Builds off the base of World Championship 2009, which had taken a completely different direction to the ones before. This one is definitely a much lesser jump, but features new areas, new duelists and of course, new cards.
It includes the same box puzzles and stealth sections as before (the stealth sections take place in the exact same hallways as last time), but now there's also a handful of "time reverse" puzzles which are some of the slowest sections in the game. To be honest I'm not a fan of the story stuff in general. Dialogue goes on way too long for a narrative I just don't care about (I've never seen 5D's, which I assume this is a direct re-telling of, but with an OC thrown in, kinda like Spirit Caller). The city of Satellite is just kind of boring with most areas feeling the same, though the brief trip to the Spirit World was a nice change, and I wish we could get more places like that, but I understand it's not the games fault as long as it wants to stick to the anime.
Luckily unless you want to rush through it, the story takes up a relative little amount of the time you play this game, as unlocking packs requires so much grinding of duels that you can go hours without progressing. Which sounds like a bad thing, but for me I enjoy it.
One aspect I've come to appreciate from these games over the Tag Force series is how you can't just duel anyone at any time. Tag Force stories feel anti-climatic because most of them just have duels against people you can find on the overworld and duel infinite amounts of times. These games make major characters like Yusei and Jack inaccessible except for specific story points, until the post-game where you can duel them as much as you want.
I appreciate that the game made DP grinding a little easier too. Slightly buffed numbers to certain bonuses, and a "bonus bonus" which continuously goes up the more bonuses you unlock. This gives a purpose to all those bonuses that you can get for summoning hard-to-summon monsters, as in the past it is never worth trying to summon Gate Guardian for an extra 100 points, but now do it once and not only do you get those 100 points, you also get an extra point for every duel going forward. Still not worth it? Maybe, but the more of these you do the more it adds up, and if you plan to grind a lot, it makes it worth it in the end.
And speaking of grinding, you can get speed spells from the expanded duel runner side game. While buying them from a pack is an option, doing these short time trials can net you up to 3 speed spells per ~1 minute run, plus some DP for your trouble. Unfortunately buying actual bike parts still costs DP no matter what.
While I do think this game is better than the last, and how couldn't it be when it's basically just that game but a little more, it doesn't fix many of the issues I had, and in some cases makes them worse. Performance in duels is still bad, especially when the field starts getting full and the AI takes a long time to do anything. This is exacerbated in tag duels where you need to wait through 3 AI turns to get to a single one of yours.
Card distribution is still so freaking bad. Archtypes are spread out across so many packs, all of which can only be gotten at different points in the story, and many can only be unlocked post-game. It's near impossible to build actual decks beyond just strong staples for most of the playtime.
I still think Turbo duels are the dumbest most half-baked idea. I already complained about them in my last review so no point doing it here.
The lack of ability to unlock anyone from past series sucks. And I can't remember if it was the case for the last game, but even your tag partner choices are heavily limited in this one. At least in 2008 I know you could get absolutely any duelist as a tag partner by dueling them 10 times.
I'll be real, while I think it's still fun, I don't care for having a story in this type of game. I loved 2008's world concept where you unlocked different areas and fought against different opponents, many of which had different gimmicks. And where beating challenges would unlock anime characters in World Championship mode.
It includes the same box puzzles and stealth sections as before (the stealth sections take place in the exact same hallways as last time), but now there's also a handful of "time reverse" puzzles which are some of the slowest sections in the game. To be honest I'm not a fan of the story stuff in general. Dialogue goes on way too long for a narrative I just don't care about (I've never seen 5D's, which I assume this is a direct re-telling of, but with an OC thrown in, kinda like Spirit Caller). The city of Satellite is just kind of boring with most areas feeling the same, though the brief trip to the Spirit World was a nice change, and I wish we could get more places like that, but I understand it's not the games fault as long as it wants to stick to the anime.
Luckily unless you want to rush through it, the story takes up a relative little amount of the time you play this game, as unlocking packs requires so much grinding of duels that you can go hours without progressing. Which sounds like a bad thing, but for me I enjoy it.
One aspect I've come to appreciate from these games over the Tag Force series is how you can't just duel anyone at any time. Tag Force stories feel anti-climatic because most of them just have duels against people you can find on the overworld and duel infinite amounts of times. These games make major characters like Yusei and Jack inaccessible except for specific story points, until the post-game where you can duel them as much as you want.
I appreciate that the game made DP grinding a little easier too. Slightly buffed numbers to certain bonuses, and a "bonus bonus" which continuously goes up the more bonuses you unlock. This gives a purpose to all those bonuses that you can get for summoning hard-to-summon monsters, as in the past it is never worth trying to summon Gate Guardian for an extra 100 points, but now do it once and not only do you get those 100 points, you also get an extra point for every duel going forward. Still not worth it? Maybe, but the more of these you do the more it adds up, and if you plan to grind a lot, it makes it worth it in the end.
And speaking of grinding, you can get speed spells from the expanded duel runner side game. While buying them from a pack is an option, doing these short time trials can net you up to 3 speed spells per ~1 minute run, plus some DP for your trouble. Unfortunately buying actual bike parts still costs DP no matter what.
While I do think this game is better than the last, and how couldn't it be when it's basically just that game but a little more, it doesn't fix many of the issues I had, and in some cases makes them worse. Performance in duels is still bad, especially when the field starts getting full and the AI takes a long time to do anything. This is exacerbated in tag duels where you need to wait through 3 AI turns to get to a single one of yours.
Card distribution is still so freaking bad. Archtypes are spread out across so many packs, all of which can only be gotten at different points in the story, and many can only be unlocked post-game. It's near impossible to build actual decks beyond just strong staples for most of the playtime.
I still think Turbo duels are the dumbest most half-baked idea. I already complained about them in my last review so no point doing it here.
The lack of ability to unlock anyone from past series sucks. And I can't remember if it was the case for the last game, but even your tag partner choices are heavily limited in this one. At least in 2008 I know you could get absolutely any duelist as a tag partner by dueling them 10 times.
I'll be real, while I think it's still fun, I don't care for having a story in this type of game. I loved 2008's world concept where you unlocked different areas and fought against different opponents, many of which had different gimmicks. And where beating challenges would unlock anime characters in World Championship mode.
1999
The exploration and world design in this game is fantastic. They really open up almost everything for you straight away to do in any order you want. There's so many fun things to discover, and getting a new Digimon to your town is always exciting to find out what they'll add, and how it will make things easier for you (and then disappointing when they do nothing but stand there).
This game really does feel like those tamogachi games brought into a fully fledged 3D world. With all the pros of raising a little guy to become powerful, to the cons of having to find a place for it to shit every 5 minutes.
The whole dying and rebirth system is a pain in the ass. Mostly because of the fact every new Digimon will require a lot of repetitive training in the gym. It sucks so much to lose an ultimate level Digimon and then be forced to spend hours getting a new one, because to get back to the area you were just clearing you're going to need your new Digimon to be at least as strong as you already were, if not stronger. The game does very little to mitigate this grind - the new Digimon will get a small stat boost depending on how much your previous one had, but it's so minor that it's really just saving a few training sessions. You can also upgrade the gym to get bigger boosts per session, but the 2 Digimon you can recruit to do this are literally right next to each other at the end of a pretty long section of the story (and that's IF you know where you need to go to get them asap). I don't understand why they couldn't spread them out a bit...
I guess you can't really not have it though since it's sort of baked into Digimon's core design. Still annoying.
