoically rejects Lady’s attempt to comfort him in his obvious grief, physically turning away from her to hide the evidence of his tears as he verbally denies their existence; we see it in 1 where he only talks about his feelings for Trish after he thinks she’s dead, and when she’s back at the end he frames all of his tenderness towards her insecurities rather than as a projection of his feelings; 2 is perhaps his most obviously wooden state in all directions and gives him no obvious opportunities for connection; and in 4 he essentially fails to act normal towards Nero until the actual ending, when there are multiple points where large parts of the story could have been entirely averted or assuaged had he just taken a moment to let Nero in. I don’t JUST mean when he’s first meeting Nero and Nero tries to kill him either, I mean once Nero is suspicious of the church and Dante clearly knows what’s going on; just chat him up in the jungle bro! But he can’t, that’s his whole thing. Dante is like 40 years old in DMC4, and he’s had no reason to get better about his hangups and many reasons to get worse since Vergil amplified them twenty years prior. By the time of DMC5 it’s no wonder why he tries to forcibly remove all of his friends from a dangerous scenario even before he realizes how personal the conflict is to him, and why he works so much harder once he does connect the dots – he’s fully given up on trying. And after getting away with having people at arm’s length for so long, why not? It’s going fine. So in 5 he repeatedly tries to psych Nero out of hanging around, eventually starts telling him flat out to leave, and he refuses to talk to Trish about Vergil, again framing it as for her own benefit when she’s wounded as an excuse to avoid his own feelings.
I feel like Dante is largely a pretty classic variation on the post-war Japanese delinquent type of guy who exists explicitly in opposition to the conservative society that he largely was spawned from, or even the post-delinquent kind of scrappy hero you'd see in the post-Nikkatsu studio boom (thinking about early Imamura type protagonists - although Dante's sexuality is more implicit to his being), and oftentimes this character comes with a bleeding heart of gold that may be hidden to varying degrees, to further drive home his separation from the straight lace he opposes; except that Dante clearly sees his vulnerability as a weakness to be hidden, fully erecting his facade, which DMC5 offers the most cracks in. Throughout the game, especially in the last few missions as things become more dire and he’s starting to sweat, you can see Dante’s happy-go-luckiness slip. Not that it’s a mask all the time, but that in these moments he has to work for it. There’s a degree to which he would rather fake his normal personality than deal with his shit. I don’t think Dante’s totally putting it on or anything, like I think when Vergil is like “if I 1v1 nero and win it’s like I beat you okay” and Dante replies jokingly to it I think that’s a genuine response to the absolutely unhinged thing Vergil said, but I also think it’s an effort to enact a Nothing Is Wrong Tee Hee personality All The Time, and he loses it a lot at the end of the game.
Vergil, then, as ever, is Dante’s opposite. He didn’t get those last few moments of parental love before their mom died, because she died looking for him after she sheltered Dante, so the lesson Vergil took away from that night was that the only person he can ever rely on is himself, and he needs to become strong enough that no one can hurt him ever, ever again. That is, of course, a starting point, and a driving element of his personality that we were missing before DMC5 shows us those moments in detail. Crystallizing the moment of trauma also crystallizes these two as people rather than fun but shallow shonen protagonists. Vergil may ultimately be an enormous prick with no empathy but he’s not like that for no reason now and I do think that’s worth something.
So where Dante is a red-blooded rebellious asshole Vergil is prim and proper, clothes suggesting angular lines and rigid posture. His speech is formal, his sword is more classically elegant, an ornate katana vs. Dante’s gaudy hot topic ornament broadsword. He evokes classical samurai imagery in more than his sword – it’s in his cruel demeanor, his manufactured regality, the way that much of this is a facade, and the way he considers power a justification in itself. The strong dominate the weak – he has experienced this firsthand, as the weak, as a boy – and so in pursuit of becoming the strong, nothing is off the table, and more than once he does some intense mass murder to get to where he needs to be. He essentially has the same image of the ideal man in his head that modern Japanese fascists do but he at least has the justification of terrible childhood trauma driving his insecurities.
The thing about Dante and Vergil though isn’t just that they’re opposites - they’re also twins. They perceive themselves to have the same problem: they both think that to be vulnerable is their ultimate weakness, and to cope with that they’re both performing idealized images of masculinity, they just have different ideas of what that looks like. Dante’s is obviously less harmful to the world at large because he hasn’t murdered anyone over it and he never voted for Shinzo Abe, but he’s doing the same fundamental thing Vergil is doing in his own way. And sure, Dante is in a healthier place overall; he has friends who love him and whom he loves, and I think it’s telling that when he commits symbolic seppuku among their mother’s ashes he is empowered by absorbing the last earthly relic of their father where Vergil does the same thing and it intentionally separates all of his empathy into a separate guy while he becomes a buff, shitty monster dude. But at the same time, when we get like 90% of the way to a resolution and Vergil is back to himself and Dante is there with him for the first time as real equals in over twenty years, Dante does not recreate the events of DMC3. He doesn’t reach out to Vergil. He doesn’t even try to talk him down this time. He just wants to kill him and be done with it, or die. He’s been burned too many times. He simply can’t be that guy again.
