I cannot count how many friends I have who are into retro games and just absolutely adore Klonoa. It’s a game I’ve had recommended to heck and back, and with the recent remakes of the first two games, it was a series back on everyone’s lips. It’s also a game that’s pretty darn rare in English, but it’s also pretty darn cheap (if a bit uncommon) out here in Japan, so I set out to pick up the first two games a couple weeks back. This weekend, I finally sat down and played through the first Klonoa on my PlayStation to see what all the fuss was about. It took me about 5.5 hours to play through the whole thing, rescue all the captured lads, and do the extra final level. I played the game in Japanese on real hardware.
The story of Klonoa is the story of the titular Klonoa and his friend Hyupo. A strange ring carrying Hyupo crashes down in the forest one day, and Klonoa comes across and saves him. They play and have fun all the time until one day, another strange force descends from the sky. The evil Gadius and his henchman Joker are bent on destroying the world, and it’s up to Klonoa to stop him! Along the way, you’ll meet a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of colorful characters on your quest to save the world, but the story is overall still very simple. It reminds me a lot of a 90’s family film, where the overall vibes of the adventure are more important than character arcs or larger themes. This isn’t a bad thing, as the game is so short yet packed with so much personality that it’s able to carry itself just fine, but it left me wanting more and didn’t leave much of an impact on me in the end. It’s not a bad story by any means, but I think it’s a tad too overambitious for its own good, and narrowing its scope a little and/or focusing itself a little would’ve paid dividends. The gameplay of Klonoa is a 2.5D platformer that reminds me a bit of the original Kirby’s Dreamland than anything else, and that is absolutely a good thing. Klonoa can run and jump, but he can also grab things with the power of Hyupo and his special ring. This inflates enemies big and round and places them above your head. You can then throw these enemies out in front of you (or even towards or away from the screen! Ain’t 3D crazy ;b) or throw them beneath you as you use them as a double jump. You can even grab another enemy mid-air after you’ve jumped or thrown the enemy you’re already carrying, meaning you can do some really technical maneuvering through stages (and they’ll make you by the end, believe me). Klonoa is pretty short, with only 12 levels and a final boss stage, but those stages are pretty long and also pretty darn tough. If you’re not quite experienced at platformers, you’re likely going to have a pretty rough time making it through to the end of Klonoa. It’s a fun and well-polished experience, but heck if it isn’t one that’ll make you work to see that ending XP The presentation is incredibly well done and charming. Klonoa’s design is immediately iconic, and the pre-rendered 3D assets turned 2D (think like Donkey Kong Country) create a beautiful world and super fun characters to have your adventure along with. The way the game messes with 3D space to make levels and areas loop through and around themselves is also quite neat, and it very rarely actually gets to the point where it’s confusing to try and point or aim a shot due to how the 3D is working. The music is super fun, as is the sound design. All of the characters have this almost-real-language voice acting that is nonetheless incredibly effective. It does a remarkable job of communicating the emotions of the character’s text without actually going to the length of giving proper VA to every line. With just how many of my friends who like Klonoa love to shout “Wahoo!” just the way he does, there’s no doubt in my mind that the voice work is no small part as to why this series has captured so many hearts over the years. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really excellent action platformer on the PS1! It’s not one of my favorite games ever, like I know it very much is for some folks who’ve played it, but it’s a super fun and charming time either way. It was far and away worth what I paid for it, no doubt. If you like platformers and like the way the game looks (and don’t mind a bit of a challenge), then this is absolutely one to look into acquiring digitally or snagging the remake that came out recently. You won’t regret your choice~ ^w^
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Continuing to play a bit more Mario Party in the evenings to unwind and indulge in some nostalgia, I played through a bunch of Mario Party 5 over the past couple weeks. This was the first GameCube MP I had as a kid, and I remember not liking it nearly as much as my N64 ones. Until replaying it now, I had always chalked that up to the orb system just being bad compared to the old item systems. However, with how much fun I had with the orb system in MP6 a few weeks back, I knew that couldn’t truly be the only flaw between the GameCube and N64 games. I did my best to set aside those childhood biases and go into this with a fresh mind. I played through story mode and then a few maps (as many as I could stand ^^;) against normal and hard CPUs before I called this one beaten. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The conceit of MP5 is that it’s all taking place in the realm of dreams. Therefore, the star spirits from the first Paper Mario are (strangely) here to guide you through it. The story mode consists of doing miniature versions of the normal boards, competing in mini-games against mini-koopas and trying to rob them of their coins to knock them out of the match and keep Bowser from destroying that dream (the board) that the map takes place in. It’s another conceit that’s more than fine enough to get the job done, and while it’s a little stronger than MP4’s birthday party theme, it still don’t quite approach MP3’s “drawn into a pop-up book” theme. The mechanics though, ohhhh the mechanics. You may’ve noticed in the intro that I said I only played *some* maps of normal party play instead of each of them at least once like I had with Mario Party 6 and 4, and there’s a good reason for that ^^;. While I have certainly confirmed that the orb system is not the only reason that MP5 was less fun than the N64 MPs when I was a kid, I got so, so much more than I bargained for. Starting a bit positive, the mini-games are once again quite strong. I’d say they’re easily stronger than most of MP4’s, and even a good few of MP6’s, but a few too many of them are a bit too random for my liking (and the hard mode AI cheats a bit too much, be it in mini-games or die rolls), they’re one of the strongest points of the game. Getting into more explicitly negative stuff, it’s honestly hard to pin down just one thing to start with because so many issues relate so heavily to the others. If I had to summarize it as quick as I could, though, I’d say the principle problem with MP5’s design is that money simply doesn’t