ZeldaFan
Pretty ironic that the worst part of Arkham knight is the Arkham knight
This review contains spoilers
The legend of Zelda tears of the kingdom, a very long awaited sequel to what is considered one of the greatest games ever made.
With that hype behind it, some were definitely skeptical, worrying about how it could just be “$70 dlc”, and it wouldn’t live up to BOTW, which is fair, so how do you make one of the greatest even greater……..well Nintendo’s answer is this game.
This game is fucking incredible, it literally improves on every single aspect of BOTW, so much so that it makes that game look like a $60 tech demo for this one, Nintendo didn’t just knock it out of the park, they knocked it out of the galaxy.
let’s not make this intro any longer, here’s why I love this newest Zelda game.
Out of every Zelda game, this game by far is the most fun, and that is because of two simple things: zonai devices and ultrahand, these two things alone are about what half of mine, and many others playthroughs are mostly made up of, in my time with this game I made many cars, planes, motorcycles, machines of death and destruction, mechs, attack helicopters, a lot of dicks, and so much more, these mechanics just add so much more content in this game through the sheer creativity you can manage alone, I completed many shrine puzzles in ways that weren’t intended with these abilities.
One thing I forgot to mention in my list of things I did with ultrahands and devices is torturing koroks, we all hate these little fuckers now cause of the 900 seeds you collect in the last game, and literally every reward just being that got on our nerves, and now there are a 1000 of them in this game and many of us are fed up with them.
I tortured many koroks, in total of like the fucking 50 of them I ran into, I helped maybe 3 of them reach their friend, I ignored like 15 of them, but the rest I crucified, grilled, waterboarded, the Geneva conventions went beyond just the Geneva suggestions, I tore koroks apart, and I could talk about the shit I did to them all day but we got other fun things to talk about in this game.
Ultrahand is the definitely the best new ability, but don’t sleep on the other ones, fuse is very cool, I liked fusing random fucking things together to see what random weapons I could create, and fusing a rocket to a shield is a nice replacement for revalis gale (RIP champion abilities, the one thing BOTW did better).
Ascend is a neat ability, for about the first 1/3 of the game I forgot it existed and got confused on what to do in multiple shrines before I just realized I needed to use ascend, but once I started using it more, it became extremely useful, especially for stone talus’ and going up the asses of statues.
Recall is also very cool, not much else to say about it, I basically just made a bunch of elevators and it was the main thing that helped me break some shrines and complete in non intended ways.
Lastly autobuild, more of an extension to ultrahand but I probably would’ve gone insane without it so, very cool.
Moving on from the abilities and war crimes, let’s talk about this game’s biggest jump up in quality from BOTW, that being the variety, more variety on the shrines, more variety in a good chunk of the korok (well the ones I actually did at least), WAY more variety in the enemy department, and just far more variety when it comes to approaching things in this game.
Let’s talk about that enemy variety cause holy fuck they brought so much more in compared to the last game, of course you still got your enemies from BOTW like bokoblins, lynels, hinox, stone talus’, all of them are still here, but the amount of new enemies they added is more than I think any of us could’ve expected, horriblins, gleeoks, gibdos, froxs, the gloom hands, the zonai constructs, the like likes, and even more, it’s seriously impressive how much they were able to add, this goes even further with the main temple bosses, which I’ll get to later.
Shrines to me feel far more alive this time, they really take advantage of every ability you have, I don’t have much else to say, they’re all pretty great.
Moving on from that, another thing that has majorly improved from BOTW is the temples, now I don’t think these temples aren’t as strong as some of the temples from the other Zelda games, but in my opinion, they knocked it out of the park for the temples and the build up for them specifically, I’ll start off with the wind temple, and holy fuck this is definitely the best one (well, tied with another for the best), the build up just to get to the wind temple is one of my favorite parts of this entire series, the slow gradual climb up to the giant boat, getting higher and higher as the surface seems to fade, culminating in a dive into the storm itself, this then leads to the temple itself, which I’ll say right now is alright, it’s clearly supposed to be the tutorial temple so it’s nothing too complicated, but after completing it, this leads to the 2nd best boss fight in this game, the fight with Colgera is a serene cinematic set piece, I was out of arrows by this point so I had to do the whole diving strategy, and that made the fight far more fun, the atmosphere of the fight, the really cool boss design, THE MOTHERFUCKING SOUNDTRACK JUST BLASTING DRAGON ROOST ISLAND, THAT SHIT HAD ME ASCENDING, this part of the game is just incredible, not much else needs to be said here.
In comparison, I sadly have to say that the water temple did not even come close to the wind temple’s quality, to start off with the quest to get to the temple is kinda dull, you learn that Sidon has a fiancé and now you can’t marry him……..what a sad reality, anyways after that betrayal you just do some stuff around zora’s domain, and it’s just lame until you get to the whole secret underground zora ruins and of course the sky section, which is pretty good I’ll admit, I was excited to see what the temple was like and it’s…….fine I guess, I like how open it is but the temple is just kinda underwhelming, and doesn’t really have the atmosphere of the others, plus the boss is just eh, pretty underwhelming compared to the previous temple.
In comparison, the fire temple was a big improvement, starting off with helping yunobo and scaling death mountain was fun, the boss at the top of it was cool, and then going into the depths was a nice twist compared to the two previous sky ones, and the temple itself is pretty cool, again not super difficult but the mine cart system was a neat little puzzle, and finally it ends off with a Gohma boss fight, an enemy we haven’t seen since twilight princess, it’s a pretty easy boss but it’s fun, overall I like this part way more than the water temple, but doesn’t come close to the wind section of the game.
Now the lightning temple on the other hand is my other favorite temple in this game, the build up is already super cool, showing a gerudo desert surrounded by sandstorms of some kind, and gibdos are everywhere to be seen, after a bit of stuff you help gerudo town fend off a gibdo attack, and then you gotta find the temple itself, which involves a neat light puzzle around the desert, then after that comes the temple itself, which is definitely my favorite of the actual temples in the game, it’s got an old ancient temple atmosphere to it, the surprise fight with the boss at the start is really cool, the puzzles are fun, it feels the most like a classic Zelda dungeon and it caps off with a really good boss too.
Hyrule castle, well, it’s not really a temple like the others, the search for Zelda around the castle and the reveal that the Zelda you’ve been chasing all game is actually Phantom Ganon is cool, plus the phantom ganon boss itself is very fun, but nothing else much to say about it aside from that.
Spirit temple is weird, considering that it’s only a boss room (though it is quite a fun boss) it shouldn’t really count here, the robot factory part is cool but isn’t necessarily part of the dungeon, boss fight is cool and it’s the only part of the main story (aside from the fire temple part) to use the depths so that’s cool.
Overall I think the temples and general phenomenas were very fun, still not at classic Zelda dungeon level but we’re getting there.
Speaking of the depths, they’re very cool, as well as the sky islands, it adds a great deal to the map and makes the game even bigger, I would go into more detail buuuuuuut, I don’t feel like it, I just really like them.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is the overall story of the game, cause wow it has majorly improved from BOTW, the voice acting sounds better, the memories are used a lot better than they were in the previous game, in my opinion the characters are more interesting, and the motivation to push through is generally way stronger than what BOTW provided.
One last major thing this game improved on, and I’d probably say this is the thing they improved the most.