It would be the setup for a genuine tragedy, two men trapped in a cycle of violence that reaches back (and as we will soon see, now forward as well) generations and leads them to destroy their family. It would be if not for the fact that there is a Third Boy at play. We gotta talk about Nero.
One of the most charming things about Nero is that in a series where everybody else is acting Like That all the time he is basically just a normal guy? Like yes he used to have a fucked up demon arm and yes he can rev his sword like a motorcycle but like, all this man wants to do in the world is hang out with his fuckin girlfriend bro. He’s just a nice little grumpy guy. He kind of tries to do banter with guys he fights but he’s not very good at it, and it’s VERY easy to rile him up. Really wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s pouty. I love this guy dude, I just want to make him an ice cream cone with like three scoops on it. I wanna put him in a little glass jar and shake it up. Great guy, Nero.
But he’s got his own shit, right! He was adopted by some important people in the cult church from DMC4, I forget if they had a name, it’s not important, kind of raised by his girlfriend’s brother, whom he will later kill in self-defense (5 brings this up in a pivotal moment as something that motivates Nero in the present, which I appreciate), and he has that fucked up demon arm, which he feels compelled to hide for his whole life because he assumes his church will not be cool about it, unaware that they are actually a demon cult. So when things do start popping off and the only institution that he’s known a tenuous sort of safety and family with turns on him and endangers his found family in his girlfriend Kyrie, it’s fucked up! Gets him all mad, gets him all sad! But Nero doesn’t bottle shit, he doesn’t hide it. Nero might give himself more responsibility than he’s liable for but he’s a guy who understands the value of what he’s got and sings about it loudly; we don’t know as much about his circumstances as we do Dante and Virgil’s so it’s hard to know for sure what his childhood was like or how he feels about it, but it seems that his support network and his experiences have given him perspective and the ability to deal with his feelings in a healthy way, even as he’s really put through the ringer.
So when he finds out that Vergil is his dad and everyone knew this but him he’s pissed, because Vergil DID cut off his arm and murder like a million people lol, but when he finds out that this ends in Dante and Vergil killing each other he’s confused, because Nero is a normal guy and this doesn’t make any sense from the outside. You get the vibe that Nero has always wanted a family, a place to unconditionally, belong, and now that he finds out he has one everybody’s just acting like it’s an inevitability that it has to destroy itself, and that’s fundamentally unacceptable to him. In a series where I think every single game is about people somehow killing people they consider family (except maybe 2? I don’t remember if that guy was Lucia’s dad I think he wasn’t), Nero, affirmed by a conversation with his found family in Kyrie insists that this cannot be the way. In a series where people hold their shit inside, where everyone is constantly posturing like sick badasses, Nero spends an entire boss fight yelling as his dad to knock it the fuck off and act like an adult. All it took was someone without context, with eyes unclouded by a lifetime of participation in the cycle they had created, to fight for the family instead of against it. This also activates his devil trigger for the first time in a direct inversion of how that happened for Dante in 3 – a powerful protective, loving impulse rather than the urges of despair.
And it works, mostly. Things are not fully repaired, and Dante and Vergil are not new men overnight, but they do work together to stop the apocalypse Vergil had triggered, and they do consign themselves to an indefinite co-solitude in hell where they can duel each other in a friendlier way than they have in the past, because on one hand this is truly the only way they know how to communicate and on the other, as half-demons it’s demonstrated throughout the series that violence is a form of positive communication for them. This is good, I think, to demonstrate that people so stuck in their ways can’t just fix their shit in one conversation, in one act. But Dante and possibly Vergil both wanted this, and they’re happy to have it.
This is what makes DMC5 so good; Morihashi has taken all of these disparate threads from twenty years of games, each of them with very different stories and very different ideas, and builds upon each of them to create a work that is thematically satisfying and narratively conclusive for characters who didn’t necessarily have distinct narrative arcs before this. I love these characters, they’re Cool Dudes and now they’re also compelling characters, more after this than ever before. I don’t know if this is the end of Devil May Cry but I think it very well could serve as one. I hope that’s not the case, though. Not only do I think it would simply be criminal to leave the world wanting another action game this fuuuuucking sick, but they keep proving there’s always more to mine from these characters and their world. I think it would be a shame not to take another shot at it.
