ikissgirls
2021
This review contains spoilers
No More Heroes 3 is a game I've waited a very long time for. And I think this game delivered! It made me very happy while playing it, just like the previous games, its a mix of relaxing but simple exploration, silly minigames, satisfying combat, and incredibly compelling characters and dialogue. this one feels a lot more surreal than the previous ones, it fleshes that atmosphere of Travis Strikes Again out. Maybe that feeling of surreality is fueled by how long I waited and how many expectations I had for this game, and maybe its fueled by the absurd amount of references and brands name-drops played completely straight. But it is certainly a trip, from start to finish.
The gameplay loop has changed a bit, in some ways that I like, and some ways I don't like. For one, now the map is split into 7 different locations. I like this change, it gave us some needed aesthetic variety, I've ran around Santa Destroy enough already. Though, it's kinda obvious that some of these places are lower effort than others. These maps are very minimal in interactivity, and have massive chunks you can't access. The scale of them might've been necessary for driving around in your bike to be satisfying, though. And I liked that part a lot! There's also the change to require you to do 3 designated fights every episode, which works fine enough. It gave a lot of time for you to get used to the combat, but they definitely aren't more fun than the boss stages were in previous NMH games. The jobs are as fun as they ever were, and with designated fights giving you so much cash, I imagine they might've felt less like a slog to mandatorily go through to players who didn't like them in NMH1. I like the part where you suplex crocodiles. All the overworld objectives like collecting cards, finding scorpions, and planting trees were cool too, it gave some needed depth to the overworld. I don't know if I like the general gameplay loop of this game more or less than NMH1's, it's kinda like they traded some cool stuff for some new cool stuff.
The combat of No More Heroes has absolutely never been better than this. NMH1 and 2 aren't shallow games, but they do rely a lot on the satisfaction of the combat rather than depth. I don't think NMH3 turned No More Heroes into some super complex character action game, but it did give a ton of depth to positioning, your tools, and how useful your overall kit is. Stunning into suplexes to get back battery is so incredibly fun, the Death Glove skills have a ton of varied application, and I don't think they lost any satisfaction even though I'm no longer swinging my wii-mote around all the time due to how incredibly good heavy slashes feel. And I love the mech. The mech kicks ass.
The most important part of No More Heroes' gameplay loop is definitely the boss fights, and fun-wise, I don't think these are any worse than NMH1 or 2's. Everyone knows the most fun fights in action games are the ones where the bosses are similar to you instead of giants, and NMH3 has a ton of fun fights like those. Though, they did cut a major compartment of the bosses, which is the stages you play through before them. I miss those stages, some of these fights really needed some extra aesthetics attached to them to prop them up in the cool factor. And this isn't really about gameplay, but I don't think I liked most of these bosses as characters as much as I did in the first No More Heroes. Most of those fight intros were carried by Travis being really cool, instead of the bosses also being really cool, exceptions being some ones near the end.
The plot to this game very fun, and all the colourful characters definitely kept it as anything other than boring. I found myself wondering how this game fit into the plot of NMH through a lot of my playthrough, and I think I get what they were going for. NMH1 is all about this young assassin who's desensitized to death and sex, NMH2 is him returning to his town and realizing the scope and reality of his actions, and TSA is him fucking off into the woods and coming to terms with everything. NMH3 represents an older assassin, who still definitely likes sex and violence, but understands things a bit better than he did before. At this point, Travis is living his best life, but FU comes around, a parallel to a younger Travis, eager to prove himself and in love with violence. FU works very well as a crux to Travis, an angry alien prince cool with murdering and killing, except when it happens to his friends, who are apart of shallow friendships at best, or only work with him out of fear at worst. But I did find myself wondering one thing through all of this, after TSA, did we even need a game to pinpoint Travis' character growth like this? We already know his path to maturing. In a lot of ways, I think that No More Heroes 3 might've been a story that was already told. Which might feel weird to say after establishing I waited years for this game, but I think its the main explanation to why some of the kill the past-heads felt underwhelmed by the plot. But, I can't think of a way to extend Travis' character any more meaningfully than this. You could say this was literally the best outcome! And I'd agree.
No More Heroes 3 is the game I didn't need, but I wanted. and what I got was an incredibly fun game, with a fast paced gameplay loop of super cool combat, oddly fun menial tasks, absurd dialogue, and mind blowing art design. With a ton of collectables that kept me playing for a while, style that feels equally sleek, and completely overbearing. That overbearing style lies deeply at the core of No More Heroes 3's aesthetics, with bombastic referencing, constant logo cut-ins, with an opening, outro, and even commercial breaks. There are probably parts of this that read more critical than I even feel in my heart for this game, I just really loved the whole experience. In the first hour of the game, I didn't even know what to focus my brain on, from the weird NES segment, to Sylvia talking about gaming in a tab in the corner of the screen, to the sudden introspective dialogue with Mr Blackhole. No More Heroes 3 has so much depth to its aesthetic flair, and barely lightens up on it the whole way through. This game kinda feels like sensory overload, but in a way that never feels tacky or annoying, which is pretty impressive. There are times where it relies a bit too much on that sensory overload and runs out of substance, but there's almost always something compelling somewhere to back that up, whether it be gameplay or incredible visual design. I think this game is super special, and even with its flaws, I really couldn't imagine a better conclusion to this series. I hope Suda gets more opportunities to make games like this that are completely from the heart, even in their weird quirks. And goodbye, Travis touchdown. You were the perfect protagonist for me.
The gameplay loop has changed a bit, in some ways that I like, and some ways I don't like. For one, now the map is split into 7 different locations. I like this change, it gave us some needed aesthetic variety, I've ran around Santa Destroy enough already. Though, it's kinda obvious that some of these places are lower effort than others. These maps are very minimal in interactivity, and have massive chunks you can't access. The scale of them might've been necessary for driving around in your bike to be satisfying, though. And I liked that part a lot! There's also the change to require you to do 3 designated fights every episode, which works fine enough. It gave a lot of time for you to get used to the combat, but they definitely aren't more fun than the boss stages were in previous NMH games. The jobs are as fun as they ever were, and with designated fights giving you so much cash, I imagine they might've felt less like a slog to mandatorily go through to players who didn't like them in NMH1. I like the part where you suplex crocodiles. All the overworld objectives like collecting cards, finding scorpions, and planting trees were cool too, it gave some needed depth to the overworld. I don't know if I like the general gameplay loop of this game more or less than NMH1's, it's kinda like they traded some cool stuff for some new cool stuff.
The combat of No More Heroes has absolutely never been better than this. NMH1 and 2 aren't shallow games, but they do rely a lot on the satisfaction of the combat rather than depth. I don't think NMH3 turned No More Heroes into some super complex character action game, but it did give a ton of depth to positioning, your tools, and how useful your overall kit is. Stunning into suplexes to get back battery is so incredibly fun, the Death Glove skills have a ton of varied application, and I don't think they lost any satisfaction even though I'm no longer swinging my wii-mote around all the time due to how incredibly good heavy slashes feel. And I love the mech. The mech kicks ass.
The most important part of No More Heroes' gameplay loop is definitely the boss fights, and fun-wise, I don't think these are any worse than NMH1 or 2's. Everyone knows the most fun fights in action games are the ones where the bosses are similar to you instead of giants, and NMH3 has a ton of fun fights like those. Though, they did cut a major compartment of the bosses, which is the stages you play through before them. I miss those stages, some of these fights really needed some extra aesthetics attached to them to prop them up in the cool factor. And this isn't really about gameplay, but I don't think I liked most of these bosses as characters as much as I did in the first No More Heroes. Most of those fight intros were carried by Travis being really cool, instead of the bosses also being really cool, exceptions being some ones near the end.
The plot to this game very fun, and all the colourful characters definitely kept it as anything other than boring. I found myself wondering how this game fit into the plot of NMH through a lot of my playthrough, and I think I get what they were going for. NMH1 is all about this young assassin who's desensitized to death and sex, NMH2 is him returning to his town and realizing the scope and reality of his actions, and TSA is him fucking off into the woods and coming to terms with everything. NMH3 represents an older assassin, who still definitely likes sex and violence, but understands things a bit better than he did before. At this point, Travis is living his best life, but FU comes around, a parallel to a younger Travis, eager to prove himself and in love with violence. FU works very well as a crux to Travis, an angry alien prince cool with murdering and killing, except when it happens to his friends, who are apart of shallow friendships at best, or only work with him out of fear at worst. But I did find myself wondering one thing through all of this, after TSA, did we even need a game to pinpoint Travis' character growth like this? We already know his path to maturing. In a lot of ways, I think that No More Heroes 3 might've been a story that was already told. Which might feel weird to say after establishing I waited years for this game, but I think its the main explanation to why some of the kill the past-heads felt underwhelmed by the plot. But, I can't think of a way to extend Travis' character any more meaningfully than this. You could say this was literally the best outcome! And I'd agree.
No More Heroes 3 is the game I didn't need, but I wanted. and what I got was an incredibly fun game, with a fast paced gameplay loop of super cool combat, oddly fun menial tasks, absurd dialogue, and mind blowing art design. With a ton of collectables that kept me playing for a while, style that feels equally sleek, and completely overbearing. That overbearing style lies deeply at the core of No More Heroes 3's aesthetics, with bombastic referencing, constant logo cut-ins, with an opening, outro, and even commercial breaks. There are probably parts of this that read more critical than I even feel in my heart for this game, I just really loved the whole experience. In the first hour of the game, I didn't even know what to focus my brain on, from the weird NES segment, to Sylvia talking about gaming in a tab in the corner of the screen, to the sudden introspective dialogue with Mr Blackhole. No More Heroes 3 has so much depth to its aesthetic flair, and barely lightens up on it the whole way through. This game kinda feels like sensory overload, but in a way that never feels tacky or annoying, which is pretty impressive. There are times where it relies a bit too much on that sensory overload and runs out of substance, but there's almost always something compelling somewhere to back that up, whether it be gameplay or incredible visual design. I think this game is super special, and even with its flaws, I really couldn't imagine a better conclusion to this series. I hope Suda gets more opportunities to make games like this that are completely from the heart, even in their weird quirks. And goodbye, Travis touchdown. You were the perfect protagonist for me.
When people talk about this game, one of the first words mentioned always seems to be 'nostalgia'. But playing through this remake, I didn't really get a sense of nostalgia at all. With the way they interpreted the original game's style, it kinda feels like looking at a game I've already played through a microscope and seeing all the dirt on it. On the bright side, Sinnoh is still Sinnoh, the most atmosphere-rich Pokemon has ever been, with authentic references to folklore and religion, and the villains are still pretty cute new world order obsessed 2000s cult analysis parodies, and some of those bigger routes are still a joy to explore! The game's quality is preserved, at the very least, although there are some places that feel like direct downgrades, like the visuals, the contests, interacting with the poketch, and especially the music, but there are some upgraded spots too. Being able to experience the game's online in 2021 without hassle is also pretty nice. And I think the Grand Underground is pretty cool, it's like if you split up the Wild Area into being shaped like a Zelda dungeon. They also gave a lot of important trainers really good AI and movesets, fighting competitive strategies in the middle of my campaign made me feel like I was playing a ROM hack. But the real kicker is this game's dedication to be faithful to Diamond and Pearl specifically. Even field encounter sheets and trainer teams are copied straight over, only with movesets edited. I didn't realize how much better Platinum was until I played this game, and I don't even really understand why the developers were so dedicated to avoid that game. Going into it, I assumed it was a budget cut decision, but the way it was ignored, even for simple lines of script like route encounters, confused me so much I didn't even realize the Pokemon I wanted to use weren't in the main-story campaign until I read through Serebii. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are remakes dedicated to not being the best version of Sinnoh. What's the point of a remake if the game is too scared to even be the best version of the game it's remaking?
I ended up settling on the number 3.5 as my rating because it's what felt fair to rating the game as a video game, and not a remake. Sinnoh is a really good place, with a lot of really good content. This is reasonably still the biggest Pokemon region ever, even with the engine cleaned up so exploring it doesn't feel so slow. The only thing I'm left to say about it is that this game is only really worth playing if you want to feel involved in the Pokemon community's current online networks, or if you physically cannot play Pokemon Platinum. If you missed some aspects of modern Pokemon, I'd recommend playing Renegade Platinum, the definitive quality-of-life cleanup ROM hack. I know comparing fan works and real games sounds sketchy, but a fanmade remake largely made out of minor script changes shouldn't be so uncontestable from a huge company's retail price product. I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with the game, at the very least. And I'll probably play a bunch more, just because I like Sinnoh's post-game that much. I've even seen this game turn some heads that previously weren't as receptive to the Gen 4 games, due to its faster gameplay. Though, on the other hand, these games were made in Unity, which means that they remade the Pokemon engine in Unity as fast as possible to get this game finished. They're the glitchiest Pokemon games since the first Pokemon games. But with Sinnoh's retained quality, they're also the best Pokemon games since the good Pokemon games. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are the most confusing remakes I've ever played.
EDIT 2 MONTHS LATER: i think i was way too nice to this game, it's just so redundant in comparison to other games it has no reason to exist. Sorry Brilliant Diamond I will never play you to completion again
I ended up settling on the number 3.5 as my rating because it's what felt fair to rating the game as a video game, and not a remake. Sinnoh is a really good place, with a lot of really good content. This is reasonably still the biggest Pokemon region ever, even with the engine cleaned up so exploring it doesn't feel so slow. The only thing I'm left to say about it is that this game is only really worth playing if you want to feel involved in the Pokemon community's current online networks, or if you physically cannot play Pokemon Platinum. If you missed some aspects of modern Pokemon, I'd recommend playing Renegade Platinum, the definitive quality-of-life cleanup ROM hack. I know comparing fan works and real games sounds sketchy, but a fanmade remake largely made out of minor script changes shouldn't be so uncontestable from a huge company's retail price product. I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with the game, at the very least. And I'll probably play a bunch more, just because I like Sinnoh's post-game that much. I've even seen this game turn some heads that previously weren't as receptive to the Gen 4 games, due to its faster gameplay. Though, on the other hand, these games were made in Unity, which means that they remade the Pokemon engine in Unity as fast as possible to get this game finished. They're the glitchiest Pokemon games since the first Pokemon games. But with Sinnoh's retained quality, they're also the best Pokemon games since the good Pokemon games. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are the most confusing remakes I've ever played.
EDIT 2 MONTHS LATER: i think i was way too nice to this game, it's just so redundant in comparison to other games it has no reason to exist. Sorry Brilliant Diamond I will never play you to completion again
1997
This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy VII comes from a weird little era of game history where every game is very visibly aged, in at least one way or another. The fifth generation of console’s most remembered games often have visually aged more than their fourth generation counterparts. Final Fantasy VII looks weird, it plays weird, and it’s more influential than almost every game in the series since. Square’s intense marketing of spinoffs definitely plays into that, but looking back on the game, its modern game design sensibilities really shine through. First and foremost, Final Fantasy VII is super smooth. Its storyline has just the right pace, through the lens of a remarkably likeable cast of characters, while playing like nothing else that had existed yet.
