The only GB Mega Man game I owned as a kid was the second one, and I remember quite liking it. In my most recent Mega Man marathon craze, I thought it was about time I give some time to the other GB Mega Man games, and I picked up the first one to finally give it a go. It took me about 3 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game on my GameBoy Player.
The plot is very standard Mega Man, even for Mega Man. Dr. Wily wasn't actually defeated even though you thought he was, so you'll need to go back and defeat the four old robot masters he's reconstructed to put him away "once and for good" (I'm sure we'll get him this time, everyone ;b). This being a GameBoy game, it is in more of a GB-sized package in not just literal format but in gameplay as well. Unlike the NES counterparts, there are only four robot masters to select from at the start. Even though this game started development and was released after Mega Man 3, there are four stages containing bosses from Mega Man 1 which you can pick from at the start. Though the bosses themselves are ones you've seen before, their stages are totally new, and even their patterns can be quite different. I often found the bosses here to be re-balanced in a way that made them much more enjoyable fights than the NES games, particularly Ice Man and Fire Man. Of course, after those four main stages, you have a handful of Dr. Wily stages containing their own bosses, but instead of a boss rush of bosses you've already fought, it's four more bosses from Mega Man 2. Though these fellows don't have their own stages, they do grant their powers after defeating them, and they also are followed by this game's sole unique robot master, Enker, who also gives his own special power after being defeated. Overall, the bosses are pretty darn solid, and I really liked the reworks they received to make them make more sense on a GB-sized resolution. The stages are generally pretty well designed and fun, but damn are they hard. Despite coming out after Mega Man 3, you have no special platforming tools or E-tanks to aid you in this adventure. Some stages, particularly that five-boss Wily stage at the end, are really damn tough to do with only three lives, even fighting bosses with their weaknesses. This is easily one of the hardest games in the series that I've played. The game also doesn't have the best difficulty curve, with some robot master stages being quite significantly harder than others. It's not quite Rock Man 2 levels of hard, but it's not gonna be easy to get to Dr. Wily at the end. This has to do not just with the aforementioned lack of help devices, but also with the GB's natural resolution. In order to get that same look the NES games have, Mega Man is quite big on screen. The stages are generally designed around this, but stages and boss fights can still quite often feel cramped. The presentation is quite nice, if nothing really unexpected. The large sprites look right out of the NES game, and are very pretty on the GB screen. The framerate manages to be quite stable and solid too, thankfully. Although there isn't much new designed for this game, what is there looks pretty too, and Enker is a robot master as faithful as any. The music is largely recycled tunes from the NES games, but that isn't really a bad thing. Good music is still good music, although on that note, it's a shame that a lot of it is from Mega Man 1, as that game has a decidedly weaker soundtrack than its two immediate sequels. Verdict: Recommended. This is a really solidly done portable version of Mega Man. The difficulty and slight areas that need design polish are really the only things that makes it at all difficult to recommend. If you're a Mega Man fan, this is definitely a game you should pick up, especially given that it's only a few bucks on the 3DS Virtual Console, and a relatively cheap game to acquire physically.
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This is a game I've known about for ages, but only got a proper look at a little while before I ended up buying it when I caught an episode of GCCX it was on. I then luckily managed to find one being sold in my town, and was super excited to finally give it a go. It definitely wasn't what I thought it'd be, given that it was a Konami game released in 1988, but that was more often a good thing than a bad thing XD. It took me around four hours to beat the game on the original hardware.
