(Replayed on MCC on PC with gamepad, Legendary, skipped The Library)

Honestly a lot better than I remember. I think the common praise and complaints about this game are mostly correct in kind if not always magnitude, so let me discuss some interesting specifics.

The Library is awful and you should skip it if possible. The campaign's pacing is significantly improved without it, it emphasizes everything bad about the game while downplaying everything good, Bungie devs have stated multiple times that it shouldn't have been shipped, etc. Everyone knows it's trash and I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist now, moving on.

Weapon balancing here is my favorite in the series. Everything feels powerful and situationally useful. The pistol, shotgun, and power weapons are obviously good, but the plasma pistol has great accuracy and damage even with the primary fire, the plasma rifle stuns enemies who take sustained hits, and the needler is a great Elite killer if you have the positioning for it. Even the assault rifle occasionally comes in handy against Grunts or Flood.

A huge issue with this game is the difficulty balancing. Heroic is hilariously easy for some reason, with even high-rank Elites quickly melting to plasma pistol fire. Legendary has a lot of nice changes to health (Elites don't die instantly), enemy encounters (more enemies with higher ranks), and AI (dodges grenades and fire more often), but you also take tons of damage, especially on your shield. This makes it easy to get stuck on one health pip for long periods, which makes the game into more of a cover shooter, encourages the linear playstyles like plasma pistol overcharge sniping, etc. This could have been fixed by simply placing more health packs (occasionally this does happen, why does Keyes have so many?) or perhaps raising the minimum health value like Reach did. All that being said, if you are good at single-player FPS I would still recommend Legendary, or maybe Heroic with some specific skull combination.

Enemy design and AI (of the Covenant) is stellar. This is well-known and discussed, see here and here for some other people's writeups.

Flood, not so much. A melee-focused swarming faction is an okay idea on paper, but they don't have anything close to the Covenant's differentiation, AI behaviors, or health/shield tradeoff. Fighting them isn't horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I ever looked forward to it. Special dishonorable mention to the infection forms, which block checkpoints and are constantly a chore to clean up. Thankfully, many of your encounters with the Flood are in infighting scenarios where they can be toyed with or ignored.

The level design isn't as bad as most suggest IMO. It's less that they reuse environments, and more that a bunch of the missions are too long. Assault on the Control Room has you fight in the same room + bridge geometry 3 times, but they try to mix it up with different enemy compositions (especially notable: the bridge with Elites blocking your path while Hunters on the other bridge shell you across the gap). But there aren't enough unique ideas to totally sustain the momentum, and I suspect they would have had difficulty adding more.

Let me elaborate. There are broadly two styles of FPS enemy design. On one end is Doom, whose enemies are simple but highly differentiated, and form interesting situations with how they are placed and combined by the mapper. On the other is Half-Life and FEAR, whose enemies are complex but similar, and present new situations via the dynamism of their AI. Halo is great because its AI belongs to the latter school, but its enemy designs bring in much of the former's differentiation.

A side effect of this though is that the levels in general don't feel as distinct from each other as e.g. Doom maps might, since the enemies and weapon economy are less sensitive to small tweaks in placements and terrain. Halo 3 gets around this by using tons of setpieces, though this has the tradeoff of needing more budget and potentially feeling gimmickier (and 3 has the unforced error of worse fundamentals than 1). Perhaps they could have made more arena geometries, but I suspect the lowest hanging fruit was all picked, so the game should have just been a bit shorter.

After this playthrough, I'm comfortable calling Halo my favorite of the "dynamic AI driven FPS", (with classic Doom the king of the opposing style) and Halo 1 tied with 3 for my favorite entry in the series. Great stuff!

Soul-restoring.

Can’t stress enough how much the human element adds to this; normally I’m content with the bare minimum needed to qualify in racing games (hard for me to get invested in what seems to be such a mechanical exercise), but put the pride of the team on the line, have some characters that are pulling for me? Then I’ll have to start finding the lines and gunning for first place. Particularly liked the bittersweet victories of the Dig Racing Team- finally winning the Grand Prix while parting ways with your manager and newfound friend seemed the most appropriate way to enter the new millennium.

Edit 3/29/24: Reduced to 7. Too formulaic, especially in level design. Souls stuff continues to sour on me.
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Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.

If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:

* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned

The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!

The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.

That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.

I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.

Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.

Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!

Immer noch schwierig zwischen den Stühlen zu stehen. Weil das Spiel ist amazing, wirft aber so vieles wieso ich diese Reihe mochte weg, um dafür ein sehr gutes Actiongame mit guter Story, guten Charakteren und guten Setpieces zu sein, stolpert dabei aber über ein paar der From Soft Klischees die sie sich selbst aufgelegt haben.

Nach drei Playthroughs und fast 70 Stunden hab ich nun aber dieses eine Spiel fast genau so lang gespielt, wie ich für den gesamten Rest der Reihe brauchte. Wie kritisch kann man da also schon sein?

Im Gegensatz zu den letzten AC Teilen die das Action-Gameplay über alles andere stellten, mir dafür aber nicht mit ihrem Gameplay gefallen haben, hat Teil 6 den besten Kampf der Reihe. Ich kann die Mechaniken nichtmal sonderlich gut erklären, weil sie so leicht und selbstverständlich von der Hand gehen ohne drüber nachdenken zu müssen.
Du siehst auf einen Blick ob dein Feind eher auf Nah- oder Fernkampf getrimmt ist.
Bewusstes ausweichen von Angriffen ist endlich möglich.
Die Stagger-Anzeige gibt dir ein Shortterm Goal im Kampf und macht Waffen facettenreicher.
Wenn deine Waffe nicht effektiv ist, oder zu langsam, oder dein FCS einfach nicht hinterherkommt, oder du vielleicht doch weiter boosten solltest, dann kriegst du das hier auch sehr einfach mitgeteilt.
Und so weiter und so weiter.


Eine Sache frag ich mich aber immer noch und ich hab da auch bisher keine Antwort drauf gefunden:
In AC6 geht es darum einen Build zu finden, mit dem du mit Situationen fertig wirst. Es gibt aber SO VIELE overpowered Builds die nichtmal Meta sind, sondern auf die du ganz versehentlich stößt die das gesamte restliche Spiel trivialisieren. Also bauen viele Leute nun andere Builds ohne diese Waffen, damit sie gut durch Situationen kommen, aber nicht ZU gut. Und... sollte das wirklich unsere Aufgabe sein? Uns zurückhalten damit wir es nicht zu leicht, aber auch nicht zu schwer haben?

Ältere ACs hatten das in meinen Augen etwas besser gelöst, wenn auch nie perfekt.
Aber jetzt besteht jeder Playthrough aus "Was kann ich nutzen um das Spiel zu gewinnen, AUSSER Zimmerman und Minigun und Songbird und Stun Needle Launcher". Und auch wenn ich Spaß damit hab, ist das nicht eigentlich etwas schlechtes?

