fe17
1990
(This is the 31st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
You'll see many people compare StarTropics to The Legend of Zelda, and while I never played the first two Zelda's released in 86/87, I too can see the resemblance slash inspiration. Another game I would compare this to is something like Crystalis, a JRPG from earlier in 1990 that too had some unique mechanics similar to this game that was half-fun, half-detrimental to the gameplay and we'll get over that later on in the review. A big similarity my ears noticed when playing this however was the soundtrack and late-game level design. I was wondering if the game's had the same composer but nope, doesn't look like it. Either way, listen to some of the late game songs of StarTropics and the early game overworld track of Crystalis and you probably will hear the similarities as well. In addition, in both games you find yourself in a futuristic dungeon late-game.
Of course, StarTropics has none of the RPG mechanics, as it's an Action Adventure game, and ... did you know that this is a rare Japanese developed game that only released in the West? Yes, seriously. In NA in December 1990, and in EU in August 1992.
I'm not sure what the idea behind that was, because apart from calling every town something-something-cola, giving characters generic American names, mentioning 1492 and 1776 as ID codes and referencing Indiana Jones (?), nothing really screams "lots of appeal in the West". The game has a tropical island theme, your character literally has no recognizability (Mike, brown hair, blue shirt, your average kiddo) and, while I actually appreciated how the storytelling was more geared towards children (NPCs ask you if they should repeat "complicated" story parts, so that you can read them over and over again to get the story), the gameplay on the other hand is so difficult that I'm not sure who their target audience was exactly.
Let's take a step back. What do you do in StarTropics? You play Mike, an average kid who arrives at C-Land (shaped like a C, you see. And each village name ends with cola) in a damn helicopter. Village people say that you're an "ace pitcher", a reference made at the start twice and never again, and you find out that your scientist uncle has gone missing. In 8 chapters, you gotta try to find him and figure out what happened. Each chapter has a dungeon and potentially some overworld puzzles in it. All told, you'll probably spent around 10 hours with this game if you don't use any save states. If you use save states like me to "adjust" the checkpoint system in this game, you'll probably beat it in the time I did, which was around 6 hours.
There are two parts in this game, the overworld and the dungeons. In the overworld, you walk around the bland island and enter villages to talk to NPCs. Sometimes villages are harder to get to and you have to find secret passages to get there. You get a submarine later on to travel on water and get a robot buddy as well.
In the dungeons, there is a unique mechanic in this game, which is that there are special green tiles that you have to step on to either activate buttons that open doors, or you have to jump on them in a specific order to avoid falling into water or other liquids that lead to your death. It's a neat puzzle mechanic when used right and not an issue in itself, but the controls in this game are annoying and require some getting used to. When more enemies appear at once later in the game, it also becomes clear that the controls/mechanics weren't properly balanced with the enemies, because it becomes near-impossible to avoid getting hit.
Basically, to turn somewhere, you first press the button to look that way. Only by pressing it once more or holding down the button for a second longer does your character start walking that way. With the green tiles, you can actually chain jumps better, but it gets really repetitive after a while to jump, jump, jump, unlock a button, jump, jump over to the button, jump on it to press it and jump all the way back to the now-open door. Plus you have to jump one by one, but many enemies can simply walk over them, so it often happens that they outpace you and touch you to deal damage. Finally, there are a few awful sections where these tiles disappear for a second and then reappear for a second. That itself is OK, having to time your jumps is a nice challenge. But in these instances, three back to back tiles disappear, and the only way to jump through all of them is by PERFECTLY timing your first jump and mashing the jump button as fast as you can. Chances are, you'll fail your first 10 attempts anyway because it's that unforgiving.
Combat itself, if enemies are not so aplenty that they get on your nerves, is actually fine. You start off with a yo-yo, but get access to guns, ninja stars, reflecting shields and so on later on. There are also roller-skaters that attack every enemy on screen at the same time and illuminating staffs that reveal hiding ghosts. Lots of cool stuff that loses some of its magic due to the game's odd desire to be more challenging than it should be.
The story has a satisfying conclusion but is very simple otherwise. Something a kid will definitely enjoy as it's more fleshed out than many similar games and less prone to filler-talk. The soundtrack is solid. Graphics are too repetitive and bland in the overworld especially, but don't look bad.
Between the 8 dungeons, there are multiple that look unique (like the ghost town and final dungeon) and there is a tiny bit of reward for exploration, which is nice, in the form of health potions and permanent health rewards.
OVERALL
If you're into this sort of game and the old school look doesn't bother you, StarTropics is definitely a 2D Action Adventure worth adding to your play-list. It not being an RPG is great because with the stories these games had back in the day, those complicated RPG-features often drag games down for these retro-playthroughs. StarTropics is much more efficient in its gameplay as a result, even if being repetitive and unnecessarily difficult (especially late game) are flaws that pop up here.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Couldn't find anything apart from a Walkthrough/Guide by Nintendo Power
You'll see many people compare StarTropics to The Legend of Zelda, and while I never played the first two Zelda's released in 86/87, I too can see the resemblance slash inspiration. Another game I would compare this to is something like Crystalis, a JRPG from earlier in 1990 that too had some unique mechanics similar to this game that was half-fun, half-detrimental to the gameplay and we'll get over that later on in the review. A big similarity my ears noticed when playing this however was the soundtrack and late-game level design. I was wondering if the game's had the same composer but nope, doesn't look like it. Either way, listen to some of the late game songs of StarTropics and the early game overworld track of Crystalis and you probably will hear the similarities as well. In addition, in both games you find yourself in a futuristic dungeon late-game.
Of course, StarTropics has none of the RPG mechanics, as it's an Action Adventure game, and ... did you know that this is a rare Japanese developed game that only released in the West? Yes, seriously. In NA in December 1990, and in EU in August 1992.
I'm not sure what the idea behind that was, because apart from calling every town something-something-cola, giving characters generic American names, mentioning 1492 and 1776 as ID codes and referencing Indiana Jones (?), nothing really screams "lots of appeal in the West". The game has a tropical island theme, your character literally has no recognizability (Mike, brown hair, blue shirt, your average kiddo) and, while I actually appreciated how the storytelling was more geared towards children (NPCs ask you if they should repeat "complicated" story parts, so that you can read them over and over again to get the story), the gameplay on the other hand is so difficult that I'm not sure who their target audience was exactly.
Let's take a step back. What do you do in StarTropics? You play Mike, an average kid who arrives at C-Land (shaped like a C, you see. And each village name ends with cola) in a damn helicopter. Village people say that you're an "ace pitcher", a reference made at the start twice and never again, and you find out that your scientist uncle has gone missing. In 8 chapters, you gotta try to find him and figure out what happened. Each chapter has a dungeon and potentially some overworld puzzles in it. All told, you'll probably spent around 10 hours with this game if you don't use any save states. If you use save states like me to "adjust" the checkpoint system in this game, you'll probably beat it in the time I did, which was around 6 hours.
There are two parts in this game, the overworld and the dungeons. In the overworld, you walk around the bland island and enter villages to talk to NPCs. Sometimes villages are harder to get to and you have to find secret passages to get there. You get a submarine later on to travel on water and get a robot buddy as well.
In the dungeons, there is a unique mechanic in this game, which is that there are special green tiles that you have to step on to either activate buttons that open doors, or you have to jump on them in a specific order to avoid falling into water or other liquids that lead to your death. It's a neat puzzle mechanic when used right and not an issue in itself, but the controls in this game are annoying and require some getting used to. When more enemies appear at once later in the game, it also becomes clear that the controls/mechanics weren't properly balanced with the enemies, because it becomes near-impossible to avoid getting hit.
Basically, to turn somewhere, you first press the button to look that way. Only by pressing it once more or holding down the button for a second longer does your character start walking that way. With the green tiles, you can actually chain jumps better, but it gets really repetitive after a while to jump, jump, jump, unlock a button, jump, jump over to the button, jump on it to press it and jump all the way back to the now-open door. Plus you have to jump one by one, but many enemies can simply walk over them, so it often happens that they outpace you and touch you to deal damage. Finally, there are a few awful sections where these tiles disappear for a second and then reappear for a second. That itself is OK, having to time your jumps is a nice challenge. But in these instances, three back to back tiles disappear, and the only way to jump through all of them is by PERFECTLY timing your first jump and mashing the jump button as fast as you can. Chances are, you'll fail your first 10 attempts anyway because it's that unforgiving.
Combat itself, if enemies are not so aplenty that they get on your nerves, is actually fine. You start off with a yo-yo, but get access to guns, ninja stars, reflecting shields and so on later on. There are also roller-skaters that attack every enemy on screen at the same time and illuminating staffs that reveal hiding ghosts. Lots of cool stuff that loses some of its magic due to the game's odd desire to be more challenging than it should be.
The story has a satisfying conclusion but is very simple otherwise. Something a kid will definitely enjoy as it's more fleshed out than many similar games and less prone to filler-talk. The soundtrack is solid. Graphics are too repetitive and bland in the overworld especially, but don't look bad.
Between the 8 dungeons, there are multiple that look unique (like the ghost town and final dungeon) and there is a tiny bit of reward for exploration, which is nice, in the form of health potions and permanent health rewards.
OVERALL
If you're into this sort of game and the old school look doesn't bother you, StarTropics is definitely a 2D Action Adventure worth adding to your play-list. It not being an RPG is great because with the stories these games had back in the day, those complicated RPG-features often drag games down for these retro-playthroughs. StarTropics is much more efficient in its gameplay as a result, even if being repetitive and unnecessarily difficult (especially late game) are flaws that pop up here.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Couldn't find anything apart from a Walkthrough/Guide by Nintendo Power
(This is the 32nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Usually when I am this negative on a game, the reviews online reflect that somewhat, by having the score be something like 2.xx/5 (though every game has its nostalgic fans under a YT walkthrough calling it amazing no matter how shitty it is in hindsight, and more power to them, nostalgia is a beautiful thing). This time, Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi is a game that scores much better than I would have anticipated, because in anything related to its gameplay, I disliked this very much. Though due its critical reception as well, I wouldn't say the game is necessarily objectively bad.
This game released on December 1st, 1990 for the Sega Genesis and is a platformer/hack&slash game. There is a tiny story explaining the setting, but nothing worth playing the game for. And that's fine because the game was always meant to be played for its gameplay and its gameplay alone.
The game has a soundtrack that is not bad but not a memorable one in my opinion if we compare it to the OSTs of all these other games I've played in 1990. Still, it's nice enough to listen to and overall, the game does plenty right in just about every way apart from its gameplay, at least in my opinion.
The graphics and special effects are pretty good for its time, the animations are well done and the boss design is great for the most part.
Unfortunately, I just couldn't ever get acclimated with the gameplay and the design of the levels. First off, you are this bad ass Ninja that dies after his heel is touched slightly because you only have one hit point. That's already something I dislike (see Silver Surfer) but it's something I could live with if death didn't come so cheap as it does in these games.
The first 10-20 minutes were filled with death after death after death with every new step I took because enemies would come from the front, the back, the front and back, have wild attack patterns etc. This is fine of course, that's the intention behind the start of the game and you're supposed to overcome that. But as I neared my end of a 1 hour attempt to slog my way through this, I kept dying to the way these enemies were being positioned. Jump down into one enemy and immediately duck because someone else is firing at you. He does that every 2 seconds, so you better time your get-up right or else you'll die. Gotta fend off the other guy though, so better make sure you have your eye on both guys. Kill them, take a step to the left and there is this green dude who throws his shield at you. Jumping over it is not gonna work because you'll touch the tip of the shield with your toes and die. Instead, die, restart the whole level, go back to the same spot and make sure you go exactly to the point where you can see him, but where he can't reach you. Now send your companion dog at him so he distracts him while you come in for the kill. Oh wait, your dog is useless because he has both shields up, which knocks out the dog for 15 seconds.
Ugh, even if I know I will get through this part with repetition, it just is not fun. Gameplay is in many ways similar to Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, but just worse because of insta-death, and without the charm.
OVERALL
Again, I'll give it props for graphics and animation, but it's not a game I enjoyed as someone who had no prior experience with this series. It received praise at the time of its release though, so I guess I might be overly critical here? Nah, this just was bad.
Usually when I am this negative on a game, the reviews online reflect that somewhat, by having the score be something like 2.xx/5 (though every game has its nostalgic fans under a YT walkthrough calling it amazing no matter how shitty it is in hindsight, and more power to them, nostalgia is a beautiful thing). This time, Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi is a game that scores much better than I would have anticipated, because in anything related to its gameplay, I disliked this very much. Though due its critical reception as well, I wouldn't say the game is necessarily objectively bad.
This game released on December 1st, 1990 for the Sega Genesis and is a platformer/hack&slash game. There is a tiny story explaining the setting, but nothing worth playing the game for. And that's fine because the game was always meant to be played for its gameplay and its gameplay alone.
The game has a soundtrack that is not bad but not a memorable one in my opinion if we compare it to the OSTs of all these other games I've played in 1990. Still, it's nice enough to listen to and overall, the game does plenty right in just about every way apart from its gameplay, at least in my opinion.
The graphics and special effects are pretty good for its time, the animations are well done and the boss design is great for the most part.
Unfortunately, I just couldn't ever get acclimated with the gameplay and the design of the levels. First off, you are this bad ass Ninja that dies after his heel is touched slightly because you only have one hit point. That's already something I dislike (see Silver Surfer) but it's something I could live with if death didn't come so cheap as it does in these games.
The first 10-20 minutes were filled with death after death after death with every new step I took because enemies would come from the front, the back, the front and back, have wild attack patterns etc. This is fine of course, that's the intention behind the start of the game and you're supposed to overcome that. But as I neared my end of a 1 hour attempt to slog my way through this, I kept dying to the way these enemies were being positioned. Jump down into one enemy and immediately duck because someone else is firing at you. He does that every 2 seconds, so you better time your get-up right or else you'll die. Gotta fend off the other guy though, so better make sure you have your eye on both guys. Kill them, take a step to the left and there is this green dude who throws his shield at you. Jumping over it is not gonna work because you'll touch the tip of the shield with your toes and die. Instead, die, restart the whole level, go back to the same spot and make sure you go exactly to the point where you can see him, but where he can't reach you. Now send your companion dog at him so he distracts him while you come in for the kill. Oh wait, your dog is useless because he has both shields up, which knocks out the dog for 15 seconds.
Ugh, even if I know I will get through this part with repetition, it just is not fun. Gameplay is in many ways similar to Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, but just worse because of insta-death, and without the charm.
OVERALL
Again, I'll give it props for graphics and animation, but it's not a game I enjoyed as someone who had no prior experience with this series. It received praise at the time of its release though, so I guess I might be overly critical here? Nah, this just was bad.
(This is the 33rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I don't really have much to say about this game, so let's rapid-fire this. Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu is a platformer starring well-known martial artist and actor Jackie Chan that released on December 14th, 1990 for NES.
The special thing about this game is that Jackie can do special kicks that can target enemies behind you, in front of you or above you. The game also has a solid soundtrack with some great songs. As far as its gameplay goes, it's one the easier side of 1990 platformers, but also on the unimaginative side. It's really an average fair through and through in that regard, and it gets pretty repetitive through the five levels this game has to offer.
Don't get me wrong, it's easier accessibility and no existing fetish for placing enemies anywhere and everywhere, plus not supplying the player with just one hit point like some other games of its ilk makes Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu a member of the better half of platformers of the year according to me.
It also boasts good graphics in tune with the Martial Arts theme and China setting, plus the game has nice animations for Jackie Chan's attacks. And the face he does when he falls on lava and touches his butt resembled the real Jackie's "pain face" really well and was pretty funny to see.
