This is technically the 3rd or 4th time I've beaten the game, but the first time I've played it on the 3DS. It's a game I have a lot of nostalgia for the original Gamecube game, but I have a lot of anxiety these days about buying Gamecube games with how temperamental Gamecube discs can be (and I don't like buying them second-hand because of that reason), so I was excited (albeit a little confused) to hear that it was getting a 3DS port. It was on sale on Japanese Amazon last week, so I thought it was the perfect time to finally pick up what I think will be a rare game in the future. It may not quiiite be a definitive version, but it's damn close. It's a fantastic port whose biggest problems are even then not that bad. I got every Boo and it took me a little under 6 hours playing on the Japanese version.
The game itself is Luigi's Mansion as it's ever been: A kind of Resident Evil meets Ghost Busters with a Nintendo twist. It's a horror game for those just starting to be able to play scary games. You go around a mansion as Luigi, trying to save Mario from ghosts who have kidnapped him. All you have his your trusty Poltergust 3000 (ammusingly called the オバキューム in Japanese) and a flashlight to combat 26 special ghosts and a handful of generic ghost types. As a concept, it still holds up as well as it ever did, even if it is a little short at the end of the day. The main features the port adds are a menu to the touch screen (you can see the Game Boy Horror on the lower screen so you have a map, your ghost info, and your inventory to look at quickly whenever you want) and, more importantly, a co-op feature. If your friend has their own copy of the game, you can explore the mansion side-by-side as Luigi & Gooigi. I have no friends to play with, nor do I have a second copy of the game, so this wasn't something I could test. However, if your friend doesn't have a second copy of the game, you can still do the time-attack modes against the special ghosts and boss battles via Download Play. It's a pity the whole game can't be played via download play, but that would be a LOT to download at one time, so I get it :b The other unavoidable thing this port changes are the controls, and this is likely going to be where most people either gel or don't with the game. The game does have NEW 3DS compatibility, as LZ is a duplication of the interaction button, and ZR is a duplication of the flashlight button (both of which are also on the face buttons). The C-stick on the NEW 3DS can also be used, and I would recommend using something with a second joystick if you're going to play this. The game does have the ability to use the 3DS gyro to aim up and down while using the vacuum, and that works alright (not as good as a proper C-stick like the Gamecube has, but it's fine), but you can't aim left and right that way. The NEW 3DS's C-stick has always kinda sucked, and it still kinda sucks here. One day I shall blow a bunch of cash on another 3DS and a Circle Pad Pro (which are absurdly common in Japan) to give playing it that way a try (as I imagine that's by far the best way to play this), but on a normal NEW 3DS, this is a compromise from the Gamecube version. There's no way around that. It still plays fine, but it is a noticeably hampered experience. Verdict: Recommended. With Luigi's Mansion 2 also being on 3DS and being far cheaper and Luigi's Mansion 3 on the way for Switch this October, this port is definitely a steep ask for the price you're likely going to have to pay for it. Unless you're someone who either has nostalgia for it or fancies going through over and over to try and beat the harder mode and get better cash scores, you are likely going to be disappointed in just how short this game is when so many longer games are cheaper and equally long games are cheaper. That said, this is still a great game, and this is a great port of it if you've always wanted to experience Luigi's first spoopy day out~
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And so completes my time with the final Mario & Luigi game I had not yet beaten. It isn't the best one, that honor still goes to the first game in the series (as far as my memory goes, although I plan to play the remake soon, so I'll be testing that memory soon enough), but it's a really strong contender for 2nd place. The crossover gimmick is one of the strongest the series has had and one of the best incorporated into the overall whole (a big complaint I've always had of Inside Story is that it feels like a game of two halves: a really fun Bowser half and a really standard, kinda boring Bros. half). It took me a little over 30 hours to beat the game, and I played it in Japanese. I didn't find ALL the things, but I did find most of them (and did 60 of the mini-game challenges).
