Armcannon
BACKER
54 reviews liked by Armcannon
LEGO 2K Drive
2023
I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.
It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.
What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.
User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.
2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.
You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.
It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.
What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.
User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.
2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.
You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.
really good hack ruined by a homophobic, transphobic, ableist creator
Mr. Gimmick
1992
A technical marvel that is completely fucking miserable to play.
I'll get this out of the way, first: Gimmick might be the most impressive game I have ever seen running on a Famicom. I legitimately do not know nor could I begin to understand how a game that's only a few hundred kilobytes managed to pack visuals this pretty, sounds this pleasing, and an actual fucking physics engine onto a cart that ran on a console manufactured in the year 1983. By rights, this should not exist. People everywhere seem to constantly express surprise that Gimmick isn't actually another one of those retro throwback indie games, and they're right to be shocked. This might be the game that sells me on how drastic of an upgrade the Famicom was to the consoles that came before it. The Atari 2600 isn't shit compared to this. I digress. The point to make is that Gimmick really ought to be celebrated as a feat of engineering in video games.
Regrettably, though, video games need to be played.
Looking at Gimmick is significantly more fun than actually interacting with Gimmick. Yumetaro slides around like he's wearing ice skates long before you get to the actual ice level. Emulating rudimentary physics on the Famicom is undoubtedly an impressive feat, but it's handled in way that only manages to frustrate: downward slopes have almost zero friction, so you slide down them too quickly; it takes an obscene amount of time for Yumetaro to stop moving after you stop holding the button; enemies can turn on a dime, with none of them under any obligation to bother observing something as petty as the fundamental forces of the universe.
I was tempted to write about how I'm done giving the time of day to "cruel games", but I think that's prescribing a design intent when that's not necessarily what's here. What I'm ultimately and actually annoyed with is the fact that it's impossible to intuit certain enemy patterns or placements, which is where that feeling of cruelty stems from. The archers in Stage 4 are probably the most obvious and most unfair example, where the only shot you have at dodging their arrows is if you have prior knowledge as to where they actually are; they love shooting you from off-screen, with one placed specifically to catch you at the arc of your jump as you come out from the top of a previous screen, and another waiting at the end of a hallway to snipe you with a projectile that is literally a single pixel thick and roughly the same shade as the background. It's trivial to deal with if you know that it's coming, but that's if you know that it's coming.
This is a pattern that continues consistently throughout the game, but reaches an apotheosis at the end of Stage 5. The stage boss here is a little orb guy in a cart that moves horizontally along the top of the screen, shooting lasers down at you. To hit him, you have to bounce your star off of the top of the conveyor belt on the left, or fling it from the top of the conveyor belt down and hope that it bounces up the way that you want it to. The star, following the laws of physics, cannot bounce higher than its initial, highest bounce; essentially, you have one chance to hit the boss with a conveyor belt ricochet every time he comes near, and if you whiff, you have to wait for him to go all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left again. After he takes three hits, he fires his lasers even faster. The lasers also explode when they hit the ground, so your only option is to weave between them in mid-air. After he takes the fourth hit, he shoots the lasers so quickly that it is literally impossible to weave through them. If he takes the fourth hit too close to the left side of the screen, you won't be able to charge up your star fast enough to throw it, guaranteeing that you take damage. The fifth hit takes him out, at which point a second boss walks out from stage right to fire homing missiles and Contra spread shots at you. There is an unspeakable darkness within whoever designed this fight. A joyous mind cannot conjure these tortures.
The only part of the game harder than this is getting the Stage 4 secret item that lets you fight the true final boss, where you have one chance to jump off of your star (it has collision) and into an above alcove. If you miss it, you drop down onto a checkpoint, and you can't go back to try again. You can game over and continue to restart the entire level, but using a continue clears the remaining three secret items from the prior three stages out of your collection. You need six secret items in total — one from each level — to go to the true final stage. You either make that jump on your first attempt, or you have to start the entire game over from scratch. Again, I want to call this cruel. I don't know what word would better apply.
It's disappointing, because this is a game that I really would have liked to love. I think Yumetaro's design is so ridiculously over-the-top cute that it loops back around to being funny, and that endears me to him. I think the fact that Sunsoft were able to make all of these pieces fit together on hardware as rudimentary as the Famicom is admirable. I just wish the act of playing it didn't feel like pulling teeth.
