goodchicken
145 Reviews liked by goodchicken
Clocked over 900 hours since ARR (which is undoubtedly on the low end). Mainly MSQ, dailies, crafting/gathering. Endwalker is exceptional. I don't think I can play another MMO honestly. FFXIV is all you need.
Dark Souls
2011
A revolution in game design, it's not hard at all to see why Dark Souls has been so influential in more modern games. It's so rare that you see a developer who are;
#1: So willing to let players miss out on huge swathes of content by tucking away entire, interconnected areas behind secrets, and;
#2: Willing to be so thoroughly, unapologetically evil to the player. Brutal boss fights, little to no handholding, enemies constantly ambushing you and hiding behind corners, NPCs who betray you and so much more.
You combine these things, and you have a recipe for player immersion. I'd be willing to bet that a large majority of the reason players talk up how consumed they were by Dark Souls is due to how "hands off" the game is. It never explains any of its countless nuances, it leaves the player to their own devices to discover how certain mechanics work; how to survive enemy attacks by using the I-frames on your roll, how to dual-wield weapons or use a shield in tandem with another one or use a single weapon with both hands. During my playthrough on stream, I shot arrows at the pressure plates in Sen's Fortress to trigger them without stepping on them, and my chat totally popped off. None of them had ever seen someone do that or even thought to do such a thing and it worked! That was so sick, and also I'm a genius! If more games were willing to trust their players to think for themselves and experiment, they might be hailed as just as immersive.
It's incredibly impressive how many builds and playstyles Dark Souls' combat and systems allow for, combine that with the non-linearity and potential for constant sequence-breaking with its world as open and interconnected as it is and you have a game that's also extremely replayable. At its best, Dark Souls honestly feels like an edgier and less clunky 3D Zelda only designed by people who hate you.
There are a couple things that hold it back from the complete top score for me. The second half of the game noticeably dips in quality from the first, it never quite reaches the heights of Anor Londo and Sen's Fortress again once those areas are over, and some areas like Tomb Of The Giants are outright unenjoyable for me, even as someone who likes difficulty. The Bed Of Chaos is an obviously awful boss in every regard so notorious that I hardly even feel the need to go off on it, the menu'ing is pretty clunky and unintuitive and I personally don't like having to do the "run up" to a boss again every time you die to it. I love difficulty, but I don't think that's interesting difficulty or gameplay - it just seems like padding to me, and it's especially frustrating against bosses like Gwyn who are pretty brutal and whose fight can be over in about 30 seconds, yet you have to do a like - 3 minute run-up to every time you wanna rematch him. Ugh.
Still though, anything I can find wrong with this game pales in comparison to its achievements. Very few developers have the balls to do the things Dark Souls does. In my playthrough, dastardly NPC Lautrec who betrays you if you let him live backflipped off a cliff during our fight and just died, I just got his item for free and the game just let me roll with it. Now THAT's game design. No restrictions, no refusing to let players cheese out a W, just dudes backflipping off cliffs. Fuck yeah, Dark Souls. Fuck yeah.
#1: So willing to let players miss out on huge swathes of content by tucking away entire, interconnected areas behind secrets, and;
#2: Willing to be so thoroughly, unapologetically evil to the player. Brutal boss fights, little to no handholding, enemies constantly ambushing you and hiding behind corners, NPCs who betray you and so much more.
You combine these things, and you have a recipe for player immersion. I'd be willing to bet that a large majority of the reason players talk up how consumed they were by Dark Souls is due to how "hands off" the game is. It never explains any of its countless nuances, it leaves the player to their own devices to discover how certain mechanics work; how to survive enemy attacks by using the I-frames on your roll, how to dual-wield weapons or use a shield in tandem with another one or use a single weapon with both hands. During my playthrough on stream, I shot arrows at the pressure plates in Sen's Fortress to trigger them without stepping on them, and my chat totally popped off. None of them had ever seen someone do that or even thought to do such a thing and it worked! That was so sick, and also I'm a genius! If more games were willing to trust their players to think for themselves and experiment, they might be hailed as just as immersive.