Everybody KNOWS this stuff. We’ve all played DMC5, we’ve all talked about it, the game is simply sick as fuck. We all love Pull My Devil Trigger, it’s the best song ever made, this is just true! It’s Just True. So I don’t feel like writing about that stuff any more than I have, other people have surely done it better. I try not to read reviews before I’ve finished writing my own, but I’m sure people have done it better right here on Backloggd. I’d rather talk about the way this series has very organically transitioned from something I laugh along with, that’s maybe a lot smarter about its application of gothic theming than I would have expected, to something that’s emotionally invested me on the level I care about, like, I dunno, Naruto or whatever, to something that I think has, over time, crafted a genuinely touching story of a family wounded by trauma and their ability or inability to overcome a great social and generational violence. I don’t think this has been there the whole time, but by allowing the series’ now-regular main credited writer since DMC3, Bingo Morihashi, a consistent creative voice in the franchise, he’s taken characters who have been portrayed disparately across two decades and used these gaps and these disparities as a tool to demonstrate the ways that time and experience do and don’t change us, especially when we’re molded by intense experiences early in life. I think this has been happening for a long time in this series, but DMC5 gives the context necessary to fully solidify it as a feat of characterization.
I don’t think that either of the twists in this game are particularly shocking if you’re paying attention to anything anyone says or does in DMC4 or this game but I am gonna toss out that there are a couple of big bombs in this game and I’m gonna talk pretty openly about them, and as I’ve mentioned I think the writing in this is pretty fuckin sick so if you care about that, now’s the time to duck out!
Devil May Cry 5 is a game about The Boys. Everybody tends to take their turn in the limelight in this series but as is often the case in this genre of story a lot of the time they just kind of hang out after their story is done? Like, there’s not really a good reason for Trish and Lady to be in DMC4 and 5 from a narrative perspective and they don’t really grow as characters, we’re just happy to see them because they’re Cool, right? Vergil didn’t even get to like, BE in DMC4 he only got to be a bonus character in a RE-RELEASE of it seven years later lmao. DMC5 is unique in the series in that it’s the first time we get a story that gets to focus entirely on characters we already know and whose schtick we’ve already seen and, importantly, whose schticks have not changed in a meaningful way. And this is ultimately the problem, right? The crux of this story, and in some ways, ultimately, the crux of every Devil May Cry story, is that Dante and Vergil refuse to change. They’re unable to do it on their own, and they don’t have anyone willing to force them. But they have to change, or they’re going to die. They’re going to kill EACH OTHER, and Nero is probably going to kill like a million more people, but they’re going to kill each other too, and that’s like, that’s sad, right? It sucks. These are Our Boys. Let’s talk about them.
I’ve alluded earlier and in my DMC4 review that Dante is a character who is something of a chameleon in this series – he wears a lot of different hats. He can kind of be whatever he needs to be, symbolically. A romantic hero, a gothic one, a gay icon, a harlequin. And it works, he’s a complicated guy, aided by the fact that he’s the character who most often straddles the fourth wall, playing most directly to the audience. But no matter what Dante is in a given moment there’s something he always is, unerringly: closed off. Dante’s most consistent trait, more than loving pizza, more than being a loud mouth, more than thinking violence is sexy, is being unwilling to let other people in on his own turmoil. He doesn’t lack for it! When your dad is Cool Satan and your mom dies saving you from demons when you’re only a wee lad, right in front of your eyes, as your house burns around you, surely that would fuck you up. Dante is kind of an asshole but he IS an innately kind person; he’s made it his mission to hunt demons and he does it mostly altruistically (he is clearly not raking in the bucks at any point in the timeline we meet him on) and throughout the series he’s looking out for other people, trying to do right by them even if it’s often in a paternalistic, self-sacrificial way.
