2001
is it a faux pas to say that sports games used to be really fun and do well with the nerd crowd? sure, your older brother and all his friends loved tony hawk's pro skater, but there's an enduring audience of people who still talk about and play these games to an insanely technical degree. you don't see the same level of adoration and dedication for games like FIFA and whatever the fuck else franchise sports games there are that just exist for celebrity appearances. the biggest separation between sports games back then and sports games now is the eschewing of realism in favor of over-the-top antics. the decision to say that realism fails where style succeeds. and, if nothing else, SSX Tricky has stood the test of time and shown that it is the ur example of realism not mattering.
if anything, trying to emulate reality is what has likely stagnated the sports genre to the degree where sports games are now synonymous with cosplaying as the new york mets. there's no fun, no invigorating "larger than life" attitude. just. . . egotism. why would i want to play something like soccer in a conventional way when games like SSX Tricky show that creativity is just around the corner, just a little bit past grounding? you can see indie titles take advantage of not being beholden to realism and succeed as a result (i.e. rocket league, pyre, etc.). i don't think there's anything wrong with realism in sports games, but when it's the only thing we're given, i feel starved of nourishment.
if nothing else, playing this game feels like a thick, cold slushie on a warm summer day. it's a treat i allow myself once in a blue moon to remind myself that there are sweet things in this world, you just have to look for them.
if anything, trying to emulate reality is what has likely stagnated the sports genre to the degree where sports games are now synonymous with cosplaying as the new york mets. there's no fun, no invigorating "larger than life" attitude. just. . . egotism. why would i want to play something like soccer in a conventional way when games like SSX Tricky show that creativity is just around the corner, just a little bit past grounding? you can see indie titles take advantage of not being beholden to realism and succeed as a result (i.e. rocket league, pyre, etc.). i don't think there's anything wrong with realism in sports games, but when it's the only thing we're given, i feel starved of nourishment.
if nothing else, playing this game feels like a thick, cold slushie on a warm summer day. it's a treat i allow myself once in a blue moon to remind myself that there are sweet things in this world, you just have to look for them.
replayed this for the RA set. i never bothered with the master thief sprints, so it was a pleasant surprise that some of them could be genuinely challenging (if not also aggravating due to the "alarms being set off doubles your time countdown" mechanic). every time i replay this game i waver between saying it's a game i greatly love or not, and ultimately it's just shy of greatness for me. i'm saying nothing new but the non-platforming levels are almost entirely trash and the game really would've benefited from removing all of them and adding like, another 5-6 platforming levels. at the same time, i'm not gonna claim to know how game design works, and i know that some shitty little crab shooting or chicken swatting minigame is like 40x less effort than a fleshed out platforming level would be.
still have a great fondness and nostalgia for this game, still deeply miss the sly series. i don't even need sly himself to come back, but can we please get something in this vein? modern gaming needs more lighthearted saturday morning cartoon type games again.
still have a great fondness and nostalgia for this game, still deeply miss the sly series. i don't even need sly himself to come back, but can we please get something in this vein? modern gaming needs more lighthearted saturday morning cartoon type games again.
replayed this game for RA achievements for shits and giggles. think i've come around from "i love this game!" and "i hate this game!" to the libertarian "this game is okay and enjoyable if you are a fan of the show". what a brave take.
i essentially stand by all of the complaints i levied in my original review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/averypaledog/review/584931), but i think saying it makes me outright dislike the game is overstating the negative. there's a "turn off your brain and embrace your inner vacuum cleaner" aspect of it that appeals to me in the same way something like donkey kong 64 does. the biggest sticking point is still the driving, it's amazing how incredibly mid the driving is considering how it's basically what you're doing for 86% of your playtime. the dialogue and music do all the heavy lifting, but calling this an outright bad experience just doesn't feel right, filler missions be damned. if anything, it's on me for having high expectations for a licensed game. then again, licensed games used to great. remember that?
i essentially stand by all of the complaints i levied in my original review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/averypaledog/review/584931), but i think saying it makes me outright dislike the game is overstating the negative. there's a "turn off your brain and embrace your inner vacuum cleaner" aspect of it that appeals to me in the same way something like donkey kong 64 does. the biggest sticking point is still the driving, it's amazing how incredibly mid the driving is considering how it's basically what you're doing for 86% of your playtime. the dialogue and music do all the heavy lifting, but calling this an outright bad experience just doesn't feel right, filler missions be damned. if anything, it's on me for having high expectations for a licensed game. then again, licensed games used to great. remember that?
2004
this game is a step backwards for the series. cards on the table, i knew that this game was almost certainly not going to compare to silent assassin, and i tried to adjust my expectations knowing that. for me, SA was a meteoric high and i wasn't going to fool myself into thinking lightning would strike twice. still though, i was expecting this to at least be good. yet, this game really doesn't feel like a progression from SA. it feels like a regression that amplifies the preexisting problems that SA already had while also creating new ones. i feel there's a nonzero chance i'm being overly harsh on this game because of the high standards SA set for me, but that doesn't diminish my lack of enjoyment when it's all said and done.
it feels weird writing this and thinking "the aesthetics of this game should be addressed by the second paragraph", but there's an undeniable appeal the series has in presentation. hell, there's a reason some people still praise the 2015 hitman E3 trailer to this day despite it having exactly 0% gameplay. hitman is more than a sum of its parts type of game; it's not just about killing your targets and trying to avoid detection, but also doing it with flair. style isn't a gameplay mechanic or measured stat in the game, but it's a significant part of the experience. it's a shame then that so much of the dominant strategy of this game is just waiting for cycles. SA had moments where you had to wait for certain cycles to pass (i.e. that afghanistan bazaar level where you had to wait for colonel amin and he takes his sweet ass time), but most of the time you always had something you could be doing to advance your goal or you were waiting to activate a trap on your target. in contracts, i regularly had to wait on cycles to do silent assassin runs, and it takes me out of the experience and immersion knowing i'm just waiting on an AI routine most of the time. i know this point makes me sound like an impatient asshole, but it really does weigh on the experience when out of 12 levels, there's only 3 that i can recall doing silent assassin where waiting for at least 20 seconds did not occur.
with regards to narrative aesthetics, the game's a miss for me. due to the framing device of "47 is on the verge of death and reliving his previous jobs in a dying dream sort of way", almost every level is dark, moody, and smothered in rain. i've seen the arguments that this fits 47's cloudy and hazy mental state, and sure, i get it, i just also feel as though we lose a lot of diversity and identity when they're all made in a relatively uniform aesthetic. this game also feels like a growing pain with regards to level design because there's a much greater emphasis on complex interiors, but a lot of these maps have either entirely wasted effort (did you know there's a police station in deadly cargo? or that you could poison tea in the slaying of a dragon?) or have a lot of wasted space (beldingford manor, rondevouz in rotterdam). i hate to say "make the levels smaller", but there's genuinely not a lot going on in a lot of these levels that justifies the scale of them. they feel big and aimless in a bad way rather than a "there's so many infiltration methods" way. and, sure, it's cute how they brought back the four triad missions from codename 47, but the first three are all small levels that exist only for build and are largely unnecessary. 47 is reminiscing, we can just skip to the lee hong assassination that he otherwise had to prep for and no one would mind.
compare that to SA, where you have a variety of environments and interiors to explore. you could go from the italian countryside to a classy and crowded dinner party to an ancient and largely vertical castle in japan to a subterranean bunker in india. contracts has some variety, yes, but considering we spend a third of the game in one location, it sticks out in a much worse way to me. i don't need hitman games to be globetrotting gallivanting, and i'd largely be fine if there was an entire game that just focused on one homogeneous group of targets (i.e the russian mafia, american politicians, upcoming witnesses to a trial, etc.). this game just lacks coherent theming that ties it all together for me and makes it more than its individual pieces, and that's probably the worst single flaw about the game. it feels like it has lost the style and panache i so greatly loved in SA.
i do have my fair share of gameplay nitpicks, and it was very tempting to air them all out for all to see in this review. i will name a few to make my point: guard AI is somehow worse in this game because where SA's was draconian, it was consistent, meanwhile contracts' is completely erratic and inconsistent to a fault; why do people take showers that last eternity in this game without any other routine for the AI to engage in; the inventory has a huge bug where sometimes 47 will grab the wrong item and this happens with a consistency of 5%; doors will open both inwards and outwards even if they are listed as opening only one way on the map; hunter and hunted requiring you to memorize and perfect the first 10 seconds of it is a gigantic pain in the ass and makes it my least favorite mission by far; etc. etc. still, these aren't the silver bullet for this game to me. i ultimately got less joy out of this game because it was doing less to engage with me and puzzle-solving the levels for silent assassin felt far less interesting and rewarding to me.
i don't have a neat way to tie this all up. this game felt exceptionally short to me despite being roughly 10 hours of gameplay for me. this game ends with a cliffhanger of "oh no we found out who the REAL bad guy is and you're gonna have to go after him next time 47!!!", so ending the entire reminiscence narrative with basically no plot resolution makes this game feel disposable. i haven't played the rest of the series, but i predict this game will end up in one of two fates. either i will replay this game in the future and find it to be a grower that had positives i neglected to appreciate, or i'll find myself doubling down on this opinion and end up dubbing this one of the least essential hitman experiences second only to codename 47 itself. that latter one feels much less likely, but the fact that it's still a possibility saddens me.
it feels weird writing this and thinking "the aesthetics of this game should be addressed by the second paragraph", but there's an undeniable appeal the series has in presentation. hell, there's a reason some people still praise the 2015 hitman E3 trailer to this day despite it having exactly 0% gameplay. hitman is more than a sum of its parts type of game; it's not just about killing your targets and trying to avoid detection, but also doing it with flair. style isn't a gameplay mechanic or measured stat in the game, but it's a significant part of the experience. it's a shame then that so much of the dominant strategy of this game is just waiting for cycles. SA had moments where you had to wait for certain cycles to pass (i.e. that afghanistan bazaar level where you had to wait for colonel amin and he takes his sweet ass time), but most of the time you always had something you could be doing to advance your goal or you were waiting to activate a trap on your target. in contracts, i regularly had to wait on cycles to do silent assassin runs, and it takes me out of the experience and immersion knowing i'm just waiting on an AI routine most of the time. i know this point makes me sound like an impatient asshole, but it really does weigh on the experience when out of 12 levels, there's only 3 that i can recall doing silent assassin where waiting for at least 20 seconds did not occur.
with regards to narrative aesthetics, the game's a miss for me. due to the framing device of "47 is on the verge of death and reliving his previous jobs in a dying dream sort of way", almost every level is dark, moody, and smothered in rain. i've seen the arguments that this fits 47's cloudy and hazy mental state, and sure, i get it, i just also feel as though we lose a lot of diversity and identity when they're all made in a relatively uniform aesthetic. this game also feels like a growing pain with regards to level design because there's a much greater emphasis on complex interiors, but a lot of these maps have either entirely wasted effort (did you know there's a police station in deadly cargo? or that you could poison tea in the slaying of a dragon?) or have a lot of wasted space (beldingford manor, rondevouz in rotterdam). i hate to say "make the levels smaller", but there's genuinely not a lot going on in a lot of these levels that justifies the scale of them. they feel big and aimless in a bad way rather than a "there's so many infiltration methods" way. and, sure, it's cute how they brought back the four triad missions from codename 47, but the first three are all small levels that exist only for build and are largely unnecessary. 47 is reminiscing, we can just skip to the lee hong assassination that he otherwise had to prep for and no one would mind.
compare that to SA, where you have a variety of environments and interiors to explore. you could go from the italian countryside to a classy and crowded dinner party to an ancient and largely vertical castle in japan to a subterranean bunker in india. contracts has some variety, yes, but considering we spend a third of the game in one location, it sticks out in a much worse way to me. i don't need hitman games to be globetrotting gallivanting, and i'd largely be fine if there was an entire game that just focused on one homogeneous group of targets (i.e the russian mafia, american politicians, upcoming witnesses to a trial, etc.). this game just lacks coherent theming that ties it all together for me and makes it more than its individual pieces, and that's probably the worst single flaw about the game. it feels like it has lost the style and panache i so greatly loved in SA.
i do have my fair share of gameplay nitpicks, and it was very tempting to air them all out for all to see in this review. i will name a few to make my point: guard AI is somehow worse in this game because where SA's was draconian, it was consistent, meanwhile contracts' is completely erratic and inconsistent to a fault; why do people take showers that last eternity in this game without any other routine for the AI to engage in; the inventory has a huge bug where sometimes 47 will grab the wrong item and this happens with a consistency of 5%; doors will open both inwards and outwards even if they are listed as opening only one way on the map; hunter and hunted requiring you to memorize and perfect the first 10 seconds of it is a gigantic pain in the ass and makes it my least favorite mission by far; etc. etc. still, these aren't the silver bullet for this game to me. i ultimately got less joy out of this game because it was doing less to engage with me and puzzle-solving the levels for silent assassin felt far less interesting and rewarding to me.
i don't have a neat way to tie this all up. this game felt exceptionally short to me despite being roughly 10 hours of gameplay for me. this game ends with a cliffhanger of "oh no we found out who the REAL bad guy is and you're gonna have to go after him next time 47!!!", so ending the entire reminiscence narrative with basically no plot resolution makes this game feel disposable. i haven't played the rest of the series, but i predict this game will end up in one of two fates. either i will replay this game in the future and find it to be a grower that had positives i neglected to appreciate, or i'll find myself doubling down on this opinion and end up dubbing this one of the least essential hitman experiences second only to codename 47 itself. that latter one feels much less likely, but the fact that it's still a possibility saddens me.
