I have a very large, almost encyclopedic level of knowledge on every smash title. From funny bugs like Wario's Wectoring in Smash 3DS to Melee Falcon's gentleman being negative edged for some reason. Things like ZSS' moves involving her whip such as nair not staling for some reason to more out there things like using Wario chomp on Snake's up B to trade with the cypher and destroy his recovery. I have put in a lot of effort to understand smash titles, I do with almost any game. A lot of people say I'm like, good at labbing games or something. Or come from a fighting game mindset. To tell the truth, I really don't think so. I think I am in fact, awful at fighting games.

The most obvious thing is my mind set. It absolutely isn't one of a winners, and it's likely never going to be. If I lose for almost any reason, I just get upset. Really, that's my own fault. I think almost everything I contribute, even if it's so meaningless as video game meta tech, is not really good or just not worth celebrating in any capacity. It feels like I'm intentionally just being miserable even when I do the things I like to do It's not like I don't enjoy these games-- I do. Why am I on this detour though? Well, I think Smash Ultimate is the climax of the series to me, and not because of the hoops they went through to get this game out. Not because it has everyone in it, or that it has Sora in it. Smash is just a very exhausting game to try to play at any serious level if you aren't completely composed mentally at all times.

It's not an issue exclusive to this one. By the very nature of Smash titles, they kind of effectively gaslight you into thinking that the game is played a certain way. To be clear, most things in Smash aren't intentionally designed. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Things like wave dashing, slide offs, amsah techs, crouch cancelling, ADT power shields, etc are all emergent game design. It's design the game explicitly allows for, but not due to developer intent. They keep these games intentionally open ended, having an ostensible restraint on moves having wholly unique properties, just so each tool in the sandbox has a kind of through line to them. You may not necessarily understand why something is the way it is, but you can will it into being something else. Thats how you get things like shine being essentially it's own cultural signifier.

This feels liberating but everytime they added more limits, it exposed the games to me as feeling kind of pointless. There's an easy romance to even the most modest of 64, Melee, or Brawl play. But you look at Smash 4 or Ultimate and almost nothing feels cool or interesting. It's like infinitely generated. What I meant earlier when I brought up gaslighting is that people make their own pocket metas with Smash more than they do almost any game. Because there isn't a clear, default ruleset people would agree on. It's perfectly reasonable actually, to think that some items should be legal. It's also fine to think that they're all off because complex bans are difficult to police. The Smash community starting with 4 just did what Nintendo did with the online matchmaking rules. That's why Smash 4 was mostly 2 stock 5 minutes even though almost every player understood why this ruleset sucked. My main point here is the fact that even before a match begins people are all playing different games.

We may even be using the same ruleset, but there's so many factors in Smash at work that it sometimes feels entirely random how something will go down. I'm not referring to preconditioned 50/50s, or like, the very basic universal mixup of fast fall timings. Smash has very arcane hitbox interactions. Like, one characters jab just fails to work on one character because of their collision pushing you out of the way. Or moves going into the Z Axis on specific frames and are irreconcilable essentially. What about sword disjoints that have the same frame data as characters with stubby normals except they can only be challenged if they jump closer than they ever really have to. It's like, first you think this is all consistent jank, so you can just control for it. But no, it isn't. A new thing happens almost every match. I end up feeling betrayed and irritated. It's like the game was rewriting its own rules. It's not like I'm totally adverse to learning things. I feel like this because the only way to get anywhere in learning something, is having the confidence to say something 'is such', which no matter how small gives you a vantage point from which to observe and move. While it's the nature of Smash for this very thing to always be challenged, which seems like it makes for a very dynamic, eventful game, it's just annoying! It was fine in older Smash titles because at least the game feel was just fun. Now you don't even have momentum when jumping. Plus there actually was more to the neutral in those games.

