Did you know that this game simulates the weight of each guest, and it can affect your coasters? Each person can weigh between forty-five and seventy-six kilograms, and if a cart is filled up with low-weight guests, it will lose speed more quickly than if guests had high weight values, where it will maintain speed for much longer. It won’t make a difference most of the time, but in coasters like the bobsleigh, it can be the reason a cart flies off the track after working flawlessly for years. This is never explained or mentioned in-game, but it’s a useful thing to know when designing coasters.

Did you know that each coaster type has hidden criteria that, if not met, incur severe stat penalties? The most common requirements are hitting certain benchmarks for drop height, number of drops, maximum speed, ride length, and maximum negative or lateral G forces. For each missed criteria, the coaster’s excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are usually cut in half, so failing just one of them can make for a cost-inefficient coaster, and missing two leaves you with a money sink. However, the game never mentions any of these stat requirements, nor the fact that they even exist. It can be useful to look them up before designing a coaster, so reloading a save or aimlessly making random tweaks isn’t required.

Did you know that guests will regularly pay more than $10 for a ride on each coaster? The price they'll pay isn't just affected by the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings, but the age of the ride and whether there’s another of the same type in the park. Also, each stat weighs differently into the price calculation depending on the coaster type, so there isn’t an easy formula to figure out how much each ticket should cost. However, the bonus given to a new and exciting ride is significant enough that visitors will often pay the full $20, way more than anyone would actually pay in real life, especially when framed with the knowledge that this game came out in 2002. The way the optimal price is determined isn’t explained anywhere in-game and is mostly figured out through trial-and-error, but once you get the hang of it, even the toughest scenarios become trivial.

You may have discovered a little pattern in these facts, in how Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game that’s uninterested in explaining how its simulation works. Players are just told to build a park with so many guests or earn a certain amount of money per month, and that's it. It’s fine to let players discover some things on their own, with ride prices probably being the best example, but when designing a compelling coaster can take so much fine-tuning, it would be helpful to give players an understanding of how they’re being evaluated. It’s good to know why coasters might randomly crash, it would be nice to know how scenery actually affects your park, and so on. Since so much is left totally ambiguous, it makes sense that the majority of players simply ditched scenario challenges and made the most lethal or silly coasters they possibly could. I suppose that might be true to the game’s title, being “Roller Coaster Tycoon” instead of “Theme Park Tycoon”, with the most fleshed-out elements being those that surround the coasters themselves, and the rest of the game is just a shallow framework to let you keep building. If you wanted to revisit this game after remembering it fondly from your childhood, the coaster madness absolutely holds up, but if you were looking at it as a tycoon game, there are much better choices out there.

Addendum: I found the best information about how RCT2’s mechanics work from an excellent Youtuber named Marcel Vos. He has videos breaking down all the interesting little details about the game which go otherwise unexplained, and they're definitely worth checking out. Also, for running it on modern systems, check out OpenRCT2, an open-source re-implementation of the game with some light-touch new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements. It’s probably the best way to play the game nowadays.

[Archived Forum Discussion: Adol vs Kratos]

" Kratos is a literal god vs some guy that is a traveler lol nah Adol gets bodied ez "

" Shield Staff negates any damage at the cost of mana, so if Adol keep eating pears to regen all MP he would never take damage "

" I feel kratos with spartan rage would still body him tho? "

" Shield staff negates any damage "

" so your saying a guy that can negate damage wins against the guy that literally two series worth of GODS and is immortal "

" Shield staff negates any damage "

If nothing else the scope and visuals are astounding, this is tech that nearly matches the peak fidelity of 32x with Nintendo's trade optimization tricks and 2D/3D hodge-podging. The change to a mission based structure is fine but these levels are extremely low effort, they're all like one hallway with 2 pincushions to shoot. The dogfights are pretty bad until you learn to cheese them with the charge shot. Music is way worse, neither rockin' nor movin', it's a shame.

