fe17
1990
Loom is a point & click adventure game initially released in January 1990 for MS-DOS by LucasArts using the SCUMM engine, with Brian Moriarty as its Designer. There are multiple versions for this game, but the initial release was on a floppy disk and had 16-color EGA graphics with no voice acting, while the version that I played, the "Talkie" version, released in 1992 on CD with 256-color VGA graphics. This version includes voice acting, but some scenes are censored and there are some cuts as far as conversation close-ups and puzzles with multiple solutions go.
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
1995
(This is the 111th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
(This is the 48th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
2023
As a fan of both TES and Fallout games made by Bethesda, Starfield hits on pretty much anything that makes their games so fun to me. There are a lot of quests of main, side and faction variety, a large number of NPCs, a ton of handcrafted locations, four massive cities and an unreal number of optional systems to engage with. Apart from the faces of misc NPCs, the game is a pleasure for the eyes thanks to its beautiful visual design and a pleasure for the ears due to the fantastic work done on the game's general audio and soundtrack.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
1993
(This is the 87th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I wasn't really all too familiar with or interested in the run and gun / shoot 'em up genre of video games until I played Contra III: The Alien Wars just a month ago. Based on its score, I have it rated as the 2nd best game I've played out of my 1992 playlist, and that score sounds about right, as it is one of the games I most fondly look back on from that year, and will do so in the future as well I'm sure. When I shared my thoughts about that game at the time, I was recommended to make sure that I check out Gunstar Heroes as well, which I had never heard of before but had already been on my 1993 playlist beforehand, interestingly enough.
Gunstar Heroes released on September 10, 1993 for the Sega Genesis and on Game Gear in 1995. It was produced by Mastao Maegawa, and it is the result of him and some of his colleagues at Konami rejecting an idea of a game (presumably similar to this one) that they had, which led to them quitting at Konami and starting up their own development studio, Treasure. Gunstar Heroes is a run and gun video game that players of, say, Metal Slug and of course Contra games will instantly be familiar with. You run forward on a side-scrolling screen and just shoot up dozens of enemies as explosion fill up the screen, until you reach a boss, learn its patterns and defeat it too, which lets you advance to the next stage.
In its basic form, it's the same style of game. If you enjoy a game such as Contra III, you are sure to enjoy this one as well. If you didn't enjoy Contra III or similar games at all, you won't enjoy Gunstar Heroes either.
What makes Gunstar Heroes stand out in this genre in my opinion is its presentation and the variety of weapons you can use. Contra III had about a handful of attacks that you could use and gave you two slots to put attacks onto. Get hit, and you lose an attack but can switch to the other slot. In Gunstar Heroes, you also have two slots, though you don't lose the attack in a slot if you get hit. Plus, these attacks don't just work individually, but you can also choose to use the combined effect of these, which gives you even more powerful attacks, which differ in damage output, range and firing directions. There are over a dozen combination to use this way, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, which adds a lot of replayability to how you want to challenge the tougher fights in this game.
The presentation is also worth highlighting as I mentioned. Some of the bosses look really interesting, like the Bravoo Man, Melon Bread or "Seven Force", which can take upon a variety of forms out of which a couple are randomly chosen whenever you face it. There are also some very cleverly designed levels, such as the final boss rush where the screen is presented as a "TV" on which the bad guys collectively watch you fight their guys. Whenever you defeat one of them, they get mad and you can see the main antagonist sending out the next boss out to face you. Another really well designed level is the "Dice Palace", which reminded me of Cuphead's King Dice boss fight. You roll a dice to see how many platforms you can advance, and each platform has either a boss fight or an item room for you. The bosses vary in difficulty, but most are pretty easy on "normal" difficulty. The second to last platform has you start over (just like in Cuphead) and I had the pleasure to step on it once, losing about 10 minutes of progress. Each major boss you defeat gives you one of four gems, and there is a funny scene that plays with the Dice Palace boss, who, once defeated, throws out what looks like the "red gem" but is actually a bomb. So I had the boss beat, but didn't know it was a bomb, so it hit me and I died, which means I had to start over the Dice Palace. Made me mad at the time, but was hilarious in hindsight.
Graphically, the game looks more than serviceable for the Sega Genesis and makes up for lack of high-tier production values with great enemy design. The game's soundtrack overall is pretty good. It has a few pretty average tracks and is mostly overshadowed by the constant sound of explosions. The highlight for me here though was the "theme of Seven Force", which, as I would like to eloquently say, "slaps".
OVERALL: 72/100
I wasn't really all too familiar with or interested in the run and gun / shoot 'em up genre of video games until I played Contra III: The Alien Wars just a month ago. Based on its score, I have it rated as the 2nd best game I've played out of my 1992 playlist, and that score sounds about right, as it is one of the games I most fondly look back on from that year, and will do so in the future as well I'm sure. When I shared my thoughts about that game at the time, I was recommended to make sure that I check out Gunstar Heroes as well, which I had never heard of before but had already been on my 1993 playlist beforehand, interestingly enough.
Gunstar Heroes released on September 10, 1993 for the Sega Genesis and on Game Gear in 1995. It was produced by Mastao Maegawa, and it is the result of him and some of his colleagues at Konami rejecting an idea of a game (presumably similar to this one) that they had, which led to them quitting at Konami and starting up their own development studio, Treasure. Gunstar Heroes is a run and gun video game that players of, say, Metal Slug and of course Contra games will instantly be familiar with. You run forward on a side-scrolling screen and just shoot up dozens of enemies as explosion fill up the screen, until you reach a boss, learn its patterns and defeat it too, which lets you advance to the next stage.
In its basic form, it's the same style of game. If you enjoy a game such as Contra III, you are sure to enjoy this one as well. If you didn't enjoy Contra III or similar games at all, you won't enjoy Gunstar Heroes either.
What makes Gunstar Heroes stand out in this genre in my opinion is its presentation and the variety of weapons you can use. Contra III had about a handful of attacks that you could use and gave you two slots to put attacks onto. Get hit, and you lose an attack but can switch to the other slot. In Gunstar Heroes, you also have two slots, though you don't lose the attack in a slot if you get hit. Plus, these attacks don't just work individually, but you can also choose to use the combined effect of these, which gives you even more powerful attacks, which differ in damage output, range and firing directions. There are over a dozen combination to use this way, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, which adds a lot of replayability to how you want to challenge the tougher fights in this game.
The presentation is also worth highlighting as I mentioned. Some of the bosses look really interesting, like the Bravoo Man, Melon Bread or "Seven Force", which can take upon a variety of forms out of which a couple are randomly chosen whenever you face it. There are also some very cleverly designed levels, such as the final boss rush where the screen is presented as a "TV" on which the bad guys collectively watch you fight their guys. Whenever you defeat one of them, they get mad and you can see the main antagonist sending out the next boss out to face you. Another really well designed level is the "Dice Palace", which reminded me of Cuphead's King Dice boss fight. You roll a dice to see how many platforms you can advance, and each platform has either a boss fight or an item room for you. The bosses vary in difficulty, but most are pretty easy on "normal" difficulty. The second to last platform has you start over (just like in Cuphead) and I had the pleasure to step on it once, losing about 10 minutes of progress. Each major boss you defeat gives you one of four gems, and there is a funny scene that plays with the Dice Palace boss, who, once defeated, throws out what looks like the "red gem" but is actually a bomb. So I had the boss beat, but didn't know it was a bomb, so it hit me and I died, which means I had to start over the Dice Palace. Made me mad at the time, but was hilarious in hindsight.
Graphically, the game looks more than serviceable for the Sega Genesis and makes up for lack of high-tier production values with great enemy design. The game's soundtrack overall is pretty good. It has a few pretty average tracks and is mostly overshadowed by the constant sound of explosions. The highlight for me here though was the "theme of Seven Force", which, as I would like to eloquently say, "slaps".
OVERALL: 72/100
1993
Star Fox released on February 21, 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and is a rail shooter that you play in both first-person and third-person perspectives. The special part about it is that this is a 3D game during a time where this was uncommon, and from the get-go you can tell that what Star Fox does is pretty unique, especially for the platform it released on.
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
2019
I jumped into Yakuza 4 straight after Yakuza 3 but that might have been a mistake since I'm going abroad for 6 months and didn't have much time left to finish Yakuza 4 before I leave. This means I bypassed most of the content outside of the main story and the review will mainly be focused on that. Though even if you just focus on the story here, you will constantly be shown the type of side content that is available, such as the hostess makeover minigame that was introduced in Yakuza 3, a similar make-a-fighter minigame, and a bunch of stuff that the series introduced in previous entries.
As far as the main story goes, Yakuza 4 has 4 main characters who each have 4 chapters focused on their part in the overall plot before it all culminates in a final chapter. The 4 main characters all have distinct personalities that succeed in making them all stand out. You got the charismatic Shun Akiyama who stole the show for me, but you also got his polar opposite in the stoic Taiga Saejima. I thought I'd go over each of the characters before I give my thoughts on the rest of the game overall.
I do want to say that I had mixed feelings about 4 main characters throughout. Yakuza 0 had 2 and remains my favorite Yakuza game, so I have nothing against multiple protagonists, but 4 felt like it took away from the connection you get to the character and the satisfying feeling of upgrading your character and seeing how he continues to get stronger. Here, by the time a character gains enough skills to make fights more interesting, you switch to the next protagonist. That said, side content and their own parts in the main story do offer plenty of time with each character to allow them to leave an impact, I'd just prefer a game with 2 protagonists who you switch between a la Yakuza 0, or just one character. (And yes, I do realize that Yakuza 5 has 5 protagonists. Let's see how that goes.)
Shun Akiyama: The game starts with him and his personality takes center stage pretty much off the bat. His mannerisms, voice acting and overall character made his chapters go by really quick, and I find both his backstory and the whole Sky Finance business fascinating. His fighting style is also probably my favorite in the game. Don't know the name of it but he's mainly using kicks during combat and it was a fun way to mix it up.
Taiga Saejima: Very dark character with some very memorable moments (some positively, some really negatively (you'll know when you see it). Hated his fighting style and his fights because the balancing is pretty messed up (Saito battle I'm looking at you), and he doesn't really ever become satisfying to play with. Even outside of combat, exploration with him was a horrible time because of all the police everywhere.
Masayoshi Tanimura: An overly confident police officer who doesn't shy away from breaking the rules at times. Definitely ended up being a lot more interesting character wise than I expected going in, and his parry-heavy combat style lets you pull off some of the coolest combos for sure, though his final boss fight was the biggest AIDS-inducing fight of my life, especially since I went in with just one healing item like a stupid person.
Kazuma Kiryu: His part was pretty short overall but solid as expected. I understand why they decided to add more protagonists to be able to tell stories differently, and I think that was a good call but I love Kiryu, so playing as him longer would have been what I'd have preferred.
The story in the game overall has some strong and some weak parts. For one, there is a saying called "too many cooks in a kitchen", and I think too many antagonists in a story applies here. I laughed out loud at the number of plot twists the story through at me, which I think indicates that there were too many. It's not very well written overall but rather felt like a guilty pleasure type story, and reminded me even more of a soap opera than Yakuza stories can tend to feel like. Not a terrible thing, because the protagonists are great overall and many of the antagonists and their parts in the story were well explained, but then you got guys like Daigo who feels like he was added in last second and some other names who have some odd moments that are questionable in terms of their logic. Then there are the countless "what are the odds?" moments where events occur way too perfectly for the story to progress in a certain direction, especially involving Kiryu. I can live with a few of these but I thought the game overdid it. But overall, the story had many badass moments involving badass characters and even if it wasn't well written at all times, that alone was satisfying to watch unfold. A final negative note for me was, clearly due to budgetary issues, the fact that so many key cinematic moments were interrupted and conversations ended up happening unvoiced outside of cutscenes. It does take something away from them and I wish we could have gotten half an hour's worth of additional cutscenes at least.
The combat felt improved from Yakuza 3 but also worse in some ways. Probably the most frustrating I got at a Yakuza game ever, and continuously so. Boss fights were frustrating, sure, but there were also too many mini-bosses who pissed me off. One big issue for me was that combos never worked with some of these guys because they'd just hit you with an unblockable attack to end the combo. Or that they just wouldn't get knocked down. Another big issue was that you could so easily be stunlocked. Often it took one hit and you were unable to move for 3-5 seconds. Why?? Or even worse, every group you fight has that one cunt who grabs you. Sometimes, there were even 2 or 3 of those, so you'd escape one grapple to walk right into the next with no way to avoid it. It all culminated in the final boss fight, which, until you figure out to do it in one very specific way, I'm calling it now, is just the worst thing to happen to the Yakuza series. You got the antagonist and 10 of his henchman in the way. The antagonist shoots you with his pistol and the only way to avoid them is to grab enemies and attack them that way. Going straight at the antagonist doesn't work because there are 3 guys with knives who will just stab at you incessantly and you'll actually not even see your character in the sea of enemies sometimes. Trying to input commands and being unable to do anything is so frustrating, holy moly. But there is less guarding 99% of hits (now it's 50% guarding, 49% dodging) compared to Yakuza 3 at least.
Overall, Yakuza 4 has its unique strengths and weaknesses. I liked the story and its bad parts made me laugh more than annoyed, plus the protagonists are great additions to the overall story of the series. The combat has some great parts but also some of the worst in the series (from 0 to 4), at least in my opinion. The soundtrack is great and includes some absolute bangers (Receive and Bite You, For Faith, Material Delights etc.). If you're a fan of Yakuza, the game is great and I enjoyed it, but I'd say it's the weakest of the bunch for me when you combine everything.