Final Fantasy VII’s story is used wonderfully to fuel its electric-fast pacing. The first half of the game has you constantly jumping from set piece to set piece. Every single one of those locations counts, they’re all beautifully shown to you through hyper-detailed backdrops. The game doesn’t need to tell you much about Midgar at all, the slums wordlessly show you a people who live together from whatever scraps of metal they can get their hands on. Then you get to explore the whole world, and see how that world has dealt with the dominance of Shinra. In the second half of the game, you begin to revisit many of the previous locations in the game, yet the game’s pacing doesn’t sway. These revisits are glamorous and placed perfectly to get even more worldbuilding richness out of these places than it had the opportunity to on your first visits. The game’s optional content is equally as natural to its setting, often discovered simply by revisiting previous locations as the world has changed by your own volition. All of these components come together to form a world that is richly detailed, refined, and an absolute joy to run through as you go through the game’s golden standard steampunk-fantasy plotline.
Alongside FFVII’s story comes its character cast, which is what a lot of people would consider most iconic about the game. We have our mainstage hero, Cloud Strife, introduced with complete disinterest to that position as a hero. In a genre heavily defined by power fantasy and self insert protagonists, Cloud’s story of failing his dreams is fantastic and unique. Every single mandatory party member gets their own story arc where we learn more about their problems, and it’s hard not to love every single one of them. Even Cait Sith, even if he’s a narc! By the end, my favourites were absolutely Cloud, Aerith, and Barret. Aerith is whimsical and has a good sense of humour, but she’s also strong, and you can feel that she’s lived a burdening life. Barret is intense, and emotional, but shows introspection and maturity in just the right places to make his passionate personality totally believable.
Final Fantasy VII’s biggest gameplay difference from its previous entries is its new central mechanic, Materia. Materia’s game design is immediately intuitive compared to previous FF game’s Job systems, as it enforces the player to create their own characters from scratch, built from individual moves synergizing together. By the end of the game, Final Fantasy VII will have taught the player how to make their own job classes out of their collection of materia, teaching them how to use the stat changes Materia gives to their fullest. It does all of this without any tricks, or forcing the player to commit to anything they don’t fully understand, unlike Class selections at the start of games. This is fantastic, and results in Final Fantasy VII being an incredible beginner’s RPG.
On the other hand, this results in the differences between characters in your party being even vaguer than a class name. Those differences mostly come down to minor stat distinctions and Limit Breaks, most of which you won’t see in a single playthrough. This results in the game’s party feeling expendable, as any character can have a set of materia tossed onto them and function mostly the same as someone else on the team. The game developer’s also seemed to realize this, and fully take advantage of it, filling the game with many moments of temporary party member loss. Those wouldn’t have worked without the expendability that materia allows for, but that just makes me question the value those moments bring in general.
Final Fantasy VII may have the most iconic video game character death of all time, but I can’t say I felt that loss through the gameplay. I traded around my materia and quickly moved on. This isn’t a huge flaw of the game, but it’s easy to see that modern games can convey both temporary and permanent loss much better. Materia has pure game design behind it, and is potent for easing people into the gameplay, but it muddies the water of how distinct each party member is from each other.
Looking back, the combat definitely isn’t the only reason that Final Fantasy VII’s gameplay was so memorable. Final Fantasy VII is packed with minigames and micro-mechanics to go through that’s unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Some of these suck, or have just aged pathetically, but the pretense it sends is so strong. Final Fantasy VII is a game so confident in itself that it tries to give every new plot point its own game engine. If there’s anything about the game that has sent ripples of influence to the medium as a whole, it’s that. Cloud snowboarded down that mountain so that Nathan Drake could run up one.
Final Fantasy VII isn’t just an influential RPG, it’s the rosetta stone of the modern action adventure game. It’s filled to the brim with densely detailed backdrops, and cinematic cutscenes of huge machinery and giant monsters. With its remarkable ability to transform any action movie moment that’d fit into something playable: from motorcycle chases to submarine duels, the promise it gave to people in 1997 for what a video game could be is astounding. Then combine that with an explosive 3 disk long storyline of fighting dictators, aliens, and evil overlords, you can tell why this was the game that made JRPGs a thing people cared about everywhere. But is any of this impressive in the current year, watching those dinky action figure looking character models yell at each other? Well, yeah, a lot about the game still hits the modern golden standard– RPGs to this day still struggle with having immediately gripping intros, or as effortless of worldbuilding as this game's. Its replayability is as potent as any modern action adventure game, with every room holding a secret. And despite being shown through those dinky 3D models, all those character designs have been worshipped for 25 years. Has Final Fantasy VII aged poorly? Well, there’s certainly things modern games have gotten better at, that’s for sure. But that’s exactly why this game is so memorable, it predicts a future of what modern video games could be like, and inspires that future into reality.
Side note, this playthrough of the game was through the Switch port. It’s pretty good, but I have an issue with it. It has a great 3x speed-up button, which doesn’t speed up music or sound effects, preserving the immersion that speeding up in emulators usually loses. It also has a random encounter disable button, which is convenient sometimes, and a ‘battle enhancement’ button that gives you cheats, which is pretty useful for grinding. My one issue is that I don’t like playing the game in 1080p. When the models and the backgrounds don’t blend together through resolution, they clash real bad compared to the PS1 version. I think that all the ports that run FFVII in 1080p have retroactively tricked people into thinking the game looked worse on the PS1 than it actually did, it even tricked me for a while. There should be an option to play the game with enlarged PS1 resolution, like how the PS3 or PS vita versions naturally would. It also crashes sometimes. Good port overall, could be better.
Final Fantasy VII’s story is used wonderfully to fuel its electric-fast pacing. The first half of the game has you constantly jumping from set piece to set piece. Every single one of those locations counts, they’re all beautifully shown to you through hyper-detailed backdrops. The game doesn’t need to tell you much about Midgar at all, the slums wordlessly show you a people who live together from whatever scraps of metal they can get their hands on. Then you get to explore the whole world, and see how that world has dealt with the dominance of Shinra. In the second half of the game, you begin to revisit many of the previous locations in the game, yet the game’s pacing doesn’t sway. These revisits are glamorous and placed perfectly to get even more worldbuilding richness out of these places than it had the opportunity to on your first visits. The game’s optional content is equally as natural to its setting, often discovered simply by revisiting previous locations as the world has changed by your own volition. All of these components come together to form a world that is richly detailed, refined, and an absolute joy to run through as you go through the game’s golden standard steampunk-fantasy plotline.
Alongside FFVII’s story comes its character cast, which is what a lot of people would consider most iconic about the game. We have our mainstage hero, Cloud Strife, introduced with complete disinterest to that position as a hero. In a genre heavily defined by power fantasy and self insert protagonists, Cloud’s story of failing his dreams is fantastic and unique. Every single mandatory party member gets their own story arc where we learn more about their problems, and it’s hard not to love every single one of them. Even Cait Sith, even if he’s a narc! By the end, my favourites were absolutely Cloud, Aerith, and Barret. Aerith is whimsical and has a good sense of humour, but she’s also strong, and you can feel that she’s lived a burdening life. Barret is intense, and emotional, but shows introspection and maturity in just the right places to make his passionate personality totally believable.
Final Fantasy VII’s biggest gameplay difference from its previous entries is its new central mechanic, Materia. Materia’s game design is immediately intuitive compared to previous FF game’s Job systems, as it enforces the player to create their own characters from scratch, built from individual moves synergizing together. By the end of the game, Final Fantasy VII will have taught the player how to make their own job classes out of their collection of materia, teaching them how to use the stat changes Materia gives to their fullest. It does all of this without any tricks, or forcing the player to commit to anything they don’t fully understand, unlike Class selections at the start of games. This is fantastic, and results in Final Fantasy VII being an incredible beginner’s RPG.
On the other hand, this results in the differences between characters in your party being even vaguer than a class name. Those differences mostly come down to minor stat distinctions and Limit Breaks, most of which you won’t see in a single playthrough. This results in the game’s party feeling expendable, as any character can have a set of materia tossed onto them and function mostly the same as someone else on the team. The game developer’s also seemed to realize this, and fully take advantage of it, filling the game with many moments of temporary party member loss. Those wouldn’t have worked without the expendability that materia allows for, but that just makes me question the value those moments bring in general.
Final Fantasy VII may have the most iconic video game character death of all time, but I can’t say I felt that loss through the gameplay. I traded around my materia and quickly moved on. This isn’t a huge flaw of the game, but it’s easy to see that modern games can convey both temporary and permanent loss much better. Materia has pure game design behind it, and is potent for easing people into the gameplay, but it muddies the water of how distinct each party member is from each other.
Looking back, the combat definitely isn’t the only reason that Final Fantasy VII’s gameplay was so memorable. Final Fantasy VII is packed with minigames and micro-mechanics to go through that’s unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Some of these suck, or have just aged pathetically, but the pretense it sends is so strong. Final Fantasy VII is a game so confident in itself that it tries to give every new plot point its own game engine. If there’s anything about the game that has sent ripples of influence to the medium as a whole, it’s that. Cloud snowboarded down that mountain so that Nathan Drake could run up one.
Final Fantasy VII isn’t just an influential RPG, it’s the rosetta stone of the modern action adventure game. It’s filled to the brim with densely detailed backdrops, and cinematic cutscenes of huge machinery and giant monsters. With its remarkable ability to transform any action movie moment that’d fit into something playable: from motorcycle chases to submarine duels, the promise it gave to people in 1997 for what a video game could be is astounding. Then combine that with an explosive 3 disk long storyline of fighting dictators, aliens, and evil overlords, you can tell why this was the game that made JRPGs a thing people cared about everywhere. But is any of this impressive in the current year, watching those dinky action figure looking character models yell at each other? Well, yeah, a lot about the game still hits the modern golden standard– RPGs to this day still struggle with having immediately gripping intros, or as effortless of worldbuilding as this game's. Its replayability is as potent as any modern action adventure game, with every room holding a secret. And despite being shown through those dinky 3D models, all those character designs have been worshipped for 25 years. Has Final Fantasy VII aged poorly? Well, there’s certainly things modern games have gotten better at, that’s for sure. But that’s exactly why this game is so memorable, it predicts a future of what modern video games could be like, and inspires that future into reality.
Side note, this playthrough of the game was through the Switch port. It’s pretty good, but I have an issue with it. It has a great 3x speed-up button, which doesn’t speed up music or sound effects, preserving the immersion that speeding up in emulators usually loses. It also has a random encounter disable button, which is convenient sometimes, and a ‘battle enhancement’ button that gives you cheats, which is pretty useful for grinding. My one issue is that I don’t like playing the game in 1080p. When the models and the backgrounds don’t blend together through resolution, they clash real bad compared to the PS1 version. I think that all the ports that run FFVII in 1080p have retroactively tricked people into thinking the game looked worse on the PS1 than it actually did, it even tricked me for a while. There should be an option to play the game with enlarged PS1 resolution, like how the PS3 or PS vita versions naturally would. It also crashes sometimes. Good port overall, could be better.
Super Smash Bros. is such a unique slab of video game history. I’d like to think one of the reasons so many people care about Smash Bros. is because it’s a game that made people want to care about games. Super Smash Bros. Melee presented its players with so many interesting characters, and history books worth of information on every series within, and that grew with every sequel. The passion that Smash Bros. carries for other video games is contagious. The game design is also memorable; Smash games are sandboxes of silly interactions, and have a lot of intelligent design to make fighting games more accessible. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn’t about reinventing any of this, but it is the biggest game yet.
The most defining trait of Smash Ultimate is the unique nature of its roster. The game debuted through a fantastic trailer titled “Everyone is Here”, revealing that every character that had ever been playable will be playable. This fantastically combines the sentimentality of fighting games: the attachment we get to characters who score us wins, and the sentimental feelings we hold for those series we love. When Everyone is Here was revealed, I was dumbfounded that Pichu was going to return to the series, a joke character I had grown attached to when I played Melee. Everyone has a main, and everyone gets to banner themselves through that main.
This also results in a new issue, in that the developers clearly had to prioritize quantity over quality. Why are there four Fire Emblem characters that are modified versions of each other, but Ganondorf doesn’t even play like he acts in Zelda? This is reasonable critique, but also feels like a worthwhile sacrifice. The hypothetical perfect Smash game wouldn’t have Everyone is Here, it wouldn’t need it; but Smash Ultimate puts it to great use. It honours Nintendo’s history, Smash’s history, and most importantly, a player’s own history. I may have tried Pichu in Melee in the first place because I loved Pokemon. But when they returned to Smash, I thought of my memories of messing with them in Smash more than my memories with Pokemon.
The game released 6 new characters, and 5 echo fighters. The most fundamental of these characters to my experience was Ridley. He was added due to fan requests, an important part of Smash Ultimate’s identity. He has this uniquely rugged bait-and-punish playstyle; Ridley in Smash made me feel like I was playing how Ridley would play Smash. According to the in-game statistic tracker, I had played Ridley for 65 hours, and 3 minutes. If Ridley wasn’t in this roster, I would’ve lost those hours of gameplay, which is longer than the entire runtime of some of my favourite games. If there’s any reason to believe in the power that a single character can hold, and why ‘Everyone is Here’ is a big deal, it’s that. The other new characters were fun as well: I enjoyed the Castlevania characters quite a bit, and King K Rool’s animations oozes personality.
Smash Ultimate would then enter a long DLC phase that lasted over 2 years, becoming the majority of the time we’ve had with this game so far. The most noticeable trait of the DLC was the quantity of characters from non-Nintendo series. By the end of this DLC, Smash Bros would have 18 non-Nintendo characters, which is more than the entire roster of the first Smash Bros. game. This rippled through the conversation around the game. When Smash Bros. could give us these exotic characters in rapid succession, I began to feel confused on what I even wanted from the game. Just the DLC for this game alone makes any thoughts I had about how Pichu in a new Smash game would be “awesome” sound unimaginative. I’ve recently seen conversations about how Banjo & Kazooie were the least memorable characters added in the DLC, but I can relate to those who wanted them. Banjo & Kazooie was what you’d consider a shocking luxury inclusion before we knew Smash could be this.
Smash Ultimate’s DLC lineup isn’t a linear representation of video game history, it’s more like someone’s personal video game best-of compilation. While the Dragon Quest Heroes and Steve are video game all-timers, the rest are from B-list obsession worthy game franchises. Smash Ultimate doesn’t live up to the idealistic idea that Smash Bros. could be a museum of global video game history, but these inclusions are very memorable either way.
Those DLC contains the most complex Smash Bros. characters yet. The DLC’s character kits are explosive culminations of game design inspired by their respective series, packed together to create unique play styles. Smash 4 set out to flesh out the series’ variety of play styles with its archetypal inclusions, and Smash Ultimate’s DLC often feels like much more inspired and refined takes on those archetypes. In comparison, most launch characters feel primitive. The most obvious flaw in this game design is that the DLC often relies too much on meters and second forms as a mechanic.