2012
never in my entire life do i feel like i've wasted my time harder than when i try an I/I run and this game just RNG trolls me. oh these enemies you had no ability to see spawned on you and the entire game is fog of war with no ability to improve your vision and the earlygame is insufferable from how little strategic options you have. look this game is really fun and enjoyable on normal when these stupid objectively bad game design decisions don't result in you losing a several hours run. but this game literally cannot hold up to its own difficulty. it implodes and becomes one of the most miserable luck-based tactics games i've played.
it's extremely telling how the game refuses to tell you what the enemy hit percentages when they attack because they hit improbable 360 no scope shots when you're behind full cover but you miss point blank "you have no cover" shots. i want to like this game i really do but this feels like the type of tactics games only fucking morons are capable of enjoying. when luck is the ultimate deciding factor in your tactics game, you have not made a fun game based on strategy. sorry, this isn't disco elysium, i can't forgive the excessive dicerolling you're expecting players to do.
i'm saying nothing new here but holy shit this game is not optimized well for PS3. literally why even release it on console if it's gonna chug this bad and have this bad of a cursor. there's nothing wrong with tilesets. i miss them dearly.
it's extremely telling how the game refuses to tell you what the enemy hit percentages when they attack because they hit improbable 360 no scope shots when you're behind full cover but you miss point blank "you have no cover" shots. i want to like this game i really do but this feels like the type of tactics games only fucking morons are capable of enjoying. when luck is the ultimate deciding factor in your tactics game, you have not made a fun game based on strategy. sorry, this isn't disco elysium, i can't forgive the excessive dicerolling you're expecting players to do.
i'm saying nothing new here but holy shit this game is not optimized well for PS3. literally why even release it on console if it's gonna chug this bad and have this bad of a cursor. there's nothing wrong with tilesets. i miss them dearly.
free text-based indie game that does that "you get asked the same question and your response is ignored each time" thing that every free text-based indie game does. i don't hate it but it genuinely felt like a waste of the 5 minutes i spent doing it. not to be rude but i have no earthly idea how this could affect anyone when it feels so vague and nothing. i get what it was trying to go for, but there wasn't nearly enough subversion or intrigue to succeed. i feel like i played a fakedeep buzzfeed quiz.
2003
There is a specific way you can look at art. You can appraise it on a technical scale, assess its merits, and incorporate a rubric to try and determine how you ultimately feel about it. That's what my reviews in large part do. However, you can go more free-form and say "This piece of art impacted me in this way that I cannot quantify.", sort of like you're explaining the emotions it evoked out of you and leaving them out for a third-party audience to mull over.
So, in the spirit of trying something new, I will simply say that Sonic Heroes is a video game that has brought the most misery and unhappiness out of me that I can ever recall of any piece of art. Trying to 100% this game was nothing short of a waking nightmare, and it brought out such severe anger in me that I wasn't actually aware I was capable of. This game significantly reduced my capacity to experience joy or contentment during the entire time I was playing it. Every time I sat down to play it, I walked away unquestionably feeling worse.
That is my review of this game.
So, in the spirit of trying something new, I will simply say that Sonic Heroes is a video game that has brought the most misery and unhappiness out of me that I can ever recall of any piece of art. Trying to 100% this game was nothing short of a waking nightmare, and it brought out such severe anger in me that I wasn't actually aware I was capable of. This game significantly reduced my capacity to experience joy or contentment during the entire time I was playing it. Every time I sat down to play it, I walked away unquestionably feeling worse.
That is my review of this game.
2021
i miss when metroid wasn't so plotty. i know this is something i should realistically be blaming fusion or even corruption for, but man. this game just does not need all this plot. suddenly samus has midichlorians and her metroid dna is overtaking her chozo dna or whatever and that's why giant robots that completely suck all the fun out of gameplay are hunting her. i enjoy this game in spite of itself. it has a myriad of things that do not work for me, but fortunately, it's very hard to fuck the metroid formula up, though it feels like mercurysteam is really trying to sometimes.
i am mildly shocked that this is an unpopular opinion, but the EMMI are by far one of the worst mechanics ever introduced into the series. they are not scary. they punish exploration (you know, the fundamental thing metroid games are built on). they are annoying. they waste time. what is the point of having this giant "unkillable until the game says so" enemy if it's actively ruining the player's experience? it feels so much like mercurysteam saw the popularity of Mr. X in REmake 2 and said "we should have that" (or maybe it was a nintendo directive, who knows). all i can tell you is that far and away my least enjoyable moments with the game were when i was forced to trek through EMMI zones and had fun moments like transitioning into another room just to run into one of the little cunts and have it instantly kill me. even after learning the melee counter timing, that did not deter me from feeling annoyed and like my time was being wasted any time i had to deal with them. i want to stress how incredibly serious i am when i say that they are the worst mechanic ever added into the series when games like Corruption and Other M exist. it runs so antithetical to what makes metroid work, and it's the very first thing i think of when i think of this game.
at the very least, when you're not dealing with the EMMI, dread is fun to play. melee counter is still poisoning the well but, at this point, it at least feels a little bit more natural in its implementation. some of the upgrades feel a little redundant or otherwise unnecessary, i.e. getting the baby space jump like an hour before you find the real space jump, but otherwise the new stuff here is good (i very quickly went from "i am never going to use this" to "this is vital" on storm missiles). as i've implied before, the game really loses me on the whole chozo lore raven beak stuff. not because it's terribly complex or esoteric, but more because it's so uninteresting. they keep trying to make metroid have dialogue and cutscenes, and they fail to realize the most important and memorable moments in metroid happened in spite of a big rendered cutscene or dialogue (i.e. you know the part of super metroid, the ending of metroid fusion with the omega metroid, the ending of metroid prime 1 where samus mourns the loss of the chozo culture/chozo in general, etc.). i've said it before, but we really just need another metroid prime 2-esque game that's wholly self-contained and not trying to be about some greater lore or story for samus.
overall i would say that i'm happy this game exists, because the meme of "metroid dread will never exist" dying is a good thing. from what i can tell, most people seem to be way more enthusiastic about this game than i am, so i'm glad other people are getting more out of it. hell, i'm open-minded and while i give this a light 3.5/5.0 now, i'm hopeful that i could end up revisiting it and having a better time with it. i'm not sure where the metroid series is going to go, but i am glad that people are still getting joy out of it.
i am mildly shocked that this is an unpopular opinion, but the EMMI are by far one of the worst mechanics ever introduced into the series. they are not scary. they punish exploration (you know, the fundamental thing metroid games are built on). they are annoying. they waste time. what is the point of having this giant "unkillable until the game says so" enemy if it's actively ruining the player's experience? it feels so much like mercurysteam saw the popularity of Mr. X in REmake 2 and said "we should have that" (or maybe it was a nintendo directive, who knows). all i can tell you is that far and away my least enjoyable moments with the game were when i was forced to trek through EMMI zones and had fun moments like transitioning into another room just to run into one of the little cunts and have it instantly kill me. even after learning the melee counter timing, that did not deter me from feeling annoyed and like my time was being wasted any time i had to deal with them. i want to stress how incredibly serious i am when i say that they are the worst mechanic ever added into the series when games like Corruption and Other M exist. it runs so antithetical to what makes metroid work, and it's the very first thing i think of when i think of this game.
at the very least, when you're not dealing with the EMMI, dread is fun to play. melee counter is still poisoning the well but, at this point, it at least feels a little bit more natural in its implementation. some of the upgrades feel a little redundant or otherwise unnecessary, i.e. getting the baby space jump like an hour before you find the real space jump, but otherwise the new stuff here is good (i very quickly went from "i am never going to use this" to "this is vital" on storm missiles). as i've implied before, the game really loses me on the whole chozo lore raven beak stuff. not because it's terribly complex or esoteric, but more because it's so uninteresting. they keep trying to make metroid have dialogue and cutscenes, and they fail to realize the most important and memorable moments in metroid happened in spite of a big rendered cutscene or dialogue (i.e. you know the part of super metroid, the ending of metroid fusion with the omega metroid, the ending of metroid prime 1 where samus mourns the loss of the chozo culture/chozo in general, etc.). i've said it before, but we really just need another metroid prime 2-esque game that's wholly self-contained and not trying to be about some greater lore or story for samus.
overall i would say that i'm happy this game exists, because the meme of "metroid dread will never exist" dying is a good thing. from what i can tell, most people seem to be way more enthusiastic about this game than i am, so i'm glad other people are getting more out of it. hell, i'm open-minded and while i give this a light 3.5/5.0 now, i'm hopeful that i could end up revisiting it and having a better time with it. i'm not sure where the metroid series is going to go, but i am glad that people are still getting joy out of it.
1995
survival horror, as a genre, still has this new feeling to me. i can't put my finger on it. any time i play a game like clock tower, i end up going "aww, look at how groundbreaking this was!" and i end up having rose-colored glasses with my experience. this isn't a bad thing. if anything, this is probably a very good thing, because it helps me appreciate older, rougher games like this. at the same time, i feel as though any praise of this game that i give has to be given with that context. if you're looking for this as just a game experience rather than something informative, you might be let down.
clock tower's influences are very obvious, even to someone relatively lacking in film breadth. this game is part slasher, part giallo, part monster flick, all mixed into one neat package. the gameplay is fairly simple point-and-click adventure game stuff, but when you add in the stalker element of scissorman, it adds a whole new layer. it's therefore a shame that it's fairly easy to see how the sausage is made with regards to when and how scissorman will encounter you. i can't be too hard considering that this is one of the earliest instances of "horror game stalker" as a gameplay mechanic. but there is such a precipitous drop in scare factor once you do a second or third playthrough and find out "oh scissorman can only appear in like 3 spots and you can fight him back if you run into him".
on the flip side, my first playthrough actually had me pretty anxious and on edge. when you don't know when and where scissorman can show up, it's pretty unnerving. there's barely any music in the game aside from the scare chords and the theme (that apes a lot from carpenter's Halloween theme), so you spend most of the playthrough in your head with ambient silence waiting for something, anything to happen. there's minor scares throughout the game, but you constantly get this feeling of unease. the barrows mansion isn't necessarily the most memorable place on earth, and good god, it needs a map. but it does lend itself to this creepy "you don't belong here and we know it" feeling from the environment. a sort of "the walls have ears and they're deaf to your screams" type vibe.
that's what this game luxuriates in: vibe, aesthetic, feeling. when you get to the tangible, this game is fairly short in that you could easily speedrun it in like 15-20 minutes considering the puzzles barely change from playthrough to playthrough. you can get different scenarios (i.e. what happens if you interact with [character] as early as possible vs. what happens if you interact with [character] after finding out more information), but the plot beats will all be largely the same. it's a simple game with a simple plot and it has a simple goal that it accomplishes simply. i do miss when you could say that about a video game.
clock tower's influences are very obvious, even to someone relatively lacking in film breadth. this game is part slasher, part giallo, part monster flick, all mixed into one neat package. the gameplay is fairly simple point-and-click adventure game stuff, but when you add in the stalker element of scissorman, it adds a whole new layer. it's therefore a shame that it's fairly easy to see how the sausage is made with regards to when and how scissorman will encounter you. i can't be too hard considering that this is one of the earliest instances of "horror game stalker" as a gameplay mechanic. but there is such a precipitous drop in scare factor once you do a second or third playthrough and find out "oh scissorman can only appear in like 3 spots and you can fight him back if you run into him".
on the flip side, my first playthrough actually had me pretty anxious and on edge. when you don't know when and where scissorman can show up, it's pretty unnerving. there's barely any music in the game aside from the scare chords and the theme (that apes a lot from carpenter's Halloween theme), so you spend most of the playthrough in your head with ambient silence waiting for something, anything to happen. there's minor scares throughout the game, but you constantly get this feeling of unease. the barrows mansion isn't necessarily the most memorable place on earth, and good god, it needs a map. but it does lend itself to this creepy "you don't belong here and we know it" feeling from the environment. a sort of "the walls have ears and they're deaf to your screams" type vibe.
that's what this game luxuriates in: vibe, aesthetic, feeling. when you get to the tangible, this game is fairly short in that you could easily speedrun it in like 15-20 minutes considering the puzzles barely change from playthrough to playthrough. you can get different scenarios (i.e. what happens if you interact with [character] as early as possible vs. what happens if you interact with [character] after finding out more information), but the plot beats will all be largely the same. it's a simple game with a simple plot and it has a simple goal that it accomplishes simply. i do miss when you could say that about a video game.
