fuck it, five stars. not because it's perfect (it certainly isn't), but because in its final hours it totally transcends itself, reaching some towering heights and retroactively improving everything that came before. this is one of the most idiosyncratic, visionary works i've experienced in all my time playing games, absolutely overflowing with ideas (about ideas), the result of someone who evidently did not give a shit about restraint or good sense - an attitude i might as well try to embody in my little review here. this is an impassioned, rousing defense of this medium's artistic worth, inspired, resonant, prophetic, stupid, smart, batshit insane all at once, itself the culmination of its own central thesis; to claw your way through the mud, to overcome yourself, to leave behind a beacon, to engrave in fire "i was here", to affirm yourself and in doing so elevate all others with you. my language is cloudy and more than a little histrionic, no doubt, but how else to discuss this thing but with the shock and awe and breathless grandiosity with which it climaxes with! when faced with that raw impact, it suddenly seems oh so trivial that it's a little uneven, that not all its mechanics are perfectly elaborated on, that some parts lag in comparison to others, that kojima's still not a great dramatist. ultimately, i'd take something this distinctly expressed any day over something that gets closer to whatever my ideal of perfection is. actually, on second thought - imperfection is precisely my ideal of perfection. would you not take a diamond with all its harsh edges over the smoothest, roundest rock?

from metal gear 2, kojima really had two paths he could take: either he reins in his ambitions a little and goes for something more minimal, or he loosens all fetters and tries to take his storytelling further with more dialogue, more twists, more cutscenes, etc. kojima evidently goes for the latter and thats why we love him i suppose. this is still an insane, no-holds-barred experience in 2023 and it‘s both admirable and a little exhausting; there are very large stretches of this devoted solely to cutscenes and dialogue – frankly by the end it feels like the split between that and gameplay is 50/50 – and how much that works for you is gonna depend on how much tolerance you have for narrative in this medium. this certainly is not a game for hardline “ludologists”. however, speaking personally anyway, i can’t say that kojima’s intense emphasis on narrative doesn‘t pay off in many ways. kojima‘s character work is much improved, and the plot and themes which are largely recycled (for the second time now) are also executed considerably better than before. it‘s obviously not perfect – the dialogue can get a little dire at times and kojima still hasn‘t completely gotten a handle on convincingly weaving drama into his narrative – but there‘s still campy fun to be had and, yes, some big brain moments as well. for better or worse there is simply no one else doing it like kojima, certainly not at the time but not really these days either. and while the drama and ultimate narrative thrust is pretty simple and even juvenile, there’s a lot of granular, nerdy detail that you could dismiss as fluff but i find pretty charming and enriching. i appreciate kojima’s hyper-skeptical and conspiratorial approach to geopolitics as well, it's absolutely the right approach to take, both for a twisty espionage thriller like this but also probably just in general. the localization is pretty decent (albeit with some notable lows like „japanese animes“ or „horry“, but again ymmv with how charming or not you find these perceived failures) and the dub performances impressively manage to wring some emotion and chemistry out of kojima‘s dialogue, which is easier said than done. the presentation here is also arguably the best it’s ever been – mg2 is one of the best looking 8-bit games ever, but the early 3d aesthetic with its simple, blurry, ambiguous models is very charming here and a great fit for the suspenseful, conspiratorial narrative, the fmv documentary footage interjections feel like you’re being shown stuff you're not meant to be seeing, and shadow moses island provides some incredibly atmospheric scenery, with snow falling as the gloomy night hangs above. sound design and music here is also just on another level – practically every track and alert is instantly memorable and iconic.