matter. This may come off as a bit odd of a statement, given that money to get stars is the whole point of Mario Party, but I’ll do my best to explain why in a shorter answer than I so often gave friends who asked why I was so frustrated with this game while I was playing it XD. First, let’s get into the orb system. As I explained in my MP6 review, the orb system replaces the item system used in earlier games, and this is the first iteration of it. You get orbs from capsule machines placed around the board, but you don’t get to pick which one you get. You just get a random one (which isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself). The bigger problem is that orbs are kinda useless the large majority of the time. In later MP games, using orbs that have hostile effects mark territory as yours. It’s your space, so if you land on it, nothing bad will happen, but if an enemy lands on it, then the bad thing will happen. In MP5, there is no such system. In MP5, you either spend a fee to use the capsule on yourself immediately, or you can throw it on the board up to ten spaces in front of you for free. If someone lands on that space, then the effect of the orb happens to them. Though it’s kinda cool that you can either use on yourself OR throw any capsule in the game down on the board (including ones you’d never do that with, like mushrooms for more die to roll or a Flutter to take you straight to the star), it’s ultimately an awful system because there’s no reason to use so many of them. It’s an incredible gamble to throw down an orb with a negative effect, because you might land on it that very turn, and there’s no guarantee an enemy will *ever* land on it. There are far too many orbs and far too many of them are flat-out useless like this, so it’s ultimately a really poor replacement for the old item system. There are also no shops to buy orbs at in the game, so the money you spend to use your randomly acquired ones on yourself is really the only “cost” associated with this orb system, and since the large majority are ones you’d never want to use on yourself, it’s pointless. And that’s a nice segue into the board design of MP5, because in a word: It’s awful. But it isn’t awful in the way MP3 and 4 have awful board design. It’s honestly kinda fascinating how this is a whole new way to make boards just as awful and pointless-feeling. As stated before, because there are no shops, only random orb getting points, the only thing to ever go for on the board is the star. There’s no reason you’d ever go anywhere else, and there are no alternative game modes for acquiring stars dependent on the board (as MP6 introduces), so the boards are really just a challenge to see who can roll the highest and get to the star. There’s no strategy present of any meaningful sort. The orb system also has a knock on effect that they contain basically ALL normal board effects (from chance spaces to coin & star-stealing chain chomps to even the koopa bank), so the boards themselves are incredibly barren save for a few boring happening spaces. And these boards are also HUGE and very cumbersome to get around. If you’re rolling low, you’re not going anywhere, since you can’t even buy a mushroom in a shop to get a boost of speed or something (since there are no shops where you’d do such a thing). These massive, barren boards have nothing to do on them but chase the star, and that’s why money is so useless. Even if you’re running the table and winning every mini-game, what does it matter? Even just the blue spaces your opponents land on between the vast distances between themselves and the new star location will likely be enough to buy the star when they get there, so the fun mini-games end up feeling utterly pointless too. Why even try in them if the money they give matters so little? You could say that you’d want to do them to get coins for the bonus stars at the end of the game, but that’s also a pointless-feeling exercise. This is the first (and mercifully last) MP game to not just have a mini-game star (most coins won in mini-games) and a coin star (highest maximum coin total in the game) bonus star awarded at the end of the game, but to also have the coins you win from battle mini-games count towards the mini-game star. In earlier games, battle mini-games (where everyone has to put in a bunch of money and the first and second place winners of the game get to split the prize pool) could be a fun equalizer for people a bit farther behind. In this game, since battle mini-games aren’t even spots on the board, they just randomly replace 4-player mini-games at the end of a turn, you simply get huge, game-altering (often RNG-focused) games that can far too radically alter the outcome of the game. You have so little agency in the board game part of the game, that those bonus stars at the end matter a LOT for who is going to win, and it feels pretty bad to have one or both of the mini-game & coin stars snapped up by someone who happens to win a huge prize pool on the very last turn even though they’d been doing poorly the rest of the game. MP5’s boards are lousy for different reasons than MP3 and 4’s, but the source is the same: Players have too little agency to affect the outcome of the game, and that makes it a boring and frustrating experience. Presentation-wise, this game is thankfully at least in this regard a step up from MP4. Gone are tracks of spaces floating above ugly masses of 3D with vaguely-themed textures. Now we have proper 3D spaces that hold these boards, and it makes the whole game so much more appealing to look at as well as making each board just feel that much more like a real space (or as much as a Mario Party board can feel like one, at least :b). The music is also once again very nice & Mario Party-ful. No real complaints there. Verdict: Not Recommended. Mario Party 3 has sat at the bottom of my ranking list of console MP games for a long time, but I think MP5 has just about taken its place. MP5 is a bold new direction for the series in many ways, and it’s trying a lot of new things. Heck, it even brings back duel mini-games! But it fails so aggressively in implementing these new systems that it makes for a frustrating and boring time whether your game is 35 turns or only 15. You can do better than this with virtually any Mario Party game, so if you wanna get your retro Mario Party on, you’re better off looking just about anywhere else. Mario 3 is a game I’ve played a ton of across various methods and platforms, but I’d never gotten around to enjoying the e-Reader exclusive content that the GBA port got until now. It had always been on my Wii U eShop wish list, as that version came bundled with all of the e-Reader content as well, but I just never got around to it. But now that it’s a part of the Switch Online GBA service, it felt like the perfect time to give it a try~. It took me probably about 7 or 8 hours in total to play through all the levels via the Japanese version, collecting all of the A and e+ coins as Mario with heavy save state and rewind use.