Smash 64's neutral is very like a traditional fighting game. If your defense is pretty good it's not really a super heavy 0tD game like you might think it is. Simply positioning well in that game can be as powerful as it is in any other Smash title. There's just less avenues a particular hit can go down; which of course means the times you die in one hit end up sticking out more. In each Smash game the most heavily reified game states end up having more forgiving checks in place. To me it's, Neutral, Advantage//Disadvantage, and then Offstage//Ledgeguarding. Most recoveries in 64 and Melee aren't strictly terrible, but just bad enough to where almost any hit is certain death when intercepted. Starting with Brawl unless you're like Meta Knight or something you're generally well off just trapping them at the ledge. And it's basically stayed this way ever since. Except in Ultimate they massively overturned certain things disproportionately. G&W has a frame 2 reversal with I frames that can serve as its own edge guarding tool, combo bridge, and insane out of shield option. Rob's gyro sends wherever Rob was facing when he threw it. Which sounds cool, there's like a design cue you can follow here, but then it's compounded with stuff like: The hitbox is super active when idle so it's very difficult to pick up on the ground. He has a -3, disjointed sword like nair that's a combo starter thats also safe on parry, that combos into the Gyro when tossed-- and then leads into a DI Mixup where you can actually just die even at 0 percent because his Side B is a multi hit that travels relatively far offstage and ends with a strong hit. You can play around these things but Rob has a frame 4 dtilt that trips and combos into itself essentially infinitely. He can box at any range, and if you get hit by either the Gyro, his held item or his giant nair you're forced into this really bad situation. It feels like a punish akin to Smash 64, except in Smash 64 you don't have a combo starter that works literally anywhere on the screen or the stage. Thats not just a property of the Gyro, hitboxes in Ultimate are generally designed to only ever send at one angle.

Older Smash titles can feel kind of clumsy because moves don't necessarily just work out the box. Things are minus on hit at low percents, or a move that hits multiple times tend to whiff certain hits or anything past the first hit anyway. You're generally meant to control for this on your own, which adds to greater expression. My favorite combos are ones that involve drifting forward and hitting with the front of your back airs hitbox. This ends up sending them forward, but because it was a move designed to hit the area behind you, you end up hitting the sour spot or deep into the move. Adding a new consideration for your combo game. Such a thing just doesn't happen in Smash Ultimate because if you try that it'll just send backwards and it'll be the strong hit too. These aren't necessarily bad things in a vacuum but they bubble up in a way where it feels flavorless. Now all the jank is unfun, subtractive game design that reduces a situation to just waiting. There really isn't a way to immediately stop Steve from mining behind a wall, or Cloud from just mashing back air and side b'ing on reaction when you jump in. You can just counterpick to the few characters who don't care about that-- or very very passively pressure them and then get two hard reads in a row to not even get a clean hit on them.

What ends up happening is, on its face it seems balanced because almost every character has insane win conditions you can't exactly prevent from happening-- So everyone is cheap. But this obviously benefits certain characters way better than others. Steve was a poorly thought out gimmick character who ended up having the best almost everything. And the one thing designed to limit him hardly works because there isn't a system level interface for this kind of thing. Generally I don't like the trend modern fighting games have towards relying on the system rather than character idiosyncrasies, but a lot of characters in this game end up playing kind of samey anyway. There's no traction anymore. Everyone except Kazuya has a 3 frame prejump, almost every character has lagless aerials with at least one being -4 or -6 or at least killing at 60%. Almost every character in the game does something in the form of up throw up air or down throw forward air. Etc etc. It's actually kind of bizarre how the game feel of each character is so annoyingly similar.

This game is why I end up getting so upset at almost every fighting game I play. It sounds so goofy to say but, I spent so much time on this game. It's like I got trauma from being burned by this game so much. Now it feels like everything I do in any other game is fake or 'Not Good.' Because this game is so ridiculous it made me stop actually believing that I could do anything on my own. That I could figure out things. That I even mattered really.

Sporting a Killer Instinct style combo breaking system, the best underboob of all time, custom combos, some of the most beautiful graphics on Saturn, and a ton of anime references, Astra Superstars is one of my favorite games. It's very simple mechanically, but how it unfolds is not so easy to grasp. It's not too much mind you. The operation is kept simple enough so that you can kind of just mash through arcade mode with little resistance. The actual nuances are in various minutia of it's character gameplay design.

