This game came out earlier this month on Switch (although apparently it's like a year and a half old on PC), and Gunstar picked it up and was enjoying it, so I decided to pick it up as well. I love me a good Metroidvania, after all. Around 15 or so hours later (no in-game clock that I could find) I had finished with it after quite the turbulent experience with it. It was a series of ups and downs that while I did enjoy most of it, there was a lot else I didn't so much.
Cathedral's story is pretty bare bones. Honestly it sits fairly nicely next to Demon's Crest as far as how much story there actually is. The game drops you, a nameless (no one even ever calls you "Armor." You literally never have a name of any description) mute suit of armor into the titular cathedral, and you need to find your way out. You soon come across a mischievous spirit named Soul, and they tag along with you since they don't know much of anything either. You go on a quest to collect five McGuffin orbs from around the land in order to open a big scary gate that the world eater sealed himself behind. It's a fine enough thing to set up the story, but it's not really engaging in any respect. It doesn't really have to be, granted, but even the limited dialogue in the game is largely forgettable even more than something like The Messenger, which was at least kinda funny from time to time. This game sorta has one joke (you don't talk, LOL!) and other than that some characters are kinda weirdly rude to each other. But this is a Metroidvania, story doesn't need to be the reason we're here. And that's for the most part backed up by the gameplay. One look at any screenshot and most people will probably get BIG Shovel Knight vibes, and while the level design isn't nearly that good, it's still a pretty good action game. You can swing your sword left and right and you also have a Duck Tales-style downward thrust to bounce off of enemies. However, unlike in something like Shovel Knight or Duck-Tales where attacking downward means you're attacking downward, you have more of a thrust downwards in Cathedral, so you need to use timing to hit your targets. The game has a lot of little features like that to make the game just that much harder because it can, but we'll get to more of that later. There is a succession of sub-weapons you can get that either allow for a ranged attack or for platforming help. You can also get upgrades like a double jump, a dash, a hover, and a sort of remote block pushing move, but the game has an odd approach to most of your upgrades. You get them in the form of charms, and you equip them at a charm shrine, but you can only have one at a time equipped for each type (a couple of really ignorable combat ones as well as the two movement and two Soul-related ones mentioned above). It's kinda a neat design idea to have to pick between a dash and a double jump, but then the game just gives you a charm that has the powers of both, so that whole factor of decision making doesn't actually matter, and that "it just does both" thing is something you get for all three types of charm. These charms largely just amount to giving you platforming challenges in a very inelegant way, and it's pretty annoying to have to backtrack in certain points if you happened to choose the wrong charm for the job. It's not a huge span of the game that has you yo-yo-ing between charms like this, but it's still just not super fun. It's a very neutral addition to the game's design rather than outright bad or good. The game honestly has a lot of weird little design choices that make it just that much more irritating to play. There some little things, like your hitbox actually being far smaller than your sprite, which led me to falling off of platforms in the early game a fair bit because of thinking I was wider than I really was, but there's a lot more than that. The game is weirdly stringent about health, and warp points and check points don't refill health despite acting as respawn points (so you effectively get healed there if you die). You've gotta find a health shrine or a healer for that, and that only seems to be a way for the game to increase your ultimate death counter (I had about 86 deaths) because it can. Just getting healed at check points and warp points would've made the game way better. This is especially because, like Dark Souls, your healing is actually much more important than your health, and finding more health bottles (which are effectively estus flasks charges) is gonna keep you alive WAY longer than finding more heart containers is. It just adds up to you dying more because the game hates you, I guess. This extends to UI and button layout as well, as the game just doesn't seem to have enough face buttons at times. Granted this isn't entirely the game's fault by any stretch of the imagination, but it just doesn't feel very tightly designed in that regard. Especially for the boss guarding the McGuffin door, I just felt like it'd be so much better if I could assign sub-weapons to different buttons instead of scrolling through them with R and L. Granted you can equip and unequip weapons from that R&L scroll list, which is cool, but even still you've gotta CLICK THE RIGHT STICK in order to pop a health potion. Feeling sloppily designed is felt nowhere more than the difficulty. Like the last Metroidvania I played, Demon's Crest, this game has an inverse difficulty curve problem but way worse than that. The dungeon leading up to the 3rd orb fight, the Bone Church, especially is a really awful time to get through and you'll likely be dying constantly because of how hard the flying enemies are to kill as well as with just how quickly they can kill you. The bosses are often pretty well designed and good 2D action fights, but occasionally you will run into one that will just brick-wall your progress (the 2nd orb fight was my personal nemesis in that regard, but I had a good deal of trouble with that door-guarding boss I mentioned before as well). The game got progressively easier after that 3rd dungeon, even to the point where the final boss only took me three tries to beat. It was a much more fun level of challenge than the game had been getting there, but it felt more like the game was just better designed, not so much that I had necessarily gotten better at the game (and having a lot more health bottles helped a lot too, to be sure). It's not really a black mark, per se, but the difficulty issues the game has are definitely a big caveat in my recommending it to anyone. The presentation of the game is really solid, even if it feels very derivative of Shovel Knight. Though this game does have quite good music and really pretty super-retro (pixelated but high animations) graphics, they're both SO derivative of what is probably one of if not the most successful and popular indie game ever that I cannot ignore the similarities in good conscience. They're good, but it makes the game feel overly derivative and without a real sense of personal style, and that isn't helped by just how "whatever"-levels of ignorable the plot and writing are. Verdict: Recommended. For all the issues the game has, when it's good it's good and it made me wanna keep playing. It's a really solid, if very noticeably unpolished game, but only people who are really comfortable with 2D action games should give it a look. There are a lot of much better Metroidvanias on Switch you could better use your $15 on, in my opinion, but you won't have a bad time with Cathedral if you know what to expect. I look forward to the next game this studio makes, because Cathedral has a lot of potential design-wise, and some spit and polish would make a Cathedral 2 (for lack of a better prospective title) a really stand-out title in the genre.
