After playing through the first Pikmin, my appetite for more Pikmin fun was not even close to satiated, so I ordered the sequel online post-haste! Both a game I wanted to play, AND a game for GameCube month, so win-win! I actually managed to find a copy that came with the Japan-exclusive e-Reader cards, but I tragically was not able to find an e-reader+ to use them with (I accidentally bought a vanilla e-reader instead XP). It took me around 20 hours to get 100% of the treasures (though I didn't touch challenge mode at all. I'm not that unhinged ^^;).
Pikmin 2 picks up right where the first game left off, as Captain Olimar arrives back on his home planet after being stranded on a mysterious planet (Earth) and helping the Pikmin escape. Unfortunately, the delivery company he works for has gone into unimaginable debt while he's been away all thanks to the royal heck-up of the other captain on staff, Louie. Everything seems hopeless until they discover that the bottlecap (half the height of Olimar's body) that Olimar brought back as a souvenir for his son is worth a small fortune! With their hopes restored, their boss orders both Olimar and Louie (on a trip to redeem himself) back to that mysterious planet to get enough other artifacts and treasure to pay off that horrible debt. The story is quite simple, ultimately, but it does what it needs to and then some. The more entertaining parts of the story are messages you get after each day. Instead of Olimar's logs to himself that you got in the first game, you get messages from back on Olimar's home planet. Messages from Louie's grandmother asking how he's doing, Olimar's kids and wife wondering when he'll be home, and even the antics of their boss running from the horrible loan sharks he took the debt out from XD. Your new spaceship (they sold Olimar's old one to help pay for the debt) also comes with a built in AI, whose silly banter about your adventure is also a consistent source of fun. The mechanics and design of the game are largely the same as the first but with some significant improvements and additions. First of all, you're no longer on a time limit, as you're not crash landed or anything. You have all the time you could possibly want to hunt for treasure and play with your Pikmin (and the game makes a very explicit point of telling you this almost as soon as your adventure starts). In addition, you can also multi-task more efficiently than you could before. As both Louie and Olimar are on this adventure, you can split them up and have them take care of chores on opposite sides of the map if you want. You can't actively control them both, sure, but being able to actively babysit some Pikmin tearing down a wall or constructing a bridge while the other captain does something else is very useful for time management. Pikmin AI has also been improved significantly, and they trip far less, stay in tighter groups when managed, and can also be thrown much more quickly to give you much more control in battle. On top of all that, you also have two new Pikmin types to play with! You have returning from the first game your battle-hardened and fire-proof reds, your high-flying and newly electric-proof yellows, and your drown-proof blues. Newly debuting in this game are your super tough and super strong purple Pikmin. They're basically the Wario of Pikmin, having a heavy ground pound when thrown and having both the carrying power and punching power of ten Pikmin, they pack a powerful punch! The only downside is that they're pretty slow. On the other hand, you have the diminutive white Pikmin, who are a little weaker and a little faster on top of being able to spot underground treasure with their big X-ray eyes and breathe in poison. Overall, they're both fairly solid additions, but the fact that you can only get more of them by using transformation flowers in caves really neuters their usefulness by a lot. You can't just have them carry dead enemies to an Onion like the other Pikmin can, so you're basically never going to risk having them die by using them for combat, and it all makes for their cool ideas landing a bit flat all around. Those underground caves are the last most significant upgrade to this game. While the game only has four large above-ground areas (the hardest and final of which is only unlocked in the post-game after you've paid off your debt) very similarly to the first Pikmin, there are three or four large underground caves to go through in each area. These caves have a series of almost Mystery Dungeon-style floors (they're sometimes procedurally generated) full of more simple cavern designs where you can fight monsters and hunt for treasure. They just about always have a big boss at the end, which always provide interesting and challenging fights for you and your Pikmin to try and conquer! They even drop special treasures that give you permanent passive upgrades as well (ranging from a wider whistling range to immunity to fire and even a stronger melee punch for Olimar X3). Add that on top of how you also have two special sprays you can use (one for making your Pikmin faster and stronger temporarily, and one for petrifying enemies to stone), and you have a game that's much more combat-focused than the first game. I don't really consider that a positive or a negative, so much as it's just the thing that makes this game different from the other two. You have a longer, more challenging adventure full of big boss fights instead of the tighter adventure of the first game, and it lets them both stand on their own as fine experiences. The presentation of the game is as excellent as you'd expect a first-party Nintendo game on the GameCube to be. The music is excellent, both the new versions of old tracks and the scads of new music, and the graphics and monster designs are also really cool. The treasures you're finding are basically just trash and assorted items from our human world (quite a few of which are different in the Japanese version, I was surprised to learn), and the descriptions you get of them in your log as well as just the design of the world itself gives the whole adventure a wonderful charm and character that's totally unlike that of the first game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Pikmin 2 is one of my favorite games of that generation. It was before this replay, and it still is now. It holds up excellently, and it's absolutely still worth playing if you're able to track down an (increasingly expensive) copy~.
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This is a seminal game for the PC-Engine that I've wanted to get to playing for a long time, and I've actually bought three different times (this being the third). Once on PSN, once via my PCE Mini, and then this GameCube port that Hudson put out exclusively in Japan in the middle of the GameCube's life (as they did with so many other franchises of theirs). I've always known of this as the sort of Mother series of the PC Engine: a Dragon Quest-clone that's well remembered not for its mechanics but for its memorable presentation, setting, and characters. Granted this isn't exactly that iconic original version, and it has quite a few quality of life improvements from that original version on top of its graphical overhaul, it's still quite the faithful port. It took me about 50 hours or so to beat the game (which is a pretty impressive final time, given this game has virtually no side-content and I only spent a couple hours grinding and another couple being lost at several points).