As far as the main story goes, Yakuza 4 has 4 main characters who each have 4 chapters focused on their part in the overall plot before it all culminates in a final chapter. The 4 main characters all have distinct personalities that succeed in making them all stand out. You got the charismatic Shun Akiyama who stole the show for me, but you also got his polar opposite in the stoic Taiga Saejima. I thought I'd go over each of the characters before I give my thoughts on the rest of the game overall.
I do want to say that I had mixed feelings about 4 main characters throughout. Yakuza 0 had 2 and remains my favorite Yakuza game, so I have nothing against multiple protagonists, but 4 felt like it took away from the connection you get to the character and the satisfying feeling of upgrading your character and seeing how he continues to get stronger. Here, by the time a character gains enough skills to make fights more interesting, you switch to the next protagonist. That said, side content and their own parts in the main story do offer plenty of time with each character to allow them to leave an impact, I'd just prefer a game with 2 protagonists who you switch between a la Yakuza 0, or just one character. (And yes, I do realize that Yakuza 5 has 5 protagonists. Let's see how that goes.)
Shun Akiyama: The game starts with him and his personality takes center stage pretty much off the bat. His mannerisms, voice acting and overall character made his chapters go by really quick, and I find both his backstory and the whole Sky Finance business fascinating. His fighting style is also probably my favorite in the game. Don't know the name of it but he's mainly using kicks during combat and it was a fun way to mix it up.
Taiga Saejima: Very dark character with some very memorable moments (some positively, some really negatively (you'll know when you see it). Hated his fighting style and his fights because the balancing is pretty messed up (Saito battle I'm looking at you), and he doesn't really ever become satisfying to play with. Even outside of combat, exploration with him was a horrible time because of all the police everywhere.
Masayoshi Tanimura: An overly confident police officer who doesn't shy away from breaking the rules at times. Definitely ended up being a lot more interesting character wise than I expected going in, and his parry-heavy combat style lets you pull off some of the coolest combos for sure, though his final boss fight was the biggest AIDS-inducing fight of my life, especially since I went in with just one healing item like a stupid person.
Kazuma Kiryu: His part was pretty short overall but solid as expected. I understand why they decided to add more protagonists to be able to tell stories differently, and I think that was a good call but I love Kiryu, so playing as him longer would have been what I'd have preferred.
The story in the game overall has some strong and some weak parts. For one, there is a saying called "too many cooks in a kitchen", and I think too many antagonists in a story applies here. I laughed out loud at the number of plot twists the story through at me, which I think indicates that there were too many. It's not very well written overall but rather felt like a guilty pleasure type story, and reminded me even more of a soap opera than Yakuza stories can tend to feel like. Not a terrible thing, because the protagonists are great overall and many of the antagonists and their parts in the story were well explained, but then you got guys like Daigo who feels like he was added in last second and some other names who have some odd moments that are questionable in terms of their logic. Then there are the countless "what are the odds?" moments where events occur way too perfectly for the story to progress in a certain direction, especially involving Kiryu. I can live with a few of these but I thought the game overdid it. But overall, the story had many badass moments involving badass characters and even if it wasn't well written at all times, that alone was satisfying to watch unfold. A final negative note for me was, clearly due to budgetary issues, the fact that so many key cinematic moments were interrupted and conversations ended up happening unvoiced outside of cutscenes. It does take something away from them and I wish we could have gotten half an hour's worth of additional cutscenes at least.
The combat felt improved from Yakuza 3 but also worse in some ways. Probably the most frustrating I got at a Yakuza game ever, and continuously so. Boss fights were frustrating, sure, but there were also too many mini-bosses who pissed me off. One big issue for me was that combos never worked with some of these guys because they'd just hit you with an unblockable attack to end the combo. Or that they just wouldn't get knocked down. Another big issue was that you could so easily be stunlocked. Often it took one hit and you were unable to move for 3-5 seconds. Why?? Or even worse, every group you fight has that one cunt who grabs you. Sometimes, there were even 2 or 3 of those, so you'd escape one grapple to walk right into the next with no way to avoid it. It all culminated in the final boss fight, which, until you figure out to do it in one very specific way, I'm calling it now, is just the worst thing to happen to the Yakuza series. You got the antagonist and 10 of his henchman in the way. The antagonist shoots you with his pistol and the only way to avoid them is to grab enemies and attack them that way. Going straight at the antagonist doesn't work because there are 3 guys with knives who will just stab at you incessantly and you'll actually not even see your character in the sea of enemies sometimes. Trying to input commands and being unable to do anything is so frustrating, holy moly. But there is less guarding 99% of hits (now it's 50% guarding, 49% dodging) compared to Yakuza 3 at least.
Overall, Yakuza 4 has its unique strengths and weaknesses. I liked the story and its bad parts made me laugh more than annoyed, plus the protagonists are great additions to the overall story of the series. The combat has some great parts but also some of the worst in the series (from 0 to 4), at least in my opinion. The soundtrack is great and includes some absolute bangers (Receive and Bite You, For Faith, Material Delights etc.). If you're a fan of Yakuza, the game is great and I enjoyed it, but I'd say it's the weakest of the bunch for me when you combine everything.
A game in the "Endless Runner" genre with a hip hop aesthetic. Whether you want to pick it up or not is basically tied to how appealing you think that first sentence sounds.
To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.
So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.
The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.
If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.
To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.
So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.
The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.
If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.
(This is the 15th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (released on July 20, 1990 in Japan only - available in NA/EU through MGS3: Subsistence for PS2) is the first Metal Gear game I have actually played and beaten, even though I've played a bit of MGS1, 3 and dozens of hours of MGS 5. I've abandoned those for various reasons over the years, mostly due to being distracted by other games and/or finding them too difficult (tried to play without guides), but I do plan on going through the entire series over the next few years.
For today, I am happy to say that the second MSX Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima has been beaten. It took me roughly 7 hours and I did use a guide whenever I didn't know what to do, and in my opinion, you will have a hard time beating this game without one. The gameplay mechanics themselves will not be a problem, but there are multiple instances where (1) you need an item for a boss that is very easy to miss and (2) you need to backtrack to an area and it can be hard to make out where you need to go. During those backtracking parts, often you will probably figure it out if you just check every available door but I decided to take a look at the guide whenever it took me about 10 minutes of looking around without being able to figure out my next move.
Sometimes the answer to a puzzle can be pretty convoluted as well. In one part of the game, an area is locked off by lasers. A guard is at that spot as well. There is a little shack next to it, and later on you find a keycard that allows you to enter. A few children in there tell you that "the lasers are turned off at night": There is no traditional day & night system in this game, so you can't just wait for it to be night. No, instead you have to find something elsewhere, figure out to use it near the guard, wait a few seconds for the guard cutscene to trigger, which makes him then turn off the lasers. You can get it eventually thanks to to the tips by the children, but sometimes it gets more complicated with fewer tips, at which point checking a guide is almost a must.
If you don't mind using guides a few times here and there, great, because the game is among the better ones you will get to play in 1990 and offers a fun way to spend a few afternoons. It improved on basically everything compared to the first Metal Gear game by Kojima. Plus, as I understand it, it's canon to the Metal Gear universe and much of what MG2 does is apparently repeated in some way or another in MGS1 and 2, both in gameplay and story.
More on the game in detail below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game starts with a lengthy cut scene that briefly summarizes the plot of the first game and the setting for this one. After conflict between large nations like Russia, the USA and China started to settle down, a new nuclear threat emerged in 1999, the year this game is set in (4 years after the previous one). The country is called "Zanzibar Land", which arms itself with nuclear weapons and stars invading nearby countries.
In addition to this, there is an ongoing oil crisis (the game's premise and its story themes are evidently still relevant today). A Czech biologist named Kio Marv invents "Oilix" a microbe that synthesizes petroleum, and Zanzibar Land kidnap him to gain military superiority through a combination of nuclear weapons and Oilix.
Solid Snake receives his mission by Foxhound, a special forces squad, to sneak into Zanzibar Land and rescue Kio Marv. Of course, there is a nuclear weapon called "Metal Gear" to worry about as well, as Zanzibarland are mass-producing Metal Gear units.
The beauty of this story is manifold, though you won't necessarily fall in love with the in-game plot itself. It works well, it includes plot twists and plenty of both sad and thoughtful moments. Considering that this is a video game from 1990 however, it won't blow your socks off at this day and age. What I really appreciated, however, was the attention to detail.
If you look at the manual of this game, it shows you a biography of each relevant character (did you know Snake speaks 6 languages?). It lists all basic information about Zanzibar Land (population: 40,000), it even explains what kind of training Foxhound aspirants need to go through, what gear they wear during missions and what Foxhound itself even is. The game then mentions some of this information during radio conversations, some optional, some mandatory.
The radio/codec in general is a great feature because it has a ton of immersive uses that are both helpful and engaging. Each character has their own frequency and you can ring them to partake in optional conversations, which don't always trigger depending on what situation Snake finds himself in. But when they do, you can ring Holly to learn more about Zanzibar Land and your environment. You can ring Roy Campbell, your commander, to get more information about your mission and some helpful tips. You can call Kazuhira Miller, who often does meta commentary on "not drinking too much soda when playing" or "not playing within 30 minutes of eating" (not very immersive, but humorous/actually interesting). You can also call Johan Jacobsen to get some tips whenever animals are involved. This system gets fleshed out in future entries but this game is a big step in the right direction in that regard.
Throughout the game, you will meet characters either to rescue them or to help them (or for them to help you) and each time you do, there is an engaging conversation that you can follow along. One such conversation that was pretty memorable happened between Snake and Gustava. While waiting, both literally sat down and just talked about Gustava's past, why she became involved with the STB and about the only man she ever fell in love with. I love this sort of stuff and it helps make the bigger moments in the game's story hit that much more.
Most impressive about the story in this game has got to be its meta commentary on war. It is barebones compared to what I know future games delve into, but there is still plenty of thoughtful stuff here about how soldiers are pawns of leaders who don't care about them, about how some children who are saved from battlefields are simply trained to be put back into the battlefield and about how some soldiers don't have a life worth living outside of the battlefield, so they may as well die on it. It gives the "evil" antagonists a "motivation" for their actions unlike what you will see in almost any other game, where the simple goal is to reign over the world, whereas here, it goes way beyond that.
I'm probably making the story out to be way more than it actually is, but I truly do find the attention to detail and the themes to be impressive features of this game and something that obviously stuck around big time in future iterations.
GAMEPLAY
Where to start? You play Solid Snake, a special ops soldier, and have to sneak into Zanzibar Land to find Dr. Kio Marv. When you start the game, your are equipped with your radio to contact a few individuals who will help you. You immediately get access to a handgun, some rations (healing items) and you obviously have your next-level sneaking abilities.
The game has a LIFE bar that increases each time you defeat a boss. Boss fights sometimes occur within minutes of each other, sometimes you don't fight one for over an hour. There are close to 10 in total and are pretty varied. You fight a chopper, a Running Man that just keeps running away whilst the room fills up with toxic gas, a Ninja that throws stars and teleports and of course a Metal Gear. They are pretty simple once you know what to do and are equipped for them. Often, you can simply tank their damage and just eat Rations while you fire back until they die.
To aid you with your mission, there is a RADAR for the first time in the series. It is a 3x3 screen that shows each adjacent screen and marks enemies and yourself as dots. It is pretty primitive, in that it doesn't actually show which direction the enemies are facing, so it often happened at first that I walked into a screen and immediately alerted the guards because they were staring into my direction. Later on I figured out to let the enemies walk the other direction first, at which point I obviously knew which way they were facing.
Guards in this game have a bigger field of view compared to the previous game (45°) and sometimes stand still and turn there gaze to the left or right. In addition, there are multiple different floors in this game, some that squeak when you walk over them, which alerts the guards and makes them look around. For moments like these, you can crawl, which doesn't make any noise. Plus, you can hide under stuff, either to move past enemies yourself or hide until they move past you.
There are some sections where a room is dark (you get Night Vision goggles), where a room fills with Toxic Gas (Gas Mask) or mines are on the floor (crawl over them to pick them up and/or use a Mine Detector). The situations you find yourself in are plentiful and there is a safe and easy solution to everything. The tough part is finding them sometimes.
The big gameplay loop you have here is in finding Key Cards, which help you unlock areas that previously were inaccessible. There are 9 Key Cards and after you find 3, you can find a Key Card that combines them all (Red Card, Blue Card, Green Card). There are plenty of areas with multiple doors which all require a different key card to unlock, which is kind of annoying. You open a door with Key Card 4, then have to use Key Card 2 for the next one and Key Card 6 for the other one.
Overall, the depth in gameplay is definitely above anything other than some RPGs of the time probably, and it's a lot of fun, even today.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
-
No voice acting. I liked the sound design, while I found the soundtrack to range from OK to very good. The quality of the soundtrack really shined whenever the game entered action or story heavy scenes, while some of the overworld themes were catchy as well. I really enjoyed the intro theme too.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Metal Gear 2 certainly looks good for a 1990 game. It is much improved compared to Metal Gear in both use of colors and variety of locations. There is also more detail within locations, like the sewers, the "forest" area (not sure what the official name was), the swamps and then smaller locations like an infirmary, dining rooms etc.
ATMOSPHERE
I found this game to have fitting atmosphere throughout, but the game technically was obviously pretty limited in what it could do. It didn't help the setting that you spend like an hour on elevators it felt like, and I also found some things off putting and too game-y, like the fact that kids were just running around in random rooms waiting to give you tips on how to progress.
