deknalis
16 reviews liked by deknalis
Dark Souls has strokes of brilliance, Ornstein and Smough is now one of my favourite boss fights ever, remembering how to navigate the world is a fun puzzle in a would-be-otherwise mindless game, and Undead Burg is a great starting area.
Dark Souls also spends many hours being absolutely terrible, having no respect for its player's time, and feeling wholly unplaytested.
The start of the game is definitely its strongest run, Undead Burg is a treat to move through and learn the way around, and I was having a good time up until Capra Demon. The combination of a boss that can easily kill you in the first few seconds until you have spent the time and runs to learn how to deal with the dogs, along with an either long or tedious run back is a horrible experience. Which highlights why I don't think the runs back to bosses after losing to them works. Most runs back consist of either taking some elevator or running a long distance without much conflict, or running past a whole load of enemies as you scootch your way through the fog door with their attacks swinging through you. I don't see how either is engaging gameplay. In the case of the Capra Demon fight, it only served to make the experience more tedious, drawn out, and frustrating. I did not feel like my time was being valued at any point running back to a fog door in this game. I understand the concept behind having to run back to the boss, but at least for anyone who can make it through the basic enemies and levels but has yet to learn the boss, I think its a complete failure and only serves to waste your time.
One of the reasons why Undead Burg works well for me is how long you stay in it, and have to keep moving through it in different ways to go to other places. This, I feel, is not really a factor for most areas in the game. Areas like Blighttown, Depths, and The Catacombs feel more like highways that you move through once or twice to get to the new area, especially after the Lordvessel makes their endpoints accessible. I wasn't really able to get any idea of Blightowns layout since I just made one easy descend, killed the boss, and then made one easier ascend. To go through Blightown again would be the same experience as my first time through, even though I had only seen it for the first time like two days ago. I wish these areas had reasons to go back to them. Darkroot Garden is seems like it would be a similar sort of area, but since I had to go there three separate times I've actually connected with it.
I can only really say that I like maybe three bosses in this game. Most everything dies too quickly and has nothing scary about their moveset to ever really give that much of a challenge. I cant say that most fights are more engaging than Asylum Demon (hell they literally copy this boss twice !,) and some feel like they flat out don't work and were never playtested. I can see Qualaag's slashes whiffing when you're close just another tutorial for staying close to the enemy being good, but why the hell does literally every attack of Sif miss? I can't imagine From testing this boss, getting in range to hit him, having every attack of his miss, and then feeling complete in their work. Far too much of this game is complete jank bullshit for me to really engage with it (like getting grabbed by Gaping Dragon without him ever playing any sort of attack animation).
There are simply not enough redeeming factors for this game to make the slog that it was worthwhile beyond zeitgeist.
Dark Souls also spends many hours being absolutely terrible, having no respect for its player's time, and feeling wholly unplaytested.
The start of the game is definitely its strongest run, Undead Burg is a treat to move through and learn the way around, and I was having a good time up until Capra Demon. The combination of a boss that can easily kill you in the first few seconds until you have spent the time and runs to learn how to deal with the dogs, along with an either long or tedious run back is a horrible experience. Which highlights why I don't think the runs back to bosses after losing to them works. Most runs back consist of either taking some elevator or running a long distance without much conflict, or running past a whole load of enemies as you scootch your way through the fog door with their attacks swinging through you. I don't see how either is engaging gameplay. In the case of the Capra Demon fight, it only served to make the experience more tedious, drawn out, and frustrating. I did not feel like my time was being valued at any point running back to a fog door in this game. I understand the concept behind having to run back to the boss, but at least for anyone who can make it through the basic enemies and levels but has yet to learn the boss, I think its a complete failure and only serves to waste your time.
One of the reasons why Undead Burg works well for me is how long you stay in it, and have to keep moving through it in different ways to go to other places. This, I feel, is not really a factor for most areas in the game. Areas like Blighttown, Depths, and The Catacombs feel more like highways that you move through once or twice to get to the new area, especially after the Lordvessel makes their endpoints accessible. I wasn't really able to get any idea of Blightowns layout since I just made one easy descend, killed the boss, and then made one easier ascend. To go through Blightown again would be the same experience as my first time through, even though I had only seen it for the first time like two days ago. I wish these areas had reasons to go back to them. Darkroot Garden is seems like it would be a similar sort of area, but since I had to go there three separate times I've actually connected with it.
I can only really say that I like maybe three bosses in this game. Most everything dies too quickly and has nothing scary about their moveset to ever really give that much of a challenge. I cant say that most fights are more engaging than Asylum Demon (hell they literally copy this boss twice !,) and some feel like they flat out don't work and were never playtested. I can see Qualaag's slashes whiffing when you're close just another tutorial for staying close to the enemy being good, but why the hell does literally every attack of Sif miss? I can't imagine From testing this boss, getting in range to hit him, having every attack of his miss, and then feeling complete in their work. Far too much of this game is complete jank bullshit for me to really engage with it (like getting grabbed by Gaping Dragon without him ever playing any sort of attack animation).
There are simply not enough redeeming factors for this game to make the slog that it was worthwhile beyond zeitgeist.
Elden Ring
2022
I doubted From Software. I will be the first to admit that, after the proverbial dreg heap that was Sekiro and the reminder of how stunningly mediocre Souls games can be with the Demon’s Souls remake, I came at Elden Ring with a healthy amount of caution. The irony is that I have a deep love for From Software when they’re firing on all cylinders. While I have always been weary of the fantasy genre and the often maligned “dark fantasy” label, the world of Dark Souls speaks to me. Although I have very little appreciation for the lore present in the series, I respect the uncompromising vision that the lore follows. As a vehicle for unforgettable visuals is where the lore shines, though. I doubt anyone who has played the Dark Souls series will forget things like Sen’s Fortress, flanked by a lush forest and standing ominously as a roadblock to a city bathed in light. The Dark Souls series is filled with displays of From Software flexing their visual design muscles, proving time and again that there is no other studio who can bring such horrifically beautiful creatures and worlds to life at such high frequency. Irithyll, Anor Londo, Duke’s Archives, Yharnam, Lothric, The Fishing Hamlet and I could name at least ten more locations from these games that all came out within the same decade that are among the most breathtaking areas in any game that I’ve played. The only lore that I need is that someone built these places, and that they are no place for the speck in this world that I’m playing as. Their size frequently dwarfs your player character, reinforcing the fact that this place is hostile to you, that despite any level of undeniable beauty that still remains, that you are not welcome here.
There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.
Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.
There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.
Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.
Metroid Dread
2021
This review contains spoilers
For reference, I’m a long-time, hardcore Metroid fan who’s played and beaten nearly every game in the series, of which my favorites are AM2R and Super Metroid. When it comes to action games, I’m a big fan of complex level and world design, routing and movement, complex and mechanically challenging encounters, and thick atmosphere. I finished Metroid Dread in just under 9 hours, with roughly 50% completion. I won’t be discussing the story here, both out of fear of spoilers and because story analysis is not something I’m good at, but I very much enjoyed it, it had some cool twists, and I thought it made for a solid conclusion to the arc beginning with Metroid 1.
Going into Metroid Dread I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I wasn’t overly fond of Samus Returns, MercurySteam’s 2017 remake of Metroid 2 for the 3DS, and the trailers for this game made it look like a refinement of the ideas that went into that game. I didn’t like how reliant the enemy design was on the melee counter, I disliked the inclusion of teleporters, and while the one-off boss fights were decent, I didn’t particularly care for the Metroid encounters. The pre-release gameplay and interviews for Metroid Dread made it look and sound like a significant improvement, and I ultimately went in cautiously optimistic. I still had my doubts about the melee counter’s centralizing nature, and the potential presence of teleporters.
My fears were mostly unfounded, though. Within the first hour of gameplay I was having the time of my life. The movement in this game is exceptionally fluid and responsive - in that respect it brings back fond memories of 2016’s fan remake of Metroid 2, AM2R. Both of these games have movement that feels incredibly slick and satisfying on a basic level, and is fast enough to allow room for optimization to be a challenge. Though I’m somewhat disappointed by the lack of a single-wall jump, the game allows for infinite bomb jumps, and the rest of the movement feels so snappy that it’s hard for me to be especially torn up over the single wall jump’s absence.
Having said all that, I do still feel that the melee counter is too strong. It one-shots every normal enemy upon whom you execute a successful counter, which causes some of the larger, more intimidating normal enemies to end up feeling underwhelming. As a result of this, movement through levels with normal enemies is not much of a challenge in and of itself. Normal enemies end up functioning more like obstacles, and the primary challenge, rather than being to kill them, instead lies in trying to get past them as quickly as possible.
Framed in this manner, the enemies work fairly well. The inclusion of a running counter as an offensive move, as well as an aerial counter which doesn’t deal damage, make it so that enemies are at worst a non-factor. They no longer bring the pace to a screeching halt like they did in Samus Returns, and in some cases they can actually present interesting challenges, especially when encountering an enemy without counterable attacks. Mid- and late-game areas have a number of these, and they are a refreshing change of pace, even if the damage they deal is rarely a significant threat due to the abundance of health pickups dropped by enemies - this is something I hope is improved by Hard mode.
Moreover, my fear regarding teleporters was completely unfounded. In fact, this game’s teleporters function more like elevators than teleporters because they’re one-to-one, which means that instead of negating the world’s structure, they actually add to it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Metroid Dread has the single most topologically complex game world in anything I’ve ever played.
Most metroidvanias with a world this complex end up including fast travel. This actually simplifies the topology, and reduces the capacity for routing challenges, as the fastest way to get from one point to another is usually through the fast travel system. Your route boils down to “go to the fastest portal, teleport to the closest portal to your destination, go to your destination”. There is rarely any larger-scale routing optimization to be done, so the interconnections between areas don’t really end up mattering.
Metroid Dread does not fall into this trap. Because the teleporters are one-to-one, they effectively add an extra interconnection to the map. There are quite a few areas in this game, and those areas have lots of interconnections between them in the form of these teleporters, the series’s traditional elevators, and horizontal-moving trams. I can only imagine that routing for a speedrun is going to evolve considerably as new tricks and optimizations are discovered.
Somewhat unfortunately, the game’s critical path almost never stresses this routing potential. The intended route is very straightforward and almost never asks you to backtrack more than one area, so the fastest route is usually pretty obvious. In the end I’m more impressed with the overall routing challenge of the critical path in something like Super Metroid, but there’s potential in Dread that may very well emerge with the advent of alternative routes and sequence breaks, a number of which have already been confirmed to be present in the game. I look forward to seeing how the routing evolves over time.