It's easy to see why this was canned when the game still needed a huge amount of content to fill out the world, and the cost of FX-2 boards would eat out their profits.

Tekken is a game about decades long family feud so here’s my story of Tekken-related patricide.

When I turned 6 my dad decided to gift me a Playstation 1. We weren’t rich so we bought it second hand. He found some guy willing to sell his console and we visited him together to make sure it works. I remember his room being cluttered and messy. I also remember the game he showed us first. It was Tekken 3. It blew our minds. Never have we seen 3D graphics that looked so detailed, so animated, so lively. Coming straight from shitty famicom clones it looked unbelievable. My excitement about graphics peaked right there and I’m still trying to catch that high. That dude sold us his stack of discs as well (I also remember a shitty Mission Impossible game), but really we only cared about the “game with brawls”. When we got back we played Tekken 3 all night long. That was maybe the most memorable day of my childhood.

Years passed and I “grew out” of PS1. I didn’t have a PS2 or PS3, I got into PC gaming instead, so the rest of the Tekken series passed near me. I played some T5 on friends’ PSPs (I even showed them how to do cool Law kickflips that still worked exactly how I remembered) but otherwise it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in anymore. I’m into “smart” games now, not those meathead fightings.

But my dad, it turns out, never stopped caring. Now living a pretty prosperous life he bought his new son a PS3 (we stopped living together by then) with, you guessed it, Tekken 6. And this time it was a deliberate ploy for him to REALLY get invested in fighting. He started maining Hwoarang, actually learning his moves, trying out online. I remember my lil bro’s excitement when T7 got announced for PS4 because he knew dad would WANT to play that one, so yet another birthday Playstation was imminent. In T7 he got addicted to ranked play so he got really good. The meme about 40yo old dudes playing Kazuyas perfectly wavedashing and putting you in nasty mixup is real, except it’s my dad, he’s 50 now and he’s Hwoarang.

And of course whenever I’d visit Dad's side of the family he’d invite me to play Tekken for old time’s sake. And since he got so good it’s gotten pretty miserable. I played a bit of T7 as well since it was on PC, but never on the level that invited understanding, just mashing here and there with friends. Of course it wasn’t enough against Dad’s Hwo. And whenever he’d perfect K.O my ass he’d laugh straight in my face. Look at the gamer son who can’t play fighting games! I very much gave up on reaching his level, I just accepted my beatings at occasional family gatherings.

That is until Tekken 8.

Something clicked with me in this game. Maybe it’s fantastic learning tools, maybe it’s yet again great graphics, maybe it’s Jun Kazama being an amazingly fun character, but it got its hooks deep in me. Now I know how to apply pressure, how to put an enemy in a mixup state. I understand the concept of taking turns, the difference between crush and evade, when to use my 13i and 10i punishes. I know my character’s moves and available tools. I’m actually learning.

My Dad of course also hopped on T8. He bought an entire new laptop for the game, justifying it as a working expense! And yesterday we finally got to play some sets.

These were my most nailbiting T8 matches so far. Turns out Dad doesn’t like it when I’m ducking his highs. He also can’t do much when it’s me who’s putting the pressure and forces the mixups. I put everything into this… and finally got him. We went 4-3. I defeated my Dad. I truly am the son of the Mishima family.

Somber platforming and an eclectic soundtrack full of waltz compositions and an oddly pervasive use of lo-fi samples and drum beats, very unique. But levels get pretty repetitive pretty quick, and bosses are generally bad.

The ending to this game is so fucked up, the original cuts to credits right after the final boss. The fan translation adds a
custom ending, but it looks total dogshit cause they just re-use sprites from the other parts of the game with no regard for proportions. It needs to be seen to be believed, it's like a dogshit newgrounds animation.

I think it's really sweet that this whole game is just genuinely appreciative of the CDi games and the resulting YTP scene. It never punches down on its own source material or even defaults to some irony-poisoned take on the matter; it's just a continuation of games that, despite all reason, managed to resonate with people in their own weird way.