It's incredibly impressive how many builds and playstyles Dark Souls' combat and systems allow for, combine that with the non-linearity and potential for constant sequence-breaking with its world as open and interconnected as it is and you have a game that's also extremely replayable. At its best, Dark Souls honestly feels like an edgier and less clunky 3D Zelda only designed by people who hate you.
There are a couple things that hold it back from the complete top score for me. The second half of the game noticeably dips in quality from the first, it never quite reaches the heights of Anor Londo and Sen's Fortress again once those areas are over, and some areas like Tomb Of The Giants are outright unenjoyable for me, even as someone who likes difficulty. The Bed Of Chaos is an obviously awful boss in every regard so notorious that I hardly even feel the need to go off on it, the menu'ing is pretty clunky and unintuitive and I personally don't like having to do the "run up" to a boss again every time you die to it. I love difficulty, but I don't think that's interesting difficulty or gameplay - it just seems like padding to me, and it's especially frustrating against bosses like Gwyn who are pretty brutal and whose fight can be over in about 30 seconds, yet you have to do a like - 3 minute run-up to every time you wanna rematch him. Ugh.
Still though, anything I can find wrong with this game pales in comparison to its achievements. Very few developers have the balls to do the things Dark Souls does. In my playthrough, dastardly NPC Lautrec who betrays you if you let him live backflipped off a cliff during our fight and just died, I just got his item for free and the game just let me roll with it. Now THAT's game design. No restrictions, no refusing to let players cheese out a W, just dudes backflipping off cliffs. Fuck yeah, Dark Souls. Fuck yeah.
This review contains spoilers
Played with the sound restoration patch on a GBA emulator, apparently the best way to experience ff6, though the pixel remaster may take its place when it releases. Final fantasy 6 is a masterful rpg. Tonally/thematically as well as in terms of storytelling, it is easily one of the finest and most important games of all time.
I've not played final fantasy 1 through 5, but from what I understand, 6 is where everything changed for the better. The sheer scope and ambition of 6, considering its time, the platform it was designed for and what had come before it, is pretty crazy. The fact that the original came out in 1994 baffles me because it still holds up tremendously well even today. At the time I feel like the real intricacies of game design and games' potential as an art medium were still very much in their early stages and there was a lot of experimentation and shifting trends as games were still trying to make their presence known in popular culture. I feel like before games like ff6 the most popular and well regarded games were not even remotely similar in terms of what they were trying to achieve. Most were seemingly light entertainment and were designed primarily to stand out at an arcade or on the shelves of different game box art. The final fantasy games, as far as I can tell, were a bit of an enigma in this regard. The box art was always very stylised and somewhat abstract/cryptic, seemingly aiming for something quite different from the loud, in your face box art people were used to at the time. The focus of these games were on the player crafting an experience for themselves - being able to put themselves into the game and actually feel like they're roleplaying. After setting many trends in this genre of 'role-playing game' and building upon it, suddenly square subvert almost all of these expectations with ff6.
Even now, having played a ton of different rpgs and losing myself in all manner of different games both classic and modern, I am floored by ff6's ambition, creativity and heart. I said the same of ff7, I can only wonder how people must have felt about these games at the time of their release. Ff6 has 14 playable characters, 10 of which are not optional and almost all of which are well realised, fleshed out characters. What's more is their importance has no super strict hierarchy - yes some are more important than others but ultimately there is no one hero that you control. This works wonderfully to serve ff6's narrative and heart, it allowed me to fully invest myself in the cast of of characters and get a better understanding of who each of them are. The writing team of ff6 supposedly divvied up the characters amongst themselves and laboured over their identity, backstory and design to the point of exhaustion and it shows! The way characters are established and then, importantly, developed has such heart to it, with some surprisingly dark themes to set up character motivations, a bizarre and goofy sense of humour at times and a general feeling of sincerity.
