in the days before resident evil 4, third-person shooters rarely followed a set framework for their mechanics, ranging from the auto-aim of syphon filter to the centered reticle of max payne to old-school resident evil's fixed camera angles and inability to move while firing. as a member of the survival horror subgenre of TPSs, silent hill 2 draws from the RE template while adding its own twists into the formula.

while protagonist james' background is never mentioned, we can assume he has formal combat training given his talent with an array of firearms as well as improvised weaponry. by pulling the right trigger, james enters an aiming stance where he will fix his sights on a nearby target. pressing the cross button at this point will cause james to discharge his gun, which can be repeated multiple times to inflict sequential damage on a target. however, attempting to fire with an empty clip will trap him in place while dry reloading. the player must carefully count their ammo usage in the chaos of combat in order to avoid this occurance and safely reload from the inventory menu.

much like this game's ps1 predecessor, james has access to three different types of firearms. the first is the pistol, which provides high manueverability in exchange for low firepower. the shotgun is the middle tier weapon, as it seems to be a semi-automatic with the ability to fire off six shells in succession, but it has a notable amount of recoil. this weapon is designed in an unorthodox fashion compared to its contemporaries, where spread of the shotgun is rather focused and thus is mainly used for blowing enemies back at close range. finally, the rifle provides the highest firepower in exchange for heavy recoil, sluggish recovery time, and low ammo capacity. this weapon sees the most use in slower boss battles, where the damage output becomes a necessity. the tradeoffs between each of these create dynamism in each encounter, where weapon selection becomes as important as actually disposing of enemies. this is unfortunately undercut by the generous amount of ammo for each weapon, making resource conservation less of a focus. however, the ammo allotment is tightly designed such that players can't simply run into battle willy-nilly with the rifle: certain enemies naturally counteract each weapon based on their own behaviors, attack patterns, and agility, and many fights will need to be conducted with the handgun to ensure that precious rifle ammo isn't needlessly wasted on enemies that can easily avoid its shots.

ranged combat dominates much of the latter half of the game, but james enters into silent hill with no equipment and must conduct on-site procurement a la konami's other famous playstation franchise metal gear solid. given the barren state of the town, james must make do with both a wood plank and a steel pipe as he slowly builds up his arsenal of weaponry. the game's biggest enhancement over the original silent hill is its evolution of its melee mechanics. for example, silent hill 2 deftly weaves in the pressure-sensitive buttons of the ps2 in order to differentiate between two types of close-ranged attacks. softly holding the cross button creates gentler, more strategic blows, such as the plank's walking swing and the pipe's lunge. these attacks can be used to overwhelm opponents in order to stagger them for the heavier melee strike. by forcefully pressing the button, james will unleash an nasty overhead capable of quickly downing enemies. developing an understanding of how to correctly manipulate the pressure sensor in order to use each move at will goes a long way in terms of enriching james' arsenal. melee weapons also have one important upside over their ranged brethren: they allow the player to block attacks by holding the square button when standing still. silent hill 3 would extend this to a universal parry, but silent hill 2's implementation feels natural and easy to use in the heat of battle. while these options become less consequential as the game extends into the second half, they do reward those who prefer to stay up close and personal by rewarding james with the giant knife. this hefty blade betrays the developer's japanese side by calling to mind such classic weapons such as cloud's buster sword or guts' ferocious dragon slayer.

there's one other primary attack that must be mentioned: the stomp. by pressing the cross button without aiming over a downed enemy, james will coup de grâce his opponent with a deadly heel strike to the head. this iconic technique is a series staple, and it presages similar attacks that would appear in later games of its ilk such as resident evil 5 and dead space. while in the original resident evil games zombies would often rise up after briefly tasting carpet, the effect was primarily to catch unsuspecting or overeager players unawares when they hadn't quite finished off their foe as well as offering the chance to run by to those low on ammo. in silent hill's case, stomping a downed enemy is the primary way of killing most targets due to the speed of its use compared to simply filling an opponent full of lead. this is especially important for the lying figure enemies, who can deal major damage by scrambling from a fallen state. the average enemy will be able to arise multiple times if left unaccounted for, forcing stomps as a necessity for those hoping to cleanly end encounters. this is especially apparent in group encounters, where other enemies may cut off downed ones from james' approach. in these cases crowd control becomes integral to survival, as the player must prioritize enemies with enough space around them that james can run up to them and stomp them upon toppling them without getting side-swiped by another enemy along the way. when the player has a better grasp of the combat, they may line up enemies in such a fashion that they inadvertently strike one another thanks to the game's friendly fire, potentially toppling or staggering them with minimal input from the player. these nuances make silent hill 2 more than just blindly firing at enemies when it's at its best in terms of encounter design.

as for enemies, the game primarily cycles between three: the lying figure, the mannequin, and the nurse. the lying figure slowly approaches james upon seeing him, emitting an acid spray when james comes into range. the mannequin meanwhile remains in a random position until james comes into range, flailing wildly with its appendages at any provocation from the player. finally, the nurse menacingly struts towards james upon seeing him, swingingly carelessly with a steel pipe at anyone in the vicinity. all three of these require a delicate understanding from the player of their general health pool, behavior in close quarters, and primary weapon of choice for dispatching them. it's unfortunate that the lying figures end up becoming too frequently utilized, especially in the labyrinth zone, which diminishes the impact of the nurses in particular, who rarely show up once james enters the historical society. various other enemies such as the grate-swinging mandarins and the abstract daddies with their devastating command grab show up sparingly as well.

