My desire for more 2D Zelda goodness was not fulfilled by completing LTTP last weekend, so I picked up Link's Awaking DX on my Japanese 3DS eShop for the super good price of 600 yen (seriously the eShop has a lot of really good deals on Gameboy games even when they aren't on sale, certainly compared to a physical cart that may have a dead save battery, anyhow). As with LTTP, I played this one a LOT growing up, so I could basically go through most of it by memory and didn't need to fumble through the Japanese too much to figure out where to go, and could mostly just sit back and enjoy the original version's dialogue. It took me about 7.5 hours over the course of a few days, and I got all but 3 heart pieces as well as the ultimate sword (which I didn't even need a guide to find all the shells for, and I was very proud of myself :b ).
Given that I started it the evening after I finished LTTP, the first thing I noticed was just how much easier this game is than that one. Most enemies, even bosses, don't do THAT much damage, certainly not compared to the heavy hitters in LTTP, and the combat overall just felt a lot more easy and forgiving. Especially in the DX version, where you can do the bonus color dungeon after the 3rd main dungeon to get a tunic that either doubles your damage or defense permanently (and you can go back to swap between them whenever), the boss battles almost become trivial at a point when you kill them in like 5 or 6 sword hits. Especially when you get the ultimate sword (so you're dealing 4 normal sword hits-worth of damage per attack), anything that can be killed with a sword dies REALLY fast XD. That said, around the 5th dungeon, most bosses and mini-bosses aren't even attacked with the sword, and are often hit with either bombs or by throwing things at them, so they clearly anticipated you wrecking things with your ultra sword at least a littttle bit XD. The world and map design are things I'm kinda torn on. On one hand, if you know what you're doing, the world map and dungeon design are super fun to navigate and conquer over and over, and have a good blend between feeling like something you're naturally constantly wanting to explore and simple puzzles to navigate. On the other hand, if you DON'T know what your doing or where to go, you can wander around for AGES trying to find the ONE bit of the map where the area you can progress through is. Especially once you get to around the 6th and 7th dungeons, the game can be pretty unforgiving in expecting you to basically remember the entire map and what bits contain elements you couldn't get past before, and even then the ways you get to those places aren't always very intuitive *glares angrily at Flying Rooster*. Dungeon maps aren't super detailed, but they often get the job done. The real stumbling block they hit is that there are a lot of staircases that lead to 2D platforming sections which will wrap you around to other areas of the dungeon. These staircases nor their 2D sections are shown nowhere on your map, so again, the game really expects you to have a keen memory for how a dungeon is laid out or you're gonna spend a LOT of time lost. Especially in the 8th dungeon, which has a much more non-linear design than the others in the game, and I can specifically remember I just got so lost and confused in that dungeon I gave up on it on two separate playthroughs growing up (and the gimmick to finish the 7th dungeon is also one that stumped me a lot as a kid, and I had to look that up eventually too). This is really Link's Awakening's biggest problem. The limited graphical hardware of the GameBoy made it so a lot of important map details couldn't really easily be made to the player, and outside of remembering what the Owl tells you when you beat a dungeon (that makes sense in context I promise), you often have very little clue of where to go next or what to do it outside of remembering where you have or haven't been. Most areas of the map are visually distinct enough that you'll remember them, at least, but there aren't enough tile sets in the game to keep that from happening EVER, and there are fields I frequently confuse the locations of still to this day despite how many times I've played through this game. The overworld map is almost comically useless with how unspecific and vague it is about the locations of things, so while you can kinda use it for the general location of things, it's useless for actual navigation (in stark contrast to the map in LTTP which had basically EVERYTHING on the map which you could see on it). Verdict: Recommended. The bad signposting is really the only thing keeping me from giving this game a whole-hearted highly recommended mark. Losing where you're supposed to can be SO frustrating that it really just makes it feel like the game isn't respecting the player's time. This wouldn't be something I'd complain much about if this where any other game, as that bad navigation that expected a lot of the player was very common in old action/adventure games. But Link's Awakening unlearns so many good design lessons from LTTP that I cannot leave it unpenalized in good conscience. This is a great game, but do be expecting to use a guide to get through some of the later (or even quite early) overworld sections if you do decide to pick it up and don't want to spend ages wandering around the overworld trying to remember where to go (or if you like making really meticulous maps with notes for your retro adventure games, then I suppose you'd probably love this game).