An example is how this game doesn't have special moves, only 6 unique normals. No command normals either, instead you have 2 moves you can perform as you bounce off a wall from heavy knockback, and 2 turning normals for if you're behind an opponent. Typically over or below them. See, in this game you're both in flight, but unlike how other games might do it the lower part of the screen is treated exactly like how the upper part is. You literally just jump downwards. Those turn normals seem useful in neutral, the most devious left rights ever you might imagine. But they're also important combo bridging tools. In this game everyone has very over the top squash and stretch, looney tunes esque moves. You tend to launch the opponent pretty far, which seems fine because everything is dash cancellable-- except in the corner. If the screen can't scroll in that direction, you can't dash cancel your normals that way. It seems like this is a hard line the game draws. The chain system is very freeform, so you end up getting decent combos by just doing a few dash cancels with the light auto combo into mediums, then 2 jump cancel (knock them down, follow downward, then back up!) heavies into a super.

The solution is that you don't really have to carry them there! You can launch them upwards or downwards, dash over or below them, and then use your turn normals as a solid combo bridge, as your own back will act like a surface for them to collide with. It's very very cool in motion. It's extremely DBZ.

Other examples are how the placement of your normals really matter. Even though everyone has giant normals, there's ostensible dead zones you're meant to manually compensate for. And like, you actually totally can. For what would normally be an awkward or impossible area to hit for a normal fighting game character due to being locked into just having specific moves with specific hitboxes, Astra Superstars characters can just do it because they can jump downwards. You can also cancel either the down or up jump at any point. A normal hits low, then very high, but you don't have time to wait for it to connect high? You can just spike them downward and press it or do it rising. Vice versa too. Every character has a moveset with specific multi hitting or wide arcing moves that can hit in a myriad of different ways that all matter due to very granular positioning intricacies. Very pleasant game, amazing art and music. Insane presentation, it's honestly kind of perfect!

Nintendo's last true arcade title. Not like, literally a game made for arcades, but in terms of design. It's no secret that I basically don't like anything Nintendo has put out in almost 20 years at this point. The easiest answer for why is that their new titles are very safe, chaste, inbred games with few new ideas. This isn't to say their new stuff is strictly bad, far from it. There's still a competency somewhere there. It's kind of like the best playing garbage ever though. What defines modern Nintendo games is mainly the lack of any sort of design that approximates 'something.' What I mean is that it's all self-referential to what 'games' collectively are, and what Nintendo games used to be, rather than just simply being fun games with an identity that isn't so tautological. I ponder over this because DKJB has a lot of those 'square-hole' style ideas that went on to plague more modern entries; Being a sort of precursor to Mario Galaxy, by staff and design motivations. Yet this is one of the only modern Nintendo games where the design isn't frustratingly patronizing.

Arcade game design had you fit very dense encounter variety back to back into your games. The nature necessitated it. Time was literally money, but it was also a good way of keeping a game fresh in the eyes of venue frequenters. There were all kinds of flashy games, which due to primitive tech, had to come up with unique ways of executing a usually simple idea. Back then, there weren't many standards in place, so a game more naturally became what it wanted to be. Putting it super succinctly so we aren't here all day: Back then arcade games were inherently more engaging because the concept had to be front and center, and that 'flashiness' was delivered through gameplay density. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a sidescrolling score attack game with a lot of ideas. From callbacks to the original Donkey Kong game with the logo font; To the barrel graze jingle, this game's explicitly introspective on the nature of arcade games. I see that even in how it controls. Just 3 inputs, Left, Right, and the 'Clap', which can be triggered by tapping the side of the bongos too. The somatosensory element of the controls are complemented by the frantic nature of the game as well. It can be very difficult to keep most combos going, and when DK grabs hold of enemies he beats the ever living daylights out of them. I'm pretty sure it was so violent it forced the ESRB to make E10+ because they didn't want this game to be rated T.

There's even an arcade game it actually closely resembles, in spirit and operation. Mach Breakers: Numan Athletics 2. A game about a superhuman decathlon. Mach Breakers also only has 3 inputs, insane mashing that really makes you FEEL the action of your characters, and above all extremely arcadey. I draw this comparison because there's even more DKJB could be paying homage to, that I may not be fully aware of because it's not exclusionary in that way. It's not some reference that exists solely for it's own value. It's kind of a more natural one, that I'm sure began during development as a coincidence and then they leaned into it as a genuine inspiration. I haven't even gone into the scoring system yet, which I find very interesting and well designed. Everytime DK does a unique action, such as backflipping, wall jumping, swinging, sliding up onto a ledge, etc; It adds to a combo trick meter. The combo stays going as long as you're in the air, unless you get hit. The combo counter acts as a multiplier for each individual instance of a banana you collect. Which bunches being their own multiple of 3. Additionally, when you grab many stray bananas at the same time using the clap motion it adds an additional amount by 1 per banana you caught. There's a lot they do with this. With all the unique enemy and banana layouts, it adds a lot of strategy to routing particular areas, without turning it into a chore necessarily. Because there's a lot of freeform stuff you can just try and do in the moment.

