This is a game I’ve been looking at picking up for genuinely years. I watched an arc of One Piece in a movie night with some friends on Discord, and my close friend mentioned this game afterwards as a good way to get a good overview of One Piece (especially the pre-time skip stuff). Fast forward like 2+ years to only a couple weeks ago when I learned that this bad boy was not only on Vita and worked on the Vita TV but that it was also only 500 yen at Book Off, and I snapped it up as quick as I could x3. I played through both the adventure (story mode) and dream log (the challenge map mode, basically) modes all the way through and unlocked every character. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (and I have no idea how long it took me, but it had to be at least 50 or so hours).
The story of Pirate Warriors 3 is basically just the story of the One Piece anime up through at least the start of the Dressrosa arc (which was airing when this came out in 2015 but wasn’t close to finishing, so this game just makes up an ending for it to cap off its story mode). While I’m not completely unfamiliar with One Piece, a lot of this game’s story was completely new to me, and for my money it does a pretty good job of translating the source material to Musou maps. It generally does this by turning one story arc into one map, but here and there you’ll get an arc spread over two maps, or some smaller unimportant (or difficult to Musou-ify) arcs just summed up in pre-mission briefings before actual levels. How well those are translated into Musou levels varies by arc, with some being still very effective despite how truncated they are here and others being *so* truncated that it’s honestly difficult to tell what’s going on or where certain emotional beats are supposed to come from. At the very least, I think they do a very admirable job of turning One Piece into a Musou game, and I by and large really enjoyed going through the narratives of each arc. Being a Musou game, the overall gameplay is likely not difficult to guess for anyone familiar with the genre. You go around big maps killing hundreds or thousands of little unimportant generic soldiers as you complete objectives. These objectives often revolve around fighting other major characters, but they also include defending friendly hero units or capturing enemy capture zones. All that stuff is going to be extremely familiar to anyone who’s played a Musou game of basically any stripe since like 2004, and this game does it quite well. While there are a few pretty lackluster maps here and there (either for story or gameplay reasons), map design is generally quite strong and the 37 different characters feel very different and fun to play (albeit how balanced one will feel from another varies quite a bit). What Pirate Warriors 3 does uniquely (or at least relatively so) among Musou games aren’t super extreme, but they do give the game a fun vibe apart from contemporary mid-2010’s Musou games like Dynasty Warriors Gundam, Dragon Quest Heroes, or Hyrule Warriors. Maps have extra semi-hidden objectives called Treasure Events that you can do for both extra story events and boons occurring for your side in the fight, and they add a fun flair to maps and a good encouragement to replay maps, even if they’re hardly a game defining addition. Another neat thing in maps is how you can link with an ally on the map and they’ll hop in to deliver an assist-like extra attack when you finish a combo (or you can summon them outright when you max out the gauge and do a super attack along with them). This is a tiny change, but it definitely changed how I played the game a fair bit compared to something like the Gundam Musou games. Being that you need to finish your combo to trigger their assist, it discourages just dodge-cancelling constantly mid-combo like the Gundam Musous’ combat systems do, and figuring out which kinds of assists work best with which player characters added a fun but not too complicated extra layer of depth to clearing out waves of enemies or taking on powerful enemy hero units. The aspect of this game compared to other contemporary Musous that is most worth mentioning is how character leveling and advancement works. Where most other Musou games by this point had equippable weapons or armors you could find in stages or resources you could use to unlock further combo trees or move sets, Pirate Warriors’s bread and butter is in its character coins. Fighting as a character, fighting with a character as your assist, and outright defeating enemy hero units will earn you character coins of those characters. These can be used in between battles to upgrade your stats, and they’re a *very* meaningful aspect of upgrading power alongside simple leveling up (which can be done by just using a character or you can outright buy levels with in-game currency too). It’s a neat idea, and it certainly gives you a *lot* to grind for in certain cases, but it’s overall more of a hindrance than it is a help in my experience. Especially in the story mode, it makes playing anyone but a few characters very prohibitively difficult unless you want to go back and grind for specific coins in past stages, as different characters require different (and sometimes far rarer) coins to upgrade their power levels. It made me stick to playing just a few characters a lot more than I would’ve liked, and it’s ultimately the game’s biggest weakness compared to its contemporaries. It’s not a *huge* weakness, as especially once you’re doing the challenge maps, you’ll likely have more than enough coins to mess around with a good few characters should you so choose to, but it definitely makes the story mode a bit more restricted than it already is in terms of who you can play around with and not expect to get the tar kicked out of you. The presentation is really well done. There’s tons of music tracks from the show as well as original ones as well that make for fun, pumping fights during stages, and I found myself humming the main theme quite a lot in between sessions of