In botw, calamity Ganon was a mildly interesting force of nature antagonist, but thanks to no real personality connected to it, Calamity Ganon ends up becoming one of the less memorable things about the game as it goes on, doesn’t help that the final boss in that game is disappointingly easy, however in TOTK, THEY BROUGHT BACK THE FUCKING GOAT.
Ganondorf in TOTK is not only a massive step up form Calamity Ganon, but he’s also just a spectacular return to form for this character, we’ve seen pig Ganon a bunch in the games recently, but we haven’t fully seen Ganondorf himself in a mainline game since twilight princess, IN 2006, 17 YEARS, and oh boy he delivers a plate of absolute devious villainy.
Ganondorf is an absolute menace in this game, in the opening of the game he literally hurts link’s arm so bad that it not only has to be amputated but also nearly kills Link, SHATTERS THE MASTER SWORD LIKE NOTHING, and then taunts both Link and Zelda, HE FUCKING WOKE UP AND IMMEDIATELY BROKE THE ANCIENT SWORD FORGED BY GODS, this is just the start, I didn’t even mention the fact that Calamity Ganon, the force of nature that caused the fucking apocalypse in the last game, was just his leaking malice coming from his body………BRO CAUSED AN APOCALYPSE FROM JUST HOW MUCH HIS ANGER AND HATRED BUILT UP DOWN THERE, THE CALAMITY WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A BEEFED UP PHANTOM GANON.
This is just the start of the game btw, we next see him trying to take hyrule by force, failing but then swearing his allegiance to the royal family in the most disrespectful and evil way possible, he just doesn’t give a fuck, he literally just fucking exerts evil, this is the ganondorf that channels Demise the most.
Now this next part is fucking mind blowing, so he tries to kill Queen Sonia while disguised as Zelda, but the actual zelda ends up stopping him, but then he pulls a little deceptive trick and kills Sonia, now he doesn’t just kill her by stabbing her or something, no, HE PUNCHES HER, LITERALLY ALL HE DID WAS PUNCH HER AND IT FATALLY WOUNDED HER, he grabs the tear from her falling body, and as Zelda mourns Sonia and cries, GANONDORF PULLS OUT THE MOST DEVIOUS SMILE EVER AND JUST LAUGHS, after that he puts the stone in his head and within seconds becomes the anti-Christ and spawns an army that sweeps over hyrule within a matter of seconds, LIKE HOLY SHIT BRO IS HIM.
After some time he ends up battling the sages, a fully powered Zelda, and two descendants of gods all at once, AND HE FUCKING WINS WITHOUT EVEN GETTING TIRED OR INJURED, however he’s then sealed for god knows how long and that ends his reign of terror………for that time at least.
Back to the present, Ganondorf uses phantom Ganon to fuck with all of hyrule by disguising as Zelda once again, and he causes some mass trickery, leading to every race getting fucked over in some way.
After all the phenomenas have been cleared and link beats phantom Ganon in hyrule castle, Ganondorf proceeds to show them what he’s gonna do to their world, scaring basically every sage and causing them to go and find the fifth sage to ultimately take down Ganon.
Now up to this point Ganondorf has proved that he is the ultimate menace, but does his fight live up to that hype?……….yes, fucking yes, in fact I’d say it’s the best Ganondorf fight in the series, and easily the game’s best boss fight.
It starts off with a simple fight against his gerudo form, he has some basic attacks that you’ve seen from the phantom ganon fights, but it’s more difficult and harder yo focus because Ganondorf’s muscles, they’re……..they……..the—, oh my lord bro………uh anyways, after this phase Ganondorf upgrades into Demise anti-Christ form and makes his new health bar, which fills up, and fills up……….where’s it going……..WHY IS IT GOING THAT FAR TO THE RIGHT, WHAT THE FUCK, dude that moment had my jaw dropping on the floor, and just a few seconds after that I entered a flurry rush with his attack, AND HE FUCKING DODGED AND FLURRY RUSHED BACK, that shit had me going insane, and this continues and the fight is way harder on this phase, he throws all this shit at you, switching between all types of weapons and eventually summoning those gloom spirit balls that not only take away your max hearts permanently, but also CAN BREAK A FULLY UNDAMAGED HYLIAN SHIELD IN TWO HITS, it’s insane.
They brought back Ganondorf in such a good way in this game bro, I love how Nintendo just went all out on making him an absolute menace, it’s just beautiful.
This leads to the final phase, which yeah is basically just a dragon version of the dark beast Ganon fight from the last game, but to be fair this one’s a lot cooler, Zelda actively has a role in it, it has call backs to the beginning of the game, uses the element of skydiving which you’ve been doing a lot throughout the game, it’s just all around better even if it is still really easy.
I especially forgive it cause the cutscene after I just absolutely adore, the ending cutscene in BOTW was kinda just eh, Zelda doesn’t really say anything noteworthy and doesn’t even seem happy that she just beat the beast that trapped her for 100 years, here though, this one’s just cool, after Rauru and Sonia’s spirits free Zelda from dragon form, you’re sent into a skydiving sequence, in which you need to catch Zelda, this part is generally just cool and has a really nice callback to the beginning of the game when Link couldn’t catch Zelda from falling, but now here, thanks to player input, he does save her, and they both land in water, the part after this is genuinely so fucking good, mostly cause of Zelda’s reaction to Ganondorf being defeated, she’s completely stunned and almost on the verge of crying tears of joy, it really just delivers that this ancient evil is truly just gone, and caps this masterpiece off wonderfully.
And that’s about all I have to say, well not everything but most of the major stuff, this is a truly beautiful game, and an absolute improvement from BOTW, it’s basically just superior in every way and I don’t see myself going back to replay BOTW with this game now being in existence, now is it the best Zelda game? Idk, I praised it to all hell but like most things, I’ll need time for my thoughts on this game to fully flourish.
Speaking of time, I recently got an itch to replay Ocarina of Time, I don’t know why, but imma go do that………..see y’all
With that hype behind it, some were definitely skeptical, worrying about how it could just be “$70 dlc”, and it wouldn’t live up to BOTW, which is fair, so how do you make one of the greatest even greater……..well Nintendo’s answer is this game.
This game is fucking incredible, it literally improves on every single aspect of BOTW, so much so that it makes that game look like a $60 tech demo for this one, Nintendo didn’t just knock it out of the park, they knocked it out of the galaxy.
let’s not make this intro any longer, here’s why I love this newest Zelda game.
Out of every Zelda game, this game by far is the most fun, and that is because of two simple things: zonai devices and ultrahand, these two things alone are about what half of mine, and many others playthroughs are mostly made up of, in my time with this game I made many cars, planes, motorcycles, machines of death and destruction, mechs, attack helicopters, a lot of dicks, and so much more, these mechanics just add so much more content in this game through the sheer creativity you can manage alone, I completed many shrine puzzles in ways that weren’t intended with these abilities.
One thing I forgot to mention in my list of things I did with ultrahands and devices is torturing koroks, we all hate these little fuckers now cause of the 900 seeds you collect in the last game, and literally every reward just being that got on our nerves, and now there are a 1000 of them in this game and many of us are fed up with them.
I tortured many koroks, in total of like the fucking 50 of them I ran into, I helped maybe 3 of them reach their friend, I ignored like 15 of them, but the rest I crucified, grilled, waterboarded, the Geneva conventions went beyond just the Geneva suggestions, I tore koroks apart, and I could talk about the shit I did to them all day but we got other fun things to talk about in this game.