Not a whole lot of the game is up to scripted events. Even though you'd think there'd be a reason to add many of them because of the game's limited controls, the game uses them sparingly. Even when you grab a melon that was thrown at you as a projectile, there's still a chance it can miss when hit back because of poor positioning. But like, also, it has physics that do matter when being juggled by the claps soundwave. The game plays out mostly setpiece to setpiece, and the 'breaks' are still fraught with heavy mashing. It's a very involved game, but I love it for that.

A common thing you tend to see mid or higher level players of fighting games tend to say is: 'Emergent Mechanics.' To put it simply, emergent mechanics in a game are just multiple systems intersecting in a way seemingly organic. Something that wasn't explicitly hard coded in but arises from things interacting with eachother naturally. It's a common talking point because most modern fighting games tend to be designed in a way where tactics can't naturally emerge. It's a somewhat misleading term, the way people use it. Because mechanically, fighting games are inherently very emergent because they're games where 2 players move asynchronously and mechanical behavior varies based on many different contexts. But there's a bit of truth to it really.

What does this have to do with SF6? Basically everything! This is one of the most stressful and aggravating fighting games I've ever played. It somehow even managed to make me pull an LTG and get salty at shotos. The biggest problem this game has and most modern fighting games have is it's hitbox design. Almost everyone I know who's played this game butts heads with the Drive Rush system. The Drive gauge in general is awful, but I'll get into that in a bit. Drive Rush lets you spend 1/6th of your Drive gauge in neutral to dash forward and any button you press out of it is invariably plus on block because it adds a static, high amount of frame advantage to that button.

The first issue is that the game actually just drops inputs when this is performed. So sometimes you can react to it (which is actually extremely difficult because you have to be watching for a lot of different things all at once, because almost every action in this game will end up consuming your drive gauge, more on that later.) and get bodied anyway. Let's say you get past that hurdle, what now? Well, normally what you'd do is 'check' their drive rush with a quick button you can just throw out. Usually it'd be a jab, but cr.LKs are also good because historically they've been a bit disjointed and although they have less coverage it's safer because you're crouching... If you're fighting a shoto or dee jay or something though, they can just press cr.MP, and that manages to hit lows. Yeah, this crouching, or sometimes even standing punch aimed the midsection hits low kicks from afar. And you can even take 60% max health for trying to hit them with lows. It's not as simple as just positioning or timing better because there simply isn't any favorable hitbox interaction here that isn't reliant on something that's too committal. Like a special move with high priority or a parry. Which, they could just throw that anyway. It's not a raw reaction, but you basically just forced a 50/50 in neutral by pressing a button. This combined with them getting plus frames if you block it anyway, is a very common trend with modern fighting games. It's exactly like nago beyblade, or spark vanish// random super dash+ android barrier, or almost anything in dnf duel, or 66l, etc.

So many modern fighting games all do this exact thing where it's so polarizing to fight advancing attack options, that are plus in basically every context, and I'm honestly sick of it. When people say a game is less emergent, they're very slightly off the mark, but the aspect that's true is how you end up having to fight this. The solution becomes fighting the system more than fighting the opponent. I mentioned the Drive gauge earlier, and this is also what really upsets me. It costs meter to do almost anything, even block. Naturally you'd assume there's some natural push and pull happening here with how you spend your meter. It in a way forces you to take initiative at each turn if you can because it's very volatile what will happen. But this is exactly why this system sucks. If you get hit with a big combo and someone spends their entire gauge and enters exhaustion: Their meter is almost back full because level 3 cinematics take forever.