Ich denke all das kommt von diesem Mix aus Bossen mit telegrafierten Mustern und Angriffen bei denen es eindeutig um Playerskill geht wie in anderen modernen From Titeln und die auch absurd schwierig werden können, wenn du nicht drauf vorbereitet bist - die sich dann aber auch völlig trivialisieren lassen mit bestimmten Builds. Diese Kombination geht glaub ich einfach nicht so gut auf wie in anderen Spielen. Dafür macht es trotzdem Spaß.

Und wenn wir nun endlich aufhören könnten dieses Spiel nur darauf zu reduzieren ob nun ein bestimmter Boss schwierig war oder nicht, das wär ECHT angenehm

Thought this would be a fun one to clear in a weekend, but it quickly spilled out into something I’ve had to chip away at over the course of the last month or so, each session revealing some new layer to the game. It may not seem like much at the outset, with SkyGunner’s base difficulty being pretty relaxed, other aerial targets flying lazily around the screen and death being a genuine rarity- taking enough damage only sends you into a “crashing” animation you’ll need to button-mash to pull out of. Combined with the breezy story and charming visuals, and it makes for a very inviting game if you just want to “see” it, (a nice contrast from the initial hostility of many arcade games) but if you’re really taken with it, going for score more than makes up for the initial ease of everything.

There’s a great balancing act in trying to build up your multiplier and keeping your combo timer alive, taking down enemy squadrons to build-up your resources and cashing out by destroying ground targets for their destructive and extremely lucrative “chaining” properties. At the same time you need to prevent your engine from overheating by overusing your abilities, so you have to use your special moves and fully-charged weapons judiciously or plan around the movement penalty incurred by maxing out your gauge, and doing all this while completing its quickfire succession of different objectives; It’d be easy to build up a decent score in a vacuum, but the real test is if you can do it under the pressure of a timer or while protecting an ally, making risky maneuvers to try and clear the skies as quickly as possible. The result is something where you always feel challenged to further optimize your play, where even something as basic as firing your standard machine guns can send you into the red, as it eats away your score- one more great consideration of many to add to your mental stack.

To be honest, chasing high scores is rarely the main appeal of a game for me, but it’s framed particularly well here: you may not care too much about it in the abstract, but SkyGunner frames this is as a competition between the main trio, the minimal threat of the objectives revealing itself to be a race to see who can get to the highest value targets first. Earn a “D” rank at the end of the game and it might not matter so much, but lose the lead in a simulated competition and that might be enough to spark some interest in the scoring system. And, as an added bonus, the extras are only unlocked after getting first place with each of the characters, another nice incentive to see how well the game flows together.

I mention it a lot, but the pacing here really is phenomenal: 5 stages that come in at around 45 minutes if you skip all the cutscenes. No scene here drags out too long or has a chance to outstay its welcome, and even an endgame stretch that initially felt a little dull can be dramatically shortened by helping your companions complete their own objectives for them (thanks for the tip Caim!)

I also want to mention its unique approach to difficulty: instead of a standard set of difficulty modes, it's instead divided up into different characters, who in addition to having planes with unique stats and moves, also end up tackling their own scenarios at specific points in the story. The second mission, for instance, can see you fighting off additional waves of standard enemies as Femme, the game’s easy mode, to destroying volleys of incoming missiles as Copain, the game’s hard mode. Outside of something like The Ninja Warriors: Once Again, I’m hard-pressed to think of a title where your choice of character can so dramatically recontextualize your understanding of the game, the combination of their remixed arsenals and deviations in their stories making for something where successfully finishing it once only leaves you with the realization of how much more there is to experience.

That said, there is one convergence point for all of the characters that I do think is kind of weak: all of them have to contend with the upset that is the final boss, Ciel and Femme the tasked with performing the surprisingly tricky maneuver of hitting it with three fully-charged missiles in a short window of time, a task that asks you to keep track of your ammo and heat meter in a way that no other section of the game outright mandates. On the other hand, Copain gets the much easier objective of simply landing one fully-charged bomb on him and then continuing the fight as normal. It's manageable with some practice, but it’s the one point in where the game feels really inelegant, throwing newer players into a set piece that demands a surprising amount from them, and a strangely flat way to close out the game, dramatically. It might also be the downside of having such a tightly-paced game, it’s one misstep given prominence in a way a longer game might never invite.

There are a few other hang-ups worth mentioning to: the lack of a first-person view has been discussed by the devs as a feature that was experimented with before being cut, but there a few targets where it’s easy to lock-on to some vestigial turret and a waste your shot due to the lack of a more precise aiming option (again, a small thing brought into more pronounced focus on the final boss). Can totally see the art style being a dealbreaker too; reminds me a lot of the self-reflection Jason Rubin had on the Jak games, caught between aesthetics in a way that might be intensely appealing to some, but seems like it’ll ward off just as many. Also easy to imagine another game using the multiple perspectives here to tell a more layered story- for the most part you’re getting different insights into what charming detour each of the characters went on, with only the unlockable character’s story offering some real intrigue.

It’s been hard to articulate why I’ve enjoyed this so much- know a trend in the past for me has been a sense of “completeness,” no ideas left unexplored and where the prospect of mastering the game feels limitless. That quality is probably the reason the lack of a sequel (well, a true sequel) is easier to live with, a sense that developer PixelArt truly understood their own game, successfully creating a title meant for newcomers and hardcore players alike. A rare and excellent thing.

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References

2001 Developer Interview for SkyGunner, https://shmuplations.com/skygunner/

Interview with Jason Rubin (Timestamped for the discussion on the aesthetics of Jak), https://youtu.be/0EkRT7qOMq0?si=qrzfYN9VGL1JEChr&t=2150

the lynchpin of pikmin 1 discourse is the time limit; intensely upsetting for some and the core of the game's appeal to others. this 30 day time limit serves a dual function: it not only provides a rigid skill barrier for players to overcome in order to reach an acceptable ending, but it also enhances the fear of the unknown. pikmin 1 explicitly highlights olimar's journey as one of necessity, where his survival is never guaranteed or even feasible. he has absolutely no understanding of the planet he's landed on (though his observations form valuable foreknowledge for later series protagonists), and thus every interaction he has with the unfamiliar flora and fauna must be taken with care. the time limit synergizes with this to create a looming, uncertain objective. without a layout of the planet to observe and plan around, every single miniscule decision becomes weighed against hundreds of similiarly small decisions down the line based on their efficiency. this creates an anxious drive to further improve and strategize, with the tension of olimar's life on the line ever growing the more you commit to your actions. while this system is static and not particularly interactive from a mechanical standpoint, and pikmin 3 would toy with its implications on routing via the fruit juice system, pikmin 1's implementation remains finely tuned to maximize the fear of unfettered exploration.

it may surprise you, then, that hey pikmin expertly turns this immersive friction on its head. from the moment it begins, one can sense that this olimar is older, less naive, and more familiar with the eccentricities of faraway planets. when he crash-lands on yet another planet, there is little in the way of suspense or anxiety. immediately there is a new objective put in front of him: 30,000 sparklium needed as fuel to escape. to the casual player, this might seem like an ordinary challenge, one that scarcely can capture the emotional resonance of the original pikmin. many have struggled to stay with this game because of it. I know I fell prey to this way of thinking myself.