The roster is where the most innovation lies within Smash Ultimate, but there are iterative gameplay improvements as well. Smash Ultimate’s engine is a mid-ground of previous Smash Bros. game’s traits. The ending lag that moves have is so much faster in this game that it feels like they intentionally didn’t want any attack to feel committal. The lagless gameplay results in punishing an opponent's bad moves being downplayed by the game’s mechanics. Though, the changes to the speed of lag and being hit allows for Smash Ultimate to speed up the pace of the gameplay a lot. The game is just fast enough, but not too committal so that planning ahead and focusing on your opponent’s actions are easier for a broader number of players. While the game could definitely have some more momentum to its movement, it reaches a sweet spot of speed and ease of player control.
The game also has 115 stages, another boast used to justify the title of ‘Ultimate’. Almost every stage has been visually revamped, and they all look pretty. The new stages the game released with are only okay, but some of those DLC stages are great. The game also improves omega forms, introduces battlefield forms, and adds a ‘hazards off’ toggle, which allows for these stages to be experienced in many ways.
Then there’s the centerpiece single player mechanic, Spirits. Through several modes, including the game’s Adventure Mode, you experience many Spirit Battles. Spirits seem to use a rather low CPU level, no matter what rank they are. They dodge around, reading your inputs, but never seem to play that great. These matches are so stilted, they feel like puzzles where you equip the right thing and mash away. I messed around with equipment sets to see if I could have an optimally fun experience, and the best I got was from simply using the spirits the game recommended me. If there’s anything to like about spirits as a collectible in comparison to trophies, it’s that seeing illustrations by a large collection of artists conveys the diversity of styles between games better than character models do. The descriptions being gone is a huge loss, though.
Spirits just aren’t luxurious enough to be a centerpiece for a game like Smash Bros. Ultimate. They’re out of place, and don’t work as an incentivizing reward at all. There are other single player modes in the game, but all of them are bland. Smash Ultimate’s Classic and Spirit modes both constantly reference things, but the references are shallow. Trophies made me want to try new things, Spirits and references made me feel out of the loop.
This results in Smash Ultimate’s most pivotal flaw, that despite the incredibly dense amount of content it holds in its core gameplay, there aren't that many valuable ways to interact with that content. The single player content is mediocre, and the online netplay is aggressively terrible. The best way to play Smash Ultimate is through its main mode– Smash. And that main mode, while fulfilling its exact purpose, has proven itself to not be accessible enough. This has rightfully formed cynicism in the community for the game, and the truth is that everyone would hate it if this game wasn’t so dynamic. Smash became the most successful fighting game series exactly because it was multifaceted, because its ruleset customization allows for it to be played in so many flavours. Even if you only played the game with one ruleset for the entirety of your time with it, there’s more variety in this game than most other fighting games in general. Just one mode and some bad netplay was enough to form some great memories with the game.
Near the end of the final Smash Ultimate presentation, a list of statistics began to play, showing the numbers of how many characters, stages, spirits, and other things were contained in the game. During that presentation, a looming feeling formed in my mind, as I had realized that I had experienced this before, 6 years ago at another Smash presentation. In that moment I knew that one day, Smash Ultimate would also be nothing but statistics in the back of my mind, downplayed by fans in comparison to whatever game came next. The path to iteratively improving on Smash Ultimate has become rather clear, as its flaws have shown themselves over time. Smash Ultimate’s title of “Ultimate” has a deadline on it, and I’m sure the developers knew that as well. The game came out in a time in which the primary traits of Smash are now less unique. Crossovers are now a staple of our current brand of pop culture. Platform-fighters are a legitimized subgenre, one that has brought several games with fresher ideas than any individual mechanic Smash Ultimate brings. This made me wonder what made Smash Ultimate unique in this modern ecosystem, and why I kept coming back to it. And I knew that I wouldn’t have kept playing it, if not for the memories the game had flowing through its DNA. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing if not for how I saw something new every time I played. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate celebrates old memories so that I can keep wanting to make new ones.
The most defining trait of Smash Ultimate is the unique nature of its roster. The game debuted through a fantastic trailer titled “Everyone is Here”, revealing that every character that had ever been playable will be playable. This fantastically combines the sentimentality of fighting games: the attachment we get to characters who score us wins, and the sentimental feelings we hold for those series we love. When Everyone is Here was revealed, I was dumbfounded that Pichu was going to return to the series, a joke character I had grown attached to when I played Melee. Everyone has a main, and everyone gets to banner themselves through that main.
This also results in a new issue, in that the developers clearly had to prioritize quantity over quality. Why are there four Fire Emblem characters that are modified versions of each other, but Ganondorf doesn’t even play like he acts in Zelda? This is reasonable critique, but also feels like a worthwhile sacrifice. The hypothetical perfect Smash game wouldn’t have Everyone is Here, it wouldn’t need it; but Smash Ultimate puts it to great use. It honours Nintendo’s history, Smash’s history, and most importantly, a player’s own history. I may have tried Pichu in Melee in the first place because I loved Pokemon. But when they returned to Smash, I thought of my memories of messing with them in Smash more than my memories with Pokemon.
The game released 6 new characters, and 5 echo fighters. The most fundamental of these characters to my experience was Ridley. He was added due to fan requests, an important part of Smash Ultimate’s identity. He has this uniquely rugged bait-and-punish playstyle; Ridley in Smash made me feel like I was playing how Ridley would play Smash. According to the in-game statistic tracker, I had played Ridley for 65 hours, and 3 minutes. If Ridley wasn’t in this roster, I would’ve lost those hours of gameplay, which is longer than the entire runtime of some of my favourite games. If there’s any reason to believe in the power that a single character can hold, and why ‘Everyone is Here’ is a big deal, it’s that. The other new characters were fun as well: I enjoyed the Castlevania characters quite a bit, and King K Rool’s animations oozes personality.
Smash Ultimate would then enter a long DLC phase that lasted over 2 years, becoming the majority of the time we’ve had with this game so far. The most noticeable trait of the DLC was the quantity of characters from non-Nintendo series. By the end of this DLC, Smash Bros would have 18 non-Nintendo characters, which is more than the entire roster of the first Smash Bros. game. This rippled through the conversation around the game. When Smash Bros. could give us these exotic characters in rapid succession, I began to feel confused on what I even wanted from the game. Just the DLC for this game alone makes any thoughts I had about how Pichu in a new Smash game would be “awesome” sound unimaginative. I’ve recently seen conversations about how Banjo & Kazooie were the least memorable characters added in the DLC, but I can relate to those who wanted them. Banjo & Kazooie was what you’d consider a shocking luxury inclusion before we knew Smash could be this.
Smash Ultimate’s DLC lineup isn’t a linear representation of video game history, it’s more like someone’s personal video game best-of compilation. While the Dragon Quest Heroes and Steve are video game all-timers, the rest are from B-list obsession worthy game franchises. Smash Ultimate doesn’t live up to the idealistic idea that Smash Bros. could be a museum of global video game history, but these inclusions are very memorable either way.
Those DLC contains the most complex Smash Bros. characters yet. The DLC’s character kits are explosive culminations of game design inspired by their respective series, packed together to create unique play styles. Smash 4 set out to flesh out the series’ variety of play styles with its archetypal inclusions, and Smash Ultimate’s DLC often feels like much more inspired and refined takes on those archetypes. In comparison, most launch characters feel primitive. The most obvious flaw in this game design is that the DLC often relies too much on meters and second forms as a mechanic.
The roster is where the most innovation lies within Smash Ultimate, but there are iterative gameplay improvements as well. Smash Ultimate’s engine is a mid-ground of previous Smash Bros. game’s traits. The ending lag that moves have is so much faster in this game that it feels like they intentionally didn’t want any attack to feel committal. The lagless gameplay results in punishing an opponent's bad moves being downplayed by the game’s mechanics. Though, the changes to the speed of lag and being hit allows for Smash Ultimate to speed up the pace of the gameplay a lot. The game is just fast enough, but not too committal so that planning ahead and focusing on your opponent’s actions are easier for a broader number of players. While the game could definitely have some more momentum to its movement, it reaches a sweet spot of speed and ease of player control.
The game also has 115 stages, another boast used to justify the title of ‘Ultimate’. Almost every stage has been visually revamped, and they all look pretty. The new stages the game released with are only okay, but some of those DLC stages are great. The game also improves omega forms, introduces battlefield forms, and adds a ‘hazards off’ toggle, which allows for these stages to be experienced in many ways.
Then there’s the centerpiece single player mechanic, Spirits. Through several modes, including the game’s Adventure Mode, you experience many Spirit Battles. Spirits seem to use a rather low CPU level, no matter what rank they are. They dodge around, reading your inputs, but never seem to play that great. These matches are so stilted, they feel like puzzles where you equip the right thing and mash away. I messed around with equipment sets to see if I could have an optimally fun experience, and the best I got was from simply using the spirits the game recommended me. If there’s anything to like about spirits as a collectible in comparison to trophies, it’s that seeing illustrations by a large collection of artists conveys the diversity of styles between games better than character models do. The descriptions being gone is a huge loss, though.
Spirits just aren’t luxurious enough to be a centerpiece for a game like Smash Bros. Ultimate. They’re out of place, and don’t work as an incentivizing reward at all. There are other single player modes in the game, but all of them are bland. Smash Ultimate’s Classic and Spirit modes both constantly reference things, but the references are shallow. Trophies made me want to try new things, Spirits and references made me feel out of the loop.
This results in Smash Ultimate’s most pivotal flaw, that despite the incredibly dense amount of content it holds in its core gameplay, there aren't that many valuable ways to interact with that content. The single player content is mediocre, and the online netplay is aggressively terrible. The best way to play Smash Ultimate is through its main mode– Smash. And that main mode, while fulfilling its exact purpose, has proven itself to not be accessible enough. This has rightfully formed cynicism in the community for the game, and the truth is that everyone would hate it if this game wasn’t so dynamic. Smash became the most successful fighting game series exactly because it was multifaceted, because its ruleset customization allows for it to be played in so many flavours. Even if you only played the game with one ruleset for the entirety of your time with it, there’s more variety in this game than most other fighting games in general. Just one mode and some bad netplay was enough to form some great memories with the game.
Near the end of the final Smash Ultimate presentation, a list of statistics began to play, showing the numbers of how many characters, stages, spirits, and other things were contained in the game. During that presentation, a looming feeling formed in my mind, as I had realized that I had experienced this before, 6 years ago at another Smash presentation. In that moment I knew that one day, Smash Ultimate would also be nothing but statistics in the back of my mind, downplayed by fans in comparison to whatever game came next. The path to iteratively improving on Smash Ultimate has become rather clear, as its flaws have shown themselves over time. Smash Ultimate’s title of “Ultimate” has a deadline on it, and I’m sure the developers knew that as well. The game came out in a time in which the primary traits of Smash are now less unique. Crossovers are now a staple of our current brand of pop culture. Platform-fighters are a legitimized subgenre, one that has brought several games with fresher ideas than any individual mechanic Smash Ultimate brings. This made me wonder what made Smash Ultimate unique in this modern ecosystem, and why I kept coming back to it. And I knew that I wouldn’t have kept playing it, if not for the memories the game had flowing through its DNA. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing if not for how I saw something new every time I played. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate celebrates old memories so that I can keep wanting to make new ones.
2019
This review contains spoilers
Pokémon Sword and Shield are almost 3 years old, and we’re already moving onto the next major Pokémon game already. It felt like it was the right time to revisit these games. Pokémon Sword and Shield have the unique placement of being the series’ first mainline console game. They also released on the Switch, when every other Nintendo series were reinventing themselves. To say that Sword and Shield were sitting on a hotspot of expectations would be an understatement, but by launch we all knew what kind of game this was. Pokémon Sword and Shield is an iterative sequel that’ll be placed right next to all the other iterative sequels. However, that isn’t an objectively bad thing, and that’s exactly why I want to see where it stands in the series.
To summarize the presentation, these games follow up Pokémon Sun and Moon’s style without much change. The soundtrack is alright, but uses some real terrible MIDI samples in some places. Some songs are hit harder by this than others. Graphically, they use a cell shading-like shader with some coloured outlines. Bloom effects loudly sheen off every Pokémon model. The game looks the most polished in towns, the routes have some weird assets but look fine, and the open Wild Areas have tons of graphical hijinks. There isn’t much to add to the graphics conversation, so to comment on the positive improvements: While 90% of moves still generically apply to Pokémon when they use it, this game introduces a handful of unique moves that compliment the Pokémon they’re attached to well. The trainer animations during battle also have a ton of character appeal. The negatives culminate in a game that doesn’t feel as polished as the average Nintendo game.
Most Pokémon games have minimal storytelling, but this one is a bit different. Similar to some of the recent games, a combination of cutscenes and extra dialogue puts a bit more dramatic focus on the story. The story vaguely uses Britain’s competitive sports culture as a pastiche for a competition fueled region, which works pretty well. Your rival is Hop, who’s one of the best rivals in the series, primarily because his arc is honest. He’s anxious about living up to his older brother and childhood friend, but realizes that competition isn’t all there is to life and uses his experiences to find new passions. It’s cute, and smarter than most rivals having their arcs get smashed by the protagonist. The rest of the rivals are also pretty likable, so it’s the plot climax where the game gets messy. The story of Eternatus just isn’t great at all, its backstory is so messy. The plot tries to make the antagonist morally gray, but doesn’t elaborate on their motivations enough. And don’t get me started on Sordward or Shielbert. While the rivals improve from the extra dialogue, the villains have too much dialogue paired with a nothing plotline. The plot never even gets the chance to explain what exactly Dynamax is.
Dynamax features as this game’s main battle gimmick, and it’s not all bad. Every “Max move” has this synergetic side effect that results in cool team-up attack moments during player battles. Unfortunately, there’s only one Dynamax double battle in the whole campaign, so most players won’t see any of that. Dynamax lacks appeal to most players because it’s a nonsense concept, titled with a nonsense name, with no worldbuilding or visual appeal to at least make it cool nonsense. There are at least Gigantamax forms that change in design, but these are elusive and impossible to obtain on your playthrough without grinding. This is the most a mainline Pokémon gimmick has felt dead on arrival, the game didn’t even try to make it seem cool to people.
Max Raids are a new multiplayer co-op mode, and they offer a unique way to interact with the game socially that Pokémon didn’t really have before. Getting to team up with 3 friends is great, though they lack a bit in variety. There are some hard ones once you beat the game, but the shields they gain during parts of the fight ignore super effective moves and status effects, making strategy repetitive. This is a wonderful feature on paper, but it definitely needs some iterating. Other than these two new mechanics, the combat is the same as it always has been.
However, when you rank formulaic sequels against their precursors, content depth stands out just as much as gameplay iteration. This game does contain a 15-20 hour campaign with an hour long post-game quest, and a handful of things to grind out. This is like every game. It also has the least amount of routes in any Pokémon game, doesn’t have any optional areas at all, has very few side quests, no super-bosses, and barely any daily events. It’s the first game in the series to not have every existing Pokémon, but I couldn’t tell you how many more hours I would’ve gotten out of being able to use a Weedle. Probably not any at all, but it’s clear that Sword and Shield cut down both the fat and the meat. What this does tell me is that Pokémon at its most lean is still a sizable experience, with cooperating with friends to complete the Pokédex, and some online battling and shiny hunting. I also know that most players and most playthroughs are never going to touch any of that stuff, so for the sake of most players, make the campaigns good.