The ebb and flow in this game is really shallow in an aggravating way because it feels like both sides are contrived to be equally compromised. If you get someone into the corner, you have to actually worry about any number of things they could do that all require a specific solution. They can sweep, use an invincible special move, Drive Impact, Drive Rush, throw, jump, or really any number of things. Obviously the onus is on you to control these options with your own pressure. You'd think that because of the plus frames granted from Drive Rush, meaty buttons would be everything, but they can just perfect parry that. And then you can get blown up for it! Seems like reasonable counterplay but there arent many ways to stop someone from doing this outside of having a command grab. Historically this kind of mechanic has been difficult to implement in a healthy way because on defense it's more difficult than you'd think to have there be a window where you can exploit them for attempting to go for this. It's actually so difficult to do almost anything in this game even if you're way better than someone because the matchups are decided by the most esoteric things possible. The system forces this out because there's very little to the fundamental side of the game. That being hitboxes and such. You can 'check' spaces but every character does it the exact same way. You just counterpoke with your disjointed cr.MP and buffer drive rush within it. If it whiffs, they're not really punishing this. If it hits, you can just win the round. And if your character can't do this, then they're one of the worst characters in the game!

You could say this is one big 'skill issue' but it's not fun game design. I don't care about the single player at all. The music in this game is terrible. This game's visuals are terrible. I hate Kim and Lily's stupid 'The Pjs' ahh foreheads. I hate how every modern fighting game has to have the least intuitive, worst looking combo structures ever. This game makes me feel like there will never be a good fighting game that is also new.

People tend to overstate the importance of movement in platforming games. While it's the number one most important aspect, a lot of people have the wrong idea on what exactly makes these games fun or interesting. Having many chainable air actions that 'flow' together doesn't necessarily make your game good. Nor is that actually fun. This game is essentially just a more convoluted version of Mario Odyssey in terms of stringing together moves. It was already cumbersome in that game (cap jumps weren't interesting after the first couple times you did it. there's basically no skill to it either unless you're doing esoteric trick jumps off slants that hardly ever work because the game's physics are terrible) but this game makes it more of a chore.

It's commendable in a way that this is a game that tries to not rely on scripting so much though. On top of having actual slope physics. But it's disappointing that just like cap jumps, the main thing you can do in the game kind of only really works in one way; And it isn't engaging within the context of the environment almost ever either. People get the wrong picture about movement because it's more specific than just having moves, or being able to traverse great distances freely.

It's very difficult to break down exactly why a game is compelling through just text. Video Games as a medium are essentially every other medium at the same time. This is a big problem. Because where we might have some success in mediums like music in delineating the fundamental elements that can be used to create any music: Providing a great framework for understanding the thought process behind a work; Such a thing doesn't really happen in games. I guess Video Games tend to lean in most on the visual art side of things, but generally speaking it's even more severe with visual concepts. Visual things are best expressed through just, other visuals. Writing down what something looks like discretely simply isn't worth doing because it's divorced from the actual feeling of it. You'd think it's adding context, but the context required would be seeing the game, and sometimes playing it. Video Games are simply just too involved for mere words to accomplish such a feat, especially arcadey titles for a reason I'll get into later. This is why it can be hard to talk about a game like Sin & Punishment.

Sin & Punishment is one of 3 games Hideyuki Suganami explicitly directed. Treasure's games didn't really have directors-- As such so any one's contribution was seen as equal to others. One of the other games he directed was Alien Soldier, which was mostly his entire project. I think stating this in advance is important to know because this colors the kind of perception you get from what S&P actually is. Suganami and the rest of Treasure were mostly focused on games that let you do what you want; But had very clear constraints and a high pressure environment that forced players to go about it with gusto. I think the opening line for Suganami's column on Grobda in the August 1993 edition of Beep! Mega Drive magazine kinda best sums out their thought process on games: "This is only for those of you who know. Gameplay is all about tactics. The person in charge is the player, and the game is where they test their decision-making abilities for attack and defense."

Like I said earlier, visual concepts are best explained visually. It's kind of a nothing assertion; But what happens with games? You'd need an entire system, a very wordy explanation for us to be operating on even a baseline level for my writing to make sense. Well, it's not all for naught. There's more to games than just gameplay, but I'm musing over this to get to my point of how value is distilled from video games. Treasure comes at it from the angle of player decision making first and foremost, and the interplay between the game's design and the tactics they naturally come to. Sin & Punishment as a game is generally focused on 3D Shooting.