The world is under threat from the evil alien Waruda, and he's locked up just about all the Konami heroes that could stop him! But fear not, as Dr. Cinnamon has a plan to save it! Enlisting the help of Konami Man and Konami Lady (as this game has co-op play~), he uses his teleportation machine to get them to where they need to go so they can save all the captured heroes to finally take down Waruda once and for all. This is in a certain respect an adventure game, but the story is all just silly fun to enable the crossover goodness, and I'm all good with that~. The gameplay involves you going to several side-scrolling worlds to rescue the Konami hero trapped in each. You start with Konami Man and Konami Lady, but you'll eventually come to rescue Ganbare Goemon, Simon Belmont, Getsu Fuma (from a Japan-only Konami RPG of the same name), Mikey (from the Goonies), a walking Moai head from Gradius, and even King Kong (who Konami also made a game or two about). Each character has their own method of attacking, as well as nominally different attack, defense, and speed values. You can pick from any of the first six stages, but there is actually an order you have to play them in due to the Metroid-like style the game is put together. The levels are often fairly linear with some limited branching paths, but each character has an attribute or ability special to them that will allow you to progress through a certain other character's stage. For example, King Kong can jump higher than any other character, so only he can get over the relatively high wall blocking progress the hell stage that Getsu Fuma is hidden at the end of. Each character has their own normal attack, but each also has a projectile weapon that can be found hiding somewhere (almost always in their own stage), but the thing is that they themselves must pick it up. There are even some passive pick ups that effect everyone, like boosting your attack or defense permanently. The game also has some interesting but ultimately effective ways to control all of these characters and weapons with only two buttons. You press up and jump to change character outside of the pause menu, and down and jump to change from melee to ranged weaponry and back. It can get a bit confused at times, but it all works pretty darn well in the end. Though the main way this isn't the typical Konami game from this era is in its relatively fairly challenging (as opposed to frustratingly difficult) difficulty, there are absolutely annoying, janky things about it in places. For starters, each character only gets one "life" at a time, so if Goemon jumps down a pit and dies, you'll need to play as someone else until you can bring him back. Meaning if he dies before he gets an item only he can have, you gotta exit and come back to try again. This can be extra annoying if the only character who can actually progress through a roadblock in the current area dies, as then you're basically forced to game over and continue to progress. When you continue, you return to only Konami Man and Konami Lady alive back at Dr. Cinnamon's base, where you can revive dead characters at any time. However, it costs 100 ammunition to bring characters back from the dead, and having to grind out 600 bullets (at five at a time) even from safe, easy grinding spots takes a while and is just so annoying. Especially given that this game is far from easy, it's just not so hard compared to other Konami games from time. It's not a deal-breaker, and the game does have an eleven-character password system you can use if you don't mind going back to before the things you just did at the cost of having whoever was alive then back again, but it's still an unfortunate annoyance that really doesn't respect the player's time. The presentation are really nice. The levels all look very different from one another, and the characters sprites are all well designed, if a bit simply animated. What's both cool and unfortunate is that the stages themselves don't usually have music. Instead, the characters have their own music, almost always an upbeat iconic tune from the series they're from (for example, Simon has the Vampire Killer theme). Thankfully, it's all good music that's well mixed here, but it's an odd quirk nonetheless. Verdict: Recommended. It's got some annoyances in its design, but Wai Wai World is overall a very surprisingly solid and well-balanced game, particularly for when it came out. It isn't a particularly expensive import, and it's also not a game where text is all that important either, so there isn't much of a language barrier if you're willing to stumble through the dialogue sequences you gotta do to get your passwords and revive people. If you want a more linear Metroid-like NES game with the difficulty balancing of a Mega Man-type game, you'll likely find a lot to enjoy with this game. Known as "Red Arremer: Makaimura Gaiden" in Japanese, this is a game I know I owned as a kid in English, but I don't really remember if I beat it or not. I had so much fun with Demon's Crest earlier in the year, I decided to pick up this (and a GameCube and a GameBoy Player ^^;) so I could play more of Firebrand's series on stream~. It took me just about dead-on two hours to beat the Japanese version of game on stream.
The game opens with a text scroll about how the underworld is under attack my a mysterious army, and a few dying monsters relate that directly to Firebrand as you start the game. Getting through the first stage past the gates of hell, you enter into the underworld to a grim sight. The underworld is crawling with the lackeys of the lord of destruction, Breager. He was defeated eons ago by a legendary hero, and you're entrusted by the lord of the underworld to do it again! There are a few characters in the game who are silly fun in a way, but this is a GB game from 1990 (the first GB game Capcom even put out, so far as I can tell), so we're here for action more so than story, and the game knows that. Gameplay-wise, this game plays like Zelda 2 had a baby with Mega Man. You have an overworld you walk around in and can get in random battles into, and you also how towns you can enter as well as dungeons to get through to progress the story. The overworld and towns are from a Zelda 1-like top-down perspective, but all the action is sidescrolling that feels more like Mega Man. You get upgrades to your health, jumping/flying power, and attack power as the game goes on, but I don't think any of it is actually optional. The game is for all intents and purposes stage-based with the illusion of a more open experience, as most often beating the big dungeon and/or boss of the section of the world map you're in will dump you into an area that you can't return from. That said, the adventure parts, isolated between stages as they may be, may be simple but are still well executed for what they are. As evidenced by how I beat it in two hours, it's not a super duper long game, but you do have a password system to let you come back and play it in multiple sittings if you want to. But this is first and foremost an action game, and that's where the game really delivers. Firebrand has a main attack of spitting fireballs, and different fire breaths can be acquired through the course of the story that have different power