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This is one on the Switch Online SNES service that I've had a mind to play for a while but finally got down to actually doing when I was helping a friend with their fundraising Twitch stream last weekend. I had night crew duty, so once the other night crew went to sleep and I didn't have friends to play Kirby with anymore, I cracked open this to play on stream. I ended up beating it juuust as the person hosting the stream woke back up, but then I put a few more hours into it to get the best ending (or at least to try to XP). It's not the hardest SNES game I've played, but it's up there for sure. It took me around 6 or so hours to beat the SNES version of the game on the Switch Online service with limited save state use.
Demon's Crest is the third and final game starring Firebrand, the red demon from Ghosts 'n' Goblins. 1000 years ago, a demon named Phalanx defeated Firebrand and threw him in the underworld's arena, and that's where the game starts. However, at the end of this match, the force of defeating your foe makes a shockwave powerful enough to break a hole in the wall to freedom! After once again dispatching your previously-not-actually-dead dragony enemy, Firebrand sets off to set the underworld free from under the foot of the demon king Phalanx and his foul machinations. Firebrand himself is a silent protagonist, and there ultimately isn't that much story in the game save from talking with the one demon NPC in the city and then with Phalanx himself. There are several endings to the game, depending on how much of the collecting you've done: If you go to fight Phalanx immediately, if you collect all 6 power crests, and if you collect EVERY item (very much like how Mega Man X hides its super weapon), and Phalanx gets harder for each better ending you want, gaining first an actual dungeon (it's not finished yet if you go too early XD) and a second form, and then a much more powerful third form. Beating the game even nets you a secret password for a new game+ with a new powerful gargoyle form and you can fight a much MUCH MUCH harder true final boss. Phalanx, like the rest of the bosses in the game, is a pretty good fight (though his third form is a bit too tricky to be much fun, I found), but the true final boss (some "out of nowhere" actual strongest demon simply named Dark Demon) is an absolutely awful test of luck and endurance and I didn't have the patience to actually kill him for his ending (I gave it an hour and a half of my life and I won't give it any more XP). The gameplay itself is a bit different from the other Gargoyle's Quest games, playing a bit more like the weird Metroidy cousin to a Mega Man game than the sort of weird cousin to Zelda 2 the other GQ games play like. There's a Mode 7 map to fly around in, and from there you go to locations (some of which are pretty well hidden, but those are optional) and those locations are your levels. Even the game's one town is actually a level. This is functionally your level select screen, much like a Mega Man game. However, each level has multiple paths leading to different bosses (not to mention oodles of hidden power ups and secrets), so the game's 6 levels feel more like 10-ish. Of those goodies are pieces of vellum you can get spells put onto (which I never actually used since they're not that useful), bottles to put potions into (which can do everything from teleport you out of a level to giving you a full heal), or even give you new modes of fire. Finding all of the variations on Firebrand's normal fire breath actually nets you one of the crests you need for the best ending, although these breaths themselves tend to be either used for progression (breaking breakable blocks) or just slight power upgrades. Speaking of progression, Firebrand's main mode of travel is jumping, clinging to walls, and then a hover he can do indefinitely until he gets hit. That hover kinda compromises how levels can be designed, and so they tend to be pretty dangerous and narrow so you can't just fly over everything. Additionally, as you find the actual crests (all rewards for beating bosses, Mega Man-style, although not every boss drops a crest, and most actually drop health upgrades, Zelda-style), you also get rewarded with new gargoyle forms! These forms let you charge through barriers, not just hover but fly, and even swim in water. Unfortunately, you can't have the previously mentioned Firebrand breaths at the same time as a crest form, and especially once you get later forms that are literally just super-powered up Firebrand, the extra breath forms kinda become either extremely situational or outright useless (I basically never used them at all). The level design isn't Capcom's best, but it's still really solid and generally fun and fair feeling. Really, Firebrand's kinda slow movement and the general difficulty of the game hurt the flow of the level design more than anything. Talking about the difficulty, it's kinda a weird one. Because the game has a level select (although more levels are opened up later as you get more gargoyle forms, so you can't go genuinely anywhere at the start), the difficulty at the start is one of those cases where there's an intended path, but you can do it in many potential orders. What order you take will determine what order you fight bosses in, and some like Flier SUCK as far as how maneuverable they are compared to you and just how much health they have. The game has a real "inverse difficulty curve" problem, where it starts out hard and gets easier as you go on, but largely because you're just more survivable, as well as just getting better at the game. The more moderately difficult parts of the game are good fun, but the more punishing stuff (particularly those hardest bosses) feel more clumsily designed than a genuinely fun challenge. Thankfully, the game is pretty ahead of its time in that it doesn't have any life or continue system. It uses passwords to save progress, unfortunately, but you can have as many attempts at a boss as you want because you effectively have infinite lives. It's not an easy game, and it's definitely one of the harder Capcom games I've played, but overall the difficulty is pretty nice once you get past the bumpier beginning parts. The presentation is pretty nice, and about what you'd expect for a late-life SNES title. The music is pretty darn good. Nothing particularly MP3 player-worthy, but all good tracks that fit their environments well, as you'd expect from Capcom. It's also a very pretty game, making beautiful enemies and landscapes of the demon realm, though the animations are often limited. Later levels can hit a bit of slowdown, but it's nowhere near as bad as I'd heard it was, and overall the game ran really well. Even the slowdown that was there never impacted my ability to play it, which was nice. Verdict: Recommended. It's got some rough aspects to it, and the difficulty problems will definitely turn some people off, but this is a really solid game! The physical cart is hideously expensive, but the Switch Online service is a really great way to experience this game. If you want some Mega Man-ish, Metroidvania-y fun in a SNES-era style, this is a great way to spend a weekend~ And so ends my journey playing/replaying through the Paper Mario games. This was definitely a breath of fresh air after having just played Super Paper Mario, but it was also very neat to see just how many of the seeds of what would ultimate ruin SPM are used to such good effect here (whether knowingly or not). Though not my favorite of the series, it's definitely the best out of the original 3 as far as I'm concerned. I was even having so much fun that I actually beat the Pit of 100 Trials for the first time ever~. It took me 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game (confusingly enough called "Paper Mario RPG").