So the main gimmick is that the Paper Mario universe has exploded out into the Mario & Luigi universe, and the Marios (and a Luigi) need to join forces to fight the power of two Bowsers and their combined armies from kidnapping the two Princess Peaches. The game has nowhere NEAR as much text in it as something like Paper Mario: Color Splash, but I enjoyed the writing that was there. The way the Mario & Luigi characters interact with their flat counterparts is consistently amusing, and I especially enjoyed the way that the Peaches and Bowser Jr.s respectively bonded with their doubles, and how the Kameks and Bowsers constantly fought and bickered with their respective doubles XD . The normal combat will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played a Mario & Luigi game, especially Dream Team. There aren't just a lot of animations reused from Dream Team, but a lot of Bro Moves taken wholesale from that game too (although Dream Team really needed improvements, so I'm completely fine with this game building off of what that game did well). As normal, Mario is the A button, Luigi is the B button, and the new addition Paper Mario takes the Y button. Paper Mario fights really differently to the other Bros., and it really helps make up for how similar the Bros fight compared to Dream Team. Paper Mario can summon up to 6 copies of himself to help him fight and also tank hits for him. If he gets hit, he'll lose some copies, but he can just use his next turn to resummon them (meaning you REALLY wanna keep him from getting hit if you want him to be as effective as possible). His copies allow him to let each copy do a successive jump on a target, as well as spread out as evenly as possible to hit each enemy on screen with a hammer strike. He also has Trio Moves, which are basically Bro Moves that require all 3 Bros to be up and unincumbered to do, and they usually are effectively Bro Moves with better AOE damage. The Mario & Luigi games have always had very similar combat from game to game, but Paper Jam does a good job of varying things up without making enemies feel too spongey or the combo attacks feeling too technical (a problem Partners in Time had pretty bad). If anything, the game has a bit of the opposite effect where it can get pretty hard against later-game bosses and enemies, as both you and them tend to hit quite hard, and dodging their attacks gets pretty tricky. I never got a game over, but this is definitely one of the harder Mario & Luigi games there's been. The last addition to the combat are battle cards (but not like Paper Mario Color Splash). As you do better action commands, you earn star points, which allow you to play battle cards from the touch screen. You can find cards from rare shiny enemies (who hit like freakin' cars and are real scary despite the rewards they give if they catch you off guard) as well as buy them from shops, and you can have a deck of 10 cards and you can see 3 cards to potentially play at a time. They go a long way as to making what is otherwise probably the hardest Mario & Luigi game a lot less unforgiving, and certain boss battles even put interesting spins on them. Speaking of making things easier, this game has some incredible accessibility and quality of life features. The game has an easy mode you can turn on to make the whole thing easier, nearly every tutorial has a skip option, and you can hold R to fast-forward through any cutscene. The game does a really good job of giving the player the option to play it no matter their skill level, and that's something I always appreciate. However, the best change, in my opinion, is they have FINALLY gotten rid of the gimmicky, slow, and simple giant battles that Inside Story and Partners in Time had. In their place are giant papercraft battles which are basically giant 3D environment mech battles. Now this is hardly Virtual On in terms of complexity, but it manages to be engaging and fun in a much more simple package. B is your dash, A is your jump, and you move vaguely like a tank with the L button focusing the camera and allowing strafing and the R button allowing for a quick 180-degree turn. You play as 5 different paper mechs through the course of the game, and each plays a little bit differently. It spices up the boss battles really nicely, and I never had the "oh heck this again" feeling that Inside Story and Dream Team's giant battles gave me. What I did have a bit less patience for are the Paper Toad rescue missions. There are certain points in the game where you need to do different mini games to rescue Paper Toads who are lost and terrified in the Mario & Luigi kingdom. They vary them well, and they definitely don't grate as badly if you aren't doing the hard-mode versions of them (some of which are downright vindictively unforgiving) to try and unlock some of the best battle cards like I did, but it's still something I wish weren't in the game quite as much. As a final note, I did play the game on a NEW 2DS XL, and that did bring with it some good things and bad things. The good things are some minor NEW 3DS functionality. You can press the ZR and ZL buttons to automatically top up your BP and HP respectively in the most efficient way possible from the items currently in your inventory. You can also use the C-stick to turn the camera (albeit a bit too slowly to be that useful) in the mech battle sections, and you can also use it to move the map around on the touch-screen when walking around instead of moving it with your finger. The bad parts came from the 2D. It doesn't happen that often, but there are a few bosses and normal enemies whose attacks are more difficult to dodge than they should be when playing in 2D rather than 3D. The game isn't really hard enough to make it anything more than an annoyance, but it's something that happened enough that I can't not mention it here. Verdict: Recommended. Though it does not top the original, it is the Mario & Luigi game that has come closest. The games have always had a problem in not really sicking out that much from each other, and Paper Jam is no exception to that, but it is one of the better in the series for sure, and an excellent swansong to the series (at least a far better one than Dream Team was). If you can only play one Mario & Luigi game, you should definitely play Superstar Saga, but if you can only play TWO, there is very good reason to make Paper Jam your second pick. It's certainly not the best RPG on the 3DS, but it's still a great addition to any 3DS library, and an overall good time. A favorite Twitch streamer of mine mentioned this game earlier in the week and called it "the second best Paper Mario game." I was naturally quite intrigued by this. I had heard some fairly good things about Color Splash, but never such high praise as this. I was in between bigger games, and Color Splash happened to be one of the few Wii U games I'd brought with me from America with the intent to finish eventually, so I set to work. Five days later and about 40-50 hours of gameplay later (getting nearly all the cards and doing enough stuff to get the "real" ending), I can say that this is not just a great Paper Mario game, it is the BEST Paper Mario game.