Gameplay wise this definitely shows in how the elevator pitch is pretty much just "CDi Zelda but playable". It's a rather short game that, crazily enough, isn't pushing any narrative boundaries, but the extra gameplay polish makes the quest hunting really palatable. One of my friends got into speedrunning it with some sequence breaks and has the world record so I'd say the world design has to be doing something right.

I know the main draw for most people is the meme factor, so I'd say it lands pretty well. Arzette is the distilled mythos of the CDi girlboss Zelda and her reactions to whatever arbitrary characters show up next are pretty good. The story isn't winning any awards, although Arzette's dad dying gives off some "overly verbose YTP lore" vibes which was fun. I don't think any of these people are going to end up iconic enough to where I'll see them singing Stronger than You next month but they were fine on their own. Really the only things that felt off were the blatantly sauceless Morshu and the one random Castlevania reference. Also I swear a Bubsy line snuck in somewhere.

Overall, I think it's a very cute game that provides a chance to reminisce on some old shitposty memories. Not really anything more than that, but I figure that was obvious from the get-go.

This is a really rough port man. Not only did we get the very vanilla arcade ports and not the best editions for each game, meaning that we're missing SO much content that was added onto other versions of the game, but fighting the CPU on arcade mode feels like you're fighting pro players each time. Even if the difficulty is set to the lowest setting, whatever satanic programming went into the AI for the single player is so unfair to play against and becomes so quickly frustrating to deal with that the only fun to be had with these ports is the ability to play with friends.

I'll give props though, this does make the entire series more accessible for people who don't know how to emulate with a PC. The bonus art, character profiles and seeing how the series evolves by trial and error with each game is definitely some dope stuff to keep in mind and track.