CONTENT
For a playthrough without the use of a guide, you are looking at a game that is about 10-15 hours long. If you use a guide here and there, you're looking at 6-8 hours, which for games of this time that are not RPGs or endless games is in my opinion the perfect length. Games at this time simply weren't feature rich or technically able enough to provide a lot of content that is limited in repetition.
I don't think I would necessarily have been to keen on spending ~$50 per game back in the day for this length, but the shorter length does a lot of good to the enjoyment of the game if we disregard that initial price tag.
There is a lot of fun stealth gameplay here that offers enough variety in how to approach things thanks to a multitude of stealth mechanics and weaponry. There is enough here that even a second playthrough may be worth it to you to approach some scenarios slightly differently. It's not like you can take different routes to get to the same destination - the game is pretty linear in that regard - but the moment to moment action can definitely easily be switched up a little bit.
There is some backtracking and as mentioned many times, you will likely need to use a guide here and there unless you're very patient, but Metal Gear 2 offers the best mix of quality and quantity of all 15 games I have played of 1990 up to this point.
Once you beat the game, there is a "boss rush" mode that unlocks as an additional mode.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There are a few main areas (two different buildings, forest/swamp area, desert) and the game asks you to backtrack a lot, but each time you do, you are able to enter new areas that are unlocked by acquiring a key card. Buildings have multiple doors and floors that require different key cards (there are 9) and each time you enter a new area within an area, there is enough of a different stylistically that it doesn't really feel repetitive. Often there are new stealth challenges added as well, but it could have definitely been much more difficult in that regard.
You can obviously alert guards, but it isn't really that punishing, especially on Easy difficulty. You can simply go to the next screen and hide underneath something and the guards will disappear without being on "semi-alert" status or something like that like they do in future games.
The structure of this game is pretty much the same throughout, and it's a fun structure, so I don't have too much to say about that. You get your mission to go to Area X, on your way you find key items hidden in specific rooms, you sometimes gotta piece together which item you need to use at which point, and then you fight a boss to progress further. It all works well.
One thing I didn't like was how key items were sometimes hidden somewhere and totally missable. Some bosses for example can only be hurt with one specific weapon, like the chopper early on, so I didn't particularly enjoy showing up to that one unable to do any damage. Often, once you do find the item, defeating them is rather simple.
So yeah, overall pretty good stuff with that small complaint.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Absolutely one of the more innovative games I've seen so far and it introduced many mechanics that were still in use when MGS1 released 8 years later. This game had everything you would want from a sequel. Bigger field of view for enemies makes stealth a bit more difficult, but the game offers a lot more "toys" for the player in terms of equipment, plus you can sneak and hide underneath stuff, and there is a lot more detail in the game's story telling.
REPLAYABILITY
There are two areas that will make this game slightly more replayable. There is a lot of equipment that I didn't use in my first playthrough. First, because I played it on easy (only available through MGS 3: Subsistence) and second, because there really are so many items and not all are necessary to be successful. There is a blanket for example that you can hide under, which I didn't use. Mice and cold medicine are other items that come to mind as one's I didn't require, to a point where I don't even know what cold medicine might be usable for. There are lots of other items like that which were in my inventory until the game was beaten.
The second area that allows for a little replayability are the radio conversations. There are dozens of optional conversations that you can try to find and I'm sure I didn't get to listen to all of them. It's nothing compared to what future games will offer, but considering the issue of memory limitations was pretty big at the time, it's impressive to see this much room put aside for optional conversations that offer (1) additional lore about the world and its inhabitants, (2) meta commentary and (3) humorous interactions.
Apart from this, you will experience everything in a singular playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
So far, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was definitely the best game I have played that released in 1990. Impressive amount of features with limited filler to pad play time, by far the most story telling and character development, limited frustration apart from not knowing where to go or what to do a few times and definitely a step in the right direction for video games. I think it's unlikely that I will manage to hold off from playing MGS1 all the way until I reach 1998, but I'll try, just to really build up that anticipation.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Nothing here since it didn't release outside of Japan until 2005.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (released on July 20, 1990 in Japan only - available in NA/EU through MGS3: Subsistence for PS2) is the first Metal Gear game I have actually played and beaten, even though I've played a bit of MGS1, 3 and dozens of hours of MGS 5. I've abandoned those for various reasons over the years, mostly due to being distracted by other games and/or finding them too difficult (tried to play without guides), but I do plan on going through the entire series over the next few years.
For today, I am happy to say that the second MSX Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima has been beaten. It took me roughly 7 hours and I did use a guide whenever I didn't know what to do, and in my opinion, you will have a hard time beating this game without one. The gameplay mechanics themselves will not be a problem, but there are multiple instances where (1) you need an item for a boss that is very easy to miss and (2) you need to backtrack to an area and it can be hard to make out where you need to go. During those backtracking parts, often you will probably figure it out if you just check every available door but I decided to take a look at the guide whenever it took me about 10 minutes of looking around without being able to figure out my next move.
Sometimes the answer to a puzzle can be pretty convoluted as well. In one part of the game, an area is locked off by lasers. A guard is at that spot as well. There is a little shack next to it, and later on you find a keycard that allows you to enter. A few children in there tell you that "the lasers are turned off at night": There is no traditional day & night system in this game, so you can't just wait for it to be night. No, instead you have to find something elsewhere, figure out to use it near the guard, wait a few seconds for the guard cutscene to trigger, which makes him then turn off the lasers. You can get it eventually thanks to to the tips by the children, but sometimes it gets more complicated with fewer tips, at which point checking a guide is almost a must.
If you don't mind using guides a few times here and there, great, because the game is among the better ones you will get to play in 1990 and offers a fun way to spend a few afternoons. It improved on basically everything compared to the first Metal Gear game by Kojima. Plus, as I understand it, it's canon to the Metal Gear universe and much of what MG2 does is apparently repeated in some way or another in MGS1 and 2, both in gameplay and story.
More on the game in detail below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game starts with a lengthy cut scene that briefly summarizes the plot of the first game and the setting for this one. After conflict between large nations like Russia, the USA and China started to settle down, a new nuclear threat emerged in 1999, the year this game is set in (4 years after the previous one). The country is called "Zanzibar Land", which arms itself with nuclear weapons and stars invading nearby countries.
In addition to this, there is an ongoing oil crisis (the game's premise and its story themes are evidently still relevant today). A Czech biologist named Kio Marv invents "Oilix" a microbe that synthesizes petroleum, and Zanzibar Land kidnap him to gain military superiority through a combination of nuclear weapons and Oilix.
Solid Snake receives his mission by Foxhound, a special forces squad, to sneak into Zanzibar Land and rescue Kio Marv. Of course, there is a nuclear weapon called "Metal Gear" to worry about as well, as Zanzibarland are mass-producing Metal Gear units.
The beauty of this story is manifold, though you won't necessarily fall in love with the in-game plot itself. It works well, it includes plot twists and plenty of both sad and thoughtful moments. Considering that this is a video game from 1990 however, it won't blow your socks off at this day and age. What I really appreciated, however, was the attention to detail.
If you look at the manual of this game, it shows you a biography of each relevant character (did you know Snake speaks 6 languages?). It lists all basic information about Zanzibar Land (population: 40,000), it even explains what kind of training Foxhound aspirants need to go through, what gear they wear during missions and what Foxhound itself even is. The game then mentions some of this information during radio conversations, some optional, some mandatory.
The radio/codec in general is a great feature because it has a ton of immersive uses that are both helpful and engaging. Each character has their own frequency and you can ring them to partake in optional conversations, which don't always trigger depending on what situation Snake finds himself in. But when they do, you can ring Holly to learn more about Zanzibar Land and your environment. You can ring Roy Campbell, your commander, to get more information about your mission and some helpful tips. You can call Kazuhira Miller, who often does meta commentary on "not drinking too much soda when playing" or "not playing within 30 minutes of eating" (not very immersive, but humorous/actually interesting). You can also call Johan Jacobsen to get some tips whenever animals are involved. This system gets fleshed out in future entries but this game is a big step in the right direction in that regard.
Throughout the game, you will meet characters either to rescue them or to help them (or for them to help you) and each time you do, there is an engaging conversation that you can follow along. One such conversation that was pretty memorable happened between Snake and Gustava. While waiting, both literally sat down and just talked about Gustava's past, why she became involved with the STB and about the only man she ever fell in love with. I love this sort of stuff and it helps make the bigger moments in the game's story hit that much more.
Most impressive about the story in this game has got to be its meta commentary on war. It is barebones compared to what I know future games delve into, but there is still plenty of thoughtful stuff here about how soldiers are pawns of leaders who don't care about them, about how some children who are saved from battlefields are simply trained to be put back into the battlefield and about how some soldiers don't have a life worth living outside of the battlefield, so they may as well die on it. It gives the "evil" antagonists a "motivation" for their actions unlike what you will see in almost any other game, where the simple goal is to reign over the world, whereas here, it goes way beyond that.
I'm probably making the story out to be way more than it actually is, but I truly do find the attention to detail and the themes to be impressive features of this game and something that obviously stuck around big time in future iterations.
GAMEPLAY
Where to start? You play Solid Snake, a special ops soldier, and have to sneak into Zanzibar Land to find Dr. Kio Marv. When you start the game, your are equipped with your radio to contact a few individuals who will help you. You immediately get access to a handgun, some rations (healing items) and you obviously have your next-level sneaking abilities.
The game has a LIFE bar that increases each time you defeat a boss. Boss fights sometimes occur within minutes of each other, sometimes you don't fight one for over an hour. There are close to 10 in total and are pretty varied. You fight a chopper, a Running Man that just keeps running away whilst the room fills up with toxic gas, a Ninja that throws stars and teleports and of course a Metal Gear. They are pretty simple once you know what to do and are equipped for them. Often, you can simply tank their damage and just eat Rations while you fire back until they die.
To aid you with your mission, there is a RADAR for the first time in the series. It is a 3x3 screen that shows each adjacent screen and marks enemies and yourself as dots. It is pretty primitive, in that it doesn't actually show which direction the enemies are facing, so it often happened at first that I walked into a screen and immediately alerted the guards because they were staring into my direction. Later on I figured out to let the enemies walk the other direction first, at which point I obviously knew which way they were facing.
Guards in this game have a bigger field of view compared to the previous game (45°) and sometimes stand still and turn there gaze to the left or right. In addition, there are multiple different floors in this game, some that squeak when you walk over them, which alerts the guards and makes them look around. For moments like these, you can crawl, which doesn't make any noise. Plus, you can hide under stuff, either to move past enemies yourself or hide until they move past you.
There are some sections where a room is dark (you get Night Vision goggles), where a room fills with Toxic Gas (Gas Mask) or mines are on the floor (crawl over them to pick them up and/or use a Mine Detector). The situations you find yourself in are plentiful and there is a safe and easy solution to everything. The tough part is finding them sometimes.
The big gameplay loop you have here is in finding Key Cards, which help you unlock areas that previously were inaccessible. There are 9 Key Cards and after you find 3, you can find a Key Card that combines them all (Red Card, Blue Card, Green Card). There are plenty of areas with multiple doors which all require a different key card to unlock, which is kind of annoying. You open a door with Key Card 4, then have to use Key Card 2 for the next one and Key Card 6 for the other one.
Overall, the depth in gameplay is definitely above anything other than some RPGs of the time probably, and it's a lot of fun, even today.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
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No voice acting. I liked the sound design, while I found the soundtrack to range from OK to very good. The quality of the soundtrack really shined whenever the game entered action or story heavy scenes, while some of the overworld themes were catchy as well. I really enjoyed the intro theme too.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Metal Gear 2 certainly looks good for a 1990 game. It is much improved compared to Metal Gear in both use of colors and variety of locations. There is also more detail within locations, like the sewers, the "forest" area (not sure what the official name was), the swamps and then smaller locations like an infirmary, dining rooms etc.
ATMOSPHERE
I found this game to have fitting atmosphere throughout, but the game technically was obviously pretty limited in what it could do. It didn't help the setting that you spend like an hour on elevators it felt like, and I also found some things off putting and too game-y, like the fact that kids were just running around in random rooms waiting to give you tips on how to progress.
CONTENT
For a playthrough without the use of a guide, you are looking at a game that is about 10-15 hours long. If you use a guide here and there, you're looking at 6-8 hours, which for games of this time that are not RPGs or endless games is in my opinion the perfect length. Games at this time simply weren't feature rich or technically able enough to provide a lot of content that is limited in repetition.
I don't think I would necessarily have been to keen on spending ~$50 per game back in the day for this length, but the shorter length does a lot of good to the enjoyment of the game if we disregard that initial price tag.
There is a lot of fun stealth gameplay here that offers enough variety in how to approach things thanks to a multitude of stealth mechanics and weaponry. There is enough here that even a second playthrough may be worth it to you to approach some scenarios slightly differently. It's not like you can take different routes to get to the same destination - the game is pretty linear in that regard - but the moment to moment action can definitely easily be switched up a little bit.
There is some backtracking and as mentioned many times, you will likely need to use a guide here and there unless you're very patient, but Metal Gear 2 offers the best mix of quality and quantity of all 15 games I have played of 1990 up to this point.
Once you beat the game, there is a "boss rush" mode that unlocks as an additional mode.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There are a few main areas (two different buildings, forest/swamp area, desert) and the game asks you to backtrack a lot, but each time you do, you are able to enter new areas that are unlocked by acquiring a key card. Buildings have multiple doors and floors that require different key cards (there are 9) and each time you enter a new area within an area, there is enough of a different stylistically that it doesn't really feel repetitive. Often there are new stealth challenges added as well, but it could have definitely been much more difficult in that regard.