Ultrahand is the definitely the best new ability, but don’t sleep on the other ones, fuse is very cool, I liked fusing random fucking things together to see what random weapons I could create, and fusing a rocket to a shield is a nice replacement for revalis gale (RIP champion abilities, the one thing BOTW did better).
Ascend is a neat ability, for about the first 1/3 of the game I forgot it existed and got confused on what to do in multiple shrines before I just realized I needed to use ascend, but once I started using it more, it became extremely useful, especially for stone talus’ and going up the asses of statues.
Recall is also very cool, not much else to say about it, I basically just made a bunch of elevators and it was the main thing that helped me break some shrines and complete in non intended ways.
Lastly autobuild, more of an extension to ultrahand but I probably would’ve gone insane without it so, very cool.
Moving on from the abilities and war crimes, let’s talk about this game’s biggest jump up in quality from BOTW, that being the variety, more variety on the shrines, more variety in a good chunk of the korok (well the ones I actually did at least), WAY more variety in the enemy department, and just far more variety when it comes to approaching things in this game.
Let’s talk about that enemy variety cause holy fuck they brought so much more in compared to the last game, of course you still got your enemies from BOTW like bokoblins, lynels, hinox, stone talus’, all of them are still here, but the amount of new enemies they added is more than I think any of us could’ve expected, horriblins, gleeoks, gibdos, froxs, the gloom hands, the zonai constructs, the like likes, and even more, it’s seriously impressive how much they were able to add, this goes even further with the main temple bosses, which I’ll get to later.
Shrines to me feel far more alive this time, they really take advantage of every ability you have, I don’t have much else to say, they’re all pretty great.
Moving on from that, another thing that has majorly improved from BOTW is the temples, now I don’t think these temples aren’t as strong as some of the temples from the other Zelda games, but in my opinion, they knocked it out of the park for the temples and the build up for them specifically, I’ll start off with the wind temple, and holy fuck this is definitely the best one (well, tied with another for the best), the build up just to get to the wind temple is one of my favorite parts of this entire series, the slow gradual climb up to the giant boat, getting higher and higher as the surface seems to fade, culminating in a dive into the storm itself, this then leads to the temple itself, which I’ll say right now is alright, it’s clearly supposed to be the tutorial temple so it’s nothing too complicated, but after completing it, this leads to the 2nd best boss fight in this game, the fight with Colgera is a serene cinematic set piece, I was out of arrows by this point so I had to do the whole diving strategy, and that made the fight far more fun, the atmosphere of the fight, the really cool boss design, THE MOTHERFUCKING SOUNDTRACK JUST BLASTING DRAGON ROOST ISLAND, THAT SHIT HAD ME ASCENDING, this part of the game is just incredible, not much else needs to be said here.
In comparison, I sadly have to say that the water temple did not even come close to the wind temple’s quality, to start off with the quest to get to the temple is kinda dull, you learn that Sidon has a fiancé and now you can’t marry him……..what a sad reality, anyways after that betrayal you just do some stuff around zora’s domain, and it’s just lame until you get to the whole secret underground zora ruins and of course the sky section, which is pretty good I’ll admit, I was excited to see what the temple was like and it’s…….fine I guess, I like how open it is but the temple is just kinda underwhelming, and doesn’t really have the atmosphere of the others, plus the boss is just eh, pretty underwhelming compared to the previous temple.
In comparison, the fire temple was a big improvement, starting off with helping yunobo and scaling death mountain was fun, the boss at the top of it was cool, and then going into the depths was a nice twist compared to the two previous sky ones, and the temple itself is pretty cool, again not super difficult but the mine cart system was a neat little puzzle, and finally it ends off with a Gohma boss fight, an enemy we haven’t seen since twilight princess, it’s a pretty easy boss but it’s fun, overall I like this part way more than the water temple, but doesn’t come close to the wind section of the game.
Now the lightning temple on the other hand is my other favorite temple in this game, the build up is already super cool, showing a gerudo desert surrounded by sandstorms of some kind, and gibdos are everywhere to be seen, after a bit of stuff you help gerudo town fend off a gibdo attack, and then you gotta find the temple itself, which involves a neat light puzzle around the desert, then after that comes the temple itself, which is definitely my favorite of the actual temples in the game, it’s got an old ancient temple atmosphere to it, the surprise fight with the boss at the start is really cool, the puzzles are fun, it feels the most like a classic Zelda dungeon and it caps off with a really good boss too.
Hyrule castle, well, it’s not really a temple like the others, the search for Zelda around the castle and the reveal that the Zelda you’ve been chasing all game is actually Phantom Ganon is cool, plus the phantom ganon boss itself is very fun, but nothing else much to say about it aside from that.
Spirit temple is weird, considering that it’s only a boss room (though it is quite a fun boss) it shouldn’t really count here, the robot factory part is cool but isn’t necessarily part of the dungeon, boss fight is cool and it’s the only part of the main story (aside from the fire temple part) to use the depths so that’s cool.
Overall I think the temples and general phenomenas were very fun, still not at classic Zelda dungeon level but we’re getting there.
Speaking of the depths, they’re very cool, as well as the sky islands, it adds a great deal to the map and makes the game even bigger, I would go into more detail buuuuuuut, I don’t feel like it, I just really like them.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is the overall story of the game, cause wow it has majorly improved from BOTW, the voice acting sounds better, the memories are used a lot better than they were in the previous game, in my opinion the characters are more interesting, and the motivation to push through is generally way stronger than what BOTW provided.
One last major thing this game improved on, and I’d probably say this is the thing they improved the most.
In botw, calamity Ganon was a mildly interesting force of nature antagonist, but thanks to no real personality connected to it, Calamity Ganon ends up becoming one of the less memorable things about the game as it goes on, doesn’t help that the final boss in that game is disappointingly easy, however in TOTK, THEY BROUGHT BACK THE FUCKING GOAT.
Ganondorf in TOTK is not only a massive step up form Calamity Ganon, but he’s also just a spectacular return to form for this character, we’ve seen pig Ganon a bunch in the games recently, but we haven’t fully seen Ganondorf himself in a mainline game since twilight princess, IN 2006, 17 YEARS, and oh boy he delivers a plate of absolute devious villainy.
Ganondorf is an absolute menace in this game, in the opening of the game he literally hurts link’s arm so bad that it not only has to be amputated but also nearly kills Link, SHATTERS THE MASTER SWORD LIKE NOTHING, and then taunts both Link and Zelda, HE FUCKING WOKE UP AND IMMEDIATELY BROKE THE ANCIENT SWORD FORGED BY GODS, this is just the start, I didn’t even mention the fact that Calamity Ganon, the force of nature that caused the fucking apocalypse in the last game, was just his leaking malice coming from his body………BRO CAUSED AN APOCALYPSE FROM JUST HOW MUCH HIS ANGER AND HATRED BUILT UP DOWN THERE, THE CALAMITY WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A BEEFED UP PHANTOM GANON.
This is just the start of the game btw, we next see him trying to take hyrule by force, failing but then swearing his allegiance to the royal family in the most disrespectful and evil way possible, he just doesn’t give a fuck, he literally just fucking exerts evil, this is the ganondorf that channels Demise the most.