The story of Color Splash revolves around Peach recieving a strange letter in the mail: A folded up Toad with no color! She brings it to Mario, and the two of them along with a single Toad retainer go off on a boat to the island the letter was postmarked from: Port Prisma. Upon arriving there, they find an island whose paint has been sucked up in droves by a mysterious force of largely Shy Guys, and with the help of their new friend Huey the paint can, Mario sets off to work to save the island and return its color. It's not an incredible feat of storytelling that has something super in-depth or meaningful to say about the human condition, of course. This IS a Mario game, so the guess of who's behind it all isn't that difficult. That said, the real winning part of the story is its presentation and the dialogue. This game is, even for a Paper Mario game, incredibly silly and irreverent in its humor. It's constantly breaking the 4th wall, making homages to other Mario and Paper Mario games, and poking fun at RPGs and the Mario series in general with its own spin on a very modern humor. It's a sense of humor that will probably date the game to a certain extent, compared to the other Paper Mario games certainly, but it had me absolutely in stitches the entire time I was play. I loved getting to an area with new NPCs because I just HAD to talk to everyone. Huey especially is the ultimate realization of the replacement for the colorful cast of sidekicks that the first two Paper Mario games had but the next two did away with. He really feels like a companion and a character rather than just a guide through the story, and Huey in particular is probably what puts the writing and humor of this game above the other Paper Mario games for me. Huey is the only actual new Mario character in this, as all the citizens of Port Prisma are Toads and not some new kind of islander (despite the Stars looking like Isle Delfino Shines, that is entirely coincidental and no Mario Sunshine references or characters are in this at all, actually), but the way the game is written, the island really feels like it has a personality all its own in a way that feels different from other Mario RPGs. I'm sure some people will bounce off the humor of this game, but it clicked with me 100%. Further on the topic of presentation, this game is really nice looking. Paper Mario is hardly a photo-realistic art style, of course, but they really lean into the paper-craft look of the series in a way that is a logical progression of how they were treating things in Sticker Star. It's also referenced in the dialogue/humor a lot, how everyone/thing is paper, but everything looks that way and acts like it too. Enemies will tear up the cardboard to try and smash you with it, Toads will fling themselves like shuriken to make a staircase, Bowser's goons will tape doors shut with Bowser-branded tape to keep you from getting past. The game's HD look and its style make the game look great, and except for a few cutscenes, the game keeps a really solid framerate as well. Even still, the best part of the presentation may be the game's music. Now I'm not usually one to notice music in games or even talk about it, but holy crap this game has some incredible music. It has a really well done orchestral score that I think may be my favorite sound track to a game ever. It does a great job at setting the atmosphere for more serious moments (the few there are), as well as creating a specific brand of silliness for different lands you visit throughout the island. Music is of course a very subjective topic, but this is the only game I've ever played that I've thought "where can I buy the soundtrack for this thing?" Speaking of lands, that's another thing this game does a little bit differently from other Intelligent Systems Mario RPGs. Rather than a traditional hub world, the game has several dozen "stages," which are more linear experiences unto themselves. You find different exits in each in the form of stars, and those starts create paths to other stages. Many stages even have redundant exits leading to already explored stages just to make the world map a bit more easy to get around. It's a really clever way to design an RPG's world, as it means that things lack a concrete "point A to point B" cohesion, but it also means that each stage feels like a complete experience in and of itself. Now finally, we get to the meat and potatoes of an RPG, the combat. I'm gonna start out immediately with clarifying that, as you may've guessed, this is far from the most complex RPG combat system in the world. If Final Fantasy V is the baseline you set for RPG combat systems, and anything less will make a game super boring for you, then you won't find much to love here. That said, this is the most complex a Paper Mario game's combat has ever been. By expanding on Sticker Star's dull and pointless combat, they've managed to create something really compelling and interesting. The biggest problem Sticker Star, the previous Paper Mario game, had was that the combat felt like a waste of time. Your stickers were limited, and because there was no XP system in that game, getting into battles felt like something universally worth avoiding, since it would just drain your precious sticker supply. All you cared about were HP and stickers, and battles drained both of those things for very little reward past the occasional rare sticker. Color Splash fixes all of this this by adding one more thematically appropriate resource pool: Paint. In Color Splash, instead of stickers, you have battle cards. Battle cards don't require being painted to be used, but they're far more powerful when imbued with paint. However, your red, blue, and yellow paint reserves are limited, so in addition to keeping track of how many of each card you have (out of a max of 99), you also must keep track of how much paint you're using. Battling enemies will use up paint and cards, yes, but battling enemies will net you more paint as well as EXP, which is the only way to increase your maximum paint supplies, which you'll want as high as possible. 