It's more complicated than you initially suspect. In a 1995 interview, Masato Maegawa, president of Treasure went on record stating some of their core design considerations. The one important here is the fact that, the way he saw it, a game's concept shouldn't inherently start with it "being 3D." Unless it's 3Dness is conducive to the scope and key premise of the game, there's no reason it should be 3D. In Sin & Punishment, the main problem that arises is the relation of the reticle and your character's position at the bottom of the screen. Such a thing is possible within 2D constraints, but the added dimension is clearly a main idea here. As bullets fire off in the distance, they aren't 'hitscan.' These bullets physically travel, and objects and enemies often intersect their vectors. Some people think this game's controls are awkward. That's not really true, but I think I understand what they mean. The disjointed aspect of aiming in this way is actually one of the game's main challenges. You aim at a particularly nasty enemy that's far in back, or the boss. But things get in the way, or your attention is drawn elsewhere for a split second which clouds your judgement. There's various subtleties in aiming at a specific inclination, not particularly aiming at anything, to create a wall; Or using the weaker alternative fire, which tracks onto a particular enemy, as a moving anchor for dividing space with constant fire. Even this isn't giving you the full picture though. It's really genius because of how many unique enemy patterns the game throws at you. An insanely dense hour of gameplay that's very introspective about its own 3D nature.

Anime licensed games in general get kind of a bad rap. There will always be a prevailing notion that they're somewhat less of a game because they aren't originally from this medium. However, I can't actually say almost any anime game I've played is an entirely frivolous, soulless game. Even weird ones that shouldn't even exist like Ravemaster on GameCube.

People following these kinds of games maybe know about the history of a game like Shrek SuperSlam. The gist is that they were given a really tight deadline to produce a game that was divisive among their team-- But soon they got a second wind and decided to make it something. Heavily inspired by competitive Melee at the time, they ended up making the game a lot more hardcore than what a Shrek game should be. Extremely expressive movement, with Power Stone inspired environmental mechanics. While at the top level the game devolved into something very awful; The attempt was both prescient and ostensible.

I bring up the Shrek anecdote not because One Piece Grand Battle 3 has any sort of documented design history that led to a cult following-- it's mainly to illustrate that these are still games with ideas in them. I do think these games tend to suffer from massive design clutter just because of the odds they're given though. Typically not even given a full year to complete these games-- They have to fit in as many callbacks to the source material as possible, which doesn't always translate well to game mechanics.

The Grand Battle series is kinda unique in that it's entire presentation and style are I'd say, on brand. But no other game or related media actually does what they do or look like how they do. You hear a lot of people decry anime arena fighters nowadays because there are too many of them; But each of these games are genuinely very unique. The sequel to this game, Grand Battle Rush is one of the best looking games ever created in my opinion. Insane texture work, with really cool shadow masking techniques. The way it handles character outlines is cool too, it's a combination of many different blend modes which made the outlines not always super graphic. Something that you'd think would break art direction, but it's accounted for everywhere.

So, I'm writing for One Piece Grand Battle 3 mainly because there's one design element in this game that really stuck out to me and best embodies my thesis here. The fact that these are really games worth looking at. In this game, Hina is a playable character. Any One Piece fan might be surprised to hear this. In the series she only ever did one thing and basically never came back. But because she was relevant in 2003 she's here now! She has the ability to make her body into shackles that detach after latching onto a target. In game, she has a move that adds up to two stocks of charge, and with 2 charges her shackles ensnare the opponent for the longest duration. The first guess is that you use this in tandem with one of her other moves, just a straight lunge that applies the shackles. As a sort of way of just catching someone, or maybe it's like a command grab. But this move isn't unblockable, and it's slow and terrible.

You'd think there was no use of charging her stocks, but there actually is one. At the end of her horizontal auto combo (There are 3 combo trees. Horizontal, Vertical, and Guard Break. There are two enders unique to the Horizontal and Vertical path. Either continue forward, or end with the other button. Example being A->A->X as a horizontal string with a vertical ender.) the vertical ender will whiff its final hit if the combos motion went over unlevel terrain. The hit right before applies the stock shackle effect. The interplay here is monumentally interesting to me. Because in a more modern game, these moves would be scripted. But there's an emergent quality here. All of her strings end with her ensnaring the opponent, just to automatically break it with the followup. It's one move, and yet. Whiffing it this way grants you an entirely new combo extension.