Far East of Eden 2 is the story of its subtitle's character, Manjimaru, and takes place in the Japan-parodying fictional country of "Jipang" (a parody of Japan as imagined by modern Japanese through the lens of how 19th century Westerners imagined Japan to be). The descendant of the legendary Fire Clan who sealed away darkness a thousand years ago, he must follow in his ancestor's footsteps and join up with other Fire Clan members to seal away the dark Root (like those of a plant) Clan once again. It's overall a pretty straightforward story, but it made up for it at the time with some really impressive anime-style animated cutscenes and tons of voice acting for them in addition to major story moments (all of which have had their quality bumped up a bit but otherwise been left more or less totally unchanged for this remake). There are a few moments that present themselves as more serious, but it's more often a sort of comedy than anything else. Although those more serious moments go HARD when they come around or go by basically untouched upon. One of my biggest criticisms with the game is the way it so poorly maintains a sense of tone or decency in regards to its comedy and seriousness. There is some incredible tonal whiplash over the game's eight or so chapters (which aren't really chapters so much as they are just incremental "YOU DID THE THING!" of which there are 8, so I call them chapters :b). You go from a super silly transformation fight cutscene in the middle of chapter 2 to later that chapter getting full VA and animated character portraits as a family is slowly dissolved into the man-eating forest. You get to watch as silly, lovable side characters are brutally executed one by one in cruel and narratively cheap ways that just feels so trashy every time it's done. This also easily holds the new mantel for the most shockingly homophobic/transphobic game I've ever played, not only having it's very bluntly gay-coded villain both be an animal abuser, but also very heavily implied (they stop the adventure to directly repeat it to you several times) to be both a pedophile and into bestiality. While the funny moments did make me genuinely laugh out loud several times, I think this game's writing has too easy a tendency to use human suffering and triggering topics like sexual assault as lazy plot dressing to do no more than gratuitously drive home how evil the villains are. It's overall aged like fine milk and is trash better left in the dustbin of history. Mechanically, it's really just Dragon Quest but more annoying, more often than not. The combat is DQ save for just how needlessly overly complicated and confusing the UI is (SO many menus that don't need to be there or could be condensed into less boxes), it's first-person combat encounters, you have a party of four. The more annoying parts take shape in not only the bad menus (which have been improved for the GC port but are still very annoying) but also your absolutely puny character-specific inventories which hold anywhere from nine to a mere three items (depending on the character) and each character only being able to hold six equipment items (four of which are the equipment they're presently wearing). The game has had its leveling system at the very least made a bit higher, as my party's level of mid-80's was way higher than the PCE-version guide's recommended levels of several dozen levels lower, although it's difficult for me to gauge just how much of that is actual rebalancing or if they just made the same growth curve spread out over more levels. Granted even if that were the case, you do get significantly more powerful in even a level up or two, and you thankfully get a full heal with every level up, which is also nice. There are a few more notable changes from the typical DQ formula present in the early 90's. One of the most important is how spells work. Each character does have their own special, unique skills that they learn as they level up and require no mana. However, I found these skills to be too situational at best and utterly worthless at worst (I barely ever used them). The actual magic spells come in the form of scrolls that you acquire by visiting huts of tengu spread all over Jipang. Many spells can only be used by certain characters, but the spells themselves can be passed around between party members freely. While it does mean that you only get one copy of each spell at maximum, it also provides interesting opportunities for strategy in who gets what spells and when, especially in a game with small inventory space, no item stacking, and very limited options when it comes to mana restoration that isn't via sleeping at an inn. At least it *would* present more interesting opportunities for strategy if the game were balanced and designed a bit better. On the balancing front, the game is designed much more on the easier side. I'm not sure if that's a reality of rebalancing done for the GC port or if it's a reflection of how things were in the PCE original as well, but regardless of the cause that was the reality of my playthrough. It's pretty easy save for certain brutal difficulty spikes, particularly through the entirety of chapter 4 as well as the final boss gauntlet. Thankfully, however, this is the rare early 90's game (or at least a port of one) without true game overs, as you simply get kicked back to the last big inn you stayed at when you die, just like Pokemon. It also thankfully (even in the PCE original) is kind enough to show you remaining enemy health, which makes it one of a very few number of games from that era to do so, at least in my experience. The other large mechanical problem is that spells by and large just kinda suck. The only stats in the game are attack, defense, and speed. While I think magic attack IS some stat that exists, it's not one you can see or affect visibly through equipment (This is part of a larger problem of very poor player information that's been lovingly preserved from the PCE port, in that you're never told what passives equipment has or what items do, but that's a totally separate problem). Offensive spells are often too weak to bother using as soon as you get them, and even then, they're far too expensive to warrant using in the first place compared to healing spells. Simply just attacking things until they die with normal attacks and using the MP you do have for healing up afterwards is a strategy that will get you through virtually the entire game save for a small handful of boss fights where using buffs or debuffs can prove useful. Not TOO useful, however, as buffs and debuffs wear off very quickly and need to be reapplied every so often (when they go away seems to be entirely up to RNG). It's a game whose combat system is both overly complicated and also lacking any and all depth, and that winds up making it difficult to understand AND boring to engage with at the same time, which is a fascinating achievement in and of itself, in a way. The GameCube port's biggest changes are in the realm of presentation, but also in a small amount of quality of life features, most significant of which is the mini-map (which also has the added bonus of showing town, dungeon, and tengu hut locations on maps!). All cutscenes have been preserved in content but had their resolutions increased significantly, and the same goes for the voice overs, so far as I can tell anyway. It also makes the menus a little