Now this next part is fucking mind blowing, so he tries to kill Queen Sonia while disguised as Zelda, but the actual zelda ends up stopping him, but then he pulls a little deceptive trick and kills Sonia, now he doesn’t just kill her by stabbing her or something, no, HE PUNCHES HER, LITERALLY ALL HE DID WAS PUNCH HER AND IT FATALLY WOUNDED HER, he grabs the tear from her falling body, and as Zelda mourns Sonia and cries, GANONDORF PULLS OUT THE MOST DEVIOUS SMILE EVER AND JUST LAUGHS, after that he puts the stone in his head and within seconds becomes the anti-Christ and spawns an army that sweeps over hyrule within a matter of seconds, LIKE HOLY SHIT BRO IS HIM.
After some time he ends up battling the sages, a fully powered Zelda, and two descendants of gods all at once, AND HE FUCKING WINS WITHOUT EVEN GETTING TIRED OR INJURED, however he’s then sealed for god knows how long and that ends his reign of terror………for that time at least.
Back to the present, Ganondorf uses phantom Ganon to fuck with all of hyrule by disguising as Zelda once again, and he causes some mass trickery, leading to every race getting fucked over in some way.
After all the phenomenas have been cleared and link beats phantom Ganon in hyrule castle, Ganondorf proceeds to show them what he’s gonna do to their world, scaring basically every sage and causing them to go and find the fifth sage to ultimately take down Ganon.
Now up to this point Ganondorf has proved that he is the ultimate menace, but does his fight live up to that hype?……….yes, fucking yes, in fact I’d say it’s the best Ganondorf fight in the series, and easily the game’s best boss fight.
It starts off with a simple fight against his gerudo form, he has some basic attacks that you’ve seen from the phantom ganon fights, but it’s more difficult and harder yo focus because Ganondorf’s muscles, they’re……..they……..the—, oh my lord bro………uh anyways, after this phase Ganondorf upgrades into Demise anti-Christ form and makes his new health bar, which fills up, and fills up……….where’s it going……..WHY IS IT GOING THAT FAR TO THE RIGHT, WHAT THE FUCK, dude that moment had my jaw dropping on the floor, and just a few seconds after that I entered a flurry rush with his attack, AND HE FUCKING DODGED AND FLURRY RUSHED BACK, that shit had me going insane, and this continues and the fight is way harder on this phase, he throws all this shit at you, switching between all types of weapons and eventually summoning those gloom spirit balls that not only take away your max hearts permanently, but also CAN BREAK A FULLY UNDAMAGED HYLIAN SHIELD IN TWO HITS, it’s insane.
They brought back Ganondorf in such a good way in this game bro, I love how Nintendo just went all out on making him an absolute menace, it’s just beautiful.
This leads to the final phase, which yeah is basically just a dragon version of the dark beast Ganon fight from the last game, but to be fair this one’s a lot cooler, Zelda actively has a role in it, it has call backs to the beginning of the game, uses the element of skydiving which you’ve been doing a lot throughout the game, it’s just all around better even if it is still really easy.
I especially forgive it cause the cutscene after I just absolutely adore, the ending cutscene in BOTW was kinda just eh, Zelda doesn’t really say anything noteworthy and doesn’t even seem happy that she just beat the beast that trapped her for 100 years, here though, this one’s just cool, after Rauru and Sonia’s spirits free Zelda from dragon form, you’re sent into a skydiving sequence, in which you need to catch Zelda, this part is generally just cool and has a really nice callback to the beginning of the game when Link couldn’t catch Zelda from falling, but now here, thanks to player input, he does save her, and they both land in water, the part after this is genuinely so fucking good, mostly cause of Zelda’s reaction to Ganondorf being defeated, she’s completely stunned and almost on the verge of crying tears of joy, it really just delivers that this ancient evil is truly just gone, and caps this masterpiece off wonderfully.
And that’s about all I have to say, well not everything but most of the major stuff, this is a truly beautiful game, and an absolute improvement from BOTW, it’s basically just superior in every way and I don’t see myself going back to replay BOTW with this game now being in existence, now is it the best Zelda game? Idk, I praised it to all hell but like most things, I’ll need time for my thoughts on this game to fully flourish.
Speaking of time, I recently got an itch to replay Ocarina of Time, I don’t know why, but imma go do that………..see y’all
Metroid Prime is a fucking phenomenal game
It’s every bit as tense and mysterious as the other metroids, but now in the whole new dimensions of 3D, while overall the action aspect isn’t as commonly seen like it was in most of the 2D games, it’s balanced out with some of the absolute best atmosphere, exploration, and puzzle solving I’ve ever seen in any video game.
The game’s graphics are beautiful, incredible atmosphere in every area, the lush and beautiful rains of the Tallon Overworld, the rough archeological feel of the chozo ruins, the deep cave feel of magmoor, the beautiful snow terrain of phendrana, and the absolute mechanical desolate feel of the Phazon mines, all of it comes together to bring this game to life, and man does it stick with you, it’s all helped by the amazing soundtrack, bringing even more life to these already excellently crafted areas.
The game’s lore and story is also great, it starts off much like Super Metroid did with samus exploring an abandoned ship, encountering a horrifying situation, finding good ol ridley fucking around, and then ridley escapes and Samus follows him to the planet of Tallon IV, she loses Ridley and searches the planet for him, but eventually you get caught up in trying to discover what the hell happened to this planet, and the game doesn’t really tell you much directly, you gotta find out through exploring and scanning any pirate logs you may find, it’s an excellent way of storytelling, and one that can only be done with a video game.
Now while this game does have less action, that doesn’t mean there’s none here, when there is action it’s all excellently done, like the beginning of the game with the parasite Queen and the ship escape sequence, the plant boss thing, the multiple surprise ghost chozo attacks, Thardus, the Omega Pirate, the surprise Ridley attack, and the final boss itself, the titular Metroid Prime, the action is there when it needs to be, and the less of it there is, the more impactful the action moments do hit.
I just gotta say, one of my favorite moments in this game is just the entrance to phendrana, the music and atmosphere swells up, and it kinda has a cozy feel, a feeling that is lost as soon as you see the looming shadow of Ridley flying overhead later on in the area, I just love it.
While it is my favorite Metroid game, and one of my favorite games in general, this game does have a few issues, namely the backtracking which while I can mostly ignore in these games, this game does take it a little too far sometimes, and of course the big complaint, the chozo artifact hunt, it’s basically a less egregious version of the triforce hunt from wind waker, but it is still annoying, not as bad on replays but that first time definitely isn’t gonna be pretty for new players.
Overall though, despite its flaws, it’s a phenomenal adventure with truly breathtaking atmosphere, and it’s just an ultimate vibe.
Now normally I would say something like “now onto Metroid Prime 2” but uh, yeah I have no way to access Metroid Prime 2, now I’d say I would move on to Prime 3, I don’t have Prime 3 yet but I am getting it soon…………however, I did get another game, another Wii Metroid game, a very infamous one, it basically killed the franchise for 7 years after it came out.
Yep………Other M
It’s every bit as tense and mysterious as the other metroids, but now in the whole new dimensions of 3D, while overall the action aspect isn’t as commonly seen like it was in most of the 2D games, it’s balanced out with some of the absolute best atmosphere, exploration, and puzzle solving I’ve ever seen in any video game.
The game’s graphics are beautiful, incredible atmosphere in every area, the lush and beautiful rains of the Tallon Overworld, the rough archeological feel of the chozo ruins, the deep cave feel of magmoor, the beautiful snow terrain of phendrana, and the absolute mechanical desolate feel of the Phazon mines, all of it comes together to bring this game to life, and man does it stick with you, it’s all helped by the amazing soundtrack, bringing even more life to these already excellently crafted areas.