OVERALL
Very average and almost forgettable platformer / run & gun. That's neither bad nor great, it's just not a game you will hear anything about amongst the great platformers of the 90s. The soundtrack might have its fair share of fans still though.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Ed Semrad for EGM, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "Jackie Chan is another average jump and kick game."
- Martin Alessi for EGM, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "It's not highly original, but the game plays better than most similar titles."
I don't really have much to say about this game, so let's rapid-fire this. Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu is a platformer starring well-known martial artist and actor Jackie Chan that released on December 14th, 1990 for NES.
The special thing about this game is that Jackie can do special kicks that can target enemies behind you, in front of you or above you. The game also has a solid soundtrack with some great songs. As far as its gameplay goes, it's one the easier side of 1990 platformers, but also on the unimaginative side. It's really an average fair through and through in that regard, and it gets pretty repetitive through the five levels this game has to offer.
Don't get me wrong, it's easier accessibility and no existing fetish for placing enemies anywhere and everywhere, plus not supplying the player with just one hit point like some other games of its ilk makes Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu a member of the better half of platformers of the year according to me.
It also boasts good graphics in tune with the Martial Arts theme and China setting, plus the game has nice animations for Jackie Chan's attacks. And the face he does when he falls on lava and touches his butt resembled the real Jackie's "pain face" really well and was pretty funny to see.
OVERALL
Very average and almost forgettable platformer / run & gun. That's neither bad nor great, it's just not a game you will hear anything about amongst the great platformers of the 90s. The soundtrack might have its fair share of fans still though.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Ed Semrad for EGM, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "Jackie Chan is another average jump and kick game."
- Martin Alessi for EGM, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "It's not highly original, but the game plays better than most similar titles."
1991
(This is the 34th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Zombie Nation, released initially on December 14th 1990 for the NES, is one of the weirdest shoot 'em ups you will play in your life time, because the character you play is the severed head of a samurai traveling to the USA to stop a meteor called "Darc Seed" from destroying the USA completely. The reason why he does that is because Darc Seed has the ability to control a powerful samurai sword.
So you control this severed head called Namakubi and vomit projectiles on jets, buildings, turrets, people, whatever gets in your way. Yes, really. It's such a weird premise but actually not a turn-off on its own.
What was actually the bigger turn-off for me here was that, all told, the gameplay is just not that fun and game doesn't impress in any area apart from its weirdness. The music is alright, the graphics meh and the level design essentially very average. You don't really get to find any fun new abilities or power ups, there are no secrets to uncover and the enemy variety is low. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again in each level with very limited options. To top it off, the later levels include so many projectiles on the screen at once that the game can't handle it and starts lagging.
OVERALL
Suffice to say, this game is not worthy of a suggestion if you're looking for a fun game. It might be worth checking out if you want to take a look at a very weird game at least. Despite my opinion, I think it's funny and worth a mention that the damn "St. Petersburg Times" (now Tampa Bay Times) ranked Zombie Nation tied for 10th among the best games ever list in 1992. That's some weird taste they got over there.
Zombie Nation, released initially on December 14th 1990 for the NES, is one of the weirdest shoot 'em ups you will play in your life time, because the character you play is the severed head of a samurai traveling to the USA to stop a meteor called "Darc Seed" from destroying the USA completely. The reason why he does that is because Darc Seed has the ability to control a powerful samurai sword.
So you control this severed head called Namakubi and vomit projectiles on jets, buildings, turrets, people, whatever gets in your way. Yes, really. It's such a weird premise but actually not a turn-off on its own.
What was actually the bigger turn-off for me here was that, all told, the gameplay is just not that fun and game doesn't impress in any area apart from its weirdness. The music is alright, the graphics meh and the level design essentially very average. You don't really get to find any fun new abilities or power ups, there are no secrets to uncover and the enemy variety is low. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again in each level with very limited options. To top it off, the later levels include so many projectiles on the screen at once that the game can't handle it and starts lagging.
OVERALL
Suffice to say, this game is not worthy of a suggestion if you're looking for a fun game. It might be worth checking out if you want to take a look at a very weird game at least. Despite my opinion, I think it's funny and worth a mention that the damn "St. Petersburg Times" (now Tampa Bay Times) ranked Zombie Nation tied for 10th among the best games ever list in 1992. That's some weird taste they got over there.
1990
(This is the 35th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
The final game I played for my 1990 play-list is Actraiser, the fourth SNES game to ever release, which released on December 16th and is unique for combining two genres that you don't see combined often: City building and platforming.
There are multiple towns that you have to liberate from monsters in order for humans to live in them. You then help them establish themselves there and help them out with all their needs. Basically, you play god. Each town has a few monster lairs that you need to close and then a final one that you need to venture into in platforming sections to kill the boss. Once a town has no monsters left, you can move on to the next one.
Each town tells its own little story, which adds a lot of motivation to playing this game to completion. The gameplay itself offers a fun loop for a few hours, but due to its age and limitations does get repetitive after a while, at least it did to me.
But the mix of these genres works pretty well here and this game was yet another standout for the SNES, which looks to provide a lot of fun as I move on to 1991, where the world was greeted by classics like Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Castlevania IV, among others.
OVERALL
Should be in your play-list if you're looking to find out what some of the better games of the early 90s were. It has a unique mix of city-building and platformer that is pretty simple in execution due to the time it released in, but overall pretty successful in offering the player a fun 10 hours or so of gameplay.
The final game I played for my 1990 play-list is Actraiser, the fourth SNES game to ever release, which released on December 16th and is unique for combining two genres that you don't see combined often: City building and platforming.
There are multiple towns that you have to liberate from monsters in order for humans to live in them. You then help them establish themselves there and help them out with all their needs. Basically, you play god. Each town has a few monster lairs that you need to close and then a final one that you need to venture into in platforming sections to kill the boss. Once a town has no monsters left, you can move on to the next one.
Each town tells its own little story, which adds a lot of motivation to playing this game to completion. The gameplay itself offers a fun loop for a few hours, but due to its age and limitations does get repetitive after a while, at least it did to me.
But the mix of these genres works pretty well here and this game was yet another standout for the SNES, which looks to provide a lot of fun as I move on to 1991, where the world was greeted by classics like Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Castlevania IV, among others.
OVERALL
Should be in your play-list if you're looking to find out what some of the better games of the early 90s were. It has a unique mix of city-building and platformer that is pretty simple in execution due to the time it released in, but overall pretty successful in offering the player a fun 10 hours or so of gameplay.
1991
(This is the 36th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Hey, we made it to 1991. This is the first game in my challenge that released in 1991, as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior graced console players (SNES) on February 6th of that year.
This game needs little introduction, as it changed the fighting game landscape forever. How has it aged though? Well, my subjective opinions on that are down below. Spoiler Alert: Plenty of games from 1990 aged poorly, some however aged really well. I would put Street Fighter II somewhere in the middle, though closer to the "aged poorly" side of things.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
The game does actually have storytelling, but only a very brief cutscene when you win all battles with a character. Then you will be shown how the characters react to defeating M. Bison. The oddest one? Chun Li goes to her father's grave to tell him that she has avenged him by defeating M. Bison.... and that she can now go back to being a young single girl! WTF! So 90s.
So this does add some recognizability beyond their gear and special moves to these characters, but it's pretty limited of course and you only get the one cutscene per fighter. Despite this, some of the characters have "icon" status in video gaming, like Ryu or the aforementioned Chun Li. Hell, I've never played a Street Fighter game before this in my life (Tekken only back in the day) but even I recognized them immediately.
The manual includes a short bio on all of the 8 main characters and a list of their special moves and how to execute them.
There is good variety among these characters. Chun Li is speedy, Ryu is a martial arts expert who can also do a cool fireball attack (Hadouken!), Honda is a big sumo wrestler, Blanka has a low center of gravity, Dhalsim is a lanky piece of shit and Ken ... is another Ryu? Not sure why they made them so similar. If you listen to the experts, there are differences between the two, though I'm not sure how much that applies to Street Fighter II. I didn't play this game that much to be able to tell you whether there are slight differences in footwork and pace or whatever. But to conclude, there are a bunch of different characters here overall with different abilities.
There are also bosses, one of whom looks like Mike Tyson (which he didn't know about until recently funnily enough). Even more funny and interesting: Mike Tyson's character in the US is called Barlog. There is a different character called M. Bison who is wearing a red military uniform or something.
In Japan, M. Bison actually stands for Mike Bison and is the name given to the character that looks like Mike Tyson. They've changed names around when they localized the game out of fear that they'd be sued.
Less funny story: The M. Bison in the US version can fuck off kindly, man is he tough to beat.
GAMEPLAY
In this game, you can either play simple 1v1 fights or choose a character and then travel the world to fight all the other characters plus some bosses that are non playable characters, like Barlog, Vega and M. Bison.
Each character has a few special moves and their own stage. You fight until someone wins two rounds. By now this formula has been repeated a billion times, but of course by then this concept was never done as well as Street Fighter II did it.
And while I can see a young me putting a lot of time and effort into this to get better, the current me simply can't shake the fact that this game hasn't aged as well as some other titles have of this time, including F-Zero and Super Mario World, two other very early SNES titles.
Movement of characters is stiff and pulling off special moves was really tricky because a lot of the time I didn't feel like my inputs were recognized correctly. Or I was doing it wrong, I don't know. But even when I put the difficulty to damn 0, there were some enemies that just didn't let me breath for a second. Hit up, hit low, hit up up up, uppercut and while I learned to block attacks after a while, attacking windows felt so small sometimes and the opponent was able to block so many of my attacks that I had to resort to doing specific OP moves to get them off me. This is actually a gripe I had about fighting games back in the day and I guess will always carry with me, is that abusing the mechanics and quicker trigger fingers will often be decisive of outcome. Maybe this was done better in later entries, but once I got hit in a specific way, especially once I dialed the difficulty up a little bit, I often felt like I was hopelessly at the mercy of my opponent to ever get a chance to hit again. The game also has a feature where you get dizzy for a few seconds, which I think is really silly for a game like this and one I didn't like at all.
Animations and the different attack styles of all characters definitely do feel pretty advanced for a game of this time, so I gotta give credit for that. And now that I've played this, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how other fighting games that released in the coming years will compare.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to damage noises and "Hadouken!", which is enough to have it be iconic. Sound design I thought was solid and the soundtrack is about 40 minutes long and includes music for each character. Some of my favorites include the tracks for Guile, Ryu, Blanka and M. Bison.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I like the character design and the different styles of the backgrounds of the arenas that the characters fight in. I'd say the graphical quality is pretty good overall but nothing that will make you go "wow".
ATMOSPHERE
Seeing groups huddle around to watch you and your opponent fight is always awesome. But the stages themselves are otherwise very static, you can break a few barrels here and there but otherwise the environment you fight in doesn't change anything. The best thing the game does atmospherically during fights is have the tracks fit the "boss" of the arena. For example, Vega fights very fast and his track is also very fast.
CONTENT
You got 8 characters + 4 bosses. You can play any character in Battle Mode and face every other character. This will take you a good 20-30 minutes and you will be rewarded with a short cutscene that suits the character you fought with. When you win with Ryu for example, you get a cutscene where Ryu is supposed to be given an award for winning, but instead he is shown walking off into the horizon because ceremonies mean nothing to him and he is off to the next fight.
In addition, you can fight locally against a friend and adjust difficulty in the Options menu. Plenty of content here, as you get 8 different character "stories" to play through and will need to spend many more hours to properly learn how to fight with each character.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The structure of fights is pretty simple by today's standards. One v One fights, the first to two round wins, wins the fight. It's simple, but effective. You also can choose to play any character's story as I mentioned previously, and what I just said about the structure of fights applies here too.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Can't really do anything but give full grades for a game that has changed the shape of a genre like this. Few games accomplish for their genres what Street Fighter II did back in the day, even if it was the Arcade version and not the SNES version that I played that had done the deed.
REPLAYABILITY
Endlessly replayable to learn how to master this game, though that probably applies to back then more than it does to new players today.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can't say it aged as well as some other games from that time period but fighting games were not established at the time like platformers, so to have Street Fighter II take such a leap is to be respected, and it's not like you won't have your fun with it if you decide to play it today. The game delivers beyond expectations in the storytelling department thanks to endings for each character (and a hilarious/ridiculous one for Chun Li), has created characters that are still iconic to this day and has delivered multiple sequels since. And those sequels I'd probably recommend to you more than this game in particular, which I doubt will live on as a great game by today's standards rather than simply being an iconic old-school video game that propelled the medium forward in a big way.
Hey, we made it to 1991. This is the first game in my challenge that released in 1991, as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior graced console players (SNES) on February 6th of that year.
This game needs little introduction, as it changed the fighting game landscape forever. How has it aged though? Well, my subjective opinions on that are down below. Spoiler Alert: Plenty of games from 1990 aged poorly, some however aged really well. I would put Street Fighter II somewhere in the middle, though closer to the "aged poorly" side of things.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
The game does actually have storytelling, but only a very brief cutscene when you win all battles with a character. Then you will be shown how the characters react to defeating M. Bison. The oddest one? Chun Li goes to her father's grave to tell him that she has avenged him by defeating M. Bison.... and that she can now go back to being a young single girl! WTF! So 90s.
So this does add some recognizability beyond their gear and special moves to these characters, but it's pretty limited of course and you only get the one cutscene per fighter. Despite this, some of the characters have "icon" status in video gaming, like Ryu or the aforementioned Chun Li. Hell, I've never played a Street Fighter game before this in my life (Tekken only back in the day) but even I recognized them immediately.
The manual includes a short bio on all of the 8 main characters and a list of their special moves and how to execute them.
There is good variety among these characters. Chun Li is speedy, Ryu is a martial arts expert who can also do a cool fireball attack (Hadouken!), Honda is a big sumo wrestler, Blanka has a low center of gravity, Dhalsim is a lanky piece of shit and Ken ... is another Ryu? Not sure why they made them so similar. If you listen to the experts, there are differences between the two, though I'm not sure how much that applies to Street Fighter II. I didn't play this game that much to be able to tell you whether there are slight differences in footwork and pace or whatever. But to conclude, there are a bunch of different characters here overall with different abilities.
There are also bosses, one of whom looks like Mike Tyson (which he didn't know about until recently funnily enough). Even more funny and interesting: Mike Tyson's character in the US is called Barlog. There is a different character called M. Bison who is wearing a red military uniform or something.
In Japan, M. Bison actually stands for Mike Bison and is the name given to the character that looks like Mike Tyson. They've changed names around when they localized the game out of fear that they'd be sued.
Less funny story: The M. Bison in the US version can fuck off kindly, man is he tough to beat.
GAMEPLAY
In this game, you can either play simple 1v1 fights or choose a character and then travel the world to fight all the other characters plus some bosses that are non playable characters, like Barlog, Vega and M. Bison.
Each character has a few special moves and their own stage. You fight until someone wins two rounds. By now this formula has been repeated a billion times, but of course by then this concept was never done as well as Street Fighter II did it.
And while I can see a young me putting a lot of time and effort into this to get better, the current me simply can't shake the fact that this game hasn't aged as well as some other titles have of this time, including F-Zero and Super Mario World, two other very early SNES titles.
Movement of characters is stiff and pulling off special moves was really tricky because a lot of the time I didn't feel like my inputs were recognized correctly. Or I was doing it wrong, I don't know. But even when I put the difficulty to damn 0, there were some enemies that just didn't let me breath for a second. Hit up, hit low, hit up up up, uppercut and while I learned to block attacks after a while, attacking windows felt so small sometimes and the opponent was able to block so many of my attacks that I had to resort to doing specific OP moves to get them off me. This is actually a gripe I had about fighting games back in the day and I guess will always carry with me, is that abusing the mechanics and quicker trigger fingers will often be decisive of outcome. Maybe this was done better in later entries, but once I got hit in a specific way, especially once I dialed the difficulty up a little bit, I often felt like I was hopelessly at the mercy of my opponent to ever get a chance to hit again. The game also has a feature where you get dizzy for a few seconds, which I think is really silly for a game like this and one I didn't like at all.