boss fights are not puzzle-based in any way and instead primarily require the player to put distance between james and the boss, fire off shots, and then run for safe territory. while not terribly interesting, bosses in general were rarely well-designed at this point of third-person shooter history. of these, pyramid head is certainly the most notable given his timer-driven boss fights where shots scored on his metallic helmet reduce the amount of time until he leaves the area. other bosses require more finesse, such as eddie and his game of cat-and-mouse in a meat locker between frozen cadavers. skilled players will find that with tight execution they can perform a stunlock on him by using the rifle's shot to stagger him and then following up with rifle shots repeatedly until the fight ends. while most strategies for these fights feel rote, there are certainly ways for astute players to develop novel strategies for them. the major downside to some bosses who reside in larger arenas is that the camera is unable to keep track of them given that it centers on james at all times. this certainly isn't a game-breaker thanks to james being able to automatically aim at off-screen enemies when facing in their direction, but it does make positioning considerations rather awkward.

as a hallmark of the playstation 2's early action lineup, silent hill 2 provides one of the most focused gun-toting romps of the early 00s. it's hard to compare it directly to those that followed in its wake given the modern focus on stick-driven aiming and over-the-shoulder viewpoints, but parallels can be drawn between its synergy between melee and ranged combat and its positioning-focused combat encounters to modern shooters, whether they derive from survival horror antecedents or not. aspects of it have aged poorly such as the awkward camera controls and the lack of enemy variety, which may put off players more used to today's iterations of these genre conventions. however, the simple viscerality of the firing mechanics and small weapon pool combined with the tactics involved with positioning and weapon selection lend the game an arcade-like quality that has been lost in modernity. revisiting these games is vital for understanding the development of this incredibly popular genre today.

I'm tired and didn't expect to finish this tonight so I'm going to stay terse. naughty dog is obsessed with filmic avenues for games as art. game design is entirely secondary and liberally cribbed from contemporaries. consider literally any jak game (standard collectathon for first game, same engine grafted to eyebrow-raising drab GTA world for second game) or uncharted (bog-standard cover shooter + ico-lite platforming + half-hearted turn towards horror in the back quarter). naughty dog only believes in conglomerates of design. interwoven webs of market-proven mechanics where the connective tissue is the graphical fidelity and storytelling.

this is not what I like in games. I like games that create internal logics that interact with each other in novel ways. this doesn't have to be complex. arcade-style games form tiny cores of necessary mechanics and grow their universes from exploring the facets of each element in further and further detail. surprisingly, the last of us is naughty dog's attempt at making such a game. it is meant to be a rich tapestry of survival, horror, grounded shooter, et cetera. its individual elements are evidently meant to pulsate and reprise in waves across the experience. approaches to encounters are meant to run the gamut of stealth, guns blazing, trap-oriented, and any combination of these you can conceive.

naughty dog is not a studio that has the design chops to make such a game though. instead, the end product is The third-person shooter. the third-person shooter monolith if you will. a pastiche of nearly a decade of design patterns evolving shoved into a single casserole. when in tightly constrained areas, cover is conspicuously placed for you to camp behind while you clear the room. other areas feature hidden routes to quietly crouch-walk through under the auspicious of "tense" play. others feature onslaughts of infected waves meant to be gunned down. these are discrete and easy to recognize. what makes it interconnected is that the options are bare enough to make transitioning styles required. getting caught during stealth just makes the game a cover shooter. running away from clickers far enough transitions back into stealth. remaining in cover long enough will eventually force the enemies to push and let you react aggressively. no one system ever has enough juice to invigorate the experience on its own. walking up behind someone to shiv them rarely changes outcomes over just shooting them with an arrow or walking past. shotguns sometimes barely stagger opponents so what pleasure do I attain from experimenting with the weapon when a point-blank headshot doesn't even cause them to explode into gibs. I could just use any of the multiple other weapons that have the same effect.

all you're doing at the end of the day is eliminating individual enemies with one of the options off of the a la carte weapons menu. no need to manipulate their search AI or clump them into groups or anything beyond just rotating weapons and picking off every enemy one by one. only thing that changes is if you're supposed to be playing gears-style cover tactics or far cry-style "clear the base by pressing the takedown button behind everyone" or resident evil-style horde extermination. which is potentially enough to satisfy anyone who wanted a third-person shooter buffet. none of the styles are really entertaining enough on their own to justify the whole. the universe the game design resides in is disjointed.

the rest is pushed forward by walking forward through pretty corridors pressing triangle whenever the game asks you to. none of the aforementioned mechanics lend themselves to puzzle-solving, so virtually every instance of one in the world is just moving a ladder or letting ellie float on a wood pallet. in keeping with the crash bandicoot crate methodology ie provide minute interaction between the actual tests of competancy, the game litters materials all throughout the world for you to mindlessly pick up. any semblence of creating fragments of life in these environments is shattered by this. joel and ellie's banter is mumbled as backdrop for me rumaging through lockers and piles of trash for extra bandages or ammo. representations of life pre-apocalypse decaying are bastardized as I sift through drawers looking for those telltale item symbols to pop up for me to view. this is not an insignificant portion of the game mind you. some of these segments of nothingness reach the 15-20 minute range. if they were so concerned with letting me appreciate the views, maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to breadcrumb trail me around, pointing my camera at the ground constantly in the process. which does not even begin to highlight the inauthenticity of every supposed residential area with conviently placed rubble or cars or such to create cover-based combat arenas.