You can obviously alert guards, but it isn't really that punishing, especially on Easy difficulty. You can simply go to the next screen and hide underneath something and the guards will disappear without being on "semi-alert" status or something like that like they do in future games.
The structure of this game is pretty much the same throughout, and it's a fun structure, so I don't have too much to say about that. You get your mission to go to Area X, on your way you find key items hidden in specific rooms, you sometimes gotta piece together which item you need to use at which point, and then you fight a boss to progress further. It all works well.
One thing I didn't like was how key items were sometimes hidden somewhere and totally missable. Some bosses for example can only be hurt with one specific weapon, like the chopper early on, so I didn't particularly enjoy showing up to that one unable to do any damage. Often, once you do find the item, defeating them is rather simple.
So yeah, overall pretty good stuff with that small complaint.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Absolutely one of the more innovative games I've seen so far and it introduced many mechanics that were still in use when MGS1 released 8 years later. This game had everything you would want from a sequel. Bigger field of view for enemies makes stealth a bit more difficult, but the game offers a lot more "toys" for the player in terms of equipment, plus you can sneak and hide underneath stuff, and there is a lot more detail in the game's story telling.
REPLAYABILITY
There are two areas that will make this game slightly more replayable. There is a lot of equipment that I didn't use in my first playthrough. First, because I played it on easy (only available through MGS 3: Subsistence) and second, because there really are so many items and not all are necessary to be successful. There is a blanket for example that you can hide under, which I didn't use. Mice and cold medicine are other items that come to mind as one's I didn't require, to a point where I don't even know what cold medicine might be usable for. There are lots of other items like that which were in my inventory until the game was beaten.
The second area that allows for a little replayability are the radio conversations. There are dozens of optional conversations that you can try to find and I'm sure I didn't get to listen to all of them. It's nothing compared to what future games will offer, but considering the issue of memory limitations was pretty big at the time, it's impressive to see this much room put aside for optional conversations that offer (1) additional lore about the world and its inhabitants, (2) meta commentary and (3) humorous interactions.
Apart from this, you will experience everything in a singular playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
So far, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was definitely the best game I have played that released in 1990. Impressive amount of features with limited filler to pad play time, by far the most story telling and character development, limited frustration apart from not knowing where to go or what to do a few times and definitely a step in the right direction for video games. I think it's unlikely that I will manage to hold off from playing MGS1 all the way until I reach 1998, but I'll try, just to really build up that anticipation.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Nothing here since it didn't release outside of Japan until 2005.
(This is the 113th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest came out pretty much exactly a year after the original set the SNES world on fire. Because of that, it's actually impressive how creatively designed the levels are, how beautifully composed the soundtrack is and how well the game flows at many times.
Even still, I caught myself not quite enjoying this as much as it felt like I should at every second. I truly found myself controlling Diddy Kong and wondering "Do I not like platformers that much?". I can't say I grew up with platformers, though I did play many hours playing Super Mario Bros. 3 and both World games as a child. So maybe there is some truth to that. But then again, replaying Super Mario World about a year ago was a lot of fun.
Then I thought about Mega Man. About Sonic. About Kirby. About Wario. I enjoyed their platformer games for what they were (besides Mega Man, me and that series just isn't going to work out unfortunately) but didn't fall in love with any of them despite the praise most of the games have gotten. And it's a similar story with Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2. I love their visual style and their soundtracks. I can appreciate the gameplay and level design for what they are. But the loop just isn't all that fun to me relative to how it probably should be.
So I'm leaving these thoughts here just to catalogue the game as part of the challenge I'm doing, and if you're someone like me who is on the fence about the platforming genre, maybe you just find someone who shares your gaming tastes.
If I had to guess what the issue is, it's probably the fact that platformers are based on quick reaction times and the patience to learn patterns and repeat them for success. As a 26 year old, I feel like that's not the kind of stuff I can let myself be lured into anymore. With that comes the lack of patience for failure that I perceive comes cheaply, which is kind of what I felt in this game, more so than in the original Donkey Kong Country, though only by a little bit. Your character is pretty large compared to the overall screen, and your field of view is small as a result. Which means a lot of the time, I'd get hit by a character just appearing at the edge of the screen, leaving me with a small window to react. Another example are the jumps, which you have to execute within a small window because your characters can't jump all that far, even while running, leading me to fall to my death all too often by an inch.
Overall, it's a game I probably would love, similar to early Super Mario platformers, if I had played it as a kid and learned a lot of the patterns and secrets over dozens of hours of dying easy deaths, but Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest did not have that same appeal to today's me unfortunately.
I'll leave the review with this. If you're looking for retro platformers, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 are undoubtedly among the best gaming had to offer at the time. The way I play games these days just doesn't seem to work with these platformers all that well.
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest came out pretty much exactly a year after the original set the SNES world on fire. Because of that, it's actually impressive how creatively designed the levels are, how beautifully composed the soundtrack is and how well the game flows at many times.
Even still, I caught myself not quite enjoying this as much as it felt like I should at every second. I truly found myself controlling Diddy Kong and wondering "Do I not like platformers that much?". I can't say I grew up with platformers, though I did play many hours playing Super Mario Bros. 3 and both World games as a child. So maybe there is some truth to that. But then again, replaying Super Mario World about a year ago was a lot of fun.
Then I thought about Mega Man. About Sonic. About Kirby. About Wario. I enjoyed their platformer games for what they were (besides Mega Man, me and that series just isn't going to work out unfortunately) but didn't fall in love with any of them despite the praise most of the games have gotten. And it's a similar story with Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2. I love their visual style and their soundtracks. I can appreciate the gameplay and level design for what they are. But the loop just isn't all that fun to me relative to how it probably should be.
So I'm leaving these thoughts here just to catalogue the game as part of the challenge I'm doing, and if you're someone like me who is on the fence about the platforming genre, maybe you just find someone who shares your gaming tastes.
If I had to guess what the issue is, it's probably the fact that platformers are based on quick reaction times and the patience to learn patterns and repeat them for success. As a 26 year old, I feel like that's not the kind of stuff I can let myself be lured into anymore. With that comes the lack of patience for failure that I perceive comes cheaply, which is kind of what I felt in this game, more so than in the original Donkey Kong Country, though only by a little bit. Your character is pretty large compared to the overall screen, and your field of view is small as a result. Which means a lot of the time, I'd get hit by a character just appearing at the edge of the screen, leaving me with a small window to react. Another example are the jumps, which you have to execute within a small window because your characters can't jump all that far, even while running, leading me to fall to my death all too often by an inch.
Overall, it's a game I probably would love, similar to early Super Mario platformers, if I had played it as a kid and learned a lot of the patterns and secrets over dozens of hours of dying easy deaths, but Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest did not have that same appeal to today's me unfortunately.
I'll leave the review with this. If you're looking for retro platformers, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 are undoubtedly among the best gaming had to offer at the time. The way I play games these days just doesn't seem to work with these platformers all that well.
2023
These "charming Indie(-style) platforming-adventure games" (like Rime, Gris, Aer, or even Journey) are not usually quite for me. The feeling the devs would like you to feel whilst playing these games don't usually bubble up inside me when I play these, even though I certainly can and do become emotional when I play video games. If you're like me and are still curious about Jusant, here is what I thought. If you're the opposite, I'd just disregard this review and read some of the other ones you find.
I booted up Jusant because I had a few days of Xbox Game Pass left and read multiple positive reviews (both by critics and players) about it. It's quite short at 3-4 hours (though it took me 5, maybe because I read every letter), so why not just play through it in an afternoon or two.
Ultimately, my experience with Jusant was pretty much the same as with the games I've described above, though closer to Journey and Gris than Aer and Rime (which is to say I thought it was above average in its category of games). Gameplay was enjoyable, I like the visuals and the soundtrack has some good songs in it, but the payoff to both the main story and the side story told in letters were both 'meh' because despite heavy lore dumps in letters at times, a lot of questions remain unanswered about this world. So much so that I find it hard to come to my own conclusion as to what happens after the ending, which is something many games ask you to do and usually feel satisfactory in doing so.
To go into it a bit more in-depth, gameplay consists of two things. The main part, which is climbing. You are an unnamed wanderer who starts close to the Sand Plains, which, to my understanding, is the bottom part of this so called "Tower" that you are about to ascend. You reach the "Low Tide" area, where you find some letters that clue you in on the story. From there, you start climbing upwards, finding some of the different areas that the letters previously described to you.
Each of these areas present you with additional climbing challenges, some of which remain for the rest of your playthrough and some of which are region-specific. For example, in the heat your stamina drains faster and roots of a plant wilt and disappear after a short while.
Climbing was fun enough for the duration of the game. It was not challenging but also not just a matter of pressing RT and LT all the time until the end. I've seen some call it meditative and, for the most part, I'd agree with that.
The other part of the gameplay is the collectibles. There are four or five things you can collect in this game: Letters, cairns which you can complete by adding a stone on top, frescos which you can light up, shells which you can listen to and altars which you can turn. The frescos look different, the shells give you different sounds each time and the letters obviously have differing contents, but as you can perhaps tell, these tasks are repetitive and don't serve a lot of purpose other than being busy work for achievement hunters.
The frescos look differently and have poems attached, which might impress you if you're into poems. I'm not a poems person myself. The shell sounds are OK but I didn't feel like there being 0 people in this tower besides you was a particularly good idea, so the shell sounds to replace them wasn't something I thought was sufficient to add to the game's atmosphere.
Finally, the letters consist of two types. There are Bianca's letters, which tell the story of a girl who leaves her home at a young age to join an expedition to the clouds and logs her progress. The second type consists of letters by past inhabitants of the homes you find these attached to and their worries, as well as newspaper articles to clue you in on the lore. While it helped in that final aspect, I didn't find most of these letters interesting and Bianca's story to not be worth the 15 minutes or so I've spent reading it.
The fate of the people in the tower is a sad thing for sure, but without really knowing much about the circumstances of them nor your character, I can't really say I knew enough to be able to care much about it all.
Despite that, the visuals, the climbing gameplay and the calm nature of it were enough to make this an enjoyable couple hours for me. You can (and should) avoid the non-letter and perhaps even shell and fresco side activities though, because they don't add much to the experience other than making it take longer.
I booted up Jusant because I had a few days of Xbox Game Pass left and read multiple positive reviews (both by critics and players) about it. It's quite short at 3-4 hours (though it took me 5, maybe because I read every letter), so why not just play through it in an afternoon or two.
Ultimately, my experience with Jusant was pretty much the same as with the games I've described above, though closer to Journey and Gris than Aer and Rime (which is to say I thought it was above average in its category of games). Gameplay was enjoyable, I like the visuals and the soundtrack has some good songs in it, but the payoff to both the main story and the side story told in letters were both 'meh' because despite heavy lore dumps in letters at times, a lot of questions remain unanswered about this world. So much so that I find it hard to come to my own conclusion as to what happens after the ending, which is something many games ask you to do and usually feel satisfactory in doing so.
To go into it a bit more in-depth, gameplay consists of two things. The main part, which is climbing. You are an unnamed wanderer who starts close to the Sand Plains, which, to my understanding, is the bottom part of this so called "Tower" that you are about to ascend. You reach the "Low Tide" area, where you find some letters that clue you in on the story. From there, you start climbing upwards, finding some of the different areas that the letters previously described to you.
Each of these areas present you with additional climbing challenges, some of which remain for the rest of your playthrough and some of which are region-specific. For example, in the heat your stamina drains faster and roots of a plant wilt and disappear after a short while.
Climbing was fun enough for the duration of the game. It was not challenging but also not just a matter of pressing RT and LT all the time until the end. I've seen some call it meditative and, for the most part, I'd agree with that.
The other part of the gameplay is the collectibles. There are four or five things you can collect in this game: Letters, cairns which you can complete by adding a stone on top, frescos which you can light up, shells which you can listen to and altars which you can turn. The frescos look different, the shells give you different sounds each time and the letters obviously have differing contents, but as you can perhaps tell, these tasks are repetitive and don't serve a lot of purpose other than being busy work for achievement hunters.
The frescos look differently and have poems attached, which might impress you if you're into poems. I'm not a poems person myself. The shell sounds are OK but I didn't feel like there being 0 people in this tower besides you was a particularly good idea, so the shell sounds to replace them wasn't something I thought was sufficient to add to the game's atmosphere.
Finally, the letters consist of two types. There are Bianca's letters, which tell the story of a girl who leaves her home at a young age to join an expedition to the clouds and logs her progress. The second type consists of letters by past inhabitants of the homes you find these attached to and their worries, as well as newspaper articles to clue you in on the lore. While it helped in that final aspect, I didn't find most of these letters interesting and Bianca's story to not be worth the 15 minutes or so I've spent reading it.
The fate of the people in the tower is a sad thing for sure, but without really knowing much about the circumstances of them nor your character, I can't really say I knew enough to be able to care much about it all.
Despite that, the visuals, the climbing gameplay and the calm nature of it were enough to make this an enjoyable couple hours for me. You can (and should) avoid the non-letter and perhaps even shell and fresco side activities though, because they don't add much to the experience other than making it take longer.
I've played Star Wars: Dark Forces on two separate occasions over a year apart now, but each time I start this up, I get to the sewer level and give up after being lost for close to an hour. It was only after I dropped this for good today that I'm hearing that the sewer level is infamous for making players do that. Well, I understand your frustration now, my friends.
That said, the last time I dropped this game, I wanted to play games chronologically starting in 1995. This one released February 15 and was therefore the first on my list. As a retro newcomer of sorts, this game understandably looked very bad and getting to grips with its controls (Page up/down to look down or up respectively, 5 to reset view) and its level design had me uninterested pretty quickly.