Animations and the different attack styles of all characters definitely do feel pretty advanced for a game of this time, so I gotta give credit for that. And now that I've played this, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how other fighting games that released in the coming years will compare.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to damage noises and "Hadouken!", which is enough to have it be iconic. Sound design I thought was solid and the soundtrack is about 40 minutes long and includes music for each character. Some of my favorites include the tracks for Guile, Ryu, Blanka and M. Bison.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I like the character design and the different styles of the backgrounds of the arenas that the characters fight in. I'd say the graphical quality is pretty good overall but nothing that will make you go "wow".
ATMOSPHERE
Seeing groups huddle around to watch you and your opponent fight is always awesome. But the stages themselves are otherwise very static, you can break a few barrels here and there but otherwise the environment you fight in doesn't change anything. The best thing the game does atmospherically during fights is have the tracks fit the "boss" of the arena. For example, Vega fights very fast and his track is also very fast.
CONTENT
You got 8 characters + 4 bosses. You can play any character in Battle Mode and face every other character. This will take you a good 20-30 minutes and you will be rewarded with a short cutscene that suits the character you fought with. When you win with Ryu for example, you get a cutscene where Ryu is supposed to be given an award for winning, but instead he is shown walking off into the horizon because ceremonies mean nothing to him and he is off to the next fight.
In addition, you can fight locally against a friend and adjust difficulty in the Options menu. Plenty of content here, as you get 8 different character "stories" to play through and will need to spend many more hours to properly learn how to fight with each character.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The structure of fights is pretty simple by today's standards. One v One fights, the first to two round wins, wins the fight. It's simple, but effective. You also can choose to play any character's story as I mentioned previously, and what I just said about the structure of fights applies here too.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Can't really do anything but give full grades for a game that has changed the shape of a genre like this. Few games accomplish for their genres what Street Fighter II did back in the day, even if it was the Arcade version and not the SNES version that I played that had done the deed.
REPLAYABILITY
Endlessly replayable to learn how to master this game, though that probably applies to back then more than it does to new players today.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can't say it aged as well as some other games from that time period but fighting games were not established at the time like platformers, so to have Street Fighter II take such a leap is to be respected, and it's not like you won't have your fun with it if you decide to play it today. The game delivers beyond expectations in the storytelling department thanks to endings for each character (and a hilarious/ridiculous one for Chun Li), has created characters that are still iconic to this day and has delivered multiple sequels since. And those sequels I'd probably recommend to you more than this game in particular, which I doubt will live on as a great game by today's standards rather than simply being an iconic old-school video game that propelled the medium forward in a big way.
2021
As someone who just a couple months ago played through Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which originally released for the MSX back in 1990, seeing this in the most recent Humble Choice Bundle (November 22) was the cherry on top of what I found to be a great group of games.
Unmetal doesn't hide the inspiration it takes from that game, just look at the name of the game, but it also has references to other media, such as the TV shows "The A Team" and "MacGyver". As far as its presentation goes however, this game is all Metal Gear. The game tries to stand out by injecting a lot of humor into its storytelling. Does it work? Most of the time, it does.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You play Jesse Fox, a simple man who gets arrested and put into a high-security prison for a crime he didn't commit. The story is told through narration by Jesse Fox, who is said to have escaped from imprisonment by the Soviets using a helicopter. He is shot down once he reaches Allied territory due to the fact that his helicopter belongs to the Soviets. He finds himself in an interrogation room and has to explain how he got into the situation he was in. And thus starts 8 hours of narrating the occurrences, which you as the player get to play through.
In the middle of your escape, you also uncover classified information about an "Operation Jerico" (sic), a terrorist plan involving nuclear warheads. You uncover more and more about it and have to aid a certain Colonel Harris in stopping certain disaster for all of humanity.
Now the important part to keep in mind about all of this is that every bit of storytelling is drenched in humor.
I'd say, in a positive way, that the game fails a lot, but it succeeds just as often. And that's where you will probably find out whether this game is for you or not. The game certainly won't hit everyone's humor, and definitely not on a regular basis. Yet, the gameplay is regularly interrupted by the narration by Jesse Fox, making it an essential part of the playthrough.
While the game is unapologetically Metal Gear, these two points is where it differentiates itself, for better and worse: A ridiculous storyline that is not to be taken too seriously, and a higher ratio of storytelling to gameplay.
Jesse Fox narrates the whole thing, and the way he remembers the events is not always going to be realistic. For example, every guard in the game is called "Mike", probably because Jesse is bad at remembering names.
Or for the boss fights, Jesse Fox has to fight a tank, a submarine and an octopus of sorts.
I thought this kind of exaggeration was fine and humorous, but some might of you will not be as lenient as me with the sort of edgy humor this game upholds for its entirety, though some of the repetitive jokes never landed at best and got slightly annoying at worst.
What the game does really well however is incorporate the player into its jokes. For example, on one level you need to pass through an area where fire comes up from the ground for a few seconds at a time. When you go through the area slowly but surely and reach the end, Jesse revels in his zen-like patience and great skill, only for the sergeant who interviews him to ask "couldn't you just have put on your thermal suit and run through the fire?". This is the player's fault for not figuring out, but makes Jesse look bad.
There are also a bunch of sections where the player can choose what kind of obstacles Jesse will face. Were there "no rats" or "a ton of rats" in the sewers? Does the octopus have 2, 4 or 6 tentacles? The answers don't always are what they seem to be and funny scenarios play out depending on what you choose.
The game is much more clever in its execution than I would have thought and despite its shortcomings as far as a lack of
a gripping storyline or a lack of interesting side characters goes, it does mix it up enough and is funny enough for me to have enjoyed it.
GAMEPLAY
In this pixelated 2D stealth game, you need to find a way to escape to freedom. This means using stealth, first off. This also means solving puzzles by using the correct items at the right places. If necessary, you need to combine the items in your inventory to create the correct one. For example, a circuit and an unencrypted radio make an encrypted radio.
And finally, this means getting into fist or gun fights, especially with bosses, of which there are plenty in the games 10 chapters.
The game does a good job of introducing new gameplay elements constantly, like different weapons, different gadgets, different means of traversal etc.
As far as stealth mechanics go, the game leaves a bit to be desired, as there aren't a lot of ways you can approach stealth. You mainly hide and try to stay out of the guards view, but really, the only way to do that is to simply stay behind a wall. Apart from coins there aren't any meaningful ways to distract enemies, there is no crouching, no moving stuff around to block enemy vision, no ability to turn off cameras and alarms (unless the story requires it) and no reliable way to hide after triggering an alarm. About a dozen enemies quickly circle you in, all doors get locked and 3 shots kill you, so your best chance is to find a wall that hides from all angles and then just beat up all enemies one by one as they approach your hiding spot.
So while it says "stealth" in the description, it does fall flat here.
On the other hand, you do have the puzzles, but you also are incentivized to explore the entire maps to find reusable equipment like medkits, and one time use gear to get past certain sections. You will for example need night vision goggles to enter a dark dungeon.
Then there is the combat, which the game mostly discourages because Jesse Fox doesn't kill, but it becomes useful against machines and bosses, as mentioned.
Boss fights themselves are aplenty and most of them are pretty simple to figure out, at least on Normal difficulty. Instead of their difficulty, it's the absurdity that these boss fights would exist within the framework of the story that Jesse Fox tells, that make them notable.
One boss fight is also just simply a dialogue where you have to choose the correct options. This one took a lot of trial and error and whether you're happy with the outcome (if it takes you 5 tries like it did for me) depends on your style of humor. If you enjoyed the humor up to this point, you should like the outcome though.
Overall, I'd say the gameplay is OK to solid. As I mentioned in the Storytelling part, there is a lot of back and forth between narrative and gameplay parts, so whether you enjoy your time here will depend on whether you like the humor just as much, if not more so. If you do, the gameplay does just enough to keep you invested.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is good, though most enemies have the same voice actor. I'm guessing for budgetary reasons? They've done a good job of making a joke out of it by calling all guards Mike.
I'm listening the OST right now and there are some good tracks in here. Some feel inspired by Metal Gear as well. It sounds like your typical stealth game soundtrack, though I feel like a bit more timid than it needs to be. Some of the tracks could have definitely been more aggressive to increase tension.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
As someone who played Metal Gear 2 from 1990 before this, I can obviously appreciate the jump in graphical quality where others would say that the game is a simple, pixelated 2D game. I'd say it looks relatively good graphically for the type of game it wants to be. Technological advancements obviously allow it to standout just in its color use compared to a game like Metal Gear 2. As far as creativity goes, I enjoyed how the devs decided to drop Jesse Fox into an empty level and then have Jesse talk all the details into existence. The level would be filled with everything Jesse would say.
ATMOSPHERE
This game feels like a less serious Metal Gear game, so mission accomplished in that regard. It doesn't stand out in this regard otherwise.
CONTENT
10 Chapters, 8-12 hours of gameplay for a single playthrough depending on difficulty, enough content to have you find new things in a second playthrough. There are a couple chapters that drag on, but all provide something new and aren't there for filler reasons. The length of the game is also very suitable for a game of its style, an hour or two could have easily been shaved off to make it a more tight experience.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game mixes things up by having multiple boss fights in a single chapter, while foregoing any boss fight in others. All chapters introduce new gameplay features and stay fresh enough to warrant their place in the game. Some levels and sections do become annoying at certain points though.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Very clever with some of the jokes and how it incorporates the player, plus a "choose your own adventure" style of giving options that do actually alter the outlook of levels are the two things the game does that make me want to call it "innovative" the most. Other than that, a bunch of stuff you've seen before and done better.
REPLAYABILITY
Definitely worth a second playthrough if you enjoyed your time with it. The game lets you change levels at multiple stages and seeing what the other options do should make a second playthrough viable. You can change the difficulty and hunt some optional challenges the game offers as well. The narrative as a whole doesn't change however.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I think you figured out where I stand on this game overall and to whom I'd recommend it. It has fine gameplay that was very fun at times, enjoyable enough for the most part and dragged on here and there. Whether you have the motivation to stick with it however will depend on how funny you find the game, or how much of its humor you can tolerate. There have been games that I have abandoned because the gameplay wasn't enough to keep me through bad humor in my opinion (Borderlands series) but this wasn't one of them.
I didn't laugh out loud a lot, but I did a few times, which is more than I can say for most games that incorporate jokes, and it got me exhaling out of my nose a few times. I'd say check out the Announcement Trailer and go from there. As long as the humor works for you, the rest of the game will as well.
Unmetal doesn't hide the inspiration it takes from that game, just look at the name of the game, but it also has references to other media, such as the TV shows "The A Team" and "MacGyver". As far as its presentation goes however, this game is all Metal Gear. The game tries to stand out by injecting a lot of humor into its storytelling. Does it work? Most of the time, it does.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You play Jesse Fox, a simple man who gets arrested and put into a high-security prison for a crime he didn't commit. The story is told through narration by Jesse Fox, who is said to have escaped from imprisonment by the Soviets using a helicopter. He is shot down once he reaches Allied territory due to the fact that his helicopter belongs to the Soviets. He finds himself in an interrogation room and has to explain how he got into the situation he was in. And thus starts 8 hours of narrating the occurrences, which you as the player get to play through.
In the middle of your escape, you also uncover classified information about an "Operation Jerico" (sic), a terrorist plan involving nuclear warheads. You uncover more and more about it and have to aid a certain Colonel Harris in stopping certain disaster for all of humanity.
Now the important part to keep in mind about all of this is that every bit of storytelling is drenched in humor.
I'd say, in a positive way, that the game fails a lot, but it succeeds just as often. And that's where you will probably find out whether this game is for you or not. The game certainly won't hit everyone's humor, and definitely not on a regular basis. Yet, the gameplay is regularly interrupted by the narration by Jesse Fox, making it an essential part of the playthrough.
While the game is unapologetically Metal Gear, these two points is where it differentiates itself, for better and worse: A ridiculous storyline that is not to be taken too seriously, and a higher ratio of storytelling to gameplay.
Jesse Fox narrates the whole thing, and the way he remembers the events is not always going to be realistic. For example, every guard in the game is called "Mike", probably because Jesse is bad at remembering names.
Or for the boss fights, Jesse Fox has to fight a tank, a submarine and an octopus of sorts.
I thought this kind of exaggeration was fine and humorous, but some might of you will not be as lenient as me with the sort of edgy humor this game upholds for its entirety, though some of the repetitive jokes never landed at best and got slightly annoying at worst.
What the game does really well however is incorporate the player into its jokes. For example, on one level you need to pass through an area where fire comes up from the ground for a few seconds at a time. When you go through the area slowly but surely and reach the end, Jesse revels in his zen-like patience and great skill, only for the sergeant who interviews him to ask "couldn't you just have put on your thermal suit and run through the fire?". This is the player's fault for not figuring out, but makes Jesse look bad.
There are also a bunch of sections where the player can choose what kind of obstacles Jesse will face. Were there "no rats" or "a ton of rats" in the sewers? Does the octopus have 2, 4 or 6 tentacles? The answers don't always are what they seem to be and funny scenarios play out depending on what you choose.
The game is much more clever in its execution than I would have thought and despite its shortcomings as far as a lack of
a gripping storyline or a lack of interesting side characters goes, it does mix it up enough and is funny enough for me to have enjoyed it.
GAMEPLAY
In this pixelated 2D stealth game, you need to find a way to escape to freedom. This means using stealth, first off. This also means solving puzzles by using the correct items at the right places. If necessary, you need to combine the items in your inventory to create the correct one. For example, a circuit and an unencrypted radio make an encrypted radio.
And finally, this means getting into fist or gun fights, especially with bosses, of which there are plenty in the games 10 chapters.
The game does a good job of introducing new gameplay elements constantly, like different weapons, different gadgets, different means of traversal etc.
As far as stealth mechanics go, the game leaves a bit to be desired, as there aren't a lot of ways you can approach stealth. You mainly hide and try to stay out of the guards view, but really, the only way to do that is to simply stay behind a wall. Apart from coins there aren't any meaningful ways to distract enemies, there is no crouching, no moving stuff around to block enemy vision, no ability to turn off cameras and alarms (unless the story requires it) and no reliable way to hide after triggering an alarm. About a dozen enemies quickly circle you in, all doors get locked and 3 shots kill you, so your best chance is to find a wall that hides from all angles and then just beat up all enemies one by one as they approach your hiding spot.
So while it says "stealth" in the description, it does fall flat here.
On the other hand, you do have the puzzles, but you also are incentivized to explore the entire maps to find reusable equipment like medkits, and one time use gear to get past certain sections. You will for example need night vision goggles to enter a dark dungeon.
Then there is the combat, which the game mostly discourages because Jesse Fox doesn't kill, but it becomes useful against machines and bosses, as mentioned.
Boss fights themselves are aplenty and most of them are pretty simple to figure out, at least on Normal difficulty. Instead of their difficulty, it's the absurdity that these boss fights would exist within the framework of the story that Jesse Fox tells, that make them notable.
One boss fight is also just simply a dialogue where you have to choose the correct options. This one took a lot of trial and error and whether you're happy with the outcome (if it takes you 5 tries like it did for me) depends on your style of humor. If you enjoyed the humor up to this point, you should like the outcome though.