easier to navigate and the text far easier to read. To lean harder into the "old Japan" theme, the game uses a lot of old lexicon and obsolete names and kanji for things even in the PCE version. That made the PCE version's tiny 16-bit kanji very hard to understand for me, and the poorer audio quality didn't help me understand the subtitle-less cutscenes any better either. They still don't have subtitles for those cutscenes (something I find MUCH harder to forgive in 2003 than it was in 1992), but the text is far easier to read and the menus are a bit easier to navigate and understand. It's still very clunky, but it's better than it was at least. The presentation of this version as a whole is very good. Enemy design is super diverse, with the game's dozens of areas having a huge amount of monster sprites which are only reused twice at most (very impressive for the time, to be sure). The enemies and bosses all get small animations to how they move, giving them a bit more life than their PCE counterparts had. The music also ranges from good to excellent, really flexing the power of remixed tracks that were also just good all around to begin with. The biggest sticking point for people will likely be the new graphics style, which blends 2D character sprites (and entirely 2D first-person perspective fights) with 3D environments. I thought they looked nice, but that has been one of the most divisive elements of the presentation when I've shown the game to friends (both retro-loving and otherwise). Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. This game overall holds up okay, but really only in the context of being a DQ-clone from 1992. I think it really outstays its welcome with trashy, bad writing and a really dull combat system that extend over a run time that's at least ten hours too long, but for those of you who like more simple older games like this, that might be just your cup of tea. It isn't outright bad, but it's a difficult game to return to that I don't think stands up all that well even for when it was released (outside of the notable presentation aspects). I'm glad I have some experience with the series now to speak about it firsthand, but honestly, outside of historical curiosity like I had, I think this is a game best left ignored for better contemporaries of early 90's JRPGs, even in its improved GameCube format. This is a game I wasn't really planning on replaying or rebuying any time soon, but then I found it in very nice condition for a whopping 300 yennies, so into the playlist for GameCube month it went! X3. It's a game I've beaten a time or two before and played with friends on several occasions, but that was so long ago I'd forgotten just about everything about this game. It took me about 8 or so hours to complete the Japanese version of the game by myself.
Four Swords Adventures is the Nintendo-made follow up (of sorts) to the extra Four Swords multiplayer mode Capcom put into their GBA port of Link to the Past several years before. Rather than just a handful of levels, this is a whole game designed for four Links to partake in as they fight to save Hyrule from the evil wizard Vaati. The story is very light for a Zelda game outside of simple plot exposition, but most of the text is dedicated to light flavor text or just explaining what to do in each stage, and the writing that is there does a good job of explaining things and being as entertaining as it needs to be. And that's right, you read that right. This is a Zelda game with stages. You play through eight worlds of three stages each trying to get to the end of it to complete your exceptionally linear adventure. Granted that isn't a bad thing, as this is a fairly necessary concession to make for the sake of the multiplayer, which is this game's main draw. This is an adventure for four Links, and you can control them by yourself or you can have up to three other friends take control of them. Playing by yourself or with any number other than four people, you can use the C-stick or hold Y to access fixed formations for your Links to walk in to achieve different environmental puzzles or take on particular enemies or bosses that demand more spread out or compact formations (such as walking in a horizontal line to push a large block or form an offensive wall to take on oncoming enemies). The only real downside to this is that playing with any number of friends is a pretty significant investment in equipment, as each player needs their own GBA and link cable to the GameCube to play (as you go into a personal sub-screen to go into sub-areas of a larger area). You don't need that to play alone, but it's a pretty unfortunate obstacle in experiencing what's otherwise a pretty damn impressive and unique multiplayer experience. If you imagine a Zelda game with all of the fluff known as "adventure" taken out and boil it down to a more linear approach to the usual puzzle solving and enemy fighting, then that's what you've got here. The combat arenas and the sheer emphasis on the number of enemies in combat are a little unorthodox for a 2D or 3D Zelda, sure, but it fits really well into the multiplayer format this game is designed around. Stages have an impressive diversity of being more combat, platforming/exploring, and puzzle focused, and that leads to always feeling like you're doing something different. Some of the puzzle focused stages are a little *too* puzzle-y for my liking (both as a kid and as an adult there were a few solutions I had to look up on my own), but perhaps they're mean to be harder because you're intended to have four heads thinking up solutions rather than one XD. At any rate, it really pays to pay attention to what NPCs tell you, as they often given rather crucial hints to solving the puzzles in your way and are almost always there to do more than simply add flavor text. The presentation is a very wild thing, even in the context of Zelda in the mid-2000's. You have a 2D game that feels a lot like the original Four Swords game, but the presentation is this weird mish-mash of Link to the Past-like and Minish Cap-like environments combined with a lot of NPCs (and bosses) plucked straight out of Wind Waker (though they're obviously different characters within the universe of the game). They do a really cool job of converting what were once 3D boss fights into 2D ones, and it overall gives the game a very eclectic feeling in how it's presented. The music is also excellent, but it's also by and large remixes of existing Zelda tracks, just to add one more onto the pile of how much of a delightful mish-mash of Zeldas this game feels. Verdict: Recommended. This is definitely more highly recommended if you have friends to play with, but just as a solo game, it's simply quite good. It really won't set your world on fire, but it's nonetheless a really neat and unique game by any measure, particularly for the time. Definitely one worth spending a weekend on if you can find it for the right price, even if you don't have friends to enjoy it with~. Continuing my fervor for GameCube stuff during GameCube month, I hunted down an old favorite of mine~. It's been only a few years since I beat Pikmin, but that was on Wii. It's been a loooooong ol' time since I've played it on GameCube, and this seemed like as good a time as ever ^w^. Playing the Japanese version of the game, it took me about 6 or 7 hours to get all 30 ship parts in 19 in-game days.