This time however, I had already started my challenge well over a year ago in 1990, so I have over 100 retro games and even more time-appropriate expectations before going into this. So how does Dark Forces compare to its contemporaries? Actually pretty well.
Star Wars: Dark Forces takes the FPS / boomer-shooter genre, accepts its fate as being called a doom-clone in every single review made for it at the time, and adds adventure game elements to it, as well as the looking up and down mechanic I talked about in the last paragraph. The adventure game elements consists of actual cutscenes and mission briefings that actually give you story details as well, which is really nice.
In doing so, the game actually brought the genre forward in a meaningful way at the time. In addition, the maze-like levels known to players from Doom I and II at this point are 'mazified' even further by adding additional floors and overall complexity to them not found in boomer shooters before this point. For the most part, I appreciated this. The complexity also means that you can more easily get lost, and I think in that regard the devs misunderstood complex for stupidly obtuse in certain levels, like the aforementioned sewer level. Add to that that in that particular level there is lots of darkness and limited amount of battery power for your NVGs and it can get pretty frustrating unnecessarily. The very low resolution in this game and poor framerate doesn't help matters as you try to figure out where to go.
Everything you can make out despite the resolution does look pretty appealing though, especially if you're into Star Wars. It often actually looks like you're in an enemy base instead of room after room with same-textured wall after wall. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Doom plenty, but when talking about bringing something new and improved to the table, Star Wars: Dark Forces does that in the visual design of its levels as well. Enemy design is another part of this. The game obviously has the immediate unmistakeable Star Wars enemies in the Stormtroopers (and Darktroopers, which is a new enemy type introduced here) as well as all the officers and commanders of the Empire you will find waiting for. But that's not all, as there are probably 20 or so enemies in the game in total, from Droids to turrets to those disgusting Dianogas in the sewer level.
Star Wars: Dark Forces will be remastered in February 2024, which means I'll definitely revisit the game at some point next year. If you're into Star Wars and don't mind retro gameplay, this game is definitely going to be a blast to the past that is well worth experiencing with that updated package.
That said, the last time I dropped this game, I wanted to play games chronologically starting in 1995. This one released February 15 and was therefore the first on my list. As a retro newcomer of sorts, this game understandably looked very bad and getting to grips with its controls (Page up/down to look down or up respectively, 5 to reset view) and its level design had me uninterested pretty quickly.
This time however, I had already started my challenge well over a year ago in 1990, so I have over 100 retro games and even more time-appropriate expectations before going into this. So how does Dark Forces compare to its contemporaries? Actually pretty well.
Star Wars: Dark Forces takes the FPS / boomer-shooter genre, accepts its fate as being called a doom-clone in every single review made for it at the time, and adds adventure game elements to it, as well as the looking up and down mechanic I talked about in the last paragraph. The adventure game elements consists of actual cutscenes and mission briefings that actually give you story details as well, which is really nice.
In doing so, the game actually brought the genre forward in a meaningful way at the time. In addition, the maze-like levels known to players from Doom I and II at this point are 'mazified' even further by adding additional floors and overall complexity to them not found in boomer shooters before this point. For the most part, I appreciated this. The complexity also means that you can more easily get lost, and I think in that regard the devs misunderstood complex for stupidly obtuse in certain levels, like the aforementioned sewer level. Add to that that in that particular level there is lots of darkness and limited amount of battery power for your NVGs and it can get pretty frustrating unnecessarily. The very low resolution in this game and poor framerate doesn't help matters as you try to figure out where to go.
Everything you can make out despite the resolution does look pretty appealing though, especially if you're into Star Wars. It often actually looks like you're in an enemy base instead of room after room with same-textured wall after wall. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Doom plenty, but when talking about bringing something new and improved to the table, Star Wars: Dark Forces does that in the visual design of its levels as well. Enemy design is another part of this. The game obviously has the immediate unmistakeable Star Wars enemies in the Stormtroopers (and Darktroopers, which is a new enemy type introduced here) as well as all the officers and commanders of the Empire you will find waiting for. But that's not all, as there are probably 20 or so enemies in the game in total, from Droids to turrets to those disgusting Dianogas in the sewer level.
Star Wars: Dark Forces will be remastered in February 2024, which means I'll definitely revisit the game at some point next year. If you're into Star Wars and don't mind retro gameplay, this game is definitely going to be a blast to the past that is well worth experiencing with that updated package.
1993
(This is the 89th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
If you are a fan of video games and of its history in particular, there is nothing I can add to the discourse around the original Doom that hasn't already been said by critics, fans, the original devs, damn politicians even, and you are likely aware how big a deal Doom has been and still is for the video gaming medium. By now, Doom is as old as it is iconic, having released on December 10, 1993 for MS-DOS originally. [Calling it old also makes my palms sweat as I'm typing this, considering how close we are getting to my birth date in terms of this challenge.]
Doom is not the first FPS game ever made, but it certainly is the most influential. I think it would be an apt comparison to think of it the same way you see how Souls-likes are discussed these days. "Soulslike" has become its own genre these days, and while Doom's genre is the FPS genre, for many years after its release, every FPS game would pretty much be looked at as "Doom-clones". Now there is a good reason for this beyond just the first-person view and shooting gameplay, which is that these games would often use the exact same style. UI blocking the bottom row of the screen horizontally, no vertical aim possible, 2.5D sprites and pretty much the same gameplay loop of a boomer / corridor shooter for all of them.
Doom is id Software's next FPS release after Wolfenstein 3D, and it won't take long to notice how much of an improvement Doom is over it in a lot of ways. Doom takes roughly 4-6 hours to finish (if you play the three main episodes) and has stayed relevant for a long time thanks to its mod-friendly nature and the countless fan levels that are available alongside the main game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
According to the manual, which gives you "the story so far", you are a space marine who got transferred to Mars. The "Union Aaresopace Corporation", your contractor, has been conducting secret projects on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, like creating portals or "gateways" that allowed for gadgets to be thrown into Phobos' portal and come back in Deimos' portal. Before the game starts, what happened is obvious. The experiments went terribly wrong, and demonic creatures started coming out of these portals, which is why you, later to be called "Doomguy", make your way to Phobos alongside a troop of other combatants, who all die while you're ordered to secure the perimeter of the base. Now you are on your own and need to get off the planet, which is where the game starts.
In-game, as soon as you start a new game, you load in with a pistol equipped and can start shooting. If you can appreciate the beauty of games that throw you straight into the action, that's all you need to know I presume. If you want to play games with stories, Doom doesn't offer much apart from the summary of the game's story setup in the manual I have just given, introducing us to an iconic video game character called 'Doomguy' and giving you another block of text at the end of each of the three episodes summarizing your achievement and telling you what happens next. When the first episode ends for example, the text tells you that you are not done yet and need to go into the depths of hell to fight even more demons and find a way out. During gameplay, there is no dialogue, no real environmental storytelling or anything of the sort.
Suffice to say, this is fine and not the reason people fell in love with Doom for.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Doom is THE prototypical boomer shooter. Just like in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, you traverse through a labyrinth / maze-like level, shooting every enemy in your way. You can pick up items that give you health, armor, ammo, a map and weapons, as you go. Most items are in your way and are supposed to be found, while some are hidden in hard to reach or completely hidden secret areas.
Each episode you play contains 9 episodes with a boss fight at the end. The main goal of each level is to figure out the way to the exit, the way to which gets more and more complex as levels become more complex as well. The game has a clever way of trying to get you playing for a lot more than one playthrough however by introducing multiple side-goals. Whenever you finish a level, you see the percentage for how many enemies on the level you killed, how many items you collected and how many secret areas you found. On top of that, there is a "par time" for each level. I didn't stay below that par time once, but it's a great little thing that gives you a benchmark for testing your skill.
The gameplay in Doom is a lot more refined than in Wolfenstein 3D thanks to a faster pace, better sound to the weapons and more weapon and enemy variety. You start out with just a pistol, but soon after will find a shotgun that saved my butt on multiple occasions, a chaingun that plows through pistol ammo at a much faster rate, a rocket launcher, a more basic plasma rifle, the BFG 9000 which shoots a plasma ball that destroys everything in sight pretty much and a chainsaw, if you want to get up close and personal. It's a good variety of weapons and depending on the difficulty you set, you will want to or need to switch often, as some weapons are more advantageous in certain situations and because there simply is not enough ammo to stick with one or two weapons throughout. While I found the variety that these weapons and the enemies presented to be satisfying, I would have liked to have a couple more enemy varities in the game to be honest. Overall, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but excluding bosses, there are less than 10 different enemies in the game.
The boss fights themselves could also have been better. There are three in the game. For the first two, all you need to do is dodge projectiles and fire back until the boss dies. For the third one, I didn't find another way to beat it other than to hide behind a structure at the center of the map and shoot it just as its legs came into sight. The boss has undodgeable, lock-on aim and can kill you in a couple seconds once it starts shooting. This game also has the same issue that the other id Software FPS games had, which is that if you die against a boss, you start on the same level but only have the pistol equipped. With what the level offers you in terms of weapons and ammo, it gets pretty tough to kill the boss without bringing all the other weapons and ammo with you from the previous level, so I recommend saving and reloading for every boss fight, if you do die.
Overall though, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay loop in Doom. It felt a lot more refined than Wolfenstein 3D and has aged well enough to still be a fun time today. Its length is also at a solid level and can easily be doubled, tripled or quadrupled through multiple playthroughs on higher difficulty levels and with a bigger focus on completionism.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting apart from some screams. The sound design in this game is great. While you have to judge this relative to sound in 1993, weapons sound a lot more realistic and have a lot more oomph to them and they sound miles better than the sounds of Wolfenstein. This applies to other sound effects as well, such as simply picking up items, which sounds a lot less obnoxious and discreet here than in Wolfenstein. Doomguy constantly moaning when you press space to interact with objects or walls is kind of an odd choice though.
The soundtrack to this game is great as well, with some pretty iconic tracks included that even someone like me who never played Doom instantly was familiar with, such as the Episode 1 Level 1 track "At Doom's Gate". The soundtrack has a few more bangers like this included, but I realized that it was overall a lot more atmospheric than I expected. I was expecting a bigger emphasis on metal music to emphasize the fast-paced demon-slaying that you are doing on-screen, but it was not the case for many levels. While I don't mind atmospheric sounds at all, I found that some tracks didn't fit so well at times.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
What id Software achieved for a first-person game at a time when no one else did is still commendable, even more so since Doom is the game where it visually comes together the best. Unlike Wolfenstein and especially Catacomb, Doom's visuals actually have variety. The game's levels also actually take place outside at times, giving you a view of the horizons. These don't look so great, funnily enough, but it's still something I appreciated. Enemy designs look better, weapon designs look better and the resolution is simply much higher here as well. The UI looks improved and cleaner too, though it's not what you would consider eye candy still. But the visual variety on display here is pretty encouraging after the jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein wasn't as big as I had hoped. Doom seems like the step in the direction I was more thinking of, and it's a big step at that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Thanks to each episode differing in design here, this is the first id Software FPS where there truly is a hint of atmosphere other than just using images from Hitler everywhere in Wolfenstein. You are a badass MF who is on Mars to beat the crap out of demons. That's it. Thanks to the game's visuals and the soundtrack, as well as the gun sounds and fast-paced gameplay, that feeling comes through pretty well.
CONTENT | 9/10
Tons of content here from official content to fan content, which officially found their way into versions of this game. Each main level also offers side-content to try to find, so you can spend a lot of time with this game. If you really click with the gameplay, you probably will.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
3 main episodes as well as one additional one. Each episode has 9 levels, the final one being a boss fight. Levels are actually pretty varied here and it will be rare for two levels to feel all that similar to each other in their design. Texture variety can still be improved and still will lead you to get lost here from time to time, but overall levels are complex enough without making it nearly impossible to find your way around. Finding maps for each level also helps a lot.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Not much to say here about one of the most influential games of all time.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
Tons of replay value here after your first playthrough. There are 5 difficulty options, a 4th additional episode, endless fan levels and then there is the completionism aspect to the main episodes, where you can try to get 100% enemy kills, items and secret areas, as well as try to beat the par time. A speedrunner's dream.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Doom is still a lot of fun to play. It didn't age as well as some other games of its time because the FPS genre simply evolved a ton since these early days, but you can still have a fun couple hours with it. I'm glad I played it and if you are someone who is curious about video game history, I'd recommend you to do the same.
If you are a fan of video games and of its history in particular, there is nothing I can add to the discourse around the original Doom that hasn't already been said by critics, fans, the original devs, damn politicians even, and you are likely aware how big a deal Doom has been and still is for the video gaming medium. By now, Doom is as old as it is iconic, having released on December 10, 1993 for MS-DOS originally. [Calling it old also makes my palms sweat as I'm typing this, considering how close we are getting to my birth date in terms of this challenge.]
Doom is not the first FPS game ever made, but it certainly is the most influential. I think it would be an apt comparison to think of it the same way you see how Souls-likes are discussed these days. "Soulslike" has become its own genre these days, and while Doom's genre is the FPS genre, for many years after its release, every FPS game would pretty much be looked at as "Doom-clones". Now there is a good reason for this beyond just the first-person view and shooting gameplay, which is that these games would often use the exact same style. UI blocking the bottom row of the screen horizontally, no vertical aim possible, 2.5D sprites and pretty much the same gameplay loop of a boomer / corridor shooter for all of them.