The biggest new tagline feature of Pokémon Sword and Shield is the Wild Area. The Wild Area was advertised as a home console-worthy innovation, immediately drawing comparisons to the concepts and innovation of games such as Breath of the Wild. I can’t say with certainty that there wasn’t any inspiration coming from contemporary Switch releases, but the Wild Area is more about Pokémon Go than anything else. The Wild Area is a reaction to Pokémon Go, analyzing what exactly made catching so tantalizing for people. This comes back to the conceptual start of the series, as Pokémon was one of the first series to take advantage of social experience for playing through a single player campaign. The amount of choices that comes with being able to build a team out of 150 monsters make your teams feel inherently personalized. This makes everything from teams to finding a Pokémon in the wild for the first time feel like something worth sharing. We see this trend across the games industry now, with scores and gacha results being posted all over social media. Pokémon Go richly takes advantage of the core of these traits. Both the original Pokémon games and Pokémon Go play to our wants for personalization, our sense of discovery, and our likening to be rewarded for exploration. Pokémon Sword and Shield analyze this through the vein of a central hub of Pokémon discovery moments. It plays a video game magic trick; visibly dangling hundreds of personalized options for the player to pick from, urging us to tell our friends about our teams later. Unfortunately, this is a one trick magic show, as the discovery factor fades on most playthroughs the moment we’ve caught enough to form a team. The terrain we explore is flat and without secrets, and the game doesn’t have satisfying movement that makes exploring it feel good either. And while this isn’t a new issue, the rigid numbers game of catching feels much more like it’s interrupting the game flow in an RPG like Sword and Shield. This isn’t an issue in Pokémon Go, since catching is the entire game. I don’t think the Wild Area made catching feel more interesting, it didn’t make me want to complete the Pokédex. Despite that, the magic trick still worked on me, about once per playthrough. Gawking at the jumbles of options that form the Wild Area was a unique experience. The center of these games really is the Pokémon choices.
Lastly, that brings me to the new Pokémon. I can’t objectively summarize things these Pokémon do right or wrong on a visual design level, as aesthetic issues I have with the Pokédex aren’t easy to summarize. Most of the designs are clean, some use some gaudy neon palettes, but that’s about it for broad aesthetic issues. Where I run into issues is in their origins and inspirations. The Galar region is based on Great Britain, and I can’t help but find its inspirations too superficial. Almost every new Pokémon is a species repeat; the starter Pokémon aren’t based on animals that live in Britain, and the new legendaries are all simplistic medieval knights and dragons reference. Regional variants were introduced in Pokémon Sun and Moon as a reference to divergent evolution, but end up being used in this game only to apply references to Britain to existing Pokémon. It fixates more on fictionally exaggerated royalty than the actual real world Britain. This superficiality doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of individual designs. I still liked a handful of new Pokémon; Corviknight and Falinks being highlights. It just made me question why they chose Britain in the first place, if they were interested in such a small slice of its history and wildlife. It was equally hard to ignore that it felt like the game didn’t care about the new Pokémon. Almost none of the new Pokémon show up in the Wild Area, or even in overworld encounters on routes. Lots of them are locked behind shaking grass-random encounters and appear only at 1% chances. This statistically obscured availability felt like the game was trying to urge me to stick to the Charizards and avoid the new stuff.
The game also got a DLC expansion in 2020, which was pretty cool. It directly responded to some of my critiques listed earlier on: with better verticality in its level design, more Galar Pokémon integrated into the overworld, and a new form of max raids that don’t use shields. The main issue is these expansions aren’t formatted great; there are almost no battles and their content depth heavily relies on if you want to complete the Pokédex. However, Pokémon being integrated into an overworld of diverse biomes definitely makes catching more interesting, even if the game design isn’t improved.
This game taught me a lot about how I interact with this series, and my standards for it. I put a lot more hours into this game than Sun and Moon. I completed the Pokédex, I traded and raided with friends, and I did a ton of wifi battling. And yet, I never ended up feeling a love-hate relationship with the game, despite all these problems I had with it. This led me to concluding that the controversy of Pokémon Sword and Shield was an expectations game. At the center of this web of biases, I feel conflicted knowing I want to criticize this game’s faults, knowing that I wished the game took bigger steps. And knowing at the same time, if someone asked me for a recommendation, I’d say something like “yeah it’s like pretty fun i guess”. Maybe the formula of Pokémon has been so cleanly refined over the years, that if you take advantage of every feature, you’ll always have a “pretty fun” time with it. And maybe it’s that fine line between adequacy and mediocrity that will always turn fans into dreamers.
To summarize the presentation, these games follow up Pokémon Sun and Moon’s style without much change. The soundtrack is alright, but uses some real terrible MIDI samples in some places. Some songs are hit harder by this than others. Graphically, they use a cell shading-like shader with some coloured outlines. Bloom effects loudly sheen off every Pokémon model. The game looks the most polished in towns, the routes have some weird assets but look fine, and the open Wild Areas have tons of graphical hijinks. There isn’t much to add to the graphics conversation, so to comment on the positive improvements: While 90% of moves still generically apply to Pokémon when they use it, this game introduces a handful of unique moves that compliment the Pokémon they’re attached to well. The trainer animations during battle also have a ton of character appeal. The negatives culminate in a game that doesn’t feel as polished as the average Nintendo game.
Most Pokémon games have minimal storytelling, but this one is a bit different. Similar to some of the recent games, a combination of cutscenes and extra dialogue puts a bit more dramatic focus on the story. The story vaguely uses Britain’s competitive sports culture as a pastiche for a competition fueled region, which works pretty well. Your rival is Hop, who’s one of the best rivals in the series, primarily because his arc is honest. He’s anxious about living up to his older brother and childhood friend, but realizes that competition isn’t all there is to life and uses his experiences to find new passions. It’s cute, and smarter than most rivals having their arcs get smashed by the protagonist. The rest of the rivals are also pretty likable, so it’s the plot climax where the game gets messy. The story of Eternatus just isn’t great at all, its backstory is so messy. The plot tries to make the antagonist morally gray, but doesn’t elaborate on their motivations enough. And don’t get me started on Sordward or Shielbert. While the rivals improve from the extra dialogue, the villains have too much dialogue paired with a nothing plotline. The plot never even gets the chance to explain what exactly Dynamax is.
Dynamax features as this game’s main battle gimmick, and it’s not all bad. Every “Max move” has this synergetic side effect that results in cool team-up attack moments during player battles. Unfortunately, there’s only one Dynamax double battle in the whole campaign, so most players won’t see any of that. Dynamax lacks appeal to most players because it’s a nonsense concept, titled with a nonsense name, with no worldbuilding or visual appeal to at least make it cool nonsense. There are at least Gigantamax forms that change in design, but these are elusive and impossible to obtain on your playthrough without grinding. This is the most a mainline Pokémon gimmick has felt dead on arrival, the game didn’t even try to make it seem cool to people.
Max Raids are a new multiplayer co-op mode, and they offer a unique way to interact with the game socially that Pokémon didn’t really have before. Getting to team up with 3 friends is great, though they lack a bit in variety. There are some hard ones once you beat the game, but the shields they gain during parts of the fight ignore super effective moves and status effects, making strategy repetitive. This is a wonderful feature on paper, but it definitely needs some iterating. Other than these two new mechanics, the combat is the same as it always has been.
However, when you rank formulaic sequels against their precursors, content depth stands out just as much as gameplay iteration. This game does contain a 15-20 hour campaign with an hour long post-game quest, and a handful of things to grind out. This is like every game. It also has the least amount of routes in any Pokémon game, doesn’t have any optional areas at all, has very few side quests, no super-bosses, and barely any daily events. It’s the first game in the series to not have every existing Pokémon, but I couldn’t tell you how many more hours I would’ve gotten out of being able to use a Weedle. Probably not any at all, but it’s clear that Sword and Shield cut down both the fat and the meat. What this does tell me is that Pokémon at its most lean is still a sizable experience, with cooperating with friends to complete the Pokédex, and some online battling and shiny hunting. I also know that most players and most playthroughs are never going to touch any of that stuff, so for the sake of most players, make the campaigns good.
The biggest new tagline feature of Pokémon Sword and Shield is the Wild Area. The Wild Area was advertised as a home console-worthy innovation, immediately drawing comparisons to the concepts and innovation of games such as Breath of the Wild. I can’t say with certainty that there wasn’t any inspiration coming from contemporary Switch releases, but the Wild Area is more about Pokémon Go than anything else. The Wild Area is a reaction to Pokémon Go, analyzing what exactly made catching so tantalizing for people. This comes back to the conceptual start of the series, as Pokémon was one of the first series to take advantage of social experience for playing through a single player campaign. The amount of choices that comes with being able to build a team out of 150 monsters make your teams feel inherently personalized. This makes everything from teams to finding a Pokémon in the wild for the first time feel like something worth sharing. We see this trend across the games industry now, with scores and gacha results being posted all over social media. Pokémon Go richly takes advantage of the core of these traits. Both the original Pokémon games and Pokémon Go play to our wants for personalization, our sense of discovery, and our likening to be rewarded for exploration. Pokémon Sword and Shield analyze this through the vein of a central hub of Pokémon discovery moments. It plays a video game magic trick; visibly dangling hundreds of personalized options for the player to pick from, urging us to tell our friends about our teams later. Unfortunately, this is a one trick magic show, as the discovery factor fades on most playthroughs the moment we’ve caught enough to form a team. The terrain we explore is flat and without secrets, and the game doesn’t have satisfying movement that makes exploring it feel good either. And while this isn’t a new issue, the rigid numbers game of catching feels much more like it’s interrupting the game flow in an RPG like Sword and Shield. This isn’t an issue in Pokémon Go, since catching is the entire game. I don’t think the Wild Area made catching feel more interesting, it didn’t make me want to complete the Pokédex. Despite that, the magic trick still worked on me, about once per playthrough. Gawking at the jumbles of options that form the Wild Area was a unique experience. The center of these games really is the Pokémon choices.
Lastly, that brings me to the new Pokémon. I can’t objectively summarize things these Pokémon do right or wrong on a visual design level, as aesthetic issues I have with the Pokédex aren’t easy to summarize. Most of the designs are clean, some use some gaudy neon palettes, but that’s about it for broad aesthetic issues. Where I run into issues is in their origins and inspirations. The Galar region is based on Great Britain, and I can’t help but find its inspirations too superficial. Almost every new Pokémon is a species repeat; the starter Pokémon aren’t based on animals that live in Britain, and the new legendaries are all simplistic medieval knights and dragons reference. Regional variants were introduced in Pokémon Sun and Moon as a reference to divergent evolution, but end up being used in this game only to apply references to Britain to existing Pokémon. It fixates more on fictionally exaggerated royalty than the actual real world Britain. This superficiality doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of individual designs. I still liked a handful of new Pokémon; Corviknight and Falinks being highlights. It just made me question why they chose Britain in the first place, if they were interested in such a small slice of its history and wildlife. It was equally hard to ignore that it felt like the game didn’t care about the new Pokémon. Almost none of the new Pokémon show up in the Wild Area, or even in overworld encounters on routes. Lots of them are locked behind shaking grass-random encounters and appear only at 1% chances. This statistically obscured availability felt like the game was trying to urge me to stick to the Charizards and avoid the new stuff.
The game also got a DLC expansion in 2020, which was pretty cool. It directly responded to some of my critiques listed earlier on: with better verticality in its level design, more Galar Pokémon integrated into the overworld, and a new form of max raids that don’t use shields. The main issue is these expansions aren’t formatted great; there are almost no battles and their content depth heavily relies on if you want to complete the Pokédex. However, Pokémon being integrated into an overworld of diverse biomes definitely makes catching more interesting, even if the game design isn’t improved.
This game taught me a lot about how I interact with this series, and my standards for it. I put a lot more hours into this game than Sun and Moon. I completed the Pokédex, I traded and raided with friends, and I did a ton of wifi battling. And yet, I never ended up feeling a love-hate relationship with the game, despite all these problems I had with it. This led me to concluding that the controversy of Pokémon Sword and Shield was an expectations game. At the center of this web of biases, I feel conflicted knowing I want to criticize this game’s faults, knowing that I wished the game took bigger steps. And knowing at the same time, if someone asked me for a recommendation, I’d say something like “yeah it’s like pretty fun i guess”. Maybe the formula of Pokémon has been so cleanly refined over the years, that if you take advantage of every feature, you’ll always have a “pretty fun” time with it. And maybe it’s that fine line between adequacy and mediocrity that will always turn fans into dreamers.
For the first time in a long time, Pokémon has gotten a game in a brand new flavor of gameplay. Pokémon Legends: Arceus isn’t exactly innovative, but it is working with a lot of ambition-requiring components that Game Freak has never even dipped their toes into before. My biggest question going into this game was how much of this would feel arbitrary, and how the gameplay loop compares to previous games. It took me about 20 hours to beat the game, but you could have a 40 hour playthrough as well. With blockbuster mechanics and runtime brings new challenges for the series to overcome.
Going over the presentation of the game, Pokémon Legends takes place in Meiji era Sinnoh, a change in style for the series. The graphics are bad! The art direction is fine. The music is shockingly good for a modern Pokémon game. The soundtrack is still comprised of MIDI, but with much nicer sample choice and fantastic composition. Rather than focusing on straightforward remixes, the bulk of the soundtrack uses abstracted isolated melodies from the original material of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The identity to how it uses leitmotifs is unique, you can sense a strong understanding of the original source material through it. The storytelling is lightweight and minimal without emphasis on a singular villain, and the campaign ends abruptly. Despite that, the script is fun; the writers have gotten good at writing these shonen filler episode-flavored miniature character arcs. There’s a bit too much dialogue in some places, though. You have to go through the motions a lot in this game – you don’t just rank up when you get enough points, you have to talk to the professor, and then talk to Cyllene. Overall, I enjoyed the setting and thought it fit the gameplay. This game feels a bit like a spiritual remake. Abstractly revisiting the feelings, aesthetics, and inspirations behind the original Diamond and Pearl, while tiptoeing around directly repeating setpieces or plot.
Pokémon Legends has switched up the formula to take place on huge sprawling maps, and the resulting game design is surprisingly clean. The maps themselves are decent, with a lot of verticality, caves, and secret pathways. Traversing them on the game’s various mounts also felt good, they all have good game feel. This game’s strengths lie in how it rewards the player. These maps are covered with collectibles that trickle down into the content and attributes of your team. Pokémon function both as diverse collectibles and interactive obstacles. The game manages to create a variety of interactions out of surprisingly little; simple formations of Pokémon can heavily encourage specific ways of playing. Sometimes rare shy Pokémon will surround a powerful aggressive Pokémon, and being noticed by just one Pokémon can disrupt the chain of events fast. You get a lot of items to make certain play styles easier, but inventory limitation puts weight on which you bring.