The individual levels are also structurally interesting. The very first area of the game has you loop back through about 70% of it a second time after obtaining a powerup, the final 30% instead being filled by a smaller loop that shoots off from the main one. Cool little structural elements like this occur repeatedly throughout the game, occasionally spanning more than one major area. I greatly enjoyed this aspect of the game, and there were several moments during my exploration when I started grinning from ear to ear as I figured out where the game was going to take me.
Dread has a fairly typical set of abilities for Samus to collect. All of the 2D Metroid staples are here: Morph Ball, Missiles, Varia Suit, Space Jump, etc., but I want to specifically comment on this game’s iteration of the Speed Booster, a classic upgrade introduced in Super Metroid. Simply put, it’s phenomenal. The game now allows you to perform wall jumps while speed boosting, much more readily allowing you to traverse vertical areas while maintaining the boost. The shinespark returns, of course, and the game features a number of optional puzzles that do a fantastic job of challenging your ability to use it. Many of the other abilities have new quirks, and almost all of them are used in very clever ways for progression throughout the game.
Onto the main selling point of the game, relative to other entries in the series and the genre: the EMMI. It’s a stalker-type enemy that patrols specifically designated zones of the map. It cannot be killed through normal means, and if it detects you in its cone of vision, it will lock the zone exits and aggressively pursue you by climbing on any available surface. Should it ever come in contact with you, you have two chances to perform a randomly-timed, very tight counter move, before being instantly killed. There are seven EMMI in total, though the first one functions largely as a tutorial and does not pose a significant threat. Each EMMI introduces a new ability. I won’t spoil what they are.
I will, however, say that the EMMI on the whole are a stroke of genius. Moving through the zones that they patrol was easily my favorite part of the game. The EMMI themselves create a lot of tension and atmosphere, but I particularly love how they work on a mechanical level. Taking any action, moving, shooting, or even crouching, within a certain radius of them will “soft” alert them to your presence, and they will begin to move towards where they last detected you. After the first actually threatening EMMI encounter, the game gives you access to the phantom cloak, which will render you undetectable by the EMMI, though if you come in direct contact with them they will still catch you.
The dynamic that emerges as a result of this is nothing short of brilliant. I again won’t spoil everything the EMMIs are capable of throwing at you, but because the EMMI’s position is shown on your map, you’re encouraged to route on the fly to avoid its detection radius for as long as possible. In the almost inevitable event that they do detect you, you need to think and move quickly to reach a hiding spot or an exit before they see you. If they do see you and start chasing, the game quickly spirals into an intense sequence requiring precise movement and quick thinking in order to evade them. As you play, you start to learn little tricks and jukes you can use to exploit their AI and make your escape after being seen.
Eventually you’ll gain access to the Omega cannon after a short miniboss battle, which will allow you to destroy the EMMI. The first step is to break their faceplate, which requires prolonged fire (the EMMI’s movement is significantly slowed during this period), and the second step is to destroy their head, which requires you to charge the cannon up before firing it. This requires you to find a spot where you can put some distance between yourself and the EMMI so that you have enough time to fire it before it catches you. Some people have reported issues with the aiming during these segments, but I didn’t run into any issues on my playthrough.
There’s a lot going on here and I love all of it. The EMMI stress both your basic movement and your routing abilities in a way that I didn’t realize I wanted until I encountered them, but now that I’ve seen it, I want so much more of it. I absolutely love this element of the game.
I should at this point mention what is probably my overall biggest complaint with Dread. Much like Samus Returns, the game provides invisible checkpoints at various points, usually after interacting with an important mechanic, upon entering an EMMI zone, or before a boss fight. This does have somewhat of a tendency to deflate the tension of the game. It’s not a huge deal for me personally, but I think for some it might significantly impact the tone and challenge of the game in a negative way. I think it would have been better to have an easy mode with the checkpoints, and remove them on normal, or at least to remove them on hard mode. This only had a minor impact on my experience, but your mileage may vary. I think it was most noticeable with the boss fights, for most of which the checkpoints were decidedly unnecessary.
Speaking of boss fights, this game has some seriously solid ones. I’ve always said that MercurySteam actually has a pretty good handle on boss design; Samus Returns demonstrated that they were at least baseline competent with bosses like Diggernaut and the final boss of that game, which were an excellent foundation to build off of, even if they weren’t amazing fights in their own right. Dread takes many of these ideas and refines them into what I consider to be the strongest overall boss roster in the official Metroid series. While I still wish they would go further with most of them, and there were a few things I was hoping for that the game didn’t end up including, I thought the roster was pretty strong overall.
The bosses themselves can be heavily punishing when they hit you, often taking off a full energy tank or more, but their attacks are all very reasonably avoidable. The challenge, of course, lies in avoiding them consistently, as these bosses by and large do not die quickly. Certainly not as quickly as those in Zero Mission or Metroid 2, but I also think they’re notably bulkier than those in Super and Fusion. They get bulkier and their attacks get harder to avoid as the game progresses - the difficulty curve is really nicely tuned with regards to bosses. There are a couple spikes, but nothing egregious, and I enjoyed almost every boss battle.
The game does reuse a couple of minibosses several times throughout the game, but they were enjoyable, so I didn’t particularly mind it. That being said there was one fight in particular that got a little ridiculous towards the end, on what I’m fairly certain was its fifth or sixth encounter with minimal changes.
I won’t go into too much detail on the bosses themselves because I want to avoid spoilers, but there are a few bosses in the final third of the game that I consider to be easily the best fights in the series, even if there are a couple quirks. Both my favorite fights have a mechanic that I did not figure out on my own, and which is borderline necessary if you want to defeat the boss. Having said that, the actual mechanics of the boss fights are exceptional. The game’s final boss is a multi-phase showdown that’s pretty tough and very satisfying to beat, and has a pretty crazy number of attacks, all of which need to be dodged in different ways, and none of which make the boss invulnerable while they’re happening. I keep saying that I want MercurySteam to go further with their boss designs, and this is an example of what happens when they go all out. It’s easily my favorite boss in any metroid game, possibly even surpassing AM2R’s best fights, and is an incredible capstone for an already great game.
A few stray thoughts before I wrap up this review: several sequence breaks and quick kills for bosses have already been found, and I’m really excited to see what else the community can come up with in the coming days. I absolutely adore the visuals and art direction, but that seems to be a divisive topic amongst the community. The music isn’t as memorable or melodic as previous entries, but it’s wonderfully atmospheric and I think it does its job very nicely. This seems to be an unpopular opinion.
Overall, I absolutely loved Metroid Dread. It’s not going to be for everyone; it’s a good deal more challenging than your average Metroid title (though I found it easier than Hollow Knight and Environmental Station Alpha), the EMMIs stress skills that aren’t usually stressed in this genre, and it has flaws that are going to be more severe to some than to others. But for me? This is the best official Metroid game. And being that Metroid is among my favorite series, that makes me really, really happy.
Going into Metroid Dread I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I wasn’t overly fond of Samus Returns, MercurySteam’s 2017 remake of Metroid 2 for the 3DS, and the trailers for this game made it look like a refinement of the ideas that went into that game. I didn’t like how reliant the enemy design was on the melee counter, I disliked the inclusion of teleporters, and while the one-off boss fights were decent, I didn’t particularly care for the Metroid encounters. The pre-release gameplay and interviews for Metroid Dread made it look and sound like a significant improvement, and I ultimately went in cautiously optimistic. I still had my doubts about the melee counter’s centralizing nature, and the potential presence of teleporters.
My fears were mostly unfounded, though. Within the first hour of gameplay I was having the time of my life. The movement in this game is exceptionally fluid and responsive - in that respect it brings back fond memories of 2016’s fan remake of Metroid 2, AM2R. Both of these games have movement that feels incredibly slick and satisfying on a basic level, and is fast enough to allow room for optimization to be a challenge. Though I’m somewhat disappointed by the lack of a single-wall jump, the game allows for infinite bomb jumps, and the rest of the movement feels so snappy that it’s hard for me to be especially torn up over the single wall jump’s absence.
Having said all that, I do still feel that the melee counter is too strong. It one-shots every normal enemy upon whom you execute a successful counter, which causes some of the larger, more intimidating normal enemies to end up feeling underwhelming. As a result of this, movement through levels with normal enemies is not much of a challenge in and of itself. Normal enemies end up functioning more like obstacles, and the primary challenge, rather than being to kill them, instead lies in trying to get past them as quickly as possible.
Framed in this manner, the enemies work fairly well. The inclusion of a running counter as an offensive move, as well as an aerial counter which doesn’t deal damage, make it so that enemies are at worst a non-factor. They no longer bring the pace to a screeching halt like they did in Samus Returns, and in some cases they can actually present interesting challenges, especially when encountering an enemy without counterable attacks. Mid- and late-game areas have a number of these, and they are a refreshing change of pace, even if the damage they deal is rarely a significant threat due to the abundance of health pickups dropped by enemies - this is something I hope is improved by Hard mode.
Moreover, my fear regarding teleporters was completely unfounded. In fact, this game’s teleporters function more like elevators than teleporters because they’re one-to-one, which means that instead of negating the world’s structure, they actually add to it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Metroid Dread has the single most topologically complex game world in anything I’ve ever played.
Most metroidvanias with a world this complex end up including fast travel. This actually simplifies the topology, and reduces the capacity for routing challenges, as the fastest way to get from one point to another is usually through the fast travel system. Your route boils down to “go to the fastest portal, teleport to the closest portal to your destination, go to your destination”. There is rarely any larger-scale routing optimization to be done, so the interconnections between areas don’t really end up mattering.
Metroid Dread does not fall into this trap. Because the teleporters are one-to-one, they effectively add an extra interconnection to the map. There are quite a few areas in this game, and those areas have lots of interconnections between them in the form of these teleporters, the series’s traditional elevators, and horizontal-moving trams. I can only imagine that routing for a speedrun is going to evolve considerably as new tricks and optimizations are discovered.
Somewhat unfortunately, the game’s critical path almost never stresses this routing potential. The intended route is very straightforward and almost never asks you to backtrack more than one area, so the fastest route is usually pretty obvious. In the end I’m more impressed with the overall routing challenge of the critical path in something like Super Metroid, but there’s potential in Dread that may very well emerge with the advent of alternative routes and sequence breaks, a number of which have already been confirmed to be present in the game. I look forward to seeing how the routing evolves over time.