Can I fuck 🥺
I'll get this out of the way, first: Gimmick might be the most impressive game I have ever seen running on a Famicom. I legitimately do not know nor could I begin to understand how a game that's only a few hundred kilobytes managed to pack visuals this pretty, sounds this pleasing, and an actual fucking physics engine onto a cart that ran on a console manufactured in the year 1983. By rights, this should not exist. People everywhere seem to constantly express surprise that Gimmick isn't actually another one of those retro throwback indie games, and they're right to be shocked. This might be the game that sells me on how drastic of an upgrade the Famicom was to the consoles that came before it. The Atari 2600 isn't shit compared to this. I digress. The point to make is that Gimmick really ought to be celebrated as a feat of engineering in video games.
Regrettably, though, video games need to be played.
Looking at Gimmick is significantly more fun than actually interacting with Gimmick. Yumetaro slides around like he's wearing ice skates long before you get to the actual ice level. Emulating rudimentary physics on the Famicom is undoubtedly an impressive feat, but it's handled in way that only manages to frustrate: downward slopes have almost zero friction, so you slide down them too quickly; it takes an obscene amount of time for Yumetaro to stop moving after you stop holding the button; enemies can turn on a dime, with none of them under any obligation to bother observing something as petty as the fundamental forces of the universe.
I was tempted to write about how I'm done giving the time of day to "cruel games", but I think that's prescribing a design intent when that's not necessarily what's here. What I'm ultimately and actually annoyed with is the fact that it's impossible to intuit certain enemy patterns or placements, which is where that feeling of cruelty stems from. The archers in Stage 4 are probably the most obvious and most unfair example, where the only shot you have at dodging their arrows is if you have prior knowledge as to where they actually are; they love shooting you from off-screen, with one placed specifically to catch you at the arc of your jump as you come out from the top of a previous screen, and another waiting at the end of a hallway to snipe you with a projectile that is literally a single pixel thick and roughly the same shade as the background. It's trivial to deal with if you know that it's coming, but that's if you know that it's coming.
This is a pattern that continues consistently throughout the game, but reaches an apotheosis at the end of Stage 5. The stage boss here is a little orb guy in a cart that moves horizontally along the top of the screen, shooting lasers down at you. To hit him, you have to bounce your star off of the top of the conveyor belt on the left, or fling it from the top of the conveyor belt down and hope that it bounces up the way that you want it to. The star, following the laws of physics, cannot bounce higher than its initial, highest bounce; essentially, you have one chance to hit the boss with a conveyor belt ricochet every time he comes near, and if you whiff, you have to wait for him to go all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left again. After he takes three hits, he fires his lasers even faster. The lasers also explode when they hit the ground, so your only option is to weave between them in mid-air. After he takes the fourth hit, he shoots the lasers so quickly that it is literally impossible to weave through them. If he takes the fourth hit too close to the left side of the screen, you won't be able to charge up your star fast enough to throw it, guaranteeing that you take damage. The fifth hit takes him out, at which point a second boss walks out from stage right to fire homing missiles and Contra spread shots at you. There is an unspeakable darkness within whoever designed this fight. A joyous mind cannot conjure these tortures.
The only part of the game harder than this is getting the Stage 4 secret item that lets you fight the true final boss, where you have one chance to jump off of your star (it has collision) and into an above alcove. If you miss it, you drop down onto a checkpoint, and you can't go back to try again. You can game over and continue to restart the entire level, but using a continue clears the remaining three secret items from the prior three stages out of your collection. You need six secret items in total — one from each level — to go to the true final stage. You either make that jump on your first attempt, or you have to start the entire game over from scratch. Again, I want to call this cruel. I don't know what word would better apply.
It's disappointing, because this is a game that I really would have liked to love. I think Yumetaro's design is so ridiculously over-the-top cute that it loops back around to being funny, and that endears me to him. I think the fact that Sunsoft were able to make all of these pieces fit together on hardware as rudimentary as the Famicom is admirable. I just wish the act of playing it didn't feel like pulling teeth.