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Watching a Twitch streamer poke around in this last week, I really got itching to play LTTP again. Once I remembered that I could just DO that because I brought my SNES Classic to me from America, I hopped right in over the weekend and played through it over just under 7 hours on Sunday morning. It was a lovely nostalgic romp through a game I haven't played the SNES version of in MANY years (it was a game I lost as a child, though still have no idea how).
I played the GBA version a LOT more than the SNES version growing up, and I was surprised at just how many things I had assumed were quality of life additions in the port were in the original all along (keep in mind I had that game from the ages of like, 3 to 5, so my memory of it from then is very rough). Fantastic bits of signposting like the village boy actually marking on your map where the elder is, or the dark world dungeons being listed in order on your map are there in all their glory (and apparently always had been XD). Early Zelda games have always had shaky relationships with good signposting of where next to go and how to do it (especially Link's Awakening) in my experience, so it was a really cool realization of just how well this game had been put together back then. That said, my 7 hour completion time is very largely due to how good my memory is of this game up to about the second to last dungeon, so the real benefits of the signposting were something I couldn't really enjoy organically as if it were my first time playing. This game is also so much harder than I remember it being. Maybe they made the GBA ports easier or something, but there are SO many enemies, especially early bosses (and MOST especially the one you fight in the first dark world dungeon) deal SO much damage, like two hearts in one hit, that you can die in like 3 or 4 hits if you haven't been tracking down every heart piece you can get your hands on. Certainly not the the extent of something like Zelda 2, which is a game I find so hard that it's very difficult to enjoy playing it, but it was still a surprising entry for me of back when Nintendo made HARD games that did not hold your hand. Going back to the short completion time, it was weird to see JUST how small and short so many of the dungeons are. Some of the quickest can be done in like 10 or 15 minutes barely trying if you're just following where they point you to go and don't get stuck on some logic puzzle or lost inside them. They always seemed SO huge and sprawling to me as a kid, it's weird to go back like, 10 years since I last beat this and see just what a relatively tiny experience this game is (granted it has like a dozen freaking dungeons, so it's not that bad that they're small. If anything I prefer them this way). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still not my favorite 2D Zelda game, but I do certainly appreciate it more this time around than my memory had treated it before. Not really enough NPC interaction for my tastes, as this is still very much an exploration-based action/adventure game more in the style of the games that came before it, but it's still easily and obviously one of the best action adventure games on the system (shocking news to you all, I'm sure XD) My N64 kick continues (possibly to an end for now) as I finish Mario Story, aka Paper Mario. I thought it'd be a really fun exercise to play a game with such fun writing (which I also happened to know the English of so well) in its original language, and I was very much right! Now this N64, one I brought with me from America from when I was a kid, has seen from beginning to end 3 of my favorite games from my childhood UwU
The writing was a really interesting thing to notice differences in. Particularly among the main cast of Mario's partners. Goombario is far more of a little brat, almost like a wannabe tough guy middle schooler, which had me just in stitches for some of the Tattle descriptions he'd do XD . Bombette's speaking style is much more of a cross between girly but sassy and I thought it was very cute. Lady Bow is actually SUPER similar to how she is in English, and Watt's speaking style uses a kind of baby talk-ish lisp for how they say things that, while cute, made it really hard to understand what they were saying at times. Bowser is also just SO over the top campy with how evil he talks that it always makes me laugh more than anything. I've loved him in other Mario RPG's I've played and now I really wanna buy a Super Famicom Mini to play Mario RPG itself in Japanese because the way he's written is always just so funny XD . The combat is more puzzle-y than I remember, though I think that's just my more analytical way of thinking due to my age rather than tastes. I did not remember at all taking SO much damage from even normal enemies, but it certainly made sense with how baby-me always maxed out health as the first stat they could when I played the game when I was little. It really heavily incentives rushing down enemies as fast as possible, so every encounter almost feels like a kind of simple puzzle (save for somewhat more complex boss encounters) of how to get it over with ASAP. It also has a weird kind of feeling to how powerful you are because your attack and defense are linked to story-related gear instead of level, so that's one more element forcing you to engage with that puzzle-type fighting because you can't just power-level your way to one-shotting everything. It's a very interesting design that makes it a far more unique experience than something like Mario RPG. That said, I still enjoy the sequel more. Paper Mario's best parts are its writing, and the often dialogue-less dungeons can tend to really drag on, especially towards the end of the game and in the final dungeon. TTYD does a much better job in surrounding its dungeons in larger story beats that just makes it an overall more enjoyable experience to me. I might try and pick that up again soon too; it's been far too long since I've played it. <3 Verdict: Recommended. The simplicity of the combat and sillier, lighthearted story may turn of some people, but if you're a Nintendo fan and don't demand large degrees of tactical choices from your RPGs, you will likely enjoy Paper Mario quite a lot UwU I played a lot of Mario Party 2 over the Golden Week vacation two weeks ago, and it made me want to try out some of the other ones again since it's been so long since I've played most of the games. It's been at least like 10 years since I've played any Mario Party before 9 to any great extent. N64 games tend to be very cheap (at least the more popular/common Nintendo first-party ones) around here, so I went and got Mario Party 3 the other day for a whopping 600 yen (200 yen off because it had the box but not the manual XD ).