1-Up mushrooms that refill your paint supplies in battle are rare, and XP doesn't affect how hard you hit, only the power of the card affects what damage you do, and more powerful cards need a lot more paint. Pre-painted cards do exist and can be bought in-game, but they're far more expensive and harder to find than unpainted cards. Enemies are persistent with the instance of the stage, so if you clear out a room, it'll stay cleared out until you exit the stage, so each stage effectively acts like one larger resource management puzzle (albeit a bit of a simple one: this is far from the hardest game in the world), and the large variety of them makes opening up a new stage always something exciting. The last returning feature to be improved upon from Sticker Star is the Thing system. Things are objects which are not made of paper that you'll find in the world that can have the paint squeezed out of them to have them turned into a battle card. These are almost always a part of the solution to some puzzle at some point in the game, whether its an environemental puzzle or a certain part of a boss battle, and knowing which ones to have and when is crucial to not getting stuck. The up-side to this is not only can you buy another of any Thing you've found at a store, like you could in Sticker Star, but unlike Sticker Star, there's a Toad in a trash can right next to that store who will give you a hint (granted its a very obvious hint) of what kind of Thing the next puzzle you'll encounter will require. It removes any element of clairvoyance you'd need to have to guess which Things to take along with you for the next stage, and helps the game flow much better since you aren't constantly backtracking to get the Thing you had no idea you'd need. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This game is one of my favorite games I've played all year. It's up there with Dad of War as a game I thought I might like when I started it, but grew to absolutely adore as an all-time favorite over the course of completing it. I stand firm in that this is the best Paper Mario game, and it is also a contender for best Mario RPG (and that includes Mario & Luigi games) as well. The humor certainly won't be for everyone, and the combat will be too simple for some RPG fans as well, but if you've enjoyed any of the other Paper Mario games, you will likely enjoy this game quite a lot as well. I got this as a beloved childhood favorite of mine (I would play it in Animal Crossing on the Gamecube) on the Japanese Wii U VC as something to just play to destress in between other games. I ended up REALLY getting into it, and playing all the way through to the end of the "story" mode A, something I thought I'd never do as a kid. I mean I was right in a way, since the only way I beat it was using the VC's save states to effectively have infinite lives, because you either need to be super lucky or a combo GOD to get through the last dozen or two stages, but I did it in the end! The game does technically have more levels in A mode after the first 99 that you see the credits after, but I saw the credits so I'm counting this game as beaten XD
While the game DOES have incremental level select ever 5 levels you reach, it doesn't have saves, so you do effectively have to beat it in one sitting. The VC also helped with that, because with its save state I could just set it down and come back to that same "session" later. However, you also only get one life when you do a level select (whether it's level 1 or 100), so it's no small feat to get through those final stages with the game's normal save system. Level 88 and 98 in particular took me AGES and dozens of tries each, and there's no way I ever could've beaten this on the actual hardware without a Game Genie or something. Wario's Woods is a puzzle game made by Nintendo, was the last officially licensed game to be released for the NES in North America, and also had a SNES port. I'd describe it as something like "Orcs Must Die meets Puyo Puyo." You play as Toad in a playing field and need to run around it to manipulate the monsters and bombs yourself as the character. Make lines of 3 or more of the same color with at least one bomb, and it destroys everything in that line. Destroy all the monsters on the field and you progress to the next stage. The board also has two modes it switches between. While Birdo is out, you only receive bombs from the top of the screen, but when the timer fills up and Wario comes out, you'll receive both bombs AND new monsters from the top of the screen, and Wario will make the top of the board lower. You can only raise the top of the board back up again by making matches quickly, and you can even make Wario go away faster and Birdo stay longer by making chains. Additionally, you can make matches with anything Toad is carrying in his hands, and given the way you can pick things up whilst running up a stack to pull it out of the stack, you can even make matches in mid-air in fairly clever ways, so there's a lot of thinking that needs to go on when the stacks get high if you wanna navigate all the different colors you need to destroy. Add on top of this how some monsters can only be destroyed by diagonal