Can I fuck 🥺
Persona 5 Royal
2019
I guess it's fitting that after my first (serious) review that I review a game I find on the opposite spectrum. In my MOTHER review I briefly touch that my interest with the game transcends its mediocre review score, and while granted, my rating for this game isn't much higher than that of how I rated MOTHER, it is a game I hold considerably more contempt for. Persona 5 is a game that while at its best is fun to think about certain aspects (namely the gameplay and aesthetic which I will talk about shortly), the writing of this game has disgusted me and left me uncomfortable at numerous points that it considerably sours the experience for me. There is some seriously messed up and problematic material in this game, but I figure I should start with the positives first.
It goes without saying that Persona 5 is a visual marvel. It oozes flair and confidence in its music and especially visual presentation that has left me awestruck on multiple occassions. The UI feels like a streamlined and futuristic graffiti, aptly representing how the Phantom Thieves rebel against their society. It's one of my favorite art styles for a game and I have tried to emulate it on my own time it's that good. But that is just the style, how is the substance?
Gameplay has this weirdly satisfying pacing to it. Whenever I get bored with dungeon crawling is just often when I near the finale of a palace (I usually do palaces in one day if possible), and when I'm wanting to get back to it the game usually starts heading towards its next arc. Persona fusion makes Joker feel like an invincible badass, which is funny because if he dies your game instantly ends. A bit of a side tangent but I never liked that in games, why have the party leader be the load bearer in jrpgs when revival items work on other party members. Sometimes Joker just keels over because of a few enemies targeting him and that just feels frustrating and unfair, especially with this game having quite a few instant death spells. Besides that however, gameplay is pretty simple but pretty enjoyable which is usually how I like my JRPGs. Blasting enemies with your favorite colors of magic and shooting them in the head with assorted firearms is satisfying due to all the vibrant and poping effects. That is only half of the gameplay, and sadly is what I think is the better side of the coin.
Now, that doesn't mean I think the social sim is without merit. Theres a lot of various activites, especially in royal, to take care of, with just enough days to get what you want done. Routing what you want to get done feels satisfying, and it feels nice to see your bonds grow closer with others. Ryuji, Yusuke, Sojiro and Yoshida are very charming characters that have great moments, and raising not only their confidants but of everyone else is satisfying due to their affects on gameplay. I just wish that the game didn't spend an eternity to unlock certain things to do in the city, from locations to other confidants. Considering each arc can take 10+ hours, it feels like I'm just waiting to unlock certain mechanics as I wade through the first few chapters of the game with limited options. If only my issues with the game ended there.
You may have noticed that I only listed male characters when talking about confidants I like, and that is not a mistake. Persona as a series, or at least starting from 3, has had issues depicting women and your relationship with them. Hell, one of the biggest memes I hear about the series is how the writer doesn't think men and women can exist in non sexual/romantic relationships. This has lead to issues throughout the latest 3 games, but as I have not played those, I would rather keep my discussion to 5. Now granted, I have not finished Persona 5. I played the original release up until the end of Futaba's palace and Royal up to the end of Kaneshiro's, which is earlier than in the vanilla game. As such, I will mainly only talk about what I have experienced while also somewhat mentioning other issues I have heard later on in the game.
To say the writing of persona 5 objectifies women is a complete understatement. They're half baked and uninteresting characters at best and completely disgusting in their portrayals at worse. Of the ones I've seen so far, Makoto is by far the least offensive, but she also doesn't do much besides be the general brains of the thieves. She's not who I have issues with however. Ann is a character I just feel bad for. A victim of sexual grooming in the first arc, the fact that she then goes on to be constantly hit on, sexualized, and otherwise just made into a general pin up model is appalling. While yes I understand that she still wants to become a model, it feels off when the game makes it a constant joke to point out her in universe hotness, from her cleavage revealing skintight thief costume to out of character moments such as Yusuke asking her to strip model for him. And to those who say that her wanting to be a model empowers herself and has her growing out of an abuse, why would you give this sort of arc to a 16 year old? Even then, shes more of a victim of this games writing, and she actively wants to not be sexualized outside of her modeling gig from what I've seen. The same cannot be said for Kawakami. After your local incel forces you to order a maid you get to see your teacher all dressed up to work for you wow! While she doesn't want to work for you and would wish you to forget about that encounter, the fact you can have her still be her maid and still press on in the relationship is borderline creepy. It gets worse with the fact you can eventually romance her like any other women in this game, especially after the first arc made it a point that teachers dating students is wrong. I guess if you don't outwardly abuse them it's fine I guess! Absolutely horrid.