In my youth back before I even had a Gamecube, Mario Party 2 was always my favorite of the original 3 Mario Parties, and 3 was always my least favorite. I'd never really been able to put words as to why other than that I didn't like the boards, but the great amount of time I've spent beating story mode twice over the past weekend (once on easy once on hard) has really allowed me to put words to why Mario Party 3 is not just a game I don't enjoy as much as its predecessor, I can also put words to more significant faults in its overall game design. Now I want to make clear I am not trying to state that Mario Party 3 is an outright bad game. I think if one were to do that you'd be taking all the pre-9 Mario Parties down with it with how much greater DNA they share. But all Mario Parties are not created equally, and I am definitely arguing that Mario Party 3 is built of lesser stuff than many of its console-borne brethren. Mario Party 2 was in MANY ways a "fixed" version of Mario Party 1. A significant amount of the mini-games aren't so much recycled so much as they are improved upon from the first game (although there is the occasional 1-to-1 copy like Hexagon Heat). Other than the new maps, Mario Party 2's main innovations upon the first game are the introductions of concepts like items, a bank, duels during the last few turns, and far fewer ways for players to directly steal items from one another via the normal end-of-turn mini-games. By doing this, Mario Party 2, however unintentionally, amplified the main design flaw from Mario Party 1: It is very easy to run the table by just being very good at all the mini-games. Two of the end-of-game bonus stars are linked to winning them frequently, and things like items and duels gave the best players more ways than ever to utilize that cash advantage and rob other players of their own coin advantages. If everyone wasn't around the same skill level, Mario Party 1 and 2 would quickly turn into a game where the winner was very obvious from the start, and it ironically enough made it an awful party game because of the amount of how difficult casual play was with players of varying skill levels. Mario Party 3's apparent solution to this was to introduce more random chance into not just the mini-games, but all aspects of the game's design in several ways: 1) Chance Time, the frequently frustrating equalizer that, while rare, would give anything from 10 coins to ALL a player's stars to another player if done correctly, now has a much more frequent sibling in Game Guy. Game Guy is a solo-player event that whisks you away to his casino and forces you to bet ALL of your coins in a very easy-to-lose game of chance. Where Chance Time at LEAST involved several players (one pushing the buttons of the game and at least one other being affected by it), Game Guy is not only a totally solo event that really slows the pace of the game down, but it is also something that either totally cripples one player by funneling ALL of their coins into the garbage, or granting them a coin lead so massive that no other player has the slightest chance of topping them (making one of the 3 bonus stars for the highest coin total at one time basically pointless). There's even a rare item you can use to sic Game Guy on any player (even yourself) if you want, as kind of a tacit acknowledgement from the game itself that going to it is a BAD thing you don't want to do. Game Guy's games, in isolation, aren't terrible, but the impact they have on the overall flow of the board game adds an element of randomness that doesn't really do anything but rob agency away from the players in a series that already has issues with random chance. 2) The mini-games. A lot of MP3's mini-games are really good fun. Some take way longer to play than I'd like, but the addition of a selection of item and duel mini-games instead of each map having its own really spices things up for those parts of the game (although both of those do a LOT to slow down the overall pace of each game). Overall I'd say it's a game with higher mini-game highs but lower mini-game lows than its predecessors. However, something that is in MP3 a lot more than 2 are games that rely on random chance to win. It's something that gets far more apparent on higher CPU difficulties as well, but other games too are just designed in such a way that the CPU has a fundamentally easier time to the point where some games are literally impossible for a human player to beat them in. Any game that relies around knowing the character's hit-boxes to a very exact degree or being able to move to adjust to an upcoming obstacle quickly is one the CPU will almost always win. I reached a point where there were times I'd just put down my controller if the game came up because there was genuinely no point in even trying. Although their sporadic length does a lot to slow down the overall pace of the game, the increased amount of games where no amount of skill (or human-attainable skill) makes MP3 a very frustrating experience especially in its special single-player mode. 3) The board design. This is the #1 problem that Mario Party 3 faces as far as I'm concerned. Every single board has a varying level of the core conceit of it tied to