however, after a mere few worlds, the genius of this requirement becomes apparent. the necessary sparklium to leave the planet is vast, and the rate at which you obtain it seems slight in comparison. the old fear began setting in, just as potent and all-consuming as before. even without an explicit time limit, hey pikmin weaves the claustrophobia of pikmin 1 by fostering a profound sense of ennui. this is a game shrouded in decay, obsessed with teasing out the ending drops of lust for adventure; exhaustively interrogating olimar's exploitation of each world he encounters. its minimalist level design and mechanics follow suit. I quickly found the further in I dug that these elements combine together to make every second spent fruitlessly in the game's world to be wasted time. every empty corridor without much sparklium or moment of inelegant routing through a level reintroduced that telltale anxiety, the feeling that I might have let more precious seconds slip through my hands. in these times I felt like olimar, synapses blown from an overexposure to new, meaningless experiences while desiring only to escape the planet.

beyond my personal feelings, the game's use of its sparklium as a ludonarrative device becomes essential for routing as well, as there is a vital interplay between treasure collection and overall "speedrunning" through the critical path. while the game features a significant amount of treasure, secret stages, and other collectables, the heady brew of boredom concocted by its featureless environments and slow progression are obviously intended to ensure that no player would be able to stomach actually taking a completionist route through the game (it wouldn't make sense for olimar to want to spend more time on the planet). therefore, the player is met with a choice at every fork in their road. will they spend valuable time searching for more treasure in each level and risk spending unnecessary time playing the game when easier treasure exists later on, or will they beeline towards the exit, expecting that it will be more time efficient to gather treasure in a later level? while this may sound similar to how pikmin 1 lays out many of its interactables such as destroyable gates and bridges that may be unnecessary in the long run, hey pikmin makes a major refinement to this formula. pikmin 1's time limit is cloying and artificial; it forces the player to consider their time spent playing as wasted through the mechanic. hey pikmin manages to instill the feeling of wasted time through its own design; a much more organic solution. this wouldn't be possible if the developers didn't center the game around this simultaneously rich yet hollow sensation of weariness. its lack of design speaks volumes. this unique manipulation of the player's expectations on platformer design spoke to me; I felt a wave of relief that brought me to the verge of tears when I finally reached my sparklium goal a mere two stages before the game was set to finish, saving myself from further time spent backtracking through old levels for treasure.

hey pikmin further breaks down the series' valorization of far-flung exploration by providing a new perspective on the relationship between olimar and the pikmin. other games in the series establish olimar as a paternal figure to the pikmin, as he guides their reproduction through the onion. while the onion is briefly featured in hey pikmin, olimar's primary method of gathering pikmin to his cause is now pulling them out of marked spots in the environment. these spots often replenish when your pikmin stock gets too low, creating an uneasy sense of worthlessness to maintaining a full pack of pikmin. furthermore, pikmin procured in each level are simply discarded after the fact, with olimar extracting more and more pikmin from the environment in each level. indeed, this game goes furthest in suggesting that olimar's direction of the otherwise-sentient pikmin violates their personhood and sense of worth.

there are two main aspects to this. the first is another ludonarrative trick that the series has had up its sleeve since the first entry. this is an incredibly subtle touch by the developers, so it may not be obvious to some, but by making the pikmin AI horrifically stupid, it actually conveys the idea that the pikmin themselves are stupid. hey pikmin goes out of its way to show that olimar takes the pikmin into situations outside of their natural environment they are highly ill-equipped for cognitively, such as moving platforms, small differences in elevation, and areas near tiny enemies. this recklessness on the part of olimar juxtaposed with his inability to emote and lack of character comes off as a recharacterization of him as perhaps sociopathic. hey pikmin approaches this idea from another direction as well; in what seems like a homage to the strong anti-capitalist themes of pikmin 2, olimar uses the pikmin cast aside at the end of each level as a task force for resource extraction in other parts of the planet. this small between-level management minigame reeks of colonial exploitation, casting a new shadow at olimar's "activities" on each planet he visits. while pikmin 2 analyzed the economic implications of resource extraction from the untainted wilderness, hey pikmin instead centers those desperate workers forced into servitude at the fringes of empire.

vastly overlooked by the majority of the gaming public thanks to its late release in the life of the 3ds and seeming low-budget status, hey pikmin is a crowning aesthetic achievement that none should miss. it brilliantly unravels the myths behind pikmin as a series while simultaneously building upon the ideas of its forebears. pass it by only if you want to miss a shocking portrait of the listlessness and apathetic abuse at the heart of exploration. a forward step for the medium; sleep paralysis in video game form.

contrary to popular belief, the wiimote does not have a gyroscope in it. gyroscopes are devices commonly used to measure rotation, so this may come as a bit of a shock to you if you've played kororinpa or its sequel, which are entirely based around rotating the wiimote to tilt obstacle courses for a rolling marble. instead, the wiimote features a three-axis accelerometer, which tracks linear movement. imagine that these devices feature a small weight suspended by springs. when the device is moved in a direction, the acceleration will cause the weight to squash a spring in the direction it moves in while stretching a spring in the opposite direction. thus, by measuring the squash and stretch of these springs (or whatever equivalent is actually in the accelerometer you're using), you can detect linear movement in any given direction. if you want to prove to yourself that this technology drives the motion sensing in kororinpa, simply turn the tilt visualization on during a stage, place the wiimote on a flat surface, and push it from side to side. even though the wiimote isn't tilting at all, the tilt visualization will rock back and forth as if it were.

knowing this, the precision of the tilt sensing in kororinpa stumped me for quite a while until I stumbled upon this tidbit of information. the accelerometer in the wiimote measures acceleration in its rest frame, which is on Earth, where we are constantly experiencing a gravity force downwards into the planet's core. because everything we are surrounded by experiences this, the accelerometer, if it were in free fall and only affected by the Earth's gravity, would not register any movement at all. likewise, when the wiimote is sitting flat in your hand or resting on a table, it is being pushed up against gravity, and so it registers a constant acceleration upwards. kororinpa exploits this by constantly tracking which axes the upwards acceleration affects at any given time. for example, if the wiimote is at rest and there's still a constant acceleration in the positive X direction (that is, jutting out from the left side of the controller), then the player must have rolled the wiimote clockwise, and the game will tilt the current level clockwise as well. extremely clever and well-implemented for a japanese launch title!

the gameplay brilliance of this control scheme comes from the ability to freely tilt each level in any direction and thus alter its relative position to the marble, changing walls to floors and vice versa. in each level, the game requires the player to search out some number of orange diamonds before reaching an end goal. combined with the ability to freely tilt, each level places its collectable diamonds in spots that must be approached by transitioning the marble up walls and back onto floors without accidentally letting it fly into the void. the best applications of these let the player skip wide gaps and navigate complex 3D mazes by "altering gravity" as well as letting the ball purposefully free-fall before catching it onto a surface with a careful tilt.