The individual levels are also structurally interesting. The very first area of the game has you loop back through about 70% of it a second time after obtaining a powerup, the final 30% instead being filled by a smaller loop that shoots off from the main one. Cool little structural elements like this occur repeatedly throughout the game, occasionally spanning more than one major area. I greatly enjoyed this aspect of the game, and there were several moments during my exploration when I started grinning from ear to ear as I figured out where the game was going to take me.
Dread has a fairly typical set of abilities for Samus to collect. All of the 2D Metroid staples are here: Morph Ball, Missiles, Varia Suit, Space Jump, etc., but I want to specifically comment on this game’s iteration of the Speed Booster, a classic upgrade introduced in Super Metroid. Simply put, it’s phenomenal. The game now allows you to perform wall jumps while speed boosting, much more readily allowing you to traverse vertical areas while maintaining the boost. The shinespark returns, of course, and the game features a number of optional puzzles that do a fantastic job of challenging your ability to use it. Many of the other abilities have new quirks, and almost all of them are used in very clever ways for progression throughout the game.
Onto the main selling point of the game, relative to other entries in the series and the genre: the EMMI. It’s a stalker-type enemy that patrols specifically designated zones of the map. It cannot be killed through normal means, and if it detects you in its cone of vision, it will lock the zone exits and aggressively pursue you by climbing on any available surface. Should it ever come in contact with you, you have two chances to perform a randomly-timed, very tight counter move, before being instantly killed. There are seven EMMI in total, though the first one functions largely as a tutorial and does not pose a significant threat. Each EMMI introduces a new ability. I won’t spoil what they are.
I will, however, say that the EMMI on the whole are a stroke of genius. Moving through the zones that they patrol was easily my favorite part of the game. The EMMI themselves create a lot of tension and atmosphere, but I particularly love how they work on a mechanical level. Taking any action, moving, shooting, or even crouching, within a certain radius of them will “soft” alert them to your presence, and they will begin to move towards where they last detected you. After the first actually threatening EMMI encounter, the game gives you access to the phantom cloak, which will render you undetectable by the EMMI, though if you come in direct contact with them they will still catch you.
The dynamic that emerges as a result of this is nothing short of brilliant. I again won’t spoil everything the EMMIs are capable of throwing at you, but because the EMMI’s position is shown on your map, you’re encouraged to route on the fly to avoid its detection radius for as long as possible. In the almost inevitable event that they do detect you, you need to think and move quickly to reach a hiding spot or an exit before they see you. If they do see you and start chasing, the game quickly spirals into an intense sequence requiring precise movement and quick thinking in order to evade them. As you play, you start to learn little tricks and jukes you can use to exploit their AI and make your escape after being seen.
Eventually you’ll gain access to the Omega cannon after a short miniboss battle, which will allow you to destroy the EMMI. The first step is to break their faceplate, which requires prolonged fire (the EMMI’s movement is significantly slowed during this period), and the second step is to destroy their head, which requires you to charge the cannon up before firing it. This requires you to find a spot where you can put some distance between yourself and the EMMI so that you have enough time to fire it before it catches you. Some people have reported issues with the aiming during these segments, but I didn’t run into any issues on my playthrough.
There’s a lot going on here and I love all of it. The EMMI stress both your basic movement and your routing abilities in a way that I didn’t realize I wanted until I encountered them, but now that I’ve seen it, I want so much more of it. I absolutely love this element of the game.
I should at this point mention what is probably my overall biggest complaint with Dread. Much like Samus Returns, the game provides invisible checkpoints at various points, usually after interacting with an important mechanic, upon entering an EMMI zone, or before a boss fight. This does have somewhat of a tendency to deflate the tension of the game. It’s not a huge deal for me personally, but I think for some it might significantly impact the tone and challenge of the game in a negative way. I think it would have been better to have an easy mode with the checkpoints, and remove them on normal, or at least to remove them on hard mode. This only had a minor impact on my experience, but your mileage may vary. I think it was most noticeable with the boss fights, for most of which the checkpoints were decidedly unnecessary.
Speaking of boss fights, this game has some seriously solid ones. I’ve always said that MercurySteam actually has a pretty good handle on boss design; Samus Returns demonstrated that they were at least baseline competent with bosses like Diggernaut and the final boss of that game, which were an excellent foundation to build off of, even if they weren’t amazing fights in their own right. Dread takes many of these ideas and refines them into what I consider to be the strongest overall boss roster in the official Metroid series. While I still wish they would go further with most of them, and there were a few things I was hoping for that the game didn’t end up including, I thought the roster was pretty strong overall.
The bosses themselves can be heavily punishing when they hit you, often taking off a full energy tank or more, but their attacks are all very reasonably avoidable. The challenge, of course, lies in avoiding them consistently, as these bosses by and large do not die quickly. Certainly not as quickly as those in Zero Mission or Metroid 2, but I also think they’re notably bulkier than those in Super and Fusion. They get bulkier and their attacks get harder to avoid as the game progresses - the difficulty curve is really nicely tuned with regards to bosses. There are a couple spikes, but nothing egregious, and I enjoyed almost every boss battle.
The game does reuse a couple of minibosses several times throughout the game, but they were enjoyable, so I didn’t particularly mind it. That being said there was one fight in particular that got a little ridiculous towards the end, on what I’m fairly certain was its fifth or sixth encounter with minimal changes.
I won’t go into too much detail on the bosses themselves because I want to avoid spoilers, but there are a few bosses in the final third of the game that I consider to be easily the best fights in the series, even if there are a couple quirks. Both my favorite fights have a mechanic that I did not figure out on my own, and which is borderline necessary if you want to defeat the boss. Having said that, the actual mechanics of the boss fights are exceptional. The game’s final boss is a multi-phase showdown that’s pretty tough and very satisfying to beat, and has a pretty crazy number of attacks, all of which need to be dodged in different ways, and none of which make the boss invulnerable while they’re happening. I keep saying that I want MercurySteam to go further with their boss designs, and this is an example of what happens when they go all out. It’s easily my favorite boss in any metroid game, possibly even surpassing AM2R’s best fights, and is an incredible capstone for an already great game.
A few stray thoughts before I wrap up this review: several sequence breaks and quick kills for bosses have already been found, and I’m really excited to see what else the community can come up with in the coming days. I absolutely adore the visuals and art direction, but that seems to be a divisive topic amongst the community. The music isn’t as memorable or melodic as previous entries, but it’s wonderfully atmospheric and I think it does its job very nicely. This seems to be an unpopular opinion.
Overall, I absolutely loved Metroid Dread. It’s not going to be for everyone; it’s a good deal more challenging than your average Metroid title (though I found it easier than Hollow Knight and Environmental Station Alpha), the EMMIs stress skills that aren’t usually stressed in this genre, and it has flaws that are going to be more severe to some than to others. But for me? This is the best official Metroid game. And being that Metroid is among my favorite series, that makes me really, really happy.
Metroid Dread
2021
If you gave me enough beers, put this on a boxy CRT and told me "This is the secret Metroid Nintendo made in 2005 for the gamecube", I'd like to think I'd believe you. The kindest thing I can say about Dread is that it really just feels like a natural successor to Fusion without... caveats. Mercurysteam have got their own flair in parts (dear lord do they love their parry QTEs), but the thing I was worried with most about Dread - that it'd feel like this unnatural weird growth on the core Metroids, was unfounded. Dread really just in Fusion 2.
And the core of that is the control I feel. Fusion, to this day, is still one of the nicest 2D games to just move about and do stuff in. It's gamefeel is just spectacular. I'm not convinced Dread is better, but it's close enough for this to just feel like a wonderful game to just run about in. It's absolutely wonderfully animated too, with loads of little things - Samus putting her hand above morph ball holes when you're nearby them, for instance - that add up to the game just feeling wonderful to play outright.
As a Search-Action game, it takes much more from Fusion than any of the other Metroids, with more of a focus in putting the player in areas to puzzle through rather than leaving more of the map open at any one time. There's plenty of points of no return and theres way fewer means to sequence break, and lot more square hole-square peg problems than in Super, at least from what I can tell. Which is fine. What it loses in the sheer freedom, it gains a lot in pacing and direction, and does a much better job of conveying the goals and "plot" than Super does.
And clumped in the middle of all that is the EMMI. They're pretty good! Whilst they never get close to the sheer fear of death the SA-X put in my 8 year old's heart, they provide a good degree of tension and a neat obstacle in the middle of the zones. The generous respawns the game has undercuts it, and the (mostly pretty great) boss fights a bit, but I think it's a reasonable concession to the fairly difficult nature of both the EMMI encounters and portions of the game in general.
The way the game ups the power of the EMMI, through letting them start seeing through walls, freeze samus and walk freely through water she can't, is pretty good, but the facade definetly does wear thin towards the end of the game when samus has about a dozen different movement options and can easily outpace them, especially after you get Gravity suit and Space jump. Fortunately though, they take a backseat in the last few hours and honestly they're not as much of the game as it seems.
Honestly the best thing they offer in my opinion is the psychological effect. Triumphing over an EMMI basically completely gives you the reins to each zone, especially as they're tied to key progression items. It helps create a great flow of rising and lowering tension throughout the game, and help reinforce your progress in a game that has nothing else like Super Metroid's 4 bosses to kill or Fusion's sectors.
There are faults here. I'm not going to pretend to care about the Metroid storyline, but I think it's fair to say it lacks one of the exceptionally strong beats which kinda characterises Metroid 2 and Super in particular, outside of some pretty good characterisation of Samus through her actions. There's not enough new abilities really, and the placement of some powerups is extremely strange to the point they almost feel like they're put in out of obligation. I really like what the game does in mixing up the original item order but it does feel kinda stupid to get Power bombs so damn late and they're near completely useless, for instance. And it would have been nice if they could have gotten rid of the loading screens and elevators between zones, which feels like a pure technical constraint.
But honestly, I don't really care. I just know first time I stopped playing it, I realised I felt exactly the same way Fusion made me feel all those years ago. There's a certain thrill to a wonderfully paced, fun controlling search action game. Countless devs have tried in the wake of Metroid. Some of them have managed to scratch that itch, most of them fall pretty dang flat. There's frankly just not enough games that feel like Fusion and Super. That drip feed of satisfaction and thick tension thats so wonderful, that knows not to overstay its welcome. I honestly did not think that the developers of Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 could come close. I am very happy to be wrong.
Dread probably isnt going to be my favourite Metroid. But if someone told me it was - I'd get it. It's a game that slots right in among some of the best games Nintendo have ever made in Fusion and Super. And that's really something.