Doom is id Software's next FPS release after Wolfenstein 3D, and it won't take long to notice how much of an improvement Doom is over it in a lot of ways. Doom takes roughly 4-6 hours to finish (if you play the three main episodes) and has stayed relevant for a long time thanks to its mod-friendly nature and the countless fan levels that are available alongside the main game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
According to the manual, which gives you "the story so far", you are a space marine who got transferred to Mars. The "Union Aaresopace Corporation", your contractor, has been conducting secret projects on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, like creating portals or "gateways" that allowed for gadgets to be thrown into Phobos' portal and come back in Deimos' portal. Before the game starts, what happened is obvious. The experiments went terribly wrong, and demonic creatures started coming out of these portals, which is why you, later to be called "Doomguy", make your way to Phobos alongside a troop of other combatants, who all die while you're ordered to secure the perimeter of the base. Now you are on your own and need to get off the planet, which is where the game starts.
In-game, as soon as you start a new game, you load in with a pistol equipped and can start shooting. If you can appreciate the beauty of games that throw you straight into the action, that's all you need to know I presume. If you want to play games with stories, Doom doesn't offer much apart from the summary of the game's story setup in the manual I have just given, introducing us to an iconic video game character called 'Doomguy' and giving you another block of text at the end of each of the three episodes summarizing your achievement and telling you what happens next. When the first episode ends for example, the text tells you that you are not done yet and need to go into the depths of hell to fight even more demons and find a way out. During gameplay, there is no dialogue, no real environmental storytelling or anything of the sort.
Suffice to say, this is fine and not the reason people fell in love with Doom for.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Doom is THE prototypical boomer shooter. Just like in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, you traverse through a labyrinth / maze-like level, shooting every enemy in your way. You can pick up items that give you health, armor, ammo, a map and weapons, as you go. Most items are in your way and are supposed to be found, while some are hidden in hard to reach or completely hidden secret areas.
Each episode you play contains 9 episodes with a boss fight at the end. The main goal of each level is to figure out the way to the exit, the way to which gets more and more complex as levels become more complex as well. The game has a clever way of trying to get you playing for a lot more than one playthrough however by introducing multiple side-goals. Whenever you finish a level, you see the percentage for how many enemies on the level you killed, how many items you collected and how many secret areas you found. On top of that, there is a "par time" for each level. I didn't stay below that par time once, but it's a great little thing that gives you a benchmark for testing your skill.
The gameplay in Doom is a lot more refined than in Wolfenstein 3D thanks to a faster pace, better sound to the weapons and more weapon and enemy variety. You start out with just a pistol, but soon after will find a shotgun that saved my butt on multiple occasions, a chaingun that plows through pistol ammo at a much faster rate, a rocket launcher, a more basic plasma rifle, the BFG 9000 which shoots a plasma ball that destroys everything in sight pretty much and a chainsaw, if you want to get up close and personal. It's a good variety of weapons and depending on the difficulty you set, you will want to or need to switch often, as some weapons are more advantageous in certain situations and because there simply is not enough ammo to stick with one or two weapons throughout. While I found the variety that these weapons and the enemies presented to be satisfying, I would have liked to have a couple more enemy varities in the game to be honest. Overall, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but excluding bosses, there are less than 10 different enemies in the game.
The boss fights themselves could also have been better. There are three in the game. For the first two, all you need to do is dodge projectiles and fire back until the boss dies. For the third one, I didn't find another way to beat it other than to hide behind a structure at the center of the map and shoot it just as its legs came into sight. The boss has undodgeable, lock-on aim and can kill you in a couple seconds once it starts shooting. This game also has the same issue that the other id Software FPS games had, which is that if you die against a boss, you start on the same level but only have the pistol equipped. With what the level offers you in terms of weapons and ammo, it gets pretty tough to kill the boss without bringing all the other weapons and ammo with you from the previous level, so I recommend saving and reloading for every boss fight, if you do die.
Overall though, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay loop in Doom. It felt a lot more refined than Wolfenstein 3D and has aged well enough to still be a fun time today. Its length is also at a solid level and can easily be doubled, tripled or quadrupled through multiple playthroughs on higher difficulty levels and with a bigger focus on completionism.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting apart from some screams. The sound design in this game is great. While you have to judge this relative to sound in 1993, weapons sound a lot more realistic and have a lot more oomph to them and they sound miles better than the sounds of Wolfenstein. This applies to other sound effects as well, such as simply picking up items, which sounds a lot less obnoxious and discreet here than in Wolfenstein. Doomguy constantly moaning when you press space to interact with objects or walls is kind of an odd choice though.
The soundtrack to this game is great as well, with some pretty iconic tracks included that even someone like me who never played Doom instantly was familiar with, such as the Episode 1 Level 1 track "At Doom's Gate". The soundtrack has a few more bangers like this included, but I realized that it was overall a lot more atmospheric than I expected. I was expecting a bigger emphasis on metal music to emphasize the fast-paced demon-slaying that you are doing on-screen, but it was not the case for many levels. While I don't mind atmospheric sounds at all, I found that some tracks didn't fit so well at times.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
What id Software achieved for a first-person game at a time when no one else did is still commendable, even more so since Doom is the game where it visually comes together the best. Unlike Wolfenstein and especially Catacomb, Doom's visuals actually have variety. The game's levels also actually take place outside at times, giving you a view of the horizons. These don't look so great, funnily enough, but it's still something I appreciated. Enemy designs look better, weapon designs look better and the resolution is simply much higher here as well. The UI looks improved and cleaner too, though it's not what you would consider eye candy still. But the visual variety on display here is pretty encouraging after the jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein wasn't as big as I had hoped. Doom seems like the step in the direction I was more thinking of, and it's a big step at that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Thanks to each episode differing in design here, this is the first id Software FPS where there truly is a hint of atmosphere other than just using images from Hitler everywhere in Wolfenstein. You are a badass MF who is on Mars to beat the crap out of demons. That's it. Thanks to the game's visuals and the soundtrack, as well as the gun sounds and fast-paced gameplay, that feeling comes through pretty well.
CONTENT | 9/10
Tons of content here from official content to fan content, which officially found their way into versions of this game. Each main level also offers side-content to try to find, so you can spend a lot of time with this game. If you really click with the gameplay, you probably will.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
3 main episodes as well as one additional one. Each episode has 9 levels, the final one being a boss fight. Levels are actually pretty varied here and it will be rare for two levels to feel all that similar to each other in their design. Texture variety can still be improved and still will lead you to get lost here from time to time, but overall levels are complex enough without making it nearly impossible to find your way around. Finding maps for each level also helps a lot.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Not much to say here about one of the most influential games of all time.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
Tons of replay value here after your first playthrough. There are 5 difficulty options, a 4th additional episode, endless fan levels and then there is the completionism aspect to the main episodes, where you can try to get 100% enemy kills, items and secret areas, as well as try to beat the par time. A speedrunner's dream.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Doom is still a lot of fun to play. It didn't age as well as some other games of its time because the FPS genre simply evolved a ton since these early days, but you can still have a fun couple hours with it. I'm glad I played it and if you are someone who is curious about video game history, I'd recommend you to do the same.
(This is the 53rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Following 1990's 'Gargoyle's Quest', the next release in the 'Ghosts 'n Goblins' series is Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, the third main entry after the 1985 and 1988 Arcade games. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, developed and published by Capcom, is the first among these three to not be released for the arcade at all, instead focusing all efforts on a SNES release on October 4th, 1991 in Japan initially.
As the challenge started in 1990, I didn't play the other two games in the series, but I didn't have to to have heard of 1985's 'Ghosts 'n Goblins', which is infamous for being one of the hardest games of all time. Just by looking at gameplay for that game, I can tell you that 'Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts' for the SNES is a much easier game, though by no means easy.
Regarding the difficulty, there is a pretty noticeable difference in the NA and Europe versions. The European version is much simpler due to fewer enemies on screen, fewer of the harder enemies and, from what I can tell, less hits needed to take them out. Apart from the lower difficulty, this helps combat the slowdown effect that is more common in the USA version. A slowdown, for those who don't know, is literally that, the game slowing down. This happens when there are many sprites and/or special effects on-screen at the same time as, in this case for the SNES, it pushes the console to its limits. In the European version, I've experienced slowdown only once, and that was very brief. So if you want to play the game and are looking for an easier time, go with the European version.
Accessibility: I might lead off with this one from here on out for all games that have any sort of accessibility options, as those are still not common at all in 1991. For this game, as it is not originally designed for the Arcade I assume, there are some pretty nice options to make the experience even easier / more bearable for yourself. First, there are four difficulty levels, from beginner to professional. Higher difficulties increase enemy amount, boss health, how many money bags you need to collect to gain additional continues and a few other things I haven't noticed. In addition, you can choose the amount of lives you have from 1 to 9. Add to both of these that there is a checkpoint system and all this definitely makes the game much easier than the vanilla experience.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
Once again, you are knight Arthur. The setting for this one is described in the manual only. It's titled 'A Knight's Quest'.
"All hail, dauntless knight Arthur! Years ago you quelled the terrifying phantoms of the Ghoul Realm [...] and rescued Princess Guinevere. But now the kingdom is shrouded under an eerie spell. Sardius, the Emperor of Evil, has snatched Princess Guinevere [...]"
It's your typical old-school platformer sequel storyline set-up. Same things happened again, you must save everyone again. It's fine, you didn't play a game like this for the story back then.
In-game, the opening has Arthur and Guinevere in arms in her castle, as someone approaches through the large window behind them. It's Sardius, who kidnaps Princess Guinevere and flies off. Now you must go through 8 levels to defeat Sardius and get the Princess back. But there is a catch. Like is typical for this series, you don't go through the levels just once to win. Once you go through them for the first time, the Princess tells you that she was wearing a powerful bracelet. That bracelet was the reason she was kidnapped and using it is the only way you defeat Sardius. Luckily, she dropped it whilst kidnapped, so you gotta go through all levels and find it. That's the only dialogue in the game, so you're really not playing it for the story, but the game gets a bonus point for having continuity with its main character and, albeit just a tiny bit, for adding to its lore.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
Let's compare some of this to 1985's 'Ghosts n' Goblins' here to show you where this game changed and, usually, improved.
You control knight Arthur in a 2D platformer where you kill enemies with some sort of a projectile whilst jumping from platform to platform to avoid falling to your demise. There are 8 total levels and a boss at the end of each level. Apart from throwing your projectiles (lance, dagger, crossbow, scythe, torch, axe, tri-blade - yes, these all act as projectiles here), you can double jump and crouch, which I don't think you could do in the NES title.
You have two hit points, which is unchanged from the original, so get hit twice and you die. You either are sent back to the start or, if you've made it far enough, start at a check-point. Each level has a 5 minute time limit, something I never had an issue with. You either die or make it in time.
Many enemies are the same from the NES title, and act the same. Most infamously, there is the "Red Arremer Ace", the red devil-like creature that constantly avoids your hits and swoops down on you out of nowhere. This thing is just as annoying here as in the NES game, because the worst part is, if you don't kill it, it will follow you until you do. Plus, depending on the weapon you got - and plenty of them suck - it will take multiple hits to die, but you're likely going to get hit at least once before you get it down, and often enough twice, which, again, means you die. Horrible little creature.
Gameplay on the easier difficulty levels is mostly controlling well, but there are some issues you will have to live with no matter how many enemies are on screen. For example, jumps can be very hard to control sometimes, a frustration that is exacerbated by the fact that platforms you need to jump on are very small sometimes. Plus, you need to choose the direction you want to jump in while you press jump. No changing direction mid-air, so you can imagine how frustrating that is. On top of that, there are ladders you can climb here. For some reason, you need to hold 'Up' while climbing for much longer than the ladder appears to be long, as your character is stuck in an animation at the top of the ladder for a good second before he stands upright. This second is usually vital as some sort of enemy or obstacle is often placed near the top of ladders. And if you are on top of a ladder and just want to crouch, to for example break open a chest next to it, too bad, your character will start climbing down the ladder instead.
Boss fights in this one, for the most part, are surprisingly easy. Especially if you get the right weapons into the boss fight, you can make a lot of damage quickly.
There are some unique environmental challenges to each level, which I enjoyed. In the first, you need to stand on top of the right platforms while a wave forms, otherwise it will take you out. In another, an avalanche approaches and can throw you to the start of the area, so you need to climb ladders or stand on a platform above that the avalanche can't reach to avoid that. There are some other things like that, which adds to the variety in gameplay, which otherwise isn't all too varied but mostly enjoyable.
The end game condition being that you have to find a bracelet does tank the overall fun factor however, because to get it, you need to open chest after chest without getting hit once until you can upgrade to the golden armor, at which point one of the next chests will reveal the bracelet. Get hit once and you lose your armor and need to keep opening chest after chest once again, because chest #1 gives you iron armor, then a random number of chests later you'll find emerald armor and after another random number of chests later you'll find the gold armor, so this takes a while.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. The sound design is fairly average, though with a few sound effects that are odd picks. For example, destroying stone statues gives off the sound of glass breaking. The soundtrack overall is quite fitting with the overall atmosphere that is present here, with some spooky tracks to enhance the immersion. Wouldn't place the OST among the greats, but fits the game well.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Compared to the NES game, this is a great jump in graphical quality in pretty much every aspect. Not a surprise given the jump to the SNES, but this definitely gives off sequel vibes just based on that. The devs did a great job in the enemy design and put plenty of effort in animations to make the game feel much more lively. A nice touch is that your health is indicated by what you're wearing. Wearing armor means you can get hit once without dying.
The first 5 levels have a pretty unique design and weather conditions. Stage 6 to 8 all play in Sardius castle and look similar.