While a guide is heavily recommended for the game imo. You probably could get by with just exploring constantly, it'd just take a lot longer. I know as a kid I had no idea what I was doing in the game, and yet there were still places and moments in this replay that I recognised and thought to myself there's no way kid-me would have been able to work all this out. I guess I just brute forced my way through it until I found something that did something.
The requirements for Digivolutions however are a bit of a cluster mess. While players could easily get by either just going with what the game gives them, or trial and error, through stat-requirements, the fact weight and care mistakes matter a lot is something I feel few people would intuitively work out. Weight because many heavy Digimon require massively force feeding the prior form to meet those requirements, and care mistakes because not all Digimon require <x amount made, but some have a minimum amount needed. Who would ever guess that not feeding your Digimon when it's hungry and not letting it sleep could lead to some actually good evolutions? And yet supposedly these things shorten a Digimon's lifespan, so to get certain Digimon you have to shorten their life? That's kinda messed up.
I love a lot of this game. It mostly just gets really frustrating with how often you essentially have to reset the whole process over and over, going through the same slow boring gym training and having very little to show for it when that Digimon dies.
This game really does feel like those tamogachi games brought into a fully fledged 3D world. With all the pros of raising a little guy to become powerful, to the cons of having to find a place for it to shit every 5 minutes.
The whole dying and rebirth system is a pain in the ass. Mostly because of the fact every new Digimon will require a lot of repetitive training in the gym. It sucks so much to lose an ultimate level Digimon and then be forced to spend hours getting a new one, because to get back to the area you were just clearing you're going to need your new Digimon to be at least as strong as you already were, if not stronger. The game does very little to mitigate this grind - the new Digimon will get a small stat boost depending on how much your previous one had, but it's so minor that it's really just saving a few training sessions. You can also upgrade the gym to get bigger boosts per session, but the 2 Digimon you can recruit to do this are literally right next to each other at the end of a pretty long section of the story (and that's IF you know where you need to go to get them asap). I don't understand why they couldn't spread them out a bit...
I guess you can't really not have it though since it's sort of baked into Digimon's core design. Still annoying.
While a guide is heavily recommended for the game imo. You probably could get by with just exploring constantly, it'd just take a lot longer. I know as a kid I had no idea what I was doing in the game, and yet there were still places and moments in this replay that I recognised and thought to myself there's no way kid-me would have been able to work all this out. I guess I just brute forced my way through it until I found something that did something.
The requirements for Digivolutions however are a bit of a cluster mess. While players could easily get by either just going with what the game gives them, or trial and error, through stat-requirements, the fact weight and care mistakes matter a lot is something I feel few people would intuitively work out. Weight because many heavy Digimon require massively force feeding the prior form to meet those requirements, and care mistakes because not all Digimon require <x amount made, but some have a minimum amount needed. Who would ever guess that not feeding your Digimon when it's hungry and not letting it sleep could lead to some actually good evolutions? And yet supposedly these things shorten a Digimon's lifespan, so to get certain Digimon you have to shorten their life? That's kinda messed up.
I love a lot of this game. It mostly just gets really frustrating with how often you essentially have to reset the whole process over and over, going through the same slow boring gym training and having very little to show for it when that Digimon dies.
This review contains spoilers
I bet they really regret using the reunion subtitle on the Crisis Core remake now.
The good thing about Rebirth compared to Remake is that the open world and much more varied locations allow a lot more chances to pad out a relatively small portion of the game without feeling totally forced. There's still some moments that seem to exist just to make the game longer, but I wouldn't say there's things as bad as that one chapter in Remake where you fall to the bottom of the lab just so you have to spend an hour climbing back up.
Certain actions like climbing up cliffs feels very slow and clunky though. Having to move crates is slow. And the chapter where you have to pick up and throw boxes as Cait Sith is agonizing. Then there's forced walking sections and having to hold down R2 and L2 to make small movements. These are all relatively few compared to the size of the game, but the fact they still exist is quite annoying. Luckily open world areas allow for large portions with mostly uninterrupted gameplay if you choose to do them (except for Chadley talking in your ear every 5 minutes).
With them no longer needing to masquerade the game as a faithful remake there's also a lot of changes. The story beats are the same, but many parts are basically fully rewritten. I don't really get this because wasn't the idea that only Sephiroth was aware of the "original" timeline and thus it was only his changes that made Remake different? Now it feels like ever character is taken in massively different directions from the original game with no explanation. I don't really care that they did it, I just don't understand the whole concept of this timeline stuff and the whispers.
I do think they did a fantastic job at making all the areas feel distinct and have their own personality, especially compared to the original game. But the way they're all siphoned off from each other definitely makes it feel more like large levels than a connected world. It's especially bad in this regards in the way nothing you unlock later has any use in earlier regions. You can do 100% of a region on the first visit (except for those 2 intel's in Corel which for some reason are unlocked in the late game). Every region has a unique Chocobo which have their own abilities, but you can't take them out of that region and thus can't use Nibel's Chocobo with its power to basically fly above water and use it to find cool collectibles in earlier regions. Even the grappling hook which is a traversal item you unlock mid-game is used almost exclusively in that region, with maybe 1 or 2 uses afterwards.
So I do like what they did with the world, I just think they could have made it feel a little better to make it feel less like a one and done checklist and more like you get the items and methods needed to fully explore over the course of a game.
People complain about the vast amounts of mini-games, but I don't mind them. Only a few of them truly sucked imo, and most of the time the worst parts of them are completely optional. Some of the games I even liked and wish they had more chances. I'd take Fort Condor (which has actually been simplified from its Intermission version!) or Gears and Gambit over Queensblood as the main minigame.
Chocobo racing is fittingly more like the Chocobo GP game that came out a few years ago.
Keeping Cid and Vincent non-playable hurt the game a bit. I mentioned in Remake that I loved how every character had their own distinct playstyle, so I was excited to try more. In this game we only really get Red XIII (who was a non-controllable fighter in Remake already) and Cait Sith. Yuffie was spoiled in the Remake DLC. They could have even added a new party member or two with all the chances they made, but they didn't do that... outside of 2 very brief exceptions. Could have let us play as Cissnei if they're gonna add her to the plot anyway.
There's too much about this game to really talk about off the top of my head, but I don't think it holds a candle to the original game except obviously in graphics and presentation (which are fantastic). While I think it did much better than Remake in regards to not wasting the players time, there's definitely still purposefully slow stuff mechanics.
The good thing about Rebirth compared to Remake is that the open world and much more varied locations allow a lot more chances to pad out a relatively small portion of the game without feeling totally forced. There's still some moments that seem to exist just to make the game longer, but I wouldn't say there's things as bad as that one chapter in Remake where you fall to the bottom of the lab just so you have to spend an hour climbing back up.
Certain actions like climbing up cliffs feels very slow and clunky though. Having to move crates is slow. And the chapter where you have to pick up and throw boxes as Cait Sith is agonizing. Then there's forced walking sections and having to hold down R2 and L2 to make small movements. These are all relatively few compared to the size of the game, but the fact they still exist is quite annoying. Luckily open world areas allow for large portions with mostly uninterrupted gameplay if you choose to do them (except for Chadley talking in your ear every 5 minutes).
With them no longer needing to masquerade the game as a faithful remake there's also a lot of changes. The story beats are the same, but many parts are basically fully rewritten. I don't really get this because wasn't the idea that only Sephiroth was aware of the "original" timeline and thus it was only his changes that made Remake different? Now it feels like ever character is taken in massively different directions from the original game with no explanation. I don't really care that they did it, I just don't understand the whole concept of this timeline stuff and the whispers.