And the core of that is the control I feel. Fusion, to this day, is still one of the nicest 2D games to just move about and do stuff in. It's gamefeel is just spectacular. I'm not convinced Dread is better, but it's close enough for this to just feel like a wonderful game to just run about in. It's absolutely wonderfully animated too, with loads of little things - Samus putting her hand above morph ball holes when you're nearby them, for instance - that add up to the game just feeling wonderful to play outright.
As a Search-Action game, it takes much more from Fusion than any of the other Metroids, with more of a focus in putting the player in areas to puzzle through rather than leaving more of the map open at any one time. There's plenty of points of no return and theres way fewer means to sequence break, and lot more square hole-square peg problems than in Super, at least from what I can tell. Which is fine. What it loses in the sheer freedom, it gains a lot in pacing and direction, and does a much better job of conveying the goals and "plot" than Super does.
And clumped in the middle of all that is the EMMI. They're pretty good! Whilst they never get close to the sheer fear of death the SA-X put in my 8 year old's heart, they provide a good degree of tension and a neat obstacle in the middle of the zones. The generous respawns the game has undercuts it, and the (mostly pretty great) boss fights a bit, but I think it's a reasonable concession to the fairly difficult nature of both the EMMI encounters and portions of the game in general.
The way the game ups the power of the EMMI, through letting them start seeing through walls, freeze samus and walk freely through water she can't, is pretty good, but the facade definetly does wear thin towards the end of the game when samus has about a dozen different movement options and can easily outpace them, especially after you get Gravity suit and Space jump. Fortunately though, they take a backseat in the last few hours and honestly they're not as much of the game as it seems.
Honestly the best thing they offer in my opinion is the psychological effect. Triumphing over an EMMI basically completely gives you the reins to each zone, especially as they're tied to key progression items. It helps create a great flow of rising and lowering tension throughout the game, and help reinforce your progress in a game that has nothing else like Super Metroid's 4 bosses to kill or Fusion's sectors.
There are faults here. I'm not going to pretend to care about the Metroid storyline, but I think it's fair to say it lacks one of the exceptionally strong beats which kinda characterises Metroid 2 and Super in particular, outside of some pretty good characterisation of Samus through her actions. There's not enough new abilities really, and the placement of some powerups is extremely strange to the point they almost feel like they're put in out of obligation. I really like what the game does in mixing up the original item order but it does feel kinda stupid to get Power bombs so damn late and they're near completely useless, for instance. And it would have been nice if they could have gotten rid of the loading screens and elevators between zones, which feels like a pure technical constraint.
But honestly, I don't really care. I just know first time I stopped playing it, I realised I felt exactly the same way Fusion made me feel all those years ago. There's a certain thrill to a wonderfully paced, fun controlling search action game. Countless devs have tried in the wake of Metroid. Some of them have managed to scratch that itch, most of them fall pretty dang flat. There's frankly just not enough games that feel like Fusion and Super. That drip feed of satisfaction and thick tension thats so wonderful, that knows not to overstay its welcome. I honestly did not think that the developers of Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 could come close. I am very happy to be wrong.
Dread probably isnt going to be my favourite Metroid. But if someone told me it was - I'd get it. It's a game that slots right in among some of the best games Nintendo have ever made in Fusion and Super. And that's really something.
Metroid Dread
2021
Metroid dread is basically the best parts of samus returns and fusion put into one game. most of my complaints are purely aesthetic, as the music and general environments didn't leave a lasting impression on me. However, Dread makes up for that with some splendid combat and exploration. Bosses are flashy and large in spectacle, and the parry from samus returns doesn't break the pace as much like it used to. I didn't do much sequence breaking myself, but I can see there's more than meets the eye. while I don't see myself replaying this as much as Super Metroid or Zero Mission, this game holds its own fairly well.
This is meant to be more of a review of the environment that this game created, as I have very little credibility when it comes to the critique of its mechanics. I don’t play Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitively, and I have rarely looked into the deeper mechanics at play. I still get frustrated by Sephiroth’s neutral B catching me while not paying attention, and I frequently spam Banjo’s side B to my friends’ equal dismay. If you’re interested in reading the experiences of a high-level Ultimate player, this is not the place to do it. What this game accomplishes on the gameplay side of things is enough to facilitate having fun with my friends, and that is all it has to do. Smash Ultimate was more than just a game to me in the excess of three years it has continually been in the public eye for. While the character reveals for Smash 4 were monumentally hype, especially as it opened to door for characters like Cloud and Ryu, Smash Ultimate solidified the “character reveal event” with the Fighter Passes. Everyone would come together for each Nintendo event with bated breath, wondering if enough time finally passed for a new fighter to be revealed. These characters captured everyone’s imagination, and Joker’s reveal gave credence to anyone’s left field bozo pick. Dante? Definitely in the conversation. Doom Guy? Not too out there. Steve from Minecraft? He actually made it in, and it still feels like a fever dream. The funny thing is that, other than Sephiroth, I don’t particularly love any of the DLC characters included. Even Sephiroth, while a very left field pick, didn’t really wow me in the same way Cloud did for obvious reasons. The truly surprising door was already opened by the likes of Cloud and Joker, and every character that followed them was a little less surprising. The community aspect was still there for characters like Byleth and Min Min, but nobody’s dream was coming true. That kind of cynicism that felt so antithetical to Smash Brothers, the series that embodied everyone’s childhood fantasies, started to creep its way in. For the final DLC character, it felt like almost an inevitability that they would disappoint. Despite the overwhelming amount of soul that Masahiro Sakurai (one of my all-time favorite creators) has given Smash Brothers as a series, and the equally astounding care put into each character in their every facet, even I started to feel like Smash Ultimate would end on a down note. I was ready to post some unoriginal and unfunny joke when I believed the character would be from Dark Souls. I was anticipating my cynicism to be rewarded as it usually is in this world, and I would feel the momentary satisfaction of coming down on this labor of love that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t even the knowledge that Sora would be the final character that quelled this feeling. I had considered Sora to be a leading candidate despite the licensing nightmare that is his existence. It was the love that was put into his cinematic, and the silly but bittersweet knowledge that Sakurai’s wild ride was coming to an end.
I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.
I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.
No More Heroes
2007
This review contains spoilers
Ash has already done a very good review of this game which I won't try to live up to, read it, it's probably on top of the feed rn. So I won't go too deep into the game here, honestly.
But...
The #2 assasin in No More Heroes, Bad Girl, in her introduction, after murdering a bunch of gimps on a conveyer belt with a baseball bat, sits down, downs a beer, and despite being waaaaay too into the murder, remarks on it being the daily grind.
Whilst the more ridiculous, meta and upfront stuff comes in the following hour or so, this moment, which by no means is unsubtle, is what hit me most in NMH. Even this absolutely batshit lady who i want to step on me is stuck in the grind.
Because that's what NMH really is about for me. This absurd narcissistic fantasy story about travis where he's forced to rise and grind, GET THAT BREAD from working shitty jobs, doing deadlifts that demand way too many A presses, giving money to a grift, live like shit and only really finding solace in porn, getting way too into this one girl that pays attention to him and his delightfully low-poly kitten.
You ride around a shitty town on your piece of shit badly handling motorcyle, passing the same streets over and over going between a few locations just trying to eek out the living you want. Even if that living is heroic, or bullshit, the grind is all the same. Money is what makes things spin in this world. You can get caught up in your murderous fantasies and adventures all you want, but when it comes to us third-raters? Me, Travis, Bad Girl, we've got to pay rent all the same.
It's probably not the thing everyone takes from no more heroes. It's a game so heavily driven by vibes and themes that people are always going to latch onto different portions of it.
But for me, it's just that. We've all got to grind out paths. It won't be easy, whatever choices we make, whatever route we go down. So, we may as well take our true path.
But...
The #2 assasin in No More Heroes, Bad Girl, in her introduction, after murdering a bunch of gimps on a conveyer belt with a baseball bat, sits down, downs a beer, and despite being waaaaay too into the murder, remarks on it being the daily grind.
Whilst the more ridiculous, meta and upfront stuff comes in the following hour or so, this moment, which by no means is unsubtle, is what hit me most in NMH. Even this absolutely batshit lady who i want to step on me is stuck in the grind.
Because that's what NMH really is about for me. This absurd narcissistic fantasy story about travis where he's forced to rise and grind, GET THAT BREAD from working shitty jobs, doing deadlifts that demand way too many A presses, giving money to a grift, live like shit and only really finding solace in porn, getting way too into this one girl that pays attention to him and his delightfully low-poly kitten.
You ride around a shitty town on your piece of shit badly handling motorcyle, passing the same streets over and over going between a few locations just trying to eek out the living you want. Even if that living is heroic, or bullshit, the grind is all the same. Money is what makes things spin in this world. You can get caught up in your murderous fantasies and adventures all you want, but when it comes to us third-raters? Me, Travis, Bad Girl, we've got to pay rent all the same.
It's probably not the thing everyone takes from no more heroes. It's a game so heavily driven by vibes and themes that people are always going to latch onto different portions of it.
But for me, it's just that. We've all got to grind out paths. It won't be easy, whatever choices we make, whatever route we go down. So, we may as well take our true path.
Super Mario Sunshine
2002
Uniquely among the Mario games released prior to Galaxy 2, I have no nostalgia for Super Mario Sunshine.
I wasn't around for its reveal and initial release, and I had no way of playing it as a kid - my first playthrough of Sunshine was in 2015, emulated on a computer that could barely run the game at near-full speed with the audio disabled.
But I really enjoyed my time with the game - far more than I did with the Galaxy games - and I've come back to replay it a handful times since, including this playthrough on the rather unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection.
Sunshine is often treated as the black sheep of the series, a janky, unpolished mess compared to the rest of the games - and especially Galaxy right after it, which vastly surpassed it in its aesthetic and supposed scope.
When I say that it's this game that's actually one of my favorite games in the series, I acknowledge this reputation Sunshine has gathered over the years.
In other words, I don't mean to deny the aspects of Sunshine that are noticeably less well thought-out than the rest of the franchise. Let's go on an obligatory quick roll call: the lilypad stage is near impossible to complete normally, adding insult to injury in how long it takes to get there; the watermelon festival is clumsily designed; the Corona Mountain boat is hard to control; the missions are overall too dependent on Shadow Mario chases and red coins... We've all heard these a million times if we've ever discussed Sunshine on the Internet. Let's move on.
It does beg a few questions, though. Why do people complain so much about the lilypad, the pachinko, the watermelon, and all that while conveniently leaving out the fact that most of Super Mario Sunshine's supposed worst shines are completely optional?