levels and effects such as making temporary safety blobs on spiked walls, but you generally just always wanna use the most recent one you got. You can also hover with your wings for limited (at first) amount of time. The level design and boss design is pretty darn solid, but the game's main issue is a serious inverse difficulty curve problem. The first and especially the second bosses are really hard because you only start the game with two hearts between you and death. It's not an impossibly hard game, but just getting past the start can be really daunting. And that's unfortunate, since the rest of the game is generally really well balanced and fun, but that first hurdle is likely going to frustrate even people like myself who are quite comfortable with Capcom's action games. The presentation is pretty good, even for this early in the GameBoy's life. Sprites are fairly well detailed and environments are as well. The music is also quite good, as one would expect from any Capcom game of this era, with my personal favorite being the theme that plays in Breager's Castle. Verdict: Recommended. This is a really solid, if short, action platformer with an action/adventure twist. It's hardly Capcom's best 2D game, let alone their best GameBoy game, but it's still a very enjoyable, if a bit frustrating, way to spend an afternoon. Known as "Moguranya" in Japanese (a portmanteau of the Japanese word for "mole" and the English word "mania", and also oddly enough the name of the main character in the Japanese version), this is a game that's been recommended to me for years, but I only just got around to finally giving it a go. I recently picked up a GameCube and a GameBoy Player, so I finally have a way to play GameBoy games again. I also found a copy of this for 300 whole yen at the resale place where I picked up my GameCube and such, so it was an easy choice to pick it up. Unfortunately, the save battery was dead, so I had to beat it in one sitting, but I probably would've beaten it in one sitting anyway because of how addicting it is X3. I 100%'d the Japanese version of the game over the course of a little over 6 hours. The game stars the main character Moguranya in a quest to save his family. The game opens with the cabbage farmer Jinbe angry that the moles keep stealing his cabbages, so he takes things into his own hands and kidnaps Moguranya's whole heckin' family, all seven children and his wife, and leaves Moguranya a taunting note daring him to try to get them back. Being a loving father, Moguranya of course immediately sets out on a quest to rescue his family and teach Jinbe a lesson. It's a fairly light story, but there's quite a bit of fun, silly dialogue given to you via signs in each level written by both the bosses of that world as well as from the elderly mole who serves as your tutorial giver as well as checkpoint bearer. There are also fun little vignettes of Moguranya and his rescued kids every time you beat a world (very much like older Kirby games have), which add to the silly fun of it all. But the real meat here is the gameplay, and the gameplay that's here is basically a Sokoban game (warehouse block pushing), but probably the most fun version of that I've ever played (especially granted it's a genre I don't generally enjoy). The game has seven worlds (with world 8 just being a boss rush) of many rooms each, and the goal of each room is to get a boulder to the rock wall at the end to break it and allow you to progress to the next room. There are also 20 cabbages in each level to collect by rolling them into a hole, as well as a map, radar, and time trial mini-game against Jinbe which also add to the score you get at the end of each stage (although 100%-ing the game doesn't actually do anything, so far as I can tell). What sets this apart from other Sokoban games isn't just the very forgiving difficulty, but the fact that it not only auto-saves after every room you complete (probably why the save battery in mine is dead ^^;), but it also has unlimited lives and you respawn at the start of a room just as you entered it. While there are enemies and tough, well-designed bosses, getting killed at the action parts will never send you way-way back, and they're just as much a part of the puzzles as the walls and boulders are. You also have a large degree of control as to how you manipulate the boulders, cabbages, and other obstacles you'll encounter. You can push them, pull them, and also launch them forward and behind you by flipping them over yourself. This means that while it may be possible to make a room unsolveable so you need to backtrack a room to reset it, you'll never get stuck or have to redo large swaths of content like so many other Sokoban games. You're also a mole, so naturally you can dig too, giving every room two layers to consider in your goal to solve the puzzle therein. The level design is really well done, and although the difficulty curve is a bit up and down in a weird way at times, it always feels so satisfying when you finally solve the room. That difficulty curve issue, if you can even call it that, is really the only major issue the game has, if you can really call it that. There's a weird feeling to having one room that takes you some 15 minutes to finally wrap your head around and complete, and then have it followed by several that you almost instantly figure out, but it's not really a bad thing. Though this game does suffer from that Lemmings-style of "okay, I know what to do, now I just gotta DO it" that many action-puzzle games suffer from. The game should also really heal you whenever you complete a room, as there are heal rooms run by the elderly mole, so you can just backtrack through safe, completed rooms to get healed when you're really hurt, and it doesn't really make much sense not to just heal you every time you win a room. But again, these are really small complaints. The presentation is also really what you'd expect from a first-party Nintendo game. It may only be a GameBoy game, but the sprite work is really excellent, as are the animations. It looked really nice even on a big TV~. The music is also very good, and has a very Kirby-like feel to it (despite not being a game made by HAL). Verdict: Highly Recommended. I'm definitely not the first person to recommend people play Mole Mania, and I highly doubt I'll be the last. It's an excellent puzzle game with a super addictive "just one more room!" feel to it that is never consistently soul-crushingly hard. It's not a super hard physical game to find, and it's also on the 3DS Virtual Console, so this is a pretty easy game to pick up legit too. If you're a fan of puzzle games, this is absolutely not a game to sleep on~ This is yet another game I rented as a kid but never ended up beating. With all of the 3D Sonic games I've played over the past year, this is a game I've had in my sights for a while. Being from the same generation as the 3D Sonics I've played, I view Billy Hatcher as very much a sister game to things like Sonic Adventure and such. Just in time for Easter, I played this over two streams (one week apart) and beat it in around eight hours, and then played a bunch more after the stream to get 53 out of 60 emblems (all I could be bothered to get XP) for a total of about 15 or so hours.