matches and how making a match of more than 5 pieces gets you a colored diamond that can remove every monster (but not bomb) of that color if matched with, and things can get REALLY hectic on later stages. The controls are also pretty complex for a puzzle game too, being that it's somewhat like a platformer. You can run left and right, but also up walls of pieces and the walls of the board itself, but you can't jump. A picks up a whole stack in front of you (if there's room) and will put down the entire stack you're holding. B picks up the single item in front of you, and puts down the single thing lowest in your stack. Finally, pressing Down on the D-pad will move you to the top of the stack you're currently carrying. HOWEVER, in the Famicom version, pressing Down does nothing, and you need to simultaneously press A and B to move to the top of your stack. This makes that move FAR harder, as the timing to do that is very precise, and I died a TON from accidentally putting down what I was holding instead of moving to the top of my stack. 100% avoid the Famicom version of this game, because that little nuance makes the game far harder in a way that is not fun at all. The game has a very different dynamic than something like Tetris or Puyo Puyo, since you're controlling a character who manipulates the pieces instead of controlling the pieces like in Tetris or a cursor like in Tetris Attack. I really like this, because it means there's more of an emphasis on what you can do in your immediate surroundings, and less emphasis on making giant chains to KO an opponent or something (although the game does have a vs. mode), which I am very very bad at. It means the game ultimately has less competitive depth than something like Puyo Puyo, and the complex controls means it has less ease of play like Tetris, but it's still a fine puzzle game that I find very satisfying to run through casually. Verdict: Recommended. While I absolutely cannot recommend the Famicom version of this game due to the control issue I mentioned earlier, the NES or SNES versions of this are well worth picking up if you're looking for a different kind of puzzle game. It's far from the best puzzle game out there, sure, but it's certainly one of the more competent Tetris wannabees to come out in the NES and SNES eras. I decided to at least attempt to finish what I started and played through the original DKC this afternoon. I already owned it on my SFC Mini, so I figured I may as well give it a try and I'd put it down if it got too hard like when I tried to play it a few weeks ago. Roughly two hours later, I'd finished the game with about a 60% completion rate. Getting 101% doesn't actually involve unlocking any content that you don't see through the course of the game normally like the sequels' extra boss fights and Lost World stages, and I've had more than enough snipe hunts for super secret bonus stages in DKC2 to want to bother try and getting full % completion on this game XD. It's still my least favorite out of the 3 games, but not nearly by as much as it was before this playthrough.
The lack of the concretely defined bonus stages that the sequels' use, with their bonus coins and such, and a focus on more fluid platforming through the stages really sets this apart from DKC 2 and 3. I'd go as far as to say that the feel of playing the later two games differs so much from this one that I almost don't feel quite fair making direct comparisons between them as the design philosophy of the sequels vs. the original feel so different. For a Mario analogy, DKC 1 is Mario 2/USA, while the sequels are Mario 3 and Mario World. It's unmistakably the same series, characters, etc., and a lot of the DNA you see in later games is still there, but one of these things is clearly not like the other. Nonetheless, I played through all 3 in succession to compare them directly to one another, so I'm gonna keep doing it here XD On the topic of bonus stages, DKC1 does have them, sure, and they do add to the completion percentage, as I mentioned before, but their end purpose is different. Where the sequels' bonus barrel challenges are meant to be something to achieve in and of themselves, almost like mini-games using the main game's mechanics, DKC1's bonus areas are primarily towards the purpose of racking up extra lives and you're gonna NEED those extra lives. DKC1 is definitely the hardest of the 3 DKC games. While 2 does have some very tricky stages, particularly the bramble ones, DKC1's love of levels that require many very accurate timings of successive spinning barrel blasts or weaving juuust around enemies makes the whole difficulty curve of the game jump all over the place. Even as a kid, I had a TON of trouble getting past the game's 6th stage because the barrel timings were just so difficult to get past, and the same goes for the minecart stage (of which there are mercifully only two in the whole game) in world 2. DKC's design is very tight and the game plays great, but the momentum-based platforming, many difficult barrel timings, and many auto-scrolling stages (minecart-based or otherwise) make it really stand out from other Nintendo-published SNES platformers of the time for me. Especially lacking Dixie, so you have no hover to use to help with more difficult platforming sections, you have no choice but to learn the game's jumping and physics to the point where they're second-nature. I finished the game with nearly 50 extra lives this time, but a lot of that is due to not only playing the game in one sitting (this game has save points! Why doesn't it save your lives too? O_o), but also the practice of the series' platforming