Pikmin is the story of Captain Olimar, a pint-sized astronaut who crash-lands on a mysterious Earth-like planet. However, for Olimar, our precious oxygen is very toxic, and he only has 30 days to repair his ship before he does a big die. Thankfully, he has the help of eager and easily controlled little plant-like aliens: the Pikmin! The game is quite light on both story and premise outside of Olimar's logs, but they more than do the job of what the game needs for its narrative. The mechanics and design of Pikmin are where it's at. Using Olimar, you can control your red (immune to fire and better fighters), yellow (can carry bombs and be thrown higher), and blue (don't drown in water) Pikmin to help you do everything from fight giant monsters to building bridges to destroying destructible walls. You can have 100 Pikmin out at a time, and you grow more by having them retrieve the bodies of monsters they kill and bringing them back to their little Onion homes. IF they are allowed to grow in the ground longer or find nectar to drink while they're out and about, the leaves on their heads will grow into buds and then flowers, allowing them to move more quickly. The combat isn't super technical, and mostly just revolves around using red Pikmin (whenever possible, at least) to strategically maneuver around your large and often slow and lumbering opponent to hit their weakpoint until they're dead (while avoiding getting eaten yourself). You have 30 days to collect 30 ship pieces, and while it isn't the biggest time crunch in the world, it can certainly be stressful, so time management is the name of the game. Pikmin is a game more about gameplay and atmosphere than deep technical strategies. It's such a short game, in fact, that it even has scoreboards for how many Pikmin you had die, how long you took to get the ship pieces, how many Pikmin you grew, etc.. This makes it more of a time-attack challenge, in the long-run, and is definitely a game made with multiple playthroughs in mind. That said, it isn't a game without flaws. Most of the issues I have with the game come from the Pikmins' AI, which can be very capricious at times. Certain objects such as little crust on the ground or grasses will hide nectar within them, and if a Pikmin passes by it at all (whether you directed them to or not), they will stop what they're doing to try and get the nectar. Additionally, Pikmin aren't the best runners, and they can trip fairly frequently, so waiting for your little guys to catch up with you is an annoyance that often eats up a fair bit of time. There are also issues with larger Pikmin swarms not packing together very nicely and leading to cases where they end up getting caught on rocks or falling off of bridges, leading to unintentionally leaving them behind or drowning just because you weren't paying attention enough. Admittedly, a lot of these things are bigger problems when viewed in the context of the sequel which fixes basically all of those problems in one way or another (sometimes AI fixes, sometimes via level design), but they're still annoyances here one way or the other. The presentation is as excellent as you'd expect from a Nintendo first-party title. The Pikmin, Olimar, and all the creatures are unique and adorable in their own ways, and the world design really gives a great impression of being around an inch tall~. The music is also excellent, and adds to the atmosphere very nicely. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It may be a bit on the short side and rough around the edges, but Pikmin still holds up excellently. I'll always prefer its sequel, but the whole nature of the smaller world and time management aspects make Pikmin 1 unique from its successors in a way that I think is still worth appreciating. This is a game I'd been meaning to get to during my Mega Man Mega Marathon a few months back, but got burned out on Mega Man before I could get to it. It also wasn't super duper easy to procure a copy, so that also kept me away. However, as luck would have it, in looking for more games to play for this TR's GameCube theme, I managed to find a copy of the relatively quite rare GameCube version for sale in town for a price I couldn't say no to~. I had heard good things about it from tons of people, and I had those things more or less all around confirmed for me over the course of playing it. It took me around 26 hours to beat the main story of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, and then I spent around another 3 hours doing the post-game extra content and extra bosses.