Billy Hatcher tells the story of the titular character, Billy, and his friends. They're taken by the god of chickens to Morning Land, which has fallen to the might of the crows who seek to bring eternal night to Morning Land. If that happens, then eternal night will come to all worlds, so Billy is here to save Morning Land and defeat the crows! There's a bit of exposition and such in the levels from the elders of each of the worlds you explore, but really the story is pretty unimportant and is largely just here to set up the action. What the action is, is simultaneously one of the best mechanically conceived games Sonic Team (Japan or USA) put out that generation, but also easily its hardest. Billy gets the chicken suit in the first level, and you use it to push eggs around to pick up enough fruit to get them big enough to hatch them. The eggs you find are your gameplay lifeblood, as they augment your speed and jumping abilities as well as allow you to attack at all. You can also hatch them to get power up items or little animal companion friends (some of which are even other Sonic Team characters like Sonic or even Nights!) whom you can use for special attacks to fight the many enemies you'll encounter over the seven worlds of the game. There are seven worlds, and they have a very Mario 64-style to how they're set up. The first mission is saving the elder of that world, and then the second is defeating the boss of the crows in that world, and the other missions in the world are either one of a set of generics ("defeat 100 enemies!") or one unique to that world. The worlds themselves don't change, but your starting location and mission objective to get the courage emblem do. Like I said, very Mario 64. While you only NEED to beat the first two (of eight) stages in each world, you actually need 25 emblems in order to unlock world seven whose first stage hides the final boss. The game doesn't tell you that, though, and it'll be mean enough to let you FINISH level 6-3 and then just tell you you don't have enough (but not how many you actually need) and then once you have enough you gotta do that WHOLE (quite hard) stage again. It's not unforgivable, but it's a very weirdly bad piece of design considering that Mario 64 turned 9 years old the year this game game out. The game is overall pretty darn tough, and even though you start the game with six extra lives, you can tear through them really quickly in later worlds because this game LOVES bottomless pits. It also loves pretty merciless checkpoints in its later stages too. Doing the bouncing on the eggs and dashing on the eggs across small platforms also takes a lot of getting used to, and my gosh do the last handful of stages love having you do that. The level design of the game is pretty solid, but as soon as the third world, it's very consistently unforgiving. There're also the rails your egg can ride along, which are awful in that if your egg is small, there's a good chance the egg will just bug out and pass right through the rail. Controlling the egg itself can also be a pain, as you simply walk up to the egg to start pushing it, and then you walk away to leave the egg. The only issue is that "walking away" and "turning" are quite similar things in a 3D platformer, and there were many times when I didn't or did mean to leave an egg, but the controls conspired to make me to the opposite and I ended up dying. Given that the Z-button literally isn't used at all, a dedicated "interact" button for the eggs would've been really appreciated. Adding up all of that level design meanness, the control issues, and the bugs (which are present enough to be annoying, but not enough to kill the game overall), you will likely get quite a few game overs before you reach the end of the game's story. As expected for a Sonic Team game, the music and presentation are pretty damn good. The game has a lot of really fun music, and all the character designs are great. Billy's friends and the boss enemies in particular are really well designed, and the boss fights too are (usually) really good fun (my personal favorite being the world 6 boss, with my least favorite being the final boss, as they do that whole "learn a whole new mechanic to beat this boss" nonsense and it makes the whole thing feel awkward and unfair). It feels weird that Billy's friends are restricted to their own special stages (rescuing each of them unlocks a 6th, 7th, and 8th mission in each world respectively) instead of just being generally selectable, given that all of them play identically, but it's not a huge horrible deal in the end. Verdict: Recommended. Warts and all, I enjoyed my time with this game. It's definitely one of the harder 3D platformers I've played over the years, and certainly in the GameCube generation of consoles, but it's still worth checking out. If you can pick it up for a reasonable amount, or you just enjoy a challenge in your 3D platforming, this is one you will likely find worth your time. Even when I'm not marathoning several of them back to back, I co-stream on Twitch with a friend of mine every weekend and watch her play them X3. Well a couple weeks back, like the first time I started playing Atelier games, I got so in the mood to play more of them after watching her play them, I decided to finally play through Atelier Elie. I was so into playing Atelier Elie that I beat it in like two days over some of my last days of spring vacation, which likely speaks well to how much fun I was having X3. Using a guide to make sure I hit the flags for the ending I wanted, I got the best ending after playing for like 20 or so hours.