Princess Peach is traveling when she comes to the seedy port town of Rougeport (or "Gorotsuki Town" in Japanese), where she buys a mysterious treasure map. She sends it on to Mario and asks him to come join her there to help look for the treasure, but she's kidnapped while he's in transit. It turns out the treasure map leads to the legendary Crystal Stars, which themselves are the key to opening the titular legendary Thousand Year Door which lies in the ruins under Rougeport. But Mario isn't alone in his hunt for the Stars. The X-Nauts (aka the "Megabatten" in Japanese) are also on the hunt for them, which is why they've kidnapped Princess Peach, to get her to tell them where the map is, and even Bowser is throwing his bumbling hat into the ring as well. The quality of the writing is overall very good. Like the first game in the series, this is a turn-based game where Mario is joined by a series of companions which each area progressively focuses on in some fashion. While the problem of a character effectively disappearing from the narrative (other than mechanically) after their particular chapter is over is still present, the bits they're included in are still very entertainingly done. The tone of the game is well balanced between the silliness of Mario & Co., and just how scheming and evil the leader of the X-Nauts, Batsugalf (I don't remember his English name ^^;) is. A balance that Super Paper Mario would later go on to tip wayyy out of balance in both directions to very negative effect. Princess Peach and Bowser also get their own parts as well. Peach's parts are very much like they were in the first game, as she explores her captor's headquarters to try and hunt for information for Mario, but she's also joined by the X-Nauts' base's computer AI, TEC. Though the whole subplot of "woman with EMOTIONS teaches emotionless computer to LOVE" is a pretty tired cliché even for 2004, they do it well here and it doesn't feel annoyingly done. Bowser also gets his own, much shorter segments, which are entirely comedy focused to balance out the more serious tones of Peach's segments, as he bumbles around far behind Mario, failing to do anything of import for nearly the entire game and making himself look very silly. The biggest narrative difference between the English and Japanese versions of the game is a relatively well known one in that Vivian, one of Mario's companions, is transgender. Confirming how this was done for myself (after totally missing it when I was younger and my Japanese was much worse) was one of the main reasons I wanted to replay this game again. While it isn't exactly a super great bit of representation, for the time (and even for now) it's pretty well done. Vivian's gender is treated as a source of stated but ultimately unimportant confusion for the protagonists. While they don't really understand it, they never do anything to treat her as anything else than a girl. There's a very clearly portrayed dynamic of "people who misgender her are the villains, and those who respect her gender are the protagonists", and I really liked that. It's ultimately a minor enough point that I can see why the English localizers erred on the side of caution in removing it, although I would say that it's a better piece of trans representation in a Nintendo game at the time than something like Mother 3. The mechanics and overall design of the game are basically "Paper Mario 64 but more and better" all around, with only a couple small exceptions. You're still going from area to area in 3D space (as opposed to Super Paper Mario's approach) exploring to fight baddies, gather info from NPCs, and look for goodies. The same fairly simple turn-based battles return from the N64 game, with Mario and a companion taking turns fighting against baddies and bosses. Mario still has HP for life, FP for special moves, and BP for equipping badges, and these can be upgraded upon a level up. Badges still give either passives or allow special moves to be done, but these systems have been modified in small ways here and there. For your companions, their move sets have been varied up a bit, and they've even been given their own HP bars just like Mario has (which get stronger when they're upgraded). An emphasis on making the companions more of a secondary Mario-level of ability extends to the badges as well, as there are many companion versions of Badges that need to be found and equipped separately from the Mario versions. Companions can't get whole new special moves from Badges like Mario can, but it really varies up the kinds of things you can do with Badges while still keeping the systems overall very familiar from the first game. If you liked how the first game played, you're gonna enjoy them here too. If you didn't like how the first game played, this isn't gonna change your mind. The only real negative aspects of the game have to do with some approaches to the presentation as well as some of the game's overall design. Some of the things relate more to how they feel on a replay, as there are a couple more mystery-based areas where you're looking for clues and such. On the first playthrough, they're fun, albeit a bit poorly signposted in places, but on a replay, they kinda drag compared to the rest of the game since the mystery is already solved and the drama surrounding them isn't terribly interesting. The game also has you backtracking a fair bit in certain areas and it really feels like padding. It's not unforgivable, but going through the dark forest and back again three separate times for the fourth crystal star is kinda lot. Then aside from that you have the battles, which are now not just aesthetically a stage, but literally a stage. There's an audience in front of them and a sort of back stage as well. This allows random things to fall from above you or the backdrops to land on you (and harm you), as well as the audience throwing good and bad things at you. While you can bop an audience member to not get something thrown at you (as long as you notice it in time), the stuff falling from the stage or the random freezing/mist effects are just totally RNG and not fun. They just make the battles frustrating because they only make them more of a chore, as you have no idea when they're coming. Battles are simply going fine but then oops! Mist time, so half of all attacks will miss until it decides to go away. You also can't pause during battles, so if you set the controller down to go answer the door and an audience member decides to throw something nasty at you, there was nothing you could've done about it. None of this stuff is game-breaking, but it's stuff that was routinely annoying in this as well as prior replays. The presentation is all around really quality. The graphics are really pretty using component cables to view them through (they make SUCH an impact for Wii & GameCube stuff. Using component cables for my Wii to play GC games with is one of the only reasons I have the Wii anymore XD). Although Mario gets a few paper folding techniques to traverse the world with, the whole "paper" aspect of it is still a more incidental aspect of the aesthetic than a way the world diegetically is like it is in Sticker Star and beyond. The music is all around quite good but I don't really find that much any of it sticks out for me as much as the music in the N64 game did. It all fits its respective locations appropriately, but nothing super duper memorable I'd wanna listen to again later. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is still my 3rd favorite of the series, but it's still a really excellent game. I think my time with the Paper Mario series over the past couple years has really helped me solidify my opinions on what makes a Paper Mario game really great, more than anything, and that's quality writing. It's what separates the really great ones from the utterly boring ones for me, and I never would've been able to pin that down without having played through the 3rd and 2nd games again. This is a really excellent GameCube game, and one well worth checking out if you want a well-written RPG with simple yet flexible battle mechanics. After playing through so many Paper Mario games a couple years ago, I'd been meaning to play through the others again, and the fun I had with Origami King pushed me to finally get to replaying the Wii and GameCube games. I couldn't find the GameCube one, so first up was the Wii game. While I have beaten this before, it was only once like 10+ years ago and it's not nearly as well engrained in my memory as the N64 and GameCube entries are. I remembered it not being my favorite, but liking the story all right. Where I'm at now that I've finished it is mostly just glad that I only paid 300 yen for this ^^;. It took me around 22 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game. While I didn't really rush through it, I definitely didn't go for 100%-ing the game.
Super Paper Mario starts with Mario & Luigi sitting at their living room table, as Luigi bittersweetly complains about how boring and peaceful everything is. Suddenly, a Toad rushes up announcing that Peach's Castle has been attacked, and the Bros. immediately rush over to Bowser's Castle to stop him! However, upon arriving, they're surprised to see that Bowser is at home simply preparing to make a move on Peach's Castle, and he's just as surprised as the Bros. are that she's been attacked. They're suddenly attacked by the evil Count Bleck (who is Count Noire in Japanese) who attacks Mario and spirits away Bowser, Peach, and Luigi. By having Peach marry Bowser, Bleck plans to use the power of chaotic love that spawns from it to destroy the universe and remake it in his own image. Mario awakens in Flipside (Hazama Town, in Japanese), where he meets Merlin and a Fairian named Tippi (who is simply "Anna" in Japanese). Mario then needs to go to a series of different worlds to collect the eight Pure Hearts to counteract the power of the chaotic love and defeat Count Bleck to save the universe! Compared to the other Paper Mario games (certainly the ones that came before it), even the basic plot summary is quite a lot to process, and that sets the tone for the rest of the game's writing. While there are funny and charming moments here and there, the massive bulk of the game is spent going from world to world engaging in neverending seas of uninteresting dialogue through one-note characters you almost never meet again, or through one-note characters you meet all the time who just never stop talking. Gone are the companions of previous games and in its place is Mario's companion Tippi, but she isn't much of a character until about 2/3rds through the game. While Peach, Bowser, and Luigi do eventually join up with Mario, they don't have a ton of commentary on the narrative either, and while the game's narrative does try to end strong, there just isn't enough buildup to actually make it feel all that significant. It feels like the seriously legwork of the interesting bits of the story are all held at the end, and the only things up to that point that really relate to it is foreshadowing too vague to really feel all that impactful even on a second playthrough. Between six main protagonists and six main antagonists (and those are conservative descriptions), the game is packed with too many characters with too little interesting to say, and the whole experience drags like heck because of it. The game has TONS of exposition that I just could not care about, and it really feels like a game whose main narrative thrust relies on you already caring about it without actually doing the work to give you reasons to care. The gameplay is very experimental and unique, but a lot of elements don't really flow together very well, and they end up exacerbating other problems the game has as a result. Super Paper Mario abandons the turn-based RPG style of the earlier games for an action RPG style that is also reminiscent of old Super Mario games. Rather than the chapter system of the old games, this game has stages with concrete beginnings and ends. There's sometimes an adventure game-like process to getting there, but generally it's just getting from the start to the end to get to the next bit. You walk around on a 2D plane and jump and hammer on enemies to deal damage (and characters like Bowser can breathe fire as well). There's a lot of platforming, with Peach having a parasol for hovering and Luigi having a spring jump to get up to really high places (which doubles as an attack). But the main draw is that Mario's special power is turning the world 3D to get up and around obstacles that the normal 2D perspective hides. In addition to that, in order to replace the companions whose narrative functions have been (fairly poorly) passed onto Tippi, their mechanical functions have been passed onto little fairies you find, who have purposes ranging from just a simple bomb to a hovering platform you can speed around on. All of this sounds good (albeit a little complicated) on paper, but the devil is in the details. The 2D nature of all of the level design makes them feel very same-y and unmemorable, as you don't even have turn-based battles to make you stay in a location longer to help get any kind of bearings to it. You're just getting from the start to the end. The 3D parts of them aren't much more interesting, as they're generally just barren rectangles, and you can only stay in 3D mode for so long before having to let the dimension-flipping power recharge, so that isn't really