But while he’s happy to be there for other people, emotionally and more often physically, he’s loathe to let anyone be there for him. After Vergil rejects his offer of family Dante essentially shuts down and he’s on a downward path for the rest of his life. We see it at the end of the third game when he stoically rejects Lady’s attempt to comfort him in his obvious grief, physically turning away from her to hide the evidence of his tears as he verbally denies their existence; we see it in 1 where he only talks about his feelings for Trish after he thinks she’s dead, and when she’s back at the end he frames all of his tenderness towards her insecurities rather than as a projection of his feelings; 2 is perhaps his most obviously wooden state in all directions and gives him no obvious opportunities for connection; and in 4 he essentially fails to act normal towards Nero until the actual ending, when there are multiple points where large parts of the story could have been entirely averted or assuaged had he just taken a moment to let Nero in. I don’t JUST mean when he’s first meeting Nero and Nero tries to kill him either, I mean once Nero is suspicious of the church and Dante clearly knows what’s going on; just chat him up in the jungle bro! But he can’t, that’s his whole thing. Dante is like 40 years old in DMC4, and he’s had no reason to get better about his hangups and many reasons to get worse since Vergil amplified them twenty years prior. By the time of DMC5 it’s no wonder why he tries to forcibly remove all of his friends from a dangerous scenario even before he realizes how personal the conflict is to him, and why he works so much harder once he does connect the dots – he’s fully given up on trying. And after getting away with having people at arm’s length for so long, why not? It’s going fine. So in 5 he repeatedly tries to psych Nero out of hanging around, eventually starts telling him flat out to leave, and he refuses to talk to Trish about Vergil, again framing it as for her own benefit when she’s wounded as an excuse to avoid his own feelings.
I feel like Dante is largely a pretty classic variation on the post-war Japanese delinquent type of guy who exists explicitly in opposition to the conservative society that he largely was spawned from, or even the post-delinquent kind of scrappy hero you'd see in the post-Nikkatsu studio boom (thinking about early Imamura type protagonists - although Dante's sexuality is more implicit to his being), and oftentimes this character comes with a bleeding heart of gold that may be hidden to varying degrees, to further drive home his separation from the straight lace he opposes; except that Dante clearly sees his vulnerability as a weakness to be hidden, fully erecting his facade, which DMC5 offers the most cracks in. Throughout the game, especially in the last few missions as things become more dire and he’s starting to sweat, you can see Dante’s happy-go-luckiness slip. Not that it’s a mask all the time, but that in these moments he has to work for it. There’s a degree to which he would rather fake his normal personality than deal with his shit. I don’t think Dante’s totally putting it on or anything, like I think when Vergil is like “if I 1v1 nero and win it’s like I beat you okay” and Dante replies jokingly to it I think that’s a genuine response to the absolutely unhinged thing Vergil said, but I also think it’s an effort to enact a Nothing Is Wrong Tee Hee personality All The Time, and he loses it a lot at the end of the game.
Vergil, then, as ever, is Dante’s opposite. He didn’t get those last few moments of parental love before their mom died, because she died looking for him after she sheltered Dante, so the lesson Vergil took away from that night was that the only person he can ever rely on is himself, and he needs to become strong enough that no one can hurt him ever, ever again. That is, of course, a starting point, and a driving element of his personality that we were missing before DMC5 shows us those moments in detail. Crystallizing the moment of trauma also crystallizes these two as people rather than fun but shallow shonen protagonists. Vergil may ultimately be an enormous prick with no empathy but he’s not like that for no reason now and I do think that’s worth something.
So where Dante is a red-blooded rebellious asshole Vergil is prim and proper, clothes suggesting angular lines and rigid posture. His speech is formal, his sword is more classically elegant, an ornate katana vs. Dante’s gaudy hot topic ornament broadsword. He evokes classical samurai imagery in more than his sword – it’s in his cruel demeanor, his manufactured regality, the way that much of this is a facade, and the way he considers power a justification in itself. The strong dominate the weak – he has experienced this firsthand, as the weak, as a boy – and so in pursuit of becoming the strong, nothing is off the table, and more than once he does some intense mass murder to get to where he needs to be. He essentially has the same image of the ideal man in his head that modern Japanese fascists do but he at least has the justification of terrible childhood trauma driving his insecurities.
The thing about Dante and Vergil though isn’t just that they’re opposites - they’re also twins. They perceive themselves to have the same problem: they both think that to be vulnerable is their ultimate weakness, and to cope with that they’re both performing idealized images of masculinity, they just have different ideas of what that looks like. Dante’s is obviously less harmful to the world at large because he hasn’t murdered anyone over it and he never voted for Shinzo Abe, but he’s doing the same fundamental thing Vergil is doing in his own way. And sure, Dante is in a healthier place overall; he has friends who love him and whom he loves, and I think it’s telling that when he commits symbolic seppuku among their mother’s ashes he is empowered by absorbing the last earthly relic of their father where Vergil does the same thing and it intentionally separates all of his empathy into a separate guy while he becomes a buff, shitty monster dude. But at the same time, when we get like 90% of the way to a resolution and Vergil is back to himself and Dante is there with him for the first time as real equals in over twenty years, Dante does not recreate the events of DMC3. He doesn’t reach out to Vergil. He doesn’t even try to talk him down this time. He just wants to kill him and be done with it, or die. He’s been burned too many times. He simply can’t be that guy again.