What really helps this game to get that across and craft its impressive narrative actually has a lot to do with its presentation. Ff6 is incredibly detailed, with clever use of sprite animations for expressions and performance in cutscenes. Sometimes the use of its little sprites is almost comical, adding a layer of charm to ff6's most sincere and dramatic moments. It also has an expansive world that the narrative naturally sees you explore every inch of during the character's exploits (but not without its fair share of secrets) and it is all tied together by a masterclass soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu. The opera section in particular has to be in my top video game moments ever and actually made me shed a tear! Little pixel people and a lovely operatic soundtrack on a SNES did that to me, that's so awesome! The entire scene with celes singing on the balcony is simply beautiful and is followed by such brilliant comical chaos, i'm shocked that they could achieve something so simple yet so brilliant.
The gameplay of ff6 still holds up really well too, the combat feels fair yet challenging and there's no end to the ways in which you can customise and build your party if you want to. The esper system is a lot of fun to use, giving you a vast array of different summons and spells to equip to (almost) every party member. There's some actually nicely thought out puzzles sprinkled in the mix and some genuinely great boss fights too, not limited to fighting big ass mechs, different elemental dragons and an actual undead train (which you can german suplex for some reason and it's incredible).
Now ff6 does have its fair share of 90s jank and a couple of problems, not all of them due to its age necessarily. It really does show its age in areas, such as trying to navigate its menus and manage your team, a lack of quality of life like telling me what spells do in the spellcasting screen, a quite obnoxious encounter rate and being overly vague with its direction in where to go next, particular in the world of ruin. There's always an inevitability for this kind of stuff in games that are old and translated into english of course and thankfully I was able to subvert much of it thanks to the emulator's speed up function and save states and of course thanks to google. But I imagine playing this at the time without those assists would have been quite the task, as the game would take like 3x as long to finish and dying would, I suspect, often send you back very far.
One of the game's main issues is that the final third, the world of ruin in general, feels quite rushed. It starts out very strong with Celes waking up a year after the world is almost destroyed, but what follows feels, as i've seen described, like one big side quest up until the finale. Despite a really strong setup in the world, story and characters in the world of balance, the game stumbles slightly with bringing the characters back into the party. The world of ruin is generally less interesting because of this, as characters just kind of finish what they were doing quickly and join you again just like that. The main exception for me is Terra, who's relationship with a village of orphaned children with whom she is seen as a mother figure was honestly quite moving. I managed to recruit everyone (including Umaro and Gogo who just kind of, join you for little to no reason) except shadow because of a glitch that wouldn't let me wager an item in the coliseum. The world of ruin especially also has a LOT of completely missable content, so feels less focused and if I hadn't had a guide I imagine I wouldn't have found much of it. This was likely their philosophy at the time and that's cool but it would be a shame to miss out on some great segments like jumping into cyan's mind, now that was strange.
The finale of ff6 is very strong. Kefka's tower as a dungeon is fine and over pretty fast but the final battles that ensue are fantastic. They feel looming and threatening, the party characters that you've built up and journeyed with all come together and are all utilised and the score for this part of the game is out of this world. The way they wrap the game up does feel quite rushed and abrupt but when the final scenes play and the credits roll it really reminds you of what an amazing journey you've been on. I'd grown attached to just about every character in my party and now the world is starting to rebuild.
thematically, final fantasy 6 really shines - with some dark twists and surprisingly heavy themes dealing with things like war crimes, life under a military dictatorship, suicide, teenage pregnancy, loss/grief and, when hope shines through, discovering & learning to love. All this done on a system with less memory than an average photograph takes up on a modern computer. Ff6 has really stood the test of time and deserves all of the praise it gets, I love this game to bits and with a bit of fine tuning I really think it could be about as close as you could get to a perfect game.
Did you think a little thing like the end of the world was gonna do me in?