of course, the resourcefulness of this control scheme naturally forces restrictions on what kinds of levels are feasible without causing the controller to go haywire. firstly, because the reference values for movement are calculated when the wiimote is right-side up, it is much less precise when completely upside-down, and thus no stages ever force you to completely turn the wiimote over. secondly, because the reference view for the player must be consistent, the game always displays in a fixed perspective slanted down at the marble. any section that requires the player to roll the ball towards themselves cannot actually show upcoming obstacles to the player, which necessitates frustrating trial-and-error in these sections thanks to the lack of line of sight. the map, which does not allow free-roam and is uncomfortable fixed to the marble as a center point, is not a great help either. the most disappointing expression of both of these restrictions is the final unlockable level, which seems like the ideal complex 3D maze mentioned in the previous paragraph at first glance yet shies from truly maximizing the mechanical potential because every single section can be tackled without fully flipping the orientation of the level.

fortunately basic execution tests on your fine motor skills and ability to control your tilting through tight corridors and wall-less ledges serves as a solid foundation for the majority of the levels. most levels in the main campaign are less exploratory and more akin to linear gauntlets, which helps alleviate frustration with the camera. while the designers have a decent grasp on how to design appropriate challenges around the limited controls and unique free-tilt mechanics, the later stages begin exhibiting an uncomfortable tendency to escalate difficulty by simply drawing out the length of the stages. often times the most difficult stages feel more like disjoint challenges glued together with no connecting throughline, or worse, copy-pasted segments obsessed with testing consistency. fun enough for one straight playthrough, but rather tedious when going for faster times. perhaps they should've chopped many of these stages into multiple smaller stages and driven up overall stage count.

kororinpa is a budget title that can be bested within a couple of hours, but to the developers' credit they padded out the experience in meaningful ways for those looking to invest more brainpower. for starters, new marbles with different handling characteristics and shapes are unlocked during the campaign, and experimenting with which marbles work best with which layouts and hazards helps diversify approaches when optimizing each level. to encourage this, the game offers a rank system, with extra-difficult bonus levels appearing as the player achieves more and more "gold trophy" times in levels. there are also emeralds tucked away in each level as collectables; the best of these illustrate routes for interesting skips or narrow alternate routes, while the worst merely require tossing one's self off an edge repeatedly until hitting the emerald off-screen. each set of collected emeralds unlocks another set of bonus levels, which veer more towards "shitpost-y" themes like castle exploration and slalom skiing. it's unfortunate that these two separate extrinsic motivation methods feel antithetical to each other, as going for the emeralds often jeopardizes a gold trophy time, and you're unable to recollect emeralds after collecting them the first time in case you wanted to try a route that both sets a record time and collects the emerald.

overall this game shines best when it leans into the strengths of its control scheme and lets you devise nasty flips and skips, gently tossing the marble around between different surfaces. I would have liked to have seen more variety in these surfaces, as many of the levels descend to mediocrity by keeping all of their surfaces flat with guard rails and each of the joints between walls and floors completely 90 degrees. the most interesting levels are those that play with sloping surfaces, especially when switching between different slopes very quickly. another good variation on this are levels that feature heavy curved edges where one can build up speed yet must avoid careening off from the downward force, such as the ufo bonus level or the downward jam in the dessert world. more levels that utilized these concepts would have kept me from viewing a decent chunk of the levels as nondescript; a major dampener in any puzzle action game. still impressed by it nonetheless.

Once severely maligned by casual players and hardcore fans of the series alike, Final Fantasy 13 has been nothing but vindicated by the success of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. A hybrid combat system with both real-time and turn-based elements. A strong focus on characters and vistas. The presentation of the world as a sight-seeing tour through mostly linear corridors.

This might feel very contentious to a lot of people, but it’s true that a lot of 13’s DNA is present in 7R, and for the most part, 13 just does it flat out better. This game has a strong focus on its central mechanics - the combat system. It’s the central way of engaging with the game, and – spin-offs excluded – it’s one of the most combat-heavy Final Fantasy games to date, with even the more exploration-heavy areas having combat as their main reward.

The combat is designed really well - a very compact system that lets you do decisions about a meta-level of play that any sensible player already knows how to employ if they ever touched a turn-based combat system. As the developer correctly surmised, there is no challenge anymore in menuing to a Cure spell every other round to keep the party alive, especially for JRPG veterans. Final Fantasy 13 still seeks its identity in an idea adjacent to ATB, although the real-time component of older Final Fantasies mattered too little to actually make the quick menuing dangerous to your party. Final Fantasy 13 solves these problems: It relieves you of the burden to micromanage and additionally makes the real-time component integral to the challenge by constantly pressuring you to make quick decisions.

The focus in the battle system lies on choosing the correct strategy and not telling each character exactly what to do. These strategies are defined by the “roles” each character has, and these roles define what moves a character has and how they will behave. There are 6 roles in the game, each character has 3 of those 6 roles as their “main” roles, in which they excel. Each possible role combination of the 3 active characters is a “paradigm”. One of the genius parts of this battle system is that you can only choose 6 paradigms before each battle in your load-out, which means you have to leave a lot of possible options on the table and still have to be prepared for all eventualities that might occur in the battle. The game would arguable devolve into just another form of micro-managing if you could assign roles individually during a battle, so I welcome this limitation. There will always be some fights where you won’t have the optimal paradigms equipped, and still winning quickly despite that is what makes you feel like you really understood the ins and outs of the game.

During battle you only directly control your party leader, meaning the other characters behave autonomously according to their role and the current state of the battle. The fact that the automated characters almost always (and by almost I really do mean 99+% of the time) make sensible choices in combat is a testament to how simple the rules of menu-based combat usually are. Even for the party leader, the game gives you an option to preselect the character moves for you, still abiding by the thought that what you have before you is probably an easily solvable problem, as long as you have the correct strategy in mind. You can – of course – always manually choose the inputs of the party leader to optimize everything a bit further, and that is sometimes a key component of harder boss fights, but micromanaging one character in a tight situation is a far cry from inputting moves for every character each round regardless of the current battle complexity.

This all begs the question, if everything is automated, surely the game must not be very challenging? The answer is: Kind of. Final Fantasy 13 can be an easy game if you just try to play it safe and survive at any cost, but playing that way is highly discouraged through fostering intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The really smart thing about this combat system is how the game tries to get you to overextend yourself, and it has 2 main ways of doing this: The ranking system and the stagger system.

The ranking system is very simple, but elegant for this purpose: The faster you complete a battle, the better your rank is and a better rank means you get better items. This gives you an additional extrinsic motivation for optimization and going for offense, and it cost me quite a few battles just because I really wanted a full 5 star rating and made an unsafe decision because of that. It’s very to the point: “You could have been faster“, and holding this over your head alone is a great motivator and factor that keeps pushing you into new strategies.

The other way the game tries to goad you into making mistakes is the stagger system. Most modern Final Fantasy games have the stagger system as a bar that fills upon attacking the enemy until it – on completion – stuns the enemy for a brief period of time and gives you a damage multiplier on your attacks during that period. The interesting thing about this is that 13 is the first FF to ever employ this system, and it’s still by far the most interesting iteration. In this game it’s not only designed to give you catharsis through a bigger damage output through upon completing the bar, it actually has a few more purposes that feed directly back into the idea of letting the player make more mistakes.