It would be the setup for a genuine tragedy, two men trapped in a cycle of violence that reaches back (and as we will soon see, now forward as well) generations and leads them to destroy their family. It would be if not for the fact that there is a Third Boy at play. We gotta talk about Nero.
One of the most charming things about Nero is that in a series where everybody else is acting Like That all the time he is basically just a normal guy? Like yes he used to have a fucked up demon arm and yes he can rev his sword like a motorcycle but like, all this man wants to do in the world is hang out with his fuckin girlfriend bro. He’s just a nice little grumpy guy. He kind of tries to do banter with guys he fights but he’s not very good at it, and it’s VERY easy to rile him up. Really wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s pouty. I love this guy dude, I just want to make him an ice cream cone with like three scoops on it. I wanna put him in a little glass jar and shake it up. Great guy, Nero.
But he’s got his own shit, right! He was adopted by some important people in the cult church from DMC4, I forget if they had a name, it’s not important, kind of raised by his girlfriend’s brother, whom he will later kill in self-defense (5 brings this up in a pivotal moment as something that motivates Nero in the present, which I appreciate), and he has that fucked up demon arm, which he feels compelled to hide for his whole life because he assumes his church will not be cool about it, unaware that they are actually a demon cult. So when things do start popping off and the only institution that he’s known a tenuous sort of safety and family with turns on him and endangers his found family in his girlfriend Kyrie, it’s fucked up! Gets him all mad, gets him all sad! But Nero doesn’t bottle shit, he doesn’t hide it. Nero might give himself more responsibility than he’s liable for but he’s a guy who understands the value of what he’s got and sings about it loudly; we don’t know as much about his circumstances as we do Dante and Virgil’s so it’s hard to know for sure what his childhood was like or how he feels about it, but it seems that his support network and his experiences have given him perspective and the ability to deal with his feelings in a healthy way, even as he’s really put through the ringer.
So when he finds out that Vergil is his dad and everyone knew this but him he’s pissed, because Vergil DID cut off his arm and murder like a million people lol, but when he finds out that this ends in Dante and Vergil killing each other he’s confused, because Nero is a normal guy and this doesn’t make any sense from the outside. You get the vibe that Nero has always wanted a family, a place to unconditionally, belong, and now that he finds out he has one everybody’s just acting like it’s an inevitability that it has to destroy itself, and that’s fundamentally unacceptable to him. In a series where I think every single game is about people somehow killing people they consider family (except maybe 2? I don’t remember if that guy was Lucia’s dad I think he wasn’t), Nero, affirmed by a conversation with his found family in Kyrie insists that this cannot be the way. In a series where people hold their shit inside, where everyone is constantly posturing like sick badasses, Nero spends an entire boss fight yelling as his dad to knock it the fuck off and act like an adult. All it took was someone without context, with eyes unclouded by a lifetime of participation in the cycle they had created, to fight for the family instead of against it. This also activates his devil trigger for the first time in a direct inversion of how that happened for Dante in 3 – a powerful protective, loving impulse rather than the urges of despair.
And it works, mostly. Things are not fully repaired, and Dante and Vergil are not new men overnight, but they do work together to stop the apocalypse Vergil had triggered, and they do consign themselves to an indefinite co-solitude in hell where they can duel each other in a friendlier way than they have in the past, because on one hand this is truly the only way they know how to communicate and on the other, as half-demons it’s demonstrated throughout the series that violence is a form of positive communication for them. This is good, I think, to demonstrate that people so stuck in their ways can’t just fix their shit in one conversation, in one act. But Dante and possibly Vergil both wanted this, and they’re happy to have it.
This is what makes DMC5 so good; Morihashi has taken all of these disparate threads from twenty years of games, each of them with very different stories and very different ideas, and builds upon each of them to create a work that is thematically satisfying and narratively conclusive for characters who didn’t necessarily have distinct narrative arcs before this. I love these characters, they’re Cool Dudes and now they’re also compelling characters, more after this than ever before. I don’t know if this is the end of Devil May Cry but I think it very well could serve as one. I hope that’s not the case, though. Not only do I think it would simply be criminal to leave the world wanting another action game this fuuuuucking sick, but they keep proving there’s always more to mine from these characters and their world. I think it would be a shame not to take another shot at it.
look i dont like saying this but this was a reddit game lmao
Eco Fighters
1994
buy energy saving lightbulbs or this will happen to you
Blazing Star
1998
Refused to kill the final boss because it's an actual infant with a gun and the game called me 'poor', explain yourself SNK.