Rock Man X: Command Mission may have Zero and X and Axel in it, but it's more like a story inspired by the state of things that Rock Man X7 left things in rather than a direct continuation in any sense. X and Zero work for the military to hunt down Mavericks (or as the Japanese versions call them, "Irregulars"), but other than that, this is a side-story at least and a totally different continuity at most from the rest of the Rock Man X storyline. That said, this game put together by members of the team of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter and Rock Man X7 is quite the impressive achievement in bringing a truly unique-feeling Rock Man RPG experience to life. The whole conceit of the game is that the world of reploids has been revolutionized by the discovery of a powerful new technology: Force Metal. It has properties that give incredible potential for power in reploids and machines that use it, and it becomes the focal point of the world's society very quickly. However, when the prime spot for the mining and processing of Force Metal is suddenly attacked by Irregulars, X and Zero are sent off to solve this crisis presented to the world before Force Metal is monopolized by the wrong hands. While this is still very much a Rock Man X game in its world and character design, this is easily one of the best written games in the X series (as one would hope of a narrative-driven RPG). For starters, it's one of the sage few games in the series to actually address in any way, shape, or form the fact that X's whole deal as an Irregular Hunter basically makes him a super cop just hunting down government-identified terrorists, and that he's potentially just a tool for wannabee demagogues because his conviction towards hunting Irregulars is so unyielding. Beyond that, you can also definitely see the influence of the Breath of Fire members of the development team with the strong themes about leadership and the importance of a good, self-sacrificing leader. It's a story that moves very quickly, and speeds through character moments quite fast, but it still manages to do its relatively large cast justice more often than it doesn't. Enemies range from seriously cruel to delightfully wacky in a way that doesn't break the tone, and the good guys are also staffed with a fun range of characters with their own motivations and personalities. It's certainly not the best written RPG of its generation, but it's a surprisingly well done swansong for Capcom's days of making straight turn-based RPGs. My only real complaints are around a twist in the end kinda compromising Zero's story arc, and the fact that it's just so short. Though in a sense, while leaving the player simply wanting *more* of your story isn't a great place to leave them hanging in, it's certainly a sign of a job well done. The RPG mechanics of the game don't really play like anything else I can think of, other than a bit like Final Fantasy X in how you can do mid-battle party swapping in your team of 3 (although it seems like that was a very popular mechanic to steal from FFX, so Capcom aren't unique in that regards XD). Each party member goes into battle with their main weapon and sub weapons, with the former being bound to A and the latter being bound to X and Y. You get weapon energy at the start of every turn, and while your turn will end if you fire your main weapon, you can also spend weapon energy on firing your sub-weapons beforehand. In addition, you can also save up your weapon energy to activate a super move whose power is determined by how well you complete a little mini-game before hand, which can range in simplicity from simply holding down A to spinning the C-stick clockwise (something you'll do a LOT because that's the healer's free healing super move XP). You also have a super mode you can activate for a few turns, but it only gets its charges restored when you either level up or do a full heal (or use a special healing item of which there are only a set number in the game). Even though you don't really have armor to equip, as you only have weapons to equip (though they do affect things like defense and speed as well as attack), the story-important Force Metal also plays a role in what are basically accessories. Each character has a certain number of Force Metal slots they can equip them in and a certain number of points they can allocate to it, and more powerful Force Metals generally take more points to equip. You can mitigate that by dedicating a Force Metal equipping slot to a special Force Metal that just gives you more points to allocate, or you can just equip over your limit and run the risk of negative side effects happening during battle as a result (much like the system Mega Man Battle Network uses). The game's combat flows really quickly as a result of it being so many quick button presses with quick (sometimes too quick, and impairs readability) animations, which makes the large amount of random encounters not feel so overbearing. The random encounters are actually the main difference between the GameCube and PS2 ports of this game, as while the GC version may run at 60 FPS instead of the PS2's 30 FPS, encounter rate is tied to framerate, so you're going to get double the random encounters. The difficulty curve tends to lean towards the high side, though, so having more monsters to grind XP from isn't the worst thing in the world. Having good Force Metals equipped and a party you're comfortable using as efficiently as possible is key to survival, and while this certainly isn't the hardest RPG of the generation (there are hidden extra hyper forms for Zero and X and steal-able super Force Metals that can tilt things in your favor by a LOT, making even the super hard post-game bosses much more manageable), it certainly surprised me with just how tough it often was, even in the first several chapters. The presentation is really well done. The character designs do often err towards being on the more over designed side, but they're still very pretty and memorable. The music is also very good. The environments and dungeons to tend to be very simple and samey, however, with most of them being fairly unimpressive corridors, giving the game a very linear bent. Granted that linearity and uncreative dungeon design is really one of the most critical things I can level at the game from a mechanical or design standpoint, which isn't a bad place to be. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I thought this game would be just okay, but I ended up really enjoying it. It's for sure an RPG on the GameCube and PS2 worth checking out, especially if you're a Mega Man fan who likes RPGs. It manages to make not just a really fun Mega Man RPG, but a great RPG in its own right, and that's possibly the singular most impressive thing it manages to do. I wanted to play more Zelda, but I didn't have any more 3D Zelda games to play. That's when a friend of mine mentioned that she had just started Minish Cap, and I just had the urge to play through it again. While I don't have a physical cart anymore, I have it via the Ambassador Program on my 3DS, so that's how I played through it. It took me around 11 or so hours to play through the English version of the game on my New 3DS XL.
The last 2D Zelda game made by Capcom, Minish Cap is a mid-life GBA game that reuses a lot of assets from their Four Swords GBA game to tell an all new tale. Long long ago, the land was under assault by monsters until a hero in green appeared with a blade bestowed to him by the very small Minish. This Piccori blade was used to defeat the evil, and the blade has been enshrined in Hyrule ever since. One day, the evil wind mage Vaati destroys the blade, turns Princess Zelda to stone, and releases a massive swarm of monsters into the world in the process. It's up to Link and his strange friend Ezlo to restore the blade and defeat Vaati once and for all. It's a pretty standard story for a handheld Zelda adventure, and it does the job of Ezlo is a former Minish who was turned into a weird triangular bird thing by Vaati, and he joins Link on his quest by riding around on his conveniently hat-less head (given his very convenient hat-like shape). Ezlo not only gives you advice like Navi does, but he also gives you the ability to turn small like the Minish themselves, and that turning big and small is the most significant gimmick of this game. Being small is generally very similar to being big, mechanically speaking, but getting a mouse's perspective on human-world objects has a delightful charm that never outstays its welcome. Outside of that, the game is a fairly standard 2D Zelda affair with dungeons to complete and special items to find in them, sidequests to complete, and monsters and bosses to defeat. The dungeons are fun and well designed as are the bosses, but the signposting on how to progress or even fight bosses can be a bit confusing at times. This isn't helped by the fact that Ezlo often doesn't give terribly helpful hints on how to progress, so being a bit stumped on how to progress is a not infrequent issue in this game compared to other mid-/late-2000's Zelda titles. Like Capcom's Oracle series of Zelda games, there's a bit more involvement with NPCs than in Nintendo's 2D Zelda games, but in this case it takes place in the form of Kinstones that you fuse with other NPCs to both unlike side quests, treasure troves, and sometimes story progression. The Kinstones are a neat collectible and fun to do, but they're also effectively the entirety of the game's side content, so there isn't much writing for side content that doesn't ultimately get reduced to fusing Kinstones and wandering to where they've had their effect. The presentation is very charming. While the game plays more like the GBC Zelda games, it has the aesthetic of the Four Swords games and Wind Waker, giving it a lovely colorful and cartoony style. The music is also quite good, and the game all around plays and sounds just like you'd expect a Zelda game should. Verdict: Recommended. I didn't enjoy this game quite as much as I remembered enjoying it, but I still liked my time with it nonetheless. It can be a little clunky and unclear in places, but it's still a really solid Zelda game and another remarkably good job by Capcom in bringing Zelda to life on Nintendo's handhelds~. I've always considered this Zelda my favorite of the style pioneered by Ocarina of Time, but it'd been so long since I played it I was really curious how it held up to my memory (and I also still really had the itch for more 3D Zelda after finishing OoT :b). I wasn't sure how much I'd do in it, given that I had already gotten all the masks before when I last played it however many years ago, but I ended up having so much fun that I got all of the masks again and all but about 8 of the heart pieces. It took me about 30 or so hours to do all that in the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.