ATMOSPHERE | 7/10
A spooky atmosphere is present throughout. Though the fact that you walk around in your underwear when one hit away from death is kind of an odd pick as it works contra to the atmosphere the game is going for otherwise.
CONTENT | 6/10
The game is not overly long, and most of the duration comes from the trial and error due to the difficulty. Apart from that, there is a slightly average amount of content here for a platformer, with more weapons than usual, more enemy variety than usual and different types of environmental challenges.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Of the eight levels in this game, the final level is just the boss fight with Sardius, the two preceding ones are relatively similar (and one is very short) and then you have five that are unique in design. The mission design for these is pretty basic. Go through a level, defeat the boss at the end to move forward. The time limit present is not that relevant and I never had any issues with it. Having to go through the same levels with a slight increase in difficulty again after going through them once already is something I personally didn't necessarily enjoy, but your experience might vary there.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
It's pretty much the same game compared to the other ones. The most innovative part about this game is the fact that it was made much more accessible to players of lower skill.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Apart from trying to beat your high score and trying to win with higher lives selected, you can also try to win the game on higher difficulty levels.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times. You'll experience a bit of slowdown, if you play the US version, so I'd recommend the European one.
OVERALL | 59/100
A very skippable game. It doesn't take advantage of the SNES at all from a graphical and technical standpoint, it's a much worse version than the one for the Arcades, it's in general a rather basic platformer, very repetitive and lacks features. Not the worst game of the year, but a Top 5 contender.
Following 1990's 'Gargoyle's Quest', the next release in the 'Ghosts 'n Goblins' series is Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, the third main entry after the 1985 and 1988 Arcade games. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, developed and published by Capcom, is the first among these three to not be released for the arcade at all, instead focusing all efforts on a SNES release on October 4th, 1991 in Japan initially.
As the challenge started in 1990, I didn't play the other two games in the series, but I didn't have to to have heard of 1985's 'Ghosts 'n Goblins', which is infamous for being one of the hardest games of all time. Just by looking at gameplay for that game, I can tell you that 'Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts' for the SNES is a much easier game, though by no means easy.
Regarding the difficulty, there is a pretty noticeable difference in the NA and Europe versions. The European version is much simpler due to fewer enemies on screen, fewer of the harder enemies and, from what I can tell, less hits needed to take them out. Apart from the lower difficulty, this helps combat the slowdown effect that is more common in the USA version. A slowdown, for those who don't know, is literally that, the game slowing down. This happens when there are many sprites and/or special effects on-screen at the same time as, in this case for the SNES, it pushes the console to its limits. In the European version, I've experienced slowdown only once, and that was very brief. So if you want to play the game and are looking for an easier time, go with the European version.
Accessibility: I might lead off with this one from here on out for all games that have any sort of accessibility options, as those are still not common at all in 1991. For this game, as it is not originally designed for the Arcade I assume, there are some pretty nice options to make the experience even easier / more bearable for yourself. First, there are four difficulty levels, from beginner to professional. Higher difficulties increase enemy amount, boss health, how many money bags you need to collect to gain additional continues and a few other things I haven't noticed. In addition, you can choose the amount of lives you have from 1 to 9. Add to both of these that there is a checkpoint system and all this definitely makes the game much easier than the vanilla experience.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
Once again, you are knight Arthur. The setting for this one is described in the manual only. It's titled 'A Knight's Quest'.
"All hail, dauntless knight Arthur! Years ago you quelled the terrifying phantoms of the Ghoul Realm [...] and rescued Princess Guinevere. But now the kingdom is shrouded under an eerie spell. Sardius, the Emperor of Evil, has snatched Princess Guinevere [...]"
It's your typical old-school platformer sequel storyline set-up. Same things happened again, you must save everyone again. It's fine, you didn't play a game like this for the story back then.
In-game, the opening has Arthur and Guinevere in arms in her castle, as someone approaches through the large window behind them. It's Sardius, who kidnaps Princess Guinevere and flies off. Now you must go through 8 levels to defeat Sardius and get the Princess back. But there is a catch. Like is typical for this series, you don't go through the levels just once to win. Once you go through them for the first time, the Princess tells you that she was wearing a powerful bracelet. That bracelet was the reason she was kidnapped and using it is the only way you defeat Sardius. Luckily, she dropped it whilst kidnapped, so you gotta go through all levels and find it. That's the only dialogue in the game, so you're really not playing it for the story, but the game gets a bonus point for having continuity with its main character and, albeit just a tiny bit, for adding to its lore.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
Let's compare some of this to 1985's 'Ghosts n' Goblins' here to show you where this game changed and, usually, improved.
You control knight Arthur in a 2D platformer where you kill enemies with some sort of a projectile whilst jumping from platform to platform to avoid falling to your demise. There are 8 total levels and a boss at the end of each level. Apart from throwing your projectiles (lance, dagger, crossbow, scythe, torch, axe, tri-blade - yes, these all act as projectiles here), you can double jump and crouch, which I don't think you could do in the NES title.
You have two hit points, which is unchanged from the original, so get hit twice and you die. You either are sent back to the start or, if you've made it far enough, start at a check-point. Each level has a 5 minute time limit, something I never had an issue with. You either die or make it in time.
Many enemies are the same from the NES title, and act the same. Most infamously, there is the "Red Arremer Ace", the red devil-like creature that constantly avoids your hits and swoops down on you out of nowhere. This thing is just as annoying here as in the NES game, because the worst part is, if you don't kill it, it will follow you until you do. Plus, depending on the weapon you got - and plenty of them suck - it will take multiple hits to die, but you're likely going to get hit at least once before you get it down, and often enough twice, which, again, means you die. Horrible little creature.
Gameplay on the easier difficulty levels is mostly controlling well, but there are some issues you will have to live with no matter how many enemies are on screen. For example, jumps can be very hard to control sometimes, a frustration that is exacerbated by the fact that platforms you need to jump on are very small sometimes. Plus, you need to choose the direction you want to jump in while you press jump. No changing direction mid-air, so you can imagine how frustrating that is. On top of that, there are ladders you can climb here. For some reason, you need to hold 'Up' while climbing for much longer than the ladder appears to be long, as your character is stuck in an animation at the top of the ladder for a good second before he stands upright. This second is usually vital as some sort of enemy or obstacle is often placed near the top of ladders. And if you are on top of a ladder and just want to crouch, to for example break open a chest next to it, too bad, your character will start climbing down the ladder instead.
Boss fights in this one, for the most part, are surprisingly easy. Especially if you get the right weapons into the boss fight, you can make a lot of damage quickly.
There are some unique environmental challenges to each level, which I enjoyed. In the first, you need to stand on top of the right platforms while a wave forms, otherwise it will take you out. In another, an avalanche approaches and can throw you to the start of the area, so you need to climb ladders or stand on a platform above that the avalanche can't reach to avoid that. There are some other things like that, which adds to the variety in gameplay, which otherwise isn't all too varied but mostly enjoyable.
The end game condition being that you have to find a bracelet does tank the overall fun factor however, because to get it, you need to open chest after chest without getting hit once until you can upgrade to the golden armor, at which point one of the next chests will reveal the bracelet. Get hit once and you lose your armor and need to keep opening chest after chest once again, because chest #1 gives you iron armor, then a random number of chests later you'll find emerald armor and after another random number of chests later you'll find the gold armor, so this takes a while.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. The sound design is fairly average, though with a few sound effects that are odd picks. For example, destroying stone statues gives off the sound of glass breaking. The soundtrack overall is quite fitting with the overall atmosphere that is present here, with some spooky tracks to enhance the immersion. Wouldn't place the OST among the greats, but fits the game well.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Compared to the NES game, this is a great jump in graphical quality in pretty much every aspect. Not a surprise given the jump to the SNES, but this definitely gives off sequel vibes just based on that. The devs did a great job in the enemy design and put plenty of effort in animations to make the game feel much more lively. A nice touch is that your health is indicated by what you're wearing. Wearing armor means you can get hit once without dying.
The first 5 levels have a pretty unique design and weather conditions. Stage 6 to 8 all play in Sardius castle and look similar.
ATMOSPHERE | 7/10
A spooky atmosphere is present throughout. Though the fact that you walk around in your underwear when one hit away from death is kind of an odd pick as it works contra to the atmosphere the game is going for otherwise.
CONTENT | 6/10
The game is not overly long, and most of the duration comes from the trial and error due to the difficulty. Apart from that, there is a slightly average amount of content here for a platformer, with more weapons than usual, more enemy variety than usual and different types of environmental challenges.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Of the eight levels in this game, the final level is just the boss fight with Sardius, the two preceding ones are relatively similar (and one is very short) and then you have five that are unique in design. The mission design for these is pretty basic. Go through a level, defeat the boss at the end to move forward. The time limit present is not that relevant and I never had any issues with it. Having to go through the same levels with a slight increase in difficulty again after going through them once already is something I personally didn't necessarily enjoy, but your experience might vary there.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
It's pretty much the same game compared to the other ones. The most innovative part about this game is the fact that it was made much more accessible to players of lower skill.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Apart from trying to beat your high score and trying to win with higher lives selected, you can also try to win the game on higher difficulty levels.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times. You'll experience a bit of slowdown, if you play the US version, so I'd recommend the European one.
OVERALL | 59/100
A very skippable game. It doesn't take advantage of the SNES at all from a graphical and technical standpoint, it's a much worse version than the one for the Arcades, it's in general a rather basic platformer, very repetitive and lacks features. Not the worst game of the year, but a Top 5 contender.
1994
(This is the 104th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Thanks to this challenge I finally played so many beloved Nintendo franchises for the first time in my life. Metroid, Zelda, Kirby and now, I finally played my first ever Donkey Kong game: Donkey Kong Country. I knew next to nothing about this game before playing it and I still know next to nothing about the rest of the games, but after playing Donkey Kong Country, I'm definitely excited to check out whichever games next for this character.
Donkey Kong Country released on November 18, 1994 and was developed by Rare. Rare developed 3 games before this that I actually played, namely Captain Skyhawk, Battletoads and The Amazing Spider-Man for the GameBoy. While I didn't necessarily enjoy all of these games (I'm looking at you Amazing Spider-Man), I saw even then that Rare are capable of developing good games, it's just gonna be a budgetary thing that'll decide the overall quality. So Rare developing a game for Nintendo sounded like a great combo before playing this, and turns out, it was.
Donkey Kong Country went on to sell over 9 million copies (3rd best-selling SNES game, best Donkey Kong game), which led to two sequels on the SNES that released in 95 and 96, which I'll check out for sure. But not before sharing my thoughts on this game. :)
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
There is no actual storytelling in the game. You control Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong to rid Donkey Kong Island of the Kremlings and to reclaim your bananas that were stolen. This is all explained in the manual exclusively, which has a nice, longer-than-usual story explaining the setting for the game. In the game itself, there are a few characters you meet who will help you out. Funky Kong, the cool dudebro surfer gorilla, who flings you back to a previously finished level really fast if you want to, Candy Kong, Donkey Kong's love interest according to the manual who saves your game, and Cranky Kong, an elderly and wise gorilla who gives you tips. His bio is pretty hilarious because he is apparently the Donkey Kong who featured in the games from the 80s and wants nothing to do with the fancy visuals of (then-)modern day. Legend.
But you're not gonna be playing this for the story and characters, but for the gameplay, the levels and the music.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Donkey Kong Country is a 2D platformer like many others before it. It differentiates itself mainly due to its main character and his barrel-flinging escapades, as well as the amount of space he takes up in the otherwise rather small levels. This changes the dynamic of avoiding enemies and objects somewhat because you have to be more precise with your inputs in many of the levels, which is one of the main reasons why Donkey Kong Country is not as easy as it may seem. There is a save system in place, both in-game and in-emulator (if you want), as well as a generous number of extra lives you can get as you play, so beating the game is by no means impossible, but you'll die more often than you think.
Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong run alongside each other and you can swap them out whenever you want. That's worth it at specific points because Diddy Kong is smaller (good for water levels), runs faster and jumps higher, but Donkey Kong is stronger (kills enemies by jumping on them just once instead of twice), grabs vines automatically and can hold a barrel over his head instead of just in front of him, which matters depending on enemy positioning.
There are many obstacles to face in the game, and they continuously change up as you play. The game uses the same items and enemies throughout, but makes use of them pretty creatively. The main challenges include avoiding enemies or killing them by jumping on top of them / rolling into them, grabbing ropes/vines to jump across platforms, jumping into barrels which catapult you forward and chaining together some of these challenges to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which unlock bonus rooms. There are also mine cart levels, underwater levels and rainy levels which make the floor slippery (always love those), so the challenge is constant and varied enough. The difficulty is mostly fair, but not perfect.
Each world ends with a boss fight. These are pretty simple, which is typical for Nintendo platformers I find. Find a good time to jump on top of the enemy, repeat this 5 times (with Donkey Kong) and the enemy is down. Apart from the final boss, I found these to all be easy.
Overall, it's a fun loop and it's one of the better platformers for its time. Donkey Kong's move set is more limited than I would have liked, so I hope the sequels improve upon that, but gameplay is enjoyable enough to carry you through as you listen to the music and take in the great visual style.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
There is actually voice acting here, though mainly for Donkey Kong yelling. If you're talking about audio in Donkey Kong Country though, you're mainly gonna talk about its soundtrack. Beloved by just about each of the 9+ million individuals who bought it and the many more millions who emulated the game through other means, Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack is just as much part of the experience as the gameplay.