with this said, its adaptability is its greatest strength as much as it is its downfall. the general workbench design and locked doors are lifted from dead space and rendered more enjoyable here thanks to a streamlined tech tree and relatively-common shivs being used as keys rather than expensive power nodes. the actual gunplay is medicore since it never matches one modality, but at the same time it is at least a better murder sim than uncharted and its sanitized pg-13 firefights. enemy AI is not exactly robust and is easy to exploit thanks to the overeemphasived distraction item mechanic (bricks and bottles are yet another endlessly available item to collect), but it is complex enough to surprise the player and force more reactive play.

there's a particular moment I really liked. in the basement of the hotel there's waterlogged storage rooms with an elevator to reach the main floors that is disabled. enabling this requires turning on a generator located on the opposite side of the area, which will attract many waves of infected along with a dangerous bloater enemy. there are many approaches to this section, including simply beelining to the exit with the keycard for the elevator, setting traps in places where the spawns become most congested, or simply fighting it out amongst the onslaught of opponents. this is identical to the style-switching I discussed earlier. however, this particular encounter is totally open-ended in a way where a particular approach isn't necessarily prescribed. in my first attempt I played cat and mouse with the bloater before I knew the keycard location because I had unwittingly turned the generator on upon seeing it. my second attempt I tried to fight back more proactively, and on my third attempt I laid down traps and planned an escape route beforehand. none of these were intended strategies to the extent that the developers felt pressed to include copious hints towards one style or another (blatant cover, passageways to crouch-walk through, etc.). the area is relatively large as well, and thus the actual tactical evaluation feels less limiting. if only more encounters in the game had attempted something higher-level like this instead of pulling from canned ideas.

all of this is in service of delivering the story. I would call it a children of men rip-off if I had ever actually watched that movie. I appreciate that joel is the anti-nathan drake. the deluge of quips is replaced by generic gruff guy behavior (not to mention ellie handles most quip duties when appropriate), but at the very least the game does a better job presenting him as a total psychopath and justifies the insane bodycount he racks up. the ending in particular I enjoyed; the "actually he did all this terrible shit because he's a terrible person!" throughline is not novel nor was it in 2013, but I rarely see a game attempt such a purposeful lack of closure. the rest is marginal. various character sketches dedicated in each chapter with predictably dour results for each. the repeated "people do terrible things under pressure" motif is wrung far too dry. makes each character's arc slight since the outcome is always known in advance. perhaps this is why I liked the ending: did not necessarily expect it given most games' predilection for riding off into a sunset.

the latter section is sort of damning because I actually played the majority of this game while dogsitting for my girlfriend months ago, and finally finished today to add another game to the halloween roster. I frankly don't remember much about the story other than the broad strokes. I at least remember more than a dozen or so particular enemy encounters, which is pretty great for a game that runs about 15 hours. what's less reassuring is how scattered my responses to said encounters were: I often remember routes I took but what guns or tactics I favored are completely absent from my memory.

a smorgasbord of opportunites for you to throw a brick somewhere and make everyone around you go "huh? what was that" and allow you to walk behind them. speaking of which: the clickers. the perfect synthesis of "scary enemy that actually is so trivial to circumvent that it's not scary" and "scary enemy that awkwardly OHKOs you and becomes more frustrating than scary". having your primary horror encounters be based around an enemy that cannot see you renders virtually every situation with them one that rewards just walking really slowly. that is when you don't have a brick, which you nearly always will because they're generously located near all clickers. finally building up the firepower to kill them more efficiently would be great if not for the OHKO, and so just walking around them still feels like the dominant strategy up through the final area. other than using the flamethrower that is, which I frankly underused outside of the final areas. also this review is more terse than my usual shit which thankfully meant I knocked it out in about an hour but still is way too long. oh well. better than my original draft from when I was more actively playing it that tried to wade into the lukewarm "games as art" discourse.

+re5/re6 are already pretty comfy to play, but this next-iteration of RE third-person shooter mechanics has really refined all the best parts of the prior entries. running is smooth (though understandably not that fast), turning around isn't a nuisance in instances where the quick-turn isn't optimal, and the handling for the guns nails the tense wobble of prior games without the same seemingly inconsistent shots.
+indeed, much of the fear in zombie confrontations comes from their erratic movements. zombies take many bullets to permanently dispatch, and lining up headshots isn't child's play. the undead will seize up, crane their noggins over lopsided, and stumble back and forth; all the while evading your fire.
+the whole police station section from the clock tower above to the dog pound below rules. perfect balance of planning your runs/routes + working out the various puzzles around the station.
+love the concept of the locker room. finding one of the blank keys lit my brain up with thoughts of what goodies I would get next. would have been interested in seeing this expanded.
+the usual resident evil cheese is much appreciated in the notes and emails and such over the course of the game. the cutscenes feel suitably more serious than the truly B-movie ones from the psx games, but the supplementary text belies the schlock under the hood.
+inventory system is cramped enough to not make smart loadout choices pointless, but also far less annoying to manage from when I played REmake. the hip pouches are also perfectly timed as you build out your weapon selection, great addition.
+best jumpscares and overall terror out of any of the REs I've played up to this point. when tyrant burst out of that wall in the east hall first floor my heart skipped a beat.
+ada...