Overall, I'd say the gameplay is OK to solid. As I mentioned in the Storytelling part, there is a lot of back and forth between narrative and gameplay parts, so whether you enjoy your time here will depend on whether you like the humor just as much, if not more so. If you do, the gameplay does just enough to keep you invested.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is good, though most enemies have the same voice actor. I'm guessing for budgetary reasons? They've done a good job of making a joke out of it by calling all guards Mike.
I'm listening the OST right now and there are some good tracks in here. Some feel inspired by Metal Gear as well. It sounds like your typical stealth game soundtrack, though I feel like a bit more timid than it needs to be. Some of the tracks could have definitely been more aggressive to increase tension.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
As someone who played Metal Gear 2 from 1990 before this, I can obviously appreciate the jump in graphical quality where others would say that the game is a simple, pixelated 2D game. I'd say it looks relatively good graphically for the type of game it wants to be. Technological advancements obviously allow it to standout just in its color use compared to a game like Metal Gear 2. As far as creativity goes, I enjoyed how the devs decided to drop Jesse Fox into an empty level and then have Jesse talk all the details into existence. The level would be filled with everything Jesse would say.
ATMOSPHERE
This game feels like a less serious Metal Gear game, so mission accomplished in that regard. It doesn't stand out in this regard otherwise.
CONTENT
10 Chapters, 8-12 hours of gameplay for a single playthrough depending on difficulty, enough content to have you find new things in a second playthrough. There are a couple chapters that drag on, but all provide something new and aren't there for filler reasons. The length of the game is also very suitable for a game of its style, an hour or two could have easily been shaved off to make it a more tight experience.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game mixes things up by having multiple boss fights in a single chapter, while foregoing any boss fight in others. All chapters introduce new gameplay features and stay fresh enough to warrant their place in the game. Some levels and sections do become annoying at certain points though.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Very clever with some of the jokes and how it incorporates the player, plus a "choose your own adventure" style of giving options that do actually alter the outlook of levels are the two things the game does that make me want to call it "innovative" the most. Other than that, a bunch of stuff you've seen before and done better.
REPLAYABILITY
Definitely worth a second playthrough if you enjoyed your time with it. The game lets you change levels at multiple stages and seeing what the other options do should make a second playthrough viable. You can change the difficulty and hunt some optional challenges the game offers as well. The narrative as a whole doesn't change however.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I think you figured out where I stand on this game overall and to whom I'd recommend it. It has fine gameplay that was very fun at times, enjoyable enough for the most part and dragged on here and there. Whether you have the motivation to stick with it however will depend on how funny you find the game, or how much of its humor you can tolerate. There have been games that I have abandoned because the gameplay wasn't enough to keep me through bad humor in my opinion (Borderlands series) but this wasn't one of them.
I didn't laugh out loud a lot, but I did a few times, which is more than I can say for most games that incorporate jokes, and it got me exhaling out of my nose a few times. I'd say check out the Announcement Trailer and go from there. As long as the humor works for you, the rest of the game will as well.
Third attempt at getting out of the Prologue was successful. The first two tries ended because I got distracted by other games, not because I didn't think the game wasn't good.
Quite the opposite, actually. A long-running RPG series with deep world building and an increasingly convoluted, yet gripping narrative sounds awesome, so it was only a matter of time before I really got into this series. It only took me ...
nearly 6 years after acquiring it in a January 2017 Humble Bundle to beat it.
And I'm glad I did.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10
The main characters in this game (and the whole 3-game arc) are Estelle and Joshua Bright. At the start of the game, Joshua is brought home by Estelle's father, Cassius Bright, under unknown circumstances, at least as far as Estelle's perspective goes.
The game fast forwards 5 years, where both kids reach 16 years of age and ready themselves for their final exams to join the Bracer Guild, a combat and investigative specialist group that aids civilians in whatever they may need help with. Sometimes that's retrieving a lost item and sometimes it's killing a strong monster that blocks the road to the next city.
Estelle and Joshua's father is one of the strongest and revered members of the Bracer Guild and at the start of the game, receives a concerning message via letter that leads him to leave their home town, Rolent. Estelle and Joshua are left under the guide of their mentor, Sherazard Harvey, and are tasked with completing requests by civilians that are regularly left on the Guild Blackboard. As new bracers, they only receive "Junior Bracer" status until they can collect "recommendations" by all 5 major cities in the kingdom of Liberl, for which they will have to finish tasks of extraordinary difficulty.
As Estelle and Joshua work on these tasks, they slowly start to uncover that something a bit bigger is going on on a national scale that they might not quite be ready for, but eager to prove themselves, they go on a quest to solve these mysteries anyway.
Thus, you embark on a 35-70 hour journey, depending on how much you can engage in side activities, to take on those mentioned large-scale challenges but to also achieve Senior Bracer status. Along the way, they meet dozens of side characters with different, interesting personalities and their own, regional problems that require assistance. Every stop in a major city also leads Estelle and Joshua one step closer to solving the mystery, which turns out to bigger than they thought.
The game, and essentially the entire series, is well-known for taking its time with storytelling. That doesn't mean that the story is riddled with "filler content". Instead, the aim of the developers is to immerse you into this deep world that they've created, 10 years after a major war had occurred in these lands and at a time where tensions between the Kingdom of Liberl and the Erebonian Empire are still pretty high.
So the game takes the approach of really introducing you to all these cities and countries, to all the characters you meet and to technological advancements in this world, like the Orbal technology, on a very deep level, pretty much unlike almost any video games series you've seen.
I can happily say that this is worth it if you stick around, at least as it pertains to the first iteration in this long-lasting series. I'm not gonna lie, there are times where I started to get impatient, and I think this would apply to many players. I'd say this has rather to do with the fact that the game teases you on 46 occasions throughout your time playing time and opens up more and more questions as you go along whilst answering very few, and it does not mean that the dialogue and little stories in this game are not excellent, because they are.
But this game in particular often focuses on small-scale problems and stories, and reduces the big guns to teasing most of the time, which I'm told changes in future games. Heck, I can tell you right now, the ending to this game is fantastic and absolutely worth the pay-off. But just keep in mind that if you can't find joy in the smaller aspects of story telling that this game is filled with, then you might have a hard time sticking with this.
One final note I want to make here is about the characters. Many of them were unique and quirky in their own way and whilst every stereotype is filled here, it helps that the game gives each of these characters plenty of time and lines to really turn into their own. They all do a great job interacting with the two main characters, both of whom are excellently written as well.
One character that is especially intriguing is Olivier. He has had one of the worst introductions I've had the displeasure of experiencing (making constant sexual remarks at two strangers, who, let me remind you, are just 16!) but has redeemed himself on each separate occasion that he appeared. There is a certain mystery and especially unpredictability to him that allows each of his appearances to go in any which direction, and I think that's a good thing to have for a game/series like this.
But if we wanted to talk about the game's sometimes weird sexual outbursts, I think it's also worth mentioning that Sherazard's special attack is called "Sadist Whip", and the game zooms into her chest before she stars whipping the enemy endlessly.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
This is a turn-based JRPG with combat that takes place on a grid. One thing worth mentioning right off the bat is that the game does not require grinding, I'd say it almost actively discourages it even. This, I think, is extremely important if you create an RPG that is this long and asks you to stay very patient for a long time to get some big main story payoffs. There is also a Turbo Mode you can activate by holding ALT, which I think should be a feature in every turn-based RPG because it allows you to skip some of those Magic Attacks with long animations. You will shave hours and hours off your playtime by using this feature.
The combat overall is OK to solid. Each character icon is displayed on the top left to show you the attack order, and sometimes, certain rows have bonuses to them, for example a critical attack or health regeneration. There are certain things you can do to knock enemy's off their row if you want the Critical Bonus yourself, but this is one of the areas where the combat unfortunately is reliant on RNG a bit. Same goes with what attacks the enemy does, whether the harder enemies spawn a foe or heal themselves are all factors that play out differently if you battle them again and again.
But I'd say that overall, a good strategy is rewarded and you get enough battle-mates throughout the game that you pretty much have to mix things up in that regard as well, which I think is always a plus.
Some characters have Ranged attacks, some are better used for healing, some for tanking damage, so pretty much the usual assortment of fighters. What the game allows you to do however is to add and subtract certain abilities from all characters through a unique feature called "Orbments". These are placed into Orbment slots, devices that basically allow you to cast Magic (Arts). They also can improve basic stats of the character, and you open more and more slots as you go. There are Healing, Attack, Defense, Earth, Experience Gain and pretty much any other orbments that you can think of. You can add and remove them as you like and as I said, customize your battles this way. Pretty good stuff.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
The English version released 7 years after the game originally came out and only has voice acting during battles. There are mods out there however that allow you to add in the Japanese voice acting, which is very good.
The soundtrack of this game has a few highlights, like the final dungeon music, and overall fits the mostly light tones of the game very well. There are also your typical sad song, suspense song and confession song that you will hear constantly throughout your playthrough. I'd say it's a good but not great soundtrack.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The game looks solid graphically but really shines in attention to detail. The cities all look unique and interesting, have their own themes and definitely had me excited to go visit them as a Chapter was nearing its end.
Roads outside of cities and dungeons on the other hand almost all looked the same, and not that detailed, but that's not entirely out of the ordinary for mid-2000s JRPGs.
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Each city has its own musical and visual theme, each city has its own dozens of own characters with their own stories and problems, their own homes, their own jobs and ambitions and the game constantly connects places to people, people to places and people to other people that you really feel like you're in a world with a proper history.
CONTENT | 8/10
There is a lot of content here, up to 70-80 hours depending on how often you use Turbo Mode, how many optional dialogue options you pursue with random NPCs, how many of the optional tasks you complete and which difficulty you play. It took me about 42 hours after I did all side activities in the first 3 cities and talked to many NPCs over that time. For the final 2 chapters, I mostly mainlined the story. I figured out Turbo Mode about 1/3 of the way through and it definitely sped up my time through the combat which obviously got a bit repetitive against the easier enemies that would run into you on roads. I'd say the majority of the game was of high quality, and whether you enjoy the content will depend on how OK you are with a 50/50 story/gameplay split.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The game is pretty formulaic in that you visit a place, work there until you gain the recommendation you're after and move on to the next. This is not to its detriment but takes away some of the surprise factor of "holy shit, where am I?", especially when many dungeons do look pretty similar.
That said, the game gets a big plus in my book for not requiring you to grind at all and it always offers you enough items and material to face the challenges each Chapter has in store, whichever difficulty you end up playing. The 50/50 story/gameplay split also meshes well here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The game does not try to innovate a whole lot. On a surface level, this is run-of-the-mill JRPG design, and that's more than fine for an introduction to the series. It will make it harder for some to get into the series however.
What the game does specialize in is world building and dialogue. It does a great job of having its dialogue actually feel "realistic", at least as far as a video game story goes. Especially Estelle is written in this ditzy, clumsy way that is more endearing than being a typical video-game "comical relief dumby" (looking at you here Dorothy). There are also orbments that allow you to customize your characters and a constant mix of which characters travel with you, which necessitates change in strategy, especially on higher difficulties.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There aren't really many secrets to uncover here apart from somewhat hidden chests, but these do include some great items that allow you to mix up your battle strategies. The secrets are usually in form of "hidden dialogue" by going to an Inn for example, and finding one of your friends having a drink on their own. You can then engage them and have a pretty lengthy, optional conversation with them. This is the kind of stuff that lets me know that the devs really care about building deep characters and worlds.
But the story plays out the same every time and the game is pretty long without enough variety to present replay value if you've already been pretty thorough on your first playthrough.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 78/100
As I reached the final hours of this game, I thought this was a good introductory game that doesn't surprise you much in terms of its narrative than it does with its depth. And I was fine with that. So I thought I'd beat this and return to the series some time before Summer 2023, so about half a year after this review is posted. But those final hours were so intense and exciting way beyond what I was expecting, that I definitely want to get back to this series sooner than later.
20 or so hours of dialogue only and 1.5 million total characters (dialogue) does take its toll though, so I do think it's worth it to keep a few week/month break in between these games. But if you really want to feel engrossed in a world and are a fan of turn-based JRPGs, Trails in the Sky is absolutely worth the recommendation.
Quite the opposite, actually. A long-running RPG series with deep world building and an increasingly convoluted, yet gripping narrative sounds awesome, so it was only a matter of time before I really got into this series. It only took me ...
nearly 6 years after acquiring it in a January 2017 Humble Bundle to beat it.
And I'm glad I did.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10
The main characters in this game (and the whole 3-game arc) are Estelle and Joshua Bright. At the start of the game, Joshua is brought home by Estelle's father, Cassius Bright, under unknown circumstances, at least as far as Estelle's perspective goes.
The game fast forwards 5 years, where both kids reach 16 years of age and ready themselves for their final exams to join the Bracer Guild, a combat and investigative specialist group that aids civilians in whatever they may need help with. Sometimes that's retrieving a lost item and sometimes it's killing a strong monster that blocks the road to the next city.
Estelle and Joshua's father is one of the strongest and revered members of the Bracer Guild and at the start of the game, receives a concerning message via letter that leads him to leave their home town, Rolent. Estelle and Joshua are left under the guide of their mentor, Sherazard Harvey, and are tasked with completing requests by civilians that are regularly left on the Guild Blackboard. As new bracers, they only receive "Junior Bracer" status until they can collect "recommendations" by all 5 major cities in the kingdom of Liberl, for which they will have to finish tasks of extraordinary difficulty.
As Estelle and Joshua work on these tasks, they slowly start to uncover that something a bit bigger is going on on a national scale that they might not quite be ready for, but eager to prove themselves, they go on a quest to solve these mysteries anyway.
Thus, you embark on a 35-70 hour journey, depending on how much you can engage in side activities, to take on those mentioned large-scale challenges but to also achieve Senior Bracer status. Along the way, they meet dozens of side characters with different, interesting personalities and their own, regional problems that require assistance. Every stop in a major city also leads Estelle and Joshua one step closer to solving the mystery, which turns out to bigger than they thought.
The game, and essentially the entire series, is well-known for taking its time with storytelling. That doesn't mean that the story is riddled with "filler content". Instead, the aim of the developers is to immerse you into this deep world that they've created, 10 years after a major war had occurred in these lands and at a time where tensions between the Kingdom of Liberl and the Erebonian Empire are still pretty high.
So the game takes the approach of really introducing you to all these cities and countries, to all the characters you meet and to technological advancements in this world, like the Orbal technology, on a very deep level, pretty much unlike almost any video games series you've seen.
I can happily say that this is worth it if you stick around, at least as it pertains to the first iteration in this long-lasting series. I'm not gonna lie, there are times where I started to get impatient, and I think this would apply to many players. I'd say this has rather to do with the fact that the game teases you on 46 occasions throughout your time playing time and opens up more and more questions as you go along whilst answering very few, and it does not mean that the dialogue and little stories in this game are not excellent, because they are.
But this game in particular often focuses on small-scale problems and stories, and reduces the big guns to teasing most of the time, which I'm told changes in future games. Heck, I can tell you right now, the ending to this game is fantastic and absolutely worth the pay-off. But just keep in mind that if you can't find joy in the smaller aspects of story telling that this game is filled with, then you might have a hard time sticking with this.
One final note I want to make here is about the characters. Many of them were unique and quirky in their own way and whilst every stereotype is filled here, it helps that the game gives each of these characters plenty of time and lines to really turn into their own. They all do a great job interacting with the two main characters, both of whom are excellently written as well.