Those are the main two I wanted to talk about, but they're not the only ones I have problems with. I think Mishima is a fucking tool, the jailkeep twins are annoying, and while Haru is an aesthetic gender apparently her arc has her dealing with her getting sold off and then having little to no screentime afterwards. They're all pretty minor gripes for characters sure, but I wasn't done yet. There's something evil left in this game. A being that haunts my brain stem and I only wish absolute suffering on. Anyone who has played this game talking about, so I'm just going to get to who it is.
Morgana is straight up my most hated characrer in gaming. This whiny shit bitches 24/7 and does nothing productive at all. He contributes to Ann's horrible treatment and has the gall to make everything about him. Never have I wanted to erase a character off my screen more than him, and from what I hear he gets even worse later in the game. He is just generally unlikable and I don't know how else to explain it. The biggest irony of his existance is that his VA has also voiced my favorite character in all of gaming (Nami from League of Legends), so that's like one positive I guess? Except not really because that ties him to League which is a massive L in itself, lmao.
Persona 5 is a game I want to really like. I want to take the gameplay and art syle and apply it to games that aren't pedophelic or hate women, but I can't. I'm still going to finish this game, but probably on PC so I can mod over it and have a more ironic enjoyment. While my experiences are often mixed to positive in the moment, it's one of those games where I sour on it more and more as I distance myself from it. Considering this is the first MegaTen I've ever played, it doesn't set a good precedent, yet I'm still morbidly curious to play other Persona and SMT games when I'm done. It's weird, but for as much as I hate this game, there's something weirdly charming like that. That I can just want it play it and other games in its series even with its humongous fault. I don't see my opinion on this game changing anytime soon, but hopefully the good parts of it shine more when I get my third fucking copy of this game (why) and beat it for real.
It goes without saying that Persona 5 is a visual marvel. It oozes flair and confidence in its music and especially visual presentation that has left me awestruck on multiple occassions. The UI feels like a streamlined and futuristic graffiti, aptly representing how the Phantom Thieves rebel against their society. It's one of my favorite art styles for a game and I have tried to emulate it on my own time it's that good. But that is just the style, how is the substance?
Gameplay has this weirdly satisfying pacing to it. Whenever I get bored with dungeon crawling is just often when I near the finale of a palace (I usually do palaces in one day if possible), and when I'm wanting to get back to it the game usually starts heading towards its next arc. Persona fusion makes Joker feel like an invincible badass, which is funny because if he dies your game instantly ends. A bit of a side tangent but I never liked that in games, why have the party leader be the load bearer in jrpgs when revival items work on other party members. Sometimes Joker just keels over because of a few enemies targeting him and that just feels frustrating and unfair, especially with this game having quite a few instant death spells. Besides that however, gameplay is pretty simple but pretty enjoyable which is usually how I like my JRPGs. Blasting enemies with your favorite colors of magic and shooting them in the head with assorted firearms is satisfying due to all the vibrant and poping effects. That is only half of the gameplay, and sadly is what I think is the better side of the coin.
Now, that doesn't mean I think the social sim is without merit. Theres a lot of various activites, especially in royal, to take care of, with just enough days to get what you want done. Routing what you want to get done feels satisfying, and it feels nice to see your bonds grow closer with others. Ryuji, Yusuke, Sojiro and Yoshida are very charming characters that have great moments, and raising not only their confidants but of everyone else is satisfying due to their affects on gameplay. I just wish that the game didn't spend an eternity to unlock certain things to do in the city, from locations to other confidants. Considering each arc can take 10+ hours, it feels like I'm just waiting to unlock certain mechanics as I wade through the first few chapters of the game with limited options. If only my issues with the game ended there.
You may have noticed that I only listed male characters when talking about confidants I like, and that is not a mistake. Persona as a series, or at least starting from 3, has had issues depicting women and your relationship with them. Hell, one of the biggest memes I hear about the series is how the writer doesn't think men and women can exist in non sexual/romantic relationships. This has lead to issues throughout the latest 3 games, but as I have not played those, I would rather keep my discussion to 5. Now granted, I have not finished Persona 5. I played the original release up until the end of Futaba's palace and Royal up to the end of Kaneshiro's, which is earlier than in the vanilla game. As such, I will mainly only talk about what I have experienced while also somewhat mentioning other issues I have heard later on in the game.