I do think they did a fantastic job at making all the areas feel distinct and have their own personality, especially compared to the original game. But the way they're all siphoned off from each other definitely makes it feel more like large levels than a connected world. It's especially bad in this regards in the way nothing you unlock later has any use in earlier regions. You can do 100% of a region on the first visit (except for those 2 intel's in Corel which for some reason are unlocked in the late game). Every region has a unique Chocobo which have their own abilities, but you can't take them out of that region and thus can't use Nibel's Chocobo with its power to basically fly above water and use it to find cool collectibles in earlier regions. Even the grappling hook which is a traversal item you unlock mid-game is used almost exclusively in that region, with maybe 1 or 2 uses afterwards.
So I do like what they did with the world, I just think they could have made it feel a little better to make it feel less like a one and done checklist and more like you get the items and methods needed to fully explore over the course of a game.
People complain about the vast amounts of mini-games, but I don't mind them. Only a few of them truly sucked imo, and most of the time the worst parts of them are completely optional. Some of the games I even liked and wish they had more chances. I'd take Fort Condor (which has actually been simplified from its Intermission version!) or Gears and Gambit over Queensblood as the main minigame.
Chocobo racing is fittingly more like the Chocobo GP game that came out a few years ago.
Keeping Cid and Vincent non-playable hurt the game a bit. I mentioned in Remake that I loved how every character had their own distinct playstyle, so I was excited to try more. In this game we only really get Red XIII (who was a non-controllable fighter in Remake already) and Cait Sith. Yuffie was spoiled in the Remake DLC. They could have even added a new party member or two with all the chances they made, but they didn't do that... outside of 2 very brief exceptions. Could have let us play as Cissnei if they're gonna add her to the plot anyway.
There's too much about this game to really talk about off the top of my head, but I don't think it holds a candle to the original game except obviously in graphics and presentation (which are fantastic). While I think it did much better than Remake in regards to not wasting the players time, there's definitely still purposefully slow stuff mechanics.
Definitely starting to realise how many puzzles in these games are just the exact same thing with slightly different wording. Still fun and charming. The cutscenes still impress me for being on the DS.
1994
It's OK. Nothing special. Did get a bit better once I realised you can instantly charge by double tapping a direction instead of having to run far enough.
The stages go through a lot of aesthetic variation, many of which are pretty cool, if a bit seizure-inducing. The actual layouts feel somewhat randomly generated at times.
The stages, despite having absolutely nothing to do with them, are all set in countries, such as Japan, USA, Thailand, Japan again and everyone's favourite country, Alaska.
I doubt the devs would find much success after this game unfortunately.
The stages go through a lot of aesthetic variation, many of which are pretty cool, if a bit seizure-inducing. The actual layouts feel somewhat randomly generated at times.
The stages, despite having absolutely nothing to do with them, are all set in countries, such as Japan, USA, Thailand, Japan again and everyone's favourite country, Alaska.
I doubt the devs would find much success after this game unfortunately.
This review contains spoilers
Upon booting up the game for the first time in over a year the game managed to shock me again with its terrible performance. Has it gotten even worse, or did I just forget about it?
Maybe not the DLC's fault since it's a base game problem, but surely you should fix your base game before doing DLC in the first place.
As far as The Teal Mask's unique aspects go, it's fairly fun, pretty much as "more of the same game" as you could expect. It doesn't really invite any new features beyond one mini-game. So if you liked the base game and wanted more, here it is. If you didn't like the base game and wanted improvements, well here it isn't.
One thing I think Pokémon DLC will always struggle with is a set difficulty. The Pokémon games are always known for being easy, but at least the main games are attempting to scale with you. DLC is just like "Well the player has finished the story but now they could be anywhere from level 50 to level 100" and thus it is impossible to make a one size fits all challenge. If you do the DLC before finishing the main game then this one does have a more appropriate level curve, albeit one that seems very accelerated. The DLC without story completion starts at level 12 and ends at level 38, whereas post-game it starts at around level 60 and ends at 76. I can't speak for how well the non-post game level curve works (though it would make the main game an absolute joke if you did this first), but 60-76 is just so random. I think if you went straight from the end game to this, it'd be about to scale, but in the year it took the DLC to come out many players had grinded up a lot more. Either you purposefully reset your team to an appropriate level, losing the mons you spent a year connecting with, or you just steamroll the thing. It's a huge problem Pokémon will always have with this kind of DLC method.
The story itself is Pokémon levels of fine. You can get attached to the new legendary, which may make catching and using it on your team that much more meaningful than most times legendary's are caught.
I do love that Ursaluna gets its own little story AND a completely unique form. We need way more non-legendary Pokémon getting special versions like this.
I also like how Ogerpon's battle worked, acting as more of a boss rush with all 4 of its masks in a row.
Unfortunately they don't do much to address my issue of the world just being kind of bland. 90% of Kitakami present is just empty fields and mountains. There's one main cave, and a bunch more smaller pocket-sized caves. They're full of a bunch of useless items scattered all over, and wild Pokémon. Exploring them isn't not fun exactly, but it also doesn't feel very rewarding or exciting. If you're the kind who likes to catch everything then this dex adds about 100 new ones to do that, so each new "area" in the game is mostly just a chance to find and catch new stuff, otherwise what else are you gonna do? Pick up all the potions and Pokéballs?
At least areas now have unique names instead of "West Province (Area four)".
I'm not asking for like an entire substory and a minigame for every area, I just like the parts that stand out more. Even the apple field here is one of the "good" ones to me, because it makes the wild encounters like Ekans slinking beneath the apple trees feel just a little more "if Pokémon existed in a human world" and less "here's an empty desert area with rocks everywhere, there's ground Pokémon all over". I guess in many ways that also comes down to the fact Pokémon barely do anything when roaming the field though - the idea of Ekans beneath trees (some of which have Applin's in) isn't really expanded upon in the game itself, it's more the interactions it implies.
Basically pretty much on par with the main game for the amount of content relative to the price point.
Maybe not the DLC's fault since it's a base game problem, but surely you should fix your base game before doing DLC in the first place.
As far as The Teal Mask's unique aspects go, it's fairly fun, pretty much as "more of the same game" as you could expect. It doesn't really invite any new features beyond one mini-game. So if you liked the base game and wanted more, here it is. If you didn't like the base game and wanted improvements, well here it isn't.
One thing I think Pokémon DLC will always struggle with is a set difficulty. The Pokémon games are always known for being easy, but at least the main games are attempting to scale with you. DLC is just like "Well the player has finished the story but now they could be anywhere from level 50 to level 100" and thus it is impossible to make a one size fits all challenge. If you do the DLC before finishing the main game then this one does have a more appropriate level curve, albeit one that seems very accelerated. The DLC without story completion starts at level 12 and ends at level 38, whereas post-game it starts at around level 60 and ends at 76. I can't speak for how well the non-post game level curve works (though it would make the main game an absolute joke if you did this first), but 60-76 is just so random. I think if you went straight from the end game to this, it'd be about to scale, but in the year it took the DLC to come out many players had grinded up a lot more. Either you purposefully reset your team to an appropriate level, losing the mons you spent a year connecting with, or you just steamroll the thing. It's a huge problem Pokémon will always have with this kind of DLC method.
The story itself is Pokémon levels of fine. You can get attached to the new legendary, which may make catching and using it on your team that much more meaningful than most times legendary's are caught.
I do love that Ursaluna gets its own little story AND a completely unique form. We need way more non-legendary Pokémon getting special versions like this.
I also like how Ogerpon's battle worked, acting as more of a boss rush with all 4 of its masks in a row.