a viable method of exploration even if the 3D environments were interesting in the first place. The more adventure game-like stages are more memorable, but the puzzles in them range from annoying to blatant time wasting and backtracking. You're also constantly bringing up the quick menu to switch between characters and companion fairies, which breaks the flow of the already mediocre and flat platforming. Add in some fairly rough signposting, and you have a game with not just a boring story, but boring gameplay too. This is one of the only action games I can remember that I've nearly fallen asleep playing, and that in itself should say enough for just how good the actual gameplay is. The presentation of the game is pretty good, but still one of the weaker entries in the series. The graphics are colorful and bright, and the boss and character designs are also good. You don't spend all that much time with any of them, so the designs aren't super memorable, but what's there is fine. The music is also just an overall "fine" in quality. It may also have to do with just how much of the game is you just flying through levels, but none of the music really stood out to me as particularly memorable or good beyond just well suiting the atmosphere of the place you were in. None of it is bad, per se, but it's all definitely below most of the rest of the series for me. Verdict: Not Recommended. This really isn't a bad game, but with the experience I had with it, I simply cannot recommend it in good conscience. It's an interesting stepping stone from the turn-based RPG Paper Mario games to the turn-based action/adventure games they'd become, but aside from that it's mostly a pile of uncomplimentary experiments and gimmicks of both storytelling and game design. I think it's ultimately totally subjective, of course, but if I had to pick between the trudging, snail's pace design of this compared to the near total lack of a narrative in Sticker Star, I'd choose Sticker Star every time. At least that game has some pretty good music Xp This is a game I've owned since I was little but sold before I moved to Japan. While I have beaten it before, it's got a lot of nostalgic value for me, so I picked up this Japanese copy before too long, but only just got around to playing through it. I played through it twice by myself and then twice on stream on Twitch, and it was twice through the normal ending and twice through the harder ending. I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a review for it, but since I not only haven't written one before but also wanted to comment on changes between the English and Japanese versions, I felt one was warranted. I actually managed to get onto the high score table of my own second-hand cartridge, so I call that beating it enough for me (got a very respectable 1138 points~).
Star Fox 64, like the SNES original, is a rail shooter where you play as the titular Fox McCloud. Years ago, the evil Dr. Andross (or "Andolf", as he's hilariously called in Japanese XD), threatened the Lylat system with destruction, but he was thwarted by the actions of Fox's father. However, Fox's father was betrayed by Pigma, one of his companions, and didn't make it out alive. Now that Andross once again threatens the safety of the system, Fox has taken up his father's mantel with his mercenary group Star Fox to take down this threat. It's a fine story that sets up the stakes in a good way and the way the characters banter back and forth during missions (between both friend and foe) is really entertaining and memorable. The Japanese script is more or less pretty similar content-wise to the English version, but the tone is quite different in the slight deviations and especially the delivery. Where the English version is very silly and campy from start to end, the Japanese version is played much more straight and has moments of silliness in it. It can even get quite dark, with at one point Pigma taunting "Your daddy's waiting for you in hell!" (with the much deeper voice he has in Japanese). I don't really think it works as well as the English version does, but it does go a long way to explain the darker tones in later Star Fox games like Command and Assault. One last weird note is that the audio quality on the VA seems significantly less good in Japanese than it is in English, which is a shame, as this VA IS good, but it's just overall not quite as good a package as what the localization would become. The game itself is a series of 7 missions where you always start on Corneria and end on one of two possible versions of Venom (the normal one or the harder, true ending one), and there are 25 possible paths to take between the stages. Most of the stages have two possible ways to complete them, with one normal route and one secret route, with the secret routes generally leading to levels that give more points but are more difficult (and lead to the true ending fight). As a rail shooter it's super solid and well-remembered for a reason. Damn near everyone reading this likely knows just what Star Fox 64 already is and is like, so I'll be light on the details of the actual combat. You fly around collecting rings for health (or even health extensions), powerups to increase the power of your main fire, bombs to fire in emergencies, and even repair tokens to repair your wings if they get slammed off. You've gotta shoot all the enemies you can for a high score (and you know, not to die), and you can even use charged normal shots to kill several enemies at once for extra points~. Just be careful not to shoot down your companions! The bosses are super fun and challenging, and while most are in the 3rd person rail shooter sort of style most of the rest of the game is in, a handful of bosses (and even levels) are in an "all range mode" where you fly around a set map and dog fight with enemy fighters. Some levels don't have you in your spaceship at all, and you're in the land-bound Landmaster or the underwater submarine. Not all levels are made equal, but damn if they aren't super solid as a rule, and trying to get higher scores and different routes means that the fun you can have extends far beyond just getting the best ending. Verdict: Highly recommended. This verdict likely comes as no surprise. Y'all already know this is a great game, and I'm not here to contest that. It's a game I definitely prefer in English, but its quirks in Japanese are still very interesting and I'm glad I saw what the game has to offer in the differences present in the original. I've loved Paper Mario since I was a kid, and though the series has had its ups and downs, I really loved the Color Splash on the Wii U. When Origami King was announced, I was a big mix of emotions. Happy because there was more Paper Mario coming (as Color Splash being a late Wii U game meant that it didn't exactly sell well, especially being a direct successor to the very fairly unpopular Sticker Star on the 3DS), but also a little sad since it meant that Color Splash was almost certainly not getting a second chance at life on the Switch (and probably still won't). What I was pretty sure of was that I would enjoy it, even if I wasn't too sure what to make of the weird new battle system. I got some Christmas money from my family, so I thought that this was a fine a time as ever to finally pick up Origami King and see what all the fuss was about, and I'm really glad I did! It took me a week to 100% the game, and I'd reckon it took me about 40-ish hours in total to do that with the English version of the game.