-tyrant was honestly underused compared to what I expected from hearing others talk. he's present for a bit of the police station, but is unfortunately absent from the rest of the game other than a couple obviously scripted appearances. he's not really much of a threat either given that his punches don't deal much damage.
-the sewer and the lab arent't bad but don't have the great design web of the station. the sewer really just requires making like two loops through to get everything, and the lab has one small five-minute area + another area that just takes two loops through. puzzles are stlil fun, but it didn't quite hit the same for me.
-enemies also feel less threatening during these sections than the zombie windows and lickers of the station. the giant water monsters in the sewer are freaky but really only show up in two main locations, while the plant monsters of the lab go down quickly with the flamethrower regardless of their regeneration and their potentially to insta-kill leon.
-given the engine I actually wouldn't have minded an action focus later on in the game. missed opportunity imo, again given that the latter half is missing that je ne sais quoi of the first half.
-the section where you actually play as ada isn't that great. tracing the electrical systems made me feel like I was playing some obnoxious insomniac spider-man mission.

hit the spot as a "no thoughts" game while I recovered from marathoning so many games in the last two months. in terms of pacing I would have preferred a bit more bulk (I came in just shy of 8 hours IGT) or at the very least some way to just mow down zombies for a bit towards the end. the setpieces are good and the bosses passable for RE, but the bar is low, is it not? I absolutely could not put it down in the station though; playing this and onimusha sort of close to each other reminded me how much my brain gets tickled by RE-style puzzles.

another member of the dying gasp of the diegetic rhythm game subgenre along with space channel 5 pt. 2, gitaroo man showcases a young keiichi yano and his team at inis ltd. stretching the concepts previously established by parappa about as far as they could reasonably go. rather than simple call-and-response, gitaroo man attempts musical dialogue between combatants, where U1 and his opponent trade twos attempting to one-up each other with increasingly stylish licks. this isn't a strict memorization game or based in player improv; rather, each phrase is chosen from a pool of possible riffs that all conform to the same chord progression. the format requires a different level of player dexterity in adapting to new rhythms compared to many games of its ilk, and remains possibly the most fascinating aspect of the game design to this day.

the actual input method swaps between two modes: attack/charge and defend. in the former mode, U1 commands his axe via a series of tube-like notes that crawl across the screen that must be followed with the analog nub while simultaneously matching the rhythm with the face buttons. while unorthodox, this system perfectly captures that feeling of bending in a particularly wailing note or leaning into the whammy bar for that wobbly pitch. the defense system is straight-forward by comparison: simply press the corresponding face button as it flies towards the center of the screen. alternating between these two styles generally occurs primarily in the aforementioned random-phrase vamp for the majority of the song where you attempt to whittle down the enemy's health, though the game is smart about mixing up their inclusion so it never gets stale. there's both a full-attack and full-defend song out of the ten-song roster, as well as nuanced twists such as U1 having to dodge attacks in his non-gitaroo man form during the sanbone trio's song or a song change in the middle of the second-to-last fight. structurally the game never rests on its laurels, and instead makes an honest effort to keep the player continually invested throughout the experience.

being of its early vintage, it's easy to spot the cracks in gitaroo man's design unfortunately. it's hard for me to discern quite what the differences between the original ps2 version and this psp port are given that the former is finicky both via emulation and ESR, but my suspicion having read threads on the matter + anecdotal evidence from friends indicates that the directional input for the attack sections can be unfortunately sensitive. on the psp version I've always found it rather forgiving, which may be a byproduct of it controlling pretty smoothly with the nub. however, given that the notes constantly curve and that there aren't visual delineations between measures, it becomes difficult to ascertain the timing of the notes in this mode as the charts become more dense. this is manageable in the main story mode, but in the master mode it becomes utterly overwhelming and lays the limits of the engine clearly bare. the defend sections are relatively lax in comparison given how large the input windows are, but the psp's 16:9 screen makes the square and circle notes appearing from the sides visible far before the vertically-oriented triangle and cross notes, which unfortunately makes their order of arrival differ from their actual rhythmic order. again, not a real issue outside of master mode once you get a handle on each of the songs.

but the mechanics alone aren't what really sells this game, right? 326's scratchy character designs with their deranged spike teeth and determined droopy-eyed stares make the concept pop just from the cover; the gitaroo man outfit and its 70s alien prog color scheme with the winged helmet look so sick. the cutscenes as well jump so desperately from rapid-fire dubbed lines to printed mantras of both despair and honey-love back to wicked character transformations and unexpected left-turn boss fights. rarely has such a soundtrack been as effortlessly eclectic as this one: expect to switch from steady-as-she-goes hard rock to eurobeat to funk to ambient dub within just the first set of stages. far from focusing just on the squalls of cock/butt rock, lead composers/performers COIL (entirely unrelated to another even more viciously experimental duo from a different set of isles) twist U1's titular guitar into a vast landscape in sounds depending on what would benefit the current track, from delay-riddled murmurs to finger-picked flamenco. one of the bands I'm in used to play legendary theme as a warmup before practices; undeniably one of the freshest leads ever written. intro soft machine should've been playable. that riff sits so tall in my mind palace of slacker-y 90s indie guitar fuzz.

it's odd to think that there aren't many other games that take cues from yoshi's island considering how well respected it is. the slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs were incredibly novel in the mid-90s, but the shift away from side-scrolling platformers with the rise of 3D wilted this particular evolutionary branch before it had time to really blossom. thankfully while klonoa doesn't feature the sprawl of yoshi's beloved headlining debut, it offers a tightly-paced knockout of a platformer that tills the same field to create a masterfully crafted experience.