One character that is especially intriguing is Olivier. He has had one of the worst introductions I've had the displeasure of experiencing (making constant sexual remarks at two strangers, who, let me remind you, are just 16!) but has redeemed himself on each separate occasion that he appeared. There is a certain mystery and especially unpredictability to him that allows each of his appearances to go in any which direction, and I think that's a good thing to have for a game/series like this.
But if we wanted to talk about the game's sometimes weird sexual outbursts, I think it's also worth mentioning that Sherazard's special attack is called "Sadist Whip", and the game zooms into her chest before she stars whipping the enemy endlessly.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
This is a turn-based JRPG with combat that takes place on a grid. One thing worth mentioning right off the bat is that the game does not require grinding, I'd say it almost actively discourages it even. This, I think, is extremely important if you create an RPG that is this long and asks you to stay very patient for a long time to get some big main story payoffs. There is also a Turbo Mode you can activate by holding ALT, which I think should be a feature in every turn-based RPG because it allows you to skip some of those Magic Attacks with long animations. You will shave hours and hours off your playtime by using this feature.
The combat overall is OK to solid. Each character icon is displayed on the top left to show you the attack order, and sometimes, certain rows have bonuses to them, for example a critical attack or health regeneration. There are certain things you can do to knock enemy's off their row if you want the Critical Bonus yourself, but this is one of the areas where the combat unfortunately is reliant on RNG a bit. Same goes with what attacks the enemy does, whether the harder enemies spawn a foe or heal themselves are all factors that play out differently if you battle them again and again.
But I'd say that overall, a good strategy is rewarded and you get enough battle-mates throughout the game that you pretty much have to mix things up in that regard as well, which I think is always a plus.
Some characters have Ranged attacks, some are better used for healing, some for tanking damage, so pretty much the usual assortment of fighters. What the game allows you to do however is to add and subtract certain abilities from all characters through a unique feature called "Orbments". These are placed into Orbment slots, devices that basically allow you to cast Magic (Arts). They also can improve basic stats of the character, and you open more and more slots as you go. There are Healing, Attack, Defense, Earth, Experience Gain and pretty much any other orbments that you can think of. You can add and remove them as you like and as I said, customize your battles this way. Pretty good stuff.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
The English version released 7 years after the game originally came out and only has voice acting during battles. There are mods out there however that allow you to add in the Japanese voice acting, which is very good.
The soundtrack of this game has a few highlights, like the final dungeon music, and overall fits the mostly light tones of the game very well. There are also your typical sad song, suspense song and confession song that you will hear constantly throughout your playthrough. I'd say it's a good but not great soundtrack.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The game looks solid graphically but really shines in attention to detail. The cities all look unique and interesting, have their own themes and definitely had me excited to go visit them as a Chapter was nearing its end.
Roads outside of cities and dungeons on the other hand almost all looked the same, and not that detailed, but that's not entirely out of the ordinary for mid-2000s JRPGs.
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Each city has its own musical and visual theme, each city has its own dozens of own characters with their own stories and problems, their own homes, their own jobs and ambitions and the game constantly connects places to people, people to places and people to other people that you really feel like you're in a world with a proper history.
CONTENT | 8/10
There is a lot of content here, up to 70-80 hours depending on how often you use Turbo Mode, how many optional dialogue options you pursue with random NPCs, how many of the optional tasks you complete and which difficulty you play. It took me about 42 hours after I did all side activities in the first 3 cities and talked to many NPCs over that time. For the final 2 chapters, I mostly mainlined the story. I figured out Turbo Mode about 1/3 of the way through and it definitely sped up my time through the combat which obviously got a bit repetitive against the easier enemies that would run into you on roads. I'd say the majority of the game was of high quality, and whether you enjoy the content will depend on how OK you are with a 50/50 story/gameplay split.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The game is pretty formulaic in that you visit a place, work there until you gain the recommendation you're after and move on to the next. This is not to its detriment but takes away some of the surprise factor of "holy shit, where am I?", especially when many dungeons do look pretty similar.
That said, the game gets a big plus in my book for not requiring you to grind at all and it always offers you enough items and material to face the challenges each Chapter has in store, whichever difficulty you end up playing. The 50/50 story/gameplay split also meshes well here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The game does not try to innovate a whole lot. On a surface level, this is run-of-the-mill JRPG design, and that's more than fine for an introduction to the series. It will make it harder for some to get into the series however.
What the game does specialize in is world building and dialogue. It does a great job of having its dialogue actually feel "realistic", at least as far as a video game story goes. Especially Estelle is written in this ditzy, clumsy way that is more endearing than being a typical video-game "comical relief dumby" (looking at you here Dorothy). There are also orbments that allow you to customize your characters and a constant mix of which characters travel with you, which necessitates change in strategy, especially on higher difficulties.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There aren't really many secrets to uncover here apart from somewhat hidden chests, but these do include some great items that allow you to mix up your battle strategies. The secrets are usually in form of "hidden dialogue" by going to an Inn for example, and finding one of your friends having a drink on their own. You can then engage them and have a pretty lengthy, optional conversation with them. This is the kind of stuff that lets me know that the devs really care about building deep characters and worlds.
But the story plays out the same every time and the game is pretty long without enough variety to present replay value if you've already been pretty thorough on your first playthrough.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 78/100
As I reached the final hours of this game, I thought this was a good introductory game that doesn't surprise you much in terms of its narrative than it does with its depth. And I was fine with that. So I thought I'd beat this and return to the series some time before Summer 2023, so about half a year after this review is posted. But those final hours were so intense and exciting way beyond what I was expecting, that I definitely want to get back to this series sooner than later.
20 or so hours of dialogue only and 1.5 million total characters (dialogue) does take its toll though, so I do think it's worth it to keep a few week/month break in between these games. But if you really want to feel engrossed in a world and are a fan of turn-based JRPGs, Trails in the Sky is absolutely worth the recommendation.
1991
(This is the 37th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
(This is the 38th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Well, I regret keeping this on my list. I have The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout as the 2nd worst game I've played in 1990's batch, but it was sort of entertainingly mediocre, so I thought I'd double down and play another Bugs Bunny themed video game.
This time, that game is The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle II, a GameBoy game that initially released in April 26, 1991. Wikipedia lists it as an "Action" game, which I think makes it the least "action" Action game I've ever played. I'd rather call it a Puzzle game myself. I would also call it a bad game. Check out the "Overall" part to see my overall thoughts, check out any part you want if you want more detailed thoughts there.
____________
STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 1/10
Very simple. Bugs Bunny's girlfriend, Honey Bunny, is captured by "Witch Hazel" and must be rescued by finishing 28 levels. The game starts by showing an image of the Witch's castle and the picture of Honey Bunny on top of it. Then the game starts. You'll get a tiny scene at the end but that's pretty much it. So pretty typical stuff for a puzzle / platformer type affair.
GAMEPLAY | 5/20
You start a level and find yourself on a screen filled with enemies and doors. The goal is to enter these doors, find all keys, and then exit through the designated exit door. In between, you also have to pick up weapons or a hammer for example to kill enemies or break some obstacles in your path.
The idea is simple. The level is presented to you as a puzzle, and you have to figure out how to perform all necessary tasks in an order that allows you to beat it without getting hit. Because if you get hit even once, you die and have to restart the level.
From the get go, I gotta say that the game design here is not that good. First, instead of simply picking up keys on the screen, you have to enter doors, all of which simply have a key. So why not just leave the keys on the screen and forego the minutes and minutes of time you will lose on opening all these doors over the entire play time.
Second, the game seriously lacks in features. Opening doors and collecting keys is all you do. Apart from picking up those weapons, you can also use a rope to get to another platform and you can step on platforms that are marked as "Up" to jump up. The game picks up in difficulty the further you go of course, but this is generally it. There is a small sense of reward of finishing a level that you feel and the game as a package is much, much tighter than Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout, but it isn't really fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10
No voice acting. I didn't like the sound design that much. The sound of picking up keys got a bit irritating after a while, and the OST is only 7 minutes long. It's not the good kind of retro OST either, as its sound quality often is just subpar.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 3/10
It's an early 90s GameBoy game, so it looks like you'd think it looks. There isn't much attention to detail here and the fact that jumping platforms are simply labeled "Up" shows how little passion went into this. There are 5 games of this type by the way.
ATMOSPHERE | 2/10
There is no atmosphere to feel here. You could put anyone as the main character and it wouldn't really feel any more out of place. If you are going to enjoy this, you'll enjoy it for the puzzle design, but I doubt it will offer you any value in any shape or form by the way it looks and feels.
CONTENT | 4/10
There are 28 levels here and a boss fight. It's not a terrible offering. If you enjoy the puzzle aspect of this game, there is plenty here to work your brain over, but I don't know why you would choose to play this if you could instead play any of the other 4 Crazy Castle iterations or, here is a thought, a good puzzle game, of which there are thousands.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
It works in that each level has a guaranteed way of being passable if you figure out the right way. Figuring that out on some levels can be somewhat of a challenge, so it does its job as a puzzle game, but it's too repetitive and not that fun to begin with.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
There is nothing here that could be considered innovating. As a concept, it works, that's probably the best thing to say here.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
Levels have a specific way of being completed and you won't really do anything differently the second time out. All you could do is try to finish the levels faster but why would you?
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Unlike the other Bugs Bunny game I've played, this didn't play at constant 15 FPS, so that's a big plus. It works from start to finish without issue.
OVERALL
This is a repetitive, boring puzzle game that feels like a reskin of a reskin of a reskin, even if it isn't so necessarily. There just isn't anything here to make it stand out, the way the game is designed is just not fun and I was shocked to find out that by the end of 90s, it had sold over 200.000 copies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Well, I regret keeping this on my list. I have The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout as the 2nd worst game I've played in 1990's batch, but it was sort of entertainingly mediocre, so I thought I'd double down and play another Bugs Bunny themed video game.
This time, that game is The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle II, a GameBoy game that initially released in April 26, 1991. Wikipedia lists it as an "Action" game, which I think makes it the least "action" Action game I've ever played. I'd rather call it a Puzzle game myself. I would also call it a bad game. Check out the "Overall" part to see my overall thoughts, check out any part you want if you want more detailed thoughts there.
____________
STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 1/10
Very simple. Bugs Bunny's girlfriend, Honey Bunny, is captured by "Witch Hazel" and must be rescued by finishing 28 levels. The game starts by showing an image of the Witch's castle and the picture of Honey Bunny on top of it. Then the game starts. You'll get a tiny scene at the end but that's pretty much it. So pretty typical stuff for a puzzle / platformer type affair.
GAMEPLAY | 5/20
You start a level and find yourself on a screen filled with enemies and doors. The goal is to enter these doors, find all keys, and then exit through the designated exit door. In between, you also have to pick up weapons or a hammer for example to kill enemies or break some obstacles in your path.
The idea is simple. The level is presented to you as a puzzle, and you have to figure out how to perform all necessary tasks in an order that allows you to beat it without getting hit. Because if you get hit even once, you die and have to restart the level.
From the get go, I gotta say that the game design here is not that good. First, instead of simply picking up keys on the screen, you have to enter doors, all of which simply have a key. So why not just leave the keys on the screen and forego the minutes and minutes of time you will lose on opening all these doors over the entire play time.
Second, the game seriously lacks in features. Opening doors and collecting keys is all you do. Apart from picking up those weapons, you can also use a rope to get to another platform and you can step on platforms that are marked as "Up" to jump up. The game picks up in difficulty the further you go of course, but this is generally it. There is a small sense of reward of finishing a level that you feel and the game as a package is much, much tighter than Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout, but it isn't really fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10
No voice acting. I didn't like the sound design that much. The sound of picking up keys got a bit irritating after a while, and the OST is only 7 minutes long. It's not the good kind of retro OST either, as its sound quality often is just subpar.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 3/10
It's an early 90s GameBoy game, so it looks like you'd think it looks. There isn't much attention to detail here and the fact that jumping platforms are simply labeled "Up" shows how little passion went into this. There are 5 games of this type by the way.
ATMOSPHERE | 2/10
There is no atmosphere to feel here. You could put anyone as the main character and it wouldn't really feel any more out of place. If you are going to enjoy this, you'll enjoy it for the puzzle design, but I doubt it will offer you any value in any shape or form by the way it looks and feels.
CONTENT | 4/10
There are 28 levels here and a boss fight. It's not a terrible offering. If you enjoy the puzzle aspect of this game, there is plenty here to work your brain over, but I don't know why you would choose to play this if you could instead play any of the other 4 Crazy Castle iterations or, here is a thought, a good puzzle game, of which there are thousands.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
It works in that each level has a guaranteed way of being passable if you figure out the right way. Figuring that out on some levels can be somewhat of a challenge, so it does its job as a puzzle game, but it's too repetitive and not that fun to begin with.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
There is nothing here that could be considered innovating. As a concept, it works, that's probably the best thing to say here.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
Levels have a specific way of being completed and you won't really do anything differently the second time out. All you could do is try to finish the levels faster but why would you?
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Unlike the other Bugs Bunny game I've played, this didn't play at constant 15 FPS, so that's a big plus. It works from start to finish without issue.
OVERALL
This is a repetitive, boring puzzle game that feels like a reskin of a reskin of a reskin, even if it isn't so necessarily. There just isn't anything here to make it stand out, the way the game is designed is just not fun and I was shocked to find out that by the end of 90s, it had sold over 200.000 copies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
1991
(This is the 39th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Vice: Project Doom is definitely one of the best named games I've played so far. Is it one of the best games games though? Well, not really. It does some things really, really well, it has a lot more storytelling than you would expect from NES titles, but it is a game that shares similarities with many, many other games out there and other games have done many things better than this one.
This game released on April 26, 1991 for NES in Japan and NA, and got a release on Nintendo Switch Online in August 2019.
____________
STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 6/10
You play Detective Hart, to is tasked with investigating the "BEDA corporation", a front run by alien beings living on Earth in secrecy. They've developed a substance that was supposed to be food for the Aliens, however has been misused by humans due to its addictive natures, despite the fact that it has very bad side-effects.
Usually I would mention how the story resolves because for the vast majority of games, the plot and the storytelling in particular are afterthoughts. Not here. Vice: Project of Doom stands out in its storytelling and the sheer volume of its cutscenes. If I had to give a comparison, I think the Ninja Gaiden series fits best. After every stage, a cutscene plays with shots of the characters and lines of dialogue below. The camera pans left to right during these and the characters remain still otherwise, but this is very much unusual for this time and the #1 factor in which this game stands out.
There are some twists and turns in the story as well. That said, the storytelling isn't that great, probably because devs back then were game devs first and storytellers like sixteenth, so they're excused but the effort is there.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
There are 3 types of stages in this game. In the first kind, you drive a car through a narrow driving lane and have to move side to side to avoid the edges, to avoid obstacles in front of you that damage you, and destroy/avoid enemy vehicles. This is not that great and there are only two short levels of this kind.
The second type is a side scrolling rail shooter kind of stage that repeats twice as well. You shoot enemies, some close by, some far away, before they shoot you. You pick up items they drop by moving the cursor above the items. You have a few different weapons you can use, some of which have higher AoE damage. It's OK and a nice-to-have change of pace, but I wouldn't say these levels are good. They're tolerable at best.
The third type, finally, is the main kind, 2D platforming with enemies everywhere. You have three weapons at your disposal, two of which need ammo (dynamite, gun). You also have a sword that you can slash your way through levels with. I mostly stuck with the sword. The timing window with your sword is not that long, so I often would be just early or just too late and get hit. It doesn't help that at many points, there are a lot of enemies coming from both angles. Some drop into view out of nowhere sometimes and immediately start shooting, which makes avoiding their shots impossible unless you move forward a step at a time, which would kill the pace and therefore your enjoyment of the game. So just eat those hits and keep moving.