Origami King opens with Mario & Luigi headed to Toad Town for the Origami Festival, but they arrive to find the place totally abandoned. Undaunted, they assume everything is actually totally fine and go into Peach's castle only to get kidnapped by a horrifyingly orgami-fied Peach. Mario finds a new friend, Olivia, a fairy folded by origami but who is friendly, and together they escape the castle along with a folded up Bowser, but not before being assaulted by the titular Origami King: Olivia's brother Olly. They narrowly escape the castle with the help of a Shy Guy swooping in with Bowser's clown car as five giant streamers wrap around the castle and take it to a far away mountain. With Olivia's help, Mario must embark on a quest to save the Princess and the Kingdom from the anger of the Origami King. Origami King is another game in the trend that has been established since Super Paper Mario, where it's Mario with a dedicated companion instead of the series of partners the first two games had. Olivia serves as your constant companion and is written delightfully. She's naïve but kind and silly, and I adored her just as much as I adored Huey in Color Splash (which is to say, a lot). Just like Color Splash, I found the humor and writing in this game as a whole to be very entertaining and funny, and it's easily one of the best localized games I've played. I really wanna play it in Japanese sometime to see just what the original was like, because it's definitely a game where I have a hard time imagining what the original is with just how well the translation is done. Origami King goes for a bit more heavier theming and plot beats than Color Splash did, but to mixed success. There's a pretty heavy plot beat in the middle of the game that I thought they pulled off pretty well, but the ending of the game leaves something to be desired. This isn't a spoiler-ing review, but I'll just say that it's an ending that I felt was a bit of a missed opportunity, since I don't think it would take THAT much to make it work much better. However, shaky ending or no, the writing is still very entertaining and is definitely one of the highlights of the game for me. While Olivia IS your constant single companion, that isn't to say that side-partners are entirely absent. Throughout the game Mario & Olivia are accompanied by several characters particular to that area of the game, and they provide some narrative and mechanical function. They can even take part in battle (which we'll delve into more later), but you don't control them directly. It's an interesting middle ground to walk between the new style and the old style, but I think they pull it off pretty well. They serve as important and defining elements to the places they're a part of, and then part from you when their necessity to that part of Mario's quest ends. Given that they don't have much mechanical purpose outside of their respective areas, this really isn't much different from how the older games would have characters functionally drop out of the narrative after their respective areas were finished, and this is a clever take on that. The exploration is more along the lines of Paper Mario & The Thousand Year Door than Color Splash, but Color Splash's influence is certainly there. It's one giant world like TTYD was, so the stages that you went between like Color Splash are gone, but there are still elements of completion that are kept track of for each larger area (which is very handy for if you're someone trying to do all the things like I did). I think the world is laid out well. Between usable items and collectibles, exploration always felt like I had something important I was looking for. Collectibles range from little statues of enemies and characters in the game to holes literally torn in the world that you can repair by throwing confetti at them (much like you would repaint the world in Color Splash). You get more confetti by bashing objects and killing enemies, and holes in the world are a good indicator for where you have and haven't been as well as to indicate important areas. Most importantly, though your supply of confetti at one time has a cap, it isn't used up if you aren't using it to repair holes, so you can fling confetti to your heart's content otherwise~. All of the areas feel very different and special in their own ways, from exploring the great sea in your boat to driving across the sand in your Kuribo's Shoe-like car, the game is really good at making each area feel different to play in as well as being memorable in their presentations. Now for the main meat of how this game differs from its predecessors: the combat. The weird ring-spinning combat was the big question that everyone was talking about when t he first trailers for this dropped about a year ago, and with good reason. It's very unlike any other turn-based game I've played, but it ultimately IS connected to the lineage of the post-TTYD games in many significant ways. Normal battles take the form of single-solution puzzles. Enemies are on four rings around Mario, and there are ten segments around him. Your goal is to use the 1 to 3 movements you have to arrange the enemies in either rows of 4 or blocks of 2x2 (adjacent to Mario) so you can attack them with either your jumps (for lines) or your hammer (for blocks), and if you manage to complete the puzzle, you get a 1.5 times attack power boost! An important thing to mention is that this is a successor to Sticker Star in that it is NOT an RPG. There are still no experience points here, and it is still that sort of "turn-based action/adventure game" genre that Paper Mario has dabbled in throughout the last decade, but I think this is definitely the best it's ever been. Though the puzzles in the early game are pretty dead easy, I was surprised at how difficult they got in the mid and late game. Thankfully, there's a training area in Toad Town that you can use if you want a smattering of ring puzzles to test your brain meats