There isn’t really any story to this, being that it was just extra levels distributed via e-Reader cards that you could feed into your Super Mario Advance 4 game. It’s just a bunch of levels that you can play in any order if you so choose that is completely separate from the normal Mario 3 content in SMA4. The levels have a very Mario Maker feel to them, despite being put together so many years before Mario Maker was created. Using mechanics, enemies, and even power ups from Super Mario Bros. 1 all the way to Yoshi’s Island, this does a really cool job of making a ton of totally unique mechanics and animations to SMB3. If only it were any fun ^^; That’s honestly the biggest problem with World e+, as the game calls it. They’re special challenge levels, sure, but they have such a different design philosophy behind them, you can tell that they were made in a totally different design environment from the normal SMB3 levels. Lacking any checkpoints (as this IS SMB3, after all), it just feels mean an not fun as you trudge your way to the same nearly impossible jump again and again or comb over levels again and again looking for that one A coin or extra collectible you missed. Sure, going for the collectibles makes them even harder, but given how many of the stages are mazes of some kind, going for all of them seems like a pretty clear intention of its design to me. I cannot imagine how frustrating this must’ve been on an original GBA with no save states or rewinds, because good gods are so many of these levels overly demanding and unfair towards the player. It’s not quite the hardest Kaizo Mario hacks you’ve ever seen in terms of difficulty, but it’s certainly close enough to that that it’ll keep you from having much fun a lot of the time. The presentation is very SMA4, but the new bespoke assets (like how Mario uses the cape from Mario World but as his SMB3 self) do look very nice and pretty. Other than the cape, though, most assets haven’t had new versions made. They’ve just had the sprite imported wholesale, so there’s not a ton of visual cohesion between SMA4 and, for example, the little blue penguin fellas from Yoshi’s Island you run into. The music is good, but it’s just all stuff originally from SMB3 anyhow, so nothing really special to report on that front. Verdict: Not Recommended. I said it best when I said it earlier: This game mode just fails to be much fun. The comparison to Mario Maker earlier was absolutely every bit as much praise for the concept as it was criticism of the design. It’s not literally unplayable, but it’ll certainly make you wish you were playing a different, better Mario game (like Mario 3!) a lot of the time you’re playing it. I’m glad I didn’t actually pay money for this, as I would’ve ended up feeling quite cheated at the quality of these levels. They’re something neat to check out if you’ve already got the Switch Online’s Expansion Pak service, but your time is ultimately better spent elsewhere with other platformers. Like Popeye, Burger Time has always been a classic arcade game I really like even if I’m pretty bad at it xD. When I saw that Burger Time Deluxe had been added to the Switch Online GameBoy service, I saw a great opportunity to just sit back and relax with a game that probably went on forever, as it was an arcade game, after all. You can imagine my surprise when the game ended and I saw credits after finishing world six! XD . It took me about 1.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on my Switch not using save states or rewinds at all.
The conceit of Burger Time is pretty simple, as is the case for most old arcade games. Peter Pepper owns a burger shop, but the evil owner of the donut shop next door wants him out of business! Rather than simply coexisting (as surely a burger shop and a donut shop could, as they hardly fill the same niche. If anything, surely one being dinner and the other being dessert, they complement one another?) or out competing him, he sends a bunch of living food to destroy Peter Pepper. Pete has to walk over giant burgers to complete them and avoid food along the way, because this is presumably a means to an end <w>. It’s a big of a silly story, but it’s a good enough excuse as any to walk all over giant burgers that are presumably then served to people X3. There are also fun little cutscenes every 4 stages between worlds that illustrate little antics between Pete and the living food, many of which contain tons of completely unique animations and assets which are otherwise not in the game at all, which I found neat and worthy of mention~. The mechanics of Burger Time are, befitting an arcade game, simple to get a hold of but contain some very difficult design and tricks to lean within it. To complete a level, you need to complete all the burgers. You walk over the entire length of it and drop it down to the next platform. If it lands on another ingredient, it’ll knock that one down too, and that one can knock down the one below itself, and so on and so forth. How they interact with the evil food you’re after is important too though. Of course, if an enemy is under a falling ingredient, it’ll get flattened to death and have to respawn. If you have to take an enemy head-on by yourself though, you’ll need to spend a charge of pepper, which is difficult to get back, but at least it’ll temporarily stun enemies long enough to get away. Every level has a maximum number of enemies that can be out at any time, so you’ll need to weigh the consequences in the moment if the devil you do know (the enemies as they’re currently spawned) is worth getting rid of for the devil you don’t (wherever they’ll respawn from later once killed). If an enemy is on the ingredient with you as you drop it, though, they’ll cause it to fall down an extra floor! More enemies on it mean more floors dropped as well, so even though it won’t kill them, it can be worth assembling a posse behind you sometimes to then drop ingredients faster and make burgers faster too~. Though I don’t know for sure if other versions of Burger Time do this, there are some neat and interesting tricks to Deluxe that will really help in later levels. For example, all five enemy types have their own AI priorities that they’ll