To say the writing of persona 5 objectifies women is a complete understatement. They're half baked and uninteresting characters at best and completely disgusting in their portrayals at worse. Of the ones I've seen so far, Makoto is by far the least offensive, but she also doesn't do much besides be the general brains of the thieves. She's not who I have issues with however. Ann is a character I just feel bad for. A victim of sexual grooming in the first arc, the fact that she then goes on to be constantly hit on, sexualized, and otherwise just made into a general pin up model is appalling. While yes I understand that she still wants to become a model, it feels off when the game makes it a constant joke to point out her in universe hotness, from her cleavage revealing skintight thief costume to out of character moments such as Yusuke asking her to strip model for him. And to those who say that her wanting to be a model empowers herself and has her growing out of an abuse, why would you give this sort of arc to a 16 year old? Even then, shes more of a victim of this games writing, and she actively wants to not be sexualized outside of her modeling gig from what I've seen. The same cannot be said for Kawakami. After your local incel forces you to order a maid you get to see your teacher all dressed up to work for you wow! While she doesn't want to work for you and would wish you to forget about that encounter, the fact you can have her still be her maid and still press on in the relationship is borderline creepy. It gets worse with the fact you can eventually romance her like any other women in this game, especially after the first arc made it a point that teachers dating students is wrong. I guess if you don't outwardly abuse them it's fine I guess! Absolutely horrid.
Those are the main two I wanted to talk about, but they're not the only ones I have problems with. I think Mishima is a fucking tool, the jailkeep twins are annoying, and while Haru is an aesthetic gender apparently her arc has her dealing with her getting sold off and then having little to no screentime afterwards. They're all pretty minor gripes for characters sure, but I wasn't done yet. There's something evil left in this game. A being that haunts my brain stem and I only wish absolute suffering on. Anyone who has played this game talking about, so I'm just going to get to who it is.
Morgana is straight up my most hated characrer in gaming. This whiny shit bitches 24/7 and does nothing productive at all. He contributes to Ann's horrible treatment and has the gall to make everything about him. Never have I wanted to erase a character off my screen more than him, and from what I hear he gets even worse later in the game. He is just generally unlikable and I don't know how else to explain it. The biggest irony of his existance is that his VA has also voiced my favorite character in all of gaming (Nami from League of Legends), so that's like one positive I guess? Except not really because that ties him to League which is a massive L in itself, lmao.
Persona 5 is a game I want to really like. I want to take the gameplay and art syle and apply it to games that aren't pedophelic or hate women, but I can't. I'm still going to finish this game, but probably on PC so I can mod over it and have a more ironic enjoyment. While my experiences are often mixed to positive in the moment, it's one of those games where I sour on it more and more as I distance myself from it. Considering this is the first MegaTen I've ever played, it doesn't set a good precedent, yet I'm still morbidly curious to play other Persona and SMT games when I'm done. It's weird, but for as much as I hate this game, there's something weirdly charming like that. That I can just want it play it and other games in its series even with its humongous fault. I don't see my opinion on this game changing anytime soon, but hopefully the good parts of it shine more when I get my third fucking copy of this game (why) and beat it for real.
This is a tough one to write about.
Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.
Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).
Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.
The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.
Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.
Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.
Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.
I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.
I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.
I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.
Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.
The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.
What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).
It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.
I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.
I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.
Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.
Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).
Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.
The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.
Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.
Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.
Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.
I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.
I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.
I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.
Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.
The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.
What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).
It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.
I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.
I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.
Automaton Lung
2022
Earlier today I was telling a friend about my most Boomer gamer take (which I do not have a lot of). Especially after playing some older 3D games like Deus Ex and 5th/6th gen stuff I get annoyed at how many modern AAA games are so overly detailed and therefore unreadable.
I was thinking that for the first and only hour I gave to The Surge 2 before shelving it that so many environments are so cluttered and overly detailed that not only are they slighlty uncomfortable to look at at times trying to parse them, but they necessitate almost fourth wall breaking guidance elements like big arrows and sharp colour contrasting paint splodges to guide players through. These get made fun of a lot and chalked up to "gaming being dumbed down" and all that but honestly I think most of it is just how modern level design is too complicated to be easily readable.