Having listened to the soundtrack for hours while playing the game and a couple more hours in addition to that, I can both definitely say that it's a great soundtrack, but also that I wouldn't put it among my favorites on the SNES. The soundtrack has a distinctive quality, which is that pretty much all of the tracks are nice to listen to and there are no real stinkers included, but the soundtrack, for me, doesn't have that many tracks that make me stop and listen to them like I have a tendency to. Games like A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania, Super Metroid, Super Mario World etc. come to mind.
What makes Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack additionally to me though is that I did not at all expect it to be this vibey and play with different themes like it did. I expected cheerful and jolly music throughout while you run around carefree from level to level. As discussed, the game is much harder than I would have anticipated as well, so it's only fitting I guess that from time to time, the music can set an almost dangerous vibe. If you wouldn't agree on dangerous, I'm sure you can agree that some tracks set a mysterious, adventurous and even thoughtful tone from time to time. Then there is a track like Acquatic Ambience, which sounds incredibly soothing and chill instead of hyper and energetic like I would have expected.
In general, the water levels have some of the better tracks in this game, which I'm thankful for, because the levels themselves sucked. So if you do play Donkey Kong Country, I hope the levels themselves don't ruin the songs for you. Overall, a great soundtrack by David Wise, who is another composer I can add to the list of "one's to look out for".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
Wow. To call Donkey Kong Country's visuals unique would be an understatement. If you are looking for some of the best looking games of the early 90s, put Donkey Kong Country on your list asap. It's really worth reading up on the technology used to make these sprites come to life, but suffice it to say it's impressive how Rare pulled this off. I have no real working knowledge of this stuff, but if I understand it correctly, they managed to turn 3D geometry into 2D images to use in this game, and whatever way would be correct to explain it, all you need to know is that it looks great.
Environments from the jungles to the mines also look great to extend the vibes and emotions that are put forth by the soundtrack, as well as simply being pleasing to look at. Some locations are repeated here, which is worth pointing out, but thanks to obstacles/challenges constantly varying from level to level, the levels still feel much more distinct than different-looking levels in some other platformers were the challenge stays static.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
I've gone over the vibes and emotions I got from playing the game and how it is way different from what I would have anticipated. Apart from the whimsical, quirky characters that aid Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong in their adventure, there is no storytelling or anything here, so it's important for the music and visuals to set the main tone for this game and if you're like me and have played so many of these cheerful platformers that give off "low stake, made for children" vibes (and I don't mean this negatively, I enjoy them myself to this day), you might feel some fatigue from it from time to time. So to have Donkey Kong Country switch up the tone here and there was a very welcome change and definitely will make the game stick with me longer than some of its contemporaries.
CONTENT | 7/10
The content in this game is very good, but it doesn't feel like it has the budget of a Mario game for example. This is understandable for a video game character that remained dormant for a while, but is noteworthy nonetheless. Donkey Kong has a lack of skills, enemies and objects repeat pretty early on (even though their placement creatively differs regularly) and levels provide lots of fun, but not a lot of depth to them. It has the feeling of the start to something bigger to it in many ways.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
This game has a lot of levels. While I'd consider most to be good and some to be excellent, there were some levels I really didn't like. A lot of it has to do with the space given to your character and the timing of button presses. The windows to jump in order to reach a platform or barely just get past an enemy (like those damn zingers) felt too short many times. Two things come to mind especially. First, it's all the levels that include ropes. Half the time I'm struggling getting Donkey Kong to hold on, and the other half of the time where I succeed, I felt like I always would eventually hit my head or my legs on one of the zingers patrolling all the ropes in this world. The other situation where this issue arises is during water levels, where fish are seemingly everywhere and you don't have enough control nor space to maneuver past them reliably, at least as a new player. So if you find yourselves in these situations, best of luck to ya.
Apart from that though, there is more variety here than you'd expect based on the number of enemy types and the limited feature set for Donkey Kong. The barrel levels were fun, the mine cart levels, ditto. Finding secret areas is neat, riding one of the multiple types of animals a la Yoshi is cool too. I thought the mini games weren't as exciting as in Mario games for example, and the last boss was pretty annoying, so there is lots of good and bad here for me, though overall the good definitely wins.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The innovation here definitely comes from the graphics. Apart from that, the level design and gameplay has similarities to many platformers of its time, and in many ways to Mario as well. It's just that Donkey Kong Country has passion oozing off of it from every direction and also controls well for the most part, which is more than I can say for most platformers in this era of gaming.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
After beating this, you can try and find more of the bonus levels to get closer to 101% completion, though as someone who has never done a speedrun or followed the scene, I still don't know what the additional percentages after 100 mean in these games.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 74/100
A must-play for platforming fans. Some of the most unique visuals for its time, a great soundtrack, fun levels (but also some frustrating ones) and overall just a charming game. I wouldn't call it my 3rd favorite SNES game like its sales would suggest, but I'm positive someone else out there will and I can definitely see their point.
Thanks to this challenge I finally played so many beloved Nintendo franchises for the first time in my life. Metroid, Zelda, Kirby and now, I finally played my first ever Donkey Kong game: Donkey Kong Country. I knew next to nothing about this game before playing it and I still know next to nothing about the rest of the games, but after playing Donkey Kong Country, I'm definitely excited to check out whichever games next for this character.
Donkey Kong Country released on November 18, 1994 and was developed by Rare. Rare developed 3 games before this that I actually played, namely Captain Skyhawk, Battletoads and The Amazing Spider-Man for the GameBoy. While I didn't necessarily enjoy all of these games (I'm looking at you Amazing Spider-Man), I saw even then that Rare are capable of developing good games, it's just gonna be a budgetary thing that'll decide the overall quality. So Rare developing a game for Nintendo sounded like a great combo before playing this, and turns out, it was.
Donkey Kong Country went on to sell over 9 million copies (3rd best-selling SNES game, best Donkey Kong game), which led to two sequels on the SNES that released in 95 and 96, which I'll check out for sure. But not before sharing my thoughts on this game. :)
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
There is no actual storytelling in the game. You control Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong to rid Donkey Kong Island of the Kremlings and to reclaim your bananas that were stolen. This is all explained in the manual exclusively, which has a nice, longer-than-usual story explaining the setting for the game. In the game itself, there are a few characters you meet who will help you out. Funky Kong, the cool dudebro surfer gorilla, who flings you back to a previously finished level really fast if you want to, Candy Kong, Donkey Kong's love interest according to the manual who saves your game, and Cranky Kong, an elderly and wise gorilla who gives you tips. His bio is pretty hilarious because he is apparently the Donkey Kong who featured in the games from the 80s and wants nothing to do with the fancy visuals of (then-)modern day. Legend.
But you're not gonna be playing this for the story and characters, but for the gameplay, the levels and the music.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Donkey Kong Country is a 2D platformer like many others before it. It differentiates itself mainly due to its main character and his barrel-flinging escapades, as well as the amount of space he takes up in the otherwise rather small levels. This changes the dynamic of avoiding enemies and objects somewhat because you have to be more precise with your inputs in many of the levels, which is one of the main reasons why Donkey Kong Country is not as easy as it may seem. There is a save system in place, both in-game and in-emulator (if you want), as well as a generous number of extra lives you can get as you play, so beating the game is by no means impossible, but you'll die more often than you think.
Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong run alongside each other and you can swap them out whenever you want. That's worth it at specific points because Diddy Kong is smaller (good for water levels), runs faster and jumps higher, but Donkey Kong is stronger (kills enemies by jumping on them just once instead of twice), grabs vines automatically and can hold a barrel over his head instead of just in front of him, which matters depending on enemy positioning.
There are many obstacles to face in the game, and they continuously change up as you play. The game uses the same items and enemies throughout, but makes use of them pretty creatively. The main challenges include avoiding enemies or killing them by jumping on top of them / rolling into them, grabbing ropes/vines to jump across platforms, jumping into barrels which catapult you forward and chaining together some of these challenges to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which unlock bonus rooms. There are also mine cart levels, underwater levels and rainy levels which make the floor slippery (always love those), so the challenge is constant and varied enough. The difficulty is mostly fair, but not perfect.
Each world ends with a boss fight. These are pretty simple, which is typical for Nintendo platformers I find. Find a good time to jump on top of the enemy, repeat this 5 times (with Donkey Kong) and the enemy is down. Apart from the final boss, I found these to all be easy.
Overall, it's a fun loop and it's one of the better platformers for its time. Donkey Kong's move set is more limited than I would have liked, so I hope the sequels improve upon that, but gameplay is enjoyable enough to carry you through as you listen to the music and take in the great visual style.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
There is actually voice acting here, though mainly for Donkey Kong yelling. If you're talking about audio in Donkey Kong Country though, you're mainly gonna talk about its soundtrack. Beloved by just about each of the 9+ million individuals who bought it and the many more millions who emulated the game through other means, Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack is just as much part of the experience as the gameplay.
Having listened to the soundtrack for hours while playing the game and a couple more hours in addition to that, I can both definitely say that it's a great soundtrack, but also that I wouldn't put it among my favorites on the SNES. The soundtrack has a distinctive quality, which is that pretty much all of the tracks are nice to listen to and there are no real stinkers included, but the soundtrack, for me, doesn't have that many tracks that make me stop and listen to them like I have a tendency to. Games like A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania, Super Metroid, Super Mario World etc. come to mind.
What makes Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack additionally to me though is that I did not at all expect it to be this vibey and play with different themes like it did. I expected cheerful and jolly music throughout while you run around carefree from level to level. As discussed, the game is much harder than I would have anticipated as well, so it's only fitting I guess that from time to time, the music can set an almost dangerous vibe. If you wouldn't agree on dangerous, I'm sure you can agree that some tracks set a mysterious, adventurous and even thoughtful tone from time to time. Then there is a track like Acquatic Ambience, which sounds incredibly soothing and chill instead of hyper and energetic like I would have expected.
In general, the water levels have some of the better tracks in this game, which I'm thankful for, because the levels themselves sucked. So if you do play Donkey Kong Country, I hope the levels themselves don't ruin the songs for you. Overall, a great soundtrack by David Wise, who is another composer I can add to the list of "one's to look out for".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
Wow. To call Donkey Kong Country's visuals unique would be an understatement. If you are looking for some of the best looking games of the early 90s, put Donkey Kong Country on your list asap. It's really worth reading up on the technology used to make these sprites come to life, but suffice it to say it's impressive how Rare pulled this off. I have no real working knowledge of this stuff, but if I understand it correctly, they managed to turn 3D geometry into 2D images to use in this game, and whatever way would be correct to explain it, all you need to know is that it looks great.
Environments from the jungles to the mines also look great to extend the vibes and emotions that are put forth by the soundtrack, as well as simply being pleasing to look at. Some locations are repeated here, which is worth pointing out, but thanks to obstacles/challenges constantly varying from level to level, the levels still feel much more distinct than different-looking levels in some other platformers were the challenge stays static.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
I've gone over the vibes and emotions I got from playing the game and how it is way different from what I would have anticipated. Apart from the whimsical, quirky characters that aid Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong in their adventure, there is no storytelling or anything here, so it's important for the music and visuals to set the main tone for this game and if you're like me and have played so many of these cheerful platformers that give off "low stake, made for children" vibes (and I don't mean this negatively, I enjoy them myself to this day), you might feel some fatigue from it from time to time. So to have Donkey Kong Country switch up the tone here and there was a very welcome change and definitely will make the game stick with me longer than some of its contemporaries.
CONTENT | 7/10
The content in this game is very good, but it doesn't feel like it has the budget of a Mario game for example. This is understandable for a video game character that remained dormant for a while, but is noteworthy nonetheless. Donkey Kong has a lack of skills, enemies and objects repeat pretty early on (even though their placement creatively differs regularly) and levels provide lots of fun, but not a lot of depth to them. It has the feeling of the start to something bigger to it in many ways.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
This game has a lot of levels. While I'd consider most to be good and some to be excellent, there were some levels I really didn't like. A lot of it has to do with the space given to your character and the timing of button presses. The windows to jump in order to reach a platform or barely just get past an enemy (like those damn zingers) felt too short many times. Two things come to mind especially. First, it's all the levels that include ropes. Half the time I'm struggling getting Donkey Kong to hold on, and the other half of the time where I succeed, I felt like I always would eventually hit my head or my legs on one of the zingers patrolling all the ropes in this world. The other situation where this issue arises is during water levels, where fish are seemingly everywhere and you don't have enough control nor space to maneuver past them reliably, at least as a new player. So if you find yourselves in these situations, best of luck to ya.
Apart from that though, there is more variety here than you'd expect based on the number of enemy types and the limited feature set for Donkey Kong. The barrel levels were fun, the mine cart levels, ditto. Finding secret areas is neat, riding one of the multiple types of animals a la Yoshi is cool too. I thought the mini games weren't as exciting as in Mario games for example, and the last boss was pretty annoying, so there is lots of good and bad here for me, though overall the good definitely wins.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The innovation here definitely comes from the graphics. Apart from that, the level design and gameplay has similarities to many platformers of its time, and in many ways to Mario as well. It's just that Donkey Kong Country has passion oozing off of it from every direction and also controls well for the most part, which is more than I can say for most platformers in this era of gaming.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
After beating this, you can try and find more of the bonus levels to get closer to 101% completion, though as someone who has never done a speedrun or followed the scene, I still don't know what the additional percentages after 100 mean in these games.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 74/100
A must-play for platforming fans. Some of the most unique visuals for its time, a great soundtrack, fun levels (but also some frustrating ones) and overall just a charming game. I wouldn't call it my 3rd favorite SNES game like its sales would suggest, but I'm positive someone else out there will and I can definitely see their point.