follow in different situations (not unlike the ghosts in Pac-Man). For example, eggs will always take a ladder if they encounter one, even if not taking it would get them closer to you. In contrast, sausages will always try and go towards the direction you are horizontally, even if that path ultimately leads to a dead-end they can’t reach you from. Learning to outsmart the AI was a very fun part of the game for me, and it makes it very satisfying to narrowly avoid dead because of a cleverly manipulated AI quirk~. Another interesting thing is that the items (and even extra ladders) that appear mid-stage are not random but determined by when certain ingredients fall or when particular burgers are completed. Though the where, which, and when of enemy spawning is still at least somewhat random, this deterministic design of item and ladder spawns does a fair job of making the game “solvable”, to a point, which is extra fun if you’re trying to chase high scores~. The only real complaint I’d have is that some levels are so large that you can scroll the screen left and right. This isn’t exactly a problem, but it means that there’s often a significant part of the level that you just can’t see, and that can lead to making planning them out a task of trial and error rather than quick and clever planning in the moment. It’s not a huge problem, but the limited screen resolution definitely makes the game feel a bit harder than it needs to be, at times. At least you have infinite continues that will put you back at the start of the world you’re on, and passwords to bring you back to the start of a particular world if you’re having trouble though. The presentation is very good for what’s ultimately quite an early GB game. The little enemies and Peter himself are animated and drawn up very well and distinctly, and there’s never any ambiguity in play because of how the graphics are put together. The music is also very fun, doing a good job of bringing the jaunty arcade-y energy of Burger Time to something the size of the palm of your hand~. Verdict: Recommended. Arcade games aren’t for everyone, and the same goes for their handheld ports, but this is a very fun port of what I call a very fun game. It’s not perfect in its design, but that doesn’t keep it from being a bundle of fun. If you’re into Burger Time or just into arcade-y action games, this is a great thing to dive into whether on the Switch Online GameBoy service or through some other means~. This is a game I got in some PC games bundle of some kind forever ago. I couldn’t even try to remember which one if I wanted to. But recently a friend of mine got gifted it from a friend of theirs (who very possibly got it from the same place I got it and just still had a key kicking around XD), and she asked me if I would be willing to play through it on stream with her. Both loving streaming with friends and having no idea what this game was (and confusing it with Max Payne for like 2.5 weeks before we actually streamed it XD), I of course agreed~. We played through it in co-op on stream over the course of about 3.5 hours. We played the PC version of it through Steam in English on easy mode.
Kane & Lynch 2 is a sequel to the first game, but that’s a game I have never played and only know the story of via reading the wiki entry. From what I’ve been able to gather, though, this game seems to treat the ending of the last game with some ambiguity. Lynch is living in Shanghai with his girlfriend, and despite how badly their last job together was, Lynch needs Kane’s help for one last weapons deal. Kane really needs the money, so he agrees. Everything goes from bad to worse really fast when a shootout ends up killing the daughter of a powerful gang kingpin, and Kane & Lynch need to wheel, deal, and shoot their way out of the massive sea of shit they’ve landed themselves in. Narratively, K&L2 wants to be something like an edgy, late-2000’s thriller/action movie, but it has none of the writing competence to actually pull that off. Sure, it’s got nudity, sex, torture, racism, but it’s not remotely trying to say *anything* with any of it. It’s just doing it to be shocking because it knows that that’s what edgy, serious dramas do. Both Kane and Lynch just have virtually nothing to their characters, and the story is more so just a sequence of events happening until its over. I’ve read that the devs say the poor quality of some things is intentional, but if they’re telling the truth, they’ve done a terrible job of it. There’s not enough substance here to be remotely called satire or parody of anything. Satire requires clarity of purpose, but I’m not even sure what they’d be trying to be parodying with the quite racist, sexist, vapid action movie they’ve turned into a game. Nothing drove home to me more that the writers simply have no idea what they’re doing than the ending. If they wanted to steal a note from something like the Sopranos or tons of other famous “men wrapped up in organized crime” stories, then the obvious place to end the story is at the end of the penultimate level. When Lynch has just let his feelings get in the way of business, and robbed them of their one tiny chance out of all of this hell. That would’ve been the classy time to cut to black. But instead, we get a whole other level before the credits where they make a very underwhelming escape through an airport and just take off after forcing their way onto a plane. They actually *do* escape, which does a hell of a lot to undermine the more obvious possible takeaway from the story, that being “there’s no easy way out of it for men who live their lives like K&L do”. K&L2’s story puts them through the pace of an action movie that would’ve felt generic 20 years earlier well enough, but it’ll leave you as quickly as it comes. While it’s a story that may unintentionally say some things about the culture and development environment that made it, K&L2 as a narrative isn’t trying to actually say anything, which makes it pretty boring to do anything but make fun of. Something else that makes the game pretty boring outside of making fun of it is the mechanics. Even for the inundation of cover shooters we got after Gears of War, this is a VERY underwhelming one. I’m not