I bought Peggle Deluxe expecting your average time-sink - an unexceptional product bolstered by satisfying mechanics. Yet I was quickly surprised by the comprehensive quality of this silly game, not just in its pachinko-like gameplay, but in the overall presentation and amount of quality content it includes. In fact, this has to be one of the most fun time-sinks that I’ve ever played!
In Peggle, you must destroy each stages’ pegs by aiming and shooting ten balls from the top of the screen. The twenty-five orange pegs randomly scattered throughout the level serve as your main target; blue pegs simply count towards your total score. There’s a bucket that travels back and forth at the bottom of the screen, and if your ball falls into it, you get to reuse it.
You also earn a score multiplier based on how many orange pegs you’ve already cleared from the board. Once you’ve destroyed all of them, the bottom of the screen becomes a series of buckets worth varying amounts of points. Finally, you’ll get extra points for every unused ball you have.
What really makes this game fun are the endless opportunities for combos. Each turn, there will be one randomly assigned purple peg that, if hit, gives a huge amount of points and multiplies the score for that ball. It’s half skill and half luck, as you try to predict how your ball will bounce - and it’s extremely satisfying when it works out well. If you make a particularly impressive shot, there’s an easily accessible feature to watch a replay and download it.
Before anything else, you’ll need to complete Adventure Mode, where you’re introduced to ten Peggle Masters over the course of eleven stages. This cast of silly characters - from a unicorn to a pumpkin head - not only teach you the game’s core mechanics, but also provide their own special ability when selected. After beating the final stage, you’ll graduate from the ‘Peggle Institute’, and a special trophy will be displayed on the main menu.
Each Adventure stage consists of five levels; the first ten stages are dedicated to one Master each, and the last stage tests the skills you’ve gained so far. Every level has two-randomly selected green pegs that will activate the Master ability when hit. After finishing the tenth stage, you’ll be able to choose which ability to equip before starting a level. This is easily one of the most fun parts of the game, mixing and matching the abilities with your current obstacle. It can entirely change your playstyle!
Take, for example, Warren Rabbit. His ability spins a wheel that can provide either his Magic Hat (which lights up pegs near your ball, even if they don’t directly touch), an extra ball, a random Master ability, or triple the score for two turns. You’d usually select Rabbit when you’re going for high scores. Conversely, there’s Tula Sunflower, who lights up 20% of your remaining orange pegs; a good choice if you’re having trouble clearing a level. There are a few abilities that aren’t practical to choose very often - like Kat Tut and Claude Lobster - but most of them have at least some use case.
There are three other modes to explore outside of Adventure. The first is Quick Play, where you can replay any level you’ve already beaten and try for a better high score. There’s also a Duel Mode, unlocked after finishing stage one of Adventure; this acts as a local multiplayer option in which you can play against either a local friend or the computer.
Lastly is the Challenge Mode, my personal favorite out of all of them. This one’s only unlocked after you completely finish Adventure. It boasts 75 challenge levels, each with special requirements - for example, there may be an increased number of orange pegs, or you may have to reach a specific high score.
Although there’s no actual story in Peggle, there is some dialogue during Adventure. The Masters offer tips at the beginning of each level, usually to explain their ability and the best ways to use it. I definitely appreciated the effort to integrate these characters into the gameplay further, and their advice can be useful. However, the writing constantly tries to be clever and humorous, and it unfortunately almost always fails. Here are a few examples of some particularly bad lines, so that you can gauge the quality for yourself.
“I think it's really important to be environmentally aware. That's why I'll only drive a car made of imaginary magical bricks!”
“I've got a fever, and the only cure is Extreme Fever! Ha Ha! Get it? It's ironic because the cure for my fever is actually more fever.”
“I don't have any tips or advice for you this time! I just hope you're having fun!”
Even just the way some characters speak is terrible. The lobster has an annoyingly thick French accent. The alien says a weird word at the beginning of every line, like “greep” and “gloop”. The skateboarding gopher uses outdated skater jargon in nearly every sentence, like extreme and super wicked. He even calls his multiball ability multiballular action. Kill me.
The one thing I actually did like about the writing was the inclusion of new, more creative lines that replace the tips in a NG+ Adventure. It’s still far from the best dialogue ever, but I’ll admit it got a few smiles out of me. The Masters will simply pop in every once and a while to talk about themselves or the game; this scarcity makes them feel much more charming, rather than the usual hamfistedness you deal with in a first playthrough.
As for the Masters’ physical designs, well… they’re probably my least favorite part of the game’s entire presentation. The skateboarding gopher, the cat plastered with outdated Egyptian stereotypes, all of their dead eyes staring into my soul - they’re mediocre at best, and off-putting at worst. The only one I think is halfway decent is Lord Cinderbottom, and that’s only because he’s your run-of-the-mill, standard dragon.
Aside from the Masters’, the game’s overall aesthetic is mostly really nice. An easy positive is that each level has its own unique background art; no two are the same. It’s awesome to see the effort put into this aspect of it, but still… I unfortunately just don’t like most of the pieces. While they aren’t terrible, I’m not a fan of Pop Cap’s aesthetic. It’s a weird, overly-smooth mix of cartoony and realistic that doesn’t look great to me. I especially don’t like all of the flowers and snails with human-like faces; and while I am more partial to the landscape pieces, they’re still not my favorite.
What I did love about the visuals were the way they utilized the pegs to effectively ‘trace’ each drawing, which adds a bit of a 3D effect. This makes the game feel much more unified and engaging than, say, if they’d gone with simpler backgrounds so as not to account for them while designing levels. The devs could’ve easily copped out and gone with solid colors or simple patterns - instead, they fully committed.
Another thing I really appreciated visually was the UI. The menus are effortless to navigate, and the in-game layout is nice and legible, with your ball counter taking up the left and your score multiplier on the right. Something I didn’t notice at first, but loved once I did, was that the layout’s color and corner decor changes based on the current theme of the stage! For example, the space levels are purple with planets and stars, while the water levels are blue with fish and waves. Even the ball shooter changes color to match!
The soundtrack is very fun, too, probably the best part of the presentation. Peggle opens with a small section of ‘Morning Mood’ by Peer Gynt, as the sun peeks over the horizon. And - as many are at least superficially aware, due to the Peggle 2 meme - ‘Ode to Joy’ by Beethoven serves as a crucial part of the Peggle experience. When you destroy a level’s last orange peg, rainbows and fireworks shoot across the screen as this triumphant track plays. It’s a great adrenaline rush every time, and feels like a real celebration for your completion.
The rest of the music, made to accompany gameplay, is all original material. It uses a lot of keyboard, bass, and drums to lead the beat, creating a funky vibe that can lean into either jazz or electronic roots at the turn of a dime. They’re nearly all over four minutes long, too; this ensures that you’ll be accompanied by an entire unique track during a level, instead of an annoying looping soundbite.
The choice of in-game song is selected randomly, instead of each being assigned to certain levels or stages. Surprisingly, I actually like this method. Since they didn’t create tracks focusing on each stage’s theme (ocean, space, Egypt, etc.) - which is what I would’ve ultimately preferred - it’s fun to just see what you get.
The game’s overall sound design is very tight in general! The ping when you hit a peg, that increases in pitch the more you hit in one shot, is very satisfying. Each Master also has a signature sound effect that plays when you select them on the menu or use their ability, which I thought was a nice touch.
Lastly, I want to touch on Peggle’s replayability. I think this is one of the most replayable games I’ve come across in a while. It’s so easy to boot it up for a few quick levels, since one only takes a few minutes at most. There are multiple game modes to check out; its multiplayer option (that even offers a computer opponent) is a great inclusion, and I love the unique obstacles presented in Adventure. Even just replaying levels in Quick Mode, you can work to beat your own high scores.
I had so much fun exploring all of this gameplay that Peggle Deluxe had to offer. I thought of the series as nothing but a funny joke before actually trying it. Now I genuinely understand why that guy was so excited to announce Peggle 2! I can’t wait to play the rest of the series and see how they expand the groundwork laid here. I highly recommend this first entry, as it holds up as a genuinely fun and stylish experience even seventeen years later.