the gameplay of klonoa centers around the titular character's ability to grab virtually any enemy and use them as a makeshift projectile, which has the added by-product of giving him an extra jump when the enemy is thrown downward. while simple in concept, the planners stretched this mechanic as far as it would go thanks to smart enemy design and an excellent difficulty curve. klonoa is limited in his abilities outside of this power - he does have a yoshi-esque flutter jump when he's not carrying anything - so with any danger ahead of him the player must carefully consider enemy placement both for utility and avoidance. an enemy may need to be carried from a separate section in order to boost klonoa past an obstacle, or ungrabbable enemies in the way may force the player to lure grabbable ones over to use as ammo. further into the game the execution becomes more strict with strings of enemies to chain jumps with, insta-death surfaces, and shielded enemies, but the game never manages to feel unfair. given the number of lives that the game hands out, most will find the difficulty at that sweet spot between leisurely and strenuous. it's the perfect level of challenge for encouraging replays for collectables, and it provides enough training with mechanics to make that difficult extra stage feel achievable.

the macro-design shows a clear influence from some of the key-driven levels present in yoshi's island. levels here don't stick to a left-to-right structure and instead generally feature per-room challenges that require a higher level of spatial awareness thanks to elements of both the foreground and background playing into small puzzles. while early on each stage rarely approaches non-linearity outside of small side-jaunts that contain collectables, the later stages begin playing with interconnected stage designs that feature loop-backs and stage-wide object effects such as turning elevators on or opening doors. none of it is truly exploratory (outside of one neat stage that features four keys that can be obtained in any order), but it does go a long way towards actualizing the locations beyond mere vessels of challenge.

vision 6-2 in particular shows a keen awareness of parallelism as an effective way to both present a series of challenges and the feeling of an authentic environment. this level involves a single large cylindrical tower with a long column-filled room that contains different pathways to take. more difficult pathways are locked behind timed switch puzzles at the end of the pathway before it. these switch puzzles inside the tower must be accessed by moving a block located outside of the tower behind a puzzle centered around a super-sized version of a common enemy which impedes progress. reaching this section on the outskirts of the tower requires making it through a climb sequence from within the tower, and before that a precision platforming section over a perilous drop away from the tower. the cycle of these different elements each getting increasingly more difficult imparts the feeling of true progress as one makes their way further and further through the column-filled corridor until they finally reach the end, where they can ascend the final part of the tower to reach a monumental boss fight. an exceptional display of level design chops that illustrates - more than just mechanical understanding - a conscious synthesis of micro-design and macro-design to elevate mere gameplay into a worthy struggle through perilous odds that rewards persistance and patience.

it must be said that the bosses are all excellent as well. each provides a unique twist on the enemy-throwing formula that utilizes the same hierarchy of movement, primary, and auxillary obstacles that I layed out in my cuphead review. klonoa has the extra trick up its sleeve of having those enemies be both tool and trial at once, and the bosses use this to great effect. in many instances the auxillary attack itself consists of or contains the very enemies you need to use to damage the boss, and weighing when to avoid them and when to seize them for an attack creates a lovely risk/reward element that keeps each fight fresh. no boss resembles any other boss, and most of them provide a perfect blend of attacks to keep the player on their toes and repetition to a minimum (the second boss is a little stale tho, there's a lot of downtime during it that unfortunately makes it the weakest of the bunch).

what perhaps really elevates this game beyond the rest of its ilk is its attention to aesthetic detail. no aspect feels cheap or rushed, from the rotating pentagonal prism health bars that each boss has to the gorgeous vision start splashes with unique names and subtitles each. every character is well-animated and meshes well with the 3D backdrops, and the game doesn't skimp on gorgeous oscillating polygonal effects illustrating the magical capabilities of the cast, small particle effects when klonoa runs across certain surfaces, and cinematic swirling camera angles as klonoa takes corners and breathes in monumental structures. the story is also full integrated into gameplay, with smooth transitions and everything handled in-engine with unique sprites that really sell the integration. the story itself is compact and strays little from a vague KH-esque light and darkness dichotomy, which suits the pacing of the game perfectly; mature enough for adults to appreciate while simplisitic enough to avoid overwhelming a child. it neatly foreshadows up to its infamous final cutscene twist, and while shockingly abrupt and bittersweet for a game of this nature, it perfectly captures the emotion with the turmoil and rush of the final FMV before the credits roll. it's evident that this is the culmination of hideo yoshizawa's vision of an action game that marries unvarnished gameplay to cinematic qualities.

a little note to fellow popstarter users: this game is pretty playable up to the end if you can stomach semi-frequent crashes between levels that will require a quick reset (thankfully this is after you save, so you won't lose any progress). in a couple of cases this skips important cutscenes, so be advised. I also found it impossible to reach the credits thanks to a crash after the final boss, and thus after a couple tries I resorted to duckstation to finish the game off. disappointing to be sure, but it's a testament to the game's quality that I was perfectly willing to replay the final boss (all three phases) over and over again to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and frankly it was worth it in the end just so I could play the majority of the game on a proper CRT! this is a game that benefits greatly from that phosphorescent swirl of an authentic old screen.

got to the end of terra's campaign and realized this game requires three playthroughs to complete and put it down for a year. what a vicious tactic for padding out game length... eventually I felt the urge to come back tho, I just needed a break from kingdom hearts.