randomness. Whether its being flung across the entire board by a happening space, needing to guess a 50/50 chance to not get sent back to the start instead of progressing, or just not rolling well on a particular turn so you can't go the direction the game lets you go that turn, the boards are incredibly difficult to purposefully navigate compared to the previous two games. Largely because of happening spaces dictating when and how certain parts of the board can be accessed, this makes items that do things like teleport the player to the star or change the star's location very valuable, because often times no player can even get lucky enough to even GET to where the star currently is. All of the randomness put into the board designs, on top of just how winding their paths are and visually cluttered their design tends to be, makes it not only difficult to tell how to get to places but to get to them at all. It frequently robs the board part of the board game of any kind of player agency to the point where even having it at all seems like a waste of time between mini-games. 4) The dueling mode. The 1 vs. 1 dueling mode is more of a side-point, as it's completely divorced from the usual Mario Party mode and is honestly more of a gimmick for the single-player mode to have some more length and break up its pacing a bit, but the execution is so poorly done that I cannot leave it without comment. The concept is really cool: Two players going around on a board, each with Mario Bros. baddies as partners that they use to hurt the other player. The better/stronger the partner, the more salary they take per turn, so you need to keep winning mini-games to be able to afford your partner at all! However, in practice, it is just a microcosm of how badly the randomness is in this game. Depending on the map and on the partner you start with, it is VERY possible for a match to be over in two whole turns if one player just gets lucky rolls. It's also even more frequently the case that the board is so difficult to navigate, or the players are just rolling unluckily enough, that no combat ever takes place, so the winner is decided by coins. This would be fine, but mini-games only happen when initiated by landing on space on the board, so if there aren't many that game or if you happen to keep getting unlucky with the partners you get (who are of course assigned randomly, why wouldn't they be), you'll have barely any coins by no fault of your own and just lose. The duel mode was a noble effort that honestly came out so badly I almost wish it weren't in the game at all. It is genuinely as random as two children just playing the card game War with one another: the duel mode may as well be one competing die roll to see who scores the highest and call it a day. Mario Party 3 doesn't fail in the aesthetic presentation, certainly. Sure, you have the fun map-determinate costumes from the second game gone, but you have a colorful (if cluttered) paper cut-out style to all the worlds and games, as well as a bunch of good music. You even have two new playable characters in the form of Daisy and Waluigi, and all the silly campy cutscenes in between rounds in the story mode. MP3 certainly looks and sounds as good as it should for being such a late-life N64 game. Although you could certainly argue that the toy box style was just a clever way to use mostly 2D sprite assets rather than proper polygon'd models to get the game released quicker, it still looks nice. Verdict: Not recommended. This is not a bad game, but you can do SO much better for a Mario Party even on the N64 that I just can't recommend this in good conscience, especially for the increasingly steep price point it commands outside of Japan. As said earlier, while there really aren't any strictly terrible Mario Party games outside of the GBA one, not all are created equal, and Mario Party 3 is definitely one below the rest. In an effort to distance themselves from how similar the first two games were from each other, they really tried to reinvent the wheel in a way that just was not really necessary, and the series honestly keeps a lot of these problems, even if not quite to the same degree, well into Mario Party 4. Just get Mario Party 2 or bite the bullet and start trying to hunt down the later Gamecube games if you really want great Mario Party in the pre-9 style, because you can do a LOT better for a LOT cheaper than Mario Party 3. Another 250 yen pick up from a day or two ago. A version of the game I'd always thought about picking up because of the gimmick of the Rumble Pak compatibility, and here I am without a Rumble Pak to actually test it with XD. Though this is technically a game I thiiiink I've finished on the N64 before, it's been SO long that other than my memory of most stages, I don't feel that familiar with the game. My most recent memory of it is the DS port that I played along the time it came out, and it's difficult to separate the memory of the two versions in my head XP . It's definitely a game that PLAYS way different than I remember, and this is the first time I've ever actually gotten all 120 stars on the N64 version, so I feel an exception is warranted from being a * repeat completion like Banjo-Kazooie was.