Unfortunately they don't do much to address my issue of the world just being kind of bland. 90% of Kitakami present is just empty fields and mountains. There's one main cave, and a bunch more smaller pocket-sized caves. They're full of a bunch of useless items scattered all over, and wild Pokémon. Exploring them isn't not fun exactly, but it also doesn't feel very rewarding or exciting. If you're the kind who likes to catch everything then this dex adds about 100 new ones to do that, so each new "area" in the game is mostly just a chance to find and catch new stuff, otherwise what else are you gonna do? Pick up all the potions and Pokéballs?
At least areas now have unique names instead of "West Province (Area four)".
I'm not asking for like an entire substory and a minigame for every area, I just like the parts that stand out more. Even the apple field here is one of the "good" ones to me, because it makes the wild encounters like Ekans slinking beneath the apple trees feel just a little more "if Pokémon existed in a human world" and less "here's an empty desert area with rocks everywhere, there's ground Pokémon all over". I guess in many ways that also comes down to the fact Pokémon barely do anything when roaming the field though - the idea of Ekans beneath trees (some of which have Applin's in) isn't really expanded upon in the game itself, it's more the interactions it implies.
Basically pretty much on par with the main game for the amount of content relative to the price point.
2021
A solid entry into a solid series. The already incredible job system is made even better by adding things like a second class speciality at level 12, and weapons that grant all passives for a job (albeit unlocked very late). The changes to mages is a little weird though, no longer are spells set into a "pack" where you gain access to more of those packs when you level up, but each individual spell takes up a level-up slot. This effectively makes Black Mage much shallower than before, but it also means the Red Mage gets to stand completely on its own and not just a Black Mage and White Mage combo.
The game does unfortunately drop some features that were included in Bravely Second, or even stuff that's been here from the start. The ability to set job load outs is gone, which is a huge pain in the ass because these games are made so that you want different set-ups for grinding, farming and bosses. Now if you don't want to fight bosses with a weak farming set, or don't want to waste JP by using your maxed job set, you have to constantly swap all your equipment and abilities back and forth before and after every boss. Luckily bosses are pretty well telegraphed, but some come out of nowhere, and sometimes you'll see a save point in a dungeon and assume a boss is coming, only for it to be a half way point.
They also removed dungeon maps completely for some reason. That just makes no sense when the overworld still has one.
Some changes I do like - enemies are no longer random encounters, and each one shows up on the overworld. You now get chain battles by setting off an enemy when multiple are nearby, or when using special lure items.
Other changes I'm neutral one. Special moves have been simplified greatly, with each class having their own specific one which is charged by using that classes speciality X amount of times.
A lot of this game is similar to the last 2. You still get a colourful cast of characters for each asterisk, but the main heroes, and the final villains do feel like the ones from the first game copy and pasted in some ways.
While the graphics still kind of keep the simplified almost chibi look for characters, monsters look a lot better with the upgrade to Switch. Cities likewise still look beautiful, but admittedly they ironically suffer from not being on 3DS now as it's no longer "Wow it looks so good for the hardware!"
Music is still great with the same team behind it.
Overall this game is similar in quality to the ones before it, which is to say very good. It improves some aspects like the job system a lot. But I think straight up removing features, including those that were there from the start, made it just a tiny step down, especially as the upgrade in hardware set a higher standard.
The game does unfortunately drop some features that were included in Bravely Second, or even stuff that's been here from the start. The ability to set job load outs is gone, which is a huge pain in the ass because these games are made so that you want different set-ups for grinding, farming and bosses. Now if you don't want to fight bosses with a weak farming set, or don't want to waste JP by using your maxed job set, you have to constantly swap all your equipment and abilities back and forth before and after every boss. Luckily bosses are pretty well telegraphed, but some come out of nowhere, and sometimes you'll see a save point in a dungeon and assume a boss is coming, only for it to be a half way point.
They also removed dungeon maps completely for some reason. That just makes no sense when the overworld still has one.
Some changes I do like - enemies are no longer random encounters, and each one shows up on the overworld. You now get chain battles by setting off an enemy when multiple are nearby, or when using special lure items.
Other changes I'm neutral one. Special moves have been simplified greatly, with each class having their own specific one which is charged by using that classes speciality X amount of times.
A lot of this game is similar to the last 2. You still get a colourful cast of characters for each asterisk, but the main heroes, and the final villains do feel like the ones from the first game copy and pasted in some ways.
While the graphics still kind of keep the simplified almost chibi look for characters, monsters look a lot better with the upgrade to Switch. Cities likewise still look beautiful, but admittedly they ironically suffer from not being on 3DS now as it's no longer "Wow it looks so good for the hardware!"
Music is still great with the same team behind it.
Overall this game is similar in quality to the ones before it, which is to say very good. It improves some aspects like the job system a lot. But I think straight up removing features, including those that were there from the start, made it just a tiny step down, especially as the upgrade in hardware set a higher standard.
The ability to port Tenkaichi onto PSP in such a smooth, playable way with little compensation in gameplay beyond the loss of a few buttons is amazing. Making the gimmick being having 4 fighters on screen at once was just them being cocky at that point lol.
You do feel the cut of characters and stages though. Having said that, the character roster is still solid with many inclusions you'd assume they'd cut like Chaozu or Cui. Stages are hit a lot harder, missing many staples like the Room of Spirit and Time.
Story mode, despite the bland presentation, is really comprehensive. It tackles almost every fight from the original manga from the Saiyan Saga to the Boo saga, something even many older console games didn't (I remember Budokai 3 cut all of the Ginyu Force but Recoome and Ginyu, and skipped Dr Gero and Android 19).
It makes a lot of weird decisions though starting in the Cell saga. While some fights are kind of combined before then to make use of the tag team gimmick (which isn't locked in as the game does allow 1v1 or even 2v1), like you'll fight Nappa and Saibamen together with Piccolo and any other fighter of your choice from that section, including Yamcha who died before Nappa entered the battle. But once you enter the Cell saga you get stuff like fighting Dr Gero and Android 19 together...in the city where they appeared instead of the random wasteland where the fight took place. And then after Goku fights both the androids, Vegeta comes in to fight 19 as he does in the original...but instead of Dr Gero, 19 is now teamed up with a Cell Jr? What the fuck? Piccolo gets a teammate to fight Android 17 (any of the 3 humans who were explicitly told to NOT join the fight), and yet 17 doesn't get 18 to help him. Buff Trunks is just a straight up missing character, so his fight with Perfect Cell is regular Super Saiyan Trunks, despite all the dialogue still making references to his slow speed from his power form. And Gohan fights the Cell Jrs with Android 16 - the one character there who NEVER fought a Cell Jr lol.
The Boo saga suffers the most from character and stage losses. There's no world tournament stage, so right off the bat Goten vs Trunks takes place on a random island. No Room of Spirit and Time so Gotenks vs Boo is also down on Earth. Gohan vs Dabura takes place on the Supreme Kai planet for some reason (the location they actually fight is rarely ever in games, but they tend to use the rocky areas to best match it. This game seems to use the Kaioshin planet for any "alien" world that isn't Namek). Base Gotenks and Bootenks are straight up missing. It's weird that they made sure every fight in the first 2 arcs could be replicated faithfully, but then just kind of gave up near the end. Then they go overboard and make 3 separate Goku and Vegeta vs Kid Boo fights in a row (broken up by a single Fat Boo vs Kid Boo fight), including turning the freaking Spirit Bomb moment into a full fight.