+the command deck is pretty much exactly what kh needed to gel as a combat engine. no real menuing necessary, just cycle through a couple moves and fire them off to your heart's content. helps the balance a fair bit too when you can load up on cure spells. you can definitely tell that this draws quite a bit mechanically from twewy, which released a couple of years prior.
+melding also locks in an intoxicating macro-loop centered around making better and better commands. the fact that you can slot in abilities during the melding process really did it for me: I was swapping out commands constantly trying to accrue abilities and to experiment with new tactics.
+on top of all of this, command styles allow the player to seamlessly transition into different super styles that hearken back to the drive forms of kh2. these require you to use different sequences of commands to transition, and later in the game you can transition through multiple styles. they're all a joy to use, and I'm glad there wasn't any menuing involved like with kh2.
+for the most part each campaign actually has a different set of bosses, which makes the replaying feel less repetitious. pretty decent overall too, not as high as kh2's highs but probably more fair than kh1.
+lilo and stitch is sick.
+much like twewy as well I really did enjoy the grind to some extent literally just from getting to upgrade commands and acquire new abilities. the mirage arena seems cool as well as an obvious gesture towards monhun fans, I'd still like to try this grind in multiplayer on the psp version at some point

-these worlds are so empty... absolutely nothing to see in most areas. it's more of a side effect of this being a handheld 3D game tho, so I'm not knocking off points for this alone
-this is the first real game by the osaka team (who had done re:com prior) and you can tell they didn't quite nail the physics and feel of kingdom hearts proper. characters are so slow and clunky with their attacks, with frustratingly long recovery animations and inconsistent input buffering. feels almost a bit like a return to the combat of the first game.
-maybe I'm just forgetting how the older games worked but lock-on is dreadful here. the implicit lock-on works solely on whatever enemy is closest, which ignores your analog stick direction and will often flip you 180 if you knock your current target too far away. switching between targets isn't terrible (it's like kh1) but is still a bit of a pain.
-having three classic disney princess worlds back to back at the start is a little much. too homogenous in design imo.
-aqua is a queen but also her gameplay sort of sucks without some grinding. having a magic-heavy character in the mash-x game series doesn't feel great and in the latter worlds the enemies get very spongey unless you're grabbing a couple extra levels here and there.
-general kingdom hearts shit. having one million contextual actions that don't flow into each other at all, guard/dodge roll on the same button, QTEs injected into combat, all exacerbated by having a much clunkier engine than kh2.
-shotlock is sort of neither here or there as a mechanic but d-links get to the point where it feels extraneous. I'm not against it in theory but the multitude of options and general mediocrity of the abilities gained make it a glorified free heal in practicality
-certain end bosses did get repeated, and specifically vanitas really grated on my nerves with the repetition across the campaigns. very reminiscent of riku replica from re:com

if anything what really kills it is having to play through the whole experience three times. having a single 30-hour campaign to build up your command roster and abilities as to finally have a busted character at the end would rule, but instead you end up having to restart the game with a fresh slate multiple times and never quite meet your potential. it's even worse that many abilities are random rolls - I ran through the aqua campaign with a full stack of attack haste and zero magic haste because I could not get the right random abilities. it's not a gamebreaker, but it really hurts what should have been the absolute selling point of the game.

so in the end it's bad like the other kingdom hearts games without any of wild or charming elements that draws me towards them, however reluctantly. and to be fair I often felt that same feeling here, just looser, and perhaps solely to see what happened to the trio as they approached their tragic ends that set in motion the events of the following titles. I got what I came for, but virtually all of it laid tucked away at the end, either behind 30 hours of tedium or a 100% requirement (god knows I just watched it on youtube). it's sort of been downhill for me once I realized that kh2 was probably going to be the high point of the series and that the rest was going to be more of a chore than anything.

it feels somewhat rare that an indie game really captures a retro style in a way that does more than pay lip-service to its predecessors. shovel knight was one of those games: a pitch-perfect recreation of NES-style action challenges stripped away of the mechanical uncertainty of the actual games of that era. cuphead captures that for the run-and-gun in a way that makes it not only a loving tribute but a legitimate cornerstone in the genre.

cuphead feels borne by a rigorous design methodology that demonstrates a deep understanding of the fundamentals of boss design in a 2D space. each fight is undergirded by the movement and platform features; this is generally the unifying trait. plenty of fights take place on a featureless flat ground, but very quickly wrinkles such as scrolling, conveyors, limited platforms, or combinations of these are introduced. a great late-game example is the ghost train stage that features of a platform that can and must be moved between left, center, and right using parry controls. these establish for the player the laws of their dominion so to speak: what space can the player leverage? what options exist at any given time to dodge a certain obstacle?

with each phase then comes the primary attack. bosses generally lack dynamic reactive capabilities unlike a human, so they are incapable of mindgames generally speaking. thus, in virtually all boss fights the boss cycles between random attacks that the player must apply a counterstrategy against. in modern games the design parlance is as such: windup animation begets the attack proper begets an opening for a player to either 1) rest if their counterstrategy is not efficient enough to yield a counterattack or 2) counterattack. too unthreatening and the player barely needs to muster a counterattack, and too overpowered and the player will have no time to respond. cuphead weaves in a truly surprising variety of primaries to challenge the player: the enemy may momentarily remove the player's control of the space, such as with the cat at the end of the rat tank fight batting its paws to swat the right and left sides of the screen, or perhaps the enemy creates antagonistic autonomous elements that force the player to utilize their spatial reasoning and pattern recognition to deduce a projectile's movement habits and shift their position accordingly, such as in the bee queen's middle phase where she incorporates stochaistically-drifting geometric projectiles as well as bullets that move in a linear back-and-forth climb on either side of the screen.

