Many people rejected this as a Contra game right off the bat--including blowhard Youtube assholes that pretend Contra III is this flawless masterpiece despite having the exact same game design for two entire stages--but Neo Contra was absolutely a fantastic Contra game! Fast-paced action, great controls with new options, amazingly grotesque enemy designs, and awesome music!

My only real complaint is the game is just a bit too easy. They probably wanted to ease up on the players after making a top-rank finish in Shattered Soldier nearly impossible! Even so, it's interesting that they went with the name Neo Contra, seeing as how the previous game was "Shin Contra." It was like after making the most true-blue Contra game they could muster, they wanted to take the franchise down a new direction with this isometric gameplay. I would've loved if this caught on, but sadly it's diminishing returns after this incredible title . . .

thesis: yoko taro is often listed among the foremost auteurs of the medium but the reality is his strengths lie in a kind of prototypical 'video game' method of work, borne out of necessity, that prioritizes collaboration between a consistent set of screenwriters, an unorthodox style of design targeting emotional resonance, and a plethora of unique flourishes specifically aimed at facilitating the empathy, immersion, and connection of its players (researching drakengard 1s development makes this especially apparent - it's arguably not even a yoko taro game in the usually defined sense of the term). his works, when in production, are thwarted frequently by compromise, limitation, and sacrifice - stumbling blocks, all in service of eventually reflecting a well-trodden title which charms on the virtues of its rustic artistry. wear and tear and a heart of gold. this style of development, marked by haste and experimentation and fueled by pure zeal and love for the craft, perhaps reveals why the pillars of video games, the codified monomythic genres and the primordial archetypes and the frequent allusions to popular work, so often impress themselves upon yoko taro games, and why so often his work succeeds in connecting to people where other talent may struggle. the video game of it all, if you will. incidentally, this collaborative style allows for a large breadth of potential interpretation and analysis afforded towards his work, and ive long maintained that a YT game is at its most interesting when it's not about what he intended for it to be about. did the tragedies in nier gestalt sometimes fall flat for you? me too! thankfully that's not what the game is about, at least not to me. in sum: the work of many, each willing and able to leave a fingerprint on the mosaic of development, enriches the product in the long-run, creating a full-bodied textured work of art and contributing immensely to the humanity at the core of these games. if any given chord strikes you as dull, a separate melody will enchant you - that's the nature of YT's games. they're artisan because of what they value and because of how they achieve their mission statement, and especially because of their passion, always demonstrated by the little details in these games. passion will always reveal itself, but so too will a dearth of passion reveal itself.

proof: nier re[in]carnation
if these games worked because of a certain je ne sais quois shared by the collaborative nature of a team in a trying work environment, i don't think my prospective next project would be a game in an exploitative genre where a new team of writers handled an endless barrage of one-note vignettes while YT sat back, nodded halfheartedly at his desk, and tried to string every vignette together using an overarching plot catering to obsessive drakennier fans. just my two cents

"...you can make a wonderful film about nothing. Look at Fellini. The most important thing in a movie is the actor, and everything which is in front of the camera. And the decadence of the cinema, and we have a certain decadence, comes from the glorification of the director as...being not the servant of the actors, but his master...the job of the director is to discover in the actor something more than he knew he had. The job of the director is to choose what he sees. And to an extent, to create. But a great deal of what is applauded as creation is simply there. It was there, when you put the camera...that actor, that bit of scenery, that veil that hung over the river - it was there! And you're intelligent enough to shoot it...the director should be very intelligent, preferably not intellectual. Because the intellectual is the enemy of all the performing arts." - Orson Welles, 1982

Mfs will watch the purple girl exposition at you abt the world for the entirety of Unlimited and most of Alternative and say this is the greatest gift god has ever bestowed upon mankind. For the record, exposition is about all you'll get out of this world as the majority of Alternative takes place in one singular spot, giving you very little time to see what the hellscape of Alternative's world has to offer, cool writing man, I love hours upon hours of infodump about a world I never get to actually see aside from 3 segments. Not only this but these fellas will look at the ensemble of poopoo fart characters with 0 depth and whisper under their breath "Peak Fiction". At least Chapter 7 was cool doe!