playing. It’s just so catchy! X3. The graphics are also by and large very nicely done, and they do a really good job of translating Oda’s art style from 2D manga and anime into a 3D space. The animation and cutscene work is especially very done, recreating iconic scenes from the anime very well in climactic endings to fights, moving emotional scenes, and your more general special moves. The one tiny critique I’d have for art design is that they’re clearly trying to have their cake and eat it too in regards to some characters’ pre-time skip character models. Some main characters like Luffy and Nami in particular look very noticeably unlike their more gaunt and less-built pre-time skip selves, and they’re clearly just their post-time skip models altered not nearly enough to have them fit in clothes they wore earlier in the show. It’s a very minor gripe, but it’s something even someone with only a passing knowledge of One Piece like me noticed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a more dedicated fan noticed more weirdness here and there with other characters. Performance-wise, this game is a real marvel to see run as well as it does on the PS Vita (or in my case, the PSTV). Enemy limits on screen are usually somewhere around 30 at a time, and I’d be interested to know if the PS3 version is able to up that at all, but generally speaking this game still looked great on my flat screen TV and I would’ve forgotten I was playing a Vita game if I didn’t have the little console sitting in front of me. There is some noticeable slowdown at some points when there’s a lot happening on screen, but it was never anything that really meaningfully affected gameplay for me. There are some other somewhat questionable design decisions in the controls like the lack of a lock-on button for fighting enemy hero units, but with just how fast some of them can teleport and whip around you, I can see why they didn’t end up including one. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is my new #3 favorite Musou of the modern ones I’ve played. It doesn’t quite have the polish of Hyrule Warriors (my #1), and it lacks the sheer amount of content that Dynasty Warriors Gundam Reborn does, but it still manages to be a really fun and colorful adaptation of what it’s bringing to the Musou formula. The quality of the included maps and characters carries strongly the lessons they’ve learned by their third time adapting One Piece, and it shows in just how fun it is. Where the Gundam Musou games helped make me a fan of Gundam, this Pirate Warriors game has helped me be a fan of One Piece, and if that isn’t high praise of how this adapts its license, then I don’t know what is~.
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A few months back, my partner picked up One Piece Odyssey, the new One Piece RPG, and I watched her play through just about all of it. It got me thinking about One Piece a lot again, and as a bit of a joke, I picked this game up so I could play a One Piece RPG alongside her x3. Schedules got busy, though, so it ended up being quite some time before I could actually sit down and play this with her, and this last weekend I finally saw the bugger through to the end. It took me some 20-ish hours (the game doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on my PS2, and I didn’t touch the post-game content at all.
The story premise for this is actually something my partner and I theorized about the potential of when I was watching her play One Piece Odyssey. You’re not playing as the Straw Hat crew, the licensed characters from the show. You’re playing as an original character alongside them on an adventure. I don’t wanna *be* Luffy, I wanna go on an adventure *with* Luffy, so to speak. You play as an original character plus two original friends (a boy and a girl) of theirs on a pirate adventure to collect all six legendary gold fragments of a mysterious treasure. The Straw Hat crew are also out to find them, but they’re attacked and split up from each other in the intro cutscene by a mysterious and powerful new enemy. After your rag tag crew is rescued by Ussop, you set out to help reuinte the Straw Hat crew and find all the pieces of this legendary treasure! As for where this game takes place in the One Piece story, it’s a side-story taking place in between them defeating Aaron and going to Loguetown (and the post-game involves them meeting Chopper, I believe). As a general piece of writing, it’s really nothing special, and it’s paced pretty terribly. There are some fun fan service-y segments like when you meet up with Buggy (still missing his body parts after his fight with Luffy) that made me laugh quite a bit, but overall the game is really wanting in that department. It’s cool just how much VA they got in the game, but it’s just not hitting the mark of a licensed fan service-y game like Banpresto is so good at doing. The writing is definitely *the* reason to play the game, but between the game getting in the way of itself and the generally lackluster pacing on top of that, it’s far less than stellar, and it’s honestly not enough of a draw to recommend the game on these merits alone (unlike a game like Super Hero Operations, which I played earlier this year and is from only a year or two before this). Mechanically, this *is* technically an RPG, but in a more loose sense. It’s more like an adventure game composed of various mini-games with some vague trappings of an RPG like leveling up and getting equipment. There are six different locations in the main game (with another one or two in the post-game), and each of these is one big isometric map that you sail around on completing objectives. These objectives are usually indicated to you via your compass’s needle, but often times you’ll need to just sail around and try your best to find whatever it is you’re looking for (and the game isn’t particularly interested in reminding you of what that is if you forget, not that the directions you have are all that helpful very often anyhow). A lot of this, especially around the game’s