The game’s lore and story is also great, it starts off much like Super Metroid did with samus exploring an abandoned ship, encountering a horrifying situation, finding good ol ridley fucking around, and then ridley escapes and Samus follows him to the planet of Tallon IV, she loses Ridley and searches the planet for him, but eventually you get caught up in trying to discover what the hell happened to this planet, and the game doesn’t really tell you much directly, you gotta find out through exploring and scanning any pirate logs you may find, it’s an excellent way of storytelling, and one that can only be done with a video game.
Now while this game does have less action, that doesn’t mean there’s none here, when there is action it’s all excellently done, like the beginning of the game with the parasite Queen and the ship escape sequence, the plant boss thing, the multiple surprise ghost chozo attacks, Thardus, the Omega Pirate, the surprise Ridley attack, and the final boss itself, the titular Metroid Prime, the action is there when it needs to be, and the less of it there is, the more impactful the action moments do hit.
I just gotta say, one of my favorite moments in this game is just the entrance to phendrana, the music and atmosphere swells up, and it kinda has a cozy feel, a feeling that is lost as soon as you see the looming shadow of Ridley flying overhead later on in the area, I just love it.
While it is my favorite Metroid game, and one of my favorite games in general, this game does have a few issues, namely the backtracking which while I can mostly ignore in these games, this game does take it a little too far sometimes, and of course the big complaint, the chozo artifact hunt, it’s basically a less egregious version of the triforce hunt from wind waker, but it is still annoying, not as bad on replays but that first time definitely isn’t gonna be pretty for new players.
Overall though, despite its flaws, it’s a phenomenal adventure with truly breathtaking atmosphere, and it’s just an ultimate vibe.
Now normally I would say something like “now onto Metroid Prime 2” but uh, yeah I have no way to access Metroid Prime 2, now I’d say I would move on to Prime 3, I don’t have Prime 3 yet but I am getting it soon…………however, I did get another game, another Wii Metroid game, a very infamous one, it basically killed the franchise for 7 years after it came out.
Yep………Other M
The combat has not aged gracefully
Game is a 10, don’t know what you mf’s don’t like about it
Aside from the imprisoned
Also Nintendo wtf, I may now love this game but $60 for a ten year old game? Really scummy
Aside from the imprisoned
Also Nintendo wtf, I may now love this game but $60 for a ten year old game? Really scummy
2019
Good game
You know what three things aren’t good though
Saito
Rubber bullets
Final Boss fight with multiple enemies that spam the same two attacks
You know what three things aren’t good though
Saito
Rubber bullets
Final Boss fight with multiple enemies that spam the same two attacks
2018
Enemy AI is wack, but it’s still a pretty good game
2021
Wtf
What a fucking masterpiece, easily my favorite game to come out this year.
2017
This review contains spoilers
That ending actually gave me a heart attack
Legit forgot that there were 4 more games after this starring him, why did I think Kiryu was gonna die there?
Guess you can say “they had me in the first half, not gonna lie”
Legit forgot that there were 4 more games after this starring him, why did I think Kiryu was gonna die there?
Guess you can say “they had me in the first half, not gonna lie”
After a month long hiatus, I finished wind waker for the Zelda replay, had some stuff going on and other games of course but here I am, to review again.
I will not go into too much detail here cause I already made a very long review a while ago, so I’ll just link that review below here cause it’s still accurate to my thoughts now
https://www.backloggd.com/u/ZeldaFan/review/278162/
However, there are a few things that I want to go over that I really didn’t say in my original review
One negative I’d like to bring up is how a lot of the time in this game, there’s a ton of moments where they forget the age old rule or “show don’t tell”, instead here they “tell don’t show”, the example that irritated me the most is when you fully restore the master sword, you go outside the temple and see the fish talking to the king of red lions about how the forsaken fortress is completely empty, this moment has like next to no impact and also very lazily transitions into “link, get the triforce shards”.
A way to fix this moment I think would’ve been to just have link go to the forsaken fortress after getting the master sword restored, then you see that it’s empty, maybe have a mini boss with another phantom Ganon or something, and have either ganondorf use some spirit magic shit to tell you like “haha, I’ve gone to hyrule” or have king of red lions connect the dots and tell link what’s going on…………ok this is very specific and nitpicky but I’ve played this game like 20 different times and I just notice this kind of stuff.
The moblins are one of my favorite enemy designs in the whole series, they’re extremely expressive and are great in general……..man I do not have much to say
I’ve basically said the few things I wanted to say, everything I love about this game I expressed in my earlier review so like, not much to add here except for these two things.
I mean, I literally know this game so well that I remembered where every single heart piece was, not even kidding.
Overall, it’s still my favorite Zelda game rn, though I’d say it’s definitely tied with Majora’s Mask now as well, both are my favorites.
And next up is Minish cap, never played this one so I’m excited to check it out
I will not go into too much detail here cause I already made a very long review a while ago, so I’ll just link that review below here cause it’s still accurate to my thoughts now
https://www.backloggd.com/u/ZeldaFan/review/278162/
However, there are a few things that I want to go over that I really didn’t say in my original review
One negative I’d like to bring up is how a lot of the time in this game, there’s a ton of moments where they forget the age old rule or “show don’t tell”, instead here they “tell don’t show”, the example that irritated me the most is when you fully restore the master sword, you go outside the temple and see the fish talking to the king of red lions about how the forsaken fortress is completely empty, this moment has like next to no impact and also very lazily transitions into “link, get the triforce shards”.
A way to fix this moment I think would’ve been to just have link go to the forsaken fortress after getting the master sword restored, then you see that it’s empty, maybe have a mini boss with another phantom Ganon or something, and have either ganondorf use some spirit magic shit to tell you like “haha, I’ve gone to hyrule” or have king of red lions connect the dots and tell link what’s going on…………ok this is very specific and nitpicky but I’ve played this game like 20 different times and I just notice this kind of stuff.
The moblins are one of my favorite enemy designs in the whole series, they’re extremely expressive and are great in general……..man I do not have much to say
I’ve basically said the few things I wanted to say, everything I love about this game I expressed in my earlier review so like, not much to add here except for these two things.
I mean, I literally know this game so well that I remembered where every single heart piece was, not even kidding.
Overall, it’s still my favorite Zelda game rn, though I’d say it’s definitely tied with Majora’s Mask now as well, both are my favorites.
And next up is Minish cap, never played this one so I’m excited to check it out
2010
Man, at worst I was expecting just plain ol bad for this game, but it’s so much worse than that.
Metroid Other M is a game that fails in almost every single category of being a Metroid game and even a game in general, gameplay that some potential but is disastrously tarnished by having to us just a fucking Wii remote sideways, an overall terrible area to explore with the fucking bottle ship, combat that’s extremely repetitive, any sense of exploration in discovery ruined by the stupid “authorization of items” system and of course waypoints on the map, and to top this shit cake off, a nice bit of piss icing with one of the worst stories I’ve ever seen in a video game, buckle up people, this is gonna be a long one.
Let’s talk about the controls, this is a game built to be action, a team ninja game, and to make a good action game, it requires a lot of buttons, but some fucking genius on the development team decided to have the whole game be controlled with just the Wii remote, not with the nunchuck, just the remote.