At the center of all the best changes this game makes to the format is the new third person aiming. The seamless nature of catching in this game allows for you to spend exactly as much time as you want on every single Pokémon you see. You can run into a crowd of shy Pokémon like Starly — and if you throw pokéballs at them fast enough, you’ll catch around 3/5ths of them. This is good game math, as it encourages the player to put a little effort into trying to catch everything, but a lot of effort into trying to catch something they really want. The catching of Pokémon Legends has a unique relationship with patience. You can make the game a lot easier for yourself if you catch every single thing in your path, clearing obstacles one at a time. The game rewards this through the new Pokédex system filling out after multiple interactions with a Pokémon, and those entries contribute to your rank. However, playing fast means you’ll find new Pokémon quicker.
Combat has also been massively adjusted to fit the pacing of the game, and how quick each interaction with each Pokémon can go. Pokémon at lower levels have much more HP, and don’t scale as much with each level-up. Catching also seems to only take 1-2 pokéballs as long as a Pokémon is at low health; meaning catching in battle has the same pace as catching in the overworld. You can also adjust how much damage you’ll do with your next attack through styles. These traits in combination empower the player to do as much damage as they want, making catching in battles a whole lot more natural. Trainer battles are still around, but much more sparse, and the mechanical changes don’t show improvement here. The early trainers will only use 1 Pokémon, and with how low HP is, it just felt like the later trainer battles were one-hit KO wars. Defeating higher level wild Pokémon 1 on 1 isn’t very engaging either, since outspeeding has been replaced. Where the combat functions its best is in tense 1 vs 3 situations where you have to catch multiple Pokémon at once. Even if the mechanics behind the combat itself aren’t great, it manages to get some interesting things out of having turn based and overworld combat being separated. This game sets a whole new standard for overworld encounters in modern turn-based RPGs as well, there’s a lot of fun risk and reward between choosing to engage with them or avoid them.
There are also “Noble” Pokémon boss fights, which are entirely action-based boss fights. The first 3 feel like baby Monster Hunter attack patterns, and the rest feel like baby bullet-hell attack patterns. If there were full games of these, they wouldn’t be very fun (but the baby bullet-hell game would be x10 better than the baby Monster Hunter game), but they worked well as refreshing changes of pace. The post-game has a lot of half-action half-combat fights where you have to avoid waves of projectiles in order to start a battle, and catch the Pokémon from there. There should be more of those in the sequel! This isn’t exactly a game I’d replay for the combat, but the combat works fine enough to compliment the collecting.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a big step forward, but steps aren’t everything; it’s important to remember where we stand now. And where we stand now happens to be pretty good this time around! From these new mechanics, as well as the new style system, it’s clear that Pokémon is willing to learn from contemporary adventure games and JRPGs. The gameplay also carries the DNA of Pokémon Snap, showing introspection from the developers as well. The most surprising part of that is how naturally it involves big selling point mechanics like crafting and open worlds. New mechanics and world design are tastefully implemented and acknowledge long-time series flaws regarding the unengaging side of catching, and improve upon it. This is the best Pokémon has ever been at monster collection, its tagline mechanic. The new mechanics aren’t actually the part of the game that needs iteration; it’s more about broad aspects like storyline, graphics, and combat. Pokémon’s mainline games have been in 3D for about 8 years, and I found those games to use 3D rather superficially. This game uses 3D with purpose, and it’s a strong purpose too.
Going over the presentation of the game, Pokémon Legends takes place in Meiji era Sinnoh, a change in style for the series. The graphics are bad! The art direction is fine. The music is shockingly good for a modern Pokémon game. The soundtrack is still comprised of MIDI, but with much nicer sample choice and fantastic composition. Rather than focusing on straightforward remixes, the bulk of the soundtrack uses abstracted isolated melodies from the original material of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The identity to how it uses leitmotifs is unique, you can sense a strong understanding of the original source material through it. The storytelling is lightweight and minimal without emphasis on a singular villain, and the campaign ends abruptly. Despite that, the script is fun; the writers have gotten good at writing these shonen filler episode-flavored miniature character arcs. There’s a bit too much dialogue in some places, though. You have to go through the motions a lot in this game – you don’t just rank up when you get enough points, you have to talk to the professor, and then talk to Cyllene. Overall, I enjoyed the setting and thought it fit the gameplay. This game feels a bit like a spiritual remake. Abstractly revisiting the feelings, aesthetics, and inspirations behind the original Diamond and Pearl, while tiptoeing around directly repeating setpieces or plot.
Pokémon Legends has switched up the formula to take place on huge sprawling maps, and the resulting game design is surprisingly clean. The maps themselves are decent, with a lot of verticality, caves, and secret pathways. Traversing them on the game’s various mounts also felt good, they all have good game feel. This game’s strengths lie in how it rewards the player. These maps are covered with collectibles that trickle down into the content and attributes of your team. Pokémon function both as diverse collectibles and interactive obstacles. The game manages to create a variety of interactions out of surprisingly little; simple formations of Pokémon can heavily encourage specific ways of playing. Sometimes rare shy Pokémon will surround a powerful aggressive Pokémon, and being noticed by just one Pokémon can disrupt the chain of events fast. You get a lot of items to make certain play styles easier, but inventory limitation puts weight on which you bring.
At the center of all the best changes this game makes to the format is the new third person aiming. The seamless nature of catching in this game allows for you to spend exactly as much time as you want on every single Pokémon you see. You can run into a crowd of shy Pokémon like Starly — and if you throw pokéballs at them fast enough, you’ll catch around 3/5ths of them. This is good game math, as it encourages the player to put a little effort into trying to catch everything, but a lot of effort into trying to catch something they really want. The catching of Pokémon Legends has a unique relationship with patience. You can make the game a lot easier for yourself if you catch every single thing in your path, clearing obstacles one at a time. The game rewards this through the new Pokédex system filling out after multiple interactions with a Pokémon, and those entries contribute to your rank. However, playing fast means you’ll find new Pokémon quicker.
Combat has also been massively adjusted to fit the pacing of the game, and how quick each interaction with each Pokémon can go. Pokémon at lower levels have much more HP, and don’t scale as much with each level-up. Catching also seems to only take 1-2 pokéballs as long as a Pokémon is at low health; meaning catching in battle has the same pace as catching in the overworld. You can also adjust how much damage you’ll do with your next attack through styles. These traits in combination empower the player to do as much damage as they want, making catching in battles a whole lot more natural. Trainer battles are still around, but much more sparse, and the mechanical changes don’t show improvement here. The early trainers will only use 1 Pokémon, and with how low HP is, it just felt like the later trainer battles were one-hit KO wars. Defeating higher level wild Pokémon 1 on 1 isn’t very engaging either, since outspeeding has been replaced. Where the combat functions its best is in tense 1 vs 3 situations where you have to catch multiple Pokémon at once. Even if the mechanics behind the combat itself aren’t great, it manages to get some interesting things out of having turn based and overworld combat being separated. This game sets a whole new standard for overworld encounters in modern turn-based RPGs as well, there’s a lot of fun risk and reward between choosing to engage with them or avoid them.
There are also “Noble” Pokémon boss fights, which are entirely action-based boss fights. The first 3 feel like baby Monster Hunter attack patterns, and the rest feel like baby bullet-hell attack patterns. If there were full games of these, they wouldn’t be very fun (but the baby bullet-hell game would be x10 better than the baby Monster Hunter game), but they worked well as refreshing changes of pace. The post-game has a lot of half-action half-combat fights where you have to avoid waves of projectiles in order to start a battle, and catch the Pokémon from there. There should be more of those in the sequel! This isn’t exactly a game I’d replay for the combat, but the combat works fine enough to compliment the collecting.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a big step forward, but steps aren’t everything; it’s important to remember where we stand now. And where we stand now happens to be pretty good this time around! From these new mechanics, as well as the new style system, it’s clear that Pokémon is willing to learn from contemporary adventure games and JRPGs. The gameplay also carries the DNA of Pokémon Snap, showing introspection from the developers as well. The most surprising part of that is how naturally it involves big selling point mechanics like crafting and open worlds. New mechanics and world design are tastefully implemented and acknowledge long-time series flaws regarding the unengaging side of catching, and improve upon it. This is the best Pokémon has ever been at monster collection, its tagline mechanic. The new mechanics aren’t actually the part of the game that needs iteration; it’s more about broad aspects like storyline, graphics, and combat. Pokémon’s mainline games have been in 3D for about 8 years, and I found those games to use 3D rather superficially. This game uses 3D with purpose, and it’s a strong purpose too.
Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow started a series that would end up becoming a monolith of game history, but it’s not easy to tell what game design landed them in the hall of fame at first glance. Monster collection RPGs had already been an established sub-genre in Japan, after all. Though when I look back to what first transfixed me about Pokémon, I see one obvious lead. Pokémon really felt like it was my own journey, and then its social aspects let me compare my journey to others. Your Pokémon adventure wasn’t going to be exactly like anyone else’s, and every team member would have a history and grow up by the end of the game—And then you fight! Pokémon had delicately sprinkled Tamagotchi game design over a fine foundation of D&D era team building concepts. Alongside this, the games focused on a modern day setting in which you’re a kid growing up in an urban fantasy world, where everyone is in on the same thing as you. Pokémon had this fantastical sports fantasy-esque pitch to it; it didn’t even need a compelling villain for the setting to immediately bring something vivid to the eyes of many.
You explore this setting through a grid-based constant overworld, with towns connected to each other through straightforward routes. Certainly a casualization compared to other RPGs of the time, but it’s a choice that has aged very well. Even some Final Fantasy games are built like this now! Pokémon Red and Blue have solid pacing as well, Gyms lay out an easy-to-track goalpost of progress. More uniquely in comparison to games to come, Red and Blue follow a very strict formula of having dungeons between every single Gym (although the game doesn’t make you do them exactly in that order). There’s some clear game designerly intent behind the early dungeons: Viridian Forest teaches you to manage your health against status effects in larger areas, Mt. Moon forces you to deal with encounters before you obtain repels, and Rock Tunnel teaches you the importance of Hidden moves. Unlike future games, there’s also a ton of variety in what order to play through the game. Everything from Celadon to Fuchsia can be played in whatever order – you can go to every area in the game (except the League) with only 4 Gym Badges. The best part of this isn’t just the non-linearity, it’s that there’s always going to be trainers you can fight if you’re under-leveled.
Fighting in the singleplayer campaign of this game is split between unique battles and taking your time to get some catches. Especially returning to this game immediately after playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it’s easy to see that catching in this game is a bit messy. On one hand, catching is a pure numbers game, with catching being available at any percentage of health, but damage and status effects making Pokémon easier to catch. This is good, since catching would be a very monotonous process otherwise. On the other hand, the game’s math encourages brute forcing a bit too much, especially when weakening a Pokémon you want is so scary with the damage potential of random critical hits. Beyond the faults in the experience of catching itself, Pokémon catching feels inherently rewarding. Knowing that any Pokémon you capture could become essential to your experience makes completing the Pokédex feel worthwhile.
Though for all of the aspects of personalization to feel rewarding, the battles need to work well, and they’re decent. More than later games, the combat is slow paced and often broken down by things like Wrap and sleep status effects. You don’t get strong elemental attacks until much further into the game; there’s a big chunk of time where a lot of Pokémon fight with strong normal type attacks instead. This makes the game feel a bit more methodical at times, and makes the game feel much duller at other times. Pokémon is an easy game, unless you don’t want it to be easy. I didn’t grind at all in my latest playthrough, and I beat the final boss with all of my team being 20 levels below their opponents, and that was pretty satisfying.
What really sets apart Pokémon from other RPGs is that you could take your Pokémon into battles against your friends. It’s hard to rate Pokémon PVP, because there’s so many factors to what makes battling friends interesting that exist outside of the PVP itself; the balancing is literally what you and your friends decide it to be. Having that option really just heightens the whole experience, the feeling that every choice matters because you could eventually take these Pokémon into a fight for real. It’s really the type of game design you see in a lot of games now, having something you can really apply your game knowledge to in a meaningful way beyond just the campaign of a game itself.
This game also has some glitches, it’s kind of infamous for it at this point. Most of the glitches you see in a run are miscellaneous rushed programming resulting in faulty mechanics. The most interesting bugs you can find are things you have to do very intentionally – usually defined by memory manipulation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to seriously critique this game as buggy when most of the faults of the game are oversights that you might not even notice in the runtime of a single playthrough. Personally, I love a lot of the weirder, harder to activate glitches. Something about manipulating the game into getting weird things to happen was so intriguing to me after playing it normally for so long. But I certainly wouldn’t want stuff like Focus Energy not working to persist into future games, it is a flaw.
The game’s presentation has aged dubiously. The overworld looks totally fine for a Game Boy game, but some of those Pokémon sprites were really weird. Even the Yellow version keeps the old back sprites, which often display the design incoherently, even having factual errors about them. The music sounds pretty good though; not exactly good in quality as Link’s Awakening for example, but it’s a deservingly iconic Game Boy soundtrack.
Finally regarding Pokémon Yellow version itself, this isn’t a luxury definitive edition or anything. It reminds me of a holiday themed reskin of a game; it has that amount of substance to it. It would’ve been worth critiquing back in the day as a shallow re-release, but these days it’s fair to regard it as the best version to replay the games through by default. Those new battle sprites are just that good.
The real thing that makes Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow so interesting to go back to is that everything that I’ve ever loved Pokémon was in this game already. The feeling of going on a personal adventure with a team that I had nicknamed and given personalities to. The social aspects of the game that allow me to heighten my experience through friends. Everything was already here, from the very beginning. If anything, that’s probably why these games become so easy to compare and downplay compared to sequels; Pokémon is still about these exact same things, it’s just better at them now. But just as Pokémon already had everything it’s ever been good at, it already was a game you didn’t have love everything about. You didn’t have to play Pokémon for the collecting, you didn’t have to play it with friends, you didn’t even have to feel invested in your team, you could just play it, and it’d be a good role playing game. You could play it again, and have a completely different experience, and you’d know it was one of the best experiences on the Game Boy. You could even play it now, despite all that lost polish, and you could appreciate that this game knew exactly what it wanted to be.
You explore this setting through a grid-based constant overworld, with towns connected to each other through straightforward routes. Certainly a casualization compared to other RPGs of the time, but it’s a choice that has aged very well. Even some Final Fantasy games are built like this now! Pokémon Red and Blue have solid pacing as well, Gyms lay out an easy-to-track goalpost of progress. More uniquely in comparison to games to come, Red and Blue follow a very strict formula of having dungeons between every single Gym (although the game doesn’t make you do them exactly in that order). There’s some clear game designerly intent behind the early dungeons: Viridian Forest teaches you to manage your health against status effects in larger areas, Mt. Moon forces you to deal with encounters before you obtain repels, and Rock Tunnel teaches you the importance of Hidden moves. Unlike future games, there’s also a ton of variety in what order to play through the game. Everything from Celadon to Fuchsia can be played in whatever order – you can go to every area in the game (except the League) with only 4 Gym Badges. The best part of this isn’t just the non-linearity, it’s that there’s always going to be trainers you can fight if you’re under-leveled.