2015
shockingly, this DLC that's widely maligned by its own fandom ended up being something i enjoyed more than its base game. i think being shorter helped a bit, there's less room for jorgensen to misstep and make emotional moments that don't work, and the ones in here feel much more earned and impactful. that ending part with buddy coming to terms with brad in particular is a highlight of the entire LISA trilogy, easily.
the problems with this DLC are ultimately that it's very monotonous. i don't think you inherently needed to add party members to this to make it fun, but making the majority of the game be solo encounters basically requires a very turtle-y playstyle that gets very repetitive and boring. it's exacerbated by the fact that like 60% of the encounters in the game are joy mutants that all have roughly the same set of moves, and some of them have an obscene amount of health that makes the fight take like 3x longer than it really should. and while joyful is excessive in how it handles combat, it's honestly too minimal in actual story. i like that this is relatively terse and self-contained, but a 3 hour DLC that's mostly just encounters you could've gotten from the base game feels underwhelming.
still, i find buddy to be more fascinating and groundbreaking of a main character than brad, and i think jorgensen handles her with a shocking amount of tact. buddy feels just as asocial and isolated as someone who lived her life would be. i've seen the sentiment that people feel as though buddy is unlikeable and/or excessively abrasive, but i think telling a story where she acts like a quirky shut-in seeing the world for the first time like elizabeth from bioshock: infinite would not only devalue her character, but it would make the narrative a lot less engaging. she has baggage and trauma, she reacts in uncomfortable and challenging ways, and you don't necessarily have to like it, but you do understand.
on a final note, i really dislike the bits of lore that the epilogues add to the game. they feel unnecessary, and i greatly dislike the framing of "lisa was actually the source of all the darkness in the narrative and influenced buzzo to become a monster", something the game tries to hammer home two separate times. it removes agency from his character while simultaneously demonizing children of abuse as these horrific monsters, another abuse trope that jorgensen probably thinks is way more subversive than it really is.
either way, i enjoyed my time with this expansion and was pleasantly surprised to get more good than bad out of it, especially after the base game. it doesn't stand on its own legs by any means, though, so i doubt i'll ever revisit this considering it'd have to involve revisiting the entire trilogy. i'd rather put this set of games to bed and never come back to it.
the problems with this DLC are ultimately that it's very monotonous. i don't think you inherently needed to add party members to this to make it fun, but making the majority of the game be solo encounters basically requires a very turtle-y playstyle that gets very repetitive and boring. it's exacerbated by the fact that like 60% of the encounters in the game are joy mutants that all have roughly the same set of moves, and some of them have an obscene amount of health that makes the fight take like 3x longer than it really should. and while joyful is excessive in how it handles combat, it's honestly too minimal in actual story. i like that this is relatively terse and self-contained, but a 3 hour DLC that's mostly just encounters you could've gotten from the base game feels underwhelming.
still, i find buddy to be more fascinating and groundbreaking of a main character than brad, and i think jorgensen handles her with a shocking amount of tact. buddy feels just as asocial and isolated as someone who lived her life would be. i've seen the sentiment that people feel as though buddy is unlikeable and/or excessively abrasive, but i think telling a story where she acts like a quirky shut-in seeing the world for the first time like elizabeth from bioshock: infinite would not only devalue her character, but it would make the narrative a lot less engaging. she has baggage and trauma, she reacts in uncomfortable and challenging ways, and you don't necessarily have to like it, but you do understand.
on a final note, i really dislike the bits of lore that the epilogues add to the game. they feel unnecessary, and i greatly dislike the framing of "lisa was actually the source of all the darkness in the narrative and influenced buzzo to become a monster", something the game tries to hammer home two separate times. it removes agency from his character while simultaneously demonizing children of abuse as these horrific monsters, another abuse trope that jorgensen probably thinks is way more subversive than it really is.
either way, i enjoyed my time with this expansion and was pleasantly surprised to get more good than bad out of it, especially after the base game. it doesn't stand on its own legs by any means, though, so i doubt i'll ever revisit this considering it'd have to involve revisiting the entire trilogy. i'd rather put this set of games to bed and never come back to it.
This review contains spoilers
this game has never clicked with me, and, for a long time, i used to think of it as more of a personal failing than anything qualitatively wrong with this game. i recall very few things about my first playthrough of this game. i don't remember exactly when in my life that i played it (just that i was a teenager). i don't recall how i felt about playing the game while actually playing it. all i really remember is that, ironically, i forgot most of it. i remembered the grocery store, the final level and boss, and i vaguely recalled the fights that led up to it. but i didn't remember them in the way i remembered NMH1. there wasn't any shinobu, a boss that demanded i learn not only competency with the game's systems, but also with punishing when bosses left themselves open. i'm not saying there aren't bosses like that in the game, just that i don't remember even doing that learning process. i remember "it's kill or be killed", a few jokes, and that's it. for all intents and purposes, this game was completely disposable to me for a long time. no more heroes 1 is one of my favorite games of all time; you can see how i would want to equate this more to me being a distracted and immature teenager rather than this game being just that exceptionally devoid of impact.
and now, having replayed it, i get it. i get why i didn't remember this game. it's because it's not memorable.
okay, i know that was a lot of build-up to a relatively tame insult, but work with me. regardless of how you felt about no more heroes 1 as a video game, there was essentially one thing you couldn't deny about the game: it had flavor. it was doing something unique. the execution is for all to argue and debate, but you couldn't point to many contemporary games on the wii that were doing something like NMH1. of all the things you could possibly fuck up in a NMH1 sequel, removing the memorability from it has to be the singular worst mistake you could make. it also begs the question of how could you do that? how is it even possible to syphon the personality out of a NMH game and make it feel forgettable?
you can't explore santa destroy anymore, a change i suspect was largely motivated by the bevvy of critiques against the game for having an empty open world. it was ironic and satirizing the trend of open worlds with nothing actually happening in them, but i get it, you got a lot of dings against you for that one. the problem is that in removing this world, you have to replace it with. . . something. and NMH2 doesn't. so you don't have to pay for fights anymore, meaning money serves less of a purpose, not to mention naomi has a grand total of Two (2) things to sell you in the entire game. all you really need money for are the upgrades ryan'll give you. so, you're far more likely to barely spend any time in between missions dicking around. NMH1 had pacing inherent to the game with making the player get money. it made the combat sections that much more memorable because they were separated by mundanity. some people hated it and said it made the game boring, but they missed the point in that the mundane elevated the profane. when you don't have that time to ponder and anticipate, you lose payoff. it doesn't help that the mini-games in this game are far more hit-or-miss, and while they have slightly more retro-game charm to them, that doesn't excuse how awfully some of them play (i.e. the coconut and space mini-games). you're going to more than likely just go from assassination mission to assassination mission and it will likely blur together like it did for me.
and when it does come to the assassination missions, they leave much to be desired. the game starts out pretty strong with its first few levels, but then slowly it starts to decline. eventually you get to levels that have no music playing during them, or are just empty "drive along this road for 3 minutes and reach the boss" moments. some assassination missions don't even have levels. i eventually had to look up what the dev period for this game was. it had about 2 years, which is not terrible by any means. i get that not every single part of the game can be a home-run, but there's such a gigantic lack of content relative to the first game. let me repeat: there's no open world, less worthwhile mini-games, no collectibles, less levels, no sylvia phonecalls, and less to buy. again, i don't subscribe to the theory that sequels need to be bigger and grander than their predecessor, but NMH2 cuts out so much content and replaces it with nothing. i can't help but feel like this is just a hollowed out game as a result.
the assassins in this game suffer the most in regards to lack of personality. i think this problem is more systemic than "they really struck out on bosses this frequently", because most bosses have next to no lines of dialogue, little build-up, and are disposed of with little impact to travis. they try to have a holly summers moment with ryuji, but considering that ryuji literally does not speak once and has no introduction beyond "im on a motorcycle and japanese 😤", why should i care? i mean, holly didn't have that many lines, but you still got a very strong idea for who she is and the fact that she chose her own death and the way she did it made her memorable. ryuji dies because. . . he lost to travis and sylvia wanted to troll. okay. complete flop of a moment, and they linger on travis' reaction to try and imply that this is some turning point for him. it just doesn't work.
the real kiss of death here is that i actually detest a large portion of the boss fights in regards to gameplay. let's just come right out and say it: this game is mostly bad boss fights with very few good ones. in the spirit of 13 sentinels, i will now go over every fight individually and delineate things about it that stand out to me.
helter skelter: awful fight once you get past the tutorialized section of it. i firmly believe most people tend not to notice how bad this fight is because by the time you actually start it, he has half health. he suffers from a common problem in this game, which is "has a no wind-up or tell move that comes out extremely quickly that can break your guard and often leads to a follow-up attack that will do a lot of damage". you can dodge the follow-up attack typically, but there is no way you're capable of reacting in time for the lead-up. almost every boss in the entire game has it, so this is more a universal complaint than unique, so i won't mention it in the following summaries. but still, fuck man. outside of that, he's just a boss where you have to wait for him to use the one combo that leaves him vulnerable, and if you exercise any level of proactive aggression, he punishes it immediately. it's a very boring and poor fight to start with.
nathan copeland: i mean, at least he's better than the guys he's sandwiched between. he's appropriately easy as far as early bosses go, only real difficulty comes from when his environmental hazards start stunlocking you. i barely remember anything he actually does because he's so easy to just whale on without him retaliating much.
charlie macdonald: literally not even a fight. the gimmick wears thin almost immediately and is brainless to overcome. why even include this in the game.
kimmy howell: definitely one of the few fights i like in the game. has a fun and quirky introduction that makes her honestly the most memorable character introduced in this game. only complaints i have for her is that her moveset is fairly simple, and her projectile is such a nonfactor. it definitely feels like she could've stood to have maybe a little more complexity, she's very easy to solve and her AI lacks aggression. but, again, this is a fight i like, if only because i remember it pretty vividly.
matt helms: hey look, one of the worse fights in the game! his molotov attack is buttfucking stupid in regards to him not being interruptible while using it + it breaks guards + it lingers on the ground. all you need to do is subtract one of those things and the attack becomes balanced and fine. in general i just dislike his whole adult baby vibe and the fight itself is one of the rare cases of "spamming attacks and being mindlessly aggressive is in your best interest" for the duology. his lore is completely lame too, you couldn't come up with something more interesting than "he's a spooky ghost who killed his parents!!!"?
