Ape Escape-lite with cute little dog/cat guys should rule, except it doesn't. Your character handles just poorly enough to make all the platforming sections, which are fairly rudimentary aside from the very last one (re: big vertical teleporter puzzle with moving platforms and flying enemies that can knock you back to the bottom), feel moderately irritating most of the time. Short and charming enough that I wouldn't NOT recommend it to the right person, but I can't pretend it's got much going for it beyond presentation.

This is a game that I think has aged really surprisingly well, and more people should play it. Although, this is coming from a guy who cleared the game in five hours when the average is supposedly eight. In a perfect world, this game gets a remake that irons out all the little, but bearable issues. Mainly the camera. If that happened, I think many more people would like this game, because there's a lot to love.

- The setting is pretty cool.
- The voice acting has some charm, and the actors have some serious range.
- Cyan is a character.
- The levels are surprisingly well designed to the point where I believe the devs played their own game. (Shocking how I can't say that about some modern games)
- The art's cute and nostalgic.
- Did I mention Cyan?

Even more than twenty years later, the game's worth playing. My favorite part was when Cyan told Waffle "You'll have to go on without me... Afterall, you're the Tail Concerto."

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!

MASTER MANDOU 6

Fui recomendada pelo Breno Mancini(JOGUEM MONOTONIA, DISPONIVEL NA STEAM) a jogar tail concerto no master mandou, é a minha primeira vez participando!

Vamos lá.
Um pouco tempo antes de iniciar a jogatina, perdi um gatinho, o nome dele era Amarelinho. Confesso que no inicio foi um pouco difícil jogar um jogo onde eu apreendia gatos e ouvia seus miados. Pensei em não jogar no momento, mas esse pensamento foi passando a medida que eu conhecia a atmosfera fofa e a mensagem que o jogo estava tentando passar desde o inicio.

Aos poucos o jogo foi me conquistando e apresentando sua forma de inserir assuntos delicados da forma mais didática possível. Mostrando que as diferenças devem ser respeitadas e que guerra não se aparta com mais guerra e ignorância, e sim com conhecimento e acolhimento.
É triste escrever sobre esse jogo e toda a mensagem que ele transmite sabendo o que o mundo tá passando hoje em dia. Guerras e mais guerras, cada vez um mundo mais separado e distante de uma paz e aceitação.
Um jogo é capaz de nos mostrarmos através de carisma, personagens fofos e um mundo bem construído que toda a guerra e destruição NÃO é a melhor opção, mas continuamos seguidos de anos e anos em um mundo onde paz é raridade.
Falando dele hoje, jogo de 1998, sinto que não vamos chegar na realidade de Tail concerto tão cedo, na qual no fim, vamos encontrar uma paz.

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.

This is such a charming game. The relaxed atmosphere, characters and voice acting are nothing short of adorable. There's a good mix of signature cheesiness and awkwardness in the voices, but also a fair amount of great performances. The anime cutscenes look great too, and I really enjoyed the music as well.

Unfortunately I can't like this as much as I wish I could due to the controls, the analogue movement feels overly sensitive and the d-pad movement just imprecise, as well as only being able to change the height of the camera with a few set values, with it struggling to keep up with you often. This isn't an issue with how simple most of the levels are, but some really focus on platforming and show off this huge flaw, especially the final one.

I still had a pretty good time with this though and it's only 3-4 hours long (took me 4:36), so it's worth playing if you're interested.

Waffle is the best boy!

O brilho desse jogo está em sua inconsciência que dá palco para uma abordagem completamente coração.
Nunca estive em um jogo que flerta tanto com o militarismo e temas como apartheid de forma tão inocente e fofo.
O que, claro, poderia ser um problema para mim. Se ele fosse apenas um ode à guerra pintado de criaturas fofas, eu acabaria me desconectando completamente de sua substancia e personagens, visto que são temas que me repelem.
Então, enquanto caçava gatinhos vândalos com um cão pilotando um semi-tanque de guerra, me sentia na posição de poder pela ordem e controle.Pórem, quando percebia como Waffle se encaminhava para um personagem com dilema moral e buscava se construir pela conexão entre cães e gatos que, aqui vivem separados sendo Cães o controle do império e gatos marginalizados, não pude deixar de ver um paralelo forte.
Mas ainda que esse paralelo existisse, não sei se pelas criaturas fofas ou pelo desenvolvimento de personagem, não senti maldade nenhuma da obra. Parecia apenas replicar o tropo do policial bom contra os bandidos incompreendidos.
Enquanto é verdade que essa tropo se aplica aqui, a obra, na simplicidade, consegue escalar e nos dar um motivo ideal para os vilões e, com muito carisma, construir um desenvolvimento que fez com que essa obra quebrasse completamente uma analogia banal e rompesse a linha tênue entre o militarismo e o anti militarismo para ser algo livre desse diálogo.
Mesmo que seja algo que permeia seus temas, a simplicidade e honestidade de seu desenvolvimento faz com que o militarismo seja uma consequência contextual, mas ainda assim, é tratado com sensibilidade e como algo a ser lidado.
Esse jogo é o "bandido bom NÃO é bandido morto" para alguém que não quer pensar muito nisso, e vejo um valor gigantesco em sua essência.