primary attacks on their own are only a lock-and-key design principle: find the counterstrategy that works against a particular move and apply it when needed. what creates true tension in the fight are the auxillary attacks. virtually all bosses are able to separately cycle through auxillary attacks that generally involve an entirely separate on-screen entity attacking on their own accord out of sync with the primary opponent. auxillary attacks on their own already heighten the experience by creating a space-constraint intersection that forces the player to adapt their key to more than just a single lock. certain intersections of attacks may prevent successful counterattacks or force the player to fall back on safer strategies, thus making the risk-and-reward judgment more critical and ever mutating. where cuphead really succeeds is having the auxillary attacks cycle as well. it's much like having three basic collared shirts and three basic ties: the combinations they present give you nine outfits, yielding an multiplicative amount of potential attack intersections. phase one of the sea medusa fight is a great example of this: three primary attacks (either summoning ghost projectiles or bringing one of two different fish out of the water with their own projectiles) with three auxillary attacks (staggered puffer fish projectiles, a water jet that forces a positive y velocity, and bombs that explode with a octagonal bullet pattern). each on their own is manageable, but combined there is an additional level of fluidity demanded of the player with adapting on the fly to intersections they may have never seen before.

of course cuphead doesn't simply hew to these elements in every fight; it expands on them and plays with the potential they possess. take the pirate ship fight: this begins with both a small primary attack (pellets fired by the captain one by one) with an auxillary component (a barrel that moves back and forth at the top of the screen, attempting to crush the player when they pass underneath). within time the captain will begin preempting his own pellet attack with a cycle of attacks from different sources, each with their own tell: a shark that consumes the left half of the screen, small bulldog fish(?) that slide across the ground, and a squid that both creates a fountain of bullets and can turn the screen dark if not defeated in time. on its own this is a perfectly interesting fight: manage the primary and auxillary attacks while being cognizant of primary attacks from external components via tells. however, in the second phase, the ship itself begins shooting cannonballs on a timer. at this point the player must not only manage transient attacks from the captain but also track the separate rhythms of the barrel and the ship's cannonballs. these intersect in a truly polyrhythmic fashion that pushes the fight into truly challenging territory that feels immensely rewarding to lock in with.

this is also boosted by cuphead having a stellar kit and smooth controls that feel sharp without being too abrupt or linear. his ability to parry specific objects (which are colored pink to distinguish them) adds a scale of mastery of many bullet patterns, with basic familiarity only yielding the ability to dodge while a complete understanding allows navigation to specific bullets for a parry and the reward of extra super meter. the super meter attacks are all rather useful and feel well balanced, though for the full-meter arts I can't really imagine someone using anything other than invincibility. however, I found myself legitimately switching out his shots and charms for different fights, which is not to say I found all of the variety useful (I mainly stuck to chaser and spread along with the smoke dodge and one extra heart depending on the fight), but to require a level of specificity in strategy for each fight encourages me to experiment more than I may otherwise. there are virtually no points of frustration I can attribute to a failure in the controls or a lack of a specific tool; almost every time I was stumped on a particular counterstrategy I always eventually worked something out even if it wasn't optimal.

I would really go as far as to say I don't think cuphead has any particular failings or even elements of unfair frustration that I can think of. while an immensely challenging experience, the primary and auxillary attacks are synergistic in such a way that a given intersection can't truly render an attack undodgeable or debilitating. never did I feel like a particular portion was just inserted because it felt cool or to fill space; rather, every bit of the game feels handled with care and finesse. the dragon fight was the peak of this for me... that particular fight walled me and put me off the game quite a bit. while the exasperation I felt was valid, I could never pinpoint a particular aspect that really felt unfair to me. at the end of the day, those projectiles that explode into smaller projectiles when hit really preyed on my spray-and-pray instincts in a way that punished me (and many others I assume) far more than most games are willing to muster. if I had to name one little thing that did feel off to me, it was the platforms during the bee queen fight. the scrolling part and random gaps don't bother me, but their collision box doesn't feel quite lined up with the art, which sometimes led to me falling randomly in confusing ways.

I do wish the flying stages had the same level of customization as the ground stages, but understandably that's a scope issue and not something I would expect from a small production. the non-boss levels also feel a bit perfunctory, but they are all still fun and only necessary for collecting coins for purchasing items in the shop. both of these won't get in the way of anyone looking to experience this: the core of the gameplay is still the tremendous boss fights. this has given me a a nice little kick in the pants to go back and dive into the early 16-bit fundamental works that helped mold this into the genius showpiece that it is.

this ended up being more of a view into my personal foilbles as a gamer than anything: that ticking 30 day timer pushed me into a level of perfectionist agonizing I wouldn't have expected from a nintendo game. it was really to the point that I got to distant spring, took a look around, and promptly put the game down for nearly a year due to the anxiety. totally a needless drive too, considering I had ended up with something like seven items left and 12 days to grab them in, so I was really under no pressure at all! but sometimes it requires a break to regroup and put things into perspective.

the design here is all good though; it's absolutely novel and toys with RTS tropes in a way only nintendo at their creative peak could capture. base-building is eschewed in favor of exploration, experimentation, and plenty of pikmin micro-management, most of which the game neatly handles for you. the pikmin AI vascillates between intuitive and incomprehensible at a moment's notice, meaning that sometimes the pikmin will clue in to exactly what they're supposed to be handling and then minutes later decide to frolic off on their own to pull up weeds or stand stock-still in front of wily beasts on the move. combat also can quickly switch between these two extremes: sometimes you'll nail the throws and your pikmin will rack up damage, whereas other times it feels they're unresponsive and helpless. this is where the limited day count really hurts the game, as it made me feel like every major pikmin loss was a major reset point. it perhaps would have felt more immersive if I could take my survivors and lick my wounds back at base, all the while devising ways to get my numbers up again or try to take on the opponent a new way. instead I often reset if I couldn't get through my chosen encounters with an acceptable amount of losses, which led me to redoing numerous other objectives along the way past the point of frustration.