even particularly a fan of the genre, and that was still something super easy to see. Guns feel terrible to use and have no kick or impact at all. It’s difficult to even see if you’re hitting the enemies in front of you the animations and player feedback are so poor. You have regenerating health and can take cover behind all sorts of things. You can only carry two guns at a time, but that hardly matters much when they all feel so awful to use. Level design is also extremely linear with no secrets or optional paths/routes to speak of, so it’s almost literally a “corridor shooter” in many regards most of the time. The camera is also TERRIBLE and hella nauseating, especially when you sprint. One viewer of the stream described it as “a camera dangled on the end of a slinky from a helicopter”, and I think that fits the bill pretty well. That’s another very deliberate-feeling choice, and they certainly succeeded well in making an awful camera, so good on them, I guess. It may be a factor that we were playing on easy, but the enemy AI was extremely unintelligent. A very winning strategy we found worked a *lot* was that the AI tended to laser-focus on to the first person they spotted, so one person running forward and getting all of their aggro can allow the other player to run forward past them, completely worry-free of enemy fire, as they take them out by just walking around their cover. And that leads me to another thing: For a game with “[Guy] and [Other Guy]” in its naming scheme, it’s a pretty crappy co-op game. This felt much more like a single-player game with a tacked-on co-op mode than a game made for co-op. When your buddy gets down, you have mere seconds to go get them up before they die and you get sent back to a checkpoint. The players also don’t look distinct enough to keep you from firing upon your buddy. We both spent some time playing as each character, and while Lynch is pretty distinct looking with his very balding head and long hair in the back, Kane just looks like a guy in a suit. There we tons of times the Lynch player fired upon Kane because they just thought he was an enemy because he looks so much like the guys you’re fighting against. It’s a problem with the uninspired/bad level design as well, but even the handful of times they split you up, it feels very perfunctory. One player has to fight a ton of enemies while the other guy gives supporting fire from far-ish away, at least until that other guy giving support gets ambushed and killed by enemies out of nowhere with powerful shotguns. The presentation of the game isn’t terribly nice either. Granted, this is one thing in particular the devs say is intentional of the things that people say are bad about the game. The game is very grey-scale and drab looking, and the human models look like downright hideous playdough people (although I think the latter element of that is due to the game being a PS3 game from 2010 than anything else). Like I said earlier, I don’t think they really use this bad stuff they did “on purpose” to any meaningful effect, but I’ll give them an A for effort that they did make a game that looks quite unpleasant. The music is entirely atmospheric and forgettable. The voice direction is also just okay, but they don’t have a ton to work with, so I’d say the VA do a fine job. Sure, they got guys to actually speak Chinese for the Chinese soldiers you’re fighting, but there’s also some very sloppy voice direction work with things like how Kane and Lynch say some names. At one point, one guy tells you the crime boss you’re fighting is named Shansi (pronounced more like /shang suh/), but both Kane and Lynch (who LIVES in Shanghai and has a Chinese girlfriend) say it like /shang see/, which they’d have no reason to do unless they were reading it off of a script and just hadn’t been told how to pronounce it. One last note on performance: It runs *terribly*. Now I’m willing to chalk this up at least a little to how we played it. PC ports were often pretty bad in 2010, and I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt that it runs better on the console hardware they designed it for as well as what PCs were more commonly like back in 2010. But in the 3.5 hours it took us to beat it, it crashed or disconnected at least 4 or 5 times, and if even one player crashes/drops out, it kicks the other from the level, so there were a good few levels we had to redo significant chunks of while we just hoped it didn’t crash again. Animations also glitch constantly as well, but it’s hard to say if that’s a performance bug or if it’s always been that way. At the very least, the Steam version is a pretty crappy way to play K&L2 in 2023 :b Verdict: Not Recommended. Sometimes I’ll play a game with a bad reputation and find that it’s nowhere near as bad as people say. This is not one of those times. Kane & Lynch 2 is a painfully mediocre shooter with a miserably boring story that completely deserves its bad reputation. It’s at least not SO awful that you can’t even have fun playing it in co-op to laugh at it (as we had a pretty good time streaming it together, though more in spite of the game than because of it), but I feel like that’s quite clearly damning with faint praise. Unless you just like experiencing bad games from the 360 generation, or unless you simply must experience something so bad for yourself, this is a game to leave disliked and forgotten in the dustbin of history. A special thanks to my EldritchZoe, though, for playing through it with me and giving me such a fun time with such a bad game <3 This is a game I picked up on Wii U Virtual Console forever and a half ago. My last save-state in it was apparently from August 2019, so that’s apparently how long it’s been since I last attempted this as well XD. I’ve been meaning to hook my Japanese Wii U back up and give another crack at this while sourcing my friends over voice chat to help for ages, and something a week or so back finally compelled me to get off my butt and just do it. I finally not only tried again, but I went and did it! I beat all 100 puzzles and only looked at hints for 5 of them, which is a ratio I’m pretty darn happy with~. It took me some 15 or 20 hours to beat the game via my Wii U in Japanese.