Fighting in the singleplayer campaign of this game is split between unique battles and taking your time to get some catches. Especially returning to this game immediately after playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it’s easy to see that catching in this game is a bit messy. On one hand, catching is a pure numbers game, with catching being available at any percentage of health, but damage and status effects making Pokémon easier to catch. This is good, since catching would be a very monotonous process otherwise. On the other hand, the game’s math encourages brute forcing a bit too much, especially when weakening a Pokémon you want is so scary with the damage potential of random critical hits. Beyond the faults in the experience of catching itself, Pokémon catching feels inherently rewarding. Knowing that any Pokémon you capture could become essential to your experience makes completing the Pokédex feel worthwhile.
Though for all of the aspects of personalization to feel rewarding, the battles need to work well, and they’re decent. More than later games, the combat is slow paced and often broken down by things like Wrap and sleep status effects. You don’t get strong elemental attacks until much further into the game; there’s a big chunk of time where a lot of Pokémon fight with strong normal type attacks instead. This makes the game feel a bit more methodical at times, and makes the game feel much duller at other times. Pokémon is an easy game, unless you don’t want it to be easy. I didn’t grind at all in my latest playthrough, and I beat the final boss with all of my team being 20 levels below their opponents, and that was pretty satisfying.
What really sets apart Pokémon from other RPGs is that you could take your Pokémon into battles against your friends. It’s hard to rate Pokémon PVP, because there’s so many factors to what makes battling friends interesting that exist outside of the PVP itself; the balancing is literally what you and your friends decide it to be. Having that option really just heightens the whole experience, the feeling that every choice matters because you could eventually take these Pokémon into a fight for real. It’s really the type of game design you see in a lot of games now, having something you can really apply your game knowledge to in a meaningful way beyond just the campaign of a game itself.
This game also has some glitches, it’s kind of infamous for it at this point. Most of the glitches you see in a run are miscellaneous rushed programming resulting in faulty mechanics. The most interesting bugs you can find are things you have to do very intentionally – usually defined by memory manipulation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to seriously critique this game as buggy when most of the faults of the game are oversights that you might not even notice in the runtime of a single playthrough. Personally, I love a lot of the weirder, harder to activate glitches. Something about manipulating the game into getting weird things to happen was so intriguing to me after playing it normally for so long. But I certainly wouldn’t want stuff like Focus Energy not working to persist into future games, it is a flaw.
The game’s presentation has aged dubiously. The overworld looks totally fine for a Game Boy game, but some of those Pokémon sprites were really weird. Even the Yellow version keeps the old back sprites, which often display the design incoherently, even having factual errors about them. The music sounds pretty good though; not exactly good in quality as Link’s Awakening for example, but it’s a deservingly iconic Game Boy soundtrack.
Finally regarding Pokémon Yellow version itself, this isn’t a luxury definitive edition or anything. It reminds me of a holiday themed reskin of a game; it has that amount of substance to it. It would’ve been worth critiquing back in the day as a shallow re-release, but these days it’s fair to regard it as the best version to replay the games through by default. Those new battle sprites are just that good.
The real thing that makes Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow so interesting to go back to is that everything that I’ve ever loved Pokémon was in this game already. The feeling of going on a personal adventure with a team that I had nicknamed and given personalities to. The social aspects of the game that allow me to heighten my experience through friends. Everything was already here, from the very beginning. If anything, that’s probably why these games become so easy to compare and downplay compared to sequels; Pokémon is still about these exact same things, it’s just better at them now. But just as Pokémon already had everything it’s ever been good at, it already was a game you didn’t have love everything about. You didn’t have to play Pokémon for the collecting, you didn’t have to play it with friends, you didn’t even have to feel invested in your team, you could just play it, and it’d be a good role playing game. You could play it again, and have a completely different experience, and you’d know it was one of the best experiences on the Game Boy. You could even play it now, despite all that lost polish, and you could appreciate that this game knew exactly what it wanted to be.
This review contains spoilers
When I think about games that came out of nowhere, just to suddenly blow my mind, AI the Somnium Files is the first to come to mind. I had no background of the Zero Escape games…so when I got it based on a few recommendations here and there, I didn’t expect it to grip me like it did. It has this slick cyber-noir outline, and it’s really silly, but despite all the high concept nonsense, it could get real down to earth when it wanted to. That edge it has to its personality is something I grew to really appreciate in retrospect. Now, a sequel has finally arrived, and well…it’s none of these things. AI the Somnium Files 2 is a bloodbath of labyrinthian plotline, speeding at 1000 misdirections per second. Impossible Sci-Fi jenga-stacked on top of layers of copy-pasted Wikipedia articles.
We’re guided through this much wilder sequel through the lens of 2 very different protagonists.
Ryuki’s storyline frontends the game’s first 10-15 hours in conjunction with Tama, a contrastingly different duo than our first game’s. Ryuki’s timid exposition, and general dryness in contrast to his sidekick almost reminds me of Apollo Justice, or something. There’s unreliability to his perspective that comes in conjunction with his established mental instability. It helps let the mystery flow more naturally without recreating the amnesia plot from the first game, it’s great. Tama is pretty silly, but her immediate confrontation of Ryuki’s problems ends up making her feel like a very different character from Aiba. She’s much more emotionally honest than Aiba was.
The second route of the game stars Mizuki and Aiba from the first AI game, and there are a lot of problems with this side of the game. They’re both fun protagonists, but at the same time, their development in AI 1 was conclusive, so they don’t really have character arcs here. As a result, their presence in the plot feels loose - like they’re commentating over a storyline that isn’t really theirs. On the other hand, Aiba and Mizuki aren’t the worst commentators, they’re both really likable characters.
Over the course of the game, I just kept having thoughts like this. This is a great game, but does it exactly make sense as a followup to AI 1? Kaname Date carries over none of the great character development he had over the course of the game, he just shows up to make porn jokes. So many characters are awkwardly placed in the game when you don’t have the context of the development they had in the first game. It takes out so much tension from the long investigation segments when half the characters you’re talking to are ruled out of the mystery, since they were innocent in AI 1. Watching them try and fail to stretch jokes over the course of 2 games, like having Tama and Aiba comment on the receptionist’s boobs, or asking Kagami what his name is another 50 times…it just gets old. Luckily, all of the new characters are great, albeit not great all the time.
Kizuna and Lien end up being really likable characters, but their introduction is atrocious. I particularly liked Lien’s positive story of coming clean, but also…why is he a stalker? Who wrote this shit?? If there’s anything this game taught me about the AI writers, it’s that maybe they should lay off the romance… Then again, maybe I’m underestimating the full potential of the people who made a compelling narrative out of a dude who looks like Steve from Minecraft.
This time around, the mystery is a lot more immediately complex, evoking paranormal activity from the beginning. How could this seemingly impossible mystery have taken place? Combining that with the strange happenings of Ryuki lets the game immediately plant seeds of doubt in your mind, forcing you to keep it open to any strange misdirection you hear. I felt like the mystery was a lot more involved this time around overall; we go deeper into the criminal underbelly, and learn about the conspiratorial backgrounds of many. The twists in this game reel you in, and the truth of the plot truly made me feel like I had to rewind back to figure out its full implications. These are some seriously replayable mysteries, I watched some scenes back, and this game really dangles some of those hints right in your face.
The game’s shift to a grander cinematic story does have its faults, though. The biggest one is its shift to making all the fight scenes serious brawls with multiple characters involved. These go on for dangerously long times, and follow the same format every single time. I was shocked at how rigidly they stuck to one style, there’s not a single fight scene in the whole game that isn’t against a wave of faceless lackeys. I’m down for campy action sometimes, but I feel like I saw the same fight scene 10 times across the whole game. Nirvana Initiative definitely isn’t without pacing issues, from the lengthened investigation segments, to the bad QTE scenes.
What really helps Nirvana Initiative stand on its own - both as a game, and as a sequel, are those Somniums. Somniums in this game have gotten a complete facelift in the gameplay department, now using strictly unique concepts for each Somnium. There are just so many moments in which the imagery infused puzzles and plot implications intertwine and create something so satisfying and engaging. Sprawling through trauma nightmares, or participating in quiz shows made of your darkest secrets. It gets so much more out of the Somnium system than the first game did, and there’s so much variety too. When one’s not particularly puzzle-centric, it always feels earnt; this game manages to find some really neat alternatives. This time, Somniums aren’t the only gameplay either. There’s a new gameplay style where you recreate the sequence of events at a crime, and they’re pretty fun - a relaxed and patience requiring alternative.
I’m a bit conflicted over Nirvana Initiative. On one hand, I certainly liked the overall mystery more than I liked the original’s. On the other hand, AI 1 felt a lot cleaner and consistently worthy of my appreciation. I wondered if this game would’ve been better off as an independent sequel, though I’m sure it wouldn’t exist yet without those AI 1 assets. I definitely felt my excitement deflate quite a few times over my playthrough; awfully repetitive fight scenes, some indefensible romance threads, and poor pacing during some investigation segments. But despite everything that pulls the game down, I know the plot held an iron grip over me the whole way through. I just keep thinking back to those Somniums, and I know there’s something really special at the core of this game. This game just pulls so many unforgettable tricks, I’ll be citing it as a wonderful example of ludonarrative design for years to come. This is the best type of scope creeped game—the type that still impresses you with its scope.
We’re guided through this much wilder sequel through the lens of 2 very different protagonists.
Ryuki’s storyline frontends the game’s first 10-15 hours in conjunction with Tama, a contrastingly different duo than our first game’s. Ryuki’s timid exposition, and general dryness in contrast to his sidekick almost reminds me of Apollo Justice, or something. There’s unreliability to his perspective that comes in conjunction with his established mental instability. It helps let the mystery flow more naturally without recreating the amnesia plot from the first game, it’s great. Tama is pretty silly, but her immediate confrontation of Ryuki’s problems ends up making her feel like a very different character from Aiba. She’s much more emotionally honest than Aiba was.
The second route of the game stars Mizuki and Aiba from the first AI game, and there are a lot of problems with this side of the game. They’re both fun protagonists, but at the same time, their development in AI 1 was conclusive, so they don’t really have character arcs here. As a result, their presence in the plot feels loose - like they’re commentating over a storyline that isn’t really theirs. On the other hand, Aiba and Mizuki aren’t the worst commentators, they’re both really likable characters.
Over the course of the game, I just kept having thoughts like this. This is a great game, but does it exactly make sense as a followup to AI 1? Kaname Date carries over none of the great character development he had over the course of the game, he just shows up to make porn jokes. So many characters are awkwardly placed in the game when you don’t have the context of the development they had in the first game. It takes out so much tension from the long investigation segments when half the characters you’re talking to are ruled out of the mystery, since they were innocent in AI 1. Watching them try and fail to stretch jokes over the course of 2 games, like having Tama and Aiba comment on the receptionist’s boobs, or asking Kagami what his name is another 50 times…it just gets old. Luckily, all of the new characters are great, albeit not great all the time.
Kizuna and Lien end up being really likable characters, but their introduction is atrocious. I particularly liked Lien’s positive story of coming clean, but also…why is he a stalker? Who wrote this shit?? If there’s anything this game taught me about the AI writers, it’s that maybe they should lay off the romance… Then again, maybe I’m underestimating the full potential of the people who made a compelling narrative out of a dude who looks like Steve from Minecraft.
This time around, the mystery is a lot more immediately complex, evoking paranormal activity from the beginning. How could this seemingly impossible mystery have taken place? Combining that with the strange happenings of Ryuki lets the game immediately plant seeds of doubt in your mind, forcing you to keep it open to any strange misdirection you hear. I felt like the mystery was a lot more involved this time around overall; we go deeper into the criminal underbelly, and learn about the conspiratorial backgrounds of many. The twists in this game reel you in, and the truth of the plot truly made me feel like I had to rewind back to figure out its full implications. These are some seriously replayable mysteries, I watched some scenes back, and this game really dangles some of those hints right in your face.
The game’s shift to a grander cinematic story does have its faults, though. The biggest one is its shift to making all the fight scenes serious brawls with multiple characters involved. These go on for dangerously long times, and follow the same format every single time. I was shocked at how rigidly they stuck to one style, there’s not a single fight scene in the whole game that isn’t against a wave of faceless lackeys. I’m down for campy action sometimes, but I feel like I saw the same fight scene 10 times across the whole game. Nirvana Initiative definitely isn’t without pacing issues, from the lengthened investigation segments, to the bad QTE scenes.
What really helps Nirvana Initiative stand on its own - both as a game, and as a sequel, are those Somniums. Somniums in this game have gotten a complete facelift in the gameplay department, now using strictly unique concepts for each Somnium. There are just so many moments in which the imagery infused puzzles and plot implications intertwine and create something so satisfying and engaging. Sprawling through trauma nightmares, or participating in quiz shows made of your darkest secrets. It gets so much more out of the Somnium system than the first game did, and there’s so much variety too. When one’s not particularly puzzle-centric, it always feels earnt; this game manages to find some really neat alternatives. This time, Somniums aren’t the only gameplay either. There’s a new gameplay style where you recreate the sequence of events at a crime, and they’re pretty fun - a relaxed and patience requiring alternative.
I’m a bit conflicted over Nirvana Initiative. On one hand, I certainly liked the overall mystery more than I liked the original’s. On the other hand, AI 1 felt a lot cleaner and consistently worthy of my appreciation. I wondered if this game would’ve been better off as an independent sequel, though I’m sure it wouldn’t exist yet without those AI 1 assets. I definitely felt my excitement deflate quite a few times over my playthrough; awfully repetitive fight scenes, some indefensible romance threads, and poor pacing during some investigation segments. But despite everything that pulls the game down, I know the plot held an iron grip over me the whole way through. I just keep thinking back to those Somniums, and I know there’s something really special at the core of this game. This game just pulls so many unforgettable tricks, I’ll be citing it as a wonderful example of ludonarrative design for years to come. This is the best type of scope creeped game—the type that still impresses you with its scope.
How many people don’t know that Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has mini-games? If you open the options menu, there’s a little 4 player mini-game tab, containing 3 mini-games: 100-Yard Hop, Bumper Crop Bump, and CheckerBoard Chase. I was one of those people until about a week ago, I stumbled haphazardly into the depths of CheckerBoard Chase… To summarize it, it’s a simple Bomberman-adjacent arcade game where characters walk around on a big platform, and whenever you press A you clear out a line of the platform in front of you. The goal is to stay on the platform without falling into the destroyed lines. What would seemingly be a simple, throwaway mini-game developed for some presumedly arbitrary reason ends up having a whole lot of depth when you search for it.
First off, let’s talk about the line-clearing itself. The platform is visually broken into a simple 8x8 tileset, and you clear 1 block wide lines from where you’re standing to the stage’s edge. Clearing a line itself has a bit of startup and animation recovery, so if you and someone else clear lines in each other’s direction, you’ll only barely make it off the block before it falls. If you acted a split second late - you’re gone. You might not even clear the lines at all if you don’t click it fast enough, you’ll get stuck in startup and fall through.