Majora's Mask (or as it is in Japanese, "Majura's" Mask) is one of the few direct sequels in the larger Zelda series. Taking place a little after Ocarina of Time, Link bids Hyrule farewell as he sets off on a quest to find something he never could on his last quest: a friend. He finds himself eventually in the land of Termina, where he's attacked by a Skull Kid (or as they're called in Japanese, "Stalkid", I guess to connect them to Stalfos) wearing the titular mask. The masked assailant steals Epona and the Ocarina of Time and after a brief chase, Link finds himself still without both AND turned into a Deku Scrub. With his only company being Tatl, the fairy companion that Skullkid left behind, Link sets off on an increasingly dire quest to save Termina from the very angry moon about to crash into it. Where Ocarina of Time is more of an apocalypse lacking characters, Majora's Mask is much more intimate perspective of a world on the cusp of destruction. Link only has three days before the moon falls, but using the song of time, he can reset back to the start of those three days as many times as he likes. Every NPC in Termina has their own (often quite simple) schedule that they follow and their own problems that arise at different times during the countdown to the final moments, and all of that constant resetting gives you a lot of time to get to know the world and the characters in it. From quests as fundamental as joining the bombers to get the code to their hideout to the infamously time-intensive and involved quest to find the lost Kafei, there is no shortage of side quests you can embark on to help people out and get a bigger perspective on the world. Majora's Mask ends up being a tale oozing with character as well as the genuine tragedy. All of the imperiled lands of Termina are the result of Skullkid's mischief, who himself is (quite well) painted as another victim of the passage of time and the inevitable changes it brings. MM is deeply sewn with these themes about the importance of helping others, fighting against inevitability, and accepting what you can and cannot change. It's a story I ended up liking even more than I remembered, and it is definitely one of the highlights of the game as a whole. Another theme is the masks we all wear. Not only the fronts we use to interact with different people and different situations, but also on a mechanical level as well. While MM has four big, beautiful dungeons to trek through, there are also oodles of masks to collect along those many side quests of helping others in Termina. Many of them are used for just a heart piece or two and/or used to progress the story, but there are famously a few that allow you to transform into a Deku Scrub, a Goron, and a Zora. The different mechanics and abilities of each add a large amount of variety to the gameplay as you can fly around and bound on water as the Deku, roll around as a spiky boulder as the Goron, and swim with great speed as the Zora. Granted the rolling around as the Goron and swimming as the Zora can be a bit fiddly at times, all it takes is some practice to get the hang of it, and you're never pressured too badly to master these systems. All of this transforming does put a strain on the item quick change system, however, as constantly needing to go into your inventory to change between normal items and masks becomes more than just a bit of a pain as time goes on. Still, it makes playing through the game a very different experience and allows for scads of new puzzle designs to differentiate this from its predecessor. Those puzzle designs are by and large quite good, but occasionally they veer a bit too inscrutable. The water dungeon in particular is quite the head turner, but the game in general has much more puzzle-involved dungeon design than Ocarina of Time. On top of that, the signposting on how to progress to the next dungeon in the first place can be quite hard to pick out at times. Though you do only have three days per cycle to actually finish a dungeon, slowing down time with the song of reverse time does make that time limit not nearly so much of a problem. Aside from that, the game plays and feels very much like Ocarina of Time, and will feel very familiar to anyone who has played that game. The presentation of this game REALLY flexes the RAM expansion that the game requires to be played. While the music and character design as are excellent and iconic as ever, the graphics really do look remarkably better than Ocarina of Time's do, with a larger resolution and textures of much higher quality. It's one of Nintendo's last big games on the N64, and damn if it don't look like it. Ocarina of Time is nearly identical between English and Japanese, but I was really surprised at just how much is different between the English and Japanese versions of Majora's Mask. A lot of it is making certain challenges just a bit easier (a more lenient time limit here, a slightly easier platform placement there), but the biggest one for me is that you can't save at owl statues in the Japanese version. If you want to save the game, you NEED to reset the time loop with the song of time, and that can be very anxiety inducing at times. Sure, the Japanese version of MM is cheaper to acquire and has three save slots instead of two, but that ability to save more often without resetting the cycle (in addition to making Zora swimming a bit easier) makes the American version the easily superior version in my eyes. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I was a little nervous going in on how much I'd still like this game, but it's definitely still a big favorite of mine. While I think I do prefer the English version for its small balance changes, both versions of the game are still excellent experiences for a fan of 3D Zelda games and action/adventure games. Majora's Mask has a bit of a divisive place among Zelda fans, but I'm firmly on the side of it being an excellent spin on the formula and one of the all time greats in the series. This is a game I've beaten before, but it's been a LONG time. The last time I played through OoT was back when the 3DS port came out a decade ago. It's never been a super favorite of mine among 3D Zeldas, but a friend of mine who really really likes it was talking about it recently, and I got the itch to play through it again. I picked it up for really cheap, and it took me about 25 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware while getting about half of the heart pieces.