physics by playing the other two SNES games over the past few days also really helped me achieve what is otherwise an anomaly for me in this game XD DKC1 has some great level design that begins to peak at the kind of "one level one gimmick" formula that DKC3 executes so thoroughly on, but the lesser focus on different styles of play as well as a much more optional status of animal friends again sets this apart from its sequels. Rambi the rhino and Engarde the swordfish are in this game, but lack any kind of charge moves like they gain in 2. There's also Winky the frog and Exspresso the ostrich, but Winky's strange hop-walking and Exspresso's inability to actually harm enemies makes them very awkward to use, and while Winky wasn't quite as bad as I'd remembered him, I did not miss his presence in later games (Rattly is basically Winky but better, tbh). Squawks is here, but he's only in one stage and just carries your light for you in one stage, and is basically just Glimmer from DKC2 as opposed to mechanically resembling anything of how he plays in later games. All that said, none of the animal friends are ever transformed into or required for any stages, and are effectively treated as powerups to reward the player for exploring. This goes a long way towards making the game largely feel like an exercise in how well you can master how DK and Diddy move rather than a succession of more unique experiences. Not a bad thing, for sure, but it's one more feature that makes DKC1 stand apart from its progeny. Even on an aesthetic level, DKC1 looks quite different from 2 and 3. The game is still beautiful and the music is great, but I noticed a lot of little differences I'd never noticed in the other games. Barrels, K. Rool, the Kremlings, and even Diddy all look just a little bit different than they do in the later games. DKC1 has a much more naturalistic approach to its level and character design than the later games, and it's something that jumped out to me this playthrough more than past ones. Verdict: Recommended. DKC1 is a great platformer that, while not quite the same as its sequels in overall design philosophy, it a game that is tons of fun in its own right and one I learned to appreciate more this time around. I definitely prefer the design of the later games rather than the strict platforming of this game, but I see the appeal now in a way I didn't before this playthrough. The main thing that keeps this from getting a higher recommendation is the difficulty. This first venture for DK & crew has a noticeably higher barrier to entry on that regard, and I would recommend it more to people who like difficult platformers or fans of 2 and 3 rather than a more universal recommendation as I can more easily give the other two games in the trilogy. Didn't quite have the DKC itch out of me yet (and still might not XD) so I decided to postpone my "current" games a little longer and do a full 103% run of DKC3 for the first time. Like with DKC2, I have beaten the game before, but never a full run of all the bonus coins, DK coins, and banana birds until this time. I have been somewhat converted over to the school of "DKC3 is the best of the original trilogy", but still think DKC2 is a fantastic game. DKC3 is largely a somewhat more polished version of that game. It took me about 5 and a half hours to do on the Japanese Wii U Virtual Console.
In refining the DKC2 formula of a more meta-goodie-focused DKC, DKC3 does a much better job than 2 of designing levels and barrels that all fit well with each other. None of the bonus rooms or DK coins (which themselves are now a special enemy and not just another coin lying around) feel unfairly hidden, and the challenges you have to do to get them all feel better thought out and interesting than in 2 where a good handful of them feel like filler. The roster of animal friends have also received a slight change again, as Rattly the snake has been completely removed (while he was fun, I feel 2 really exhausted his potential), and the purple Skwaks the parrot who in 2 could only descend as well as not spit eggs can now both fly upwards as well as pick up barrels. Finally, the overly invincible (yet very fun) Rambi has been replaced by Ellie the Elephant, whose water spitting mechanics and fear of mice have her as the star of many of the more unique levels. DKC3's best points, as far as the series go lie in these refinements and uniqueness of levels. Very rarely do two levels feel much alike in this game, as each one tries to do something in a way you've not yet seen. Sometimes it falls flat and is a bit miserable, like the rocketship level or Ellie's stampede level, but most often it provides a new challenge in an interesting way, like Ellie's mouse-avoidance level or the level where you need to keep a hungry fish fed behind you. This extends to even the boss fights, which also break beyond the mold of the more typical "dodge and smack with barrel" that 2 had mostly carried on from 1. All this on top of a really well thought out difficulty curve really do make the general quality of 3 stand above the other 2 original DKC games and puts it definitively as one of the best platformers on the system for me. Where 2 was as much of a sequel as it was a re-imagining of what DKC could be as a franchise, 3 is everything a sequel should strive to be in how it succeeds in innovating on the good ideas and paving over the not-so-good ideas and mundanities of its predecessor. But no game is perfect, and neither is DKC3. In trying to innovate so hard, it does occasionally fall flat in some quite annoying ways. This mostly lies in the occasional gimmick that doesn't work