Sutte Hakkun doesn’t really have a narrative. It was originally released in chunks over the SFC’s Satellaview service over the course of 1997, with a RAM cart download and a dedicated cart released containing the whole collection (and a little bit more) in 1998. It’s also the first game Indieszero did! (who are otherwise most famous for the Theatrhythm games and the first two Retro Game Challenge games, I’d reckon). There really is no story of any kind though, so far as I can tell. You play as Hakkun, and you need to find your way to getting all of the rainbows in all 100 levels to get to the credits. This is very much a game just about completing the puzzles, to the point it even acknowledges and actively discourages you from looking at the hints, as it warns you it’ll be marked on your save file forever (and they’re not kidding about that). As for the gameplay, it’s quite simple, but they do a LOT with that simplicity. As Hakkun, a weird mosquito-kiwi-thing, you can use your beak(?) to suck in both colors, blocks, and other objects and then spit them out again. Your colors are red, blue, and yellow, and things you can put them in are blocks as well as your buddy Makkun to give each respectively different behaviors. Red makes blocks go up & down and makes Makkun springy. Blue makes blocks go left and right and makes Makkun walk back and forth. Yellow makes blocks go up and down diagonally and Makkun ground-pound in place (to continuously cycle switches, should you need to). There are some advanced techniques, like holding down the button to maintain sucking in while you jump about, jumping around corners by jumping at the veeery edge of a corner, and quickly spitting out and sucking in several objects over the course of one fall, but other than that, it’s all about your ingenuity on using these simple tools to reach the end of each stage. It’s a very well designed puzzle platformer. It gets pretty bastard-hard around world 6 of 10 (and only goes up from there), but if you’re a puzzle fan, you’ll likely get a lot of enjoyment out of this. The presentation is pretty simple, but also very effective. It’s very reminiscent of something like Umihara Kawase with the floating platforms over fixed-ish backgrounds, but the stylized simplicity gave me big vibes of later games like BoxBoy as well. There’s never any ambiguity or confusion over puzzle mechanics because of the visuals though, so that’s an A+ design choice in my book at least~. The music is also very fun! Each of the 10 worlds (including the post-game extra world) has its own theme that’ll play in all 10 of its levels, and they’re all jaunty and fun. They gave me just as big Kirby vibes as they did Wario Land vibes, so take from that what you will for their particular brand of jauntiness, but I also enjoyed them a lot either way x3 Verdict: Recommended. The premise might be too simple and the difficulty too high for many, but if you’re into puzzle platformers or just puzzle games in general, you’ll probably have a great time with Sutte Hakkun. I want to and I will say that if you really enjoyed something like Baba Is You, you’ll likely enjoy this a lot, but there are enough levels that do actually require a significant degree of platforming dexterity that I can’t say with complete confidence that the two games have perfect crossover in their appeal. Either way, this is an excellent puzzle game, and a very fun thing to hunt down the translation patch for if you wanted to play it with English menus as well~. I’m a pretty big fan of the Wario platformers, having played through all of them at least once at some time or another. WL3 has always been the one I’ve never really liked very much. When I was younger, I grew up on Wario Land 1 and 4, and then when I was a bit older I played 2, so 3 was the last I played of the original 4, and I was much older when I did. They recently added Wario Land 3 to the Switch Online GameBoy service, and after talking to a friend who was playing it for the first time and really loving it, I decided it was about time to give another go at what I considered the black sheep of the Wario Land quadrilogy. I was hoping if I went into it with an open mind and didn’t just expect it to be like the other three, that maybe I could find some of the enjoyment my friend was having. It took me around 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game with fairly liberal rewind feature use.
Wario Land 3’s story is pretty simple and straightforward. Rather than fighting with his main rival of the past two games, Captain Syrup, Wario is instead this time trapped in a music box. His plane crash lands in a forest where he finds a cave. Inside it is a weird music box that, after inspected, sucks him inside of it. Once he’s there, the protector god of the land tells him that he can only let Wario back out into the real world once he collects the five music boxes of the world, and of course Wario can keep any treasure he finds in the meanwhile. Not one to turn a nose down at treasure, Wario sets to work at finding those music boxes to get his freedom and his payday. It’s a simple story that works just fine, although it does get kinda weird, even for a Wario game, by the end, for my money. It’s a perfectly serviceable story that does a fine job of facilitating the action of the game. And what action of the game it is. WL3 is largely taking a further step forward from the design of Wario Land 2, where you once again are exploring stages for treasures but lack a healthbar. Instead, getting hit just sends you back. Whether that’s a punch from an enemy with really mean knockback that throws you down a pit, or setting you on fire or inflating you up in the air to fail the platforming challenge you’re on in some other way, it’s a different way of getting hit making the player lose progress than a game with a traditional damage and lives system. However, this operates much differently than it does in WL2, as instead of more linear stages with a treasure hidden in each, WL3 is more of a Metroid-style game, where the treasure is the endpoint of each stage. Opening that treasure will more often than not give a kind of key item that, rather than granting a move, will just open new paths to explore in other levels. Each stage has four of these treasures to find, so you end up going to each stage at least four times. That is, if you can remember what does what. Collecting one of these key items (be it just an effective key for a lock or a new power for Wario) brings you to the map screen where shining stars will indicate the levels that have changed content so Wario can now progress to the point he can find a new bit of treasure in them. However, they only show you this once, so if you miss it or forget it, you’re gonna be stuck wandering around hoping you can bump into whatever treasure will allow you to progress next. I distinctly remember as a kid *just* how easy it is to spend AGES lost in this game hunting for the next place to go (even speaking to several other friends who’ve played this game in the past, they didn’t even realize the star mechanic was a thing in the first place, and I doubt I did as a kid either). While it not being obvious where to go next is hardly much of a critique when the game DOES tell you were to go, effectively, it doesn’t help all of the other issues the game so often has. Wario controls a bit worse than he did in 2 (I also just replayed after this 2, so I say this with a high degree of confidence). He moves more stiffly and less easily, and it just makes progressing through levels feel more difficult than it seems it should be. On top of that, Wario also has such a similar move set to WL2, down to even how his sprite looks. Or at the very least, he ends up with almost the same move set. To make it a game like Metroid, they need powerups and new moves for Wario to have, but in lieu of thinking of up any new moves for him, they just stripped out nearly his entire move set and hid them inside treasure chests. Holding up to jump higher, picking up enemies, ground pounding, breaking blocks with your head, and even swimming have all been taken away from his base moveset. It makes his already awkward controls even more strange, and replaying the same levels even more cumbersome. And that’s the real critical weight of the issues with WL3. In isolation, a lot of them aren’t great ideas, but together they make a whole even weaker than the sum of its parts. A stage-based Metroidvania isn’t a very good idea at the best of times, and these short, nonlinear levels are made even more of a chore to go and re-go through with how often your no-health system-knockbacks force you through parts of them over and over within one playthrough. All of that combined with those muddier-than-usual controls makes for an experience that usually ranges between dull and frustrating, certainly compared to the other Wario Land games of the late-GameBoy era. The presentation is quite nice, at least. Sprites are colorful and expressive, and the music is full of Wario-y goodness as usual. The sprite and animation work in particular are really flexing the power of what a GBC-exclusive game could do with the big pretty sprites, and the look of the game holds up really well all these years later. Verdict: Not Recommended. While I don’t quite have it in me to call Wario Land 3 a *bad* game, I do have it in me to call it the weakest Wario Land game by a significant margin, and not really worth your time. It’s clunky and frustrating enough and its sequels are superior enough that I don’t think it’s particularly worth playing these days. There are so many much better games in this genre, some of them also being Wario Land games themselves, that I don’t really think Wario Land 3 is all that worth playing, even through the convenience of the Switch Online GameBoy service. Better known in English as Final Fantasy Legends, I bought the Switch trilogy of the original SaGa games years ago back on my last GameBoy RPG kick, but then bounced off of SaGa 1 pretty quick in the end. Now that I’m back on another GB game kick, and now that I have my Super Famicom (and a couple cheap copies of the Romancing SaGa games to play eventually as well), I figured it was high time I pushed forth and played through these classics of handheld RPGs. It took me around 15 hours or so to play through the game on Switch in Japanese not using the included speed-up function at all.