Interactions like this are kinda why I always look at these games. There's, a lot. And also, I just love One Piece.

Most of the time when I bring up Rakugaki Showtime to people, they think it's this game, or that RS is an N64 game. Both games are very obscure, extremely stylish doodle games that came out around the same time and use like every old cartoon sound effect. This is RakugaKids though!

This game is very interesting. Of course there's the fact that it even exists at all. It's a very bizarre concept-- A 2D cartoon fighting game for the N64, a platform that didn't really do many fighting games outside of a few. It's also a game they ran out of time on. There's 2 characters they didn't get to finish, and some ideas were ostensibly left a bit half-baked. The final game did come out great though.

It's not a very hardcore game, but it does feel like an Actual Fighting Game in every measure. Characters tend to have a chain system like in the Marvel vs Capcom games, but where characters are able to end their chains vary just as much. Cat Kit can chain together basically whatever he wants, and can link a heavy into a light. Marsa can only chain 2 normals max, and just light into light or light into medium. RakugaKids has 3 punch buttons, and 3 kick buttons. You can do some really difficult links, most links from a heavy tend to be 1 framers. And there's some really funny, classic old game stuff. Like Mamezo's bowling infinite or Darkness' unblockables. There's actually quite a bit to unpack here mechanics wise. But it's also a very approachable, modest game.

It doesn't have superjumps like Marvel does. The main combo structure is a ground chain into launcher, then followed with a jump-- into one air normal, double jump canceled into a air throw. Combos aren't very long aside from the infinites. But characters deal a considerable amount of damage on hits. The hitbox design in this game is also very classical. A lot of normals are meant mainly to be thrown out in neutral rather than combo fodder like MVC.

Of course the main thing to talk about here is how this game looks. This game's visuals are beautiful and impressive. All projectiles in this game cause heavy slowdown and it's kind of obvious why extra elements would do that when looking at how characters animate. Every character has a million things going on in their secondary action. From Astronots floating just off the ground cuz he's a zero gravity Spaceman, bumping up and down- to Mamezo's dastardly finger wiggling. There's also a line boil here. With everything together, characters look like they're animated at 60FPS. It's a game I'd never grow tired of looking at. The voices are very funny too, and have amazing one liners.

So, I mentioned that bit about Rakugaki Showtime because I made that mistake a very long time ago too. Except, in reverse. I knew about RS before this game, but this game was on certain ROM sites a lot earlier than RS was. So this is the game I played first heh. It ended up being just as cool!

People aren't very kind to this game. They were kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall with Knuckles' Chaotix. Because it's a Sonic game, what you can do with your character has to be meaningful within the context of stage layouts. Good player movement simply isn't enough sometimes. Knuckles' Chaotix doesn't really have any level design. If you aren't particularly good at games, which, most people that play Sonic aren't, then you aren't going to tackle the game at a level that would make it enjoyable. The difference with this game, is that there isn't much tertiary to appreciate. I'll make a distinction here-- When I say good at games, I mean the type of person actually willing to learn how a game works. Most people aren't.

I approach most Sonic games with a sort of speedrunner angle. Normally I think speedrunning defeats the purpose of playing of a game, but Sonic 'is' about going fast. To spare you the trite discussion about whether or not Sonic prioritizes platforming or not, it's pretty clear that the 2D games incentivize keeping a top speed and staying on the top route. I've spent so much time watching joeybaby69 run Sonic 2 now I feel enlightened on subpixel jank. Sonic is the kind of game where masterful play doesn't always feel completely deterministic. Player movement is extremely emergent, usually in a very gamey sorta way; But sometimes even basic jumps can get complicated just because of it's own physics. It sounds kind of irrelevant to how most people would play the game, but everyone has to deal with the game at it's barest. These are games you're meant to optimize in your own way, and this is just a consideration that was on my mind.

Knuckles Chaotix' main mechanic is the tether system. This system is actually very unique, but they didn't know what to do with it. You use the tension built by holding either character tied to it in place while one builds up potential speed (e.g. You hold them off a ledge, and they'll shoot up when you let go of the hold button due to gravity pushing them down.) And then you launch anywhere you want. This is the absolute fastest you could ever go in a 2D Sonic game, there's like, no air friction. To account for this, every stage is absolutely massive because you totally could just actually Jump To The End.