quite right, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, as sometimes that drive to innovate struck on an idea that just didn't work as well as it needed to in its execution. That problem is most present in the final boss and secret final boss fights, which rather than feeling like tests of platforming skill and timing like they do in 2, feel like boring memorization tests with battle mechanics not always very clearly explained. The other source of this also comes up with something I mentioned in the DKC2 review in the inherent problems with making a game with two main playable characters. Kiddy (or as he's amusingly called in Japanese, "Dinky") is a clever re-imagining of a "heavy" kong like DK was in the first DKC weaved into the throwing and partner mechanics expanded on in 2. However, this also just gets in the way of playing the game quite often. Dinky largely succeeds in feeling like a worse kong to be stuck with than Dixie, as he not only can't hover but also isn't faster like Diddy. He's also worse than Diddy in that he's physically larger, and the issue with the kongs being less pixely and more-animated makes Dinky's hitbox really difficult to judge compared to Dixie's, and this can make some of the trickier boss battles and enemy dodging really frustrating at times. They also made it so that Dinky's throws do the platforming leap like is done in DKC2, but Dixie's throws slam Dinky onto the ground to both attack enemies and break open the very occasional floor-hidden secret (not unlike slamming into the ground from a great height can do in DKC1). It's a neat idea, but the throwing for height is used SO much more often that it just makes it annoying to have to switch between the kongs so often. Verdict: Highly Recommended. DKC3 isn't a perfect game, but it's still a fantastic one. Even its biggest problems are still minor at best, and barely get in the way of an otherwise very fun experience. If you like SNES platformers, this is definitely not one to overlook. Also known as Donkey Kong Country 2 in English, I've been eyeing this game on the Wii U VC for quite a while now, as it's a game I have a lot of nostalgia for from when I was a kid, and I finally picked it up the other day. I really wish it were on the SNES Classic instead of the first DKC (or as it's called here "Super Donkey Kong"), but that's a personal preference. This is my favorite of the original 3 DKC games and I had a really good time playing through it. I wanted to say I'd beaten this game before, but the final boss and ending sequence were totally unfamiliar to me. Although beyond that, this is definitely the first time I've ever taken the time to get all the bonus coins and DK coins to do the secret final boss for a 102% finish (I only had to look up where one bonus room was ^w^). It took me a little under 6 hours to do.
I honestly thought that it'd be nearly impossible to try and find all the bonus rooms and DK coins myself, and I was really happily surprised I only needed to look up where one was in the end. A lot of the way they're hidden seems for more adding replay value than just spicing up the way you can play them through the first time (like how Yoshi's Island does its collectibles). Some of the designs of them feel a bit filler-y for sure, but most of them are properly good challenges. I definitely got a new appreciation for Diddy this time playing the game. I always prefered Dixie as a kid, because her hover made the tricky platforming SO much more easily navigable, but this was basically the first time I'd REALLY tried to utilize the jumps you get if you "spin" off a ledge, and I think that made using Diddy a lot easier and less dangerous. Diddy is certainly faster, but especially when replaying bits of the game to get the collectibles I missed, I noticed the characters don't control all that differently at the end of the day, which I was fine with. While I will say that, from a design perspective, having a light & a heavy character like DKC 1 and 3 do provides more opportunities for ways to hide hidden goodies, I'm kinda in two minds about that whole thing. I'm not entirely convinced that the whole "two playable characters who have inherently different abilities that are required to unlock certain secrets/defeat certain enemies/navigate certain obstacles" is an amazing design philosophy in the first place. It means you either need to design levels in such a way that the player feels screwed for not having a certain character, or you need to design them in such a flat and universal way that you end up barely using the unique aspects of each character. Ideally, levels would have interesting methods of completing them using either character in their own special way, but that's often easier said than done. This isn't to throw shade on the other two original DK Country games, so much as it is to say that I believe the "partner as power-up" method that the DKC Returns games use is a smarter way to go about things, generally speaking. I'll also admit that this doesn't have much all to do with this review. Just some thoughts I had I wanted to share that fit tangentially with this post XD Verdict: Highly Recommended. A tough game, but still one of the greats on the SNES. Whether or not it's the best DKC game will always be a matter of debate, but regardless of that, it's still a great game. This game has always looked interesting, and I needed something to distract me from how bad I am at Sutte Hakkun's puzzles, so I decided to play through this game today. It's a little short, as you could pretty easily get through it in a couple hours, but it wasn't a bad use of 500 yen on the Wii U VC.