stealth combat is interesting in this game because it‘s both better and worse than in 2. enemy ai is fairly impressive for its time and will react dynamically to things like footsteps in snow or noises you make which helps ground them as real entities you‘re interacting with. you also have more moves at your disposal and taking enemies down is slower and more involved - on the whole it‘s a more white knuckle affair which is definitely a positive for this "tactical espionage action" series, and i‘d be lying if i said i didn‘t enjoy the simple act of play here more than in 2. however, the solodon radar - the strongest innovation of mg2 which returns in this game - is a mixed bag. you now get a clear sense for the enemy‘s field of view, which is a very good addition, but in pretty much every other respect it is a less brilliant mechanic here. this is because of changes that the move from 2d to 3d brought with it - no longer are you exploring square tiles on a map, but instead a cohesive 3d space from a top down camera angle. and simply put, your view is a lot more restricted as the camera is quite zoomed in – you don´t see very far ahead which greatly limits how far you can plan ahead traversal through the level. this is where the radar comes in; no longer is it a tool for viewing the level at large, but is instead essentially a crutch to help short-term navigation by presenting you with a viewpoint of a similar scale to the one you were granted in the previous titles by default. the consequence of this is not ideal – you spend much of the time staring at an abstracted representation of the space you‘re exploring rather than the actual environments themselves. and, of course, you lose the main innovation that mg2 brought to the table, that is level-wide coordination of enemy movement patterns as you traverse. the game attempts to counterbalance this with some changes to the level design – there are far fewer enemies in this game overall than in either of the previous games, and encounters with enemies are back to being a more moment-to-moment affair like in the first.

this game is structured pretty weirdly, at least in comparison to previous games. it’s still set in a large military base that you explore and progressively gain more access to with keycards, but it’s also mostly shed any ambition of being military zelda, with progression even more linear than before and almost entirely consisting of following strict directions. i actually didn’t really mind this at all, as “exploration” in the previous games was mostly a veil for obtuse game design and intense padding. progression in this game feels more like going through a linear set of levels and i like that more than being given a large sprawling space that you then have to navigate in an extremely specific and repetitive way – in this one it feels like you’re getting into interesting situations with much higher frequency. the game world here is very small and contained, so backtracking doesn’t feel as much like a pain in the ass either. that said, because of how much this game does away with anything that could be conflated with exploration, it exposes just how much it’s wasting your time when it pointlessly forces you to backtrack across the entire map (this gets really egregious near the end). another interesting thing about the game’s structure – for a stealth game, there really aren’t a lot of stealth sections here. if anything, the bulk of the gameplay consists of boss fights. most of them are pretty fun, so honestly, fine by me. still, i think the game really could’ve used some more elaborate and difficult stealth sections instead of the mandatory backtracking bits or spectacle sequences like the stairway chase – most of the stealth is in the first half so what you end up with is a game where the core mechanics are barely elaborated on or put to the test. that's definitely unfortunate, but there's also a surprising amount of little details, secrets to find and cool strategies to work out, most of which you're not gonna see on a first playthrough, so there's still replayability (especially since skipping cutscenes cuts the game's length by like half).

there are few games i can think of that are riper for a remake in my eyes than the original mother, a truly wonderful and underappreciated 8-bit rpg whose idiosyncratic spirit shines through its technological constraints and outmoded design conventions. that said, as easy as it is to look at an nes rpg and identify frustrations and timesinks, when remaking a beloved title it's no simple task to seperate what constitutes the game's unique character from what should be changed to better fit modern sensibilities. for this reason i've been anticipating this up-and-coming fan-remake with both excitement and trepidation, because i do think the original mother is a unique game that does some things better than any other title in the series, things i'd like to see preserved in any project attempting to revise it.

below are my stray thoughts on its newly released demo.