midpoint, devolves into a ton of somewhat aimless scavenger hunting, and it is DRAINING to say the least. The game has a TON of padding around making you either aimlessly or even not aimlessly sail around the world back and forth between different locations, and it’s the biggest culprit when it comes to how bad the narrative’s pacing is. This game would be a lot better if it were 30 or 50% shorter. That is *just* how much padding we’re talking here. The other activities you do along your scavenger hunting and sailing around the map are different forms of fighting. The one the game has the most mechanics around (buying equipment, accessories, and leveling up) are the roulette-based 3v3 fights with other pirate crews. Weapons you buy in shops not only have procedurally generated stats in accordance with their weapon level, but they also determine the layout of this roulette (they use the word “roulette” but it’s more like a single-wheel slot machine) timing mini-game . How many hits (and how strong they are), how many misses, and what extra modifiers (like buffs for your team, debuffs for the enemy, and even whether or not you’re hitting a single target or the whole enemy team) are determined by your weapon. I generally found that combos (by hitting the right mark for it) are the way to go, and more damage makes the roulette spin faster, so slower weapons like bats and knuckle weapons are really the only sensible way to live. As a result, most weapons I found were basically useless, and vendors swap what they sell constantly, so it was mostly just a game of going from vendor to vendor on each map and seeing if they happened to have a better version of what I already had. These 3v3 fights are probably the best thought out part of the game, but even then, they’re far from perfect, and they also don’t have enough sprites in-game to have you fight anyone but generic enemies (generally composed of the same sprites you could’ve potentially used for your non-main character original pirate crew). How you actually fight big name bad guys like Arlong or Krieg are in several forms. First you have ship battles, which aren’t very special, but they’re the most fun of these sorts of fights. You’re shooting their cannonballs out of the air and shooting specified spots on their ships in simple rail-shooter segments, and while it’s not amazing, it’s a fun enough change of pace. Then you have what I’ll call the word battles. This is how you fight giant sea monsters (by hurling big furniture off of the deck of the ship at them) or big bosses (via your list of silly special moves) by picking a word from a procedurally generated list, and the longer the word, the more damage you do. There’s a little bit of strategy here, as you’re trying to hit them down to about exactly lethal, as if you overshoot they’ll likely get back up and not actually die, but you also effectively can’t die yourself in these segments, so it’s mostly just silly, flashy fun, and they’re a clever and efficient way to give the player fights against big bosses as well without making a ton of bespoke assets for it. The biggest loser of these extra modes is what I’ll call the choose-your-own-adventure fights. There are three of them, and they’re conceptually the Straw Hat Pirates fighting against big enemies and you’re picking moves for them from a binary list each time. Picking the right option will progress the fight down a particular dialogue tree, making this a glorified visual novel segment. However, the big problem here is that there is almost never any indication of what move is actually the right move. Even moves that “do damage” (there are no health bars in this segment) might not actually be the correct move because it’s not progressing the dialogue trees the right way. These devolve into trial and error slogs of just trying to select the correct choice to let you be free of this awful mess. These are so bad and unintuitive (not to mention I couldn’t really find guides for them on the Japanese internet even) that they alone are what make the game completely unrecommendable. I wish that were not the case, but they were so miserable and so devoid of actual mechanics that it’s just impossible to overlook them in any meaningful sense, especially in a game that’s already such a mixed bag with the good struggling very hard to outpace the bad. Speaking of mixed bags, we also have the game’s presentation, which fits that description to a T. The graphics, when they’re there, are generally either pretty okay 3d models (outside of the rail shooter segments which look better) or visual novel-style segments. The VN segments use a ton of art from the show and manga (as well as some completely original stuff), and while here and there they’ve picked some quite uncanny screen caps of the crew, it generally looks quite nice, and the Straw Hat crew in particular have a TON of different sprites they’ll use for different attacks or emotions. The audio quality also isn’t great, being a PS1 game, but quite a large amount of the dialogue is also voice acted, at least for the licensed characters. It’s honestly quite impressive just how many of them (some of which have barely any lines) they managed to gather the voice actors together to get them to record for this game for. While it’s not exactly Atelier Marie, where literally all spoken dialogue is voiced, it’s still a remarkable amount of story-important dialogue given voice. The music, though, is extremely basic and not very good. It’s all incredibly forgettable and doesn’t really scream “One Piece” at all, and it’s an unfortunate low point for a game with otherwise quite competent presentation. Verdict: Not Recommended. Even for the most die hard One Piece fans, I think this game is going to be a really tough pill to swallow compared to the sheer amount of far more competent One Piece games out there. Sure, it’s an original story, but it’s so underwhelming and poorly paced that even that can’t save it, especially with how downright awful or boring so much of the gameplay often is. I’m glad