I've not played final fantasy 1 through 5, but from what I understand, 6 is where everything changed for the better. The sheer scope and ambition of 6, considering its time, the platform it was designed for and what had come before it, is pretty crazy. The fact that the original came out in 1994 baffles me because it still holds up tremendously well even today. At the time I feel like the real intricacies of game design and games' potential as an art medium were still very much in their early stages and there was a lot of experimentation and shifting trends as games were still trying to make their presence known in popular culture. I feel like before games like ff6 the most popular and well regarded games were not even remotely similar in terms of what they were trying to achieve. Most were seemingly light entertainment and were designed primarily to stand out at an arcade or on the shelves of different game box art. The final fantasy games, as far as I can tell, were a bit of an enigma in this regard. The box art was always very stylised and somewhat abstract/cryptic, seemingly aiming for something quite different from the loud, in your face box art people were used to at the time. The focus of these games were on the player crafting an experience for themselves - being able to put themselves into the game and actually feel like they're roleplaying. After setting many trends in this genre of 'role-playing game' and building upon it, suddenly square subvert almost all of these expectations with ff6.
Even now, having played a ton of different rpgs and losing myself in all manner of different games both classic and modern, I am floored by ff6's ambition, creativity and heart. I said the same of ff7, I can only wonder how people must have felt about these games at the time of their release. Ff6 has 14 playable characters, 10 of which are not optional and almost all of which are well realised, fleshed out characters. What's more is their importance has no super strict hierarchy - yes some are more important than others but ultimately there is no one hero that you control. This works wonderfully to serve ff6's narrative and heart, it allowed me to fully invest myself in the cast of of characters and get a better understanding of who each of them are. The writing team of ff6 supposedly divvied up the characters amongst themselves and laboured over their identity, backstory and design to the point of exhaustion and it shows! The way characters are established and then, importantly, developed has such heart to it, with some surprisingly dark themes to set up character motivations, a bizarre and goofy sense of humour at times and a general feeling of sincerity.
What really helps this game to get that across and craft its impressive narrative actually has a lot to do with its presentation. Ff6 is incredibly detailed, with clever use of sprite animations for expressions and performance in cutscenes. Sometimes the use of its little sprites is almost comical, adding a layer of charm to ff6's most sincere and dramatic moments. It also has an expansive world that the narrative naturally sees you explore every inch of during the character's exploits (but not without its fair share of secrets) and it is all tied together by a masterclass soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu. The opera section in particular has to be in my top video game moments ever and actually made me shed a tear! Little pixel people and a lovely operatic soundtrack on a SNES did that to me, that's so awesome! The entire scene with celes singing on the balcony is simply beautiful and is followed by such brilliant comical chaos, i'm shocked that they could achieve something so simple yet so brilliant.
The gameplay of ff6 still holds up really well too, the combat feels fair yet challenging and there's no end to the ways in which you can customise and build your party if you want to. The esper system is a lot of fun to use, giving you a vast array of different summons and spells to equip to (almost) every party member. There's some actually nicely thought out puzzles sprinkled in the mix and some genuinely great boss fights too, not limited to fighting big ass mechs, different elemental dragons and an actual undead train (which you can german suplex for some reason and it's incredible).
Now ff6 does have its fair share of 90s jank and a couple of problems, not all of them due to its age necessarily. It really does show its age in areas, such as trying to navigate its menus and manage your team, a lack of quality of life like telling me what spells do in the spellcasting screen, a quite obnoxious encounter rate and being overly vague with its direction in where to go next, particular in the world of ruin. There's always an inevitability for this kind of stuff in games that are old and translated into english of course and thankfully I was able to subvert much of it thanks to the emulator's speed up function and save states and of course thanks to google. But I imagine playing this at the time without those assists would have been quite the task, as the game would take like 3x as long to finish and dying would, I suspect, often send you back very far.