- the dialogue feels blessedly faithful to itoi’s style, with weird non-sequiters, casual fourth wall breaking and lots of simple but charming punchlines, and is not overly influenced by memey zoomer humor.
- the animation and art direction is freakishly polished and feels like a very natural aesthetic evolution of mother 3.
- the music does a good job of updating one of the best soundtracks on the nes.
- the new ability of being able to use weapons in the overworld is great. the benefit when it comes to puzzle-solving in dungeon areas is obvious but it also allows for more player expression in combat, as battles can be significantly shortened and resources thus preserved if good positioning and timing is exercised. of course it's not like there's a lot of skill involved but it still feels very satisfying, and there's little reason to complain about battle time against grunts being shortened given that there's usually very little thought required in those battles anyway, with most important decisions being made outside the battle screen (what resources to use and preserve, which enemies to avoid, etc). as it stands overworld attacks are a nice way to wring out just a little additional depth from the barebones-by-nature combat of the original. difficulty isn't affected too much either, since you won't be able to attack the hardest enemies, the bosses, from the overworld. additional note: idk if you get a crit for hitting an enemy unnoticed (from behind, that is) but you should (otherwise there's basically no benefit to successfully sneaking up on enemies – why would you ever do that after unlocking the ability to attack from the overworld?)
- speaking of combat, the rolling health mechanic of mother 2 is, needless to say, much appreciated, though it's a little sad not to see the sound combos of mother 3 return.
- there are lots of bugs in the demo, which is understandable enough given that it's an unfinished, untested product that was probably rushed a little. that said, the issues they cause do have quite a significant effect on the game design - after speaking with some of the devs for a bit, it became clear that one of my biggest issues with the demo, namely that it was far too easy and rewarded careless play through an abundance of consumable items, was unintended. it's a testiment to the demo that it's still very fun to go through despite these pretty far-reaching issues.
- initially hearing pollyanna as you step into the overworld i think should have more oomph. doesn't have to be on the level of onett's intro track, but c'mon, this is one of the best tracks on the nes and is extremely iconic in the series, it shouldn't just casually fade in from another song.
- quite disappointed that bein' friends no longer kicks in after rescuing pippi from the cemetery. one of the most memorable moments in the original, imo.
- i don’t really see any reason why pippi has to tag along for the canary quest, since it's such a short detour and does not involve any powerful enemies (besides wally now, I guess). I feel like it should be completable before or after saving pippi, like in the original game. if they want to expand pippi's part (an understandable choice with how much personality this new incarnation has), i feel like the zoo is a much more reasonable area to have her tag along to (you could make the enemies there super powerful which would dissuade early players from going there and also justify pippi’s accompaniment)
- wally is kind of a weird boss. comes out of nowhere, feels like he’s mostly there to justify the canary quest only being completable after getting pippi. though he should definitely be included and i like that his part is expanded since he's already a weird and memorable enemy in the original.
- the overhaul of dungeon areas to be more like zelda's will no doubt massively decrease tedium and engage players more, given that the dungeons are such slogs in the original. that said, i hope not all of them will be entirely linear affairs and that something will remain of the maze-y, open-ended quality of the original ones later down the road
- in general, quite afraid that the progression will be made much more linear to conform to the structure of mother 2 and 3. speaking just for myself here (though i know i'm not the only one that feels this way), but the original mother's non-linearity is among its best aspects and a massive part of what makes it feel different in character to the otherwise very similar mother 2. searching for the melodies in that game feels the most like an organic scavenger hunt instead of a railroaded sequence of events, and i'd hate to see that quality disappear. i understand that the game is often rather abstruse and easy to get lost or stuck in - i have nothing against more explicit guiding, but the player should still be given the freedom to do stuff in whatever order they want. similarly, i hope that the optional parts of the original mother are not made mandatory - sometimes, areas being optional makes visiting them all the more meaningful, and it's not a bad thing for the player to have more options at their disposal.
- the jump ability you get in the zoo is a little questionable. it’s not that big of a deal or anything but i’m not sure if going full metroidvania does much for the game, at least in the case of this particular ability which does not meaningfully alter gameplay at all (compare this to, say, being able to hit stuff from the overworld, which is a total game changer). i hope if there’s more of this sort of stuff in the full game it won’t just be limited to contextual prompts because frankly it’ll feel like little more than padding

overall, my feelings on the demo are very positive, and i'm really looking forward to being able to play the full game. i wish the encore team all the best and my only hope is that they'll give a little more thought to preserving some of the interesting and unique thorniness of the original.