to have it out of my way, but at the rate we’re going, this is probably going to be the worst game I play this year. Of all the licensed Japan-only games you need to know Japanese pretty darn well to actually play, this is one you can very safely skip. This is a game I’ve been morbidly curious about basically since it came out. I quite like 3D collectathon platformers, and if I can afford it, I try to play all the ones I can get my hands on, even if they’re not very good. It’s been a long wait, but I’ve been biding my time ever since waiting for it to get at or below the threshold at which I find it reasonable to buy a game even if I’ll end up disliking it. I ended up getting engaged with it a lot more than I at first thought I would, first beating it, and then spending the whole weekend finishing it out nearly 100% (a couple costumes and achievements I didn’t feel it was worth my time to slog through, but I got all 300 statues). It took me around 35 to 40 hours (the game doesn’t keep track, so far as I’m aware, so I had to give my best estimate) to do it all (and beating the game originally took me around 13 or 15 hours).
Balan Wonderworld’s story is somewhat infamously told with very, very little dialogue. After the opening cutscene of your main character stumbling into the titular Balan’s world, he gives you a well animated but surreal introduction, and the subtitles there are just about the last text you’ll see as far as the story goes. The rest of the story is told through pantomime as you make your way through one world at a time, helping the character associated with that world overcome their fears and doubts to do the difficult thing in their real life. It’s somewhere between Psychonauts and Nights (with which this game shares a lot of DNA), but it’s lighthearted and fun enough to give the action a fun premise and aesthetic. Another somewhat infamous note about the story is that there is a book separately available that’s effectively a novelization of the game’s narrative, though I’d be hard pressed to say that the game is worse off for not having loads of text explaining its story. It’s not like Mario Odyssey is a good 3d platformer because it has hundreds of pages of text explaining some deep narrative, after all. Balan Wonderworld makes the smart decision to keep the in-game story as brief as it needs to be, and I found it a fun and well paced setting for the adventure to take place. The gameplay of Balan is a stage-based 3D platformer which uses a similar approach to something like Banjo Kazooie. In each stage, there are 6+ Balan statues (the equivalent of a jiggy or power star) to find. Six are scattered about, and an extra 1 to 3 are unlocked by perfecting Balan’s Bouts (which I will explain later). You need a certain total number of statues to unlock more worlds to explore, and there are 12 worlds in total with 2 acts each, with a third act to each world being unlocked after you’ve beaten the final boss. The main difference to something like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie is that, even though you do have the statues to collect, each level does have an end point you need to reach to complete it. This lends to a more well paced level design generally, and it also makes the Balan statues a bit easier to find. Ones you’ve found are listed in order in the upper left, so it’s a bit easier to try and guess where you might’ve missed one by using process of determination based on the ones you’ve already found. The way you actually navigate these stages is by running and jumping around them via the aid of costumes you find in the levels. A big deal was made during its release that Balan Wonderworld is a “one-button game”. While not entirely true (you use the shoulder buttons to swap between costumes and the pause button opens the menu, for example), just about every button does the same thing, so the costumes are how the game gives you more depth to your exploration despite the simplicity. You can bring any costume to any stage, and you can stockpile extra copies in your little wardrobe you can access at checkpoints. Getting hit once will lose you your costume, but it’s generally not too difficult to avoid getting hit. It’s a good motivator to be extra careful with your best and favorite costumes, at the very least. While the one-button gameplay does make navigating some menus a little bit more cumbersome than it feels like it should be, I found it to be a nice accessibility feature that the game is well designed around. Finding new costumes and experimenting with what they could do was always fun, and each of the 12 worlds is designed around the abilities its respective costumes give you, making the puzzle design generally nice and intuitive as well. I say “generally” because just about every stage has at least some statues that can’t be acquired using only the costumes found within it. Sometimes you’ll be waiting a very long time to get the costume that makes a much earlier world’s final statues collectible. This isn’t a super problem, given that you only need less than half of the statues to beat the game, but as an element of design philosophy, it’s one I’m not a fan of. I much prefer the approach the original Banjo Kazooie takes, were even though you’re progressively unlocking new abilities, every world can be completed as soon as you get to it. The fact that some statues are just impossible to get at first approach can make ones that are otherwise just difficult to access seem actually impossible, and it just makes for a somewhat frustrating waste of time trying to collect them sometimes. Each stages has tons of little colored crystals to collect, and you can multiply your currently held crystal total by completing the Balan’s Bouts. These are QTE-based cutscenes that you can activate by finding Balan’s hat hidden in the stage. They’re just easy enough to be far from impossible, but also not so easy as to be trivial. The fight animations in them are quite pretty and the music is fun too, so I didn’t mind replaying them in my long quest