Being a game put together in like eight or seven months after the release of the GameBoy and released that very same year, the story of SaGa is pretty simple. At the center of the world, there’s a big tower. Many have tried to make their way up this tower, but not have succeeded. You are one such adventuring party who dare to try and make your way to the top! Along the way, you’ll find yourself in four realms connected to different bits of the tower, and you’ll need to find your way through the quests in those places to acquire the crystal you need to break the seals on the tower’s doors in order to complete your tower-related quest. It’s a very piecemeal story, but it’s presented quite charmingly. Your characters are all created by you, so they don’t really have character to them, per se, but in a very Final Fantasy 3-like move, they’ll chip in to dialogue with quips here and there, which is fun. Granted, all the character dialogue is written with the assumption that your party is all male, which can result in some unintendedly very queer dialogue if your party had a lot of women in it like mine, which made me giggle to no end x3. The whole game has this sorta campy fantasy OVA quality to it in its dialogue, and it makes for a fun and short-ish adventure that I quite liked, even if it’s hardly the most impressive thing in the world. The gameplay of SaGa is both quite simple and immensely fucked, and it’s also not difficult to believe coming from the guys who had just made Final Fantasy 2. There is money, but there is no experience point or leveling system to advance in power in SaGa 1. Instead, each of the game’s 3 playable races have differently strange methods of advancing in power, though aside from some minor starting gear and stat differences, male and female characters have no difference between them, which is nice. I played through with a party of a female and a male human as well as a female and a male esper, as that was the party Popo recommended I use (and the one I’d generally recommend myself as well). First, you have the humans. For humans, money is power. They never gain or lose stats from battle. Instead, you can buy items from shops that will permanently increase their max HP, strength, and speed respectively. Though the displayed stats cap out at 99, that’s actually not true. Even though that’s the intended cap (and the enforced one in later remakes), it actually internally caps at 255 for strength and speed before wrapping back to 0, so with some clever math and purchasing, humans can easily be the strongest characters in the game. They also have 8 inventory slots to populate with usable items, weapons (which have durability, so they’ll eventually break), and armor (which mercifully does not break, although a guide to tell you what armor gives what benefits is highly recommended by your author). Humans are the peak of stability, and at least in this version of the game, easily the most powerful characters in the late game. Next you have espers, which are called “mutants” in the English version (but I’m gonna call espers here, so :b). As their English name implies, where humans are the peak of stability, espers are the peak of instability. At the end of every battle, an esper’s stats have a random chance of raising or lowering (though they always trend upwards, so the lowering doesn’t matter so much). They also have four of their eight inventory slots taken up by reserved spaces for the skills and spells they can learn (and no MP system here. We’re still using old-fashioned spell charges!). These can range from offensive elemental magic, to status and element immunities, to general passives, buff/debuff spells, and even totally useless spells and elemental *weaknesses*. And if that weren’t enough, the game also doesn’t tell you when they gain or lose skills/spells, so if you have espers in your party, you’ll be checking their stats after EVERY battle, and that includes boss fights. If they get a good skill or keep what they have, you save your game right then and there (with the game’s merciful save anywhere system). Because if they replace a valuable skill with a crap one, then it’s time to soft-reset by pressing all the buttons at once, because you’re REALLY going to want them to be powerful. Just what a bastard espers are to use is easily the biggest weakness of the first SaGa game, as even though the game isn’t super hard, it’s far from easy enough that doing an ironman run where you never load saves for better skills is reasonable at all. Then lastly you have the monsters. Monsters are in the middle of humans and espers, in a sense, as even though they can learn spells/skills like espers, they’re very static like humans. When you defeat an enemy monster, you’ll often find they’ve dropped some meat. Humans or espers eating this meat does nothing, but feeding it to a monster will have that monster become that monster. From its stats to its skills, your monster is now that monster. Even bosses can drop meat! However, this raises several problems. First of all is that, since your monsters can become bosses, bosses trend towards being quite weak, as otherwise you’d be getting absurd powerhouses on your team. Only the final boss is any real challenge, and even then if you raise your humans past 99 stats, he’ll probably be a pushover too. The other issue is that monsters have much harder ceilings on their power. Where humans can just get more money to get stronger and espers can just fight more battles to have their stats rise, you *must* find stronger monsters to eat if you want your monsters to gain power. This ends up making monsters by far the weakest of the game’s playable races, and it’s really difficult to recommend using them for anything outside of a challenge run. The presentation of the game is certainly simple, but it’s also quite impressive for what was one of the first couple dozen GB games to be released. Monsters sprites are well detailed and impressive even though the worlds you’re in are often populated with quite simple or highly repeated tile textures. The music especially is very good, in keeping with my general experience of the simple GB soundchip putting out some truly excellent tunes in its RPGs. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you’re a BIG RPG fan, and you really want to get a taste of the GameBoy’s first RPG, then this is a curiosity you’ll likely find something worthwhile in delving into. If you’re not a pretty hardcore retro RPG fan, though, you’ll more than likely only find frustration and boredom in SaGa. It’s a very old game with a lot of strange and unintuitive and incredibly annoying systems, and that’s as much part of its charm as much as it is a good reason to stay far, far away from SaGa XD. My partner is a big fan of VNs, so when Sega released this April Fool’s Day surprise a week and a bit ago, we knew we had to take a look. Her and I had a lot of fun playing through it and voicing the characters ourselves, and it took us about 3 hours to play through it.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is, as the name implies, a story about the murder of Sonic the Hedgehog! Sonic and his friends are all abord a special event train for Amy Rose’s birthday party, and a murder mystery is the event in question! You play a gender ambiguous staff member aboard this train, and it’s your first day on the job, so it’s your duty to make sure everything goes smoothly! But when things start going weird, it begins to look like everything may not be as it seems aboard your murdery mystery train, so you team up with detective Tails to try and solve the case! The end result is a really delightful story! It’s a cute and funny story full of good humor and fun references for those who are big Sonic fans (but still make for fun jokes in themselves for those who aren’t as familiar with it). The gameplay is a visual novel, but it’s more like a little Ace Attorney-style adventure than a long book with pictures. The mystery itself is far from Ace Attorney-levels of difficult, but it’s still a load of fun either way. Interspersed with those VN segments are parts where you “get your thoughts in order”, which here means an infinite runner that’s themed like the old Sonic 2-style bonus stages (though mercifully without the 3D element). The best part of those action segments is that, while they get pretty damn tough by the end, you have a ton of tools at your disposal in the menu to make them as easy and forgiving as you wish if you’d rather just have a VN rather than a platforming challenge. The presentation is great! The character portraits do an excellent job of getting across the emotions of familiar characters and they complement the writing wonderfully. The music is also very fun, and the pixel art in the infinite runner sections is very nice and retro-Sonic-y as well. Verdict: Highly Recommended. A truly excellent game, no two ways about it. It’s not just a funny April Fool’s joke. It’s genuinely a really fun and well-written VN, and one of Sega’s best considered and put together Sonic projects in years. If you like VNs and especially if you like Sonic, this is a free game that is 1000% worth your time and then some. After playing and loving the BoxBoy trilogy on 3DS years ago, I was incredibly hype when a Switch entry in the series was announced a couple years back. I bought it at once, and then immediately set it down for later. Under the impression that the entire game was co-op, I was waiting for someone to play it with to have a better time with it, and my partner visiting over spring break, it felt like the perfect time to finally get to it. It took us a bit over 7 hours to 100% the 3 stories the game has playing in English on real hardware.
Like the other BoxBoy games, BoxBoy + BoxGirl! is a story of the titular characters saving their world from an invasion of shadowy, erm, shadow blob things intent on ruining things on their cube-shaped planet. It’s all told with only gestures and looks, no words, making it great for players of any reading ability, although the puzzles are hard enough that I imagine young children would likely get a bit too frustrated trying to play the game the whole way through on their own. It’s a fun, serviceable story that does a great job of making the characters appeaing and facilitating the gameplay we’re really here for. And that gameplay is BoxBoy at his boxy-est! With a limited number of blocks to use per stage if you want to hit the objective markers (or an infinite number if you just don’t care), BoxBoy and his friends try to go from point A to point B in each of these puzzle-platformer levels by extending blocks out from his body to make paths and get him places. Only one of the game’s three stories is actually co-op, sadly, but my partner and I solved this by just swapping off the controller level-by-level for the two single-player stories. And there’s a lot here! Well over 100 puzzles populate BoxBoy’s Switch outing, and coupled with a handful of new powers he can learn as well (not to mention tons of silly costumes to wear), they’re an absolute delight to go through. The presentation is simple but very good in the way that the BoxBoy series has led us to expect. Very simple designs for our quadrangular heroes are nonetheless very appealing, and the same goes for the simple, monochromatic levels you explore. The music is also very fun, though not quite as memorable as HAL Labs often does for their Kirby game’s I’d say. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you’re a fan of puzzle platformers and you’ve got a Switch, this is absolutely not a game to miss out on. Even the 2-player levels can be played single-player, so while they’re absolutely better with a buddy, you don’t even need friends to enjoy all the boxy goodness. The masters at HAL have done it again, and I just hope that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of BoxBoy, or at the very least, I hope they keep it up with smaller, puzzle-focused games like this. They’ve made their prowess at designing puzzle games very clear, so whether it’s BoxBoy or something entirely different, my only compliant is that there just isn’t enough of it! X3 |
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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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