Story mode itself has you flying around a map like Tenkaichi 2, with a bunch of weak enemies scattered about (Saibamen, Cell Jrs, Freeza Soldiers). You occasionally get a mission if you visit the 3 towns you can interact with. These are all picked from the same pool of about 5, so be prepared to have to do shit like "clear every enemy on the map" over and over - and the game will not tell you how many are left or where they are, so you'll be looking for that last one for 10+ minutes. The game is spread into levels that tackle about 1-4 fights each, and each level has its own missions that are basically just doing the little side missions in the level itself. However for stages where you can pick between multiple characters (such as the Nappa fight) there are missions to do this level with ALL the choices. This can lead you to doing the same level 5 times, and it's not even just the relevant fight you need to do. Every time you beat Nappa with Yamcha, then Tien, then Chaozu, you also have to do the follow up Goku vs Nappa fight. These missions are optional of course, but it's annoying that they made this "content" at all (and there are unlocks between competing X amount of missions).
What-ifs return here, but instead of their own dedicated levels they add a new character option in the old ones. For example, select the first level after beating the story and you get the choice to play as Bardock instead of Goku, providing a little story where Bardock arrives before Raditz and bonds with Gohan, and then fights Raditz himself. Most of these are generally just going through the same fights as the level normally would, but with a new character.
Outside of story mode we don't have the series staple Tournament mode. We do get the Battle 100 mode from Tenkaichi 3 at least - 100 fights against themed teams. Of course Tenkaichi 3 had way more characters and could make teams of 5, while this game is limited to teams of 2, so as you can imagine there's a lot of forced pair-ups ("Long white hair" for Jeice and Dr Gero). They do at least add little challenges to each fight to earn extra points. Since any character can be used it does limit the kinds of tasks they can give the player, but it's still a way to try and change up your play style a bit for each fight and make it less monotonous.
This mode also highlights the issue with the tag team format. The best case scenario in this game is when you fight one AI and your partner fights the other, essentially turning the game into two 1v1's, with only the occasional crossing paths. A 2v1 in your favour is a stomp, and a 2v1 in your opponents favour is annoying at lower levels, and downright impossible at higher levels. The harder challenges in Battle 100 will have both opponents purposefully target you over your partner, and there are NO good options for fighting 2 opponents at once. The game flat-out failed to actually make mechanics to support its main gimmick. And your partner won't help you while you're being ganged up on - I genuinely have no idea what they're doing as the information given to you is so limited, just a little radar with dots representing the characters. I occasionally saw my partner just kind of flying around in the background. Sometimes he'd just be standing still mere feet away while both opponents abused me from all sides. Literally all they're good for in the high level fights is hoping one of the enemies will use them as a punching bag so you can focus on your own opponent. That will mean your punching bag partner will use up your senzu bean though, preventing you from getting your free revive.
You and your special needs partner also share a union stock (I can't remember what it was called in older games, but it's the stuff you spend to use buffs, or things like Solar Flare). So maybe you want to use a technique, or go into burst mode, but nope, your teammate keeps eating the stock points.
Survival mode is another mode, which is what it sounds like. Weirdly, I noticed that at the start of this mode when enemies are dumb and weak, my teammate was actually...good? They were very aggressive and able to dodge ultimates. Then as the enemies got harder, he got more sluggish and dumber. The game literally makes your teammate stupid to increase difficulty. That's pretty much the opposite of how it should work. When enemies are simple I can take on 2 of them at once and don't need a teammate. When they're challenging it becomes impossible to fight them alone, so I need at least a semi-competent teammate who can keep one of them away from me for a bit.
Going back to the limited information on screen thing, there's not much you get to see about your enemies in the game. Their health bars only appear over their heads rather than permanently on screen (which makes it impossible to know how your partner is doing vs their opponent), and you can't even see their ki or union stock.
As impressive as this game is to run on the PSP, it is basically just a watered down version of the console games, with a new gimmick that straight up wouldn't work on those better games without huge tweaks, let alone a more limited version. There's no shortage of content, even if a lot of 100%'ing the story mode is straight up padding. Extra modes provide the challenge, but for the wrong reasons. I know it's supposed to be "Tenkaichi on the go", but I didn't play it like that, so I guess I'm missing the point.
You do feel the cut of characters and stages though. Having said that, the character roster is still solid with many inclusions you'd assume they'd cut like Chaozu or Cui. Stages are hit a lot harder, missing many staples like the Room of Spirit and Time.
Story mode, despite the bland presentation, is really comprehensive. It tackles almost every fight from the original manga from the Saiyan Saga to the Boo saga, something even many older console games didn't (I remember Budokai 3 cut all of the Ginyu Force but Recoome and Ginyu, and skipped Dr Gero and Android 19).
It makes a lot of weird decisions though starting in the Cell saga. While some fights are kind of combined before then to make use of the tag team gimmick (which isn't locked in as the game does allow 1v1 or even 2v1), like you'll fight Nappa and Saibamen together with Piccolo and any other fighter of your choice from that section, including Yamcha who died before Nappa entered the battle. But once you enter the Cell saga you get stuff like fighting Dr Gero and Android 19 together...in the city where they appeared instead of the random wasteland where the fight took place. And then after Goku fights both the androids, Vegeta comes in to fight 19 as he does in the original...but instead of Dr Gero, 19 is now teamed up with a Cell Jr? What the fuck? Piccolo gets a teammate to fight Android 17 (any of the 3 humans who were explicitly told to NOT join the fight), and yet 17 doesn't get 18 to help him. Buff Trunks is just a straight up missing character, so his fight with Perfect Cell is regular Super Saiyan Trunks, despite all the dialogue still making references to his slow speed from his power form. And Gohan fights the Cell Jrs with Android 16 - the one character there who NEVER fought a Cell Jr lol.
The Boo saga suffers the most from character and stage losses. There's no world tournament stage, so right off the bat Goten vs Trunks takes place on a random island. No Room of Spirit and Time so Gotenks vs Boo is also down on Earth. Gohan vs Dabura takes place on the Supreme Kai planet for some reason (the location they actually fight is rarely ever in games, but they tend to use the rocky areas to best match it. This game seems to use the Kaioshin planet for any "alien" world that isn't Namek). Base Gotenks and Bootenks are straight up missing. It's weird that they made sure every fight in the first 2 arcs could be replicated faithfully, but then just kind of gave up near the end. Then they go overboard and make 3 separate Goku and Vegeta vs Kid Boo fights in a row (broken up by a single Fat Boo vs Kid Boo fight), including turning the freaking Spirit Bomb moment into a full fight.
Story mode itself has you flying around a map like Tenkaichi 2, with a bunch of weak enemies scattered about (Saibamen, Cell Jrs, Freeza Soldiers). You occasionally get a mission if you visit the 3 towns you can interact with. These are all picked from the same pool of about 5, so be prepared to have to do shit like "clear every enemy on the map" over and over - and the game will not tell you how many are left or where they are, so you'll be looking for that last one for 10+ minutes. The game is spread into levels that tackle about 1-4 fights each, and each level has its own missions that are basically just doing the little side missions in the level itself. However for stages where you can pick between multiple characters (such as the Nappa fight) there are missions to do this level with ALL the choices. This can lead you to doing the same level 5 times, and it's not even just the relevant fight you need to do. Every time you beat Nappa with Yamcha, then Tien, then Chaozu, you also have to do the follow up Goku vs Nappa fight. These missions are optional of course, but it's annoying that they made this "content" at all (and there are unlocks between competing X amount of missions).