to acquire all 300 statues in the game. That said, even if you hate them, collecting crystals is ultimately entirely optional, and you only need 110 of the 228 total statues available in the main game to beat it, so you can ignore the Balan’s Bouts entirely if you want (which I certainly appreciate, even if I did like them). The purpose of all those crystals, however, is to feed your Tims on the Isle of Tims in the hub world. You can either breed them by feeding them crystals or find eggs in stages to get more Tims. In stages, you’ll have little fluffy companions following you around. They’ll sometimes bring you crystals, keys, or even eggs or new Tims themselves as well as help you fight enemies. These Tims are very much like the Chao Gardens were in the Sonic Adventure games. They’re ultimately something not required to beat the game, but the crystal collecting and Tim raising is a nice activity to give extra purpose to replaying stages as well as a fun side activity in and of itself. Feed the Tims more crystals and they’ll play in the Tower o’ Tims in the hub world, and playing in it makes a counter go up which will make the Tower o’ Tims grow ever larger and more complex. The fact that you need to wait for the counter to go up can be a bit annoying if you’re power gaming for achievements and whatnot, but it’s ultimately an entirely optional activity, so I find it difficult to complain about too seriously. The presentation of Balan Wonderworld is where it shines brightest, in my opinion. Character design, particularly of Balan, his rival Lance, and the game’s bosses, are excellent, and seeing new worlds and boss designs was always such a treat. The mechanical design of the bosses is even clever too, as each has 3 primary ways to hit it, and doing each respectively will net you another statue for each one. The costumes are all super cute and fun as well, and the same goes for the enemy design. The world design can feel a bit overly blocky and simple at times, but this is in service of making the world very mechanically consistent. You never need to worry if a door or a barrel is secretly breakable from some future costume, because the only breakable objects are the very clearly marked cracked blocks, for example. That said, the simplicity sometimes works against it. There are some costumes that let you get around vertically quite a lot, and while the game has a surprising lack of invisible walls preventing you from climbing the scenery, it is not completely devoid of them. This can lead to some frustrating deaths if you’re going for the harder to reach statues as you try to do a little bit of guesswork on what weird outcroppings can actually be stood on vs. those that can’t. This is a rare problem, but it’s certainly a present one. The music is also very nice. A lot of memes and jokes were made of the little dance party scenes that play when you beat bosses, but the music in them is still fun and well done. My personal favorite track is the song that plays during the Balan’s Bouts, which made replaying them for statues even more fun x3. The animated cutscenes before and after bosses are also very pretty, even though the game itself looks pretty rough for a game on PS4 quite frequently. Therein actually lies my biggest complaint with the game: it’s pretty damn poorly optimized. I had to download a 2gb patch to play this when I first installed it on my PS4, and even then, a year and a half after release, there are some areas that have some really bad framerate drops. Only the framerate, not the action, actually drops, meaning if you just stay the course you won’t die, but it can still lead to some quite frustrating deaths in ways that really should not be the case. The game just doesn’t look good enough to be having these types of technical problems, and though I’ve heard the game runs with basically no problems on PC, let this be a warning for anyone considering picking up the PS4 version at least. Verdict: Recommended. Technical issues aside, I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed my time with Balan Wonderworld. While it’s certainly not perfect, and exactly to whom to recommend it to is a little tricky (the difficult curve for example starts a a bit too easy for veterans yet it ends a bit too hard for beginners, I’d say), it’s still a very competent game. Outside of how it was certainly not worth $60 at launch, this is a situation a lot like I experienced with Mighty No. 9 last year. The game itself holds up pretty damn well for something with *such* a toxic reputation, so it was weird to me just how solid it was. It’s absolutely worth it at the current price point, and while it’s not the easiest game to recommend 100%-ing like I did, it’s absolutely worth picking up for any fans of 3D platformers. At the very least, I’d say it’s a far more polished and well put together game than other modern 3D platformers I’ve played like Yooka Laylee or Super Lucky’s Tale, so if those didn’t exactly wow you like they didn’t wow me, Balan Wonderworld just might do it for you~ As I was out of Mario Party to play (at least of ones I could acquire cheaply, easily, and stream to Discord were concerned), a friend of mine recommended this game to me. I had never even heard of Crash Bash (or Cash Bandicoot Carnival, as we call it over here), but as luck had it, we actually had a copy available locally for cheap, so I snapped it right up. I was very curious to see what Sony’s attempt at this formula was, even if it wasn’t actually made by Naughty Dog themselves. Though I have certainly given my friend an earful for pushing me towards this in the first place, I eventually conquered the trial and tribulation and saw this game through to the end of its story mode. The game doesn’t keep track of play time, but I reckon it took me 7 or 8 hours at least to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware playing as Crash.