Hebereke (localized as Uforia) is a very odd little Metroid-like game where you go around as the titular character, a weird little humanoid chicken with a knit cap, and find a series of friends (O-chan the little girl in a cat suit, Sukezaemon the sunglasses-wearing ghost, and Jennifer the angler fish man) with different ambulatory powers to let you get through areas you couldn't before as well as charge abilities that provide a similar gating effect to later areas. It's got a silly sense of humor and very cute graphics. Now, at first, I didn't realize you could jump on enemies because you need to hold Down while you're in the air to stomp. Otherwise you just land on them and get hurt. This seems like an utterly unnecessary design choice, but it's there. Once I learned I could actually fight the enemies that were kicking the crap out of me, I started to have quite a good bit of fun with this game. It's far easier than Metroid or Kid Icarus, as you find a map and a compass quite quickly. It's not a super easy game that any kid could breeze through, but any veteran of NES-era platformers should not have a very difficult time with this game. The hardest part is remembering where the obstacles are on the map so you can go back to them once you have the right power/character to get past them (I had to look up where one particular item was because I had forgotten where on the map you went to to get to it). Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's a bit short, but Hebereke (Uforia) is a well designed game that plays great. It could really use some kind of save points rather than a password system and/or a way to recharge your health to full easier, but those are really minor complaints. If you're looking for a fun and not too punishing action adventure game on your NES, this is a good one to pick up if you don't spend an arm and a leg on it. A game I played the English patch of nearly a decade ago, it was high time I return to Mother 3 to see what the original Japanese was like. Mother 3 not only held up in my memory as a game definitively better than Mother 2 (Earthbound) in every way, but also it exceeded those expectations and is a really wonderful piece of storytelling with some really clever design both narratively and mechanically. It took me around 27 hours, and I played on the Wii U Virtual Console (the game is very pretty on a TV <3 ).
First off, the mechanics of this game aren't THAT different from Earthbound, but they move the bar just enough to take it beyond the "Dragon Quest clone with a slowly raising/lowering health gimmick" status that Earthbound largely occupies. Mother 3 introduces a "heartbeat" system that allows the player to combo basic attacks by tapping the A Button repeatedly in time with the music, almost in a "Earthbound meets Rhythm Heaven" kind of way. This doesn't seem like much, but it has a fairly ingenious way of working together with the slowly raising/lowering health gimmick. Where previously spells whose animation were the most dangerous threat to how quickly you could potentially heal a dying party member, now the player can actively CHOOSE to continue a combo or stop it prematurely to try and rush down an enemy or save that teammate before they bleed out. This system has some problems, the largest being that it's entirely up to the player's intuition on what beats of the background music the combo can be executed and some are VERY unintuitive and difficult to figure out. Given that the game seems largely balanced around the player having some skill at this system (granted I beat the game as a kid never using it, so it's not impossible to do), this can make certain boss fights or even normal enemies FAR more difficult than surrounding enemies or successive bosses that just happen to have a background track easier to time the beats to. Faults aside, the heartbeat system makes combat far more engaging, and really encourages the player to get into the fantastic musical score of the game, which has to be one of the best on the GBA (which you'd hope for a game that came out 2 years after the DS did). Speaking of the music, this game has some incredible presentation. Cutscenes are blocked with care, and some of the most important (especially one near the end of chapter 1) are some of the most impressive conveyance of emotion and atmosphere that I've seen in a 2D game with no voice acting. Similarly, this game brings back a lot of visual motifs and music from the other two Mother games (mostly Earthbound), and while sometimes it certainly feels like it's there just for familiarity's sake (like the cave theme), other times it is used in a fiendishly clever way to convey the atmosphere of a scene (like the introduction to chapter 4). The Tazmily theme is also used in a variety of ways throughout the game to convey different meanings, and the game overall uses the theme of the "uncanny" to great effect. I will be posting another blog post in the future entirely dedicated to narrative analysis of Mother 3, so I will keep comment on the story here brief. Mother 3 has a very well crafted story. The main characters actually feel like characters, and even Lucas' characterization, while brief, feels meaningful to the plot. However, it is not without its missteps. Aside from naming and presentation decisions for the "Magypsies" done in impressively poor taste, Mother 3 was originally going to be a much longer N64 game, and it shows. The game's last half disrupts much of the pacing and vignette style of the first half in favor of rapid fire globe trotting that doesn't add much to the characters. This leads to many major themes' presences getting very confused and tangled up among new minor themes, and an overall feeling that there was originally more to this story. That said, what is there is a damn good story for an RPG that tackles some quite dark themes with good taste, and even the Magypsies are actually treated quite well as characters within the narrative (their main problematic elements coming from their contextualization within the narrative, and not so much from their treatment within it). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Mother 3 is a truly impressive sequel. It manages to not only improve on the groundwork laid by its predecessor but also add in so much on top of that it could be its own franchise on top of that. It is a damn shame that this game never got officially localized, and I cannot recommend the English fan translation enough for those of you who love Earthbound (or JRPGs at all) and are willing to go through downloading a GBA emulator and installing the translation patch. |
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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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