Atelier Elie is the second game in the series, coming out in 1998 when not much of the quite prolific series had been codified yet, and is a pretty direct sequel to Atelier Marie, although not starring her. You play as the titular Elie, a student at the alchemy academy that Marie was trying to desperately to not fail out of in the first game. Saved by Marie (who had gone to be a philanthropic, itinerant alchemist in the canon ending to the first game) from an illness thought terminal, Elie journeyed to Salburg from her tiny village to learn more about this powerful thing called alchemy that somehow saved her life. You have a few classmates whom you both have academic/romantic rivalries with as well as get into hijinks with, and there are a lot of returning characters from the first game peppered about the place (even Marie herself~). Your goal is to graduate the academy at the end of four years there, with a nearly identical normal ending win condition as the first game (which makes sense, given you're graduating from the same place only a few years later). However, there are quite a few beyond that as well, including a two-year extension that's effectively a grad school program if you've managed to do well enough during the first two years. Atelier Elie is effectively the first game but "more and better" in just about every regard, and that also includes the story. You have more characters and more events with them, and following along for the best ending even sets you along a path of discovery that Atelier Totori would go on to pay homage to and evolve upon many years later (complete with your own sea serpent to fight!). In a bit of an odd turn compared to the rest of the series, you even have a few potential romance options. Though mechanically they're what would effectively become character endings in later games, it's still a neat oddity for the series. It's a sweet game with lots of fun slice of life goodness. It's still nowhere near the level where we have significant larger themes or character arcs quite yet, but what's there is entertaining and lighthearted in a way very similarly charming to the other handful of Atelier games, and I really enjoyed it~. Mechanically with the crafting, Atelier Elie is also quite similar to the first game at first, but it quickly reveals that it has quite a bit more to the table aside from just having twice as many items in the game (200 compared to Atelier Marie's 100). As you progress through the game, you first unlock the ability to rebalance your synthesis, and then the ability to create entirely new "original" synthesis recipes. The rebalancing of recipes leans into the whole student aspect of the game, and it allows you to experiment with the amounts of each ingredient of a recipe to try and get better quality or effectiveness. This is pretty time consuming and trial and error-filled by design, so I never experimented with it much, but it's pretty neat. The original recipes are around ten or so in number, and they involve the game telling you Elie's hunches about what ingredients might be used in such hidden recipes as well as other clues you get from NPC dialogue or item descriptions. It's another idea that's more cool than actually fun in its implementation, but it all makes for a deeper mechanical experience around alchemy than the first game offered, and it's a great step forward in that regard. Leaning into the whole "being a student" thing again, you even have tests annually (which you can just skip, if you aren't concerned with an ending that requires doing well on them) that you'll need to study up on your alchemy for. And this isn't just being good at crafting, this is also knowing what ingredients and tools are used to synthesize each item on the study list. It's a really neat, if somewhat overly difficult, feature, and just makes the game feel that much more like really being an alchemy student. Other aspects of the game have also been carried over and/or improved a bit. You still pick areas around town to visit and walk around in as your little chibi-looking sprite, and you still simply travel to an area and auto-collect ingredients rather than having proper environments to walk around in. However, there's been quite a bit added onto that experience quantitatively. If you follow the story the right way, you get a whole second town to go to out west, and there are a bunch more places to go exploring for items there as well. You still get requests for items from the bar, but you're more likely to get requests for things you can actually get, which is nice. There's even a new kind of request you can take that request certain types of items, which are great ways to earn fame and also get way more alchemy EXP and money~. The only thing that hasn't really been changed all that much is the combat, which is still quite simple. The only thing new about it is the ability to use money to augment the power of existing equipment, which is a nice feature, even if you can only do it once per weapon and the buffs it offers are at times difficult to actually get (some effects are pulled randomly from a pool) and the boosts aren't really that life-changing. The presentation is good, as would be expected of the series, but it's also been cleaned up in a really nice way. The art style has been refined a fair bit, and character designs look much nicer and more appealing, and people generally have a less wide and abstract look to them. It's not necessarily an objectively good change (as what in art truly can be?), but it's an art style change I like at the very least. The music is also once again very good, and there are a lot of new tunes as well as really good remixes of tracks from the first games. My personal favorite tracks were some of the ones that play when different traveling musicians come to the bar~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Part of my ease in understanding this game's mechanics may very well be because I've already earned my lumps playing the quite mechanically similar Atelier Marie, but nonetheless, I really enjoyed my time with this game. It's only the second of two games on the PS1 for the series, but it's a really solid sequel and a good capstone for the series up to that point. This is actually one (like Atelier Marie) that has a fan translation available, so if you're curious, it's well worth checking out if you're into PS1-era RPGs and want an RPG with a bit of a lighter flair to the story~. This is another game I rented as a kid, liked well enough, but never finished at the time and never got back to. With the recent resurrection of Dinosaur Planet (this game's N64 original version) via dumped files and Project64, I resolved to finally play through this game to the end. Luckily, it isn't a particularly hard to find game here or terribly expensive. I got some 96% of the content done and beat the Japanese version over the course of a couple days (like 15 or 16 hours).