The stagger bar in Final Fantasy 13 isn’t just a constantly filling bar that rewards you with a damage multiplier at the end, it consistently rises and increases the multiplier with each hit. The bar also constantly reduces (not the multiplier!) and only resets when you do a hit to the enemy. Upon the bar reaching zero, you lose the current damage multiplier and you effectively have to start your offense over again, only keeping the HP damage you did to the enemy up to that point. This, of course, means you have to constantly keep pressuring an enemy if you want to end up doing substantive damage, not to mention that keeping an enemy in check during stagger is much easier, since he is more easily interruptable.

Playing defensively is of course still an option, and having a paradigm only consisting of defensive roles is sometimes even necessary to survive, but keep that formation running for too long and you potentially nullify all effort you have put into the battle offensively. Again, this constant feeling of push-and-pull to keep going is great at getting you to overextend yourself and make bad decisions. You might be able to put all characters into an attacking role and fill the stagger bar before any of your characters die, but making the right judgment call when you go for the final part of the stagger bar is crucial. There are bosses in this game that attack relentlessly, finding windows to attack and quickly fill their stagger bar always feels like a gamble, but at some point you want to take the proverbial leap of faith and go into complete offense, lest you turtle even longer and lose that sweet 5 star rating. All systems in the game interlock masterfully to give you this one goal: Minimal defense, maximum offense.

Of course, all of this would be useless if every battle played the same. Luckily, the game understands this and has a wide variety of enemies and enemy formations that each require different strategies. The further you get in the game, the more enemy combinations make it hard to map out the encounter strategy in your head: Who should you deal with first? Can you get through this with a short buffing period? Should you have a safety healer on hand or just bumrush the enemies with a completely offensive strategy? Which offensive strategy? Is debuffing key here or not? These questions constantly turn up in play, and it’s basically guaranteed you will keep dying and learning to deal with new formations thrown at you throughout the whole game. As the game progresses, paradigm changes will happen quicker and you will sometimes change up the strategy to simply execute a single move and then move on to the next paradigm. The challenge escalates and the gameplay becomes more frantic as you go, which is an impressive feat for 30+ hour game.

One problem the game has here is that the pacing of the variation of combat encounters could be faster in a lot of chapters. There is a lot of monotony in certain locations, even with the whole idea of optimizing the battles. Some sections drag out too long and throw too many similar enemy formations at you to keep pace with player skill – which is a shame, considering that the chapter-to-chapter escalation is really solid otherwise. It feels like the developers wanted to play it too safe at some points or that they wanted to preserve the “feeling” of older RPGs where you fight each enemy more often.

The “RPG” part of the game is really digestible: All of the customization in FF 13 comes from equipment, and every character only has effectively 3 stats: Strength, Magic and HP. The lack of any defensive stat is welcome, since most RPGs don’t actually handle the potential tradeoff between defense and HP interestingly, and it only muddles the water in what the player should invest in. Some accessories grant you defensive boosts against certain types of attacks, but these correspond to flat percentage damage reductions and are therefore easily understandable.

The game is essentially one long ride from battle to battle with some sight-seeing inbetween, but I do mean that positively – mostly. The game still looks amazing, even by today’s standards, and it’s not only impressive what Square got out of 7th gen hardware, but also how fresh and unique the environments and characters in this game feel. Final Fantasy 13 presents a world that is torn between technology and naturality and everything about its visuals underscores this dichotomy. The “gods” of this world – the Fal’cie – do not fall into any standard depiction of supernaturality, they are machinistic and technologic at their core, giant and complex machines beyond our comprehension. The designs of these beings vary wildly, but they are all cohesive in that they feel fundamentally alien and slightly unsettling, almost like a mechanical version of Lovecraft’s elder gods or the often quoted “biblically accurate angels”. This is not only a very unique design choice, it also drives home the point that these beings are at odds with the natural order of the world and with the humans that reside in it.

Even the music hones in on this theme – Masashi Hamauzu created an incredible soundtrack that underscores this conflict between man and machine by mixing up electronic and orchestral music. Some of the best music in the series is here, the somber “Dust to Dust” being one of the most powerful ballads these games have to show for themselves. Hearing the haunting vocals in the melody of the games’ leitmotif while witnessing the desolation around you is a moment that will always stay with me. The main battle theme “Blinded by Light” is a triumphant orchestral piece that never gets grating and, even at the end, had me humming along with the melody. The pop track “The Sunleth Waterscape” is (in)famous for how schmaltzy it is, but that exact type of unapologetic commitment to a corny pop track is what ends up making it so charming, and it ends up being one of the highlights of the soundtrack for it.

The pacing and story of Final Fantasy 13 are probably its weakest part – many of the emotional beats miss their mark, because the melodrama has been built up in a way that feels too convoluted. The best example here is the emotional arc between Snow and Hope, which falls flat for several reasons; The biggest one being that Hope takes way too long to confront Snow about his anger and Snow making way too many convoluted and incidental remarks that specifically only serve to strenghten Hope’s grudge against Snow. While the player already knows how both characters feel, we are strung along for a very drawn-out conflict that resolves unsatisfyingly. That’s not to say that none of these emotional beats work – Final Fantasy 13 is at its best when it’s drenched in straightforward, unapologetic pathos. Each of the characters has their own moment when they decide that they “can’t run away anymore”, metaphorically speaking, and this works better for some and worse for others, courtesy of what these characters are actually running from. Sazh’s story of grappling with his feelings as a father is probably the arc that resonates the most, and the game’s theme of pushing forward is at its most personal here, and I would argue that it also has the fewest problems with its pacing.

Another problem with the story is that some aspects keep being weirdly underexplained, even if you sift through the written datalogs. Especially the character motivations of Fang are confusing – who has a crucial role in the games’ finale. Her behaviour takes quite a bit of the hype out of the climax, despite the otherwise great presentation.

Final Fantasy 13 is one of those games that really struck a nerve with me despite its obvious issues. It will stay with me for longer and give me more to think about than most other linear JRPGs, because what I see here is an extremely interesting and highly successful attempt at deconstructing menu-based combat and trying to translate it to a meta-level, making a point to be less about singular actions and more about character behaviours, and it succeeds marvelously at that. It presents an ambitious idea at a combat system for veterans of the genre that are a tired of just hitting obvious choices in menus and already think about each fight in terms of roles and tactics.

It’s a game that has a very strong visual and auditory identity on top of that, and I can’t really say I played another game that felt, sounded or looked anything close to it. It’s a unique gem in the JRPG sphere in both gameplay and presentation, and even if you don’t mesh with all the things I mentioned as much as I do, I would still recommend giving it a shot, because it does present something far away from the typical fare the genre is known for.

Armored Core 6 was 10/10 in my first playthrough, but the further playthroughs showed me that there are undeniable flaws that can’t be ignored, and it soured my enjoyment a bit. Here’s a review that explains my thought process.

