Cute, charming, lighthearted, and fun! As a massive PS1 fan I saw the price tag on this game and became very confused and interested in it. After watching a few reviews, seeing its beautiful “castle in the sky” aesthetic and listening to the soundtrack I became invested in hunting down a copy of this game. Sure enough I did and I LOVE it. It’s one of the many under appreciated hidden gems on the console. I’d recommend it to any 3D platforming and adventure game fan. The controls are often criticized but if you have an analog controller you should be fine. That isn’t to say that the game is perfect. The one major gripe I have with the game is it’s camera. It’s difficult to see what you are aiming at when in combat because the camera can be stubborn. Other than that it’s a great game. If you aren't interested in it, please at least check out its soundtrack. It’s great.

Picked this game up because it looked kinda cute, and it is. Unfortunately the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. You just walk around and collect cats between boring bosses and cutscenes. The game controls like ass but it mostly wasn't that big of a deal until the end. The last level and the last few bosses were very obnoxious for me. I wish the levels were more interesting and you got to keep the jetpack that only exists in one area. Game is really short, but I think it would have gotten pretty boring if it went on much longer as it is. I like the tsundere cat-girl.

Insane that I just got done playing Armored Core, which also happens to have an insufferable moving platform section at the very end.

Second GOTM finished for November 2023. What a charming little mech-controlling platforming adventure game! Fun (if a little cheesy or flat) voiced dialogue for much of the game, interesting movement and gameplay mechanics, and a warm and wholesome cast of characters. The overall movement of the mech can be a little over-sensitive, but still had some weight to it and felt like you were piloting a large hunk of metal. The camera control is the weakest part of this game, as it is basically nonexistent (the only options you have are using L1/L2 to raise and lower the camera angle ever so slightly) and is unfortunately highlighted pretty extensively on two important levels in the game. I have a soft spot for 3D platformers of this era, and thus am used to plenty of terrible camera controls, but it was still frustrating. Some of the boss battles could feel a bit drug out, as you only really have two methods of attack and one doesn't do much damage. A good game that is weighed down by some long boss battles and an annoying camera, but it's quite charming and doesn't outstay it's welcome. Recommended little gem!

I decided to take the Little Tail Bronx seriously and go through all the games, meaning that I had to put FUGA on pause to go back to the platformer that started it all: Tail Concerto from 1998. For the most part, this is quite clunky as you would expect of an early 3D platformer, but honestly? This is still a marginally better package than a large chunk of those platformers from that gen. This is quite an impressive first game from CyberConnect2.

You do pilot a dangly-limbed walking mech and are expected to do some light platforming with it. I'm someone who doesn't usually mind tank controls (I love them actually), so I wouldn't have minded a platformer with that scheme in mind. That said, there's two control schemes for this game depending on the location: a middle ground between tank controls and regular controls for open areas, and regular controls with a fixed camera for confined small spaced. The former is quite bizarre to get used to, as I would hold either side button to change direction only to then run off the edge. I can't say I am a fan of that control scheme for walking, and I would have preferred straight-up tank controls. There's also a bit of a learning curve when it comes to the jetpack segments in one of the islands you can visit. I should mention that there is a side jump option by tapping either left or right with the jump button, and it's very useful for some of the boss fights, yet the game never tells you about it as this was confined to the manual back in the day. Said side jump is quite clunky to pull off, and frankly I wish they simply assigned them to the shoulder buttons given that two were assigned to going forward and backwards, which you could already do with the D-pad anyways. The side jumps only register if you're facing forward, as facing in any other direction would instead just give you a regular jump. There is also a hover mechanic which can slightly help you with certain jumps without necessarily trivializing the jumping.

The platforming is generally fairly light for about 80% of the game, but starts to ask a lot more of you near the latter half, and the game is at its worst when there's precise platforming under pressure. It doesn't happen too often, but they can be brief yet frustrating walls. A major part of it comes from being asked to do risky jumps on small ledges, but the camera is pulled far back so that you can't properly gauge the distance. I normally never have depth perception difficulties, but Tail Concerto might be among the very few if not the only example where I had that issue. Sometimes, you would have threats coming at you during those precise platforming sections, or you had to jump between moving platforms where reacting quickly was a significant concern, yet are difficult to properly react to given the slow acceleration and deceleration of the mech, the slow turning speeds, the wide angles of the turning curves, and the prominent inertia when coming to a stop. All of these elements do evoke the feeling of riding a walking tank on legs, but they work counter to the platforming whenever it's brought up and is a bit more demanding with what it asks of the player.