This game could’ve easily worked with the nunchuck, like going into first person by pressing Z, and you don’t have to worry about being stationary since you can move with the nunchuck, a ton of things could’ve been fixed but for some reason Sakamoto really wanted it on a Wii remote.
These problems extend to the combat and general gameplay, so let’s get to that.
Combat in this game is absolutely tedious, mostly thanks to the controls, but also cause of the general monotony of killing enemies, not only is it tedious, it’s also just pathetically easy thanks to the “dodge” you can do, which as long as you hit the move button, you’ll dodge an enemy attack, thanks to this dodge mechanic I was able to beat the game with only like 4 energy tanks in total, even fighting Phantoon was easy with the dodge.
Speaking of that, the bosses in this game are not super great, they are better than most of this game’s other stuff, Ridley is probably the only boss I really enjoyed a lot, Phantoon and Queen Metroid are alright, but the rest are just a bunch of jokes, the original bosses in this game are just pathetic, like the lava boss or the weird purple bug thing, and of course everyone’s favorite: construction equipment, and a lot of the returning bosses aren’t that great either, the game’s normal final boss is beyond pathetic considering it’s literally just shooting basic enemies with no challenge whatsoever, I would’ve been pissed if it weren’t for Phantoon being the true final boss that you can face after MB.
Easily one of the worst parts of this game is everything involving the first person camera, it’s super janky, it’s the only way you can use missiles and it makes them a pain to use in any combat scenario, and I absolutely hate every single one of those stupid parts where you’re forced to stay in first person and look for a little itty bitty detail on the screen and scan it, it was horrible every time it happened.
Well, you know, the combat is awful, but maybe the exploration and atmosphere can save the game………….HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA no.
I can just say right now that the bottle ship is easily the worst place you explore in the entire series and it’s not even close, the ship is nothing but constant hallways upon hallways upon hallways, then you reach some beautiful looking nature rooms and think this game will finally get cool and atmospheric, but it turns out these are also just disguised hallways, it’s awful, and there’s no excuse like “oh it’s on a ship and not a planet of course it’s going to be a bunch of hallways”, my answer to that is the BSL station on Fusion, in that game the station felt alive, it has that same sense of mystery and the atmosphere that the planets had while still just being a ship, there was no fake jungle or lava areas, all of it was real, so this game has no excuse feeling this boring to just look at.
Top that all off with the horrible choices with the controller and you got yourself a very bad Metroid game, and it just gets worse.
You want to know a thing I love about these games, finding cool new upgrades and using them in earlier sections you couldn’t access earlier, or just using them in general, it adds variety so things don’t get stale and you always feel like you’re getting rewarded for exploration………..and Other M completely throws that out the window, Samus has most of her items from the start, but thanks to some story and character stuff, she has to follow orders and can only use the items once authorized to by Adam……….this leads to many frustrating moments of trying to unlock something but you can’t cause Adam said you can’t, or the stupidest example is how you aren’t allowed to use the varia suit for half of the fire area, so you’ll be running through an area as fast as possible just so you don’t die from the heat, this is astronomically stupid, it doesn’t help gameplay and makes even less sense in the story, which HOLY FUCKING SHIT LET ME TALK ABOUT THAT.
I’ll start with the characters, all but one of them suck, and that includes Samus, let’s begin with her.
Samus is a cool silent badass, she’s badass in the early games and especially more badass with her characterization in Dread, that game makes it clear she’s not a mute protagonist, but one who just chooses not to speak, and when she does, she chooses to speak the chozo language, showing she has great respect for the ones who raised her.
Other M decided to look more in depth into Samus as a person, delve into her backstory and show how she became a badass……….instead this game decides not only to make her just look weak and pathetic, but actively ruins her character that was established in previous games, in this game Samus is almost like a clumsy soldier who gets taken down a lot by enemies way beneath her, one of the big ones is when the “mysterious creature” attacks her and pins her down, and instead of doing some kind of kick to get out or grabbing its mouth and just blasting it, she kinda just squirms under there and is only saved by one of her allies.
However, that part is no where near as egregious as the infamous scene you all know about, cause much like Puss in Boots 2 and the fucking paw patrol movie, samus has a completely devastating panic attack when she sees the Ridley clone………..do I even need to explain what’s wrong here, Samus has a panic attack seeing an enemy she’s already seen come back multiple times, and has defeated multiple times, sure Ridley killed her parents, but not once in the previous games she reacts like this, in fact, the most likely scenario that would go down here would go something like this:
Samus sees Ridley, shocked to see him alive again, she thinks of all Ridley has taken from her personally and gets enraged, turns on the plasma beam without adam’s authorization, jumps on Ridley and goes fucking apeshit on him for a few quick seconds, then the actual battle would begin, but instead we got samus passing out and being nearly killed by Ridley and only narrowly being saved by her ally……….you know, my favorite part about Samus is how she’s easily able to overcome stuff stacked very much against her, and all without help………..if I didn’t enjoy the Ridley battle I’d probably consider this the absolute worst thing I’ve seen in a video game, character writing wise at least, and it’s all horribly topped off with very wooden acting for Samus, cause silent ol Samus is a talker in thsi game, and trust me, every monologue from her is terrible and it’s not helped by the voice acting.
Now we have our little happy galactic federation bunch, and there’s only like three that have any actual plot relevance.
First is Anthony, I like Anthony, he’s so cool, plus the acting for him is pretty much the only actual good one in the game so there’s that.
Then there’s the deleter, this mysterious assassin among the group, the game builds up to who he is, he’s a side threat built up………..and then the game completely forgets about him, no joke, the game doesn’t tell you who the deleter is and after the meeting with MB, he’s never heard from again, it’s super dumb, and get this, his identity is actually revealed……….in the game’s guidebook, and only there, apparently it was the James guy or whatever, the one whos corpse you find on the way to the final part of the game.
And finally Adam, I fucking despise Adam in this game.
In Fusion, Adam was a simple posthumous character who samus deeply respected enough to make an AI reconstruction of him, and I liked what Adam was there, just a figure Samus looked up to and respected and nothing more, but Adam is in this game a lot, and he’s nowhere near the guy that Samus described in Fusion, here he’s just a generic field commander who feels like he talks down to Samus more than anything, it feels like he doesn’t respect her, he fucking shoots her at one point for whatever reason, and actively harms and halts her progress with the whole authorization thing, he’s also just a bad leader, his whole squadron dies and he just decides to kill himself, and the game tries to make you feel sad at that part but it just fails spectacularly. One last thing I hate about the English version of this game is how they handle the whole Adam calling Samus “lady” thing, it was just a one off line in Fusion but here it’s just weird, it feels like how a discord mod calls an underage girl his “kitten”, it’s super weird and kinda gross honestly (side note: I know this is different in the Japanese version where Samus actively hates the name unlike the English version where she embraces it, but it’s just super weird nonetheless).
Then there’s the game main antagonist, MB, she has almost no presence in the game, does really nothing in the game, they try to give some sappy backstory for her about how she’s an AI who gained emotions or something, like fuck no game I’m not feeling sympathy for the AI recreation of the fucking leader of a terrorist organization who tried to terrorize the entire universe with Metroids twice.
None of these characters are helped in any way by the dialogue, my god it’s generic, characters have no charm of any kind when they say shit, a lot of it is exposition dump like it’s a Michael bay transformers film, but at least there you got to hear badass Peter Cullen as Optimus prime saying the lines, here it’s delivered in the most wooden way imaginable, and of course, we can’t forget, THE BABY.