The secret shines found around Delfino Plaza, the two bonus shines per course, the 100-coin shines, and each of the twenty-four shine sprites obtained from trading them in at the boathouse - accounting for 70 of Sunshine's 120 shines - are almost completely inconsequential to the game (at most, they let you unlock courses earlier), and a player could easily complete the game with 50 shines collected from the Airstrip, the first seven missions of each course and Corona Mountain.
It seems all too obvious to suggest to anyone who doesn't enjoy those aspects of Super Mario Sunshine: just leave them be!
100% completion seems like the default in 3D platformers ever since games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie emphasized the collection aspect of the genre, but in a world that's increasingly moving towards acceptance that we will never finish every game, even those we start, I don't see the harm in letting those extra shine sprites go, even if someone could argue that some of them are badly made or designed.
I'm not that someone. For context, I've enjoyed my time 100%ing this game far more than I did with Galaxy, and if I were to go back to a 100% playthrough of either it or Odyssey, I would pick Sunshine in a heartbeat.
I will first briefly give credit to the pachinko and say it gets far more hate than it deserves, and that some of Galaxy and Odyssey's more gimmicky missions are not only more obnoxious, but more drawn-out and exhausting—
With my reputation ruined with that one sentence, allow me to explain.
Super Mario Sunshine's biggest strength that no other Mario game accomplishes except for brief instances of Odyssey is its environmental platforming - how it manages to make each location feel like a genuinely believable place within Isle Delfino.
Ricco Harbor and Pinna Park are some of my favorite levels in the entirety of the Mario series in how they manage to naturally bring out Mario's platforming while making everything look like it exists for a purpose beyond being there for Mario to jump on.
While bigger than most Mario maps except some of Odyssey's larger Kingdoms, the courses generally do a good job in dividing themselves into smaller sections within a cohesive map (albeit Pinna Park might go about doing this in a somewhat ham-fisted way), where individual missions can focus on one or two of them each.
One issue I had with Super Mario Odyssey's level design was how too many of them felt like floating landmasses over a bottomless pit: twelve out of fifteen of its main kingdoms followed this design to some capacity, with only the Wooded, Lost and Luncheon Kingdoms really providing an interesting twist on this idea. Sunshine almost completely avoids this issue, with Pianta Village being the single place being designed this way. In exchange, Sunshine often uses its verticality as consequences for failing platforming challenges, with conveniences like tightropes and the Rocket Nozzle being placed to ensure players never lose too much progress for falling down - it also often ensures that players won't suffer from too much fall damage by placing water around the map, which ties into the aesthetic of the game quite brilliantly.
Speaking of aesthetic - I wouldn't give Sunshine's environmental design as much praise if it weren't for their overarching nature: there's a lot of detail put in to make it feel like (almost) everything exists within the same landmass, like how you can see Ricco Harbor from Bianco Hills. There hasn't been this much cohesion in a Mario game since Super Mario World, (another game that debatably suffered for it compared to Super Mario Bros. 3's diversity in locales) and it really goes a long way to sell the idea that Isle Delfino is a living, breathing place compared to the abstract, bizzare themes later found in Super Mario Galaxy that attempt to separate its environments as far apart as it can.
It's because it feels like a living place that I feel incentivized to explore the courses and comb every part of the island for coins, both blue and yellow - less because I'm expecting a reward like in the other Mario games, and more because it lets me live out an inherent feeling of exploration that I couldn't really have when I'd go on holidays as a kid and have my hand held the entire time, the feeling that Mario games seem to have a complicated relationship with.
It's because it feels like a living place that I can forgive the wacky Delfino people from having weird customs like the watermelon festival, blooper races; that I don't mind the fact that Mario's being scammed into helping the Sirena Beach hotel, that everything really is a little bit jank, but maybe it's fine...
Because that's how things are meant to be in Isle Delfino.
So in Rome, I'll do what the Romans do,
and enjoy it all.
I wasn't around for its reveal and initial release, and I had no way of playing it as a kid - my first playthrough of Sunshine was in 2015, emulated on a computer that could barely run the game at near-full speed with the audio disabled.
But I really enjoyed my time with the game - far more than I did with the Galaxy games - and I've come back to replay it a handful times since, including this playthrough on the rather unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection.
Sunshine is often treated as the black sheep of the series, a janky, unpolished mess compared to the rest of the games - and especially Galaxy right after it, which vastly surpassed it in its aesthetic and supposed scope.
When I say that it's this game that's actually one of my favorite games in the series, I acknowledge this reputation Sunshine has gathered over the years.
In other words, I don't mean to deny the aspects of Sunshine that are noticeably less well thought-out than the rest of the franchise. Let's go on an obligatory quick roll call: the lilypad stage is near impossible to complete normally, adding insult to injury in how long it takes to get there; the watermelon festival is clumsily designed; the Corona Mountain boat is hard to control; the missions are overall too dependent on Shadow Mario chases and red coins... We've all heard these a million times if we've ever discussed Sunshine on the Internet. Let's move on.
It does beg a few questions, though. Why do people complain so much about the lilypad, the pachinko, the watermelon, and all that while conveniently leaving out the fact that most of Super Mario Sunshine's supposed worst shines are completely optional?
The secret shines found around Delfino Plaza, the two bonus shines per course, the 100-coin shines, and each of the twenty-four shine sprites obtained from trading them in at the boathouse - accounting for 70 of Sunshine's 120 shines - are almost completely inconsequential to the game (at most, they let you unlock courses earlier), and a player could easily complete the game with 50 shines collected from the Airstrip, the first seven missions of each course and Corona Mountain.
It seems all too obvious to suggest to anyone who doesn't enjoy those aspects of Super Mario Sunshine: just leave them be!
100% completion seems like the default in 3D platformers ever since games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie emphasized the collection aspect of the genre, but in a world that's increasingly moving towards acceptance that we will never finish every game, even those we start, I don't see the harm in letting those extra shine sprites go, even if someone could argue that some of them are badly made or designed.
I'm not that someone. For context, I've enjoyed my time 100%ing this game far more than I did with Galaxy, and if I were to go back to a 100% playthrough of either it or Odyssey, I would pick Sunshine in a heartbeat.
I will first briefly give credit to the pachinko and say it gets far more hate than it deserves, and that some of Galaxy and Odyssey's more gimmicky missions are not only more obnoxious, but more drawn-out and exhausting—
With my reputation ruined with that one sentence, allow me to explain.
Super Mario Sunshine's biggest strength that no other Mario game accomplishes except for brief instances of Odyssey is its environmental platforming - how it manages to make each location feel like a genuinely believable place within Isle Delfino.
Ricco Harbor and Pinna Park are some of my favorite levels in the entirety of the Mario series in how they manage to naturally bring out Mario's platforming while making everything look like it exists for a purpose beyond being there for Mario to jump on.
While bigger than most Mario maps except some of Odyssey's larger Kingdoms, the courses generally do a good job in dividing themselves into smaller sections within a cohesive map (albeit Pinna Park might go about doing this in a somewhat ham-fisted way), where individual missions can focus on one or two of them each.
One issue I had with Super Mario Odyssey's level design was how too many of them felt like floating landmasses over a bottomless pit: twelve out of fifteen of its main kingdoms followed this design to some capacity, with only the Wooded, Lost and Luncheon Kingdoms really providing an interesting twist on this idea. Sunshine almost completely avoids this issue, with Pianta Village being the single place being designed this way. In exchange, Sunshine often uses its verticality as consequences for failing platforming challenges, with conveniences like tightropes and the Rocket Nozzle being placed to ensure players never lose too much progress for falling down - it also often ensures that players won't suffer from too much fall damage by placing water around the map, which ties into the aesthetic of the game quite brilliantly.
Speaking of aesthetic - I wouldn't give Sunshine's environmental design as much praise if it weren't for their overarching nature: there's a lot of detail put in to make it feel like (almost) everything exists within the same landmass, like how you can see Ricco Harbor from Bianco Hills. There hasn't been this much cohesion in a Mario game since Super Mario World, (another game that debatably suffered for it compared to Super Mario Bros. 3's diversity in locales) and it really goes a long way to sell the idea that Isle Delfino is a living, breathing place compared to the abstract, bizzare themes later found in Super Mario Galaxy that attempt to separate its environments as far apart as it can.
It's because it feels like a living place that I feel incentivized to explore the courses and comb every part of the island for coins, both blue and yellow - less because I'm expecting a reward like in the other Mario games, and more because it lets me live out an inherent feeling of exploration that I couldn't really have when I'd go on holidays as a kid and have my hand held the entire time, the feeling that Mario games seem to have a complicated relationship with.
It's because it feels like a living place that I can forgive the wacky Delfino people from having weird customs like the watermelon festival, blooper races; that I don't mind the fact that Mario's being scammed into helping the Sirena Beach hotel, that everything really is a little bit jank, but maybe it's fine...
Because that's how things are meant to be in Isle Delfino.
So in Rome, I'll do what the Romans do,
and enjoy it all.
Super Mario Galaxy
2007
Super Mario Galaxy is the most beautiful game that has ever disappointed me.
I should make it clear that I didn't always feel this way about this game. I'd never owned the game until the unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection, but it was always around me with an air of wonder to it: some of my first memories on the Internet include watching pre-release footage of this game and getting absolutely stunned that video games had the capacity to be so breathtaking; the few times I was able to play it at friends' houses was nothing short of magical, and as an early teenager who unfortunately refused to listen to anything but video game music, the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack was a mainstay on my music library.
This isn't my first time playing this game. I emulated it back in 2015 alongside Super Mario Sunshine and enjoyed my experience enough, but the more I've thought about it ever since, especially with the release of Super Mario Odyssey, I've found my feelings on it shifting around in somewhat cynical ways.
But that's enough trying to force parallels out with my Super Mario Odyssey review. It's true that I feel that Odyssey and Galaxy are mirror images of each other, most of their strengths being the other's shortcomings and vice versa, but Super Mario Galaxy deserves a slightly different approach. It may be my least favorite 3D Mario game in the series; it may be close to being farthest removed from the formula that Super Mario 64, the video game of all time, one that's time and time again defined my entire relationship with video games, had established... but that could have been its strength.
So let's not start with the controls. Let's not start with the game progression or pacing. Instead, let's talk about the single galaxy in the game that I understand the least:
And that's Buoy Base Galaxy. It's a pretty unique galaxy, with a fully orchestrated theme unique to it, complete with an underwater variant that brings out a pipe organ, with a really intense atmosphere to it that's only rivalled by a few other galaxies in the game. It also only has two Power Stars to it, oddly enough.