One of the game's main issues is that the final third, the world of ruin in general, feels quite rushed. It starts out very strong with Celes waking up a year after the world is almost destroyed, but what follows feels, as i've seen described, like one big side quest up until the finale. Despite a really strong setup in the world, story and characters in the world of balance, the game stumbles slightly with bringing the characters back into the party. The world of ruin is generally less interesting because of this, as characters just kind of finish what they were doing quickly and join you again just like that. The main exception for me is Terra, who's relationship with a village of orphaned children with whom she is seen as a mother figure was honestly quite moving. I managed to recruit everyone (including Umaro and Gogo who just kind of, join you for little to no reason) except shadow because of a glitch that wouldn't let me wager an item in the coliseum. The world of ruin especially also has a LOT of completely missable content, so feels less focused and if I hadn't had a guide I imagine I wouldn't have found much of it. This was likely their philosophy at the time and that's cool but it would be a shame to miss out on some great segments like jumping into cyan's mind, now that was strange.
The finale of ff6 is very strong. Kefka's tower as a dungeon is fine and over pretty fast but the final battles that ensue are fantastic. They feel looming and threatening, the party characters that you've built up and journeyed with all come together and are all utilised and the score for this part of the game is out of this world. The way they wrap the game up does feel quite rushed and abrupt but when the final scenes play and the credits roll it really reminds you of what an amazing journey you've been on. I'd grown attached to just about every character in my party and now the world is starting to rebuild.
thematically, final fantasy 6 really shines - with some dark twists and surprisingly heavy themes dealing with things like war crimes, life under a military dictatorship, suicide, teenage pregnancy, loss/grief and, when hope shines through, discovering & learning to love. All this done on a system with less memory than an average photograph takes up on a modern computer. Ff6 has really stood the test of time and deserves all of the praise it gets, I love this game to bits and with a bit of fine tuning I really think it could be about as close as you could get to a perfect game.
Did you think a little thing like the end of the world was gonna do me in?
This game has no right to slap as hard as it did. The tank battles are actually fun and in-depth; trying to look for and find every secret is satisfying, and each slime has its own personality. Being able to recruit the enemies by capturing them and sending them back to town is a fun idea, and well worth it. Really, the only bad thing I can think of is that the music could be more diverse and expansive. Actually, scratch that; the fact that none of the other games in this trilogy made it out of Japan is also bad.
Soul Blade
1995
TO LOVE
TO SHINE
TO SHINE
Soul Blade
1995
THE ABSOLUTE BEST INTRO EVER.
GOOSEBUMPS.
GOOSEBUMPS.
DragonFable
2006
otherwise known as the more fun version of adventure quest
The first 15 or so hours are magical. Then there's 30 more.
Breath of the Wild has a perfect opening couple of hours that give you these great physics tools and quickly set you loose in the open world. All of its intuitive physics and weather systems, as well as the controversial weapon durability system provide you with these great moments of thinking on your feet and out-of-the-box problem solving. Exploring the landscape and the flora and fauna that reside there is fun for its own sake, and the music and general atmosphere is enchanting enough to make simply being in the world enjoyable. I really think the vibe and beautiful art style of this game alone are what give it such a legendary reputation, rather than any kind of revolutionary game design. Nintendo knows how to nail the presentation of their games better than anyone, and it gives them the illusion of being groundbreaking and artfully designed. I really felt that way at the start of this one.
But after building a near-perfect open world experience in the first act, Breath of the Wild spends the rest of the game tearing it down through sheer tedium and repetition. Fighting the same three enemy types with the limited combat system (and being interrupted by the same combat music track), constantly breaking your weapons (which serves as no more than an annoyance once you build up an armory of weapons), doing dozens of nearly identical shrines and korok seed puzzles that just feel like chores... All of this is fun and fresh at the start, but the novelty wears off fast, and then the game just keeps going. Eventually you realize there is nothing mysterious or novel to be found in this world, really; Every cool place you find is just a container for a shrine or a korok seed. The first labyrinth you find is exciting. Then you realize there are three of them and they're all just shrine puzzles. Breath of the Wild is the joy of discovery turned into a formulaic, easily digestible skinner box.
The memorable moments that the game does manage to nail, like reaching Kakariko Village or Zora's Domain, fighting the first Divine Beast, finding the Master Sword, and fighting through Hyrule Castle are all spread too thin across so many hours of the same skinner box slop endemic to open world games. And soon, most of the systems that make the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting early on become irrelevant. Eventually you'll just be teleporting across the map, using abilities like Revali's Gale to skip the climbing, wearing clothes to ignore the weather, using food to ignore the stamina system, and using regular weapons to ignore the shiekah slate and physics system in combat. The gameplay can literally only lose depth as you go; your reward for progression is that you get to engage with the game less.