The story setup for CB is kinda weird, but ultimately not super important. Aku Aku (the good totem fella) and Uka Uka (the evil totem fella) are arguing in their little hangout in the heavens about who among them is better. They decide to determine it once and for all by summoning representatives from down on Earth to duke it out in a series of games (and since there are way more bad guys than good guys, Aku Aku is allowed to take two bad guys for two even teams of four). Whomever you pick will need to fight and win their way through four worlds of games and beat the bosses at the end in order to see your team the winner. It’s not ultimately a very important story, given the genre of game it is, but it’s cool that they went through all of the trouble to design and craft the cutscenes for it, as they’re charming in that very Crash Bandicoot-y way that the PS1 titles so often had. It’s a more than adequate premise for the gameplay at hand to take place, and it does its job well. Though this was recommended to me because of all of the Mario Party I was playing, it is decidedly not really much of a Mario Party clone as such. It’s more like Microsoft’s Fusion Frenzy, in that it’s a competitor to Mario Party via being a party game based around mini-games rather than outright trying to do its own spin on the Mario Party formula like Sega’s Sonic Shuffle. In each world, there are a series of games you need to win in order to get the trophy from that game, and you’ll need the trophy from all 22 games in order to see the credits. Be the first to win that game 3 times among you and the CPUs, and you’ve got yourself a trophy. Then, after the trophy, you’ve got a diamond and a power crystal (in very Crash Bandicoot fashion) to win as well, with certain numbers of each being needed to unlock boss fights. The diamond is generally gotten by winning a round within a time limit, and the power crystal is gotten by winning a round under some kind of challenge mode or handicap. There are eventually ankhs to win from each as well, which usually just involve winning normal rounds consecutively, but they’re only required for unlocking post-game content (which I didn’t really bother with). It’s a fine enough formula, but the mini-games themselves are the real problem here. World 1 has 4 games, 2 has 5, and so on and so forth. The way this actually works isn’t just about numbers though. Each successive world has one totally new kind of game, with the others being new spins on the games that the last world had. This means that if you’re like me and you despise the 4-player pong game that’s in the running since world 1, you’re gonna keep on playing versions of that over and over if you wanna see the credits. A lot of my complaints here ultimately are only important if you’re playing the single-player mode, but given that the PS1 only has 2 controller slots natively, most people who are playing this are going to be doing it without a multi-tap, so they’re going to have some computers to deal with. The computers are just too unbalanced in too many games. This is especially true for the pong game (including the boss fight based on it), but too many games are just too random in either their execution or difficulty balance to actually feel all that fun when you’re forced to be the first to win 3 rounds. It even feels like there’s an internal difficulty switch at times that will just dynamically make the CPUs go from playing nearly perfectly to utterly embarrassingly after you lose enough times. I imagine this wouldn’t be quite so bad for a party game with a bunch of friends, but as a single-player experience, it is a terribly frustrating experience. The boss fights are just versions of the normal mini-games but modified to be fights against bosses from the Crash trilogy. They’re usually okay, and they mercifully have checkpoints, but the good bits they *do* have are not nearly enough to offset how frustrating the normal mini-games can be (especially with how miserable the final boss’ pong section is). The presentation is quite good, but nothing super special. I wanna say most if not all of the assets are just taken from the original Crash trilogy games and modified with new animations or some new models here and there, so it’s a very familiar feeling thing. The arenas for the games themselves are usually okay, if nothing impressive, but quite a few suffer from some significant camera issues where it’s just too hard to see yourself too often. The music is very forgettable, but it fits the games its in well enough I suppose. Verdict: Not Recommended. I suppose on a desert island with friends, if this was all you had for entertainment, you could get by on it, but as a single-player experience, Crash Bash made me wanna do nothing but bash crash my head through my desk XP. Not nearly enough time and attention was paid to polishing the games to make them actually fun and balanced, and the whole product suffers for it as a result. A special shout out to my friend ButtercupBandito for recommending this to me, but I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll ever be picking up Crash Bash for any reason again other than to sell it back to the Book Off I bought it from XP The last of the Mario Party games that I both had but had not yet revisited, the very first Mario Party is one that, like Mario Party 2, I’ve had just about all my life. It was a game I played a ton as a kid, though not quite as much as I did MP2. I picked this up for cheap a little while back, and I decided why the heck not play through it until I can get to the credits. I’m pretty sure I’ve done it at least one other time, but it’s been so long I can barely remember it. I unlocked and played through every map at least once, beat the mini-game island side mode, and I beat the final “story” map and saw the credits. I played through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story of Mario Party 1 is about as simple as these games get. The gang is arguing about who the super star among them is, and to decide it, they decide to throw a big party, with the winner being declared the super star. There *is* the mini-game island single-player mode, but even that doesn’t really have any story behind it beyond, “here’s a challenge. Can you do it?”