The plot is a boring sci fi movie, the pacing is inconsistent, a lot of it is just dull, and it doesn’t pull you in enough to make you keep playing, like seriously, this game has a loop of “I don’t want to do anymore combat or any gameplay, give me a cutscene” then you get a cutscene and realize “I don’t want this shitty ass cutscene, bring me back to the gameplay” it’s an endless that repeats until the game ends.
I could talk about more, but you’ve heard it a million times already, this game is a disaster, dare I say it’s Metroid’s Sonic 06. It’s a complete betrayal of what Metroid fundamentally is and it was so bad, it made the franchise lay dormant for years to come, but thanks to the wonderful folks at mercurystream, we got a comeback in the form of Samus Returns, and then a few years later we got Dread, the long awaited 5th entry in the 2D series, and this year we got an excellent remaster of a beloved classic, Metroid Prime, and with Metroid Prime 4 off in the distance and (hopefully) potential remasters of Prime 2 and 3, this franchise is finally looking towards a hopeful future, one where we can finally abandon this fucking travesty of a game.
Welp, at least for now that’s it with my journey through Metroid, until I get Prime 3 (fingers crossed that I get it soon) and a way to access Prime 2 or Samus Returns on legal terms, and hopefully Nintendo puts Zero Mission on the game boy online thing, until then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with this franchise and can now consider myself a Metroid fan.
I’m gonna go wash the awful taste of this game out of my mouth with another playthrough of Super Metroid, or hopefully Prime 3 once it gets delivered to me.
Metroid Other M is a game that fails in almost every single category of being a Metroid game and even a game in general, gameplay that some potential but is disastrously tarnished by having to us just a fucking Wii remote sideways, an overall terrible area to explore with the fucking bottle ship, combat that’s extremely repetitive, any sense of exploration in discovery ruined by the stupid “authorization of items” system and of course waypoints on the map, and to top this shit cake off, a nice bit of piss icing with one of the worst stories I’ve ever seen in a video game, buckle up people, this is gonna be a long one.
Let’s talk about the controls, this is a game built to be action, a team ninja game, and to make a good action game, it requires a lot of buttons, but some fucking genius on the development team decided to have the whole game be controlled with just the Wii remote, not with the nunchuck, just the remote.
This game could’ve easily worked with the nunchuck, like going into first person by pressing Z, and you don’t have to worry about being stationary since you can move with the nunchuck, a ton of things could’ve been fixed but for some reason Sakamoto really wanted it on a Wii remote.
These problems extend to the combat and general gameplay, so let’s get to that.
Combat in this game is absolutely tedious, mostly thanks to the controls, but also cause of the general monotony of killing enemies, not only is it tedious, it’s also just pathetically easy thanks to the “dodge” you can do, which as long as you hit the move button, you’ll dodge an enemy attack, thanks to this dodge mechanic I was able to beat the game with only like 4 energy tanks in total, even fighting Phantoon was easy with the dodge.
Speaking of that, the bosses in this game are not super great, they are better than most of this game’s other stuff, Ridley is probably the only boss I really enjoyed a lot, Phantoon and Queen Metroid are alright, but the rest are just a bunch of jokes, the original bosses in this game are just pathetic, like the lava boss or the weird purple bug thing, and of course everyone’s favorite: construction equipment, and a lot of the returning bosses aren’t that great either, the game’s normal final boss is beyond pathetic considering it’s literally just shooting basic enemies with no challenge whatsoever, I would’ve been pissed if it weren’t for Phantoon being the true final boss that you can face after MB.
Easily one of the worst parts of this game is everything involving the first person camera, it’s super janky, it’s the only way you can use missiles and it makes them a pain to use in any combat scenario, and I absolutely hate every single one of those stupid parts where you’re forced to stay in first person and look for a little itty bitty detail on the screen and scan it, it was horrible every time it happened.
Well, you know, the combat is awful, but maybe the exploration and atmosphere can save the game………….HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA no.
I can just say right now that the bottle ship is easily the worst place you explore in the entire series and it’s not even close, the ship is nothing but constant hallways upon hallways upon hallways, then you reach some beautiful looking nature rooms and think this game will finally get cool and atmospheric, but it turns out these are also just disguised hallways, it’s awful, and there’s no excuse like “oh it’s on a ship and not a planet of course it’s going to be a bunch of hallways”, my answer to that is the BSL station on Fusion, in that game the station felt alive, it has that same sense of mystery and the atmosphere that the planets had while still just being a ship, there was no fake jungle or lava areas, all of it was real, so this game has no excuse feeling this boring to just look at.
Top that all off with the horrible choices with the controller and you got yourself a very bad Metroid game, and it just gets worse.
You want to know a thing I love about these games, finding cool new upgrades and using them in earlier sections you couldn’t access earlier, or just using them in general, it adds variety so things don’t get stale and you always feel like you’re getting rewarded for exploration………..and Other M completely throws that out the window, Samus has most of her items from the start, but thanks to some story and character stuff, she has to follow orders and can only use the items once authorized to by Adam……….this leads to many frustrating moments of trying to unlock something but you can’t cause Adam said you can’t, or the stupidest example is how you aren’t allowed to use the varia suit for half of the fire area, so you’ll be running through an area as fast as possible just so you don’t die from the heat, this is astronomically stupid, it doesn’t help gameplay and makes even less sense in the story, which HOLY FUCKING SHIT LET ME TALK ABOUT THAT.
I’ll start with the characters, all but one of them suck, and that includes Samus, let’s begin with her.
Samus is a cool silent badass, she’s badass in the early games and especially more badass with her characterization in Dread, that game makes it clear she’s not a mute protagonist, but one who just chooses not to speak, and when she does, she chooses to speak the chozo language, showing she has great respect for the ones who raised her.
Other M decided to look more in depth into Samus as a person, delve into her backstory and show how she became a badass……….instead this game decides not only to make her just look weak and pathetic, but actively ruins her character that was established in previous games, in this game Samus is almost like a clumsy soldier who gets taken down a lot by enemies way beneath her, one of the big ones is when the “mysterious creature” attacks her and pins her down, and instead of doing some kind of kick to get out or grabbing its mouth and just blasting it, she kinda just squirms under there and is only saved by one of her allies.
However, that part is no where near as egregious as the infamous scene you all know about, cause much like Puss in Boots 2 and the fucking paw patrol movie, samus has a completely devastating panic attack when she sees the Ridley clone………..do I even need to explain what’s wrong here, Samus has a panic attack seeing an enemy she’s already seen come back multiple times, and has defeated multiple times, sure Ridley killed her parents, but not once in the previous games she reacts like this, in fact, the most likely scenario that would go down here would go something like this:
Samus sees Ridley, shocked to see him alive again, she thinks of all Ridley has taken from her personally and gets enraged, turns on the plasma beam without adam’s authorization, jumps on Ridley and goes fucking apeshit on him for a few quick seconds, then the actual battle would begin, but instead we got samus passing out and being nearly killed by Ridley and only narrowly being saved by her ally……….you know, my favorite part about Samus is how she’s easily able to overcome stuff stacked very much against her, and all without help………..if I didn’t enjoy the Ridley battle I’d probably consider this the absolute worst thing I’ve seen in a video game, character writing wise at least, and it’s all horribly topped off with very wooden acting for Samus, cause silent ol Samus is a talker in thsi game, and trust me, every monologue from her is terrible and it’s not helped by the voice acting.