Getting a non-linear, open world game right is hard; I think very few games have managed to live up to such massive scope and breadth of possibility. Breath of the Wild has been hailed as the solution to this problem, but far from being a revolution in open world design, it falls into the same trap of wearing you down with hours and hours of the same copy-pasted activities. It has some ideas that show amazing potential early on, but in the end the experience reverts to the player turning their brain off to wade through a sea of filler content along the path of least resistance. Just like every shitty Ubisoft open world game that Breath of the Wild is supposed to be the answer to.
Breath of the Wild has a perfect opening couple of hours that give you these great physics tools and quickly set you loose in the open world. All of its intuitive physics and weather systems, as well as the controversial weapon durability system provide you with these great moments of thinking on your feet and out-of-the-box problem solving. Exploring the landscape and the flora and fauna that reside there is fun for its own sake, and the music and general atmosphere is enchanting enough to make simply being in the world enjoyable. I really think the vibe and beautiful art style of this game alone are what give it such a legendary reputation, rather than any kind of revolutionary game design. Nintendo knows how to nail the presentation of their games better than anyone, and it gives them the illusion of being groundbreaking and artfully designed. I really felt that way at the start of this one.
But after building a near-perfect open world experience in the first act, Breath of the Wild spends the rest of the game tearing it down through sheer tedium and repetition. Fighting the same three enemy types with the limited combat system (and being interrupted by the same combat music track), constantly breaking your weapons (which serves as no more than an annoyance once you build up an armory of weapons), doing dozens of nearly identical shrines and korok seed puzzles that just feel like chores... All of this is fun and fresh at the start, but the novelty wears off fast, and then the game just keeps going. Eventually you realize there is nothing mysterious or novel to be found in this world, really; Every cool place you find is just a container for a shrine or a korok seed. The first labyrinth you find is exciting. Then you realize there are three of them and they're all just shrine puzzles. Breath of the Wild is the joy of discovery turned into a formulaic, easily digestible skinner box.
The memorable moments that the game does manage to nail, like reaching Kakariko Village or Zora's Domain, fighting the first Divine Beast, finding the Master Sword, and fighting through Hyrule Castle are all spread too thin across so many hours of the same skinner box slop endemic to open world games. And soon, most of the systems that make the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting early on become irrelevant. Eventually you'll just be teleporting across the map, using abilities like Revali's Gale to skip the climbing, wearing clothes to ignore the weather, using food to ignore the stamina system, and using regular weapons to ignore the shiekah slate and physics system in combat. The gameplay can literally only lose depth as you go; your reward for progression is that you get to engage with the game less.
Getting a non-linear, open world game right is hard; I think very few games have managed to live up to such massive scope and breadth of possibility. Breath of the Wild has been hailed as the solution to this problem, but far from being a revolution in open world design, it falls into the same trap of wearing you down with hours and hours of the same copy-pasted activities. It has some ideas that show amazing potential early on, but in the end the experience reverts to the player turning their brain off to wade through a sea of filler content along the path of least resistance. Just like every shitty Ubisoft open world game that Breath of the Wild is supposed to be the answer to.
Man, early Pokemon was so full of life. You can see in games like Pokemon Emerald just how clearly full of passion the design team was for these games once upon a time. Gen 3 of Pokemon's greatest strength is just how enduring it is, these games are collectively over 20 years old now and they still look absolutely amazing, the pristine pixel art has allowed them to hold up for longer than any 3D models ever could. You can see your own reflection in puddles as you run over them in this game, for the GBA that still kinda blows my mind! Not a thing about these games look dated even today, and the UI and menus are still sleek and gorgeous too.
