THE MVP

THE GOAT

THE SWANSONG OF TREASURE

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor absolutely RULES holy shit this game is so good. It's a constant barrage of challenging boss fights and it controls like a dream. The Wii pointer is perfect for an adrenaline pumping rail shooter like this. The music is good as well and it keeps the spirit of older Treasure titles. Now, story has never been a strong suit of Treasure games, but I will say that there's a plot point that recontextualizes the story in a pretty neat way. But it's all about the gameplay here and it is so damn good. I couldn't put the game down after I started it.

Best rail shooter I've ever played.

Subsumed. Immersed, but not immersed in a world, immersed in a thrill. EVERYTHING IS SPRAWLING, it barely lets, up. Where games would you pause, rest, the game just ante ups. If MOP vocal bombastic energy were in a game it would become Sin and Punishment Star Successor. Its just adrenaline , and more important you contribute to it. Where other games make you feel like you on a thrill ride, your skill affects the feel of the thrill. Its that dynamism that takes the things I loved about Sin and Punishment 64 but makes it more impressive. Consider how in stage threee its the gact that parts of the death traps are propelling towards you in asidescrolling part and the only way is to shoot it in between shooting the enemies. Like You are pushing against the stage itself. In stage 3 there is a boss around movement and destroying blocks like a puzzle game in between shooting back at a giant monster. The entire boss battle is this big set piece around movement. It’s sprawling, it can be exhausting and I admit my reflexes are slow, so while I say its hard to keep track of all the bullets, it changes not the feeling that the immediacy of jumping back in to beat the boss that whooped you ? WOO. You don’t sulk in loss, its one of my fave elements. One of the things I havevn’t decided if its too exhausting.

Like in between boss losses, I am putting down the controller trying to redo sole self. In terms of my hand hurting because I AM ALL THE WAY IN. And when I say dynamism bosses FUSE AT THE END OF STAGES. The Komodo’s dragon boss with the switch?!? That’s real design, you have to damage the environment, can’t hover in the air, then get normal shooting galleries in between. I am a sucker for a hell of a set piece where you use your environment to damage your boss. Any moment of a boss that just gets more and more subbosses? Like that amazing boss births two other boss fights! It’s unrelenting pace is immaculate. This game is able to string together consistent action that the frenzy is perfect.

I think that the only thing that failed the game is me? I could only play on easy so I know that ending boss wasn’t as amazing as other set pieces because it should feel more stressed out, but I def couldn’t step up to the task. This is def a game I would replay because the best bosses are mind bending, the dual boss you faced before the main boss? It asks so much of you, so much to attend to. You can’t let up. The game is smart to only let up to give you a fun shooting gallery. You totally forget that between the bosses the normal moment rail shooting is so fucking awesome, that you wish there were just a few more . This game only lets up, to let you catch your breathe to give it your all again. This game is spectacular, if it’s end sequence only felt as special as the first, this game would be perfection

A good bullethell time with the classic control scheme of its predecessor or (recommended!) nunchuck+ wii mote aiming.
awesome and challenging bossfights bundled in stages mish mashed of 3D and 2D environments.

Unlike the first game you can move freely about in every direction, with enemies compensating for your flexibility with extra barrages of projectiles amongst some rather spongy enemies designed for you to use your charged shot, which takes a bit of time to get back.

You have your neutral shots, lock on feature with weaker bullets and a powerful close range attack whenever you hit the trigger at something close in proximity. As well as a convenient dodge roll. The controls are constantly busy, and using the ir aiming instead of right analog clears out a lot of the harder hand cordination which the classic control scheme moreso requires.

The charge shot adds a constant pressure of prioritising whether to use it against rows of lighter enemies vs the more spongy units, maintaining the stage and keeping mobs at bay while dodging bullets and hazards is the meat of the game and mostly the game works except for a few segments where the depth perception makes incoming projectiles and enemy spawns hard to keep in track. .

Bossfights are a-plenty and they all stand out with fun and challenging patterns of bullethells and hazards you'll need to adapt to while slowly curving down sizable HP bars with as many charge shots as you can muster outside of your weaker neutral artillery.

While differing from its predecessor with its new couple implementations it is a really fun arcady shooter that does well in its own right.

There's something so "you get it or you don't" about Treasure games and other japanese action (JAction?) devs like Platinum, and you can probably guess which one I am.

Sometimes I like to think of games like a conversation between designer and player, typically the designer is posing questions like "can you beat this level? can you dodge this attack?" and the players answers simply by doing those things, but it's not a one way street.

Sometimes the player asks something like "Can I knock that full screen meteor right back into the boss's face?" and in this game the designer said "Yes, yes you can do that, here's a medal for it" and that's why this game is good.