Platforming aside, there's a nice sense of power trip coming from running around with the mech, catching cats in bubbles or just grabbing them directly. Those moves have a nice weight given the feedback from the animation and sound. The grab having a bit of wind up can get annoying during some of the sections when you have to react to stuff coming at you, especially during some of the later boss fights shooting homing missiles at you, though that's moreso a detriment to the design of those bosses rather than the mechanic itself being bad. Speaking of the bosses, they are pretty fun, even if they're usually very simple by asking you to just move out of the way, shoot at them with the bubble blaster and toss back any bombs thrown your way. Perhaps some attacks can be a bit unfair given how difficult it is to turn on a dime and gain enough speed to get out of the way, and they do juggle around a lot of the same ideas albeit recontexualized, aside from maybe one or two.

The anime cutscenes are delightful to watch, and even the in-game cutscenes are quite fun even if the 3D models do look a bit goofy, but I do appreciate the work that went into the portrait models for the dialogue boxes. I do think the graphics look good for the time this game came out in, and the anime aesthetics of the art style blend in nicely with those low-poly graphics. It's the same idea as what was implemented for the Mega Man Legend games even if not to the exact same proficiency. The story is, well, surprisingly very simple. I suppose we're spoiled by games nowadays, but I guess platformers didn't have much story to them back in the 5th gen, something I seem to have forgotten about as someone who mostly goes back to JRPGs and survival horror games for this generation. That said, there is an attempt at something far grander in terms of the narrative compared to this game's contemporaries, and I did enjoy the story for what it was. I'll refrain from commenting on the quality of the voice acting too much, as I mainly played this on an old 10 year old Homebrewed Phat Vita with a faulty speaker, but it seemed adequate enough for the time period this game came out in.

Perhaps the most egregious element of this game is the final level. It suddenly changes the platforming physics on you out of nowhere. All of a sudden, you have four times the jump height where you can't see where you're about to land, you rise and fall at half the speed, and your hover suddenly halts all your momentum. What's worse is that failing a jump sets you back to the beginning of the level, and you have to slowly jump your way back up the moving platformers. Perhaps raising the camera angle would have helped, but then I would have no means of knowing where to go by not being able to look straight ahead, and it was already difficult enough to even try to correct your jumps. I gave it a shot normally for an hour, before giving up and finishing the level with the help of save states. The level itself is very short, and is merely extended by wasting the player's time through trial and error of missing very difficult jumps. The final boss is quite demanding and expects some near-perfect reactions a lot of the time. I managed to overcome some of the harder bosses just fine without the side jump, but this one definitely demanded that I use it despite how clunky they can be. While numerical scores don't matter much to me with the way I like to review games, and are usually a lot more supplementary to my written reviews rather than being the main focus and are reliant on my writing for context, I did lower it for this game by a point because of this final level.

Overall, I thought Tail Concerto was decent and holds up a fair bit better than a lot of platformers from the era. Perhaps not better than the top platformers of the time period, but certainly better than the ones you don't hear as much about compared to your Crashes, your Klonoas and your Spyros. Once again, very impressive of CyberConenct2 to start out this strong in an era when developers were still lost in the sauce trying to figure out how to make a pizza out of this fenangled third dimension. It's certainly not necessary to play if you just want to get to the likely best parts that Little Tail Bronx has to offer, but at only 6 hours long, it's a nice bite-sized adventure that's at least worth checking out. Also Panta is the best.

[Japanese version reviewed]

Endearing, with a nicely realized world strongly inspired by Studio Ghibli's Laputa. The anime cutscenes are of good quality, too.

The 3D environments are also well done, with some neat setpieces, like the cat airship. Unfortunately, the controls are a little sluggish and the camera is bothersome.

Es un bonito juego me gusta mucho su mundo y si bien su historia es bastante simple y me deja ciertas preguntas.
Es realmente un juego bastante redondo que recomiendo, sus personajes no tendrán los mega arcos de redención o de descubrimiento personal pero te sacan una que otra risa o pequeña sonrisa especialmente Panta, totalmente panta, le daría el premio a ser mi punto de guardado favorito de la historia.
En ost no me impacto tanto como su sucesor ni en historia pero se nota que varias ideas se van a lograr redifinir, especialmente el vuelo que es bastante eeeem dejemoslo que normalucho y a veces molesto, al punto que parece que el juego sabia y te da mas tiempo de vuelo para que las cosas sean mas comodas.
Pero lo que es el movimiento en tierra, bueno perfecto no será y lleva un periodo de adaptación pero imposible no es, así que si quieres una aventura algo corta pero bastante simpática e carismatica, creo que te podria gustar.