At the end of each level, a meat item drops which regenerates most of your health, so getting hit a bunch of times is not a big issue. So yes, this is not a "one-hit and you die" type of game, thankfully. But it's not a very original game either, at least in terms of its gameplay. In fact, it's very average.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
No voice acting. Sound design is typical for NES games, so it doesn't stand out. The soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones of all NES games I've played so far, and has some bangers, including the track they've used for many of the cutscenes. The track for Boss Battles 3-2 and 7-3 is also worth a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's very average graphically. It's an NES game, so it's inferior to some of the other games that came out at the time due to the move to 16-bit across the board. Artistically, it still has the ability to stand out but it doesn't. The levels and their artistic design are unimpressive and the kind of enemies that the devs have thrown into each level appears kinda random. You gut red ninjas flying out of the ground, fish too whilst bats come down from above, it just does not feel very thought out in that regard.
ATMOSPHERE | 6/10
The game is described as biopunk and noir. That's a nice mix of themes that you don't see often, and even if the technical limitations hinder the game from delivering a truly intense/atmospheric experience, I appreciate the difference in tone, especially in terms of its story the farther you dive into it. Within the levels, there is plenty of green and black but levels often rather feel like "levels" than actual places. More detail would have helped there.
CONTENT | 7/10
You have 10 levels I believe, all (most?) with multiple stages. 2 of those have you driving, 2 have you on rails. There are boss fights at the end of each level and probably over 10 minutes of storytelling all told. It's a good amount of content.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is mostly a very typical affair. Even though there are some levels where many enemies appear at once, it rarely really leans into the ridiculous like many other games do, even a game such as Ninja Gaiden, because enemies rarely take more than one hit to be defeated and you are such a tank with your own health. There is just one early difficulty spike for one boss that is just so insane that I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of players back in the day didn't manage to beat it. Thanks to the magic of emulators and rewind, I was able to eventually get it down, but man was that ridiculously difficult, especially since almost everything else in this game is very beatable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 5/10
Innovative in only one thing, and that is its focus on storytelling. The way it tells its story is completely copied from Ninja Gaiden, but let's rather call it 'inspired' and be happy that storytelling is actually happening, something I'm always a big fan of.
The game also features a good soundtrack, but is decidedly average in every other way.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Not really replayable apart from trying to beat your high score. But it's an important game because it leans away from the arcade into a more story-focused experience, which at this time, many games still didn't do. It even gave you a lot of health instead of one hit-point like many other games, so it wasn't too concerned with artificially increasing the play time of this thing either.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Playable for the most part. It just has that typical NES slowdown issue whenever 5+ sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. It happens often enough that I deducted a point.
OVERALL | 60 - Average/Slightly Above-Average
Are you looking for something like the early Ninja Gaiden games in terms of storytelling, whilst the game maintained a similar retro style? Well, you don't have the wall jumping here, but other than that, Vice: Project Doom is the best comparison I could find so far. Storytelling is exactly the same, there is some (not a lot) of variety in gameplay and a very good soundtrack here, so give it a try. But don't expect anything special here, as this is one of the most average NES games you'll ever play apart from its storytelling.
Vice: Project Doom is definitely one of the best named games I've played so far. Is it one of the best games games though? Well, not really. It does some things really, really well, it has a lot more storytelling than you would expect from NES titles, but it is a game that shares similarities with many, many other games out there and other games have done many things better than this one.
This game released on April 26, 1991 for NES in Japan and NA, and got a release on Nintendo Switch Online in August 2019.
____________
STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 6/10
You play Detective Hart, to is tasked with investigating the "BEDA corporation", a front run by alien beings living on Earth in secrecy. They've developed a substance that was supposed to be food for the Aliens, however has been misused by humans due to its addictive natures, despite the fact that it has very bad side-effects.
Usually I would mention how the story resolves because for the vast majority of games, the plot and the storytelling in particular are afterthoughts. Not here. Vice: Project of Doom stands out in its storytelling and the sheer volume of its cutscenes. If I had to give a comparison, I think the Ninja Gaiden series fits best. After every stage, a cutscene plays with shots of the characters and lines of dialogue below. The camera pans left to right during these and the characters remain still otherwise, but this is very much unusual for this time and the #1 factor in which this game stands out.
There are some twists and turns in the story as well. That said, the storytelling isn't that great, probably because devs back then were game devs first and storytellers like sixteenth, so they're excused but the effort is there.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
There are 3 types of stages in this game. In the first kind, you drive a car through a narrow driving lane and have to move side to side to avoid the edges, to avoid obstacles in front of you that damage you, and destroy/avoid enemy vehicles. This is not that great and there are only two short levels of this kind.
The second type is a side scrolling rail shooter kind of stage that repeats twice as well. You shoot enemies, some close by, some far away, before they shoot you. You pick up items they drop by moving the cursor above the items. You have a few different weapons you can use, some of which have higher AoE damage. It's OK and a nice-to-have change of pace, but I wouldn't say these levels are good. They're tolerable at best.
The third type, finally, is the main kind, 2D platforming with enemies everywhere. You have three weapons at your disposal, two of which need ammo (dynamite, gun). You also have a sword that you can slash your way through levels with. I mostly stuck with the sword. The timing window with your sword is not that long, so I often would be just early or just too late and get hit. It doesn't help that at many points, there are a lot of enemies coming from both angles. Some drop into view out of nowhere sometimes and immediately start shooting, which makes avoiding their shots impossible unless you move forward a step at a time, which would kill the pace and therefore your enjoyment of the game. So just eat those hits and keep moving.
At the end of each level, a meat item drops which regenerates most of your health, so getting hit a bunch of times is not a big issue. So yes, this is not a "one-hit and you die" type of game, thankfully. But it's not a very original game either, at least in terms of its gameplay. In fact, it's very average.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
No voice acting. Sound design is typical for NES games, so it doesn't stand out. The soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones of all NES games I've played so far, and has some bangers, including the track they've used for many of the cutscenes. The track for Boss Battles 3-2 and 7-3 is also worth a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's very average graphically. It's an NES game, so it's inferior to some of the other games that came out at the time due to the move to 16-bit across the board. Artistically, it still has the ability to stand out but it doesn't. The levels and their artistic design are unimpressive and the kind of enemies that the devs have thrown into each level appears kinda random. You gut red ninjas flying out of the ground, fish too whilst bats come down from above, it just does not feel very thought out in that regard.
ATMOSPHERE | 6/10
The game is described as biopunk and noir. That's a nice mix of themes that you don't see often, and even if the technical limitations hinder the game from delivering a truly intense/atmospheric experience, I appreciate the difference in tone, especially in terms of its story the farther you dive into it. Within the levels, there is plenty of green and black but levels often rather feel like "levels" than actual places. More detail would have helped there.
CONTENT | 7/10
You have 10 levels I believe, all (most?) with multiple stages. 2 of those have you driving, 2 have you on rails. There are boss fights at the end of each level and probably over 10 minutes of storytelling all told. It's a good amount of content.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is mostly a very typical affair. Even though there are some levels where many enemies appear at once, it rarely really leans into the ridiculous like many other games do, even a game such as Ninja Gaiden, because enemies rarely take more than one hit to be defeated and you are such a tank with your own health. There is just one early difficulty spike for one boss that is just so insane that I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of players back in the day didn't manage to beat it. Thanks to the magic of emulators and rewind, I was able to eventually get it down, but man was that ridiculously difficult, especially since almost everything else in this game is very beatable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 5/10
Innovative in only one thing, and that is its focus on storytelling. The way it tells its story is completely copied from Ninja Gaiden, but let's rather call it 'inspired' and be happy that storytelling is actually happening, something I'm always a big fan of.
The game also features a good soundtrack, but is decidedly average in every other way.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Not really replayable apart from trying to beat your high score. But it's an important game because it leans away from the arcade into a more story-focused experience, which at this time, many games still didn't do. It even gave you a lot of health instead of one hit-point like many other games, so it wasn't too concerned with artificially increasing the play time of this thing either.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Playable for the most part. It just has that typical NES slowdown issue whenever 5+ sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. It happens often enough that I deducted a point.
OVERALL | 60 - Average/Slightly Above-Average
Are you looking for something like the early Ninja Gaiden games in terms of storytelling, whilst the game maintained a similar retro style? Well, you don't have the wall jumping here, but other than that, Vice: Project Doom is the best comparison I could find so far. Storytelling is exactly the same, there is some (not a lot) of variety in gameplay and a very good soundtrack here, so give it a try. But don't expect anything special here, as this is one of the most average NES games you'll ever play apart from its storytelling.
It's always a good feeling, when you come back to a game that you've figuratively shelved years and years ago, only to realize that it is actually a very fun game. That's how I most recently felt with Guacamelee!, a Metroidvania melee-platformer game by Drinkbox Studioes (devs of Nobody Saves the World). I beat it in 6 hours on Normal difficulty with some exploration, though there are parts that will add significant play time to your total and actually affect the ending.
____________
STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story of this game is not the highlight here, but I'd be lying if I said that it didn't enhance the overall experience somewhat. There is a great Mexican theme here that keeps the game in a fun, charming sort of mood pretty much throughout, even if some of the story points can actually get a bit dark.
You play Juan Aguacate, a farmer-turned-luchador at the start of the game when an evil skeleton called Carlos Calaca destroys your village, Pueblucho, and kidnaps your childhood love interest, who turns out to be "the president's daughter".
This all happens on the "Dia de los muertos" (Day of the Dead). To turn into a luchador, you are killed and get a luchador mask from someone else, after which you are brought back to life. Carlos Calaca has a few main partners who stand in your way as you try to find and fight him. Since he did kill you effortlessly during your first encounter, this is all OK, because you're going to want to increase your abilities before facing him once more.
His main partners or followers rather, all have their own back story and their motivations for following him. It's not much, but it's always nice to learn a bit more about the bosses you will be facing. The back story of Carlos Calaca is more interesting, though told very quickly. In general, story parts are few and far between. Most of the dialogue is limited to talking to a chicken, who teaches you combos, talking to half old-man half goat, who teaches you new abilities, and talking to side quest givers.
The theme of it all definitely gives positive vibes here overall, but again, it's not a big part of this game. A lot of stuff remains unexplained or brushed off to "the world is magical, that's why it works".
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
This is one of the few Metroidvanias I've beaten. I've played many more however, and this is definitely the game I'd recommend to newcomers to the genre the most. Metroidvania-type features are in many types of games, like the idea of finding things that are interactable, but not having the necessary abilities to interact with them until later. This blocking of exploration until later is not a key component of those games though like it is in Metroidvanias.
Even amongst Metroidvanias, this is of course handled differently, but for beginners, Guacamelee handles it best. Instead of making you make both a mental and physical note whenever you find something that you're going to want to remember for later, Guacamelee offers waypoints at all times, so that you don't really ever have to worry about where to go next. Backtracking is included here still, but at least it's not a long session of going through every corner to see if you find the right path forward or something new to interact with.
The combat in this game is melee-focused and apart from the boss fights, which are unfortunately very few, fighting in this game doesn't ask much of you. On Normal difficulty, you can take plenty of hits and have enough time and ability to dodge most attacks pretty easily. Even if you die, you instantly spawn at the last checkpoint with no loading time, and those checkpoints are usually right next to the place you died.
One thing this game does really well is combine combat and traversal elements. You learn how to do uppercuts, headbutts, frog slams and more, which you can both use to fight and create new combos, but also to break colored blocks blocking your path forward. A very resourceful way of doing things, and pretty fun.
So yes, the other big part of this game next to the combat is traversal. You'll be platforming a lot and challenges will be gravity, thorned vines and, later on, much more complicated things that I don't want to spoil. What's important to know is that if you die to gravity, you instantly respawn where you were the last time before you fell, so frustration is kept to a minimum here. It does get frustrating sometimes anyway, but it's not that bad at all. The main issue I had was that, as you learned more and more abilities and had to use almost all of them to go past specific sections, my brain pretty much refused to think that fast, so it took me more tries sometimes than I care to admit.
But the mix of platforming and combat is pretty good and while it does get slightly repetitive at times due to a lack of other gameplay systems (and variety in attack patterns is mostly kept for the boss fights, which are good), it's a game that, purely for its gameplay, I can very much recommend.
Finally, there is a good bit of exploration to be done. I'm on a 2nd playthrough on Hard difficulty and the amount of secret areas I'm discovering now is crazy. Obviously I will have to relearn the abilities to enter them later, but at least know I know what I'm looking for. And you're going to want to explore these places for multiple reasons. You'll get more money for upgrades (of which there really aren't that many though), you'll find upgrade parts for more health and special attacks, and most importantly, you will full secret worlds that you're going to want to complete before you take on the final boss. I didn't and it's not necessary, but I'd recommend it.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. I understand that for budgetary reasons, but some of the characters definitely deserved one. Sound design is good. In general, your auditory experience will be very much inspired by the Mexican theme. The soundtrack gives off that vibe right off the bat, with a great (great!) track for the first area you find yourself in, Pueblucho. I played this for the first time years ago and that track immediately sounded familiar when I got back.
In general, the OST is good, but there could have been a bit more variety/quantity overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The graphical quality of this game is not the impressive part. It's the attention to detail and the art design. Its great use of color complements the vibe this game constantly gives out and the intricate details in pretty much all the locations available in this game are definitely the highlights.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game has the Mexican culture thing going on and it sticks with it throughout. The soundtrack, the visuals, the colors and everything else combines to make for one cohesive and enjoyable experience from an "atmosphere" standpoint.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me 6 hours to beat. For 12.50€ at full price, this is OK, and on a discount, it's definitely more than enough to have a couple fun afternoons playing this game. However, there are two good things and one bad thing I want to talk about here. First, the good. The game has no game over screens, it doesn't send you back for minutes after a 5-second struggle with a boss that goes sour only to pad its playtime and there is no incessant backtracking involved unless you're a completionist. So a 6 hour playthrough here is much more focused one and with less of the filler and annoying parts of other, similar games. Second, there are multiple secret worlds that I didn't discover myself, so one can easily spend 10+ hours on this game if you were to finish those up. You will get rewarded with a different ending later on.
The bad thing here is that, whether you play for 6 or 10 hours, there is plenty of repetitive stuff going on the further you go into it due to the limited variety in enemies. Especially those secret worlds will not introduce you to too many new ones, and as far as challenge goes, the game pretty much keeps throwing more and more enemies at you the farther you go, instead of making their attack patterns more varied.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
The game has two types of content mainly, which would be melee combat and platforming. This mix stays how it is throughout, and it's a good and fun mix. Later sections and the secret worlds have more of a focus on arenas with increasing amounts of the same enemies you've faced all game. This is the substitute for a more varied challenge, so not always so great, but since the combat in itself is pretty enjoyable, if also repetitive, it's not that big of a deal.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
As I mentioned, I think this is THE game for Metroidvania newcomers. You never are really lost, even if traversal sometimes can get a bit difficult due to the platforming challenges. There is a charming theme throughout. You are introduced to a bunch of typical Metroidvania-mechanics that aren't too advanced to ever get complicated.
And to top it off, the game does a great job to combine combat and traversal mechanics, which, among with its theme, I think is the most positively unique part to this game.
But other than that, yeah, the game doesn't move the needle a whole lot of course, but it doesn't need to.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
You're unlikely to finish everything that is worth finishing by the end of your first playthrough. Plus, you will probably underutilize some abilities, miss out on some costumes you can unlock, and once you're on your second playthrough, you will keep finding these small little areas that you can only enter when you unlock those late-game abilities. So to put it short, a second playthrough will definitely be worth it, unless you use a guide to find everything on your first run.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 73/100
I'm going to give it 8/10 because my rating system has a 73/100 actually as much more positive than Metacritic/Opencritic would see it. This is a very fun Metroidvania and a short, focused game that you can bang out in two afternoons and still have some fond memories of later down the line.