Line clearing itself is a 2 stage mechanic; first a line is highlighted one by one in a split second, then the blocks start falling in order. Because of this, there’s even a sort of proximity system going on here - blocks fall faster the closer you are to the ledge. Not only that, but characters have tangibility to them; you can bodyblock! This means that when you’ve positioned correctly, you can hold someone in a corner and quickly get a confirmed kill on them.
Walking in this game is slow and doesn’t have any diagonal movement, but line clears are can be easily reacted to from afar. It’s about when you choose to walk that the skill lies, as the advantageous and disadvantageous spots on the stage are constantly changing as blocks fall and respawn. Walking for too long can often lead to you being pushed into a disadvantageous position if you can’t defend your own ground, but long stretches of watching are especially important to the end-game as the stage closes in, and bad line clears become more punishable.
If you’ve been locked in the corner, you can clear the spaces on the map where your opponent can get a confirmed kill on you from - if you’re fast enough. Though of course this sort of playstyle is risky, as you’re forcing yourself to stick to what’s usually the corners of the stage, which begin to fall as the match progresses. That’s a comeback mechanic with at least as much design intelligence as Guilty Gear: Strive.
I’ve been able to find a lot of fundamental e-sportsy game design here: from positional advantages to concepts like spacing. This is at the very least an EVO side event-worthy game that can sit in the corner next to Puyo Puyo and those Sailor Moon SNES fighting games!! Breaking this game’s subtleties open and scouring for crumbs of depth can really teach you a lot about the simple arts of game design as a whole. It’s often the rigid, initially awkward aspects of a game that lead to its depth. When analyzing a game as sheerly un-emphasized as a little mini-game hiding under the floorboards of Kirby 64, it’s hard to see where intention starts and ends. Yet ultimately as players it’s our right to breathe meaning into the dusty ashes of whatever we stumble upon. Grassroots is beautiful. Made me feel like a Ryu player circa 1994 on the sticks, feeling out their buttons. “Feeling a standing fierce here” I whisper, eyes shut tightly, as I launch a Waddle Dee into the pit of oblivion
I played Kirby 64 by the way. I don’t remember what happens in it it was a long time ago
First off, let’s talk about the line-clearing itself. The platform is visually broken into a simple 8x8 tileset, and you clear 1 block wide lines from where you’re standing to the stage’s edge. Clearing a line itself has a bit of startup and animation recovery, so if you and someone else clear lines in each other’s direction, you’ll only barely make it off the block before it falls. If you acted a split second late - you’re gone. You might not even clear the lines at all if you don’t click it fast enough, you’ll get stuck in startup and fall through.
Line clearing itself is a 2 stage mechanic; first a line is highlighted one by one in a split second, then the blocks start falling in order. Because of this, there’s even a sort of proximity system going on here - blocks fall faster the closer you are to the ledge. Not only that, but characters have tangibility to them; you can bodyblock! This means that when you’ve positioned correctly, you can hold someone in a corner and quickly get a confirmed kill on them.
Walking in this game is slow and doesn’t have any diagonal movement, but line clears are can be easily reacted to from afar. It’s about when you choose to walk that the skill lies, as the advantageous and disadvantageous spots on the stage are constantly changing as blocks fall and respawn. Walking for too long can often lead to you being pushed into a disadvantageous position if you can’t defend your own ground, but long stretches of watching are especially important to the end-game as the stage closes in, and bad line clears become more punishable.
If you’ve been locked in the corner, you can clear the spaces on the map where your opponent can get a confirmed kill on you from - if you’re fast enough. Though of course this sort of playstyle is risky, as you’re forcing yourself to stick to what’s usually the corners of the stage, which begin to fall as the match progresses. That’s a comeback mechanic with at least as much design intelligence as Guilty Gear: Strive.
I’ve been able to find a lot of fundamental e-sportsy game design here: from positional advantages to concepts like spacing. This is at the very least an EVO side event-worthy game that can sit in the corner next to Puyo Puyo and those Sailor Moon SNES fighting games!! Breaking this game’s subtleties open and scouring for crumbs of depth can really teach you a lot about the simple arts of game design as a whole. It’s often the rigid, initially awkward aspects of a game that lead to its depth. When analyzing a game as sheerly un-emphasized as a little mini-game hiding under the floorboards of Kirby 64, it’s hard to see where intention starts and ends. Yet ultimately as players it’s our right to breathe meaning into the dusty ashes of whatever we stumble upon. Grassroots is beautiful. Made me feel like a Ryu player circa 1994 on the sticks, feeling out their buttons. “Feeling a standing fierce here” I whisper, eyes shut tightly, as I launch a Waddle Dee into the pit of oblivion
I played Kirby 64 by the way. I don’t remember what happens in it it was a long time ago
After playing the game’s DLC on and off for the past year, I’ve had to acknowledge that this might be the best one.
I have to say - there is a sort of intimate trait to the way that you break into a fighting game over the course of months. Slowly filling in the holes in a character’s arsenal, feeling out every aspect of a kit until you can take advantage of every little piece of it… It’s mesmerizing. Yet the cold truth is that, well, I don’t play games for that long at a time anymore. Maybe I hit a point in which my friends have moved on for newer hotness, or I’m no longer getting that satisfaction juice from going online, but I’ll just drop it at some point. I come back a year later and realize in horror that my progress had essentially been reset; I remember a few buttons and a bnb or two, but other than that, I’m out. I certainly don’t see this as a flaw with the genre that should be taped over, it only makes sense that part of the appeal of the genre is climbing the mountain born of your own volition until your legs give out. I just know that despite my genuine love for the genre, I have been and always will be back and forth in how I interact with it.
At the very least, Smash Bros. has offered me an alternative to this that I’ve come to appreciate over time. I can jump into it and remember pretty much everything about it, because the traits that make you good at Smash are so outwardly pronounced. You throw out the big buttons, and you combo off reaction. It’s not a fundamentally better approach, but it saved Smash from falling off entirely for me. My experience with Smash was one of competitive-casualness, I’ve never entered a tourney - I just play with people who use those no items rules. 3 years into my cycle of death and rebirth with Smash, we get Kazuya Mishima, who I wouldn’t play until months after their release. A bit after Sora comes out, I decide to try and see if I can do one of those zero-to-death combos I see on Twitter… It certainly wasn’t the mountain that some fighting games can be, but as someone who never played Mishimas in Tekken, it was a cute little sandcastle.
What I would discover as I played Kazuya, is that in THE WORLD OF KAZUYA MISHIMA, THERE ARE NO RULES, BARRING THAT YOU MUST MASTER THE ELECTRIC GOD WIND FIST. It’s invincible, it combos into almost every move he has, and the best combos are simply most efficiently comboing it into itself. The casualness and intimacy I was so fond of were intertwined together; my entire learning curve with the character would become seeking out as much potential in the god fist as I could. In this way, Smash really compartmentalized the satisfaction of learning a fighting game all into one attack. And how could I forget an attack like that? Kazuya was divinely gifted with the most powerful move in the game from the heavens under the sole condition that he must “Get Silly With It” - and as God’s Silliest Soldier, I knew this was my duty since before I was born. Wrap the bow onto that gift of having a huge moveset that you’ll slowly develop biased favourites from, and those throw camera shots… And it looks like we got a winner here. Nowadays, still only playing Smash in bursts every handful of months, I make a little progress on my god fist every time.
Oh yeah, and I’m not gonna criticize this character’s apparent bad balancing. Smash Bros. is the devil’s game, and I believe that by doing Kazuya infinites online I am sending it to the depths from whence it came from.
I have to say - there is a sort of intimate trait to the way that you break into a fighting game over the course of months. Slowly filling in the holes in a character’s arsenal, feeling out every aspect of a kit until you can take advantage of every little piece of it… It’s mesmerizing. Yet the cold truth is that, well, I don’t play games for that long at a time anymore. Maybe I hit a point in which my friends have moved on for newer hotness, or I’m no longer getting that satisfaction juice from going online, but I’ll just drop it at some point. I come back a year later and realize in horror that my progress had essentially been reset; I remember a few buttons and a bnb or two, but other than that, I’m out. I certainly don’t see this as a flaw with the genre that should be taped over, it only makes sense that part of the appeal of the genre is climbing the mountain born of your own volition until your legs give out. I just know that despite my genuine love for the genre, I have been and always will be back and forth in how I interact with it.
At the very least, Smash Bros. has offered me an alternative to this that I’ve come to appreciate over time. I can jump into it and remember pretty much everything about it, because the traits that make you good at Smash are so outwardly pronounced. You throw out the big buttons, and you combo off reaction. It’s not a fundamentally better approach, but it saved Smash from falling off entirely for me. My experience with Smash was one of competitive-casualness, I’ve never entered a tourney - I just play with people who use those no items rules. 3 years into my cycle of death and rebirth with Smash, we get Kazuya Mishima, who I wouldn’t play until months after their release. A bit after Sora comes out, I decide to try and see if I can do one of those zero-to-death combos I see on Twitter… It certainly wasn’t the mountain that some fighting games can be, but as someone who never played Mishimas in Tekken, it was a cute little sandcastle.
What I would discover as I played Kazuya, is that in THE WORLD OF KAZUYA MISHIMA, THERE ARE NO RULES, BARRING THAT YOU MUST MASTER THE ELECTRIC GOD WIND FIST. It’s invincible, it combos into almost every move he has, and the best combos are simply most efficiently comboing it into itself. The casualness and intimacy I was so fond of were intertwined together; my entire learning curve with the character would become seeking out as much potential in the god fist as I could. In this way, Smash really compartmentalized the satisfaction of learning a fighting game all into one attack. And how could I forget an attack like that? Kazuya was divinely gifted with the most powerful move in the game from the heavens under the sole condition that he must “Get Silly With It” - and as God’s Silliest Soldier, I knew this was my duty since before I was born. Wrap the bow onto that gift of having a huge moveset that you’ll slowly develop biased favourites from, and those throw camera shots… And it looks like we got a winner here. Nowadays, still only playing Smash in bursts every handful of months, I make a little progress on my god fist every time.
Oh yeah, and I’m not gonna criticize this character’s apparent bad balancing. Smash Bros. is the devil’s game, and I believe that by doing Kazuya infinites online I am sending it to the depths from whence it came from.
2022
You ever go into something, expecting a simple little experience, and instead get hit over the head in the first 20 seconds? I’m not really a Splatoon fan, but on the very first load in during the demo, I knew there was something here. It’s.. that main hub. I joined during the free demo, and was shocked by the fine details of this East Asian-Brazilian inspired festival. I immediately started wandering around, seeing these little youth hangouts strung across these storefronts and rooftops. Just looking up for the first time is staggering; the train passes by you on a monorail, with graffiti, lanterns, and signposts dangling down endlessly from walls that touch the sky. During the splatfest, I went into the back alleyway, and the music faded down into a bass-booming timbre, with the clattering of plates laying at food vendors chiming away - yet you could still see a few people jamming away to the distant music regardless… It really felt like I had just stumbled onto a unified community that had generations worth of history. Splatoon games have always messed with user created content, but with such an incredibly dense amount of visuals overflowing on top of each other, the way they stick out is shockingly immersing. Lines of billboards branded with enough logos to make you dizzy with crude art of the among us crewmate and “i love men” sharply piercing out of their depths; it genuinely adds to the atmosphere of a sort of permanent youthfulness to this place.
Luckily enough, this genuine endearment for the game’s aesthetics wouldn’t fall off in the campaign. Looking back, Splatoon 1’s approach to being a lore game wasn’t the best. Learning everything through off-path collectible logs, with the ultimate reveal of its lore being some “it’s actually a post apocalypse people DIED” - it was derivative in more ways than one. Splatoon 3 however, really turned this around; this story mode’s backstory is embedded into its aesthetics in a way that kept me hooked. We explore the rubble of a last near-extinct sector of humanity’s attempts to escape isolation through the rubble of a space center. We learn that this island’s very sky and ground was formed off of the desires of these remaining humans - the longing nostalgia for a bygone era. As a result, the style of these levels feels like a time capsule, attempting to show what we’d remember now. These levels formed out of wonky, nonsensical electronic architecture; fighting your way through floating wires, cars, and PC error messages. It really gives an extra edge to the traditional video game-y architecture that Nintendo’s 3D games have been doing for years - like a Super Mario Sunshine gone weirdcore.
The game design here is pretty rock solid, Splatoon’s story mode has really embraced this identity of being a genre mish-mash game - constantly testing your skills at individual mechanics of the game through little montages. From bullet dodging challenges to run-and-gun gauntlets, these levels can range from 20 seconds long to 5 minutes. Weapons are used as difficulty options, with the more technical weapons being harder, yet all 3 weapon’s central mechanics feel implemented equally. There’s still a lot of room for improvement here: the invisible collectibles in the overworld are bad, and the boss fights still don’t feel interactive enough, but this is definitely the best thing to ever come out of Splatoon.
Despite all this high praise, I’m still not exactly sure where I land in terms of enjoyment of Splatoon as a multiplayer game. This is a very large improvement from Splatoon 2 for me, which I didn’t really like. The new level design feels more arena-like, with levels being wider, and having big points of interest that gravitate you to them, verticality sitting around them. Specials being revamped is also doing a lot of legwork - rather than cleanly falling into offense or defense, these specials have a lot more to do with siphoning your team into a push. My favourite of which so far is Tacticooler: a big can dispenser that your teammates can take from in order to get instant respawning, letting you get unsafe with your pushes. And despite all these changes to make specials more role-specific, the game doesn’t fall into the faults of the modern class shooter. Your respawns are always 4 seconds or less, and it really does feel like you can WIPE OUT a whole team by yourself if you want to. Even the PvE mode, Salmon Run, got a huge change in the form of letting you toss around the eggs you need to bring to your score. When too many eggs were at the corner of a map, my team would form a human conveyor belt, passing it between each other to the container. This is the most tug of war Splatoon has ever felt to me, which seems to be the point of the whole game.
For a long time I held this cynical view that Splatoon was a series that was both unaware of the shooter landscape, and disinterested in learning more about it. Part of me thinks that I might’ve taken that for granted, now that this game has embraced dailies and (free) battle passes, but it certainly does feel like the pretension has been cut down a lot. It is a little terrifying that it took 7 years for this series to finally get team matchmaking, but it seems the floodgates of QoL have finally been smashed open entirely this time around. Splatoon has come a long way since itself - no longer does combat devolve into killing interactivity with invincibility shields, all the while some corporate showman’s idea of what metal sounds like blares in your headphones. Splatoon has grown into something beyond just being a gimmick, or just being the pastiche of punk-y squids in Tokyo. And at this point in time, I think I like it!