on the level of presentation, this is an enormous improvement on the first game - the visuals are incredibly stylish and charming and there are numerous opulent flourishes that make the experience all the more endearing (like rondo of blood, this game has a lovely opening credits sequence that is pure pulp Vibes). in general the narrative is a lot more ambitious and memorable this time around.

gameplay is also improved, with stealth combat receiving the biggest overhaul through the addition of the radar which completely transforms enemy interaction. no longer is combat a series of room-to-room engagements but rather a broad, level-spanning obstacle where enemy movement has to be carefully observed and traversal throughout the map planned in accordance with it, which leads to deeper, more satisfying and perhaps most importantly, more convincingly stealthy gameplay. being detected is also no longer either a source of minor inconvenience or an instant game over; rather, being detected is now always a big hindrance but it is also always a recoverable situation thanks to numerous hiding spots throughout each level. granted, i think detection is often a little overzealous and hard to judge - but overall it's a big step-up from the previous system.

these micro level improvements add a lot to the experience, but take a more cohesive look and you'll start to notice some big macro level flaws as well. this game shares a near identical structure to the first game and thus carries over many of its flaws. progression is still too linear and contextual, there's still a relentless level of boring backtracking that serves as little more than busywork and padding, and direct combat still feels too clunky for how often you're thrown into situations where you fight waves of enemies (the bosses are mostly not too bad though).

the much more elaborate narrative is also a double-edged sword; kojima certainly has many intriguing ideas that make their way into the writing (it can only be described as special when a game starts dropping NATO war crime lore on you like 30m in) but the execution frequently leaves something to be desired. characters will get big, dramatic moments that feel so unearned that it's impossible to take seriously, and some of the dialogue is frankly terrible, especially during the sappier, melodramatic moments. i get that kojima is limited, both by the hardware but also by the writing being in service to a silly little military/espionage pastiche game, but maybe that's precisely the argument for a more minimalist approach.

breath of the wild but more. which is to say that its more good but also more bad. i'm happy nintendo felt compelled to build on botw's foundation and expand on the systems established in that game, i think both of these games are some of the most invigorating and delightful current day AAA releases, but i do hope that for the next game the team won't be afraid to apply that same "ruthless critique of everything existing" mentality that botw approached the series at large with to the structure of these newer games. let's maybe rein things in a bit - make the world smaller, ditch hyrule and ganon (because my god some parts of the overarching narrative here are a total misfire and symptomatic of a series in narrative stagnation), and maybe restrict the player's freedom a little so there's some room for progression (though non-linearity should be kept by any means necessary - i am certainly not one of the advocates for a return to a more linear "old school" 3d zelda). restricting the player's freedom a little could also go a long way towards fixing some issues with the game's difficulty - tying special effects to clothing is fine, but being able to switch them on the fly is something that not only becomes a tiring exercise for the player but also undermines the survivalist aspects. similarly, combat mechanics that are really quite good are undermined by the ability to heal in the menu, something that not only allows for sloppy play and makes the game needlessly easy but also feels like a chore to even do. there's just too many interruptions, and that's a big buzzkill in a game that is otherwise so dynamic and immediate. this is another reason why i've become intensely skeptical of fast travel - it's just too optimal to zip all over the place from the menu, which alienates you from the world you're exploring. certainly it's hard to imagine a game of this scale without fast travel, but that's just one more reason to advocate for a smaller world. there's a reason why the tutorial levels of these games feel great to play - because you're really immersed in the space, really engaging with the environment and the immaculately constructed systems, and steadily gaining new abilities that upend the nature of that engagement. people have called these tutorial levels "the games in miniature" but i'm not sure that's true - i think they're defined in opposition to the rest of the game which is much less restricted. after all, it feels pretty liberating to gain the paraglider. so in short, what i'd like to see in the next game is something that actually replicates how the great plateau or great sky island play on a large scale. i respect how committed these games have been to freedom and player empowerment, but the way to stay true to breath of the wild's maverick spirit is actually to confidently question even the core pillars of its game design - not to uncritically follow its formula.