cloe walsh: nothingburger of a boss both in aesthetic and fight. she has such low HP that you can cream through her fairly quickly, meanwhile her attacks are so telegraphed that you have to be not paying attention to be in any real danger. you'd think her being both in a high security prison and also having magical poison abilities would give her at least a little room to talk about who she is or what her deal is, but the game seems to want to get rid of her as quickly as possible.
dr. letz shake: fun idea to have him come back, but then you run into the obvious problem of "how are you going to make fighting a giant machine work in this type of game?", and, ultimately, they don't. he has only 3 attacks, one of which is just a basic "get off me" move. the joke outstays its welcome because it wasn't even particularly funny in the first place.
million gunman: cool fight theme, literally nothing else remarkable about him outside of him being possible to infinite (low attack into 2-3 high attacks will make him take some damage, then start dodging, and then he'll try to retaliate with a move you can punish before it launches, repeating the cycle).
new destroyman: hey look! another god awful fight! having one of the destroyman halves spam projectile moves is infuriating to deal with, difficulty be damned. i know the cheese strat of hiding in the upper right corner so that you can isolate the red eye and blue eye just does nothing, but that doesn't fix the fight. even when you do it that way, you're still going to have to play grabass with the blue eye half for at least 5-10 minutes, if not longer. all of this is exacerbated by the fact that shinobu's combos have such terrible finishing lag that your only safe option is to just spam sonic sword. either way, it's an objectively horribly designed fight.
ryuji: on this replay, i distinctly remember thinking "this is the first actual boss fight that feels like it could belong in NMH1"; that only really applies in terms of his fight's design, though. ryuji, as mentioned, is another nothingburger. i would probably like his fight if his shiteating dragon wasn't such a liferuiner. i've had the damn thing pinball me back and forth between hit boxes while guarding until my battery ran out and i died. trying to do anything to ryuji while the dragon's summoned is futile because you might as well be playing smash bros. with items on at that point. you can lock him down in a combo and the dragon will zoom into you without warning. you're better off just waiting until it disappears, so add that to the list of bosses where waiting is the most reliable strategy. ryuji himself has a decent moveset and learning how to answer his attacks genuinely feels good, it's just that shitty dragon that's the problem. . . what's that? motorcycle fight? no, we're not even going to talk about that.
mimmy: is it bad that i like this fight. i feel like it's bad because it's the easiest fight in the entire game. just spam charge attacks and use the invincibility frames to avoid damage. at least it has a good fight theme.
marge: i've never understood the hype behind marge. the location is gorgeous from an aesthetics point of view, but her fight is so stupidly easy it feels like a genuine error to place it this late. it slots in better between like, kimmy and matt helms. she genuinely does such little damage and the attacks she has are very obviously telegraphed. combine that with the abundance of health drops that spawn (excluding bitter mode obviously) and i can't imagine many people died to her. she's one of the endgame bosses and she feels like babymode. i mean, i do still like her fight, but it always feels like i'm bullying someone with a handicap.
captain vladimir: completely worthless fight. why is an astronaut an assassin. why is he floating. whatever. he has probably the "least likely to ever hit you" instakill, can shoot very easily dodged lasers, and can throw rocks at you. that's about it. it's also comedic at the game's expense when they try to have an emotional moment when he dies. who is this fucking random soviet astronaut and why is he #3.
alice twilight: going to say nothing revolutionary when i say that she's far and away the best boss in the game on every front. great cutscene introducing her that gives us the idea that she has an interior life that we'll never get to know + a fight that's designed very well + a unique fighting style + an extremely great fight theme. the only bad thing i can say about this fight is less at the fight's expense and more the game's: why play this game for this fight when heroes' paradise already has it? lol
jasper batt: everything wrong with this game can be traced back to this character. both in design and also in lore. and also yuri lowenthal. genuinely one of the worst final boss fights in a game that i've played in recent memory, potentially in the top 5. i would literally prefer if the game just ended on a fake-out with no fight than this shitshow. teleporting punch moves that have no telegraph and will break your guard? Fuck you.
these fights suffer from being either too gimmicky or too unbalanced (both for and against the player). i think you can also argue that personality-wise so many of these fights fall short because we're given nothing to work with on any level. who is cloe walsh? why should i care? who is million gunman? why should i care? who is captain vladimir? why should i care? hell, matt helms and ryuji share the exact same boss theme despite being complete polar opposites both in setting and design. i'm not going to say that every single boss in NMH1 was a winner (even though i unironically think they were), but at least i could describe them with more than like, two adjectives. i truly could not say the same thing about most of NMH2's bosses. what this ultimately means is that when there's so few boss fights i actually like, i have next to nothing to look forward to in the game. it's just "oh i have to THAT fight now, great" over and over again. ironically, despite having 15 bosses, the game feels so much shorter and less developed compared to the first game's 10. you can argue quality > quantity, and surely that's part of it, but i think another part of it is just that NMH2 lives in the shadow of the first game.
NMH2 has this huge issue of being up its own ass. it takes itself far too seriously when the first game was going in nearly the opposite direction. sure, 1 had plot twists and serious moments, but they were always underlined by how absurd the setting is. the characters play everything straight, it's the fact that they exist in this world that not only allows deathmatches, but makes it this mundane bureaucratic exercise. hell, one fight in the game gets prevented just because travis wasn't following protocol. contrast this with NMH2, where travis is suddenly viewed as a god by everyone and even gets his face painted as a mural che guevara style. the assassins you fight will literally talk about how they've been waiting to be killed by him in this cultish way, and it all doesn't work when the first game's ending reveals that the UAA was all a scam set up by sylvia to milk travis for money, not to mention that travis was a gigantic loser for falling for it. in NMH1, travis is a tragic yet pathetic character. in NMH2, travis is the opposite, an epic force meant to change the world for the better. it's so out of place and unfitting for the setting of santa destroy. you exchanged nihilism and apathy for optimism and redemption without any of the work to earn it.
it's one thing for a game to have a bad sequel, but i think going from where NMH1 left off, you were doomed no matter what. you literally sequelize the game that said "too bad, no sequel for you", where do you go from there? it's equally baffling because suda was involved in both projects, so we can't sit here and say it was a case of losing the visionary of the series. what happened? not only does this game take itself too seriously, it's about as funny as a fucking funeral. i just want so badly to find anything about this game to like, but it feels ironically a victim of its own malaise. NMH1 made fun of itself so much that it's impossible for me to take this setting as seriously as 2 wants me to. NMH1 wanted me to take this wacky setting for what it is and see what happens when people play it straight. NMH2 wanted to franchise it.
and now, having replayed it, i get it. i get why i didn't remember this game. it's because it's not memorable.
okay, i know that was a lot of build-up to a relatively tame insult, but work with me. regardless of how you felt about no more heroes 1 as a video game, there was essentially one thing you couldn't deny about the game: it had flavor. it was doing something unique. the execution is for all to argue and debate, but you couldn't point to many contemporary games on the wii that were doing something like NMH1. of all the things you could possibly fuck up in a NMH1 sequel, removing the memorability from it has to be the singular worst mistake you could make. it also begs the question of how could you do that? how is it even possible to syphon the personality out of a NMH game and make it feel forgettable?
you can't explore santa destroy anymore, a change i suspect was largely motivated by the bevvy of critiques against the game for having an empty open world. it was ironic and satirizing the trend of open worlds with nothing actually happening in them, but i get it, you got a lot of dings against you for that one. the problem is that in removing this world, you have to replace it with. . . something. and NMH2 doesn't. so you don't have to pay for fights anymore, meaning money serves less of a purpose, not to mention naomi has a grand total of Two (2) things to sell you in the entire game. all you really need money for are the upgrades ryan'll give you. so, you're far more likely to barely spend any time in between missions dicking around. NMH1 had pacing inherent to the game with making the player get money. it made the combat sections that much more memorable because they were separated by mundanity. some people hated it and said it made the game boring, but they missed the point in that the mundane elevated the profane. when you don't have that time to ponder and anticipate, you lose payoff. it doesn't help that the mini-games in this game are far more hit-or-miss, and while they have slightly more retro-game charm to them, that doesn't excuse how awfully some of them play (i.e. the coconut and space mini-games). you're going to more than likely just go from assassination mission to assassination mission and it will likely blur together like it did for me.
and when it does come to the assassination missions, they leave much to be desired. the game starts out pretty strong with its first few levels, but then slowly it starts to decline. eventually you get to levels that have no music playing during them, or are just empty "drive along this road for 3 minutes and reach the boss" moments. some assassination missions don't even have levels. i eventually had to look up what the dev period for this game was. it had about 2 years, which is not terrible by any means. i get that not every single part of the game can be a home-run, but there's such a gigantic lack of content relative to the first game. let me repeat: there's no open world, less worthwhile mini-games, no collectibles, less levels, no sylvia phonecalls, and less to buy. again, i don't subscribe to the theory that sequels need to be bigger and grander than their predecessor, but NMH2 cuts out so much content and replaces it with nothing. i can't help but feel like this is just a hollowed out game as a result.
the assassins in this game suffer the most in regards to lack of personality. i think this problem is more systemic than "they really struck out on bosses this frequently", because most bosses have next to no lines of dialogue, little build-up, and are disposed of with little impact to travis. they try to have a holly summers moment with ryuji, but considering that ryuji literally does not speak once and has no introduction beyond "im on a motorcycle and japanese 😤", why should i care? i mean, holly didn't have that many lines, but you still got a very strong idea for who she is and the fact that she chose her own death and the way she did it made her memorable. ryuji dies because. . . he lost to travis and sylvia wanted to troll. okay. complete flop of a moment, and they linger on travis' reaction to try and imply that this is some turning point for him. it just doesn't work.
the real kiss of death here is that i actually detest a large portion of the boss fights in regards to gameplay. let's just come right out and say it: this game is mostly bad boss fights with very few good ones. in the spirit of 13 sentinels, i will now go over every fight individually and delineate things about it that stand out to me.
helter skelter: awful fight once you get past the tutorialized section of it. i firmly believe most people tend not to notice how bad this fight is because by the time you actually start it, he has half health. he suffers from a common problem in this game, which is "has a no wind-up or tell move that comes out extremely quickly that can break your guard and often leads to a follow-up attack that will do a lot of damage". you can dodge the follow-up attack typically, but there is no way you're capable of reacting in time for the lead-up. almost every boss in the entire game has it, so this is more a universal complaint than unique, so i won't mention it in the following summaries. but still, fuck man. outside of that, he's just a boss where you have to wait for him to use the one combo that leaves him vulnerable, and if you exercise any level of proactive aggression, he punishes it immediately. it's a very boring and poor fight to start with.
nathan copeland: i mean, at least he's better than the guys he's sandwiched between. he's appropriately easy as far as early bosses go, only real difficulty comes from when his environmental hazards start stunlocking you. i barely remember anything he actually does because he's so easy to just whale on without him retaliating much.
charlie macdonald: literally not even a fight. the gimmick wears thin almost immediately and is brainless to overcome. why even include this in the game.
kimmy howell: definitely one of the few fights i like in the game. has a fun and quirky introduction that makes her honestly the most memorable character introduced in this game. only complaints i have for her is that her moveset is fairly simple, and her projectile is such a nonfactor. it definitely feels like she could've stood to have maybe a little more complexity, she's very easy to solve and her AI lacks aggression. but, again, this is a fight i like, if only because i remember it pretty vividly.
matt helms: hey look, one of the worse fights in the game! his molotov attack is buttfucking stupid in regards to him not being interruptible while using it + it breaks guards + it lingers on the ground. all you need to do is subtract one of those things and the attack becomes balanced and fine. in general i just dislike his whole adult baby vibe and the fight itself is one of the rare cases of "spamming attacks and being mindlessly aggressive is in your best interest" for the duology. his lore is completely lame too, you couldn't come up with something more interesting than "he's a spooky ghost who killed his parents!!!"?
cloe walsh: nothingburger of a boss both in aesthetic and fight. she has such low HP that you can cream through her fairly quickly, meanwhile her attacks are so telegraphed that you have to be not paying attention to be in any real danger. you'd think her being both in a high security prison and also having magical poison abilities would give her at least a little room to talk about who she is or what her deal is, but the game seems to want to get rid of her as quickly as possible.