Have you ever stopped to think about why it exists before? Have you ever thought about why this galaxy only houses two Stars?
I've come up with two different interpretations of this Galaxy, if you'd care to let me speculate. The first is that as an old, unused fortress, it makes sense that there's not a lot of missions left to do in this place. Its stories have already been taken place long ago, its battles already fought, and Mario is visiting a relic of the past, a constant reminder of the battles that continue to go on in the world, and the vigilance he ought to maintain in a time of current conflict, just as Buoy Base continues to be maintained in the slight chance that it may be important in battle again one day.
The other interpretation is that the developers intended it to be a full-sized galaxy with six full stars (which the Super Mario Wiki also believes), but backed out, maybe because its tone was a little too intense, to focus more on more conventionally themed galaxies like the Sea Slide, Dusty Dune and Gold Leaf Galaxies.
I assume my intent in bringing this up should be pretty apparent: Buoy Base is a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy I feel Super Mario Galaxy suffers from, its Two Big Ideas that are completely at odds with each other in the specific way Galaxy goes about executing them.
So let's get a bit more direct as we explore the First Big Idea. In its best moments, Super Mario Galaxy has some of the most interesting concepts, tones and themes ever explored in the Super Mario games.
If you really like thinking about this game, you may have watched a video titled The Quiet Sadness of Super Mario Galaxy: it's a fantastic, sentimental essay that gushes about one of (in my opinion) the best parts of Super Mario Galaxy, and watching it will undoubtedly help in understanding what I mean here, but I'll provide an interpretation of my own, using a quote from the long-time Super Mario composer, Koji Kondo:
"I try to evoke something in the silence, in the absence of sound. Rest notes are very important to me, and the connecting space between sounds." - 2001 interview from Game Maestro, translated by shmuplations
Let's think back to the opening of Super Mario Galaxy. The assault on Peach's Castle is easily the most exciting, cinematic intro to any Mario game ever, and the stakes have never been higher, with the castle uplifted far out of reach, and Mario flung out into the reaches of space - all hope seems lost.
It's at this moment Super Mario Galaxy takes a moment to breathe, to take a step back and zoom out from the Gateway into showing a vast space encircling it. Constellations and stars visible in the distance but very much currently out of Mario's reach represent a sort of Mu (無) that I think is best represented by a quote from One with Nothing:
"When nothing remains, everything is equally possible."
This sense of space between sounds, space between sensations is something that pops up every now and again in Super Mario Galaxy. Space Junk Galaxy, better known as Stardust Road in Japan, is a standout example of this, serving as a bit of a comma in the game's pacing and somehow making the idea of random objects strung together in space into something beautiful, almost introspective. Rosalina's Library can serve this purpose as well, but there's more thematic cohesion to it than just this aspect that I'd like to bring up later.
This sense of space is perhaps more important to Super Mario Galaxy than it might be for any other Mario game if only because of the intensity that's spaced apart by these moments of quietness. Super Mario Galaxy is quite maximalist in its louder moments, with an odd emphasis of war and battle; warships are common imagery within this game more than any other in the series, boss battles are found in almost every major galaxy and many minor galaxies, Bowser and Bowser Jr are fought six times compared to 64's three and Odyssey's two, and the Battlerock and Dreadnought Galaxies serve as mascots of this aspect of the game, representing the almost sci-fi militaristic aesthetic that the game adopts every now and then. The contrast makes for a very interesting tonal balance that I wish was explored in more depth, and more consistently.
I've ended up doing a lot more reading for the purpose of analyzing Super Mario Galaxy's themes than I'd expected to, going into this review. A specific Japanese idea that I've found that I feel Galaxy uniquely tackles unlike the other games in the series is mono no aware: (物の哀れ) treasuring the ephemeral, seeing beauty in the transience of everything, accepting change and letting go, but simultaneously holding those memories of the past close to your heart.
Rosalina exemplifies this idea through and through, in both her backstory, and in the ending. The storybook is one of a small (but growing) list of video game moments I've cried to, and I can't really do it justice except by saying it represents these ideas very well.
The ending literally sees the end of the universe as we had known it for the entire duration of the game, and lets it go, embracing elements of it in every new galaxy created from the ashes of the old one, accepting that this is the true purpose of stars and lumas, to constantly undergo growth, change, evolution and rebirth.
There's a lot of really fascinating ideas reflected in Super Mario Galaxy that I admire very much, themes that mean so much to me represented in such an approachable fashion. With all this said, you'd think I would adore Galaxy just as much as the other 3D Mario games, elevated just as high as Super Mario 64 and Sunshine, wouldn't you?
But transitioning into the Second Big Idea, Super Mario Galaxy came at a slightly tumultuous time in Nintendo and Mario history, after Super Mario Sunshine failed to live up to expectations, and the GameCube itself landed in third place behind the PlayStation 2 and even the Xbox. Nintendo needed the Wii's new Mario to be a solid, indisputable win, one that didn't suffer from the excess complexity that the late Satoru Iwata speculated was a contributor to Sunshine's failings. Super Mario Galaxy, a game that so far aimed to subvert Super Mario, now also needed to define it, be completely identifiable as what people envisioned a Super Mario game to be while also presenting something beyond what Super Mario had done. So what did they do?
They compromised.
I'd started talking about Super Mario Galaxy's themes by highlighting a couple of fantastic galaxies that emphasize the game's biggest strengths, so I'll start by talking about a galaxy. One that's my absolute least favorite course in the entire franchise that is Super Mario, in fact. I look at it, and I question why on earth Nintendo saw fit to include this in the same game as the Battlerock.
And that's Toy Time Galaxy.
Toy Time Galaxy feels like a personal insult, the representation of the tragic compromise found in Super Mario Galaxy's vision. The part that stings more than any other is its music: an ironic echo of the Super Mario Bros. Ground Theme plays, stripped of all its stylistic context, its original latin, reggae and jazz fusion-inspired roots, recontextualized into something offensively juvenile as Mario jumps across a pixellated version of himself collecting Silver Stars, as though the developers are saying "Yeah! Isn't this the Mario you remember from the good old days?"
And, well, no. It's not. Super Mario Galaxy drenches itself in Mario iconography (particularly that from Super Mario Bros. 3) to keep itself grounded - digging up the airships last seen in Super Mario World complete with a fantastic orchestration of their Super Mario Bros. 3 music, resuscitating the same game's athletic theme, bringing Fire Mario into 3D for the first time, and even constructing parallels between it and Super Mario 64's Bowser courses by using the Koopa's Road music once again - all for the sake of doing something the series had rarely done quite so blatantly up to that point: appealing to nostalgia.
I'm okay with nostalgia, don't get me wrong. After all, I am a Kirby fan, and that series likes to bring up connections between and across each and every game almost as much as Pokémon does. But I find it so dryly amusing that this careless self-referential attitude makes for the most ironic imagery in the franchise, such as a moment in Good Egg Galaxy's Battle Fleet where some of the most raw depictions of an open battlefield that Super Mario would allow is juxtaposed by the bolted block platforms from Super Mario Bros. 3 thrown around haphazardly all around the field.
It's moments like that that make it clear that Super Mario Galaxy felt obligated to be a video game, and especially a Super Mario game. Cliched locations like Beach Bowl, Melty Molten and Ghostly Galaxies feel like Super Mario Galaxy checking off a list of things that it contractually needs; its star-based structure seems taken from Super Mario 64 and Sunshine without really understanding what they did for the games' design, and musical moments like Bunny Chasing and Ball Rolling just feel embarrassing to be in the same game as the rest of Super Mario Galaxy's soundtrack, which often borrows harmonies and musical language from the deeply sentimental French world of musical impressionism like no other Super Mario game had really done before or since.
Maybe I'd be okay with this if it at least was a good game, one just as solid as Sunshine and 64 in its design when stripped of its thematic elements. But I'm sorry, I just don't think it is.
It's finally time. Let's start with the controls. Where Super Mario Odyssey gave Mario an extremely streamlined moveset that's almost too smooth and optimized to trivialize the platforming it throws at the player, Super Mario Galaxy's controls are by contrast a bit too fixed, with momentum all but missing, the spin serving as a one-dimensional extension to Mario's jump and most moves having zero synergy with each other except for the wall jump and spin.
It's streamlined, but in an opposite direction; there's very little depth to Super Mario Galaxy's movement, and the level design ends up being built around it to a fault. I know this is from the sequel, but think about the Throwback Galaxy for a second, and how much less interesting of an experience it is now that Mario can no longer dive all around and play around with the momentum that the slopes give him compared to Super Mario 64.
If Super Mario Odyssey makes Mario feel like a fat guy with a hat, Super Mario Galaxy just has that fat guy, and... I'm sorry, I'm just not a fan of it.
The controls were probably streamlined for the sake of the spherical, gravity-based platforming, and I feel like that's a case of compromising your game to force it around an ill-fated gimmick. Although I don't think the Course Clear-style of level design was inherently bad, the planetoid aspect messes with my sense of depth and spatial awareness far more than any other Mario game does, and the camera angles that are even more limited than Super Mario 64 (how do people defend this, again?) absolutely do not help in that regard.
Certain stars can be done in courses out of order again, but at a deadly price: only three out of six stars in each major galaxy is a properly story mission akin to Super Mario Sunshine's eight episodes per course, and the rest involve a single hidden star each that are sometimes found through clever exploration, but far too often handled through a painfully conspicuously-placed Luma that demands your Star Bits, and two Comet-based stars that you can't really predict when you'll have access to.
This throws any capacity for detailed, long-form environmental storytelling that Super Mario Sunshine had right out of the window, and the missions are instead distinguished specifically by mechanical changes and sometimes just sending you to different planetoids altogether and removing the last bit of possibility Super Mario Galaxy had of showing how its worlds would change with time.
And honestly, much of the comet stars are flat-out padding. I concede that some of the missions, mainly the Cosmic Mario races, can be interesting, but redoing certain missions again but faster? Collecting a hundred Purple Coins all thrown about an unnecessarily large map? No damage runs of certain sections of levels without any checkpoints whatsoever? Count me out.
People complain that Sunshine is full of padding and red coins, but honestly - Galaxy is no better in this regard whatsoever, and I'm sick of putting up with this hypocrisy, the blindness people seem to have about this aspect of Galaxy just because... I don't even know, honestly.