Castlevania
1986
Society's earliest recorded use of "good video gamese"
Paper Mario
2000
This is either your favorite Paper Mario or your 2nd favorite. No in betweens. This game is greatness
Regardless of how much time has passed already this game still holds itself together as a very unique approach to the Super Mario series. To think this was released 22 years ago is insane. I love this game
Regardless of how much time has passed already this game still holds itself together as a very unique approach to the Super Mario series. To think this was released 22 years ago is insane. I love this game
Chop Suey
1995
Beauty in the little knick-knacks, the cute flora and vignettes of yesteryears. True, complete, warmth in the little stops made, flights through memory to profusely loving stories!! Want to turn back time to where I made my first steps in life with these earnest wings guiding me, but I'll settle for tearful solace filling this hole embracing this work. What an incredible world we can make and stories to tell just by looking through our small beady eyes at our collective town's paraphernalia and souvenirs. Love life.
F.E.A.R.
2006
How much action can a horror game have before it is no longer able to be considered survival-horror? It's a topic gaming journalists and gamers in general have been discussing for a while now. F.E.A.R certainly has an interesting place in that debate. When you look back at the Resident Evil franchise you'll find that there was a relatively brief (and fairly recent as of this writing) period where its fans had basically turned their backs on it after the 5th and 6th main entries supposedly strayed too far away from their established roots by adopting big set pieces, a more energetic pace, cooperative gameplay, and third-person shooting mechanics that would rival even Gears of War's. They did retain some core design staples like item and inventory management though, which on paper still makes them a better representation of their original genre than this relatively standard FPS experience would be.
Rather than forcing you into slow, clunky combat encounters against grotesque monsters, or not giving you any means of self-defense at all as is the modern trend, this title is completely centered around fast and furious firefights against military-esque soldiers. Ammo is never a concern, medkits are plentiful, and you even have the ability to slow down time Max Payne style in short spurts to give you an edge. It's genuinely an absolute blast. The way your foes gush or explode into red mists of blood while debris from the semi-destructible scenery fills the air leads to visually exciting confrontations. The (to this day) highly touted enemy AI has begun to show signs of jank and age, but I remained impressed nonetheless by their capabilities on the battlefield. They'll vault over obstacles, communicate your position to one another, form strategies and try to flank you. Essentially coming up with tactics that extend beyond merely ducking behind a piece of cover with their heads poking out just far enough for you to score a headshot, which feels like all you see in our current post-CoD era. It's hard to complain about any of this from a pure fun standpoint, but it should come as no surprise that such an approach completely removes all the feelings of helplessness you would find in something like Outlast. So the only area where an accurate comparison to gems of that ilk could be made is the tone.
F.E.A.R. is structured very similarly to Half-Life in that rather than completing a string of segmented levels, you'll be making a mostly continuous progress through the world, save for the occasional interruption by a loading screen or segue-esque helicopter ride to an entirely new location. A style we haven't seen much since the BioShock series. Outside of a brief excursion into a rundown apartment complex though, the environments you'll at times get momentarily lost in lack the personality of standouts like Black Mesa, Rapture, or even the underground mining tunnels from the first Red Faction. What they do have however is atmosphere. The dynamic lighting and disquieting soundtrack craft a wonderfully tense, unsettling vibe. To the point where I felt a sense of legitimate apprehension every time I was faced with going down another pitch-black hallway. The source of my anxiety being a raven-haired little specter clearly inspired by J-horror phantoms. She's never actually a physical threat to the player, but her unexpected appearances are good for a chill up your spine or a quick jolt regardless. Allow me to inform you, this is coming from a guy who didn't find Dead Space scary in the slightest. It's terror is sporadically undermined by a few out of place segments of intentionally comedic intents involving chasing down a "Cheezee Pooz" eating fatso in a Hawaiian shirt as he tries to cram his overly wide backside into air vents in an effort to escape, or elevator rides accompanied by comedically cheery music that get stopped on every floor by hostile gunmen. Although the biggest thing that may keep you from appreciating the full scope of the nightmare offered here are the sound mixing issues which cause it to be hard to hear dialog without severely lowering everything else in the options menu, or how much of the supplementary information is hidden away in answering machine messages that are boring to listen to. Flaws that will limit your possible enjoyment of the dark, twisted story.