This semi-related tangent aside, I love how primitive the level design of Automaton Lung is. In the literal sense of the word as they approach the base geometric shapes to make up the level. Despite having very little in the way of tutorialisation or guidance (hell, you can miss 60% of the fucking game by not taking a certain door on the first level) the levels are (for the most part) so clearly readable from the wide open cities to the cramped hallways of the tower levels.
The atmosphere is top notch, added to the music which, whilst repetitive at times just had me hooked for the 3 hours or so I have clocked defeating the final boss with 180/210 stars...er, I mean chips! The movement is jank, indeed the game itself is jank but its so charming and there is enough of a learning curve to the controls (though the game itself is really not very challenging, at least not to get to the end). Its a loveable, clunky piece of shit that I will cherish for years to come.
Its not a flawless game by any means. I mentioned some of the music not having enough variety and honestly the combat is so basic as to be kind of a waste of space and I died like 3 times total, only one of those being from enemy fire and that was against a boss. Maybe it would have been better excised from the game but I'm not sure now that I think about it.
As for the plot, well its very much a no exposition affair. "piece it together" sort of thing like Dark Souls except without the item descriptions. I'm really not clever enough to put together any sort of coherent conclusion to it all, you spawn from a room with 3 futurama -esque glass tubes and one is broken and with particle effects, so Im guessing youre a clone or robot or something. I do think that the environments are interesting enough even if I don't quite understand the story they are trying to tell.
This game is also hilarious at times, from the jank to the ending cutscenes to everything else I streamed this game to friends and we had many laughs with it. I wholeheartedly recommend this game if you are interested in a "middlingly received N64 platformer/run and gun that was hailed as a misunderstood masterpiece 2 decades later". (this last description being coined by BL user Mattt)
EDIT: Having 100%'d the game (well, all achievements, all chips and weapons, if there are any secrets beyond that I will never know) I can say with some sadness that it is one of the rare games I have played where I am left wanting for more. What a gem
I was thinking that for the first and only hour I gave to The Surge 2 before shelving it that so many environments are so cluttered and overly detailed that not only are they slighlty uncomfortable to look at at times trying to parse them, but they necessitate almost fourth wall breaking guidance elements like big arrows and sharp colour contrasting paint splodges to guide players through. These get made fun of a lot and chalked up to "gaming being dumbed down" and all that but honestly I think most of it is just how modern level design is too complicated to be easily readable.
This semi-related tangent aside, I love how primitive the level design of Automaton Lung is. In the literal sense of the word as they approach the base geometric shapes to make up the level. Despite having very little in the way of tutorialisation or guidance (hell, you can miss 60% of the fucking game by not taking a certain door on the first level) the levels are (for the most part) so clearly readable from the wide open cities to the cramped hallways of the tower levels.
The atmosphere is top notch, added to the music which, whilst repetitive at times just had me hooked for the 3 hours or so I have clocked defeating the final boss with 180/210 stars...er, I mean chips! The movement is jank, indeed the game itself is jank but its so charming and there is enough of a learning curve to the controls (though the game itself is really not very challenging, at least not to get to the end). Its a loveable, clunky piece of shit that I will cherish for years to come.
Its not a flawless game by any means. I mentioned some of the music not having enough variety and honestly the combat is so basic as to be kind of a waste of space and I died like 3 times total, only one of those being from enemy fire and that was against a boss. Maybe it would have been better excised from the game but I'm not sure now that I think about it.
As for the plot, well its very much a no exposition affair. "piece it together" sort of thing like Dark Souls except without the item descriptions. I'm really not clever enough to put together any sort of coherent conclusion to it all, you spawn from a room with 3 futurama -esque glass tubes and one is broken and with particle effects, so Im guessing youre a clone or robot or something. I do think that the environments are interesting enough even if I don't quite understand the story they are trying to tell.