Visuals: 3.5/5
Sound: 4.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 5/5
Replayability: 4.5/5
Overall Game Score: 4/5 [3.9/5]

The Goddess in Green sighs, tracing an eyeline between the girl across from her and the cards in her hand. It’s a stacked deck, no matter how you cut it, yet still the girl agonizes over her decisions. Ten, maybe twenty minutes ago, this was fun, exciting even, but with the fifth reshuffling of the deck, the allure had gotten old. Yet still the girl crunched numbers in her head, a million simulations running into the same walls, chasing a fairy tale solution. Two rerolls, a move, three interactables, Witchfire… No, a reroll, two interactables, Make ‘Em Bleed, move, interactable… Maybe start with the Witchfire –

“Please, play something. Magik’s dead. You still have a revive. What are you doing?”

“Nah shut up I’m cooking.”

She wasn’t. No amount of rerolls would save this botch job of an operation, and the reality was dawning on her. She gazed out onto the field – A half-vampire, a moody Russian, and a catty goth against an endless sea of hellacious hellforged and nefarious Nazis – and laid her face in her palms. The Goddess’s army was too strong, too quick, too lucky… A floodgate of poor excuses couldn’t hold back the waves of embarrassment washing to shore. The girl held the glowing red button, ending yet another turn. The horde consumed her heroes, and everything went black.