dr. letz shake: fun idea to have him come back, but then you run into the obvious problem of "how are you going to make fighting a giant machine work in this type of game?", and, ultimately, they don't. he has only 3 attacks, one of which is just a basic "get off me" move. the joke outstays its welcome because it wasn't even particularly funny in the first place.
million gunman: cool fight theme, literally nothing else remarkable about him outside of him being possible to infinite (low attack into 2-3 high attacks will make him take some damage, then start dodging, and then he'll try to retaliate with a move you can punish before it launches, repeating the cycle).
new destroyman: hey look! another god awful fight! having one of the destroyman halves spam projectile moves is infuriating to deal with, difficulty be damned. i know the cheese strat of hiding in the upper right corner so that you can isolate the red eye and blue eye just does nothing, but that doesn't fix the fight. even when you do it that way, you're still going to have to play grabass with the blue eye half for at least 5-10 minutes, if not longer. all of this is exacerbated by the fact that shinobu's combos have such terrible finishing lag that your only safe option is to just spam sonic sword. either way, it's an objectively horribly designed fight.
ryuji: on this replay, i distinctly remember thinking "this is the first actual boss fight that feels like it could belong in NMH1"; that only really applies in terms of his fight's design, though. ryuji, as mentioned, is another nothingburger. i would probably like his fight if his shiteating dragon wasn't such a liferuiner. i've had the damn thing pinball me back and forth between hit boxes while guarding until my battery ran out and i died. trying to do anything to ryuji while the dragon's summoned is futile because you might as well be playing smash bros. with items on at that point. you can lock him down in a combo and the dragon will zoom into you without warning. you're better off just waiting until it disappears, so add that to the list of bosses where waiting is the most reliable strategy. ryuji himself has a decent moveset and learning how to answer his attacks genuinely feels good, it's just that shitty dragon that's the problem. . . what's that? motorcycle fight? no, we're not even going to talk about that.
mimmy: is it bad that i like this fight. i feel like it's bad because it's the easiest fight in the entire game. just spam charge attacks and use the invincibility frames to avoid damage. at least it has a good fight theme.
marge: i've never understood the hype behind marge. the location is gorgeous from an aesthetics point of view, but her fight is so stupidly easy it feels like a genuine error to place it this late. it slots in better between like, kimmy and matt helms. she genuinely does such little damage and the attacks she has are very obviously telegraphed. combine that with the abundance of health drops that spawn (excluding bitter mode obviously) and i can't imagine many people died to her. she's one of the endgame bosses and she feels like babymode. i mean, i do still like her fight, but it always feels like i'm bullying someone with a handicap.
captain vladimir: completely worthless fight. why is an astronaut an assassin. why is he floating. whatever. he has probably the "least likely to ever hit you" instakill, can shoot very easily dodged lasers, and can throw rocks at you. that's about it. it's also comedic at the game's expense when they try to have an emotional moment when he dies. who is this fucking random soviet astronaut and why is he #3.
alice twilight: going to say nothing revolutionary when i say that she's far and away the best boss in the game on every front. great cutscene introducing her that gives us the idea that she has an interior life that we'll never get to know + a fight that's designed very well + a unique fighting style + an extremely great fight theme. the only bad thing i can say about this fight is less at the fight's expense and more the game's: why play this game for this fight when heroes' paradise already has it? lol
jasper batt: everything wrong with this game can be traced back to this character. both in design and also in lore. and also yuri lowenthal. genuinely one of the worst final boss fights in a game that i've played in recent memory, potentially in the top 5. i would literally prefer if the game just ended on a fake-out with no fight than this shitshow. teleporting punch moves that have no telegraph and will break your guard? Fuck you.
these fights suffer from being either too gimmicky or too unbalanced (both for and against the player). i think you can also argue that personality-wise so many of these fights fall short because we're given nothing to work with on any level. who is cloe walsh? why should i care? who is million gunman? why should i care? who is captain vladimir? why should i care? hell, matt helms and ryuji share the exact same boss theme despite being complete polar opposites both in setting and design. i'm not going to say that every single boss in NMH1 was a winner (even though i unironically think they were), but at least i could describe them with more than like, two adjectives. i truly could not say the same thing about most of NMH2's bosses. what this ultimately means is that when there's so few boss fights i actually like, i have next to nothing to look forward to in the game. it's just "oh i have to THAT fight now, great" over and over again. ironically, despite having 15 bosses, the game feels so much shorter and less developed compared to the first game's 10. you can argue quality > quantity, and surely that's part of it, but i think another part of it is just that NMH2 lives in the shadow of the first game.
NMH2 has this huge issue of being up its own ass. it takes itself far too seriously when the first game was going in nearly the opposite direction. sure, 1 had plot twists and serious moments, but they were always underlined by how absurd the setting is. the characters play everything straight, it's the fact that they exist in this world that not only allows deathmatches, but makes it this mundane bureaucratic exercise. hell, one fight in the game gets prevented just because travis wasn't following protocol. contrast this with NMH2, where travis is suddenly viewed as a god by everyone and even gets his face painted as a mural che guevara style. the assassins you fight will literally talk about how they've been waiting to be killed by him in this cultish way, and it all doesn't work when the first game's ending reveals that the UAA was all a scam set up by sylvia to milk travis for money, not to mention that travis was a gigantic loser for falling for it. in NMH1, travis is a tragic yet pathetic character. in NMH2, travis is the opposite, an epic force meant to change the world for the better. it's so out of place and unfitting for the setting of santa destroy. you exchanged nihilism and apathy for optimism and redemption without any of the work to earn it.
it's one thing for a game to have a bad sequel, but i think going from where NMH1 left off, you were doomed no matter what. you literally sequelize the game that said "too bad, no sequel for you", where do you go from there? it's equally baffling because suda was involved in both projects, so we can't sit here and say it was a case of losing the visionary of the series. what happened? not only does this game take itself too seriously, it's about as funny as a fucking funeral. i just want so badly to find anything about this game to like, but it feels ironically a victim of its own malaise. NMH1 made fun of itself so much that it's impossible for me to take this setting as seriously as 2 wants me to. NMH1 wanted me to take this wacky setting for what it is and see what happens when people play it straight. NMH2 wanted to franchise it.
2014
This review contains spoilers
i do not understand what LISA is trying to say. i mean this both in the literal sense in that characters and their motivations come and go with the fickleness of a windy day in chicago, but also in that, when you look at the text of LISA, it is inane. i wanted to like this game, and, at times, i did. in spite of all that i'm about to say, there are moments in this game that genuinely amuse me. and some of the character stuff comes very close to landing with me, but it completely falls apart upon any level of scrutiny. i played this game in 2019 and only finally got around to finishing this game (3 full playthroughs, one on pain). yet, for a very long time, i've known that i dislike this game, and the biggest hurdle for this review was assessing how much i disliked it, how much was irredeemable, and how i'd be able to properly communicate the certainy i feel in that opinion to any reader.
any time my brain tries to analyze LISA, it goes immediately, as if drawn by a lighthouse on a stormy night, to the scene where brad kills marty. i am one of the few people on earth who seemingly played LISA the first before LISA the painful, so having context for not only marty's mistreatment of lisa as well as brad, i find it extremely difficult to side against brad, as the game wants me to here. marty is implied to have sexually abused lisa, was verbally and physically abusive to brad, and this is just what the player is shown. i not only understand, but endorse the violent murder of marty at brad's hands, especially knowing he's trying to groom buddy. sure, wanton murder isn't exactly moral, but this comes at the tail end of a game where it has forced death upon you with no alternative. in the grand scheme of things, killing marty should not be such a big deal. brad has killed at least a hundred guys by this point, probably more. it's telling that marty claims to have changed, yet one of the very actions he can do when brad fights him is to throw a glass bottle at him, just like in his childhood. but no, you kill marty, and in doing so, physically abuse buddy, and you are absolutely railroaded into this conclusion.
the first time i saw this scene, i assumed it was a heavy-handed hallucination/nightmare on brad's part because something this on the nose is not only poorly written, but poorly executed. why is marty here suddenly? how did he know about buddy? why is buddy so attached to him despite very likely barely getting to know him between the last time we saw buddy and now? to be fair, i'm going to take a good faith interpretation of this moment and say that, okay, sure, marty DID reform and WAS actually a changed man who was going to be a good influence on buddy (despite the game giving no evidence to believe this claim), unlike brad. but what does that say about the events that follow? if that is what was intended by the scene, then what does that say about brad and abuse victims? the only way to complete that moment is to knowingly and intentionally harm buddy, your surrogate daughter, someone the narrative has hammered home is the most important person to brad (and likely the player by this point). is this a metaphor about hurting those you love to protect them? if so, it's clumsy at best. instead, it feels as though the game cums over itself and the armchair psychology textbook it's reading from to go "abuse victims perpetuate the cycle of abuse whether they intend to or not". this is a DSM III type scene attempting to be some big emotional climax of brad's relationship with buddy, and it completely fucking sucks.
i'm all for sad and challenging narratives, but this isn't meaningful, this is just deterministic cynicism at best. brad was always doomed to harm buddy and realistically shouldn't have been anywhere near her. why? because he was never going to accept her personhood or agency and instead was set on using her for his own vindication. the text of LISA is pretty plain and direct in stating this, and it does so with the justification that lisa's suicide on top of marty's abuse forever fucked him in a way he could never recover from. this isn't dark, this is. . . boring! this is a boring read of abuse and how it functions. a narrative that says "a victim of abuse is going to be broken forever and incapable of loving themselves and those around them in a healthy way" is a very standard plot point that we've seen since something as early as 1960's Psycho. this is a standard unconscious social belief. there are bigger plot twists in "everybody poops". if you're going to choose such a standard and unremarkable theme to base your game on, at least do it well.
you can very easily take the perspective that looking at the events like this is results-oriented and that, ultimately, the events that happen in LISA are not meant to be extrapolated into universal applicability and events. i find this to be a cowardly way of viewing art, as art is not made or presented in a vacuum. there is, like it or not, baggage associated with the idea of a cycle of abuse being perpetuated by victims. if you want to use that in your narrative, there are going to be implications and inferrences. this is just how storytelling works. you can divorce yourself from the themes, but you can't deny them. LISA's problem is that it wants to be about nothing, it wants to present this shocking and grotesque world without any real-world grounding just to use shock value black humor. oh man, you made a joke about orphans getting set on fire? let me tell you this really funny dead baby joke while you're at it.
ultimately my root problem with LISA is that i detest what little of austin jorgensen i can find in his work. i do not know the man nor have i ever spoken with him, so i am not going to assert that he is this villain that needs to be taken down. i am, however, someone who has invested a significant amount of time into a game that he largely made on his own (as i understand it, outside of the music, it was a solo endeavor). it's hard to not gleam some fairly repugnant viewpoints from him based on how he portrays sexual violence, gender, and masculinity.
here, let's start with the real winner of the show: Male Rape and how epically funny it is. early in the game you're told there's a woman that exists and is real and is at a location. you go to the location where she is guarded by a fairly difficult boss encounter. you beat the boss, enter the door, and then SURPRISE lmfao the """woman""" was an man!! and it gets funnie because he cries about how they still raped him despite him having a mustache and saying he was a man XDDD and then after meeting him you get an achievement on steam titled Violated Guy, because sexual violence is teh epic pwnage. lastly, if you were unclear as to how serious he is treating the concept of rape, he names this character Fardy. because it sounds like fart. he has brothers named Shardy, Lardy, and Tardy. in-game text states that all his peers hate him.
accuse me of being a huge joyless unfun sjw all you want, i really don't care. i just want to know: what is the point of this character? rofl male rape victims are weak and when they get raped it's funny? compare this to the implied rape (via grooming) of buddy by sticky. the game at least passingly treats this as more serious and worthy of sympathy. it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but by brad's reaction and the extremely subtle dialogue with sticky afterwards ("she wanted it", "she needed to be educated", etc. etc.), you're given very little room to interpret any alternative. to be fucking blunt, if you're going to have sexual violence in your work and handle it with the shittiest most clumsy portrayal possible, do everyone a favor and just omit it. it's personally offensive to me to see jorgensen point and laugh at a male rape victim and go out of his way to let you know that not only was a man raped, but it's extremely funny and we should be finding this inherently comedic. it's legitimately evil shit to put in your game and it's astonishing to see something so mask off get so little criticism.