What-ifs return here, but instead of their own dedicated levels they add a new character option in the old ones. For example, select the first level after beating the story and you get the choice to play as Bardock instead of Goku, providing a little story where Bardock arrives before Raditz and bonds with Gohan, and then fights Raditz himself. Most of these are generally just going through the same fights as the level normally would, but with a new character.
Outside of story mode we don't have the series staple Tournament mode. We do get the Battle 100 mode from Tenkaichi 3 at least - 100 fights against themed teams. Of course Tenkaichi 3 had way more characters and could make teams of 5, while this game is limited to teams of 2, so as you can imagine there's a lot of forced pair-ups ("Long white hair" for Jeice and Dr Gero). They do at least add little challenges to each fight to earn extra points. Since any character can be used it does limit the kinds of tasks they can give the player, but it's still a way to try and change up your play style a bit for each fight and make it less monotonous.
This mode also highlights the issue with the tag team format. The best case scenario in this game is when you fight one AI and your partner fights the other, essentially turning the game into two 1v1's, with only the occasional crossing paths. A 2v1 in your favour is a stomp, and a 2v1 in your opponents favour is annoying at lower levels, and downright impossible at higher levels. The harder challenges in Battle 100 will have both opponents purposefully target you over your partner, and there are NO good options for fighting 2 opponents at once. The game flat-out failed to actually make mechanics to support its main gimmick. And your partner won't help you while you're being ganged up on - I genuinely have no idea what they're doing as the information given to you is so limited, just a little radar with dots representing the characters. I occasionally saw my partner just kind of flying around in the background. Sometimes he'd just be standing still mere feet away while both opponents abused me from all sides. Literally all they're good for in the high level fights is hoping one of the enemies will use them as a punching bag so you can focus on your own opponent. That will mean your punching bag partner will use up your senzu bean though, preventing you from getting your free revive.
You and your special needs partner also share a union stock (I can't remember what it was called in older games, but it's the stuff you spend to use buffs, or things like Solar Flare). So maybe you want to use a technique, or go into burst mode, but nope, your teammate keeps eating the stock points.
Survival mode is another mode, which is what it sounds like. Weirdly, I noticed that at the start of this mode when enemies are dumb and weak, my teammate was actually...good? They were very aggressive and able to dodge ultimates. Then as the enemies got harder, he got more sluggish and dumber. The game literally makes your teammate stupid to increase difficulty. That's pretty much the opposite of how it should work. When enemies are simple I can take on 2 of them at once and don't need a teammate. When they're challenging it becomes impossible to fight them alone, so I need at least a semi-competent teammate who can keep one of them away from me for a bit.
Going back to the limited information on screen thing, there's not much you get to see about your enemies in the game. Their health bars only appear over their heads rather than permanently on screen (which makes it impossible to know how your partner is doing vs their opponent), and you can't even see their ki or union stock.
As impressive as this game is to run on the PSP, it is basically just a watered down version of the console games, with a new gimmick that straight up wouldn't work on those better games without huge tweaks, let alone a more limited version. There's no shortage of content, even if a lot of 100%'ing the story mode is straight up padding. Extra modes provide the challenge, but for the wrong reasons. I know it's supposed to be "Tenkaichi on the go", but I didn't play it like that, so I guess I'm missing the point.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Stunning visual spectacle. Phenomenal soundtrack. A great story (albeit with some pacing issues) with pretty cool characters. I love how it takes Final Fantasy's classic summons and makes them such a crucial plot point. And though all the lore and different relationships, factions, kingdoms etc can be hard to keep up with, the game does an amazing job at keeping the player up to date by having encyclopedias, a relationship chart and world map that shows the current status of every area at any given point, and you can check these at the various points of the story to see how they evolved. In the middle of a cutscene you can even check information about relevant people, places, items or concepts.
So what's the problem? Well everything I've been praising isn't really a good game. It's more of a great show. The actual gameplay stuff in the game is average at best and horrible at its worst.
Firstly the combat, which is the least offensive part. It's very fluid, fast paced and satisfying. It does fall short in the sense that it's a lot more shallow than it might initially seem. Combined with the fact enemies are massive damage sponges, you just kind of repeat the same 2 or 3 combos over and over and over and over. Never having to think or focus on the fight because you do it so much it's just second nature to input the few different button commands. The only reason you even switch things up is for that little bit of variety, because there's no difference between strategies or techniques, nothing you can do to better defeat one enemy from another, it's just mindlessly mashing away at those same button sequences. When a move comes off cool down you use that to get a bit of extra damage, but the majority of special moves do just that, a bit of damage and you wait for it to cool down again. There's a couple of moves that have a little more thought put in to them, like ones that are made to counter, or ones that require you to hold the button for a little longer and release at the right time for a bit of extra power, which is still so minimal of an interaction it's barely worth mentioning. Almost none of the moves seem to synergise with each other, I can think of maybe one (the Ramuh one that spawns a ball) that directly benefits from specific other moves (in this cases ones that do multiple hits at once, like Bahamut's ultimate move). All others are just a case of "Use this one, then the next one, then the next one".
Weirdly despite summons being a key plot point here, elemental weaknesses and resistances are absent. It's like they purposefully dumbed things down to the point where no choices you make in combat or build matter at all. What's weird about this is that the game makes a point to say Eikons you equip will change your basic energy attack. But why? They all do the same power, there's no elemental matchups, and no Eikon gives status effects (which are also absent in general, mostly. Technically your ice moves can freeze, but not the basic energy one) so what's the point?? Other element stuff outside of an Eikon's moves, like charging up Clive's sword, will always result in his default fire. So why go out of your way to turn my basic blasts "icy" when using Shiva's power if it doesn't change a thing? It's such an obvious choice to make combat more immersive while specifically putting more importance on the Eikon's powers.
The only parts of the combat I can say I actually found good were the chronolith trials. These limit you to one Eikon per trial, going through waves of enemies and doing different actions give you a time bonus. After 3 waves you fight a boss with the extra time you've accumulated. I liked this because it was the only time I ever actually had to think about how and when I used my abilities, or which basic combo to use.
I’m almost certain this game resents being a game rather than a TV show. You can feel the games unwillingness to give the player actual control of a character after a 30 minute cutscene, just to walk down an empty corridor so another cutscene or dialogue can play. When fighting those damage sponge bosses, many times the game gets bored waiting for its turn and tapping its feet, so wrestles the controller away from you to show you how much better they are at this than you. But don’t worry, when boss fights turn in to cutscenes the game will occasionally have a “Press square” or “Mash square” prompt so it can say “See you ARE still playing the game!”. Calling them quick time events would be a bit of an exaggeration because I'm pretty sure you get a good 5 seconds to hit the single button that pops up.
This reaches its peak during one of the battles near the end in which the ENTIRE fight is a cutscene where you get to press square every now and then. The fact they give this battle the usual health bars is almost insulting. It's like those YouTube videos "X vs Y with health bars". If you're gonna be a cutscene just be a damn cutscene, stop trying to pretend to be a game.
The Eikon battles where you turn into Ifrit are the epitome of style over substance. Gameplay is reduced to be even more basic than before with far less things you can actually do, yet they're some of the most impressive-looking action scenes I've seen in a game.
I'm kinda mixed on voice acting. Some of it is good, some of it is fine and some characters just have these dull, monotone voices that feel like the actor is reading the script out loud to themselves for the first time. Not helped by the fact many characters in cutscenes will stand there emotionless, even ones that don't have equally dispassionate voices (this isn't the case for every scene mind you, there's some great ones).