Now we have our little happy galactic federation bunch, and there’s only like three that have any actual plot relevance.
First is Anthony, I like Anthony, he’s so cool, plus the acting for him is pretty much the only actual good one in the game so there’s that.
Then there’s the deleter, this mysterious assassin among the group, the game builds up to who he is, he’s a side threat built up………..and then the game completely forgets about him, no joke, the game doesn’t tell you who the deleter is and after the meeting with MB, he’s never heard from again, it’s super dumb, and get this, his identity is actually revealed……….in the game’s guidebook, and only there, apparently it was the James guy or whatever, the one whos corpse you find on the way to the final part of the game.
And finally Adam, I fucking despise Adam in this game.
In Fusion, Adam was a simple posthumous character who samus deeply respected enough to make an AI reconstruction of him, and I liked what Adam was there, just a figure Samus looked up to and respected and nothing more, but Adam is in this game a lot, and he’s nowhere near the guy that Samus described in Fusion, here he’s just a generic field commander who feels like he talks down to Samus more than anything, it feels like he doesn’t respect her, he fucking shoots her at one point for whatever reason, and actively harms and halts her progress with the whole authorization thing, he’s also just a bad leader, his whole squadron dies and he just decides to kill himself, and the game tries to make you feel sad at that part but it just fails spectacularly. One last thing I hate about the English version of this game is how they handle the whole Adam calling Samus “lady” thing, it was just a one off line in Fusion but here it’s just weird, it feels like how a discord mod calls an underage girl his “kitten”, it’s super weird and kinda gross honestly (side note: I know this is different in the Japanese version where Samus actively hates the name unlike the English version where she embraces it, but it’s just super weird nonetheless).
Then there’s the game main antagonist, MB, she has almost no presence in the game, does really nothing in the game, they try to give some sappy backstory for her about how she’s an AI who gained emotions or something, like fuck no game I’m not feeling sympathy for the AI recreation of the fucking leader of a terrorist organization who tried to terrorize the entire universe with Metroids twice.
None of these characters are helped in any way by the dialogue, my god it’s generic, characters have no charm of any kind when they say shit, a lot of it is exposition dump like it’s a Michael bay transformers film, but at least there you got to hear badass Peter Cullen as Optimus prime saying the lines, here it’s delivered in the most wooden way imaginable, and of course, we can’t forget, THE BABY.
The plot is a boring sci fi movie, the pacing is inconsistent, a lot of it is just dull, and it doesn’t pull you in enough to make you keep playing, like seriously, this game has a loop of “I don’t want to do anymore combat or any gameplay, give me a cutscene” then you get a cutscene and realize “I don’t want this shitty ass cutscene, bring me back to the gameplay” it’s an endless that repeats until the game ends.
I could talk about more, but you’ve heard it a million times already, this game is a disaster, dare I say it’s Metroid’s Sonic 06. It’s a complete betrayal of what Metroid fundamentally is and it was so bad, it made the franchise lay dormant for years to come, but thanks to the wonderful folks at mercurystream, we got a comeback in the form of Samus Returns, and then a few years later we got Dread, the long awaited 5th entry in the 2D series, and this year we got an excellent remaster of a beloved classic, Metroid Prime, and with Metroid Prime 4 off in the distance and (hopefully) potential remasters of Prime 2 and 3, this franchise is finally looking towards a hopeful future, one where we can finally abandon this fucking travesty of a game.
Welp, at least for now that’s it with my journey through Metroid, until I get Prime 3 (fingers crossed that I get it soon) and a way to access Prime 2 or Samus Returns on legal terms, and hopefully Nintendo puts Zero Mission on the game boy online thing, until then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with this franchise and can now consider myself a Metroid fan.
I’m gonna go wash the awful taste of this game out of my mouth with another playthrough of Super Metroid, or hopefully Prime 3 once it gets delivered to me.
2021
Really crazy how this game is better than every game nominated for GOTY this year
I said it in my review of the first game, and I’ll say it again here
All the shit talking I have said to this game throughout these past two years………….I take all of it back
All the shit talking I have said to this game throughout these past two years………….I take all of it back
Took a tiny break cause I just got Lies of P, but now I’m back to this
Five Nights at Freddy’s 3, I must say I was hoping on this replay that I would appreciate this game more, I thought it was mid when I first played it back then, but maybe I was just young and dumb, and that’d I’d like it more now………..that is not the case.
Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of good stuff, but it’s all tied together with some very boring elements that just make this game very eh.
I’ll start with my positives, firstly the lore, I love what this game added to the series in terms of lore, tying a lot of things set up in the previous games together, like the five murdered children being put to rest, or the puppet’s goal of freeing the children, and of course, this game finally brings William Afton into the spotlight, featuring him as the game’s main antagonist.
Speaking of William Afton, Springtrap, easily the best designed animatronic in the series, I love how creepy he looks, all the details like how decayed the suit is and the corpse spread around throughout the suit, it’s a phenomenal design, makes him feel like a true monster, like this is what the five children basically saw him as when he killed them.
This game looks ugly, but it’s definitely intentional, Fazbear’s fright is rundown as shit, and it adds to the atmosphere a lot, the shitty cameras also help build that unease………..if only the rest of the game did that.
Ok now the bad, gameplay is fucking boring, a lot of the scare factor from the previous two games is gone, instead replaced with 8000 phantom jumpscares that are seen so many god damn times throughout the nights, none of the jumpscares are scary especially Springtrap’s one.
I like the ideas this game has, the phantoms are a cool idea and having to keep one animatronic away is neat, but I just don’t think the game capitalizes on it well at all.
The whole reboot system with the ventilation, audio, and cameras is again a neat idea, but just not really used all that well in execution.
Overall this game is a big downgrade from 2, but I do know that there are some good games coming ahead.
Onto FNAF 4
Five Nights at Freddy’s 3, I must say I was hoping on this replay that I would appreciate this game more, I thought it was mid when I first played it back then, but maybe I was just young and dumb, and that’d I’d like it more now………..that is not the case.
Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of good stuff, but it’s all tied together with some very boring elements that just make this game very eh.
I’ll start with my positives, firstly the lore, I love what this game added to the series in terms of lore, tying a lot of things set up in the previous games together, like the five murdered children being put to rest, or the puppet’s goal of freeing the children, and of course, this game finally brings William Afton into the spotlight, featuring him as the game’s main antagonist.
Speaking of William Afton, Springtrap, easily the best designed animatronic in the series, I love how creepy he looks, all the details like how decayed the suit is and the corpse spread around throughout the suit, it’s a phenomenal design, makes him feel like a true monster, like this is what the five children basically saw him as when he killed them.
This game looks ugly, but it’s definitely intentional, Fazbear’s fright is rundown as shit, and it adds to the atmosphere a lot, the shitty cameras also help build that unease………..if only the rest of the game did that.
Ok now the bad, gameplay is fucking boring, a lot of the scare factor from the previous two games is gone, instead replaced with 8000 phantom jumpscares that are seen so many god damn times throughout the nights, none of the jumpscares are scary especially Springtrap’s one.
I like the ideas this game has, the phantoms are a cool idea and having to keep one animatronic away is neat, but I just don’t think the game capitalizes on it well at all.
The whole reboot system with the ventilation, audio, and cameras is again a neat idea, but just not really used all that well in execution.
Overall this game is a big downgrade from 2, but I do know that there are some good games coming ahead.
Onto FNAF 4