If you're new to the genre and want to check out an easy to get into Metroidvania, I think you found it with Guacamelee!.
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STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story of this game is not the highlight here, but I'd be lying if I said that it didn't enhance the overall experience somewhat. There is a great Mexican theme here that keeps the game in a fun, charming sort of mood pretty much throughout, even if some of the story points can actually get a bit dark.
You play Juan Aguacate, a farmer-turned-luchador at the start of the game when an evil skeleton called Carlos Calaca destroys your village, Pueblucho, and kidnaps your childhood love interest, who turns out to be "the president's daughter".
This all happens on the "Dia de los muertos" (Day of the Dead). To turn into a luchador, you are killed and get a luchador mask from someone else, after which you are brought back to life. Carlos Calaca has a few main partners who stand in your way as you try to find and fight him. Since he did kill you effortlessly during your first encounter, this is all OK, because you're going to want to increase your abilities before facing him once more.
His main partners or followers rather, all have their own back story and their motivations for following him. It's not much, but it's always nice to learn a bit more about the bosses you will be facing. The back story of Carlos Calaca is more interesting, though told very quickly. In general, story parts are few and far between. Most of the dialogue is limited to talking to a chicken, who teaches you combos, talking to half old-man half goat, who teaches you new abilities, and talking to side quest givers.
The theme of it all definitely gives positive vibes here overall, but again, it's not a big part of this game. A lot of stuff remains unexplained or brushed off to "the world is magical, that's why it works".
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
This is one of the few Metroidvanias I've beaten. I've played many more however, and this is definitely the game I'd recommend to newcomers to the genre the most. Metroidvania-type features are in many types of games, like the idea of finding things that are interactable, but not having the necessary abilities to interact with them until later. This blocking of exploration until later is not a key component of those games though like it is in Metroidvanias.
Even amongst Metroidvanias, this is of course handled differently, but for beginners, Guacamelee handles it best. Instead of making you make both a mental and physical note whenever you find something that you're going to want to remember for later, Guacamelee offers waypoints at all times, so that you don't really ever have to worry about where to go next. Backtracking is included here still, but at least it's not a long session of going through every corner to see if you find the right path forward or something new to interact with.
The combat in this game is melee-focused and apart from the boss fights, which are unfortunately very few, fighting in this game doesn't ask much of you. On Normal difficulty, you can take plenty of hits and have enough time and ability to dodge most attacks pretty easily. Even if you die, you instantly spawn at the last checkpoint with no loading time, and those checkpoints are usually right next to the place you died.
One thing this game does really well is combine combat and traversal elements. You learn how to do uppercuts, headbutts, frog slams and more, which you can both use to fight and create new combos, but also to break colored blocks blocking your path forward. A very resourceful way of doing things, and pretty fun.
So yes, the other big part of this game next to the combat is traversal. You'll be platforming a lot and challenges will be gravity, thorned vines and, later on, much more complicated things that I don't want to spoil. What's important to know is that if you die to gravity, you instantly respawn where you were the last time before you fell, so frustration is kept to a minimum here. It does get frustrating sometimes anyway, but it's not that bad at all. The main issue I had was that, as you learned more and more abilities and had to use almost all of them to go past specific sections, my brain pretty much refused to think that fast, so it took me more tries sometimes than I care to admit.
But the mix of platforming and combat is pretty good and while it does get slightly repetitive at times due to a lack of other gameplay systems (and variety in attack patterns is mostly kept for the boss fights, which are good), it's a game that, purely for its gameplay, I can very much recommend.
Finally, there is a good bit of exploration to be done. I'm on a 2nd playthrough on Hard difficulty and the amount of secret areas I'm discovering now is crazy. Obviously I will have to relearn the abilities to enter them later, but at least know I know what I'm looking for. And you're going to want to explore these places for multiple reasons. You'll get more money for upgrades (of which there really aren't that many though), you'll find upgrade parts for more health and special attacks, and most importantly, you will full secret worlds that you're going to want to complete before you take on the final boss. I didn't and it's not necessary, but I'd recommend it.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. I understand that for budgetary reasons, but some of the characters definitely deserved one. Sound design is good. In general, your auditory experience will be very much inspired by the Mexican theme. The soundtrack gives off that vibe right off the bat, with a great (great!) track for the first area you find yourself in, Pueblucho. I played this for the first time years ago and that track immediately sounded familiar when I got back.
In general, the OST is good, but there could have been a bit more variety/quantity overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The graphical quality of this game is not the impressive part. It's the attention to detail and the art design. Its great use of color complements the vibe this game constantly gives out and the intricate details in pretty much all the locations available in this game are definitely the highlights.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game has the Mexican culture thing going on and it sticks with it throughout. The soundtrack, the visuals, the colors and everything else combines to make for one cohesive and enjoyable experience from an "atmosphere" standpoint.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me 6 hours to beat. For 12.50€ at full price, this is OK, and on a discount, it's definitely more than enough to have a couple fun afternoons playing this game. However, there are two good things and one bad thing I want to talk about here. First, the good. The game has no game over screens, it doesn't send you back for minutes after a 5-second struggle with a boss that goes sour only to pad its playtime and there is no incessant backtracking involved unless you're a completionist. So a 6 hour playthrough here is much more focused one and with less of the filler and annoying parts of other, similar games. Second, there are multiple secret worlds that I didn't discover myself, so one can easily spend 10+ hours on this game if you were to finish those up. You will get rewarded with a different ending later on.
The bad thing here is that, whether you play for 6 or 10 hours, there is plenty of repetitive stuff going on the further you go into it due to the limited variety in enemies. Especially those secret worlds will not introduce you to too many new ones, and as far as challenge goes, the game pretty much keeps throwing more and more enemies at you the farther you go, instead of making their attack patterns more varied.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
The game has two types of content mainly, which would be melee combat and platforming. This mix stays how it is throughout, and it's a good and fun mix. Later sections and the secret worlds have more of a focus on arenas with increasing amounts of the same enemies you've faced all game. This is the substitute for a more varied challenge, so not always so great, but since the combat in itself is pretty enjoyable, if also repetitive, it's not that big of a deal.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
As I mentioned, I think this is THE game for Metroidvania newcomers. You never are really lost, even if traversal sometimes can get a bit difficult due to the platforming challenges. There is a charming theme throughout. You are introduced to a bunch of typical Metroidvania-mechanics that aren't too advanced to ever get complicated.
And to top it off, the game does a great job to combine combat and traversal mechanics, which, among with its theme, I think is the most positively unique part to this game.
But other than that, yeah, the game doesn't move the needle a whole lot of course, but it doesn't need to.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
You're unlikely to finish everything that is worth finishing by the end of your first playthrough. Plus, you will probably underutilize some abilities, miss out on some costumes you can unlock, and once you're on your second playthrough, you will keep finding these small little areas that you can only enter when you unlock those late-game abilities. So to put it short, a second playthrough will definitely be worth it, unless you use a guide to find everything on your first run.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 73/100
I'm going to give it 8/10 because my rating system has a 73/100 actually as much more positive than Metacritic/Opencritic would see it. This is a very fun Metroidvania and a short, focused game that you can bang out in two afternoons and still have some fond memories of later down the line.
If you're new to the genre and want to check out an easy to get into Metroidvania, I think you found it with Guacamelee!.
2017
It's not that common for me to have played and finished three games in a series, so it felt extra special to hit that milestone with the Yakuza series. Yakuza Kiwami 2, a remake to Yakuza 2 released in 2017, is exactly what you would expect if you have played the first game or the prequel, so my recommendation to you starts and ends there. Did you enjoy the previous ones? Buy it. Did you not enjoy them? Don't buy it. As a fan of these two other games, I've had my expectations met, though Yakuza Kiwami 2 does not top Yakuza 0 for me due to some issues I had with its story and its combat.
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STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 8/10
Yakuza Kiwami 2's story builds on the ending of Yakuza Kiwami directly. I'm not gonna go into it too deeply in case you haven't played Yakuza Kiwami, so let's instead go over whether I liked it more than the first game's. And the answer is: Yes.
I wouldn't say I liked it a lot more though. The main story has its usual strengths. Kazuma Kiryu as the main character is great. Ryuji Goda as the main antagonist is also great. In between, the game brings some familiar faces back but the majority of the cast is actually made of people that weren't in Yakuza Kiwami, so it took a while to get to familiarize myself with them. There are police officers, detectives, the Omi Alliance main players and more, including Kiryu's main 'partner' throughout this, Kaoru Sayama, a police officer who puts Kiryu in "protective custody" to learn more about her past, as she had learned that her parents were killed "because of the Tojo Clan". I thought her story was really interesting and fleshed out, with some pretty depressing moments throughout. She and Ryuji Goda definitely were the best parts about this game's story.
Ryuji Goda is an Omi Alliance patriarch who is not at all a fan of the rival Tojo Clan. So he obviously instantly objects when Kazuma Kiryu comes to their headquarters to ask for an alliance. Again, no spoilers, but things happen from there and Ryuji Goda and Kazuma Kiryu don't get along that well.
Ryuji's motivations are well explained and the game dives deeper into his emotions than you would expect for a game to do of its villain, and that's exactly what I loved here. Unfortunately, Ryuji Goda didn't appear as often as I would have liked.
Same, unfortunately, goes for a bunch of side characters, especially from the Omi Alliance side and a foreign group that Ryuji works with to fight the Tojo Clan. A major story point that I won't go into further.
During the first few chapters of this game, you assume that you will learn more about these guys as the game goes along, but it's unfortunate that this doesn't really happen at the end. I'm not sure what the reason for that is, whether the game just introduced too many characters in one game and couldn't find the time for them all or the story couldn't be extended for budgetary reasons. The game's story is "only" 18 hours or so long on its own, so it's not nearly as long as the story of 0. But whatever the reason is, the game's ending didn't feel quite as impactful as a result.
The game's ending in general is just bat shit crazy on another level and while I obviously very much enjoy the Yakuza silliness, otherwise I wouldn't be playing them, I think they may have gone a step too far without giving good enough of an explanation.
Apart from the main story, there is also obviously a bunch of side missions (sub stories), of which there are 76. These are funny and silly and very enjoyable as per usual and remain the unique factor about these Yakuza games. A major contrast to the main story, and some of them also are among my favorites for the series. The baby one especially is worth a look on YouTube.
Finally, the game also has a few chapters included in "Majima's story". Three chapters in fact, and they take us through what happened shortly before the start of the main story and why Majima, in the main story, works in his own Construction Firm all of a sudden. Plus, there is a very nice surprise for fans of Yakuza 0.
But overall, I just want to add that the game had plenty of highlight scenes that are extremely memorable, none more so than the bridge scene in Sotenbori when he is smoking in the rain and ... well, play it to find out.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
Gameplay is pretty much the same as in the first two games. This game is a Brawler, so you do a lot of brawling. The two main differences here compared to Yakuza Kiwami would be that, instead of having four styles, you now have one. And instead of upgrading combat skills with experience points and open world gameplay stuff with Completion Points, you now collect points for four different colors. You use those colors to unlock everything. You gain them by consuming items as well, and a Hunger Meter fills up when you eat or drink, which increases your point gain after fights. I wouldn't say I preferred this over what we had in Kiwami or 0, but it's different and not bad or anything, so I did like it.
But yeah, other than that, you're still punching and kicking, grabbing and throwing and using Heat moves to brutally annihilate your foes.
HOWEVER: The game uses a different engine compared to the other two games, and this is notable for two reasons. First, it makes combat kind of more floaty. It doesn't really feel as brutal as the other two games in how the kicks and punches hit. Second, the new engine comes with a whole lot of ragdollin'. Throw an enemy into a bike, and he will suddenly fly a few meters up into the air like if shot out of a cannon. Or have an enemy take you down with a pistol shot or something and often you will do the same.
I don't know, this just felt kind of out of place for a game like this and I can't say I really liked it. It always remained a slight distraction but I did get used to it at the end.
Apart from combat, you still explore Kamurocho (and Sotenbori), you still play a bunch of mini games and you do a bunch of sub stories.
For mini games, the most notable thing here is the return of the Cabaret Club mini game from Yakuza 0, where you run your own cabaret club. It's incredibly addicting and comes with so many features, that it could almost be its own game. You compete in four different leagues and have to do 3 minute "runs" where you try to collect as much money as possible. Collect a certain amount, and you will be able to challenge the League Champion to a Title Match.
You have to partner with shops and keep playing more and more to grow your fan base (and income), plus your hostesses gain experience as well while you're doing so, further increasing revenue. You scout for new hostesses with different skills, you can actually dress up your best hostesses to change around their stats, and after a while, you actually unlock 10-15 minute long dates with them where you learn more about them and, if you reply well, increase their level a bunch. To beat this mini game, you'll easily put a dozen+ hours into it if you want to.
Definitely surpasses Gwent as my favorite mini game ever.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
Voice acting, as per usual in this series, is class. I still would like to actually have everything main story related be voice acted, but the most important scenes are, so it's fine. Whenever drama increases, the best of the voice actors comes to show, and the impact they're leaving is definitely felt a lot, especially for Ryuji Goda's character, who has a fantastic voice actor.
I enjoyed the soundtrack here as well, it was used nicely throughout and especially the Outlaw's Lullaby Battle Theme in Sotenbori is top class. Really liked the song choice for the bridge scene in Sotenbori I mentioned above.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
The world needs more modern, realistic, grounded games. Not because the other games aren't great, they are, but I feel it's a style of game that has become almost forgotten over the past decade apart from the Yakuza series and a few select games that fit this style here and there, like Mafia 3 and the Definitive Edition and RDR2. Anyway, while Yakuza's combat may not fit my description, the design of Kamurocho and Sotenbori certainly does. The graphics are even better in Kiwami 2 than in the other two games chronologically before it, and it's genuinely been a treat to look at throughout. If I have any complaint it's that the faces of some characters looked a bit too dated compared to the rest of this game, like Kaoru Sayama's.
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Just like with the graphics, the atmosphere in this game is fantastic and I love to see a modern and grounded world like this. Yakuza's atmosphere would of course also not be what it is without its unique mix of serious main story and silly sub stories, and this game nails that once again.
CONTENT | 9/10
As per usual, there is a ton of quality main and side content here that will entertain for 20-40 hours depending on how much of the side stuff you wish to do. The only issue I have here is that some of the main story stuff unfortunately feels a little bit like filler to me.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The filler I mentioned for the main story is something I do kind of have an issue with here as well. There are multiple parts where you have to go to a guy to go to a guy to go to a guy and I just don't really see the point in that, especially when it's done more than once. There are also many times where you are tasked to "go waste some time until you get a call" and sometimes this leads you to some forgettable side-but-main story sequence that I'd personally like to keep separate.
Other than that, the design in this game is the same as with the other two games, and it's a fun gameplay loop here too.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
The concept of this series remains unique and will do so for all entries I presume. The Remake is really well done and I'm really glad they did it, because I wouldn't have gotten into this series without one.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Plenty of replayability due to its plethora of side content, but not necessarily replayable for its main content, as its pretty linear and for good reason obviously.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 83/100
Another great entry into the Yakuza series. The main story has a lot of depth and, while not everything works in the end, it created multiple emotional and dramatic scenes that I loved. The side content is fantastic as usual and especially the Cabaret Club sim adds a whole extra game to the package. I would say it's better than Yakuza Kiwami 1, which is how it should be for a sequel, but I'd place it behind 0, which in my opinion had a better overall plot, a big advantage by giving you Majima as an additional protagonist, and slightly more satisfying combat.