Before riding the AC6 hype train, I beat AC3 on my old PS2 for the study purpose. It was a decent game, and I could understand why there are many people looking forward to the revitalisation of the AC series. The gloomy but kinda wacky world building, the alien feeling of movement control, the holistic gear combination system, and the planning procedure to beat the hard missions.. all these elements are conjoined like clockwork and formed a unique mech mercenary simulator. I could see the value of that, and I even poured some love to build the best hover tank mech, but to be honest, I didn’t fully love the game.

My PS2 is a dying old machine so there were a lot of performance-related frustrations here and there, but even without the technical issues there’s a thing I didn’t like about the structure itself.

One thing I really liked about the game is that a lot of tools require some risk factors. Jumping is cool, but it drains your energy. Every bullet fired will be counted and written on the receipt. Melee swing is powerful, but you can’t easily cancel out the animation. There are several options available from the get go, but there’s an underlying stake on your basic maneuver, and the combat situations can be more hectic and dynamic when you are fighting other AC enemies and some mobile enemy types, since you have to juggle both problems - the enemies threatening you and the player control itself.

However probably 50% of the missions were filled with boring fodder enemies that die in one hit, and some weak platforming sections. These obstacles are as basic as this “monkey see monkey do”, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’m doing the tutorial mission again and again, but with different mech in control. The worst case however, would be when they introduce that “seemingly piss-easy mission” at the start, drag the game to snail pace, and then introduce the bullshit hard DPS monster AC as a mission final boss. Yes, I’m talking about the Destroy Kisaragi Forces mission. It was more than just frustrating to beat the mission, because I had to waste 5 minutes with nothing-burger obstacles just to get a single chance to beat the machine gun spamming monstrosity. Even beating that boss required some pure luck because 9 out of 10 times, my ally mech couldn’t bait the attention and the boss just spammed the machine gun at me with the extreme tracking ability and shredded me to pieces. That mission scarred my sanity to the point that I had to halt the AC3 playthrough for several months.

So, yeah. To put it shortly, what I could say about the AC series before playing AC6 was, “I can see the potential, and I hope the new one has better paced missions and encounters.”

Then AC6 was released, and I played it like there’s no tomorrow. After seeing the first credit sequence, I concluded that it is a tremendous masterpiece, the return of the king, “FROMSOFT never misses”, yada yada... You know what I mean. Everything I liked about the AC3 was conveyed with some modern touches. The movement felt slick with the modern control setting (thank god for the right stick camera control), extra stake on your positioning is still a thing thanks to the lack of i-frames, shoulder weapons and main hand weapons are much easier to juggle, and the universal assault booster is a great inclusion as a both positioning and offense tool. Even though the nuanced mech turning mechanic of old AC games got removed in the procedure, overall, it was a cool player foundation.

I also liked the inclusion of mid-level checkpoints. Of course it is an unthinkable idea when you consider about the previous entries’ core gameplay value -the pre-mission strategy aspect-, but at the very least there won’t be cases like “Destroy Kisaragi Forces”, and the mission structure could be built to throw more heavy punches at you.

I was very delighted when I met the giant tetrapod enemy for the first time, because that common enemy actually showed the “dangerous patterns to care about” unlike any other previous non-AC enemy jobbers. In fact, most of the common enemies are in the straight-up-upgraded territory when you compare them to the older games. Things like invisible sniper and the Karla’s bionicle-looking creatures added more threats to the early game. There were cool multi enemy fight sequences too, like fighting several invisible mechs in the coral plant.

Just like the previous games, AC fights are the moments where you have to focus on your actions, but the non-conventional-AC bosses are the absolute highlights of the game. The early mission chopper boss had more things going on when compared to something like that weird submarine boss you find at the late game part of AC3. And the series of bosses after that chopper never disappointed me. Cataphract is probably my favorite when it comes to the casual rematch, mainly because of the short mission structure and the rodeo-like boss fight flow I love, but there’s something special about the three giant walls of AC6 -Balteus, Sea Spider, and Ibis-.

In a way, they are designed like any other modern FROM action game bosses (especially Elden Ring bosses) which don't have a lot of safe patterns to counter. Each patterns get chained indefinitely and relentlessly, and you have to weave the counter measure when they show some windows in the attack animation. You won’t likely find them in the neutral state that often.

While the boss philosophy is similar, I liked only a handful of “hard Elden Ring bosses”, and absolutely adored every “hard boss” in AC6. Mainly because the player control is absolutely better in AC6, -like, no doubt about that- but there’s also a satisfying feeling about constantly changing and weaving your attack methods depending on the enemy pattern, enemy’s state and the position of your character. Are they too far away? Use the tracking missile to give some small damage or to bait the action. Are they in the mid-range? Use the main damage dealer (like bazuka or rifle). And if you are floating high enough, you may get a higher chance to hit it too. If you found the way to get near the boss? Time to go melee and beat the shit out of it! And these internal choices are not flowcharty at all, as some weapons have multi purposes (for example, the lancer-drill thing is really good at tracking the enemy and narrowing the space in the extreme speed, so it is good for zooming if you are low on boost energy), and the ever-changing circumstances require you to do different things.

That’s why I enjoyed the game in the game design manner, but of course there are other reasons to like it too. Even though the game is firmly set itself as a mech dystopia game, somehow FROM’s creative fantasy design found its way to shine brightly with the striking visual of crimson coral mist and the mechanical monstrosities like Ice Worm and Strider. The sound work full of heavy explosives, banging metal, crunching plates, and gearing machines can be described as top notch, even though it muffled some music in the background. And while many people criticized the game for having a dried up narrative tone and rather weak conclusion, I have to give a credit to the devs, that somehow, they made likable characters only with the audio transmission and without any portraits or animations depicting the characters. The voice actors (for the main characters) actually nailed their job wonderfully.

So why did it sour my enjoyment in the end? Well, if you think the game’s entire value is lying on the first playthrough, and you can rate the game conclusively by just watching the initial ending of it, I won’t stop you. (After all, that’s how I usually rate the games that I didn’t love with the initial approach). But I loved my first playthrough here in AC6, and I thought there’s obviously more things to dig in, as the game is built around in-depth combat mechanics, mech customization, and some branching missions.

So I dug more and I found the progression of the NG+ to be strange. There were some neat branching outcomes that are “narratively” interesting, but other than that, every vanilla mission worked as it was, without any enemy placement adjustments or difficulty tuning works. Imagine you are playing Doom Eternal with all the unlocked fully-leveled up weapons but all the enemies are the doom soldiers. That’s what it felt like going through the old missions again.

Even the new missions or the other branched missions were boring to get through. Yes, there were interesting new situations that weren’t presented in the first playthrough, but every enemy (that I complimented before) dies in one combo of assault boost-melee attack, and at that point, there were no new threats that would surprise me, because 99% of them were already utilized in the first playthrough anyway. The new test subject ACs were no different as they cannot be really distinguished from the normal ACs you fought in the normal arenas.

At the end of NG++, there were only a handful of missions that satisfied me with the fully-geared up mech. The final mission that featured Baltius 2, the Defend the Strider mission that occurred in the early part of NG++, and the true final boss mission. But even then, the feeling of clearing them was nowhere close to beating Ibis for the first time, which was a huge let down.