Star Fox Adventures sees our titular hero on the orders of General Pepper to aid the extremely troubled Dinosaur Planet. Due to an invasion of the other kingdoms by General Scales, the planet has broken apart due to him disrupting the magical energy fields the planet is (apparently literally) overflowing with. Dinosaur Planet is, unsurprisingly, populated by various tribes of talking dinosaurs, the prince of the Earth Walkers (triceratops) ends up becoming Fox's companion on this adventure. Many remarked upon this at the time and have since, but it's a very un-Star Fox-y story that is at times irritating but overall inoffensive in setting up the stakes and core action. Oddly enough, despite this being the Japanese version, there is no Japanese voice acting, with only (even for the time, kinda amazingly terrible) English voice acting accompanied by Japanese subtitles. The gameplay plays a lot like what it is: a long-lost Rare N64 title. From the level designs to the dialogue writing to the sheer aesthetics, this really does feel like a distant cousin to things like Banjo-Tooie and DK64. Mechanically, you're going through a fairly linear 3D Zelda-sort of action adventure game, with a slew of items to aid you along with the magic staff Fox uses to beat up dinosaurs and even blast magic at them! The prince of the Earth Walkers, Tricky, is also an important mechanic to use as you guide him around to have him dig up stuff for you, but he's ultimately not actually that invasive or important a mechanic. He's there, sure, but Resident Evil 4 this is not. He usually just teleports around to wherever you need him, and it's a clever way to minimize inventory management outside of some more complicated inventory system (which the game does manage to have regardless, just not in some Ocarina of Time-like menu screen :b). This is much more a kin of Rare's rougher N64 titles though, and in the efficacy of its overall design I'd rank it more along more decisive titles like Jet Force Gemini and Banjo-Tooie than any of their greats. For such a linear game, the signposting can be shockingly rough at times, and even when you know where to go, walking from place to place takes ages. The combat, while quite cinematic in an impressively flashy way, is ultimately super button-mashy and gets very boring and uninteresting fast. The dungeon lengths and designs are never really awful but not ever super inspired, and are definitely more mid-/low-tier Zelda fare. None of the design is outright terrible (save for one awwwwwful joystick balancing mini-game around the game's midpoint), but it really does beg to be polished up in certain places. The game also has some Star Fox flying segments awkwardly put into it as cool novelties/wastes of time when you go between the planet and the broken-off segments, and in a weird turn they even are used for the final boss fight. This game was a totally different game that had Star Fox put into it to help the GameCube release sell better, and these segments are very underwhelming and feel as slapped in to the gameplay loop as they indeed are. The final boss especially is a really weird choice, as it suddenly demands you start using a skill set the game has barely instilled in you at all, and the final boss ends up being pretty bad as a result. Boss fights aren't exactly the game's strong suit to begin with, but the final boss was definitely my least enjoyed out of the handful present. Presentation-wise, it really is like an N64 game with GameCube graphics. It all looks fine and, Fox himself looks quite nice as a character model. The music is pretty damn good, as one would expect from even a not so great Rare game, but the Star Fox tunes feel super dissonant with the game's score otherwise in a way I didn't really dig. The game can hit some pretty bad framerate dips when you get to areas with lots of enemies and water, but it's never anything that prevents play, and even those dips I did get were very uncommon. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is overall sorta the epitome of "fine", and while you probably won't hate it, I can't really see many people loving this game. If you can get it for cheap and the premise interests you (like it did me), then I'd say it could be worth your money, but I think for most people, they'll ultimately feel like their time was better spent elsewhere. While a neat historical curiosity, outside of some of the awful VA, Star Fox Adventures doesn't really manage to be all that memorable for being anything but a disappointing (i.e. not a successor to Star Fox 64) Star Fox game. Lair of the Clockwork God is a game I saw recommended by someone I trust on Twitter. I'd never heard of it before, but it was recommended to emphatically and I had a bit of credit on my Switch at the time that I just had to make the jump. All I really knew about it going it was that it was somehow both a platformer and a point'n'click, and even then the game routinely threw me for a loop both mechanically and narratively. It took me about 6 or 7 hours to beat the game while getting a handful of achievements along the way.