While developer Monolith mostly nailed the thematic and presentation aspects, it's the side of the package you control that makes it difficult to justify calling it true survival-horror, rather than just horror-flavored, given the lengths it willingly goes to ensure you think you're Arnold Schwarzenegger or somebody. A fact that's slightly worse on consoles due to the exclusive "Instant Action" mode that's entirely focused on the gunplay and nothing else. Yet, I guess I'm in agreement with what IGN said once, that "survival horror is one of the only genres defined not by gameplay mechanics, but by theme, atmosphere, subject matter, and design philosophy." Because of that I can't help but put F.E.A.R. in the same vein as the Silent Hill's and Amnesia's. Having the ability to more effectively stand your ground against threats shouldn't matter in my mind so long as the rest of the surrounding material fits the bill, and are we honestly going to pretend the more commonly accepted into fold Condemned duology didn't emphasize forcing you to fight rather than flee, or that The Suffering wasn't basically a near straight-up shooter? Nevertheless, regardless of whether you agree with me orare wrong not in terms of what this should rightfully be classified as, I believe you'll come to the same conclusion that it's a pretty great game. A product from a time when the single-player was the main focus so it doesn't even matter that the multiplayer is dead. Worth seeking out if you're a fan of those not quite Boomer, but no longer "Modern" shooters along the lines of the original Prey or Doom 3.
8/10
Rather than forcing you into slow, clunky combat encounters against grotesque monsters, or not giving you any means of self-defense at all as is the modern trend, this title is completely centered around fast and furious firefights against military-esque soldiers. Ammo is never a concern, medkits are plentiful, and you even have the ability to slow down time Max Payne style in short spurts to give you an edge. It's genuinely an absolute blast. The way your foes gush or explode into red mists of blood while debris from the semi-destructible scenery fills the air leads to visually exciting confrontations. The (to this day) highly touted enemy AI has begun to show signs of jank and age, but I remained impressed nonetheless by their capabilities on the battlefield. They'll vault over obstacles, communicate your position to one another, form strategies and try to flank you. Essentially coming up with tactics that extend beyond merely ducking behind a piece of cover with their heads poking out just far enough for you to score a headshot, which feels like all you see in our current post-CoD era. It's hard to complain about any of this from a pure fun standpoint, but it should come as no surprise that such an approach completely removes all the feelings of helplessness you would find in something like Outlast. So the only area where an accurate comparison to gems of that ilk could be made is the tone.
F.E.A.R. is structured very similarly to Half-Life in that rather than completing a string of segmented levels, you'll be making a mostly continuous progress through the world, save for the occasional interruption by a loading screen or segue-esque helicopter ride to an entirely new location. A style we haven't seen much since the BioShock series. Outside of a brief excursion into a rundown apartment complex though, the environments you'll at times get momentarily lost in lack the personality of standouts like Black Mesa, Rapture, or even the underground mining tunnels from the first Red Faction. What they do have however is atmosphere. The dynamic lighting and disquieting soundtrack craft a wonderfully tense, unsettling vibe. To the point where I felt a sense of legitimate apprehension every time I was faced with going down another pitch-black hallway. The source of my anxiety being a raven-haired little specter clearly inspired by J-horror phantoms. She's never actually a physical threat to the player, but her unexpected appearances are good for a chill up your spine or a quick jolt regardless. Allow me to inform you, this is coming from a guy who didn't find Dead Space scary in the slightest. It's terror is sporadically undermined by a few out of place segments of intentionally comedic intents involving chasing down a "Cheezee Pooz" eating fatso in a Hawaiian shirt as he tries to cram his overly wide backside into air vents in an effort to escape, or elevator rides accompanied by comedically cheery music that get stopped on every floor by hostile gunmen. Although the biggest thing that may keep you from appreciating the full scope of the nightmare offered here are the sound mixing issues which cause it to be hard to hear dialog without severely lowering everything else in the options menu, or how much of the supplementary information is hidden away in answering machine messages that are boring to listen to. Flaws that will limit your possible enjoyment of the dark, twisted story.
While developer Monolith mostly nailed the thematic and presentation aspects, it's the side of the package you control that makes it difficult to justify calling it true survival-horror, rather than just horror-flavored, given the lengths it willingly goes to ensure you think you're Arnold Schwarzenegger or somebody. A fact that's slightly worse on consoles due to the exclusive "Instant Action" mode that's entirely focused on the gunplay and nothing else. Yet, I guess I'm in agreement with what IGN said once, that "survival horror is one of the only genres defined not by gameplay mechanics, but by theme, atmosphere, subject matter, and design philosophy." Because of that I can't help but put F.E.A.R. in the same vein as the Silent Hill's and Amnesia's. Having the ability to more effectively stand your ground against threats shouldn't matter in my mind so long as the rest of the surrounding material fits the bill, and are we honestly going to pretend the more commonly accepted into fold Condemned duology didn't emphasize forcing you to fight rather than flee, or that The Suffering wasn't basically a near straight-up shooter? Nevertheless, regardless of whether you agree with me or
8/10
Kirby's Adventure
1993
This has to be one of the biggest sequel glowups of all time. For one thing Kirby's Adventure came out years after the SNES, so it's one of the most technically impressive NES games and looks fantastic. Absolutely stunning. For another: this is the completion of basically the entire Kirby formula that currently exists. Powers, secrets, Meta Knight, a big cool ending showdown: it's all here. What interests me, then, is what ISN'T here. What feels different between this and, say, Forgotten World, which I played really recently and said on this very website feels like a Kirby-ass Kirby game?