I could go on. I think 100% completing Super Mario Galaxy is a tedious experience, especially doing it a second time with Luigi and fighting the final Bowser fight a total of four times; the Grande Finale Galaxy is another example of Super Mario Galaxy choosing function over form by ignoring the fact that there's no way it could canonically take place, since the Toad Brigade being promoted to Royal Guards would have no reason to happen in the New Galaxy welcomed at the end of Super Mario Galaxy; I hate Star Bits, having to make sure I have enough to give Lumas both within galaxies and in the Comet Observatory, especially using the Switch Lite's touch controls; Super Mario Galaxy has an extremely bizarre conflict on how much it wants to be function-over-form, and vice versa... but I've taken up so much of your time already, and I've taken up so much of my own time in writing and researching for this, (preparing for this review involved an entire re-read of The Little Prince for example, and I never actually ended up directly referencing any of it in this review... though there are some slight aesthetic and tonal parallels) and I don't wish to keep the both of us here much longer.
After all, we need to move on. Isn't that something this game was talking about?
I want to make it clear that I don't think Super Mario Galaxy is by any means a bad game. It's far more interesting than many other platformers I've seen and played; it's not even as confused in its gameplay progression as Super Mario Odyssey was.
Super Mario Galaxy has provided me with some of my favorite ideas in video games, and has influenced me significantly as a musician and as a creative in general. Its best musical moments are some of my favorites from the series, even if the Bunny Chasing theme will make me cringe any day of the week.
Super Mario Galaxy's thematic vision is easily the best in the Super Mario series, but it's undermined by the dichotomy it created for itself, and ends up with a very diluted focus that I wish had really gone so much farther than it had the freedom to go. This might be the only Super Mario game whose biggest problem I would consider is that it had to be a Mario game. I want it to go harder on the themes it introduced, series image be damned.
But this might also be the first game where Super Mario found itself unconfident, and glossed over it with a shiny, cinematic aesthetic while it figured out where the series was to go next, just like Super Mario Odyssey would find itself doing exactly ten years after it.
It's... it's just a little misdirected. It's stuck between subverting Super Mario, and defining Super Mario, and didn't quite know how to commit, in an almost mirror image of Super Mario Odyssey's fatal flaw. It doesn't land quite as well as any of the games that committed, for better or for worse (my list would include 64, Sunshine, Galaxy 2, 3D Land and 3D World), but I want to see Nintendo revisit these ideas. Odyssey tried in some ways and played it safe in others, but maybe we might be getting close. I'll maintain hope for the future.
But now, it's truly time to move on.
Farewell, Super Mario Galaxy.
I should make it clear that I didn't always feel this way about this game. I'd never owned the game until the unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection, but it was always around me with an air of wonder to it: some of my first memories on the Internet include watching pre-release footage of this game and getting absolutely stunned that video games had the capacity to be so breathtaking; the few times I was able to play it at friends' houses was nothing short of magical, and as an early teenager who unfortunately refused to listen to anything but video game music, the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack was a mainstay on my music library.
This isn't my first time playing this game. I emulated it back in 2015 alongside Super Mario Sunshine and enjoyed my experience enough, but the more I've thought about it ever since, especially with the release of Super Mario Odyssey, I've found my feelings on it shifting around in somewhat cynical ways.
But that's enough trying to force parallels out with my Super Mario Odyssey review. It's true that I feel that Odyssey and Galaxy are mirror images of each other, most of their strengths being the other's shortcomings and vice versa, but Super Mario Galaxy deserves a slightly different approach. It may be my least favorite 3D Mario game in the series; it may be close to being farthest removed from the formula that Super Mario 64, the video game of all time, one that's time and time again defined my entire relationship with video games, had established... but that could have been its strength.
So let's not start with the controls. Let's not start with the game progression or pacing. Instead, let's talk about the single galaxy in the game that I understand the least:
And that's Buoy Base Galaxy. It's a pretty unique galaxy, with a fully orchestrated theme unique to it, complete with an underwater variant that brings out a pipe organ, with a really intense atmosphere to it that's only rivalled by a few other galaxies in the game. It also only has two Power Stars to it, oddly enough.
Have you ever stopped to think about why it exists before? Have you ever thought about why this galaxy only houses two Stars?
I've come up with two different interpretations of this Galaxy, if you'd care to let me speculate. The first is that as an old, unused fortress, it makes sense that there's not a lot of missions left to do in this place. Its stories have already been taken place long ago, its battles already fought, and Mario is visiting a relic of the past, a constant reminder of the battles that continue to go on in the world, and the vigilance he ought to maintain in a time of current conflict, just as Buoy Base continues to be maintained in the slight chance that it may be important in battle again one day.
The other interpretation is that the developers intended it to be a full-sized galaxy with six full stars (which the Super Mario Wiki also believes), but backed out, maybe because its tone was a little too intense, to focus more on more conventionally themed galaxies like the Sea Slide, Dusty Dune and Gold Leaf Galaxies.
I assume my intent in bringing this up should be pretty apparent: Buoy Base is a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy I feel Super Mario Galaxy suffers from, its Two Big Ideas that are completely at odds with each other in the specific way Galaxy goes about executing them.
So let's get a bit more direct as we explore the First Big Idea. In its best moments, Super Mario Galaxy has some of the most interesting concepts, tones and themes ever explored in the Super Mario games.
If you really like thinking about this game, you may have watched a video titled The Quiet Sadness of Super Mario Galaxy: it's a fantastic, sentimental essay that gushes about one of (in my opinion) the best parts of Super Mario Galaxy, and watching it will undoubtedly help in understanding what I mean here, but I'll provide an interpretation of my own, using a quote from the long-time Super Mario composer, Koji Kondo:
"I try to evoke something in the silence, in the absence of sound. Rest notes are very important to me, and the connecting space between sounds." - 2001 interview from Game Maestro, translated by shmuplations
Let's think back to the opening of Super Mario Galaxy. The assault on Peach's Castle is easily the most exciting, cinematic intro to any Mario game ever, and the stakes have never been higher, with the castle uplifted far out of reach, and Mario flung out into the reaches of space - all hope seems lost.
It's at this moment Super Mario Galaxy takes a moment to breathe, to take a step back and zoom out from the Gateway into showing a vast space encircling it. Constellations and stars visible in the distance but very much currently out of Mario's reach represent a sort of Mu (無) that I think is best represented by a quote from One with Nothing:
"When nothing remains, everything is equally possible."
This sense of space between sounds, space between sensations is something that pops up every now and again in Super Mario Galaxy. Space Junk Galaxy, better known as Stardust Road in Japan, is a standout example of this, serving as a bit of a comma in the game's pacing and somehow making the idea of random objects strung together in space into something beautiful, almost introspective. Rosalina's Library can serve this purpose as well, but there's more thematic cohesion to it than just this aspect that I'd like to bring up later.
This sense of space is perhaps more important to Super Mario Galaxy than it might be for any other Mario game if only because of the intensity that's spaced apart by these moments of quietness. Super Mario Galaxy is quite maximalist in its louder moments, with an odd emphasis of war and battle; warships are common imagery within this game more than any other in the series, boss battles are found in almost every major galaxy and many minor galaxies, Bowser and Bowser Jr are fought six times compared to 64's three and Odyssey's two, and the Battlerock and Dreadnought Galaxies serve as mascots of this aspect of the game, representing the almost sci-fi militaristic aesthetic that the game adopts every now and then. The contrast makes for a very interesting tonal balance that I wish was explored in more depth, and more consistently.
I've ended up doing a lot more reading for the purpose of analyzing Super Mario Galaxy's themes than I'd expected to, going into this review. A specific Japanese idea that I've found that I feel Galaxy uniquely tackles unlike the other games in the series is mono no aware: (物の哀れ) treasuring the ephemeral, seeing beauty in the transience of everything, accepting change and letting go, but simultaneously holding those memories of the past close to your heart.
Rosalina exemplifies this idea through and through, in both her backstory, and in the ending. The storybook is one of a small (but growing) list of video game moments I've cried to, and I can't really do it justice except by saying it represents these ideas very well.
The ending literally sees the end of the universe as we had known it for the entire duration of the game, and lets it go, embracing elements of it in every new galaxy created from the ashes of the old one, accepting that this is the true purpose of stars and lumas, to constantly undergo growth, change, evolution and rebirth.
There's a lot of really fascinating ideas reflected in Super Mario Galaxy that I admire very much, themes that mean so much to me represented in such an approachable fashion. With all this said, you'd think I would adore Galaxy just as much as the other 3D Mario games, elevated just as high as Super Mario 64 and Sunshine, wouldn't you?
But transitioning into the Second Big Idea, Super Mario Galaxy came at a slightly tumultuous time in Nintendo and Mario history, after Super Mario Sunshine failed to live up to expectations, and the GameCube itself landed in third place behind the PlayStation 2 and even the Xbox. Nintendo needed the Wii's new Mario to be a solid, indisputable win, one that didn't suffer from the excess complexity that the late Satoru Iwata speculated was a contributor to Sunshine's failings. Super Mario Galaxy, a game that so far aimed to subvert Super Mario, now also needed to define it, be completely identifiable as what people envisioned a Super Mario game to be while also presenting something beyond what Super Mario had done. So what did they do?
They compromised.
I'd started talking about Super Mario Galaxy's themes by highlighting a couple of fantastic galaxies that emphasize the game's biggest strengths, so I'll start by talking about a galaxy. One that's my absolute least favorite course in the entire franchise that is Super Mario, in fact. I look at it, and I question why on earth Nintendo saw fit to include this in the same game as the Battlerock.
And that's Toy Time Galaxy.
Toy Time Galaxy feels like a personal insult, the representation of the tragic compromise found in Super Mario Galaxy's vision. The part that stings more than any other is its music: an ironic echo of the Super Mario Bros. Ground Theme plays, stripped of all its stylistic context, its original latin, reggae and jazz fusion-inspired roots, recontextualized into something offensively juvenile as Mario jumps across a pixellated version of himself collecting Silver Stars, as though the developers are saying "Yeah! Isn't this the Mario you remember from the good old days?"
And, well, no. It's not. Super Mario Galaxy drenches itself in Mario iconography (particularly that from Super Mario Bros. 3) to keep itself grounded - digging up the airships last seen in Super Mario World complete with a fantastic orchestration of their Super Mario Bros. 3 music, resuscitating the same game's athletic theme, bringing Fire Mario into 3D for the first time, and even constructing parallels between it and Super Mario 64's Bowser courses by using the Koopa's Road music once again - all for the sake of doing something the series had rarely done quite so blatantly up to that point: appealing to nostalgia.