Ocarina of Time (at least at the time) positioned itself as the earliest point in the Zelda timeline: a game that would shed light on exactly who this Ganon fellow is and just why he cares so much about Zelda, the Triforce, and this Link fella. Our hero Link is sent on a quest by the Great Deku Tree to meet up with Princess Zelda and stop this darkness he feels creeping over the land, and this is a quest that brings you to every corner of Hyrule and even seven years in the future. It brings the story to life in a really spectacular way (in the most literal meaning of the word) that still holds up well today. While it may not have the deepest story in the world (and at times feels like it may've originally been meant to have one), it does have some nice themes around not giving up in the face of despair. The characters are overall fairly shallow, and it's much more a game around Link's adventure than anything else. That said, they really aren't trying to be, and they do the job of supporting Link's adventure well. It may not have the appeal of deeper writing or characters that some other games in the series have, but the brisk pace of the adventure and the solid use of the characters it does have more than makes up for that. The main meat of the game is overworld questing, find new dungeon, get item in dungeon, complete dungeon, rinse and repeat. It's more or less the same as Zelda games had been before this too, but this does it in an excellent fashion that's still super impressive to this day. Nintendo REALLY wanted Zelda's jump to 3D to hit as hard as Mario's had a few years prior, and damn if they didn't hit the nail on the head. Dungeon and boss design is all around really solid. There is some clunkyness in just how maze-like some dungeons are, however. Wandering from room to room hoping to find that place you passed a key by or can now use a key can be a real pain in some of them. Though there is at times some confusion on exactly where to go or what to do next on the overworld as well, Navi's hints do a pretty good job of kicking you in the right direction when you need it. She's just not quite as helpful in the more complicated dungeons. This is far from the truth for all dungeons, but enough of them had me wandering around for a good while just trying to bump into the next thing to do that I couldn't not mention it here. The only other thing I'd say is worth mentioning in the complaints department is that I really wish you could tap L to swap between C-button loadouts. You assign the myriad of items you have to three of the C buttons, but even then you're constantly going in and out of your inventory to change stuff. That goes double for going into your inventory to take your iron or hover boots on and off, or changing which tunic you're wearing. It's not a game breaking problem by any means, but just how clunky the inventory management can be at times is one of the biggest areas where this game shows its age (and is why they significantly improved upon the inventory management in the 3DS version). Presentation is excellent, with tons of super varied environments, beautiful character designs, and creepy looking enemies all with a timeless artistic style. I like polygonal graphics as a given, sure, but OoT really does hold up as a game that uses the polygons it has to give the game an art style that still really stands up all these years later (even though the resolution can be pretty cramped at times). The music is just as timeless too, with tons of super memorable tracks spawning from this game, even for a Zelda game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's likely no surprise that this is a game I recommend highly, but it was definitely a surprise to me that I enjoyed the game quite as much as I did. I tend to be pretty hot and cold when it comes to games in the OoT style, and my playthroughs of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword (not to mention even the 3DS version of this all those years ago) had really convinced me this just wasn't a style of game I could gel with anymore. I was very happy to have been proven wrong, and this is absolutely still a game worth checking out. To close out my quest of beating Mario Kart games I never quite finished as a child, I decided to boot up Super Circuit on my 3DS. I don't really remember if I'd ever beaten this game on the GBA as a kid. I do remember playing it a fair bit, but I also remember being confused on how new tracks were actually unlocked, so I'm doubtful if baby me ever actually properly completed it. It took me a bit over 3 hours to beat all of the normal courses on 50cc to 150cc in the English version of the game (but I didn't bother putting in the time to unlock or beat all of the SNES tracks, as I'd more than had my fill of those XP).