In a way, this can work as a power fantasy, as you can use all the upgraded mech parts and mow down all the challenges you struggled before, but for that purpose, I can replay the missions in the replay tab, not doing the same missions all over again. You can say this is a chance to use different builds or intentionally undertuned mechs, but that’s unreasonable to me as I built up my mech that suits to my fun zone, and with some experiments, I found the balancing to be extremely broken, so I decided to stay where I am -a moderately mobile tank build that has some generalist tool-.

The thing is, when I beat the game for the first time, my mech wasn’t in the most optimized state. I mained the wheelchair tank which is pretty mobile in the tank leg standard, but still clumsy about aerial mobility. I stuck to the wheelchair because it just looked aesthetically pleasing. My stubbornness about the wheelchair was the reason why my builds were not always fully optimized, which made the game more challenging in some way. Like, platforming or moving to higher ground with the wheelchair is kinda hard. Also assault-boosting towards a boss required more thoughtful and deliberate approach as you can’t easily avoid the dangers from the midrange zone with this tank leg. I kinda knew the importance of staggering enemies, but I’ve never thought about using the songbirds and shotgun, so I relied on some bazuka weapon with kinda okay-ish tracking ability, and some missile launchers on shoulders. It is not too awful, but from the late-game min-maxer’s standpoint, it is kinda mid build.

After the initial playthrough, I tried the infamous Zimmermann & Songbird combination with high mobility chicken legs. Something was definitely off, and that was the point I felt like “yeah I’ll just stay in my place because this is too busted”. This is the criticism that was done a million times by the experienced AC players by now, but the stagger system needs more than just a single balance patch. I would say the item unlock system might need some rework too. While some people consider that mowing down the hardship with busted builds can be considered as a “player expression”, I personally think it is way too easy to approach as it stands now. I just didn’t use that because I just simply assumed those weapons aren’t my vibes, but still, those OP weapons’ unlock timing is pretty questionable. Remember that you have to show some little bit of effort and study to make a busted build in the Dark Souls series.

So there you have the reasons why I thought this game doesn’t deserve the glowing five star love call. I wouldn’t say the NG++ experience was necessarily the worst time in my life, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the game showed more weakness by telling me that there are more things to discover. But unlike the bittersweet feeling -that FROM can not truly escape from its own mannerisms- I had after beating Elden Ring, I’m absolutely hopeful about the expansion of Armored Core 6 after this. After all, the game is like an old mech that has been abandoned for 10 years and just booted again. Malfunction is damned sure to happen, but the important thing is… it worked for me as the initial run. And this dust-covered mech finally got the limelight again, so there are more chances to be upgraded in the future.

[Here are some other petty complaints I want to make but I couldn’t fit them in the review so I list them here]

- I still don’t know why they decided not to rank the NG+ playthrough. If there were some score hunting elements while going through the previous missions, at least they would be more enjoyable.

- The only hover tank in this game is lukewarm at best. This is an utter disrespect against the hover leg users in the previous games.

- Speaking of special legs, including the leg parts, there aren’t many interesting body parts when you compare them to AC3. Of course the build variety would suffer with AC6’s semi-stream-lined approach, but I didn’t expect it to have this low amount of variety.

- I know the scoring hunting requires several retries, but I wish the S rank threshold was more transparent than the current form. I can’t expect what method the game wants from me to achieve the S rank in the mission. Do I have to minmax the shit out and burst everything down at the speed of light? Or do I have to wear the basic gears to lower the ammo cost? Some hints can be cool, I think.

- The current way the OST chip was implemented is not good at adjusting the small stats when you are in the first run. The devs implemented the hard reset function anyway, so why not just allow me to allocate the chip wherever I want?

- Quick match implementation, please.

In a vacuum, this game is pretty good: that's what you get for inheriting one of the best combat systems of all time. But as a Monster Hunter game, it's hard not to see this as a big misstep in 2023, especially after Sunbreak. In retrospect, Rise reads like a 5th gen regression from GU, which is insane considering how scattershot and unpolished that game is. Some of it is undoubtedly because of Covid development issues (they literally had to add the last fourth of the game in post-release), but a lot is fundamentally misguided.

Last year I discussed many of my problems in the context of Sunbreak, and those all still apply to base Rise, but with even greater severity in some cases. Some additional points:

The nicest thing I have to say is probably the structure, which streamlines by picking some low-hanging fruit (minimal gathering quests, skip some overlapping village/hub progression). Of course this is also undermined by annoying aspects like Rampage (a worthless dev timesink similar to Zorah Magdaros in World) and obtuse unlock requirements for Switch Skills which hinders experimentation, but on the whole it's probably the best in the series.

What's crazy is that copy-pasting the GU Hunter Arts system would have been significantly better than the existing silkbind system, in the sense that the separate meters at least prevents one imbalanced move from sucking the air away from all the others, as well as encouraging aggression through meter buildup by attacking.

Moreover, GU's quantity over quality approach in styles and arts arguably worked better in producing actually fun playstyles, just by trying so many things that some ended up turning out well. Nothing in Rise is as blatantly busted as Absolute Readiness in GU, but on the other hand none of the parry moves in Rise are nearly as well-balanced as Critical Juncture from GU.

The increase in parry moves in Rise (and 5th gen more broadly) also goes against a huge strength of the series's combat: dynamic defensive play. As I examine in this post, one of the remarkable things about MonHun is how the roll iframes are balanced against the size and speed of the hitboxes such that the timing and direction needed is situation-dependent. Parries and lengthy iframe moves such as LS's foresight slash subvert this by covering a variety of situations with the same input, which in turn lessens the need for good positioning in advance. (Small note of praise: it seems like the base iframes on the roll have been reduced in Rise, which actually makes sense as correcting for the trend of smaller and faster hitboxes.)

Adding wirebug movement is cool in theory, but in practice, it's really difficult to imagine how they could have gotten this right. A huge tenet of Monhun combat is how your offense and defense are heavily intertwined through positioning, and it's easy to see how powerful fast movement is if you play Insect Glaive or Hunting Horn. Changing movement presents a huge risk of either breaking the dynamic or not really doing anything. Rise wirebug movement ended up being the latter, where it's mostly limited to catching up to a monster, occasionally dodging a few attacks like Mizutsune beam, or moving around the map (which is actually super fun!).

The difficulty of the game has been discussed many times, but even putting aside systemic concerns such as restock and damage values, what's baffling to me is how so many returning monsters (ex. Rajang, Nargacuga, Tigrex) are effectively slowed down versions of their GU counterparts, in a game which has the least player commitment and highest average weapon mobility. It's even more blatantly obvious in retrospect, after most of these monsters got extensive AI reworks in Sunbreak.

Brief dishonorable mention to the Hunting Horn: for a weapon which has always had great gameplay but lackluster damage output, Capcom decided that the appropriate course of action was to totally redo the moveset from a long range poking weapon with weird attack angles and buffs to a spammy close range washing machine that my friend described as "something out of God Eater."