Bolting awake in bed, the haunting charm of the abbey provided little in the way of respite. Defeat had soured the girl’s mood, and even the cheery faces of close friends, their tiresome quips ever ready, couldn’t save the day. It was all so… morose. Until he, tall, firm, decked in dark leather, came into view. Towering over her, her heart would skip a beat at the mere sight of him, her brain melt from a wayward glance of his ruby red eyes. At the subtle hint of his fangs, she would swoon, unable to catch herself…

He was Blade, the Damphyr, and he was the lone purpose for her struggle. Her moniker, “The Hunter”, was an excuse, a pointless exposition to connect an unrequited A-to-B, a boy meets girl of a supernatural variety. Sure, evil mom, old gods, Salem, witches, whatever; the vampire had dug his teeth in, and she found no reason to complain. He made it all seem worth it… The countless hours in battle, locked in mortal combat with the Goddess in Green, the endless monotony of gamma coils and reforged cards, the insipid dialogue spewing from our compatriots… it was all worth it, to spend time with Blade.

Sixty hours, seventy missions, eighty days, thousands of cards. It all stacked up so neatly, but whereas the many found their thrills in the uninspired tale of The Hunter, or another showcase of The Avengers as prime show-stealers, I lay alone in a singular rationale for finishing this journey.

I played a sixty hour game because I think Blade is neat :)

Call me Vee....Captain Vee.....

It's been about thirty years give or take since I had encountered that ghastly damn fiddler crab. I trudged and shuffled my way through hill tops, chemical plants, casinos, and even oil spills to find all those sparkly gemstones competing in those half pipe challenges. The challenges themselves were quite a treat back in those days. They're a tad fumbly bumbly visiting them now, and the bombs are quite dastardly placed. I wouldn't expect any less from that egg-ish bastard, but that crab took everything from me. My time, my money, my gems, as well as my leg. That crabominable nincompoop took it off when I tried to jump on him, I don't know how he hit me, but he did. Underhanded he was, that's why as of this paragraph I have gone off on my expedition to track down that bloody wanker. I'm gonna get him back for what he did, I will have my revenge...

Been about a weeks worth of travel on the range, we stopped at the casino as a resting stop after my fox companion nearly got tetanus from a Grounder jumping out of the wall in those ruins earlier. Crafty bunch they are, constantly talking about buckets of chicken for some reason too. After I lost all of my rings diving headfirst into an oversized slot machine, we continued onward through the caves dodging those damn lightning bugs. We were getting closer though, closer to his habitat. I could smell the fumes of discarded fossil fuel, past this ocean, we will be within his lair. It's a shame no one has yet to do something about all this oil, I wonder if it's the seahorses keeping the cleaning crews at bay...their cheesy poof spitball can knock an echidna on their arse.

After a couple hours we finally made it, the fabled Metropolis Zone, often mistakenly known as "Genocide City" by some goers. Sounds like something owned by a blonde arms dealing supervillain living in a Nimitz-class supercarrier. My foxy companion was nearly knocked off the lug nut elevator that we were using by an exploding starfish, that's how I knew we were even closer. The music was awfully catchy for such a dangerous area, no idea where it was coming from. I can only assume that crab was behind it. We searched high and low for what seemed like hours.......perhaps even days....but then, it happened. I spotted him. Perched up on the ledge like he was last time, the crustaceous criminal.

Shellcracker. Shellcracker.....

There's no mistaking it, I could never forget such a smarmy little fucker. You could get an entire team of astrophysicists and mathematicians to construct a diagram of when and how this damn crab's hitboxes function, but they still wouldn't be able to figure it out. Baffled beyond recognition at the thievery of which this arthropod operates, science couldn't possibly understand it. I couldn't either, but I had to get it. My revenge. I cannot allow him to continue his antics, who knows how many countless others he has stolen from. How many lives ruined. All by this fiddling fiddler's debauchery and scandalous behavior. I ushered my kitsune cohort to hand me my spear...and I could see Shellcracker's eyes narrow, he knew it was me....I have come for him....only one will leave this area alive. The hunt is on....