The world is fairly uninteresting to explore. Towns are pretty barebones. They have shops and some side quests, but generally nothing to do that makes any one town unique outside of their roles in the story (which to be fair, does give them a lot of personality by itself). The open world is much larger than it really needs to be. There's these huge open areas but no real reason to explore most of them. You might find tiny amounts of gill or crafting material, but there's very rarely anything of substance hiding in there. Mostly it just seems like they're huge for the sake of letting the devs put side quests and monster hunts into more places than would otherwise feel realistic if everything was as small as it needed to be for the main story.
Dungeons are the opposite. It's literally just corridor, followed by mob fight, followed by corridor, mob fight etc. Sometimes a mini boss. Then you end with the big boss. After the mob fight it can be hard to remember which way to even go because both backwards and forwards look the exact same.
Maybe you'll find an accessory in a dungeon or in the open world though. It won't be exciting unfortunately. Almost every accessory in this game does one of two things: Boosts the power of a single move (not an Eikon, but a specific move for that Eikon) or reduce the cooldown of a specific move...by literal seconds. The funniest one to me is an accessory that reduces the charge time of your basic magic blast to its stronger version by 0.2 seconds. This isn't even a random find in a chest, this is specifically a reward for completing a certain amount of side quests that you only get relatively late in the game. 0.2 seconds!! Like I know it doesn't take that long to charge in the first place, but why in the hell would I want one of my 3 slots taken up by something that reduces the time of a charge by less than 1/4th of a SECOND.
There are a handful of more interesting accessories, like the one that gives you a mini limit break on a perfect dodge. But they're very rare.
Weapons and armour likewise lack anything outside of pure stats. Every one is just power, defence and health. The most basic and bland way to do weapon progression imaginable.
I also want to bitch about the sprinting. In order to sprint you don't press a button, you have to run for a little bit first and then Clive will sprint after a few seconds. This is annoying enough by itself, but it ONLY works in the open world sections. When in towns or dungeons you can only move at the slow pace. This gets beyond annoying when you have to constantly shuffle back and forth in any given place as part of a side quest (you will learn to hate the second hideout with the amount of times you have to 'run' around it).
Speaking of side quests, once again - good in the story sense,; bad in the gameplay sense. Every side quest falls into one of three categories: "There's a monster that needs beating - go beat it", "There's a thing I need - go get it (there's a monster there when you arrive at the destination)", "There's a thing I need to speak to - go get it (you get it without any conflict whatsoever)". Like the fact there's literal sidequests in the game that involve you just going from one character to another to go through dialogue with zero gameplay is astounding. They're less side quests and more side stories.
OK I think I'm done complaining about this. Fantastic as a story experience, horrible as a game despite the good baseline they made with smooth feeling combat that they unfortunately over simplified. There's a reason I started this game in July and only finished it now. I've never had a game that I both wanted to see through to the end, yet dreaded playing so much.
So what's the problem? Well everything I've been praising isn't really a good game. It's more of a great show. The actual gameplay stuff in the game is average at best and horrible at its worst.
Firstly the combat, which is the least offensive part. It's very fluid, fast paced and satisfying. It does fall short in the sense that it's a lot more shallow than it might initially seem. Combined with the fact enemies are massive damage sponges, you just kind of repeat the same 2 or 3 combos over and over and over and over. Never having to think or focus on the fight because you do it so much it's just second nature to input the few different button commands. The only reason you even switch things up is for that little bit of variety, because there's no difference between strategies or techniques, nothing you can do to better defeat one enemy from another, it's just mindlessly mashing away at those same button sequences. When a move comes off cool down you use that to get a bit of extra damage, but the majority of special moves do just that, a bit of damage and you wait for it to cool down again. There's a couple of moves that have a little more thought put in to them, like ones that are made to counter, or ones that require you to hold the button for a little longer and release at the right time for a bit of extra power, which is still so minimal of an interaction it's barely worth mentioning. Almost none of the moves seem to synergise with each other, I can think of maybe one (the Ramuh one that spawns a ball) that directly benefits from specific other moves (in this cases ones that do multiple hits at once, like Bahamut's ultimate move). All others are just a case of "Use this one, then the next one, then the next one".
Weirdly despite summons being a key plot point here, elemental weaknesses and resistances are absent. It's like they purposefully dumbed things down to the point where no choices you make in combat or build matter at all. What's weird about this is that the game makes a point to say Eikons you equip will change your basic energy attack. But why? They all do the same power, there's no elemental matchups, and no Eikon gives status effects (which are also absent in general, mostly. Technically your ice moves can freeze, but not the basic energy one) so what's the point?? Other element stuff outside of an Eikon's moves, like charging up Clive's sword, will always result in his default fire. So why go out of your way to turn my basic blasts "icy" when using Shiva's power if it doesn't change a thing? It's such an obvious choice to make combat more immersive while specifically putting more importance on the Eikon's powers.
The only parts of the combat I can say I actually found good were the chronolith trials. These limit you to one Eikon per trial, going through waves of enemies and doing different actions give you a time bonus. After 3 waves you fight a boss with the extra time you've accumulated. I liked this because it was the only time I ever actually had to think about how and when I used my abilities, or which basic combo to use.
I’m almost certain this game resents being a game rather than a TV show. You can feel the games unwillingness to give the player actual control of a character after a 30 minute cutscene, just to walk down an empty corridor so another cutscene or dialogue can play. When fighting those damage sponge bosses, many times the game gets bored waiting for its turn and tapping its feet, so wrestles the controller away from you to show you how much better they are at this than you. But don’t worry, when boss fights turn in to cutscenes the game will occasionally have a “Press square” or “Mash square” prompt so it can say “See you ARE still playing the game!”. Calling them quick time events would be a bit of an exaggeration because I'm pretty sure you get a good 5 seconds to hit the single button that pops up.
This reaches its peak during one of the battles near the end in which the ENTIRE fight is a cutscene where you get to press square every now and then. The fact they give this battle the usual health bars is almost insulting. It's like those YouTube videos "X vs Y with health bars". If you're gonna be a cutscene just be a damn cutscene, stop trying to pretend to be a game.
The Eikon battles where you turn into Ifrit are the epitome of style over substance. Gameplay is reduced to be even more basic than before with far less things you can actually do, yet they're some of the most impressive-looking action scenes I've seen in a game.
I'm kinda mixed on voice acting. Some of it is good, some of it is fine and some characters just have these dull, monotone voices that feel like the actor is reading the script out loud to themselves for the first time. Not helped by the fact many characters in cutscenes will stand there emotionless, even ones that don't have equally dispassionate voices (this isn't the case for every scene mind you, there's some great ones).
The world is fairly uninteresting to explore. Towns are pretty barebones. They have shops and some side quests, but generally nothing to do that makes any one town unique outside of their roles in the story (which to be fair, does give them a lot of personality by itself). The open world is much larger than it really needs to be. There's these huge open areas but no real reason to explore most of them. You might find tiny amounts of gill or crafting material, but there's very rarely anything of substance hiding in there. Mostly it just seems like they're huge for the sake of letting the devs put side quests and monster hunts into more places than would otherwise feel realistic if everything was as small as it needed to be for the main story.
Dungeons are the opposite. It's literally just corridor, followed by mob fight, followed by corridor, mob fight etc. Sometimes a mini boss. Then you end with the big boss. After the mob fight it can be hard to remember which way to even go because both backwards and forwards look the exact same.