i'll jump back and try to be a little more charitable. LISA is a game about the post-apocalypse and what would happen if all the women on earth suddenly disappeared or died or whatever. ok, well what does this world look like? surely infrastructure still exists, it's not like BOMBS fell or anything, right? NOPE, it's mad max out here and men are completely dysfunctional in all meaningful ways without women. i do believe a societal shift and potentially even collapse would occur with the total removal of women. but there's nothing to go off of what happened to cause this beyond "women no longer exist so naturally everything's fucked". like, you're telling me no one's trying to do some IVF or something? maybe trying to do some dolly-esque cloning to make a female? does some of this fall out of the scope of the game? of course, i'm not going to deny that this could come off as pedantic. but so much of this setting is cutting corners just to get to the meat of the narrative, which is men doing heinous and awful things to each other, often in gangs. i need at least something to work with to believe that civilized society could go so poorly so quickly.
but no, men without women to temper their barbarous spirits will naturally form sadistic gangs that seek out nothing but wanton destruction and suffering, as you do. again, this is such a fucking dull take on gender politics. you have an interesting premise and you completely shit the bed just to go into gender essentialism that's existed for centuries. yeah, of course, without women, men will use pornography magazines as currency. sure, that makes sense. there's such a drought of actual gay and trans men in this work too that it makes jorgensen come off as sheltered and telling on himself. did you really not consider what a gay/trans/etc. man would do in this situation or how they would fit into this new world? jorgensen comes off as someone who just wanted to tell a story that begins and ends at "men are inherently violent, women are inherently caregivers, and without one, the other goes wildly out of control."
by the way, this is a video game. i know you might have been confused considering i've said sweet fuck all about the actual gameplay of this video game that i played. and here is my opinion: it has amateur design. i know that's almost a nothing statement considering that jorgensen IS an amateur, but i want to call a spade a spade. he seems to really value and want this aura of "this game is going to make you have to REALLY choose things and it's going to be really difficult to deal with it", but he completely fumbles the execution. oh no, buzzo showed up and wants to cut off your arm or kill the first party member in your team. instead of giving him your arm, you can just reload your most recent save (which is approximately 5 minutes away from this choice), put a character you either don't ever use or outright dislike in that slot, and just kill them that way. you can spend the night at campfires but OH NO sometimes bad things can happen to you like you get poisoned or one of your party members gets held hostage. but, there's a save point near almost every major one, so you can just reload if that happens. or, even better, you can just stay at an inn that charges a measly 10 mags for guaranteed safety. how about when you're forced to do russian roullette? yep, you can just save reload until you get through flawlessly. this is a viable and applicable strategy even on the supposed "pain" mode that was intended to curb this type of behavior. these choices ultimately just end up being unnecessary inconveniences that add nothing to the game. they're speedbumps that you can detour around masquerading as some dark soulsian punishment.
i now want to talk about the part of the game that infuriated me more than any other singular part: the road scholars. for anyone unfamiliar or forgetful, the road scholars are a trap boss fight you will encounter early in the game. you go to a side path and find a small town with no way to heal, and nothing much of note in it. just one way in, one way out. no place to grind for item or money. just. that's it. still, there's a save point, so unless you're playing on pain mode, you're almost certainly going to save. and so you try to leave and suddenly you're accosted by a gang who wants either 100 mags (a significant amount of money by this point in the game) or they're going to destroy the town you just left. i want to stress that there is very little of value in this town in the first place, so this choice from a metagame standpoint doesn't even particularly matter, and thus fails to be "hard". yet, you've likely just saved and you're locked into this worst-case scenario. but, here's the thing: i'm an asshole. i hate when games try to gotcha me like this. i say no, eat shit, i'm fighting you. and i fight them. and i lose. several times. because this fight is very clearly heavily stacked against the player. it's a gotcha, but it's also a trap. you made me make a choice i didn't know i was making then tried to point and laugh at me for the choice i didn't know i made having consequences. these types of things can be done well, and oftentimes having a game react to something you did that you didn't expect it to acknowledge can be some of the best type of stimuli-reaction you can get out of the medium. but this is just a gotcha, an attempt to make me feel as though i should've been more careful when there was no way i could have possibly predicted this outcome would occur. it's not clever, it doesn't elevate the gameplay in any way, and it ultimately just burned goodwill i would've had for the game.
in a sad way i want to give points for effort and heart here, because while i think jorgensen largely missed the mark and likely has a personality i would find repellant, i genuinely respect the authorial stamp he put on this game. it is uniquely and creatively his own, probably for the worse. i still can't quite wrap my mind around the positive reception this game has garnered. this is considered an indie classic and it's frankly baffling to me how it earned such accolades. this game is mechanically unengaging, thematically cretinous, and overall an extreme disappointment considering the mountains of praise that i have seen from both strangers and friends. i can only hope that games we love in 2024 age better than the ones we loved in 2014.
any time my brain tries to analyze LISA, it goes immediately, as if drawn by a lighthouse on a stormy night, to the scene where brad kills marty. i am one of the few people on earth who seemingly played LISA the first before LISA the painful, so having context for not only marty's mistreatment of lisa as well as brad, i find it extremely difficult to side against brad, as the game wants me to here. marty is implied to have sexually abused lisa, was verbally and physically abusive to brad, and this is just what the player is shown. i not only understand, but endorse the violent murder of marty at brad's hands, especially knowing he's trying to groom buddy. sure, wanton murder isn't exactly moral, but this comes at the tail end of a game where it has forced death upon you with no alternative. in the grand scheme of things, killing marty should not be such a big deal. brad has killed at least a hundred guys by this point, probably more. it's telling that marty claims to have changed, yet one of the very actions he can do when brad fights him is to throw a glass bottle at him, just like in his childhood. but no, you kill marty, and in doing so, physically abuse buddy, and you are absolutely railroaded into this conclusion.
the first time i saw this scene, i assumed it was a heavy-handed hallucination/nightmare on brad's part because something this on the nose is not only poorly written, but poorly executed. why is marty here suddenly? how did he know about buddy? why is buddy so attached to him despite very likely barely getting to know him between the last time we saw buddy and now? to be fair, i'm going to take a good faith interpretation of this moment and say that, okay, sure, marty DID reform and WAS actually a changed man who was going to be a good influence on buddy (despite the game giving no evidence to believe this claim), unlike brad. but what does that say about the events that follow? if that is what was intended by the scene, then what does that say about brad and abuse victims? the only way to complete that moment is to knowingly and intentionally harm buddy, your surrogate daughter, someone the narrative has hammered home is the most important person to brad (and likely the player by this point). is this a metaphor about hurting those you love to protect them? if so, it's clumsy at best. instead, it feels as though the game cums over itself and the armchair psychology textbook it's reading from to go "abuse victims perpetuate the cycle of abuse whether they intend to or not". this is a DSM III type scene attempting to be some big emotional climax of brad's relationship with buddy, and it completely fucking sucks.
i'm all for sad and challenging narratives, but this isn't meaningful, this is just deterministic cynicism at best. brad was always doomed to harm buddy and realistically shouldn't have been anywhere near her. why? because he was never going to accept her personhood or agency and instead was set on using her for his own vindication. the text of LISA is pretty plain and direct in stating this, and it does so with the justification that lisa's suicide on top of marty's abuse forever fucked him in a way he could never recover from. this isn't dark, this is. . . boring! this is a boring read of abuse and how it functions. a narrative that says "a victim of abuse is going to be broken forever and incapable of loving themselves and those around them in a healthy way" is a very standard plot point that we've seen since something as early as 1960's Psycho. this is a standard unconscious social belief. there are bigger plot twists in "everybody poops". if you're going to choose such a standard and unremarkable theme to base your game on, at least do it well.
you can very easily take the perspective that looking at the events like this is results-oriented and that, ultimately, the events that happen in LISA are not meant to be extrapolated into universal applicability and events. i find this to be a cowardly way of viewing art, as art is not made or presented in a vacuum. there is, like it or not, baggage associated with the idea of a cycle of abuse being perpetuated by victims. if you want to use that in your narrative, there are going to be implications and inferrences. this is just how storytelling works. you can divorce yourself from the themes, but you can't deny them. LISA's problem is that it wants to be about nothing, it wants to present this shocking and grotesque world without any real-world grounding just to use shock value black humor. oh man, you made a joke about orphans getting set on fire? let me tell you this really funny dead baby joke while you're at it.
ultimately my root problem with LISA is that i detest what little of austin jorgensen i can find in his work. i do not know the man nor have i ever spoken with him, so i am not going to assert that he is this villain that needs to be taken down. i am, however, someone who has invested a significant amount of time into a game that he largely made on his own (as i understand it, outside of the music, it was a solo endeavor). it's hard to not gleam some fairly repugnant viewpoints from him based on how he portrays sexual violence, gender, and masculinity.
here, let's start with the real winner of the show: Male Rape and how epically funny it is. early in the game you're told there's a woman that exists and is real and is at a location. you go to the location where she is guarded by a fairly difficult boss encounter. you beat the boss, enter the door, and then SURPRISE lmfao the """woman""" was an man!! and it gets funnie because he cries about how they still raped him despite him having a mustache and saying he was a man XDDD and then after meeting him you get an achievement on steam titled Violated Guy, because sexual violence is teh epic pwnage. lastly, if you were unclear as to how serious he is treating the concept of rape, he names this character Fardy. because it sounds like fart. he has brothers named Shardy, Lardy, and Tardy. in-game text states that all his peers hate him.
accuse me of being a huge joyless unfun sjw all you want, i really don't care. i just want to know: what is the point of this character? rofl male rape victims are weak and when they get raped it's funny? compare this to the implied rape (via grooming) of buddy by sticky. the game at least passingly treats this as more serious and worthy of sympathy. it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but by brad's reaction and the extremely subtle dialogue with sticky afterwards ("she wanted it", "she needed to be educated", etc. etc.), you're given very little room to interpret any alternative. to be fucking blunt, if you're going to have sexual violence in your work and handle it with the shittiest most clumsy portrayal possible, do everyone a favor and just omit it. it's personally offensive to me to see jorgensen point and laugh at a male rape victim and go out of his way to let you know that not only was a man raped, but it's extremely funny and we should be finding this inherently comedic. it's legitimately evil shit to put in your game and it's astonishing to see something so mask off get so little criticism.
i'll jump back and try to be a little more charitable. LISA is a game about the post-apocalypse and what would happen if all the women on earth suddenly disappeared or died or whatever. ok, well what does this world look like? surely infrastructure still exists, it's not like BOMBS fell or anything, right? NOPE, it's mad max out here and men are completely dysfunctional in all meaningful ways without women. i do believe a societal shift and potentially even collapse would occur with the total removal of women. but there's nothing to go off of what happened to cause this beyond "women no longer exist so naturally everything's fucked". like, you're telling me no one's trying to do some IVF or something? maybe trying to do some dolly-esque cloning to make a female? does some of this fall out of the scope of the game? of course, i'm not going to deny that this could come off as pedantic. but so much of this setting is cutting corners just to get to the meat of the narrative, which is men doing heinous and awful things to each other, often in gangs. i need at least something to work with to believe that civilized society could go so poorly so quickly.
but no, men without women to temper their barbarous spirits will naturally form sadistic gangs that seek out nothing but wanton destruction and suffering, as you do. again, this is such a fucking dull take on gender politics. you have an interesting premise and you completely shit the bed just to go into gender essentialism that's existed for centuries. yeah, of course, without women, men will use pornography magazines as currency. sure, that makes sense. there's such a drought of actual gay and trans men in this work too that it makes jorgensen come off as sheltered and telling on himself. did you really not consider what a gay/trans/etc. man would do in this situation or how they would fit into this new world? jorgensen comes off as someone who just wanted to tell a story that begins and ends at "men are inherently violent, women are inherently caregivers, and without one, the other goes wildly out of control."