Being the 3rd entry in the series, Super Circuit is a weird beast in how it combines aspects of both the 2D SNES original with updates from the N64 title and beyond. For starters, it plays much more like the SNES title in that we're once again on flat tracks in a "Mode 7" style (although this isn't true Mode 7, of course). However, tracks have a bit more going on in them, a little like the N64 version, and items have been improved significantly (mostly in how the red shell FINALLY does not travel as the crow flies, so it finally has some greater utility as a catch up mechanic). Boasting multiplayer over cable connection and twenty tracks on its own (including an extra 20 in the form of unlockable SNES tracks), Super Circuit has quite the loadout when it comes to trying to outdo its console-borne predecessors. As far as the racing goes, this is the first one that actually starts to feel fairer in a fun way. The AI does still feel a bit too rubberband-y when it comes to its competency, but it doesn't nearly feel like you're playing against a bunch of hackers like the first two games did. Sadly, the reintroduction of the Mode 7-like graphics style reintroduces the larger problem the first game had in regards to it being difficult to see gaps in the track. This is a problem worsened further by the small GBA screen (even playing it on my larger 3DS XL screen, it was still hard to do this). Another unfortunate callback to the SNES days is the reintroduction of the 3-life system, so even though your score in the cup can mean that you could get first place 3 times and still be assured a 1st place victory with 0 points scored in the last track, you still need to get 4th place or higher to not have to redo the track completely. That was a bad idea in 1992, and it is still bad in 2001. One more small introduction to this game is that even though there are still only 8 racers, you have differences between them now in regards to their speeds and weights. The only issue with that is that it isn't balanced super great, and especially on higher difficulties, the way the AI spins you out if a heavier character bumps you can feel very overly mean when combined with their high-difficulty-cheat-speeds they can reach. The presentation is very good, as would be expected from a Nintendo first party game. You have fast moving, colorful sprites, and very nice looking characters. The music is also very good, with lots of remixes of classics alongside new good tunes as well. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The jump from this to Double Dash!! would still be another massive leap in quality, but this is the first one of these three that I had enough fun with that I can actually recommend on any level. The later difficulties still get a bit too hard with how the AI can cheat, but it's nowhere near the level of how bad it can get in the previous two games. This is where Mario Kart actually starts getting fun beyond being a party vs. game, and it's a better game for it. Not feeling like my quest to engage with earlier Mario Kart games was done, I decided to fire up my Super Famicom Mini and give a go at trying to complete the original game in the series as well. Where Mario Kart 64 was a game I owned for many years as a kid and played on and off many times, Super Mario Kart was never a game I played all that much. I picked it up when I was much older, and never really put much time into it beyond just seeing how it played (and bouncing off of it very quickly). I don't really know what I was expecting this game to be, given how much I didn't really care for its sequel, but I still blown away at just how rough a first entry this was. I only used rewinds on the final track (to finally free myself of the torment XP), and it took me a little under 2 hours to get gold on all the cups in 50cc and 100cc.
Boasting a mighty 20 tracks (5 in each cup) as well as a battle mode, there's quite a hefty amount of content in this game compared to its sequel (at least on paper). Just like 64, Super Mario Kart has a co-op two-player mode as well as Vs. features, the basic mechanics of racing work quite well, and it has a very cool split-screen design for its races. If you're doing 2-players, you each get a portion of the screen, but if you're playing by yourself, that bottom screen becomes your mini-map of how the other racers are doing (although you sadly get no mini-map if you're playing with a friend). However, outside of these clever touches, there is no small amount of glaring issues that would've frustrated players even at the time. First off there are small things that make playing the game a little more frustrating than it feels like it needs to be. First of all are small touches that its sequels would also struggle with in how it's often hard to distinguish between holes in the track and the actual track because of how the Mode 7 tracks are displayed. Then you have issues like how this has a life system, and you get only so many lives in a cup before you just get a game over. This isn't like F-Zero, where you can fall off and outright die, but you actually NEED to get 4th place or higher (out of 8 racers) or else you just need to redo the track. This can be a nice redo feature if you're in a situation where you need to beat a certain opponent to win, but it more often comes off as a needless frustration, especially with a scoring system that often calculates to you "winning" the cup via points even if you would get 0 points on the current track. Then there are much deeper seeded problems in how the AI works aside from just how brutal their rubberbanding is (and let me tell you, it's extreme). In Mario Kart 64, it often feels like the AI are playing a different game to you, but in Super Mario Kart, they very observably are playing a different game to you, and them appearing on your track to interact with is often more of a formality. The same CPUs will often win tracks because items don't work for them as they work for you. While you are limited to a single item per lap (of which there are five per track), they all get items for free after a certain amount of time depending on characters. DK. Jr. gets free bananas, Toad and Peach get mushrooms that make you small until you get run over (meaning you've basically lost if you hit one on 100cc), Mario & Luigi get invincibility stars, and Koopa amazingly enough gets shells both red and green (meaning you really need to play him if you want a chance at winning single player races at all). AI don't even get boosts in tracks (they'll drive over them but get no effect) and drive right through thwomps as well. The only thing they do interact with is the edges of the stage, and I only won a couple tracks because I was lucky enough to have Luigi (the eternal AI 1st place favorite) get stuck against a wall for most of the race. Your items on the other hand are, as mentioned, very few and often quite weak, as lighting bolts still only temporarily slow instead of stop your opponents, and red shells still go as the crow flies (making them useless unless you have line of sight, and this is another Mario Kart where the AI will start cheating their butts off as soon as they escape your line of sight). This is another case where if you start losing, it's nearly impossible to catch up because they get so many automatic advantages, and it makes the single player content very often miserable to try and engage with. The presentation is quite good, at the very least. The graphics are bright and colorful (especially the racers), and the Mode 7 effects on the tracks looks nice when it isn't confusing you on where the floor is actually solid. The music is also very good, although there aren't a ton of musical tracks in the game in the first place. Verdict: Not Recommended. Where there is some enjoyment to be gotten out of a game like Mario Kart 64, Super Mario Kart is a game I'd argue wasn't even good when it came out. It is an easily inferior game to F-Zero (which is older than it by about two years), and looking back it is amazing which series ended up continuing so far given the quality of their first entries (discounting things like the unstoppable popularity of Super Mario himself, of course ;b). This is a game that does not warrant returning to unless you simply have to experience where the series came from, as there is very little fun to be found here outside of conquering all of the crap the game puts in front of you. |
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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
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