Pokemon Emerald (and Gen 3 by extension) has so many cool, unsung little setpiece moments that help it stick in the mind. The route before Fallarbor Town being covered in volcanic ash from the nearby Mt. Chimney and having brown grass that only turns green when you run through it, the series of long-winded forest routes leading up to and past Fortree City (one of the coolest locations in any Pokemon game) and the vast and open-ended oceans you can begin exploring to your heart's content as soon as you get Surf.
Pokemon Gen 3's world design, both literally and figuratively are brilliant. Hoenn is a lush, tropical region so beautifully realised by all those little moments of artistry I touched on, but in terms of progression it's also incredible. So open-ended, so rewarding to the player for paying attention and thinking about the world. Once you beat Norman and get Surf, the game never tells you that you're supposed to go east of Mauville City to progress to Fortree, but you as the player are rewarded for caring and paying attention and thinking to yourself; "hmm, I should come back here when I can Surf." There's so many little moments like that peppered throughout the game like coming back to Meteor Falls to get Bagon when you have Waterfall or using Surf to go back yourself to the places near Dewford Town and Slateport City that Mr. Briney used to have to ferry you across. (And perhaps discovering the Abandoned Ship in the process!)
HMs do feel antiquated and needlessly restrictive, especially given the modernization of more recent games - and the physical/special split not yet existing hurts the game mechanically, but almost everything else is so well done. The new Pokemon designs are charming and do a great job at reflecting Hoenn's tropical nature, the soundtrack is lively and optimistic - enhancing the game's adventurous aesthetic and hell, the story might not be too much to write home about but it too has some interesting setpiece moments here and there and better yet - it doesn't insult your intelligence and insist upon itself at every given opportunity! Wow! What a novel idea! Next you'll tell me that this game had meaningful post-game content or something!
These games still looking so good today serves as a great microcosm of how well they still hold up in general. It's Pokemon Emerald, but it might just be evergreen. If you ever want to remember why Pokemon was so beloved, go back and play a game like this.
Pokemon Emerald (and Gen 3 by extension) has so many cool, unsung little setpiece moments that help it stick in the mind. The route before Fallarbor Town being covered in volcanic ash from the nearby Mt. Chimney and having brown grass that only turns green when you run through it, the series of long-winded forest routes leading up to and past Fortree City (one of the coolest locations in any Pokemon game) and the vast and open-ended oceans you can begin exploring to your heart's content as soon as you get Surf.
Pokemon Gen 3's world design, both literally and figuratively are brilliant. Hoenn is a lush, tropical region so beautifully realised by all those little moments of artistry I touched on, but in terms of progression it's also incredible. So open-ended, so rewarding to the player for paying attention and thinking about the world. Once you beat Norman and get Surf, the game never tells you that you're supposed to go east of Mauville City to progress to Fortree, but you as the player are rewarded for caring and paying attention and thinking to yourself; "hmm, I should come back here when I can Surf." There's so many little moments like that peppered throughout the game like coming back to Meteor Falls to get Bagon when you have Waterfall or using Surf to go back yourself to the places near Dewford Town and Slateport City that Mr. Briney used to have to ferry you across. (And perhaps discovering the Abandoned Ship in the process!)
HMs do feel antiquated and needlessly restrictive, especially given the modernization of more recent games - and the physical/special split not yet existing hurts the game mechanically, but almost everything else is so well done. The new Pokemon designs are charming and do a great job at reflecting Hoenn's tropical nature, the soundtrack is lively and optimistic - enhancing the game's adventurous aesthetic and hell, the story might not be too much to write home about but it too has some interesting setpiece moments here and there and better yet - it doesn't insult your intelligence and insist upon itself at every given opportunity! Wow! What a novel idea! Next you'll tell me that this game had meaningful post-game content or something!
These games still looking so good today serves as a great microcosm of how well they still hold up in general. It's Pokemon Emerald, but it might just be evergreen. If you ever want to remember why Pokemon was so beloved, go back and play a game like this.
It's just THAT good. The idea of focusing the story on some guy, through various parts of his life is just incredible. No wonder they chose this one to base the DQ movie on. It's great.