by the way, this is a video game. i know you might have been confused considering i've said sweet fuck all about the actual gameplay of this video game that i played. and here is my opinion: it has amateur design. i know that's almost a nothing statement considering that jorgensen IS an amateur, but i want to call a spade a spade. he seems to really value and want this aura of "this game is going to make you have to REALLY choose things and it's going to be really difficult to deal with it", but he completely fumbles the execution. oh no, buzzo showed up and wants to cut off your arm or kill the first party member in your team. instead of giving him your arm, you can just reload your most recent save (which is approximately 5 minutes away from this choice), put a character you either don't ever use or outright dislike in that slot, and just kill them that way. you can spend the night at campfires but OH NO sometimes bad things can happen to you like you get poisoned or one of your party members gets held hostage. but, there's a save point near almost every major one, so you can just reload if that happens. or, even better, you can just stay at an inn that charges a measly 10 mags for guaranteed safety. how about when you're forced to do russian roullette? yep, you can just save reload until you get through flawlessly. this is a viable and applicable strategy even on the supposed "pain" mode that was intended to curb this type of behavior. these choices ultimately just end up being unnecessary inconveniences that add nothing to the game. they're speedbumps that you can detour around masquerading as some dark soulsian punishment.
i now want to talk about the part of the game that infuriated me more than any other singular part: the road scholars. for anyone unfamiliar or forgetful, the road scholars are a trap boss fight you will encounter early in the game. you go to a side path and find a small town with no way to heal, and nothing much of note in it. just one way in, one way out. no place to grind for item or money. just. that's it. still, there's a save point, so unless you're playing on pain mode, you're almost certainly going to save. and so you try to leave and suddenly you're accosted by a gang who wants either 100 mags (a significant amount of money by this point in the game) or they're going to destroy the town you just left. i want to stress that there is very little of value in this town in the first place, so this choice from a metagame standpoint doesn't even particularly matter, and thus fails to be "hard". yet, you've likely just saved and you're locked into this worst-case scenario. but, here's the thing: i'm an asshole. i hate when games try to gotcha me like this. i say no, eat shit, i'm fighting you. and i fight them. and i lose. several times. because this fight is very clearly heavily stacked against the player. it's a gotcha, but it's also a trap. you made me make a choice i didn't know i was making then tried to point and laugh at me for the choice i didn't know i made having consequences. these types of things can be done well, and oftentimes having a game react to something you did that you didn't expect it to acknowledge can be some of the best type of stimuli-reaction you can get out of the medium. but this is just a gotcha, an attempt to make me feel as though i should've been more careful when there was no way i could have possibly predicted this outcome would occur. it's not clever, it doesn't elevate the gameplay in any way, and it ultimately just burned goodwill i would've had for the game.
in a sad way i want to give points for effort and heart here, because while i think jorgensen largely missed the mark and likely has a personality i would find repellant, i genuinely respect the authorial stamp he put on this game. it is uniquely and creatively his own, probably for the worse. i still can't quite wrap my mind around the positive reception this game has garnered. this is considered an indie classic and it's frankly baffling to me how it earned such accolades. this game is mechanically unengaging, thematically cretinous, and overall an extreme disappointment considering the mountains of praise that i have seen from both strangers and friends. i can only hope that games we love in 2024 age better than the ones we loved in 2014.
holy shit, it's truly difficult to know where to even start with this trainwreck. part of me wants to just say that this is uniformly bad and not even bother with a post-mortem, because it's shockingly bad in so many ways. so many things that previous games got right (game length, difficulty balance, boss design) this game fucks up in tremendous ways. i would honestly be less critical of CVX if it hadn't been a RE game and the dev team had been unproven. CVX as a first outing would be remarkable in some ways (mostly graphically), and i could forgive a lot of the flaws as being beginner mistakes or otherwise growing pains. but as the fourth main entry (sixth if you're counting gaiden and survivor, which a lot of people don't) to the RE series, this is just sloppy and embarrassing.
easiest thing to nail this game to the cross over is the unannounced character swaps. you absolutely NEED to know when these are coming because inventory isn't shared if it's not in the storebox, meaning you could end up having most of your ammo on claire right before you switch to chris. it's a frankly baffling decision to make it forcibly integrated instead of doing something like RE2 and strictly isolating them. the only benefits you could get from doing the former is that the world is shared, and that only really comes into play in what the player does with rodrigo. considering how easily you run into a "i saved myself at riovanes castle and can't beat wiegraf" situation with this game, it's not worth it by any stretch of the imagination. i think if the game went further in the "two different characters exploring the same area" direction, you could justify how easy it is to softlock yourself with whatever positives that brings. as it is now though, the game has claire and chris explore the same settings at completely different times, so there's no opportunity for "character a does something that indirectly affects character b" like in RE2. it's all so wonderfully pointless in execution.
as far as the survival horror aspects go, it's just really rough goings in this game. enemies are at their most obstructive and annoying here; this is the entry that we can say finally killed the art of dodging enemies. the game throws so much ammo at you that you're foolish if you don't use it. the enemies themselves are also rotted in design. bandersnatches reach across entire rooms to damage you and go through walls/obstacles while you can't. hunters do a stupid amount of damage, take far more before they fall, and some can poison you now. and bats. yes, bats. it feels petty to complain about bats, but the few times they show up, if you don't have the lighter, they are fucking miserable to contend with. i think they don't even do THAT much damage, but they're so unbelievably frustrating and avoiding them is so cumbersome that it's just a comedy of errors any time they show up. a complete shitshow.
and you know what? cool, that's fine. silent hill games make a habit out of depowering the player and making them feel vulnerable because of an overwhelming amount of enemies. that's totally viable and i respect that design philosophy. the problem lies in that CVX does not intentionally do this. CVX wants you to feel powerful by slamming you with an excessive amount of ammo while simultaneously swarming you with a grating amount of enemies. again, i'm fine if the goal is "you're overwhelmed and need to think outside the box to survive", but it's literally just that you're playing exterminator with an extra large set of pests to clean up. lovely. i think the growing emphasis on combat in the RE games was always going to naturally lead to a situation like this, but i was still able to feel tension and resource management in 2 and 3. here, i ended up with an embarrassment of riches in both healing and ammo by the end, and any time i saw an enemy, it wasn't "should i engage this?" but instead a "all right, another rat to exterminate".
i think that's the damning flaw of CVX: it's more aggravating than difficult. enemy management is never truly dangerous, and the game gives you a truly stupid amount of first aid sprays to assure you that you're never in a large amount of danger. but mitigating threats, solving puzzles, backtracking several rooms at any given time. . . it starts to wear on you. the game itself is just obscenely long for a classic RE game, and by the end i was in the 30s on save count and still had plenty of ink ribbons leftover. i say that not to point to any problem with ink ribbon distribution, but more to say that the game was accounting for me to save even more than thirty times. the devil's advocate argument is that the game's giving you more ink ribbons than necessary to account for the fact that you could miss some (in the way that RE1 felt tight on ink ribbons until you learned where all of them are), but my counter is that the ink ribbon locations are extremely obvious most of the time. hell, how many times do you get a "typewriter with ink ribbons right nearby" situation in this game? i'm not saying that i wanted them to make saving harder; i'm saying that this is symptomatic of CVX's larger problem of being too bloated and not paced nearly well enough.
CVX isn't a particularly scary game, nor is it an interesting one. some of the lore behind the ashfords is minorly intriguing, especially when you get the full picture between alexander and his two children. but alfred is a one-note character (a sometimes amusing one-note, to be fair), and alexia is just whatever. why can she summon huge tentacles out of nowhere and has pyromancy? eh whatever who cares. she feels like a house of the dead final boss transplanted into the RE universe and the contradiction glares like a sore thumb. then again, this was the entry that decided to turn wesker into a superhuman whatever the fuck. if it was amusing, it'd be camp (see: RE5). but here? it's just. . . droll. anything fun that could be had with the premise or setting isn't, and character drama is played dreadfully straight. steve in general is such a wet blanket of a character that i'm all but hooting and hollering he never came back in another game (besides darkside chronicles).
i need to go back to harping on the gameplay a bit. there are infinitely respawning hunters in this game. the steve boss fight itself is like. . . look i can't say it's the WORST boss fight i've played recently because a. it's less of a fight and more of a "get the hell out of there" moment with an egregiously overpowered entity of damage and b. i'm doing a bitter mode replay of NMH2 and man, capital f Fuck new destroyman. but it still is worth stating that the "steve is transformed and trying to kill you D:" encounter is probably the most exceptionally shitty thing i've seen in the series up to this point. this game has a lot of moments like that, honestly. that moth hallway in the antarctic base has the artistic merit of that one episode of black mirror that ends with a guy getting sent trollface as radiohead plays. there's so many shitty rooms/encounters in this game, and it's relatively pointless to sit here and list every single one. i'm beating a dead horse here, but i need to stress how acutely shitty this game was to play on a room-by-room basis. i would state positives if i could genuinely find them.
i don't know if mikami and his dev team subordinates were being pressured by capcom to make a bigger and epicer RE game to follow in 3's footsteps of being bigger and more action-heavy. it certainly feels that way, and the game has not stood the test of time in that regard. it feels very "of its time" in potentially the worst way humanly possible. i've always wondered why the game plays snippets of the opening intro of claire raiding the umbrella building before you're about to start the game. that opening CG is nothing like the rest of the game and like, i'm here, i bought the game, you don't need to sell me on this false product. that lack of self-awareness and understanding is emblematic of the game as a whole. i don't know what it's trying to be, and whatever its goals are, it failed to accomplish them. i had a pretty terrible time playing this game, i fail to recommend it to anyone but the most diehard of RE fans, and i'm still shocked that mikami could've headed a project this bad. i'm officially a witness to why people stopped giving a fuck about RE's overarching plot or RE at all. a game this bad would've fucked me off of the series for a bit too, guys.
to quote my good friend casey, this game is a behemoth of shit.
easiest thing to nail this game to the cross over is the unannounced character swaps. you absolutely NEED to know when these are coming because inventory isn't shared if it's not in the storebox, meaning you could end up having most of your ammo on claire right before you switch to chris. it's a frankly baffling decision to make it forcibly integrated instead of doing something like RE2 and strictly isolating them. the only benefits you could get from doing the former is that the world is shared, and that only really comes into play in what the player does with rodrigo. considering how easily you run into a "i saved myself at riovanes castle and can't beat wiegraf" situation with this game, it's not worth it by any stretch of the imagination. i think if the game went further in the "two different characters exploring the same area" direction, you could justify how easy it is to softlock yourself with whatever positives that brings. as it is now though, the game has claire and chris explore the same settings at completely different times, so there's no opportunity for "character a does something that indirectly affects character b" like in RE2. it's all so wonderfully pointless in execution.
as far as the survival horror aspects go, it's just really rough goings in this game. enemies are at their most obstructive and annoying here; this is the entry that we can say finally killed the art of dodging enemies. the game throws so much ammo at you that you're foolish if you don't use it. the enemies themselves are also rotted in design. bandersnatches reach across entire rooms to damage you and go through walls/obstacles while you can't. hunters do a stupid amount of damage, take far more before they fall, and some can poison you now. and bats. yes, bats. it feels petty to complain about bats, but the few times they show up, if you don't have the lighter, they are fucking miserable to contend with. i think they don't even do THAT much damage, but they're so unbelievably frustrating and avoiding them is so cumbersome that it's just a comedy of errors any time they show up. a complete shitshow.
and you know what? cool, that's fine. silent hill games make a habit out of depowering the player and making them feel vulnerable because of an overwhelming amount of enemies. that's totally viable and i respect that design philosophy. the problem lies in that CVX does not intentionally do this. CVX wants you to feel powerful by slamming you with an excessive amount of ammo while simultaneously swarming you with a grating amount of enemies. again, i'm fine if the goal is "you're overwhelmed and need to think outside the box to survive", but it's literally just that you're playing exterminator with an extra large set of pests to clean up. lovely. i think the growing emphasis on combat in the RE games was always going to naturally lead to a situation like this, but i was still able to feel tension and resource management in 2 and 3. here, i ended up with an embarrassment of riches in both healing and ammo by the end, and any time i saw an enemy, it wasn't "should i engage this?" but instead a "all right, another rat to exterminate".
i think that's the damning flaw of CVX: it's more aggravating than difficult. enemy management is never truly dangerous, and the game gives you a truly stupid amount of first aid sprays to assure you that you're never in a large amount of danger. but mitigating threats, solving puzzles, backtracking several rooms at any given time. . . it starts to wear on you. the game itself is just obscenely long for a classic RE game, and by the end i was in the 30s on save count and still had plenty of ink ribbons leftover. i say that not to point to any problem with ink ribbon distribution, but more to say that the game was accounting for me to save even more than thirty times. the devil's advocate argument is that the game's giving you more ink ribbons than necessary to account for the fact that you could miss some (in the way that RE1 felt tight on ink ribbons until you learned where all of them are), but my counter is that the ink ribbon locations are extremely obvious most of the time. hell, how many times do you get a "typewriter with ink ribbons right nearby" situation in this game? i'm not saying that i wanted them to make saving harder; i'm saying that this is symptomatic of CVX's larger problem of being too bloated and not paced nearly well enough.