Luckily enough, this genuine endearment for the game’s aesthetics wouldn’t fall off in the campaign. Looking back, Splatoon 1’s approach to being a lore game wasn’t the best. Learning everything through off-path collectible logs, with the ultimate reveal of its lore being some “it’s actually a post apocalypse people DIED” - it was derivative in more ways than one. Splatoon 3 however, really turned this around; this story mode’s backstory is embedded into its aesthetics in a way that kept me hooked. We explore the rubble of a last near-extinct sector of humanity’s attempts to escape isolation through the rubble of a space center. We learn that this island’s very sky and ground was formed off of the desires of these remaining humans - the longing nostalgia for a bygone era. As a result, the style of these levels feels like a time capsule, attempting to show what we’d remember now. These levels formed out of wonky, nonsensical electronic architecture; fighting your way through floating wires, cars, and PC error messages. It really gives an extra edge to the traditional video game-y architecture that Nintendo’s 3D games have been doing for years - like a Super Mario Sunshine gone weirdcore.
The game design here is pretty rock solid, Splatoon’s story mode has really embraced this identity of being a genre mish-mash game - constantly testing your skills at individual mechanics of the game through little montages. From bullet dodging challenges to run-and-gun gauntlets, these levels can range from 20 seconds long to 5 minutes. Weapons are used as difficulty options, with the more technical weapons being harder, yet all 3 weapon’s central mechanics feel implemented equally. There’s still a lot of room for improvement here: the invisible collectibles in the overworld are bad, and the boss fights still don’t feel interactive enough, but this is definitely the best thing to ever come out of Splatoon.
Despite all this high praise, I’m still not exactly sure where I land in terms of enjoyment of Splatoon as a multiplayer game. This is a very large improvement from Splatoon 2 for me, which I didn’t really like. The new level design feels more arena-like, with levels being wider, and having big points of interest that gravitate you to them, verticality sitting around them. Specials being revamped is also doing a lot of legwork - rather than cleanly falling into offense or defense, these specials have a lot more to do with siphoning your team into a push. My favourite of which so far is Tacticooler: a big can dispenser that your teammates can take from in order to get instant respawning, letting you get unsafe with your pushes. And despite all these changes to make specials more role-specific, the game doesn’t fall into the faults of the modern class shooter. Your respawns are always 4 seconds or less, and it really does feel like you can WIPE OUT a whole team by yourself if you want to. Even the PvE mode, Salmon Run, got a huge change in the form of letting you toss around the eggs you need to bring to your score. When too many eggs were at the corner of a map, my team would form a human conveyor belt, passing it between each other to the container. This is the most tug of war Splatoon has ever felt to me, which seems to be the point of the whole game.
For a long time I held this cynical view that Splatoon was a series that was both unaware of the shooter landscape, and disinterested in learning more about it. Part of me thinks that I might’ve taken that for granted, now that this game has embraced dailies and (free) battle passes, but it certainly does feel like the pretension has been cut down a lot. It is a little terrifying that it took 7 years for this series to finally get team matchmaking, but it seems the floodgates of QoL have finally been smashed open entirely this time around. Splatoon has come a long way since itself - no longer does combat devolve into killing interactivity with invincibility shields, all the while some corporate showman’s idea of what metal sounds like blares in your headphones. Splatoon has grown into something beyond just being a gimmick, or just being the pastiche of punk-y squids in Tokyo. And at this point in time, I think I like it!
2022
Welcome to Bayonetta 3 / Hideki Kamiya’s Super Mario Odyssey / Yuji Shimomura’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. We hope you enjoy your stay!
At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.
This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…
Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.
What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao
Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?
Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.
At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.
This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…
Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.
What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao
Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?
Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.
2022
I don’t think any series has come and gone throughout my whole life quite like Pokémon has. Thinking back to 2019: I played through Pokémon Crystal with a band of friends, and it brought back a lot of my dormant love for it. We planned our teams together, helped come up with nicknames, and tried to each catch a shiny of choice before the end of the game. By the end of the game, not only did it have that usual special Pokémon feel like you really went on a journey with your lovingly raised lil guys, my other friend’s Pokémon had also floated vaguely through my mind. Pokémon’s natural strengths of telling little wordless stories through your playthroughs all seem to shine when you do it side by side with others. Recently I’ve been playing Dragon Quest 3 - I named my party after my friends, and was really endeared by how their classes naturally make them interact with each other. 2 of my other friends, who are besties, are a mage and a priestess, and the mage is frail so the priestess has to heal them a bunch. Gotta love how classic RPGs remind me of people, but I gotta love how Pokémon brings my friends together at least just as much.
And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.
Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.
One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.
So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.
When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?
And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.
The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.
And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.
Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.
One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.
So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.
When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?
And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.
The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.
2022
This review contains spoilers
(theres a fire emblem: awakening spoiler somewhere in here so if youre still spoiler dodging that game watch out)
I'm gonna cold take with you for a second. Live A Live is good. Ridiculously, miraculously good. It's not one of those games your friend tells you is a masterpiece, and how much of a shame it is that it was never released in the west, only for it to just be alright. It's forward thinking in consistently mind blowing ways, its throughlines somehow gleem out as gorgeous and harrowing despite how pastiche-y it is at its core...It's a fuckin’ classic. And playing it through a remake this genuinely appreciative yet gaudy is like having a birthday party in a Burger King.
Off the cusp of the release of Final Fantasy VI, Live a Live feels like 90s Squaresoft flexing that they finally understood how to imbue their dinky little games with tone, showing how they’ve risen beyond riding on childhood wonder or nostalgia. The game thrives on its mastery of set piece in ways that feel 20 years ahead; so you’re a cowboy of hazy details, and you’re standing in a crowd with the sheriff breathing down your neck. A boy tugs on your shirt, pleading that you might be one of the “good guys”, and your only 2 replies are “...”, and “I ain’t a saint, kid”. This consistent motif runs through the Wild West chapter: that staying silent feels easier than speaking up, but speaking out feels right. Despite the joyful simplicity of it, every single time it presented me with that little “...”, it managed to stop me in my tracks for a few more seconds than the last. And to be honest…even as I write this, I’ve never checked if there’s some whimsically different dialogue if I chose to stay silent at the times I could, and I don’t think I will now. Twilight of Edo Japan presents you with this genuinely complex brand of playstyles - a pacifist stalker of the night, a cold blooded killer, or a unique mixture of both. So when you realize that the reward is superfluous - a cool sword that isn’t even the best sword, I can imagine someone might feel underwhelmed.
On the other hand, we have Imperial China, where the genuinely distinct fruition of our choices is obfuscated and hidden behind deceit. This story’s initially portrayed as a management sim of our 3 students, each day having its own stat theme, Present Day having conditioned me into considering things like “maybe if i hit them with certain attacks they’ll learn them???”...yet it all crashes down on us. Our journey as an instructor ends unsatisfyingly soon, before anything can feel truly fleshed out, purposeful wasting of the players time over presenting us with the direct appeal of our choices from the get-go.
My intuitive gaymer brain was able to immediately get the obvious truth regarding Imperial China’s branching paths as well - sure, it’s not thaaat impressive that there are 3 extra playable characters. Surely, they’ll all have just as little dialogue as everyone else, and the differences in their moveset will be entirely cosmetic. But just like that, Live A Live gets you. It’s not a game of routes and replayability, but interrogation. The game’s very logo presents us with a branching path despite it only having one true end, because the introspection is in our hands now. That’s when the game finally hits us with the Middle Ages arc, where we are forced to look back through time and question RPGs as a whole. The pure cathartic energy as Live a Live tears the classic RPG narrative to shreds - the intertext of our 2 faux-leads, Oersted and Streibough’s personalities being ripped straight out of Final Fantasy IV paying off. Oersted is forced to confront that his hero’s journey is a scam, written on lies promised through the corpses of ruined men, while I sit here, thinking “man they really couldve tuned down the random encounters in this section”
this game came out in 1994 holy fuck. video games? they might be good u might wanna check em out
Most importantly about this game’s remake shedding light on it for a whole lot of people, is talking about what it represents in this very climate. In my retrospective context of 1994, Live a Live feels like a cold critique of the increasingly insular pool of influences in its genre. Why not make a game where you take down the status quo of heroism, rather than enforcing it? And more humbly, why not just make an RPG that takes place in China instead of Medieval Europe! Sorry, not like that. Ironically though, when I look at Live a Live as a 2022 product, its most unique trait is its warmth. The simple details are truly where it rules: I found it chilling how all 100 people in the Edo Japan Castle had their own name. I appreciated that Oersted fought against bosses named after phobias while the real protagonists fought against philias - the game wants you to consider the fine details of where you might have it easier than someone else. If there’s anything truly ever present here, it’s the sentiment expressed towards electronics (and by extension, the good ol’ video games) during Distant Future - that like any art, these things are fundamentally humane due to how much of ourselves we put into our craft.
When you get to the game’s bad ending, and kill Oersted for the crimes he committed out of pure, unadulterated hatred, you’re left with the solemn ending message on your screen
The cycle continues
And the cycle did continue: Live a Live was a commercial failure in its home country, and its team and genre as a whole would be thrown back into the Middle Ages. I think we’ve all run into some unfortunate occasions where an RPG just feels cold: just some recent examples for me, the at times genuinely lovely Dragon Quest XI feels brittle and conservative, because it isn’t interested in criticizing the framework of its series. The critically acclaimed, yet plainly awful Fire Emblem: Awakening gives us a grand ending praising sacrificing ourselves for our country like a fucking military recruiter, shooting you a bad ending where everyone sounds regretful if you refuse. So to play Live A Live, a game so gentle that it’d simply ask you to simply consider not shooting your suicidal cowboy friend, without dangling some sort of fancy good ending behind that behavior, is the most refreshing thing I could ask for.
In every heart the seed of dark abides. The makings of a Lord when watered well…
With hate. Sweet hate. She springs eternal. Sings…
All-tempting draught. We’ll drink of her again.
-Oersted’s last words. I’ll be taking a drink next time I play a Fire Emblem game
I'm gonna cold take with you for a second. Live A Live is good. Ridiculously, miraculously good. It's not one of those games your friend tells you is a masterpiece, and how much of a shame it is that it was never released in the west, only for it to just be alright. It's forward thinking in consistently mind blowing ways, its throughlines somehow gleem out as gorgeous and harrowing despite how pastiche-y it is at its core...It's a fuckin’ classic. And playing it through a remake this genuinely appreciative yet gaudy is like having a birthday party in a Burger King.
Off the cusp of the release of Final Fantasy VI, Live a Live feels like 90s Squaresoft flexing that they finally understood how to imbue their dinky little games with tone, showing how they’ve risen beyond riding on childhood wonder or nostalgia. The game thrives on its mastery of set piece in ways that feel 20 years ahead; so you’re a cowboy of hazy details, and you’re standing in a crowd with the sheriff breathing down your neck. A boy tugs on your shirt, pleading that you might be one of the “good guys”, and your only 2 replies are “...”, and “I ain’t a saint, kid”. This consistent motif runs through the Wild West chapter: that staying silent feels easier than speaking up, but speaking out feels right. Despite the joyful simplicity of it, every single time it presented me with that little “...”, it managed to stop me in my tracks for a few more seconds than the last. And to be honest…even as I write this, I’ve never checked if there’s some whimsically different dialogue if I chose to stay silent at the times I could, and I don’t think I will now. Twilight of Edo Japan presents you with this genuinely complex brand of playstyles - a pacifist stalker of the night, a cold blooded killer, or a unique mixture of both. So when you realize that the reward is superfluous - a cool sword that isn’t even the best sword, I can imagine someone might feel underwhelmed.
On the other hand, we have Imperial China, where the genuinely distinct fruition of our choices is obfuscated and hidden behind deceit. This story’s initially portrayed as a management sim of our 3 students, each day having its own stat theme, Present Day having conditioned me into considering things like “maybe if i hit them with certain attacks they’ll learn them???”...yet it all crashes down on us. Our journey as an instructor ends unsatisfyingly soon, before anything can feel truly fleshed out, purposeful wasting of the players time over presenting us with the direct appeal of our choices from the get-go.
My intuitive gaymer brain was able to immediately get the obvious truth regarding Imperial China’s branching paths as well - sure, it’s not thaaat impressive that there are 3 extra playable characters. Surely, they’ll all have just as little dialogue as everyone else, and the differences in their moveset will be entirely cosmetic. But just like that, Live A Live gets you. It’s not a game of routes and replayability, but interrogation. The game’s very logo presents us with a branching path despite it only having one true end, because the introspection is in our hands now. That’s when the game finally hits us with the Middle Ages arc, where we are forced to look back through time and question RPGs as a whole. The pure cathartic energy as Live a Live tears the classic RPG narrative to shreds - the intertext of our 2 faux-leads, Oersted and Streibough’s personalities being ripped straight out of Final Fantasy IV paying off. Oersted is forced to confront that his hero’s journey is a scam, written on lies promised through the corpses of ruined men, while I sit here, thinking “man they really couldve tuned down the random encounters in this section”
this game came out in 1994 holy fuck. video games? they might be good u might wanna check em out
Most importantly about this game’s remake shedding light on it for a whole lot of people, is talking about what it represents in this very climate. In my retrospective context of 1994, Live a Live feels like a cold critique of the increasingly insular pool of influences in its genre. Why not make a game where you take down the status quo of heroism, rather than enforcing it? And more humbly, why not just make an RPG that takes place in China instead of Medieval Europe! Sorry, not like that. Ironically though, when I look at Live a Live as a 2022 product, its most unique trait is its warmth. The simple details are truly where it rules: I found it chilling how all 100 people in the Edo Japan Castle had their own name. I appreciated that Oersted fought against bosses named after phobias while the real protagonists fought against philias - the game wants you to consider the fine details of where you might have it easier than someone else. If there’s anything truly ever present here, it’s the sentiment expressed towards electronics (and by extension, the good ol’ video games) during Distant Future - that like any art, these things are fundamentally humane due to how much of ourselves we put into our craft.
When you get to the game’s bad ending, and kill Oersted for the crimes he committed out of pure, unadulterated hatred, you’re left with the solemn ending message on your screen
The cycle continues
And the cycle did continue: Live a Live was a commercial failure in its home country, and its team and genre as a whole would be thrown back into the Middle Ages. I think we’ve all run into some unfortunate occasions where an RPG just feels cold: just some recent examples for me, the at times genuinely lovely Dragon Quest XI feels brittle and conservative, because it isn’t interested in criticizing the framework of its series. The critically acclaimed, yet plainly awful Fire Emblem: Awakening gives us a grand ending praising sacrificing ourselves for our country like a fucking military recruiter, shooting you a bad ending where everyone sounds regretful if you refuse. So to play Live A Live, a game so gentle that it’d simply ask you to simply consider not shooting your suicidal cowboy friend, without dangling some sort of fancy good ending behind that behavior, is the most refreshing thing I could ask for.
In every heart the seed of dark abides. The makings of a Lord when watered well…
With hate. Sweet hate. She springs eternal. Sings…
All-tempting draught. We’ll drink of her again.
-Oersted’s last words. I’ll be taking a drink next time I play a Fire Emblem game
2023
When I played Pokemon Scarlet, there was a part where fake video game glitch animations, and genuine visual errors were on my screen at the same time
It made me think "oh, someone's gonna write something good about this game"
Someone wrote something good about that game
I wonder how Satoshi Tajiri is doing?
It made me think "oh, someone's gonna write something good about this game"
Someone wrote something good about that game
I wonder how Satoshi Tajiri is doing?