. It’s not a problem, though. The conceits of each board being that there’s some problem that only becoming the super star can solve is a bit weird and uninvolved with the actual gameplay, but that hardly matters. It’s a more than fine enough set up for the game to take place, and it does its job just fine. While the gameplay of Mario Party 1 *does* set up the formula that would define the franchise for the next decade, it has a lot of other elements that would never be brought back again that really give it a flavor all its own. Many aspects are very familiar to later Mario Party games. Each map is 20, 35, or 50 turns long, and there’s a mini-game at the end of every turn that involves all 4 players, a 2v2, or a 1v3. You earn coins from these mini-games and use them to buy stars on the board game part once you reach Toad, and the person with the most coins is the winner. All very familiar elements to later Mario Party games. It’s the unfamiliar stuff that I have quite a fondness for, though. For example, there are the mini-games. Of course there are the infamous control-stick spinning mini-games (which I wore a work glove to save my palm from), which I would say are easily the weakest link of this entire game. But beyond that, there’s a real adversarial aspect to the games here that later Mario Partys completely abandon. In just about every 2v2 mini-game, the winners get 10 coins, but the losers *lose* 10 coins. Many 1v3 games work the same way, with the 3 each getting or losing 5 coins, or the 1 getting or losing 15 coins, but many 1v3 games make it impossible for one side to gain money at all. You also have single-player mini-game spaces spread around the map which do drag out the game longer than it needs to be, yes, but I didn’t mind them too terribly. You even have weird mixes in quite a few 4 player mini-games, where they’re completely co-op experiences. Everyone is working together to win, and if you all win, you all get money, but if you lose, you all lose money. All of this is stuff later games completely abandoned, and it’s kinda a shame, since apart from being unique, it also just makes the game better. The only real design philosophy-level complaint I have aside from the control stick spinning is just how many games last too long. Games that last 40 to 60 seconds can be a real and literal pain when you’re mashing a button for almost the entire time, but it’s only really a problem if you’re playing a ton of Mario Party in one sitting, and it shouldn’t affect you too much if you’re playing more casually. It not only gives players more control over other player’s finances by winning and losing money in so many games, but the single-player game spaces also allow for players who aren’t so good to still gain money, even if they’re not too great at the end-of-turn mini-games. It keeps money moving through the economy and keeps maps from getting stale with one player far too far in the lead, which is something later Mario Party games REALLY struggle with. They shift from this method to battle mini-games and items to balance out their economies, but I think there was a lot more value in these old games than they assumed, and it’s a shame that they pivoted away from this style of mini-game design philosophy so quickly. Some of the games are pretty unbalanced, sure, but apart from that, it’s honestly one of the stronger mini-game libraries as far as Mario Party goes. The board design is also something that is quite strong. Like with the mini-games, the boards too follow a philosophy of trying to balance skillful strategy with just getting lucky in a way that I found keeps boards dynamic and exciting. With how Bowser isn’t just a space on the board, but a guy on the field like Toad, he provides a necessary funnel of money *out* of the economy to keep players from getting too wealthy. Another aspect that does this is how, in maps where Toad moves after he’s gotten a star bought from him, a chance time space is left where he stood before. Covering the board in chance time spaces like this really does crank up the randomness of games, sure, but the large majority of the time, it’s only coins trading hands, not entire star totals or what have you. It keeps chance time from feeling like such a death sentence like it is in later games, and it was actually something I had fun with for a change. MP1 really tries to provide a large variety of experience with its boards in a way that wouldn’t be reattempted until Mario Party 6 on the GameCube, and its massive total of 8 boards would barely be seen again in the series. The presentation is very good as well, and it manages to survive just how old it is quite well. The peppy, energetic N64-era Mario Party music is at some of its best here, and there are tons of tracks I still love hearing even after all these years and hours listening to them (including one new song that isn’t in the North American version at all, I was quite surprised to learn). The graphics also blend 3D models on 2D texture boards to make environments that look quite nice and utilize the graphical hardware of the N64 in a way that looks nice, even if it isn’t as striking as later MP games on the system. Verdict: Recommended. This would be a highly recommended if not for the control stick spinning mini-games (which don’t just destroy your hand but your joysticks too). Mario Party 1 has a ton of charm and is really well crafted for being such a clearly experimental product. I thought I’d be suffering through it, but it was easily some of the most fun I’ve had playing Mario Party these past couple of months. No other Mario Party game I can think of has normal difficulty CPUs that provided such a satisfying gameplay experience, and that’s a testament to just how well put together the boards and mini-games are. It’s definitely a game I’m happy I picked up, and even though I’ll need a new, tougher work glove rather than the cheap awful one I used for this if I wanna play more control stick spinning games, this