CVX isn't a particularly scary game, nor is it an interesting one. some of the lore behind the ashfords is minorly intriguing, especially when you get the full picture between alexander and his two children. but alfred is a one-note character (a sometimes amusing one-note, to be fair), and alexia is just whatever. why can she summon huge tentacles out of nowhere and has pyromancy? eh whatever who cares. she feels like a house of the dead final boss transplanted into the RE universe and the contradiction glares like a sore thumb. then again, this was the entry that decided to turn wesker into a superhuman whatever the fuck. if it was amusing, it'd be camp (see: RE5). but here? it's just. . . droll. anything fun that could be had with the premise or setting isn't, and character drama is played dreadfully straight. steve in general is such a wet blanket of a character that i'm all but hooting and hollering he never came back in another game (besides darkside chronicles).
i need to go back to harping on the gameplay a bit. there are infinitely respawning hunters in this game. the steve boss fight itself is like. . . look i can't say it's the WORST boss fight i've played recently because a. it's less of a fight and more of a "get the hell out of there" moment with an egregiously overpowered entity of damage and b. i'm doing a bitter mode replay of NMH2 and man, capital f Fuck new destroyman. but it still is worth stating that the "steve is transformed and trying to kill you D:" encounter is probably the most exceptionally shitty thing i've seen in the series up to this point. this game has a lot of moments like that, honestly. that moth hallway in the antarctic base has the artistic merit of that one episode of black mirror that ends with a guy getting sent trollface as radiohead plays. there's so many shitty rooms/encounters in this game, and it's relatively pointless to sit here and list every single one. i'm beating a dead horse here, but i need to stress how acutely shitty this game was to play on a room-by-room basis. i would state positives if i could genuinely find them.
i don't know if mikami and his dev team subordinates were being pressured by capcom to make a bigger and epicer RE game to follow in 3's footsteps of being bigger and more action-heavy. it certainly feels that way, and the game has not stood the test of time in that regard. it feels very "of its time" in potentially the worst way humanly possible. i've always wondered why the game plays snippets of the opening intro of claire raiding the umbrella building before you're about to start the game. that opening CG is nothing like the rest of the game and like, i'm here, i bought the game, you don't need to sell me on this false product. that lack of self-awareness and understanding is emblematic of the game as a whole. i don't know what it's trying to be, and whatever its goals are, it failed to accomplish them. i had a pretty terrible time playing this game, i fail to recommend it to anyone but the most diehard of RE fans, and i'm still shocked that mikami could've headed a project this bad. i'm officially a witness to why people stopped giving a fuck about RE's overarching plot or RE at all. a game this bad would've fucked me off of the series for a bit too, guys.
to quote my good friend casey, this game is a behemoth of shit.
1999
realistically, what is there to say about silent hill that hasn't been said already? both positive and negative appraisals of this game have run the gamut. i feel intimidated trying to be original in this review because anything i'm going to say has been said at least 20 times over. that said, i do at least want to give an attempted academic effort on this task.
i think context is most important when look at this game. you can easily say that games like resident evil, clock tower, maniac mansion, or even sweet home penned the survival horror genre, but i feel as though silent hill is the one game that has transcended enthusiast circles and made the largest impact of those early forebears. when you say silent hill, even the music girlies who haven't touched a playstation controller in a decade will know not only the aesthetic you're going for, but also the music. there's this hazy dream quality to silent hill that makes it universal. sure, i'm not a father nor have i ever had to search for my daughter. but have i felt displaced in a world that was simultaneously uncaring and hostile? absolutely, and the vast majority of people on earth could say the same thing.
the sound design of this game cannot be understated. again, i know i am preaching to the choir when i sing the praises of akira yamaoka, but the way that this game uses noises and soundscapes is so totally unlike other contemporaries of its time. noise is used as a warning, as a pretense for anxiety, as something to dread yet cherish because of its informative value. even unassuming areas that have no enemies in them like the nightmare school square or the zodiac puzzle in nowhere have these foreboding tracks that play in them; even knowing the lack of any form of danger in those rooms, i'm still on edge because of the evocative soundscape. for shits and giggles, i did a playthrough of this game on mute, and the difference is stark and immediate. it felt as though i was playing a beta of the game because of how much depth the gameplay lacked without the ambiance granted by yamaoka's audio. the sound in this game doesn't just elevate its design, it gives it the legs it needs to even stand in the first place.
i'm generally of two incongruent minds when it comes to the enemy encounters in this game. by and large, i think they succeed in not only making the player feel helpless, but the sheer number of them also guarantees that you're not going to be able to kill everything you run into (at least, not until NG+ and using bullet assist). it's not quite as elegant as resident evil's design in making you feel overwhelmed without actually numerically being overwhelmed, but it works for this game due to its open-ended nature. exteriors are usually large enough to make dodging enemies fairly easy once you know the behavior patterns, incentivizing you to save your combat experiences for when you're exploring interiors. people who complain about the conservative nature of ammo and healing in this game miss the point: you're not meant to be powerful, and survival is meant to be a genuinely difficult goal to accomplish on a first playthrough. the game is short enough (much like other horror games of the time) where should you need to start over from the beginning, it's not the death sentence of time investment that it would be in a modern 2023 game. there's something principled about that which i respect, it's a design ethos you rarely see nowadays. learn our systems or just start over and do it better. no exceptions.
but, even then, i still have a distaste for some aspects of gameplay. there are certain areas of silent hill where enemies are so numerous that they not only cause the framerate to plummet, but it makes dodging them a harrowing and hair-pulling affair. fuck those weird monkey things, they will sooner condemn their bloodline to extinction than give up chasing you once they've seen you. and while i do enjoy the boss fights in theory, outside of big mouth, they tend to just be healing checks due to the difficulty of actually dodging their attacks consistently. i guess this is more mitigated by the fact that there's not many bosses in the game, but it still rubs me wrong that the final boss is essentially a damage race and if you run out of healing, you have basically no recourse. there's a bit of whiplash going from praising this design last paragraph to now admonishing it, but it's about context. i didn't mind having to restart my first resident evil playthrough about 2 hours in because i had thoroughly fucked myself in regards to resources because it felt like i was still learning the game. i doubt i could summon the same amount of patience if i reached the end of silent hill and got hard walled by a healing check of a final boss.
it feels borderline disrespectful to even consider giving this game a lower rating due to the legacy and cultural impact it has had. don't get me wrong, i had a great fondness for my time with this game, but i almost feel compelled to oversell this game as way of demonstrating status. this game took one of the most damnable limitations of the generation (draw distance) and made it into a defining aspect of its setting (fog that blankets the town). there's such a creative ingenuity there that feels obvious from an outside perspective, but has a deceptively difficult simplicity to it. forgive me for spending the lion's share of this review grappling with silent hill's legacy more than itself qualitatively, but again, what can i say that hasn't been said? if you have not played this game, you owe it to yourself to do so. i don't consider myself the type to get easily scared from horror media nowadays, but this game consistently put me on edge in a way that i rarely find media is capable of doing. this game is a monument while also still being fresh 2 decades removed from launch.
i think context is most important when look at this game. you can easily say that games like resident evil, clock tower, maniac mansion, or even sweet home penned the survival horror genre, but i feel as though silent hill is the one game that has transcended enthusiast circles and made the largest impact of those early forebears. when you say silent hill, even the music girlies who haven't touched a playstation controller in a decade will know not only the aesthetic you're going for, but also the music. there's this hazy dream quality to silent hill that makes it universal. sure, i'm not a father nor have i ever had to search for my daughter. but have i felt displaced in a world that was simultaneously uncaring and hostile? absolutely, and the vast majority of people on earth could say the same thing.
the sound design of this game cannot be understated. again, i know i am preaching to the choir when i sing the praises of akira yamaoka, but the way that this game uses noises and soundscapes is so totally unlike other contemporaries of its time. noise is used as a warning, as a pretense for anxiety, as something to dread yet cherish because of its informative value. even unassuming areas that have no enemies in them like the nightmare school square or the zodiac puzzle in nowhere have these foreboding tracks that play in them; even knowing the lack of any form of danger in those rooms, i'm still on edge because of the evocative soundscape. for shits and giggles, i did a playthrough of this game on mute, and the difference is stark and immediate. it felt as though i was playing a beta of the game because of how much depth the gameplay lacked without the ambiance granted by yamaoka's audio. the sound in this game doesn't just elevate its design, it gives it the legs it needs to even stand in the first place.
i'm generally of two incongruent minds when it comes to the enemy encounters in this game. by and large, i think they succeed in not only making the player feel helpless, but the sheer number of them also guarantees that you're not going to be able to kill everything you run into (at least, not until NG+ and using bullet assist). it's not quite as elegant as resident evil's design in making you feel overwhelmed without actually numerically being overwhelmed, but it works for this game due to its open-ended nature. exteriors are usually large enough to make dodging enemies fairly easy once you know the behavior patterns, incentivizing you to save your combat experiences for when you're exploring interiors. people who complain about the conservative nature of ammo and healing in this game miss the point: you're not meant to be powerful, and survival is meant to be a genuinely difficult goal to accomplish on a first playthrough. the game is short enough (much like other horror games of the time) where should you need to start over from the beginning, it's not the death sentence of time investment that it would be in a modern 2023 game. there's something principled about that which i respect, it's a design ethos you rarely see nowadays. learn our systems or just start over and do it better. no exceptions.
but, even then, i still have a distaste for some aspects of gameplay. there are certain areas of silent hill where enemies are so numerous that they not only cause the framerate to plummet, but it makes dodging them a harrowing and hair-pulling affair. fuck those weird monkey things, they will sooner condemn their bloodline to extinction than give up chasing you once they've seen you. and while i do enjoy the boss fights in theory, outside of big mouth, they tend to just be healing checks due to the difficulty of actually dodging their attacks consistently. i guess this is more mitigated by the fact that there's not many bosses in the game, but it still rubs me wrong that the final boss is essentially a damage race and if you run out of healing, you have basically no recourse. there's a bit of whiplash going from praising this design last paragraph to now admonishing it, but it's about context. i didn't mind having to restart my first resident evil playthrough about 2 hours in because i had thoroughly fucked myself in regards to resources because it felt like i was still learning the game. i doubt i could summon the same amount of patience if i reached the end of silent hill and got hard walled by a healing check of a final boss.
it feels borderline disrespectful to even consider giving this game a lower rating due to the legacy and cultural impact it has had. don't get me wrong, i had a great fondness for my time with this game, but i almost feel compelled to oversell this game as way of demonstrating status. this game took one of the most damnable limitations of the generation (draw distance) and made it into a defining aspect of its setting (fog that blankets the town). there's such a creative ingenuity there that feels obvious from an outside perspective, but has a deceptively difficult simplicity to it. forgive me for spending the lion's share of this review grappling with silent hill's legacy more than itself qualitatively, but again, what can i say that hasn't been said? if you have not played this game, you owe it to yourself to do so. i don't consider myself the type to get easily scared from horror media nowadays, but this game consistently put me on edge in a way that i rarely find media is capable of doing. this game is a monument while also still being fresh 2 decades removed from launch.
"we have danganronpa at home" ass game. loses one star for the mandatory scene of the main character spying on an 11 year old girl naked in the shower