against, and there are even items you unlock around a third of the way through the game that just solves them for you or makes them much easier. It'd be really nice if that accessibility stuff was there from the start, but it's really nice to see it there at all. Now these ring puzzles are also timed, and so your brain is being tested against the clock. If you don't solve the puzzle in time, it's likely gonna be impossible to kill all of the enemies before you get hit (as ideally you should be able to win battles without taking damage if you can solve the puzzles your first try), but if you're in an area where you have a story companion, that companion gets an attack to (that sometimes fails, but it can be the difference between taking damage or not). And when you get hit, you get hit HARD. This isn't a particularly hard game, as health items are plentiful, cheap, and strong, but if you're abstaining from using them you can get the crap beaten out of you really fast. However, if you want more time to think, you can also just hold down the + button to feed coins in to the timer so you have more thinking time. You get LOTS of coins from battles (like hundreds to even thousands), and 100 coins is one second. You also have a collectible in the game in the form of folded or crumpled up Toads who need rescuing, and they'll sit in an audience around your fights. You can throw them money to have them give aid in the form of mostly solving puzzles for you, healing you, and even taking pot shots at enemies. Money is also used to buy items for combat, as this game has weapon degradation for your non-standard jumps and hammers. I found I rarely needed to buy more weapons with how often I found more just by exploring, but this is one more way that the big piles of cash you get from fighting enemies are your biggest incentive to fight them with the lack of EXP in this game. That money can even go towards accessories you can equip for passive bonuses in combat or even non-combat effects like changing what your confetti looks like or changing your sound effects. The money-combat reinforcement loop isn't perfect, and the weapon system doesn't suuuper justify its inclusion (it honestly feels like it's there just to give money a higher purpose other than buying the expensive accessories), but combat is largely a puzzle game in the first place, so this game's relation to combat is an odd one at best. I'm honestly not sure how they could've tweeked it to make it work any better, but I think what they have works in a fun way despite its flaws. However, that's just normal battles. You also have boss battles which are significantly different. While it's possible to win normal battles by just solving the one puzzle correctly, boss battles place the boss in the middle of the ring circle and Mario on the outside. You need you use arrange the arrows on the board to lead Mario ChuChu Rocket-style to different icons on the board, from the simple one that just lets you attack in the first place, to ones that double your attack power for a turn or let you attack again, to the big Vellumental Attack spaces. The big reason Olivia is helpful in your quest is that she's your window into the power of origami, and Vellumental attacks are how those manifest. Bosses always have gimmicks in how they manipulate the board to give you obstacles on how you can attack them and how easily, and the boss battles are easily one of the best parts of the game. The bosses (my favorites being the 3rd and 4th streamer guarding bosses) have tons of personality and it's always super fun to see how the next one will need to be tackled. Whittling down their defenses, exploiting an elemental weakness via a Vellumental attack, and then using Mario's own 1000-Fold Arms to give them a pounding serves as a satisfying and fun puzzle game that is finally a well-designed version of what Intelligent Systems has been trying to do via the Things system in the past two games. They've finally nailed it here, and if the normal bosses aren't hard enough for you, there are even accessory-less challenge modes you can fight the bosses in for an extra challenge. And on top of all that, there are even big Paper Macho 3D origami enemies wandering around the overworld that you fight in real-time, Super Paper Mario-style, to vary up the game's combat just that much more. There are even some bosses you fight this way, and while these parts of the game are definitely not a "Reason To Buy" in and of themselves, they're fun in their own right, and vary up the pacing of the game nicely in how they serve as unconventional mini-boss and proper boss fights. Finally there's the presentation of the game, which is continuing on the trend that Color Splash started of being absolutely fantastic. This is especially in the music department, as Color Splash and now Origami King have absolutely fantastic music. The game also looks absolutely beautiful, with the paper craft looking more, well, papery than ever before. They've been leaning into the paper gimmick more and more, and this game realizes that not just mechanically but visually as well in a really beautiful way. The visual design of the game is even good down to the way enemies are designed, as anything 2D is always friendly, and anything 3D and origami-looking is always an enemy, so there's never any question. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though not perfect, Origami King has finally succeeded in making something truly great in the post-TTYD-style of Paper Mario games. Intelligent Systems has finally found a winning formula for their puzzle-focused turn-based action/adventure weirdness they've turned Paper Mario into, and I'm all here for it. Where I had some reservations about putting Color Splash higher than TTYD in my personal rankings (and I still do put Color Splash just barely above TTYD, personally), Origami King is easily the new top of the pile for the series for me. Once again, Nintendo succeeds in making a game on Switch that, despite being relatively quite different from the other games in its franchise, is regardless a "best in series" contender. Continuing on from beating Mystical Ninja, I moved onto its immediate Super Famicom sequel to stream the following week. While the first SNES Goemon was a game I'd played nearly to completion before, I'd never played the second or third SNES games, so this was a pretty exciting look into how the series progressed from there. I was not let down, as while this isn't exactly a perfect fix, it's a huge step forward for the series to finally bring it out of the 8-bit era that the first SNES entry is still so rife with. It took me almost spot on 3 hours to beat the game via the Wii U virtual console with limited save state usage.