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STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 8/10
Yakuza Kiwami 2's story builds on the ending of Yakuza Kiwami directly. I'm not gonna go into it too deeply in case you haven't played Yakuza Kiwami, so let's instead go over whether I liked it more than the first game's. And the answer is: Yes.
I wouldn't say I liked it a lot more though. The main story has its usual strengths. Kazuma Kiryu as the main character is great. Ryuji Goda as the main antagonist is also great. In between, the game brings some familiar faces back but the majority of the cast is actually made of people that weren't in Yakuza Kiwami, so it took a while to get to familiarize myself with them. There are police officers, detectives, the Omi Alliance main players and more, including Kiryu's main 'partner' throughout this, Kaoru Sayama, a police officer who puts Kiryu in "protective custody" to learn more about her past, as she had learned that her parents were killed "because of the Tojo Clan". I thought her story was really interesting and fleshed out, with some pretty depressing moments throughout. She and Ryuji Goda definitely were the best parts about this game's story.
Ryuji Goda is an Omi Alliance patriarch who is not at all a fan of the rival Tojo Clan. So he obviously instantly objects when Kazuma Kiryu comes to their headquarters to ask for an alliance. Again, no spoilers, but things happen from there and Ryuji Goda and Kazuma Kiryu don't get along that well.
Ryuji's motivations are well explained and the game dives deeper into his emotions than you would expect for a game to do of its villain, and that's exactly what I loved here. Unfortunately, Ryuji Goda didn't appear as often as I would have liked.
Same, unfortunately, goes for a bunch of side characters, especially from the Omi Alliance side and a foreign group that Ryuji works with to fight the Tojo Clan. A major story point that I won't go into further.
During the first few chapters of this game, you assume that you will learn more about these guys as the game goes along, but it's unfortunate that this doesn't really happen at the end. I'm not sure what the reason for that is, whether the game just introduced too many characters in one game and couldn't find the time for them all or the story couldn't be extended for budgetary reasons. The game's story is "only" 18 hours or so long on its own, so it's not nearly as long as the story of 0. But whatever the reason is, the game's ending didn't feel quite as impactful as a result.
The game's ending in general is just bat shit crazy on another level and while I obviously very much enjoy the Yakuza silliness, otherwise I wouldn't be playing them, I think they may have gone a step too far without giving good enough of an explanation.
Apart from the main story, there is also obviously a bunch of side missions (sub stories), of which there are 76. These are funny and silly and very enjoyable as per usual and remain the unique factor about these Yakuza games. A major contrast to the main story, and some of them also are among my favorites for the series. The baby one especially is worth a look on YouTube.
Finally, the game also has a few chapters included in "Majima's story". Three chapters in fact, and they take us through what happened shortly before the start of the main story and why Majima, in the main story, works in his own Construction Firm all of a sudden. Plus, there is a very nice surprise for fans of Yakuza 0.
But overall, I just want to add that the game had plenty of highlight scenes that are extremely memorable, none more so than the bridge scene in Sotenbori when he is smoking in the rain and ... well, play it to find out.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
Gameplay is pretty much the same as in the first two games. This game is a Brawler, so you do a lot of brawling. The two main differences here compared to Yakuza Kiwami would be that, instead of having four styles, you now have one. And instead of upgrading combat skills with experience points and open world gameplay stuff with Completion Points, you now collect points for four different colors. You use those colors to unlock everything. You gain them by consuming items as well, and a Hunger Meter fills up when you eat or drink, which increases your point gain after fights. I wouldn't say I preferred this over what we had in Kiwami or 0, but it's different and not bad or anything, so I did like it.
But yeah, other than that, you're still punching and kicking, grabbing and throwing and using Heat moves to brutally annihilate your foes.
HOWEVER: The game uses a different engine compared to the other two games, and this is notable for two reasons. First, it makes combat kind of more floaty. It doesn't really feel as brutal as the other two games in how the kicks and punches hit. Second, the new engine comes with a whole lot of ragdollin'. Throw an enemy into a bike, and he will suddenly fly a few meters up into the air like if shot out of a cannon. Or have an enemy take you down with a pistol shot or something and often you will do the same.
I don't know, this just felt kind of out of place for a game like this and I can't say I really liked it. It always remained a slight distraction but I did get used to it at the end.
Apart from combat, you still explore Kamurocho (and Sotenbori), you still play a bunch of mini games and you do a bunch of sub stories.
For mini games, the most notable thing here is the return of the Cabaret Club mini game from Yakuza 0, where you run your own cabaret club. It's incredibly addicting and comes with so many features, that it could almost be its own game. You compete in four different leagues and have to do 3 minute "runs" where you try to collect as much money as possible. Collect a certain amount, and you will be able to challenge the League Champion to a Title Match.
You have to partner with shops and keep playing more and more to grow your fan base (and income), plus your hostesses gain experience as well while you're doing so, further increasing revenue. You scout for new hostesses with different skills, you can actually dress up your best hostesses to change around their stats, and after a while, you actually unlock 10-15 minute long dates with them where you learn more about them and, if you reply well, increase their level a bunch. To beat this mini game, you'll easily put a dozen+ hours into it if you want to.
Definitely surpasses Gwent as my favorite mini game ever.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
Voice acting, as per usual in this series, is class. I still would like to actually have everything main story related be voice acted, but the most important scenes are, so it's fine. Whenever drama increases, the best of the voice actors comes to show, and the impact they're leaving is definitely felt a lot, especially for Ryuji Goda's character, who has a fantastic voice actor.
I enjoyed the soundtrack here as well, it was used nicely throughout and especially the Outlaw's Lullaby Battle Theme in Sotenbori is top class. Really liked the song choice for the bridge scene in Sotenbori I mentioned above.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
The world needs more modern, realistic, grounded games. Not because the other games aren't great, they are, but I feel it's a style of game that has become almost forgotten over the past decade apart from the Yakuza series and a few select games that fit this style here and there, like Mafia 3 and the Definitive Edition and RDR2. Anyway, while Yakuza's combat may not fit my description, the design of Kamurocho and Sotenbori certainly does. The graphics are even better in Kiwami 2 than in the other two games chronologically before it, and it's genuinely been a treat to look at throughout. If I have any complaint it's that the faces of some characters looked a bit too dated compared to the rest of this game, like Kaoru Sayama's.
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Just like with the graphics, the atmosphere in this game is fantastic and I love to see a modern and grounded world like this. Yakuza's atmosphere would of course also not be what it is without its unique mix of serious main story and silly sub stories, and this game nails that once again.
CONTENT | 9/10
As per usual, there is a ton of quality main and side content here that will entertain for 20-40 hours depending on how much of the side stuff you wish to do. The only issue I have here is that some of the main story stuff unfortunately feels a little bit like filler to me.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The filler I mentioned for the main story is something I do kind of have an issue with here as well. There are multiple parts where you have to go to a guy to go to a guy to go to a guy and I just don't really see the point in that, especially when it's done more than once. There are also many times where you are tasked to "go waste some time until you get a call" and sometimes this leads you to some forgettable side-but-main story sequence that I'd personally like to keep separate.
Other than that, the design in this game is the same as with the other two games, and it's a fun gameplay loop here too.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
The concept of this series remains unique and will do so for all entries I presume. The Remake is really well done and I'm really glad they did it, because I wouldn't have gotten into this series without one.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Plenty of replayability due to its plethora of side content, but not necessarily replayable for its main content, as its pretty linear and for good reason obviously.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL | 83/100
Another great entry into the Yakuza series. The main story has a lot of depth and, while not everything works in the end, it created multiple emotional and dramatic scenes that I loved. The side content is fantastic as usual and especially the Cabaret Club sim adds a whole extra game to the package. I would say it's better than Yakuza Kiwami 1, which is how it should be for a sequel, but I'd place it behind 0, which in my opinion had a better overall plot, a big advantage by giving you Majima as an additional protagonist, and slightly more satisfying combat.
2017
I was looking for a short game one night, and I found a pretty good one in Detention. The game plays in Taiwan in the 1960s under martial law (under military control instead of civil law by a government). Suffice it to say, these are sensitive times where any suspicious act can lead one to be blamed as sympathizing with Communist China.
You control two students in this game. The first one finds himself alone at school during a typhoon attack after awakening from a nap that he started during class. After exploring the school a bit, he finds another student who is sleeping on a chair. After waking her up, they try to leave the school, but notice that the bridge has collapsed, meaning they are stuck at school. Shortly after, you start taking control of the girl and start to figure out the secret meaning behind this weird night at school.
It turns into a gloomy story of guilt, depression, death and more, but it's best to not spoil anything about that here. All I can say is that it is told in a manner that asks the players to understand a lot themselves. I'll admit, a lot of the things that happened I didn't quite get after playing through it, so I had to look at some explanations online after. I want to say that the game could have made a few things a bit more clear, but it could also be that 1) I am dumb and 2) It was very late and I felt tired, which is why I wasn't quite able to piece things together, even though it was explained clear enough.
That said, there are lots of metaphors and a lot of symbolism used here to explain what is happening and how the characters are feeling. On top of that, a lot of these metaphors and references are from Taiwanese culture, from Taoism and Buddhism, so as someone who has no idea about these references, there might be another reason for why I didn't quite catch everything in one playthrough.
I might have decided to play it again to figure everything out, but to be honest, the one big issue I had with this game was that it turned into a full-on walking simulator in the second half. Walking simulators are a tough sell for me, unless the atmosphere and story are very gripping. So to have a story that is told very mysteriously and to have the horror parts be kind of put aside in the final act made it kind of hard for me to have a very fun time during these walking simulator parts.
The gameplay also consists of puzzles a lot, and the puzzles are all very easy and mostly very similarly designed (find easy item, finish puzzle to get other item, put it in spot X, move on to next building to do the same). So the game lives and dies by its atmosphere and story. The atmosphere is suitably depressing for the most part, so the game mostly does a great job here. I liked the story, but the references and metaphors didn't blow me away as someone who wasn't able to get them all.
So if you're wondering whether you should play this game, think about the topics it references, think about how much you enjoy walking simulators and you'll have your answer. Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was.
You control two students in this game. The first one finds himself alone at school during a typhoon attack after awakening from a nap that he started during class. After exploring the school a bit, he finds another student who is sleeping on a chair. After waking her up, they try to leave the school, but notice that the bridge has collapsed, meaning they are stuck at school. Shortly after, you start taking control of the girl and start to figure out the secret meaning behind this weird night at school.
It turns into a gloomy story of guilt, depression, death and more, but it's best to not spoil anything about that here. All I can say is that it is told in a manner that asks the players to understand a lot themselves. I'll admit, a lot of the things that happened I didn't quite get after playing through it, so I had to look at some explanations online after. I want to say that the game could have made a few things a bit more clear, but it could also be that 1) I am dumb and 2) It was very late and I felt tired, which is why I wasn't quite able to piece things together, even though it was explained clear enough.
That said, there are lots of metaphors and a lot of symbolism used here to explain what is happening and how the characters are feeling. On top of that, a lot of these metaphors and references are from Taiwanese culture, from Taoism and Buddhism, so as someone who has no idea about these references, there might be another reason for why I didn't quite catch everything in one playthrough.
I might have decided to play it again to figure everything out, but to be honest, the one big issue I had with this game was that it turned into a full-on walking simulator in the second half. Walking simulators are a tough sell for me, unless the atmosphere and story are very gripping. So to have a story that is told very mysteriously and to have the horror parts be kind of put aside in the final act made it kind of hard for me to have a very fun time during these walking simulator parts.
The gameplay also consists of puzzles a lot, and the puzzles are all very easy and mostly very similarly designed (find easy item, finish puzzle to get other item, put it in spot X, move on to next building to do the same). So the game lives and dies by its atmosphere and story. The atmosphere is suitably depressing for the most part, so the game mostly does a great job here. I liked the story, but the references and metaphors didn't blow me away as someone who wasn't able to get them all.
So if you're wondering whether you should play this game, think about the topics it references, think about how much you enjoy walking simulators and you'll have your answer. Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was.
2015
250 hours. 7 years. And I've finally, FINALLY, beaten Fallout 4's main story. I've played this many times and gotten far into it before, but never finished the story, so this was a big milestone for me.
I love the Fallout series, even if each 3D game entry has a lot of flaws, whether it's the seemingly endless bugs for all games or the meh combat of 3 and New Vegas. But what I loved in both games was the dialogue, the way I could just talk endlessly with people about tons of topics and the way I could pass skill checks based on how I built my character.
So when I got my hands on Fallout 4 to realize that this was not the case, I obviously was pretty disappointed. That hasn't changed. I still despise the dialogue system in Fallout 4 and the illusion of choice. I also still dislike a voiced main character, even if the male one in particular has actually done a great job.
However, the game has grown on me over the years for all the things it improves upon compared to the two prior titles, plus for all those things that Fallout 4 does just as well as 3 and NV.
First, the world building and exploration is still fantastic. There are so many locations to discover, so many interesting activities and side quests to do in those locations and so much environmental storytelling to observe.
Second, the combat improved a lot in this game, and I actually had plenty of fun with it. The amount of customization options to mod your weapons and armor is also something I enjoy, not to mention the ability to find Legendary weapons.
Settlement building is something that I never dabbled with on any playthrough for more than a couple hours, but I appreciate its existence and it's been fun whenever I did build something. To think people can just spend dozens of hours of building settlements is pretty cool.
Finally, companions in this game are pretty varied in character and I really like how they open up to you as you spend more time with them, which lets you learn more about them and/or do companion quests.
So Fallout 4 is actually, in my opinion, a great game, it's just not a great Fallout game. I guess a silver lining in that regard is that Fallout 4 had to do a lot of wrong in order for Bethesda to (hopefully) get it more right with Starfield. And in that regard, all I can say about Fallout 4 is that it got me even more excited about Starfield than I already am, as there still is nothing like a Bethesda RPG.
I love the Fallout series, even if each 3D game entry has a lot of flaws, whether it's the seemingly endless bugs for all games or the meh combat of 3 and New Vegas. But what I loved in both games was the dialogue, the way I could just talk endlessly with people about tons of topics and the way I could pass skill checks based on how I built my character.
So when I got my hands on Fallout 4 to realize that this was not the case, I obviously was pretty disappointed. That hasn't changed. I still despise the dialogue system in Fallout 4 and the illusion of choice. I also still dislike a voiced main character, even if the male one in particular has actually done a great job.
However, the game has grown on me over the years for all the things it improves upon compared to the two prior titles, plus for all those things that Fallout 4 does just as well as 3 and NV.
First, the world building and exploration is still fantastic. There are so many locations to discover, so many interesting activities and side quests to do in those locations and so much environmental storytelling to observe.
Second, the combat improved a lot in this game, and I actually had plenty of fun with it. The amount of customization options to mod your weapons and armor is also something I enjoy, not to mention the ability to find Legendary weapons.
Settlement building is something that I never dabbled with on any playthrough for more than a couple hours, but I appreciate its existence and it's been fun whenever I did build something. To think people can just spend dozens of hours of building settlements is pretty cool.
Finally, companions in this game are pretty varied in character and I really like how they open up to you as you spend more time with them, which lets you learn more about them and/or do companion quests.
So Fallout 4 is actually, in my opinion, a great game, it's just not a great Fallout game. I guess a silver lining in that regard is that Fallout 4 had to do a lot of wrong in order for Bethesda to (hopefully) get it more right with Starfield. And in that regard, all I can say about Fallout 4 is that it got me even more excited about Starfield than I already am, as there still is nothing like a Bethesda RPG.