This game is also hilarious at times, from the jank to the ending cutscenes to everything else I streamed this game to friends and we had many laughs with it. I wholeheartedly recommend this game if you are interested in a "middlingly received N64 platformer/run and gun that was hailed as a misunderstood masterpiece 2 decades later". (this last description being coined by BL user Mattt)
EDIT: Having 100%'d the game (well, all achievements, all chips and weapons, if there are any secrets beyond that I will never know) I can say with some sadness that it is one of the rare games I have played where I am left wanting for more. What a gem
Gravity Circuit
2023
real gaming i fear
Adios
2021
Feels a bit like a stageplay trapped inside a video game, but it's a damn good stageplay
Resident Evil 4
2023
To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
Wonder Flower gimmicks are cute until they turn repetitious, which they do by the end of World 2. The badges largely make up for a lack of platforming aptitude which, as a seasoned gamester, means I have to play the game wrong to accommodate their use. But I'm not gonna unlearn my Mario skills so I don't remember to use them outside of when they are clearly necessary for side objectives like an over-polished immsim. You mean I should use the Dolphin badge on the levels right after I got it? Wowee Zowee!
Broadly speaking this feels like an attempt to teach the kids that grew up with the Switch what Mario is about. The hypersleek UI elements, mountains of spoken text as a replacement for other markers of design intent, the badges, the Wowee Zowee, the oodles of characters, the gacha elements of the standees, the multiple currencies (and decimalisation of Flower coins to further litter the field with shinies), the little emojis, the lack of points. These additions and subtractions are by no means bad but I won't lie, it feels a little like I'm playing a AAA game from the 2020s. Because I am. It's hard to read Wonder as a creative reinvention and reinvigoration of Mario because I know it took thousands of people to make this. That every decision was subject to board meetings and focus groups. It's the same problem as your New Super games -- the formula must be adhered to. And even if the formula changes, it's still a formula. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I look for at this point in my life.
I'll keep playing it, I'll probably finish it. It's like a Coca-Cola Creation, y'know? You see it on the shelf, you think 'what the hell do '+XP' or 'Starlight' taste like, the first sip is novel and enchanting, before long you're still drinking Coke. If I want true innovation, I'll reach for the local-made can of kombucha flavoured with some berry I've never heard of before. Like Haskap. Uhhh, for the purposes of this analogy I guess the random shit I pick up on Steam and itch.io are the kombucha.
And I gotta say, I'm sorry but I can't hear the Mario Gang say Wowee Zowee without having flashbacks to Game Grumps Kirby Super Star Part 2 where Jon and Arin argued for like a minute straight over whether or not Arin had said Wowee Zowee before. Back then life was so simple. I was so young. Games held so much potential. Eleven years, gone in the blink of an eye. In another life, I'm the Mario Wonder kid, growing up on a Switch. Who could have known things would turn out the way they did, that I'd be the person I am today...
Feels like a rebrand to cover up some controversial past half the time.
WOAH JUST LIKE GAME GRUMPS 😱
Broadly speaking this feels like an attempt to teach the kids that grew up with the Switch what Mario is about. The hypersleek UI elements, mountains of spoken text as a replacement for other markers of design intent, the badges, the Wowee Zowee, the oodles of characters, the gacha elements of the standees, the multiple currencies (and decimalisation of Flower coins to further litter the field with shinies), the little emojis, the lack of points. These additions and subtractions are by no means bad but I won't lie, it feels a little like I'm playing a AAA game from the 2020s. Because I am. It's hard to read Wonder as a creative reinvention and reinvigoration of Mario because I know it took thousands of people to make this. That every decision was subject to board meetings and focus groups. It's the same problem as your New Super games -- the formula must be adhered to. And even if the formula changes, it's still a formula. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I look for at this point in my life.
I'll keep playing it, I'll probably finish it. It's like a Coca-Cola Creation, y'know? You see it on the shelf, you think 'what the hell do '+XP' or 'Starlight' taste like, the first sip is novel and enchanting, before long you're still drinking Coke. If I want true innovation, I'll reach for the local-made can of kombucha flavoured with some berry I've never heard of before. Like Haskap. Uhhh, for the purposes of this analogy I guess the random shit I pick up on Steam and itch.io are the kombucha.
And I gotta say, I'm sorry but I can't hear the Mario Gang say Wowee Zowee without having flashbacks to Game Grumps Kirby Super Star Part 2 where Jon and Arin argued for like a minute straight over whether or not Arin had said Wowee Zowee before. Back then life was so simple. I was so young. Games held so much potential. Eleven years, gone in the blink of an eye. In another life, I'm the Mario Wonder kid, growing up on a Switch. Who could have known things would turn out the way they did, that I'd be the person I am today...
Feels like a rebrand to cover up some controversial past half the time.
WOAH JUST LIKE GAME GRUMPS 😱