There’s a part of this where you can only see the boss you’re fighting through a rearview mirror and have to damage him by judging which of the three trains you’re running along the top of to decouple behind you, which is immediately followed up by having to raise a series of platforms said boss’ baby is standing on to prevent him from dipping your co-protagonist into rising lava via crane, both while dodging hails of projectiles. These just about make the top fifteen or so wildest scenarios in the game, maybe.

If Successor of the Skies (PAL supremacy) sounds crazy, that’s because it is, though it’s crazy with a purpose. Its mechanics seem straightforward enough initially: either flying or grounded, the player’s tools are exclusively shooting, charging up a more powerful shot, melee attacks or a dodge, and these are never added to from start to finish beyond minor alterations during certain setpieces. Only when you’re thrust into a genuinely overwhelming slarry of obstacles littering the screen from every angle is it that you’re driven to discover these moves’ less obvious nuances. The level I’ve referenced in the first paragraph has a great example of this, with a sequence in which enemies who are resistant to gunfire but get OHKO’d by melee attacks charge at you in such a rhythm that doing the full melee combo’s liable to get you hit (thereby teaching you that doing just its first one or two hits is sometimes preferable), but this kind of thing’s present in other areas too. A favourite of mine is how it handles parrying bosses – instead of telegraphing which attacks can be countered with a lens flare or something, as you might expect from other action games, you’re trusted to put two and two together when a boss enters the foreground and the intrusive thought of “What if I try kicking this gigantic claw swipe out of the way?” takes hold. Be it these, gauging just how much charge a shot needs to stun a given enemy or reflecting explosive projectiles back via melee, every interaction’s connected by the philosophy of nudging the player in the right direction without explicitly telling them.

How consistently intuitive it manages to be’s pretty staggering when you consider not just this hands-off approach, but also the creativity bursting out of it at every turn. As impossible as it is not to involuntarily grin at sights like a gruff military general splitting into three giant dolphins made of ink or a supersized lion wrapping a vulture around itself to become a griffon, it runs deeper than just presentational or conceptual levels. When a nominal rail shooter switches dimensions to chuck you into scenarios like a swordfight against a flying samurai lady or a fistfight in which you’re tethered to a particular spot on the floor, it’s tempting to think of these as borderline genre switches until the initial wow factor wears off and you realise that the moveset you’re utilising hasn’t really changed throughout the whole ride. As aforementioned, it’s never added to, though it is occasionally diminished to spice things up; apart from those examples, the segment following my favourite line in the game is an especially strong instance of design by subtraction, forcing you to approach familiar enemies differently both via said alien donkey/bike’s inability to fly and restricting your ability to fire if you hit the railings at each side of the screen. What gets me isn't just the fact the few tools at your disposal are versatile enough to be twisted into situations like this while never once feeling disparate from standard gameplay, it’s also that this isn’t even the only time that the borders of your screen are weaponised against you.

When the fact that you can legitimately never guess what’s up next on a minute-per-minute basis combines with the sheer amount of nonsense you have to navigate through at any given time, it’d be reasonable to worry about visual clarity becoming an issue, but it remarkably never does. There are enough actors, other interactable assets and particle effects jumping around that I frequently find myself wondering how Treasure got it running so smoothly on the Wii, although the hardware’s probably due thanks in this regard. Character models and environments being only so detailed hits a sweet spot in the same way that the visuals of the previous console generation did, teasing at realism enough to be immediately understandable while still being abstract and stylised enough to stoke the player’s imagination as to what else is out there in this bizarre vision of the future. It’d be myopic to attribute it all to working around technical limitations, though; the relatively muted palettes of levels’ backgrounds are clearly an intentional decision given just how much they help all the vital information pop out, from the seas of mooks you can’t take your eyes off of to the brightly coloured timer/score multiplier lining your peripheral vision. It’s a wonderful translation of art to game, which I think this wallpaper I can’t find the source of exemplifies pretty well (you’re welcome).

Although I like to waffle on about how much I value a game feeling focused, I’m pretty used to reading the parts of games I enjoy the most and which I couldn’t imagine them without written off by others as “bloat” or something similar to a point that my brain sometimes autotranslates it to “the fun parts.” Successor of the Skies is different to many of my favourites in that I genuinely can’t think of anything extraneous in it. So much as the file select music you hear when booting up the game is pitch perfect in terms of how well it sets the tone for what you can expect over the course of the next few hours, with all its boisterousness and excitement and undercurrents of melancholy. Don’t let how over the top it is fool you – not many games understand themselves as well as this one.