The game follows two best friends Dan and Ben on their quest to save the world from every apocalypse at once. They return from (the tutorial) trip to South America to find a flower to cure their friend's cancer, only to return to a London embroiled in apocalypses. They manage to make it underground to the lair of the titular clockwork god, a mysterious machine that has apparently been keeping these all from happening for a long time, but had suddenly gone dormant for some reason. The two friends need to go through a series of simulations to teach the computer human emotions (via their simulated experiences) so it has the empathy required to care about humanity enough to stop all of these darn apocalypses. This is in some ways a game to make you think, but it's also definitely here for comedy. Ben is the point'n'click character while Dan is his platforming friend, and though they're quite self-aware of the fact they're in a video game, this is the rare game that is actually funny with that premise. The humor is often very adult, to a point it routinely surprised me (especially in just how sexual the humor could get), but it was still a game I enjoyed a lot. The devs clearly know their point'n'click games, as Ben feels like he walked right out of a 90's game with just what a heartless bastard he can be XD. In his own words, "I'm not a bad person. I'm immoral, or amoral. Whatever the right one is." Gameplay-wise, the game is about 60% point'n'clck and 30% platformer and 10% other, with the first taking up more time for the pretty easy to guess reason of adventure games just taking up more time by nature of their being a puzzle. The platforming is more-often more straightforward, but can also be pretty darn challenging at times. Thankfully, there are a ton of accessibility options for the game, with "platforming assistance" being a very nice slider to turn up or down depending on how good you are at such things. The platforming is generally pretty solid (if a little floaty at times), and the point'n'click stuff is just about always solveable, and you can thankfully never leave behind any necessary items accidentally. The two systems reinforce each other in a way where Dan moves platforms for Ben to progress, and Ben commonly makes new abilities to augment Dan's platforming skills. The two main genres the game grapples with are very compatently done, but then there's that "other" part, and I don't really wanna spoil to much of that, as it's kinda hard to describe outside of abstracts. This is a game that seems to have a lot of things that ultimately aren't what they seem, and in that way it plays with the idea of genre in lots of weird, wacky ways. There are a lot of genuine instances of "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" in terms of how the game can feel really perplexingly designed at times (though one point I did genuinely hit a bug and have to reset the console ^^;), and it's something best experienced for yourself, I think. The presentation is really nice, having a highly detailed and well-animated pixel-ish art style, and the music is also excellent. I know I've already said this in the review, but the people who made this really know their stuff, as the point'n'click music really fits the point'n'click sections, and the platforming section music really heckin' bops as action game tunes. The Sonic parody level in particular feels like it hopped right out of some alt-universe genuine Sonic game with how fun a song it is~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really oddball game that is a shining star among the pile of indie gold on the Switch. If you're a fan of point'n'click games, this is one you absolutely should not pass up. It's as enjoyable as it is memorable, and it's one of my favorite indie titles I've played on the Switch. The person who recommended it to me so highly had every reason to do so, and now I pass that hearty recommendation on to you~. This is a game I had recommended to me and bought at the same time as Paper Mario: Origami King, but it took me way longer to get around to playing it (despite that fact that it arrived significantly before Paper Mario did ^^;). I had heard that it was jank, but had a lot of goodness underneath that jank, and several people whose opinions I trust told me it'd be right up my alley. They were absolutely right, and I was really happy with my time with the game, although it took me a day or two of thinking when I was done to get to the point I was happy with X3. It took me like 30-ish hours to beat the game and most sidequests at medium difficulty for both combat and mysteries. Fair warning: I will be getting into somewhat spoilery territory on my analysis of the narrative.