when the game works though, it's a surprisingly clever take on puzzles and resource management from the big N with a lot of heart and an elegant internal ecology that adds to the mystique of the alien planet. lining up two pieces in a single day always made me smug, enraptured in my own success even when on the heels of multiple resets. eventually I convinced myself to eat losses here and there as long as I kept things moving; after all, the game smartly lets you take any enemy you've killed back to base to sprout new allies. occasionally these puzzles push at the limits of the controls on gamecube -- for example, in the final trial where you must throw yellow pikmin carrying bombs across water while making sure they don't drop in and also without signalling them for some odd reason -- but the game is generous with how most thought-intensive puzzles are light on enemies. I wish that I could've pressed on originally instead of having this awkward gap in playtime, but this return visit to cleanup the endgame has left me overall much more positive on where the game truly sings rather than preoccupied with the hidden frustrations behind it.

really wanted to finish this one but my infinite lives cheat borked out in level 5 for some reason. I quite literally ran out of infinite lives... so I guess it was really just making it a high number under the hood or something. the game itself is neat: slow beat-em-up style movement on the front layer with the ability to fire pistol shots and crouch, and then a machine guy to spray into the back layer much like a light-gun game. using one precludes the other so knowing which layer to focus on at any given point is key. thankfully every enemy outside of bosses dies in one hit, and most of them have pretty obvious ways of defeating them based on their telegraphs. some may jump over your shots or duck, or they may lay down to shoot and only be open when they're reloading. when there's flow, the game is a fun mish-mash of a couple different dominent trends in arcade gaming at the time.

for some reason this game includes levels where you can't shoot for whatever reason, and the quality in these sections drops precipitously. dick moves very slowly and his punch is painfully short. even with the most basic enemies these sections are absolute chores, and it becomes even worse when enemies with knives who can far outrange you are thrown into the mix. these problems begin bleeding into the regular levels as well when platforming is added. tile-wide jumps are somehow precision platforming in this game, and mixing this with your inflexible and short jump along with your inability to jump when doing any other action is very frustrating. it gets even worse when enemies are added in who lay prone constantly even when reloading, forcing you to jump over their bullets and slowly edge in on them to eventually jump on their backs and finish them off. truly cruel design.

there's also car-ride segments which play pretty much identically to the main gameplay along with bonus rounds where you must shoot gangster cardboard cutouts while perserving those of mailmen and other such friendly figures. the graphics are simple in-game and lack environmental variety, but I appreciate the comic-esque splash screens before and after each stage. mostly interesting as the debut title of mark cerny's Sega Technical Institute, and not much beyond that. it did teach me something important about the early 20th century mob though: advancing in the ranks was mainly dependent on who had the most fucked up looking face or skull, based on the variety of bosses in this game.

I'm sort of in love with this game's anachronistic setting that flits between steampunk-adjacent and purely surrealist, as well as the boundless flying that completely distinguishes it from the rest of the open-world-game-with-key-movement-tech canon. very rarely did I go for more than a minute or two without suddenly seeing a gem or secret from the corner of my eye and immediately veering off the intended path, hurtling over vast distances to pique my interest. I enjoyed kat's forthright personality and the revolving door of companions and villains around her, all of whom seem to have unique and conflicting agendas. seeing kat turn from street dweller to local oddity to respected hero charmed me and kept me pushing through to see more of the story.

it's with great regret that I have to admit that while all of the above is lovely, the game itself is undercooked. it obviously has astronomical aims on a limited budget and has to compromise a bit. the story beats are haphazard and the plot purposefully leaves threads dangling for the eventual sequel - which we should be very lucky that we have - and thus I never felt gripped from mission to mission. the missions themselves vary in structure reasonably well, but the building blocks are still monotonous: fly from place to place (perhaps carrying something), fight groups of enemies, rinse and repeat. even worse are missions that wrench away or partially disable your gravity powers, leaving you trapped in a mediocre 3D platformer with some mild puzzle elements. combat mostly consists of air kicks in desperate need of better auto-aim or popping special moves that obliterate virtually everything in your way, including bosses. on top of this is a thin film of jank; just enough to impede the player without violating the integrity of the movement system.

with this in mind, the game runs a little thin even within its <10 hour completion window. however, I actually got a kick out of the challenges scattered around the map, which helped keep me from shotgunning story missions back to back. most of them are relatively simple, but the traversal challenges especially had me optimizing and labbing out routes over retries, especially earlier on when I hadn't upgraded air speed at all. the gravity slide mechanic also fits perfectly in with the rest of kat's kit, making transitioning from air to ground travel a breeze and not a major speed reduction. the little drifts you can do slot perfectly in and make silding around an absolute joy no matter how tight the space. I also appreciated that the game was perfectly willing to jerk me out of the open world when necessary, which is something more games of this ilk should not be afraid to do. presenting alternate spaces allows us to contrast their ambiance and layout, and makes snapping back to an early area much more refreshing.

with more polish and a better variety of content (aka more stuff that takes advantage of the freedom allowed by the gravity mechanics) this would've been a must-play, and even as it stands it was enjoyable front to back. my gf also wanted me to voice a complaint she has with this game on her behalf: this game desperately needs an FOV slider, especially on ps4. I 100% agree with this assertion as well; I understand the tighter camera made sense on vita, but it's downright claustrophobic on ps4.