As far as what the game is, it's Mario 64. Chances are, you know what that is. A major pioneer of modern 3D movement in games and especially the 3D collectathon genre as a whole. 15 courses with 7 stars each, a castle hub area with 15 stars hidden in it as well, and 3 big Bowser fights before you reach the end. One of the all-time classics of the N64 that really doesn't need any serious introduction. That said, the game certainly plays more like a pioneer in the genre and less flawlessly than I remember. This game is HARD to control after going through Banjo-Kazooie a few days ago, and even harder since it controls so differently from any other Mario game I've played recently. It honestly made me kinda wanna pick up a GameCube and Mario Sunshine just to refresh my memory on how well that game controls compared to this, because while I certainly remembered always preferring the Banjo games to Mario 64 as a kid, I definitely didn't remember exactly why. Now I have a pretty good idea: The controls. Mario 64 is somewhat of a victim of its own success. All the other great 3D platformers that have come since, largely from Nintendo, have refined Mario's move-set in a way that has made his platforming far more forgiving. However, in this originator, a factor of three things make this game pretty difficult to go back to: 1. The camera is sometimes alright, but if you want to control it you're gonna have a BAD time. You GOTTA try and play like you can't even control it, because it doesn't wanna be controlled. 2. Mario's turning circle is HUGE. If you wanna turn around, he's gonna make a huge circle in front of him unless he's at a dead stop and you turn a very specific way. This means you're gonna be falling off of the game's MANY tiny platforms A LOT (into its uncountable bottomless pits), especially when the camera isn't behaving and forward is suddenly making you go right. 3. Swimming and flying are terrible and annoying. Not too related to #2, but it makes getting around that much more annoying in a game with tons of water to swim through and enough stars that involve flying to really rub it in your face how irritating the flight controls are compared to something simple like Banjo-Kazooie's flying. All those gripes aside, they only REALLY come into play, I think, when going for a 120-star run. The game only actually requires you to get 70 out of 120 stars, of course, but I never really appreciated what that meant until I played through it this time. Each of the 15 courses has 7 stars in it, and the main castle has 15 stars hidden in it (some more difficult to get than others). That means it's technically possible to beat the whole game while only visiting 8 of the 15 worlds! This combined with the fact that it's so easy to sequence-break the order you get stars in in stages really gives the player a degree of choice and freedom in choosing which challenges they want to take on and which they don't. You don't even really get anything for getting them all other than some slightly different final dialogue from Bowser at the end and the ability to go and meet Yoshi on top of the castle. It frames getting EVERY star as what it really is: A challenge only to be taken on by the truly daunting that is a reward in and of itself. Given how many prior Mario games allowed you to skip large swaths of content through things like warps and the Star Road, it certainly wasn't a huge design choice-leap to give the player such choice in which stages they want to play in Mario 64, but it's a design choice I've really only truly appreciated this time through. Nintendo really has always been trying to give players the agency to play through their games in the way the player would prefer. It isn't some super recent revelation with the era of the Wii and such. As far as differences from the original N64 release of Mario 64 go, I guess you could say this is the "definitive" edition in a certain way for Japanese players. It apparently irons out some bugs and glitches present in the original release, while also confusingly enough removing Japanese dialogue and replacing it with the English voice overs from the international release. All of Peach's dialogue, for example, is in English with Japanese subtitles. It's an interesting curiosity if you just want a rumble gimmick added to the American version of Mario 64 you're more familiar with, as far as importing is concerned (granted all the text is still in Japanese, so I hope you don't need to read anything to get through this if you did wanna import it XD). Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. The hesitant part of my recommendation is really down to my personal tastes. This isn't really a game I'm dying to play more of after my often frustrating experience going through it this time (especially with some of those later 100 coin stars XP), and the DS port adds SO much content and tightens up the controls so much that there's even a simply better (in many ways) version of this game I can far more easily recommend. It is an interesting historical piece that is very notable for the innovations in 3D platforming it presented, but Nintendo's many refinements on its formula have really made it start to show its age on its original hardware. |
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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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