my pie in the sky wish is that they yet again look to zelda 1 and this time try to replicate that game's sense of organic player discovery. obviously there's some of that in these games but what i'd like is less contextual story events, less handholding and signposting, more mystery, more trust in the player to be engaged and immersed in the world without a yellow brick road to follow. i think this is one of the few areas in which elden ring has these games beat and i'd like to see this series retake that particular throne. i'm not expecting it to, because this game runs counter to that direction with its main quests, but it's what would excite me the most. would also like to see stuff like shrines integrated more seamlessly into the world - the caves in this game are a good half step in that direction (venturing into the royal hidden passage was an early highlight of the game), it just needs a bit of depth and variation. hopefully the smaller world would prevent things from feeling like rote repetition, as it sometimes does in this game with the copy pasted rooms and blue frogs you find in every single one.

anyway i still love this game and link is really hot god bless

To say that I was skeptical about Downpour going in would be an understatement. The original Rain World is, as of the time of writing, my favorite game of all time. One of the most important things about it to me is that it feels incredibly holistically designed, with every individual component thoughtfully considered in how it relates to the larger whole. Everything in Rain World is interconnected, reflecting the Buddhist existential themes explored within it.

With that, I think you can understand the trepidation I felt when I heard about this expansion. New content of any kind was enough reason to worry about the sanctity of the original experience being trampled over – an entire expansion developed by fans, with new characters, creatures, and regions, along with ““quality of life changes”” (a subtly threatening term when it comes to something as idiosyncratically designed as Rain World)? Let’s just say that I feared the worst. The new slugcats that had been revealed didn’t exactly fill me with optimism, either. Rain World cannot claim to be a realistic game, but it is grounded - and those new slugcats did not look grounded.

Well, Downpour has now been released. Were my fears unfounded after all? Well…

Something that I really respect about this expansion, and give endless kudos to the team for, is how humbly it presents itself. Make no mistake, this is an absolutely massive DLC with heaps of new content, and yet the first thing you do after downloading it is navigate a new mod manager setting where all the new stuff is listed. This manager does not distinguish between workshop mods you can download for free and this new expansion you pay actual money for – Downpour essentially declares with pride instead of shame that it is little more than an officially supported collection of fan mods. I really, really appreciate that, because as we’ll see, Downpour is extremely ambitious; a layer of separation between what is and isn’t Videocult’s original work was an absolute necessity in my opinion, and I respect the hell out of the team for refusing to muddy the waters in this regard. More pragmatically, this is also a boon to Downpour’s reception – if you don’t like a creative decision, you can simply remind yourself that this is just one (very talented) team’s take on the original work. Nothing is sullied, but a lot can be gained.

Moving on now to discussing what has actually been added in this expansion: there’s no way around it, Downpour is a very different experience to classic Rain World in almost every regard. It turns the dial considerably towards “gaminess”, and makes for something that is a lot messier design-wise, which I just about expected. What I didn’t really expect was how high the narrative ambitions here were. This is something that would’ve troubled me immensely had I heard about it before release. Surprisingly, though, this came to be probably the part of the experience that I enjoyed the most; thanks to, again, that level of separation between the base game and Downpour, and also because the new narrative stuff is honestly nothing to scoff at quality-wise and came a lot closer to replicating the thematic and atmospheric flavor of the original than I was expecting. Mind you, that does not mean there isn’t any tension between what the original Rain World was going for and what Downpour is. The outlandish abilities of the new slugcats definitely do undermine the grounded ethos a bit, for one (though I appreciate that they’re all given reasonable explanations in-universe). More importantly, though, the narrative priorities have completely shifted.