This is something that I mentioned already in the Sunbreak review, but funnily enough has become one of my top sticking points with 5th gen MonHun: the gamefeel. I'm no animation expert, so I can't give a detailed dissection, but the less snappy animations somehow give the game this strange syrupy quality. I genuinely don't understand how something like Surge Slash GS in Sunbreak, which is the best weapon idea MonHun has had in years, feels so awkward to use despite really not being that different from an old MonHun weapon mechanically.

For what it's worth, I find it difficult to imagine them iterating on this set of mechanics in the future. But I'm sure MH6 will have many, many problems of its own making...

(Completed debt, game dropped afterwards)

Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.

The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.

On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.

The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.

Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.

I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:

- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut

If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.

What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.

Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!

I actually beat Rollerdrome back in March and was quite enamored at first, but I've since cooled down on it somewhat. A quick replay today has only confirmed my suspicions that there's unfortunately a lot left to be desired. Feel free to take my word here with a grain of salt: I'm not a particularly huge Tony Hawk fan and was more or less playing this as part of a warm-up via Jet Set Radio-likes (since Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is coming out in less than a week, and I replayed the original Jet Set Radio right before this). Still, if I had to put my finger on why this didn't hit the mark the second time around, my best guess would be that Rollerdrome doesn't understand how to create an engaging difficulty curve, and here are some of my theories as to why:

- Progression: Rollerdrome locks its stages behind completing challenges (collect all the tokens, do a certain trick while killing a certain enemy, rack up enough points, etc), with ten challenges per stage and sixty completed challenges required to unlock the finals. This is supposed to incentivize players to tackle as many challenges as possible while going through stages, but in reality what I found myself doing was farming the earlier stages for the easiest challenges to get the base completion requirement out of the way, and throwing away dry runs to farm the more manageable challenges at the beginning before resetting and running through the stages proper. This unfortunately feels like an artificial implementation of coercing me to explore its mechanics when I was usually more concerned with straight efficiency regarding combat.

- Tricks: You need to perform tricks constantly in Rollerdrome to restore your ammo, and tricks are also a way to quickly rack up points in-between shooting to exploit your current combo multiplier. Again though, I found tricks to be unnecessarily complicated and superfluous outside of doing the required tricks to complete necessary challenges: if you don't care about your score, then all you have to do for quick ammo restoration is to just hold the stick forward and perform the same grab/flip/spin while not in combat, or just spend your time grinding on rails/edges and firing since you'll automatically regain ammo for grinding up to a certain point. It also doesn't help that I found the inputs for more complex tricks a bit fiddly and perfect dodges refresh some of your ammo anyway, reducing the reliance upon tricks. Speaking of which...

- Dodge/Super Reflex: The dodge is a little too good in Rollerdrome. You can basically invincible frame roll at any time in the game (including in mid-air and while grinding), outside of a few frames right after the roll animation ends as far as I can tell. This not only provides a reliable method for quickly getting out of danger, but also you can roll in any direction to quickly alter your momentum and enter Super Reflex if you activate bullet-time right as you perfect dodge (that is, dodging in the first few frames of an active enemy attack). To summarize, this strategy easily gets you ammo refills, allows for relative invincibility when confronted by a barrage of attacks, and powers up your shots while in Super Reflex, which as a result makes Rollerdrome almost feel too reactive as opposed to proactive since it's far too advantageous to not abuse this to safely and quickly wipe out waves.

- Stages: Rollerdrome only has 11 stages, and quite a few of these stages are just repeated locales with few hazards outside of the enemies and a lot of empty, open space outside of a few trick ramps and grind rails/edges. A bit more variety in the set design (and more walls to wall-ride, which I thought was a little underutilized) would have been appreciated since by halfway through, some of the arenas started to bleed into one another for me.

- Laser: I'm fine with most of the weapon balance in Rollerdrome, but the Z-11 (the in-game laser gun) is an exception. The main caveat to using the Z-11, aside from the three shot capacity (still more than the grenade launcher though), is that you can't use aim assist to automatically lock on to foes with it and thus must manually point your reticle at them. Not a very difficult task though, since Reflex gives you more than enough reaction time and the reticle turns red as soon as you hover over a target. Because the shotgun and pistol are limited somewhat by range for aim assist (especially the shotgun due to perfect slug shots), the laser is a godsend: it bypasses this system entirely and lets you snipe foes from across the arena, taking out most enemies after a double charge and can also pierce through multiple enemies at a time. It further disrupts this balance because the Z-11 is unlocked halfway through, meaning the game's earlier combat/combo challenges are a lot more difficult without it at first but often rather trivial once you've unlocked it.

- Boss fights: I've already mentioned that Rollerdrome's dodge roll is a bit overcentralizing, but nowhere does this become more evident than during the two boss fights, shifting the prevailing strategy from any semblance of ammo management/route planning to just basic bait and punish. Simply wait for enemy attacks, dodge to regain ammo/enter Super Reflex to finish off goons, and then approach the big robot to deal damage and enter the next phase. There's no scoring optimization or crazy tricks/maneuvering involved, and as a result, these tend to be pretty dry affairs that could have been removed from the game entirely with little value lost.

I certainly get the appeal of Rollerdrome, given its potential for optimization to maximize the combo meter and quickly speedrun stages, but unfortunately I find that the game doesn't get harder, but rather gets longer with more enemies that take more hits and throw out more attacks. Even so, I had enough fun constantly filling foes with lead in slow-mo, but even this thrill began to wear itself thin an hour in. I can't help but feel that the separate movement and combat mechanics are undercooked despite how promising "Tony Hawk with bullet-time gunplay" sounds on paper. More power to those who find the core gameplay engaging enough to try and complete all the challenges + the "Out for Blood" post-game replay with stricter margins: as for me, I'm content with putting this down after a few hours and completing Finals with a C rank. Rollerdrome is by no means a bad game, but I know Roll7 is capable of so much more.

Love the way you can push your movement to overcome the obstacles here, which was probably the reason I got so thoroughly lost and had to restart a couple of times- rarely outright denied from exploring an area and forced to turn around by some explicit check. Those couple of attempts also diverged in a really wonderful way, equipped with a slightly different moveset that dramatically recontextualized some of the early-game challenges and showed the robustness of the fundamentals here. As gratifying as the full kit is to work with, I’m really curious to see how much here is possible with a paired down moveset (In retrospect, I kind of relish how cluelessly I was able to push through some of the areas!)

Was left wishing more had been done with its dreamworld imagery (the sight of some floating furniture got me unreasonably excited for an area akin to Thief's “The Sword”) but the layers of the castle, from its stained-glass skies to the fleshy halls of the underbelly make for an evocative playspace: enough binding to give everything some catharsis. Final fight also ends up being a great capstone to the whole thing, marrying the combat and movement in a suitably climactic way. Thought the healing upgrades were a little unnecessary at first, but the fight has more than enough teeth to vindicate finding a few of them; same goes for nuances like being able to reflect projectiles and bouncing off enemies when you attack them, moves that felt like nice additions suddenly given new meaning in its last moments.

Easy recommendation from me. Perfect game to play in the twilight haze of the Summer.