Copy powers: they're Kirby's whole thing. Imagine looking at Kirby's Dreamland and coming up with the idea to add the powers. I will never be that cool or smart in my whole life. I think if you asked most of us to describe Kirby's whole THING we might say something like "Kirby eats guys and gains their powers." Thing is, I find in most of these games I tend to think of the powers as being a property of the enemies, rather than the other way around. Kirby's Adventure is pretty dedicated to "enemy has a move, and you get that specific move from devouring them." Every ability has at most two sources, one normal enemy and one miniboss, and the single function of the ability will be the thing that the regular enemy uses to attack you. Throw and Backdrop are kind of exceptions because they only come from minibosses, and UFO is like a whole thing but it's also meant to be super rare and special. The funniest thing about this is the realization that Smash Brothers is kind of the only thing carrying on this philosophy of Kirby in the modern era.
You can tell that the powers were invisioned less as a thing you can just hang onto forever and fight enemies with here, because your suction power is still very strong, and a good number of abilities are pretty bad for fighting, or at least for fighting bosses. Ball is a very fun power to use that's purely about blasting through areas. High Jump is similar but more niche so you won't keep it long. Burn will eventually be incorporated into the Fire moveset but has the same property. You also lose your ability with just a single hit, and they can be tricky to get back at times, but I found myself actively dropping powers to use as a projectile more than once.
The other thing that keeps the game moving fast despite being the first Kirby with a bunch of secrets in it is that so many of them are just hidden doors, and the ones that require powers usually give you the one you need right beforehand. When the game gives you a power, it wants you to use it! I watched Twitch streamer Strawbrose get 100% in Adventure without ever having to redo a level, and it only required a few strategic uses of the roulette function that occurs when you eat two different-power enemies at once. Also, the secrets don't actually give you much other than a little bonus room most of the time. The game is meant to really MOVE in a way that later games in the series will not be.
Anyway I gotta say, this is still one of my top Kirbs. I could see it feeling a little loose for people coming back to it now, but it looks great, sounds great, plays great. Absolute banger.
Copy powers: they're Kirby's whole thing. Imagine looking at Kirby's Dreamland and coming up with the idea to add the powers. I will never be that cool or smart in my whole life. I think if you asked most of us to describe Kirby's whole THING we might say something like "Kirby eats guys and gains their powers." Thing is, I find in most of these games I tend to think of the powers as being a property of the enemies, rather than the other way around. Kirby's Adventure is pretty dedicated to "enemy has a move, and you get that specific move from devouring them." Every ability has at most two sources, one normal enemy and one miniboss, and the single function of the ability will be the thing that the regular enemy uses to attack you. Throw and Backdrop are kind of exceptions because they only come from minibosses, and UFO is like a whole thing but it's also meant to be super rare and special. The funniest thing about this is the realization that Smash Brothers is kind of the only thing carrying on this philosophy of Kirby in the modern era.
You can tell that the powers were invisioned less as a thing you can just hang onto forever and fight enemies with here, because your suction power is still very strong, and a good number of abilities are pretty bad for fighting, or at least for fighting bosses. Ball is a very fun power to use that's purely about blasting through areas. High Jump is similar but more niche so you won't keep it long. Burn will eventually be incorporated into the Fire moveset but has the same property. You also lose your ability with just a single hit, and they can be tricky to get back at times, but I found myself actively dropping powers to use as a projectile more than once.
The other thing that keeps the game moving fast despite being the first Kirby with a bunch of secrets in it is that so many of them are just hidden doors, and the ones that require powers usually give you the one you need right beforehand. When the game gives you a power, it wants you to use it! I watched Twitch streamer Strawbrose get 100% in Adventure without ever having to redo a level, and it only required a few strategic uses of the roulette function that occurs when you eat two different-power enemies at once. Also, the secrets don't actually give you much other than a little bonus room most of the time. The game is meant to really MOVE in a way that later games in the series will not be.
Anyway I gotta say, this is still one of my top Kirbs. I could see it feeling a little loose for people coming back to it now, but it looks great, sounds great, plays great. Absolute banger.