The problems start to become clear here. The stages have to be big to account for how fast you can go, but they also have to be very tall because you can just propel yourself upward too. All character specific abilities aid in movement, and end up covering huge distances as well. Because of this, enemies and hazards can't really show up too. If they did, you'd just land into a hitbox you couldn't have reacted to when trying to go fast. I like the tether system because it's unique, but it's insanely difficult to design around conceptually.

I mentioned the whole Sonic physics--speedrunner sweatlord thing because I feel like that's kind of why people don't like this one. You're actually tackling some very complex physics mechanics here. There's a bit of a learning curve to it that goes underutilized because they couldn't think of any actual challenges. Every stage is mostly an empty 11 x 17 piece of paper with random vertical strips of terrain. So like, there isn't much to like or think about here. People are gonna play this game, and just think it's extremely jank. But unlike the other classic Sonic games, it isn't pardoned because there isn't any identity for itself-- gameplay in or out.

This game limits itself in understandable but boring ways. The conundrum you have when designing action game bosses tends to be split between two paths-- where one side prioritizes precise hitboxes and hurtboxes-- and the other side is mostly inferred and contextual. The latter is a bit abstract, but think the infamously funny Plesioth hip hitbox in the earlier Monster Hunter games. You can't intermingle the two, because then that just creates a very inconsistent experience on what's possible or not. Cuphead tries to do this and creates the most wack hitboxes ever.

It's not even necessarily wrong to do it the 2nd way in a tight 2d side scroller like this game. This has a profound effect on the DPS of the game. A slight tangent, but certain people wanted this game to have a strafing button without understanding how that would break most boss designs. If you could strafe, then retreating and shooting would end up increasing DPS and lowering the amount of times you'd have to focus on repositioning. You'd end up doing too much damage, too safely; And the number tweaking required by that point would expose its own flaws. But well, this game's bosses could've totally just designed around that should they have considered it-- but they didn't. This is kind of what I meant about it having a sort of restraint to itself.

There's very little in the way of mechanics that interact together. Even in 2P, theres nothing like how you can throw each other in Gunstar Heroes, which on its own really elevated the multiplayer of that game. There's kind of no reason to want to play this with someone past the novelty of playing it together, because there's nothing like that that can meditate any potential skill gaps. A 2nd player can just end up making the game more difficult in a way that isn't necessarily due to any bosses core concept; And generally it's just because it's like these bosses were mostly designed for one person in mind anyway.

I do like this game, there just isn't anything particularly new here in terms of boss encounters. I really love the sound and visuals. And while that's enough for me to occasionally revisit it, it leaves me unsatisfied.

I have like, at least 100k characters at minimum at the ready everytime to explain why I love this game; But I'll just explain it very succinctly here.

Treasure's games are designed with a 'Turing-completeness' to their greater design space. A term coined by John Carmack when describing Doom, it is essentially a game that presents infinite possibilities. The producer and creator of this game, Kafuichi went on record stating he wanted to make an action game that wasn't strictly memorizable. And even though the combat is very unbalanced, the boss AI generally being easy to throw loop, he really did succeed. Even though the game's relatively easy, any challenge the game throws at you posits some of the most emergent gameplay I've ever seen.

The attribute mechanic is very introspective and just, COOL. I love how the zero teleport analog in this game can launch enemies, at a perfect angle where they'll get subsequently juggled, and you can grab them out of mid air and pole vault off of them or use their bodies as bullet soaking shields. Everything Shyna can do in this game is additive to it's core conceit. The difficulty might be a bit lopsided to some, the last few bosses being very particular. It kind of reminds me of Cave Story, how the bloodstained sanctuary tests muscles the game didn't build, because nothing else is quite like it. I still love this game to death. It's easily the coolest game ever created.

Very fun sandbox style game. It sort of occupies the kind of space in my mind as something like Hyrule Warriors in it's excess-- except it's actually good. Somehow Treasure made a structure-less game with few constraints interesting. The few tools you can choose, have you always approach each level with a different set of emergent tactics. Enemy AI is pretty smart with how it positions itself. Even things like time freezing-- you'd think would break the whole balance of the game, end up having it's own natural drawbacks. Like inadvertently trapping yourself with your bombs, or even in your own hit-stop if you're using the melee weapons. It's also just a very comforting, sincere game to me.