I'm okay with nostalgia, don't get me wrong. After all, I am a Kirby fan, and that series likes to bring up connections between and across each and every game almost as much as Pokémon does. But I find it so dryly amusing that this careless self-referential attitude makes for the most ironic imagery in the franchise, such as a moment in Good Egg Galaxy's Battle Fleet where some of the most raw depictions of an open battlefield that Super Mario would allow is juxtaposed by the bolted block platforms from Super Mario Bros. 3 thrown around haphazardly all around the field.
It's moments like that that make it clear that Super Mario Galaxy felt obligated to be a video game, and especially a Super Mario game. Cliched locations like Beach Bowl, Melty Molten and Ghostly Galaxies feel like Super Mario Galaxy checking off a list of things that it contractually needs; its star-based structure seems taken from Super Mario 64 and Sunshine without really understanding what they did for the games' design, and musical moments like Bunny Chasing and Ball Rolling just feel embarrassing to be in the same game as the rest of Super Mario Galaxy's soundtrack, which often borrows harmonies and musical language from the deeply sentimental French world of musical impressionism like no other Super Mario game had really done before or since.
Maybe I'd be okay with this if it at least was a good game, one just as solid as Sunshine and 64 in its design when stripped of its thematic elements. But I'm sorry, I just don't think it is.
It's finally time. Let's start with the controls. Where Super Mario Odyssey gave Mario an extremely streamlined moveset that's almost too smooth and optimized to trivialize the platforming it throws at the player, Super Mario Galaxy's controls are by contrast a bit too fixed, with momentum all but missing, the spin serving as a one-dimensional extension to Mario's jump and most moves having zero synergy with each other except for the wall jump and spin.
It's streamlined, but in an opposite direction; there's very little depth to Super Mario Galaxy's movement, and the level design ends up being built around it to a fault. I know this is from the sequel, but think about the Throwback Galaxy for a second, and how much less interesting of an experience it is now that Mario can no longer dive all around and play around with the momentum that the slopes give him compared to Super Mario 64.
If Super Mario Odyssey makes Mario feel like a fat guy with a hat, Super Mario Galaxy just has that fat guy, and... I'm sorry, I'm just not a fan of it.
The controls were probably streamlined for the sake of the spherical, gravity-based platforming, and I feel like that's a case of compromising your game to force it around an ill-fated gimmick. Although I don't think the Course Clear-style of level design was inherently bad, the planetoid aspect messes with my sense of depth and spatial awareness far more than any other Mario game does, and the camera angles that are even more limited than Super Mario 64 (how do people defend this, again?) absolutely do not help in that regard.
Certain stars can be done in courses out of order again, but at a deadly price: only three out of six stars in each major galaxy is a properly story mission akin to Super Mario Sunshine's eight episodes per course, and the rest involve a single hidden star each that are sometimes found through clever exploration, but far too often handled through a painfully conspicuously-placed Luma that demands your Star Bits, and two Comet-based stars that you can't really predict when you'll have access to.
This throws any capacity for detailed, long-form environmental storytelling that Super Mario Sunshine had right out of the window, and the missions are instead distinguished specifically by mechanical changes and sometimes just sending you to different planetoids altogether and removing the last bit of possibility Super Mario Galaxy had of showing how its worlds would change with time.
And honestly, much of the comet stars are flat-out padding. I concede that some of the missions, mainly the Cosmic Mario races, can be interesting, but redoing certain missions again but faster? Collecting a hundred Purple Coins all thrown about an unnecessarily large map? No damage runs of certain sections of levels without any checkpoints whatsoever? Count me out.
People complain that Sunshine is full of padding and red coins, but honestly - Galaxy is no better in this regard whatsoever, and I'm sick of putting up with this hypocrisy, the blindness people seem to have about this aspect of Galaxy just because... I don't even know, honestly.
I could go on. I think 100% completing Super Mario Galaxy is a tedious experience, especially doing it a second time with Luigi and fighting the final Bowser fight a total of four times; the Grande Finale Galaxy is another example of Super Mario Galaxy choosing function over form by ignoring the fact that there's no way it could canonically take place, since the Toad Brigade being promoted to Royal Guards would have no reason to happen in the New Galaxy welcomed at the end of Super Mario Galaxy; I hate Star Bits, having to make sure I have enough to give Lumas both within galaxies and in the Comet Observatory, especially using the Switch Lite's touch controls; Super Mario Galaxy has an extremely bizarre conflict on how much it wants to be function-over-form, and vice versa... but I've taken up so much of your time already, and I've taken up so much of my own time in writing and researching for this, (preparing for this review involved an entire re-read of The Little Prince for example, and I never actually ended up directly referencing any of it in this review... though there are some slight aesthetic and tonal parallels) and I don't wish to keep the both of us here much longer.
After all, we need to move on. Isn't that something this game was talking about?
I want to make it clear that I don't think Super Mario Galaxy is by any means a bad game. It's far more interesting than many other platformers I've seen and played; it's not even as confused in its gameplay progression as Super Mario Odyssey was.
Super Mario Galaxy has provided me with some of my favorite ideas in video games, and has influenced me significantly as a musician and as a creative in general. Its best musical moments are some of my favorites from the series, even if the Bunny Chasing theme will make me cringe any day of the week.
Super Mario Galaxy's thematic vision is easily the best in the Super Mario series, but it's undermined by the dichotomy it created for itself, and ends up with a very diluted focus that I wish had really gone so much farther than it had the freedom to go. This might be the only Super Mario game whose biggest problem I would consider is that it had to be a Mario game. I want it to go harder on the themes it introduced, series image be damned.
But this might also be the first game where Super Mario found itself unconfident, and glossed over it with a shiny, cinematic aesthetic while it figured out where the series was to go next, just like Super Mario Odyssey would find itself doing exactly ten years after it.
It's... it's just a little misdirected. It's stuck between subverting Super Mario, and defining Super Mario, and didn't quite know how to commit, in an almost mirror image of Super Mario Odyssey's fatal flaw. It doesn't land quite as well as any of the games that committed, for better or for worse (my list would include 64, Sunshine, Galaxy 2, 3D Land and 3D World), but I want to see Nintendo revisit these ideas. Odyssey tried in some ways and played it safe in others, but maybe we might be getting close. I'll maintain hope for the future.
But now, it's truly time to move on.
Farewell, Super Mario Galaxy.
Returnal
2021
So this game was basically just made for me. An arcade arena shooter masquerading as a roguelike, with an interesting narrative, a gorgeous sci-fi aesthetic in a bunch of cool environments, and probably the best third person shooting ever conceived.
And really that last one is all that really matters. Returnal is absolutely fantastic action game, nothing more, nothing less. Whilst it is a third person shooter, it resembles Housemarque's own Nex Machina and the likes of Twin stick shooters for the most part, with a heavy focus on enemy prioritisation, strafing, and "cutbacks" through gaps in enemy attacks, formations and such to gain positional advantages. Throw in a extremely versatile melee attack with some generous snap-to-target, a dash, and a grappling hook you get in the second area and it's just super good. It's particularly great at adapting the style to the third dimension using environmental features and verticality to evade enemy attacks and bullet formations. Add on top of that a limited, but extremely fun and varied set of weapons, and it just works so damn well. The large arena fights in particular are an absolute joy.
And then you throw on top the roguelike elements. It's a mixed bag in that whilst I feel a lot of it is pretty pointless, there's a few little aspects of it that lend such a huge amount to the game. The first is the sheer tension this adds to runs. Returnal is all about tension, the feeling of getting so far and ending back at the start with very little to your name. It makes the encounters feel even better, makes every loss of health worse, and punishes you hard when you fuck up. It's basically like getting to a lategame stage of an arcade game, and it works so well. Also ties fairly nicely with the aesthetic and narrative.
And of all things for the narrative to be actually good was the one thing I was not expecting. The closest comparison I can think of to it would be Alex Garland's Annihalation. I wouldn't want to go much further than that, but I think if you're into that sort of thing, or maybe things like Silent Hill's narratives, you'll dig this, and I certainly did. It also has some fantastic wham moments. It maybe relies a bit too hard on the use of audiologs, and this sort of narrative is never going to be for everyone, but I thoroughly liked it, and it all came together nicely for me in the end.
It's a bit rough around the edges - how it launched without a save system is beyond me, the weapon and difficulty balance is a bit weird, there's not a huge amount of different rooms per biome, and I would appreciate more difficulty options - and I get the impresison a lot of this stuff will be addressed in patches, fortunately.
But don't let any of that put you off. This is for my money, the best third person shooter ever made by a long shot, as well as just one of the finest action games available - and when you interweave that with it's presentation and narrative, it ends up something really quite special.
And really that last one is all that really matters. Returnal is absolutely fantastic action game, nothing more, nothing less. Whilst it is a third person shooter, it resembles Housemarque's own Nex Machina and the likes of Twin stick shooters for the most part, with a heavy focus on enemy prioritisation, strafing, and "cutbacks" through gaps in enemy attacks, formations and such to gain positional advantages. Throw in a extremely versatile melee attack with some generous snap-to-target, a dash, and a grappling hook you get in the second area and it's just super good. It's particularly great at adapting the style to the third dimension using environmental features and verticality to evade enemy attacks and bullet formations. Add on top of that a limited, but extremely fun and varied set of weapons, and it just works so damn well. The large arena fights in particular are an absolute joy.
And then you throw on top the roguelike elements. It's a mixed bag in that whilst I feel a lot of it is pretty pointless, there's a few little aspects of it that lend such a huge amount to the game. The first is the sheer tension this adds to runs. Returnal is all about tension, the feeling of getting so far and ending back at the start with very little to your name. It makes the encounters feel even better, makes every loss of health worse, and punishes you hard when you fuck up. It's basically like getting to a lategame stage of an arcade game, and it works so well. Also ties fairly nicely with the aesthetic and narrative.
And of all things for the narrative to be actually good was the one thing I was not expecting. The closest comparison I can think of to it would be Alex Garland's Annihalation. I wouldn't want to go much further than that, but I think if you're into that sort of thing, or maybe things like Silent Hill's narratives, you'll dig this, and I certainly did. It also has some fantastic wham moments. It maybe relies a bit too hard on the use of audiologs, and this sort of narrative is never going to be for everyone, but I thoroughly liked it, and it all came together nicely for me in the end.
It's a bit rough around the edges - how it launched without a save system is beyond me, the weapon and difficulty balance is a bit weird, there's not a huge amount of different rooms per biome, and I would appreciate more difficulty options - and I get the impresison a lot of this stuff will be addressed in patches, fortunately.
But don't let any of that put you off. This is for my money, the best third person shooter ever made by a long shot, as well as just one of the finest action games available - and when you interweave that with it's presentation and narrative, it ends up something really quite special.