My heart was racing, the adrenaline was pumping, the memories of our last encounter rushed back to haunt me. I took my trusty spear and clutched it in my dominant hand, I readied my aim at my arch nemesis. Shellcracker did nothing but sneer at me in confidence, his gigantic claw was ready to lunge at me any second now. I was at a disadvantage, but I was determined, determined to crack his shell. We glared at each other for eons, waiting for one of us to make the first move. Birds flew out of the trees that had somehow grown in this factory, and I suddenly saw his pincer rush toward me. My life flashed before my eyes, and I jumped skywards out of the way for my dear life. In the air, it felt like time had frozen. I could see him below me, now was my chance. I threw my damned spear as hard as I could, straight for his mug. I couldn't even see straight, after only a second I heard a loud "POOF" afterwards. After landing, I took a quick glance back at the enemy, a thick cloud of smoke where he once was. It was done, my revenge is complete. Shellcracker....has been cracked.....

After the smoke cleared however, a rabbit hobbled out of the wreckage of what was once a sinister shellfish. They looked at me for a few seconds, with an odd look that unsettled me. They seemed thankful, thankful that I had defeated them... something I was unprepared for. The rabbit ran off without a care, leaving me there with an almost empty feel. I got my revenge...a selfish act for sure, one that I knew made me no better than the crab, but... was it truly as selfish as that shellfish? I wonder how I would've felt if I had not seen that rabbit afterwards. I took a ponder to this during our return trip home. Riding the gondola down the skies of Hill Top, I remembered all those moments from our last adventure. The journey through the Chemical Plant outracing that vile blue jelly, exploring those aquatic ruins nearly getting my face taken off by an arrow... it's quite odd. My eyes became heavy as I stared off into the sunset, tears were felt running down my cheeks as I looked again at my new keepsake that was his claw. I spoke to him.

"Thank you for the memories, old chum."

"Uhhh, single's life is great, Roxy. I can play whatever I want... Today I money-matched Melty Blood in the bathroom!"

"The one down the hall."

"Yeah! Another great thing, you get your own light gun game. Uhhh, I shoot at Wild Dog, do you?"

"I play PlayStation Vita games in bed with my wife."

"...Oh. Yeah..."

Short version: If you adopt a stray cat it'll come and sit on the headmaster's desk.

Long version:

This game is not unique in having the player create a character, it is not unique in letting them click on students and read their thoughts, it is not unique in asking you to balance said students' happiness and their grades and the school's budget.

What makes Let's School unique is that its elements come together to create a traditional management sim that frequently has the texture of a life sim, working off its systems in place of a script - a game in which you'll hand-craft a curriculum for each class, period by period, and then sit back and watch as your students go cloudgazing at recess, develop crushes and try to sneak video games into the classroom - apologies to Janet Lewis, who has had her GBA personally confiscated by me on four separate occasions. I am simply too powerful, and you are not.

In playing the game it's easy to see that its developers have genuine admiration for a child's earnestness and enthusiasm, as the game is chock-full of little things for the kids and faculty to do that make your school feel lived-in. These are undoubtedly nice features that add flavor to the game, but more importantly they turn the consequences of any managerial decisions into something more real than just lines on a spreadsheet and a stick figure with a frowny face above their head. In theory, this shouldn't be too uncommon for the genre. In practice, though, Let's School ends up way at the top of the pack by leaning wholeheartedly into its theme. It is unmistakably a game about being the headmaster of a school, about crafting organizational charts, arranging field trips, training staff, balancing budgets, and building a facility that (hopefully) ensures your students are cared-for and comfortable enough to be kids instead of little machines that pay tuition and fill out Scantrons. Perhaps talking about things this way makes me sound like a blowhard, but I emphasize the illusion of NPC interiority because this is the game, this is why you buy Let's School over something like Two Point Campus. Its specialty lies in building your attachment to those kids to the point where - when it comes time to start spending that tuition money - you stop thinking about that "Satisfaction" value like a min-maxer and start thinking like a teacher.

----

Please stop bringing frogs into the classroom.

There seems to be a prevailing expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.