In the original game, the story of the setting (the "lore") was told in the background and was totally subservient to the player's own personal journey of surviving an enigmatic world. You'd stumble upon Moon, or Five Pebbles, and you'd react with awe and wonder, but lacking context and familiarity, file those experiences away as simply another discovery in a pile of them. In Downpour, what was previously the background narrative takes center stage. You always know where to go – to Pebbles and Moon, probably in that order. That doesn't mean that there are no surprises along the way, but on a whole the design philosophy of Downpour is totally juxtaposed with the original’s. In simpler terms: the original was centered firmly around the journey, whereas Downpour is all about the destination.

The slugcats aren't the protagonists any more - they're side characters in a narrative that centers on the iterators, with our dual protagonists being the two we can visit in-game, Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon. Now, to be completely accurate, this shift was technically already present in the original game. Fundamentally, every new slugcat campaign in Downpour is building on the groundwork laid by the Hunter’s campaign, which served as the original game’s hard mode. What makes Downpour feel like such a change, however, is the sheer totality of what is added. Hunter felt like a side mode, a way to capitalize on the game’s many brilliant mechanics in a more gamey way while still grounding it narratively. But when you add twice the amount of campaigns the original game had (and counting the Monk separately is honestly generous), it's hard not to look at these "side modes" as having become the main dish. The campaigns are thus reframed as small vignettes that serve as the building blocks of a larger narrative that is far more epic in scale – a real opus, one that presumably spans centuries and centuries. And quality-wise, I found myself rather enjoying the story being told. Though I am a little ambivalent on some particularities, on a whole the arcs of Pebbles and Moon are compelling to follow, and full of evocative moments.

The Saint’s campaign was a particular highlight; seeing the world in an even more ruinous state, collapsing in on itself, with cycles fading out as the periodic torrential rain gives way to never-ending snowstorms, was incredibly affecting and felt like a very fitting note to leave this setting on; though I am a tad conflicted on how bombastically that campaign ends – I almost feel like it totally undermines the quiet poignancy of what came before, but I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t find it to be a fascinating development that, in many ways, pulls a lot of the threads of the narrative together pretty well.

The rest of the campaigns range narratively from decent to great. Gourmand I don’t have much to say about, but I quite like the addition of the Outer Expanse – venturing outside the grounds of the iterators and back on to your (aesthetically inspired) native turf was very exciting (if a tad fanservice-y). Spearmaster allows for the experience of exploring Moon’s facility and seeing her fully operating, which is nice, but I’m not that fond of how the bulk of the narrative is told through chatlogs. Artificer’s story was like a self-contained filler episode in the context of the larger narrative, but it really won me over as it went on and somehow managed to not make me too troubled over the addition of a boss fight to Rain World of all games – it felt grounded in the narrative and avoided the most egregious pitfalls like Dark Souls style titles and healthbars. And Rivulet operates beautifully as a brief moment of optimism, with Pebbles’ redemption and the restoration of Moon preceding the melancholy of the Saint’s conclusive campaign.

With these narrative additions, a question has arisen in the community on whether Downpour is or isn’t officially canon, and ultimately, I think that question is missing the forest for the trees. It feels to me like Videocult, in officially sanctioning this fan effort, is going beyond basic notions of ‘canonicity’, essentially renouncing total ownership of the setting they’ve created and handing it over to their audience. This is further supported by Downpour separating itself firmly from the original work, and not distinguishing itself from other fan mods anyone can make. The question of canonicity then becomes functionally meaningless and a hindrance to productive discourse. It’s a different work, made by different people, with different priorities. It comments on the original ‘text’ (if you will) extensively, but is ultimately firmly separate. The only question that really matters to me is whether Downpour is engaging, interesting and worth experiencing. My personal answer to that question is that it is.