is definitely one I’ll be revisiting in the future to have fun in a nostalgic and strategic way~. The last of the Mario Party games on GameCube that I’ve yet to revisit, this is another one I owned as a kid around the time it came out, and it’s one I have much fonder memories of than I do with MP5. I knew it carried over and expanded on a lot of ideas that MP6 introduced, and so I was excited to finally get to what’s effectively “Mario Party 6-2” x3. I played through all of Dual Mode to unlock the last map, played a game or two on all six maps, and unlocked every mini-game so I could get the credits by completing all modes on the King of the River mode. I did it via the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The conceit behind Mario Party 7 is that the whole gang is going on a cruise! But all is not well, as Bowser (and his Koopa Kid minion) is intent on ruining everyone’s good time. It’s really as simple as that, and it’s more than good enough to give everyone an excuse to party it up. It’s a very fun theme, as it allows for a lot of fun maps themed around locations all over the world. Albeit, the design of those locations also allows for some casual racism here and there, but nothing particularly unique or noteworthy to this era, this console, or the company (the worst offenders imo are the Spear Guy Shy Guys, modeled after “tribal” warriors, and they’ve been around since Yoshi’s Island). The mechanics and gameplay philosophy of MP7 are roundly advancements and iterations on MP6’s developments to the formula. This means that while we of course still have boards, mini-games (including still dual mini games), and orbs instead of items, we’ve taken a few steps in various directions regarding those things in attempts to vary things up. While I’d say mini-game design is easily some of the best it’s ever been, most of the steps taken in the realm of board design are steps sideways at best and backwards at worst. Part of this is down to how orbs have been changed. You get orbs far less often now, and there are many more of them. Some have been nerfed, some have been buffed (some buffed far too much, imo), but the biggest offender is that playable characters now have unique orbs only they can acquire. This makes some characters just outright worse than others, and not in a more fun or interesting way like Super Mario Party does it with its varied dice types per character. Most of these unique orb types are at least similarly good to one another (save for my beloved Wario’s being easily the worst in the game), but the fact that everyone is outright not on a level playing field damages the game in a way that isn’t obvious at first when you’re picking your character. Even hard mode computers still won’t actually steal other player’s orb tiles, just as was the case in MP5 and MP6, but this is a far less significant problem than the aggressive unbalancing that the orb system in general has gotten since its MP6 incarnation. It’s an issue tied to orbs, granted, but the biggest issue that MP7 *reintroduces* is that boards are just far too large again. While we do have a few cool and fun new board types (the windmill map where you invest in properties instead of buying stars and the China map where you go up one long path, avoiding everyone else’s traps and perils along the way being my two personal favorites), we also have some pretty weak new boards. The NYC random treasure board is just a bad idea for a game type, and the Egypt map is just a significantly worse version of the chain-chomp star-stealing map from MP6. And from the best to the worst of these maps, they all have the issue of just being far too large. Completely gone is the territory-marking fun of MP6 where you’d slowly paint the board in your player’s colors as you grabbed and threw down orbs. Now, even in 35 turn games, orbs seem to always make up a disappointing minority of spaces on the board. I know that that’s not a universally beloved aspect of how MP6’s board game design philosophy, but it was something I enjoyed so much that I was really bummed to see it gone here. We avoid the enormous pitfalls that MP5 falls into, thank goodness, but I spent more than enough time with MP7 to feel comfortable saying that it has roundly weaker board design than MP6, and it’s a worse overall game for it in a way that it’s excellent mini-game design just can’t make up for. Hudson Soft never being ones to disappoint, the presentation is very nice here. While it’s kinda a bummer that not all playable characters from MP6 have made it into MP7 (no more playable Koopa Kid), the additions of Birdo and Dry Bones more than make up for it. The graphics are pretty and colorful, with the mini-games and board locations in particular looking very cool this time around. The music is also nice, with some of the board map songs being very ear worm-y in just how catchy they can be at times x3. My only real complaint about the aesthetics is how spaces claimed with orbs have been changed. I think the appropriately colored silhouette of the player’s head that was used in MP6 was a much better indicator of who had claimed what space than the symbols in circle that are used here. While it’s never going to confuse anyone either way, it’s just easier to tell at a glance in a way I really preferred in the previous game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Even if it isn’t the best Mario Party on the GameCube, it’s still damn close and a damn good game either way. Mario Party 6 is absolutely THE winner of the GameCube Mario Party race, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s hard to really go wrong with MP7 either. The 8 player mode is a fun and cool gimmick, and the other game modes and design is strong enough that it’s still good fun. Hudson Soft finished out the GameCube era Mario Party’s with a bang, even if the overall design loses out to its predecessor. |
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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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