The Sunken City follows private detective Charles Reed. Plagued by relentless visions of otherworldly horrors whenever he sleeps, he traces similar cases of this mysterious mass hysteria to a tiny town of Oakmont off the coast of Massachusetts. Oakmont is a tiny town not on most maps, and it's also been struck by a horrible flood recently, and a lot of the city is still underwater (it being the titular sinking city). Reed quickly gets involved with one of the city's three great families, the oddly ape-like Throgmortons, as his quest for answers to the source (and hopeful cure) of his mysterious visions brings him deeper and deeper towards the cosmic horrors that lurk beneath the city. The narrative of The Sinking City is very much inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and is made by people who clearly know their Lovecraft very well. Among the main quest and side quests, there are oodles of homages and references to different Lovecraft stories all building towards a greater point. It's no secret that Lovecraft was a horrible racist, and that those fears of an impure racial/cultural unknown fueled a lot of his writings. The Sinking City goes out of its way to use a lot of his metaphors in ways that thankfully don't just parrot his awful opinions, but try to convince the player to reflect on the world they themselves inhabit. The Sinking City's narrative is ultimately a very hopeful one. Though it has the player get mired in the swamps of all of humanity's evils (from racism to xenophobia to literal klansmen (whom you get to kill the fuck out of) lynching people), there is a consistent thread that one person with good intentions, namely you, can still do something to make some small parts of the world a little bit better. It's a story about how, despite all its evils, humanity is something still worth sacrificing to save, and having the player deliberately make that CHOICE to save humanity is a big reason I forgive what could easily be seen as an oddly lazy Deus Ex-style "pick a door" ending. In short: I really enjoyed the narrative of the game, and I think it's done really well, with lots of memorable characters and locations throughout the game. The gameplay of The Sinking City is most easily described as "L.A. Noire but you're actually doing detective work, and the combat is a bit better (and there's no driving)." You're a private eye, and that means detective work. As you do different quests, you routinely get info that you don't really know what to make of at the moment, so you need to go to one of the archives around town to use what info you DO have to try and pinpoint your next location you should check out. Whether its information about a patient at the hospital, the location a politician might live from some interview in the newspaper, or even trying to find your next inquiry spot by looking at past murders that are similar to the current one you're investigating at the police station, you really get to feel like a detective. You even have to place your own waypoint markers on the map using the addresses the game gives you. The game's difficulty for the mysteries starts out at the easiest one, where it actually gives you waypoints, but the way to play the game is definitely to put it to the middle one where it doesn't (or if you're feeling really brave, you can even put it to the hardest one, where you aren't even told what evidence is of key importance to even try investigating further about). Plenty of people will definitely find the detective stuff to be a bother not worth troubling themselves with. Especially the way that fast travel is limited to only between nodes and getting around the city by boat is also pretty slow and annoying, there's a lot that will come off as fairly irritable design to someone more familiar with these types of open world city games. But all in all, I think the detective stuff and city exploration is a really cool way to make the whole mystery more engaging for the player in a way other than just having an L.A. Noire-style phone call to base to be told where to go next. You're also fighting monsters quite a lot, and for that you'll need guns, which you slowly get as you complete more and more main quests. There are only four enemy types on land, but they're very formidable opponents, as you can get downed pretty damn fast if you're not careful. Different monsters have different weak points to aim for, giving you a strategy for each kind, but generally just using powerful guns and explosives to kill the baddies works out best. There's also a crafting system where you find materials around to stop whenever to craft more ammo and supplies, and also an XP system where you can give yourself slightly better odds at combat/crafting/questing (there's even the remnants of an apparently (and thankfully) removed stealth system), but combat is definitely not the main reason to play the game. I had fun with the combat, but if you're coming for a Lovecraftian shooter first and foremost, this is definitely not the game to seek out. I played the game on a PS4 Slim (so non-Pro hardware), and I thought it looked and sounded nice. The game generally doesn't have much music in it, and it has some really bad pop-in on this hardware, but it overall ran pretty well and has a really nice, dreary aesthetic to it. It has a heavy atmosphere to mirror the dire straits of a city on the edge of starvation, paranoia, and reality. The main character and supporting characters all have very nice designs, with Reed in particular having just such a well suited basic costume that I never thought it felt right to try putting him in the different outfits you unlock later on. It technically runs just fine too, with some troubled framerates in more crowded spaces, but otherwise being totally playable. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though there is some seriously troubled stuff with the publisher of this game (they're really shady and awful, but thankfully the Switch version is self-published by the developers), this is a game I enjoyed too much to not recommend. I have no trouble comparing it to something like Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, in that though there is combat, and even though the mechanics can be janky, the main reason you're here is for the narrative, atmosphere, and themes. Though there certainly isn't the degree of personal choice like in VtMB, and while plenty of people will probably bounce off this game for the bumps it has (though thankfully a lot of QoL stuff has been improved since launch), if what I've described sounds like something you'd enjoy, this is absolutely a game worth hunting down and playing for yourself. |
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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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