Goemon and Ebisumaru are enjoying a vacation on Okinawa when suddenly Sasuke appears and informs them that not only have the emperor and Princess Yuki been kidnapped, so has all of Oedo Castle! It's all the work of the evil general Magnus, and it's up to Goemon and friends to go across Japan (once again) and save it from the clutches of a vile interloper! There's a fair bit more story in this one than the last one, but it's still just all silly gags (and thankfully no homophobic or transphobic ones, at least not explicitly, as Ebisumaru himself is basically a walking gay joke). The silly stuff is good fun and the story does just as much legwork as it needs to to stich the gameplay together. That gameplay, while feeling very familiar, has changed a LOT since the first Super Goemon game (which I will call them from here on out, because it's a useful shorthand and the only actual difference between the Famicom and Super Famicom games' titles are long subtitles that I don't wanna type out entirely :b). First of all, joining the team of Goemon and Ebisumaru is now Sasuke, the clockwork ninja! Yae is in the story, but she's sadly not playable yet. However, I played through as Sasuke, and he brings a whole new assortment of weaponry to the team via his throwing kunai (which he can throw infinitely but are weaker than his normal slashes) and throwing bombs (which cost money). The game is still only two player co-op, but it's neat to have more options for playable characters. The old games' style of 2D platforming segments intermixed with town segments are still here, but that's been refined to what would become a standard for the series. No longer are you being attacked constantly in towns, and they now serve entirely as hubs for you to buy equipment at and ask around for information. This is made a lot easier as the game now has a Super Mario World-style world map (complete with castles that get destroyed once you beat them) that you walk around in from stage to stage. It's ultimately not that complex, save for a few extra stages unlocked by taking different routes/finding secrets in towns, but it's really welcome as a quality of life feature to replay stages and gear up safely in towns. The 2D platforming stages are largely the same in quality and caliber. There are technically more of them than in the last game (particularly due to the branching paths), but there are also less worlds in total, so there isn't thaaat much of a different in overall "CONTENT", if we're gonna weigh it that way. The quality of life features cannot go unstated though. Where a big problem in prior Goemon games is that they're just a bit too unforgiving with checkpoints, this game really goes the distance to improve that problem. Levels are overall smaller, tighter experiences based around one idea instead of one longer, drawn out thing. Even longer stages, such as the end of the game, that seem to be one long stage are actually subdivided on the world map. This means that even if you die midway through the final boss fight, for example, that you can pick up right from that phase shift, as each large stage of the final stage and even the boss fight's stages itself are split up into manageable pieces. This game even has a save battery in it to save your progress. I really never expected this level of QOL improvements from a Konami SNES game after how unforgiving the first Super Goemon game is, so this was a big plus for me. Another new thing is another new character: Goemon's own mecha, Goemon Impact! Following a formula a lot like the first N64 game (although not entirely like the rest of the SNES games), many boss fights are followed by a Goemon Impact segment where you first bash through a bunch of buildings and enemies to build up ammo and health for a first-person cockpit-view boss fight. Despite the rest of the game's boss fights and level design being top notch and really good, these Impact fights are honestly one of the lowest points of the game. Your health ticks down mid-fight, Adventure Island-style, so you not only need to avoid getting hit, but you also need to beat these fights quickly. It never feels like your cursor can aim quite fast enough, and some boss attacks I was never able to really figure out how to dodge correctly. They aren't absolute garbage, and they don't ruin the game as they're not super duper hard, but it's clear that Konami is still experimenting with how to make these actually enjoyable to play. The presentation is as excellent as ever. That reliable Konami musical score is bangin', and the graphics have been prettied up quite a fair bit since the last game. It's still very much Goemon, but the colors really pop, and the game has a ton of different music tracks and there wasn't a single miss among them, for my money. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really solid Japan-exclusive action/adventure game. If I had to hazard a guess as to why it never came out in English, I'd reckon it has to do with the several decade-long idea among Japanese devs that certain games were just "too Japanese" for Westerners to be interested in. It's not a perfect game, as I've already said, but it's a really solid entry and the quality of life improvements and generally better difficulty curve make it an easy game to recommend. The Goemon Impact segments do drag it all down, but not unforgivably so, by any means. Where Super Goemon 1 was more or less a 16-bit version of the formula of the 8-bit games, its sequel really takes leaps and bounds into the 16-bit era and the design improvements that went with it. It's a pretty easy game to play without knowing Japanese as well, and some fan translations recently came out for it as well. If you like action games, this is one you shouldn't let pass you by. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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