Maybe you'll find an accessory in a dungeon or in the open world though. It won't be exciting unfortunately. Almost every accessory in this game does one of two things: Boosts the power of a single move (not an Eikon, but a specific move for that Eikon) or reduce the cooldown of a specific move...by literal seconds. The funniest one to me is an accessory that reduces the charge time of your basic magic blast to its stronger version by 0.2 seconds. This isn't even a random find in a chest, this is specifically a reward for completing a certain amount of side quests that you only get relatively late in the game. 0.2 seconds!! Like I know it doesn't take that long to charge in the first place, but why in the hell would I want one of my 3 slots taken up by something that reduces the time of a charge by less than 1/4th of a SECOND.
There are a handful of more interesting accessories, like the one that gives you a mini limit break on a perfect dodge. But they're very rare.
Weapons and armour likewise lack anything outside of pure stats. Every one is just power, defence and health. The most basic and bland way to do weapon progression imaginable.
I also want to bitch about the sprinting. In order to sprint you don't press a button, you have to run for a little bit first and then Clive will sprint after a few seconds. This is annoying enough by itself, but it ONLY works in the open world sections. When in towns or dungeons you can only move at the slow pace. This gets beyond annoying when you have to constantly shuffle back and forth in any given place as part of a side quest (you will learn to hate the second hideout with the amount of times you have to 'run' around it).
Speaking of side quests, once again - good in the story sense,; bad in the gameplay sense. Every side quest falls into one of three categories: "There's a monster that needs beating - go beat it", "There's a thing I need - go get it (there's a monster there when you arrive at the destination)", "There's a thing I need to speak to - go get it (you get it without any conflict whatsoever)". Like the fact there's literal sidequests in the game that involve you just going from one character to another to go through dialogue with zero gameplay is astounding. They're less side quests and more side stories.
OK I think I'm done complaining about this. Fantastic as a story experience, horrible as a game despite the good baseline they made with smooth feeling combat that they unfortunately over simplified. There's a reason I started this game in July and only finished it now. I've never had a game that I both wanted to see through to the end, yet dreaded playing so much.
The big shakeup this time around, other than the move to 5D's, is that you're no longer tied to a specific tag partner. Every day gives you a fresh start for who you can team up with. Once a characters heart fills out it will automatically start their next story event though, which can be a bit funny because once you learn how easy it is to a max a heart, you'll end up with just a huge string of story events and no down-time. The problem with that? Well after the 2nd event, like in past games, you unlock the ability to edit your partners deck. Except... it doesn't unlock this feature if you go straight from the 2nd heart event to the 3rd. So essentially you need to force yourself to play the game slowly and leave characters not-quite maxed if you want to unlock that ability. And for many characters you will want it because so many of their decks are utter dogshit.
You also can't see your partners hand anymore, which I assume is to help hide how remedial the AI can be. Though having said that trying to make AI that can use literally every possible combination of cards you can put in a tag duel must be tough, so I won't be too harsh on them, especially since I didn't notice anything too bad in this one.
Many of the past games flaws are still here. You still can't set specific animations on or off, it's all or nothing as always. They do have an option to make animations only show up during story events now, so that's nice. I also recently learned the Japanese version had voice acting in these scenes which the English version removed.
Your tag partner still moves before you every single time. How have they not taken a page out of World Championship's book and let the order be decided by if you or the opponent goes first? C'mon.
The "reset filters" option in deck editing still doesn't reset the "show only labelled cards" filter, which makes adding staples to decks just that little more annoying.
And playing the game in general can feel hollow due to how pretty much every single story event is just dueling opponents that you have likely duelled dozens of times before, even outside of story events. Like the game literally lets you duel Yusei whenever you want, doing so in a story event just isn't special. It doesn't help that since we left GX for 5D's, the amount of actual usable characters have shrunk as this series was still in its relative infancy. But to the games credit, there are a few characters who only seemed to appear after beating a certain amount (or maybe certain characters) stories. These even include weird cosplays of main characters from the show, which I found out are from something called "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5C's".
As a duel simulator the games fine. Making and testing decks is as fun as ever, just now with more cards. Ironically it's the tag duels that make it worse, as having to cater around some of the worst decks I've ever seen is unfun. And you can't really just ignore the story because beating a characters story is the only way to get copies of certain cards like Stardust Dragon, and unlock some packs.
As a dating simulator it's repetitive and boring. You just go through the same 3 "mini-games" every time you want to fill a heart. The rock-paper-scissors one is so stupid and most of the answers make no sense. At least when you start getting hearts complete characters will sometimes give you a pack of random cards. By the time I stopped playing I could easily just move around screens on the map and get 100 cards for doing nothing.
These games really just need a more focused story so it feels like I'm building towards something. Instead it kinda hits a point where you realise you're just playing to get more cards, but cards to do what? Complete more characters stories? They're so basic and uninteresting that it's not a reward in itself to play them. The only reason to do so is to get their card rewards, but then it goes back to asking why you want them. And forcing tag duels in general just limits the type of decks you can actually use, even if this game does do it better than the past ones by letting you pick a new partner all the time.
You also can't see your partners hand anymore, which I assume is to help hide how remedial the AI can be. Though having said that trying to make AI that can use literally every possible combination of cards you can put in a tag duel must be tough, so I won't be too harsh on them, especially since I didn't notice anything too bad in this one.
Many of the past games flaws are still here. You still can't set specific animations on or off, it's all or nothing as always. They do have an option to make animations only show up during story events now, so that's nice. I also recently learned the Japanese version had voice acting in these scenes which the English version removed.
Your tag partner still moves before you every single time. How have they not taken a page out of World Championship's book and let the order be decided by if you or the opponent goes first? C'mon.
The "reset filters" option in deck editing still doesn't reset the "show only labelled cards" filter, which makes adding staples to decks just that little more annoying.
And playing the game in general can feel hollow due to how pretty much every single story event is just dueling opponents that you have likely duelled dozens of times before, even outside of story events. Like the game literally lets you duel Yusei whenever you want, doing so in a story event just isn't special. It doesn't help that since we left GX for 5D's, the amount of actual usable characters have shrunk as this series was still in its relative infancy. But to the games credit, there are a few characters who only seemed to appear after beating a certain amount (or maybe certain characters) stories. These even include weird cosplays of main characters from the show, which I found out are from something called "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5C's".
As a duel simulator the games fine. Making and testing decks is as fun as ever, just now with more cards. Ironically it's the tag duels that make it worse, as having to cater around some of the worst decks I've ever seen is unfun. And you can't really just ignore the story because beating a characters story is the only way to get copies of certain cards like Stardust Dragon, and unlock some packs.
As a dating simulator it's repetitive and boring. You just go through the same 3 "mini-games" every time you want to fill a heart. The rock-paper-scissors one is so stupid and most of the answers make no sense. At least when you start getting hearts complete characters will sometimes give you a pack of random cards. By the time I stopped playing I could easily just move around screens on the map and get 100 cards for doing nothing.
These games really just need a more focused story so it feels like I'm building towards something. Instead it kinda hits a point where you realise you're just playing to get more cards, but cards to do what? Complete more characters stories? They're so basic and uninteresting that it's not a reward in itself to play them. The only reason to do so is to get their card rewards, but then it goes back to asking why you want them. And forcing tag duels in general just limits the type of decks you can actually use, even if this game does do it better than the past ones by letting you pick a new partner all the time.
1999
This review contains spoilers
This game is radical.
While the first game slowly lost the "snow" part of snowboarding until it became racing on grassy hills, this game pretty much takes off the mask straight away. Level 1 is your typical snow level, but level two goes off the rails and sticks you underwater. Level 3 is weirdly another snow level, with a light Christmas theme. And after that it's just new theme after new theme. Castles, haunted mansions and outer space!
Whether you like this or not will really prefer if you prefer a more down to Earth snowboarding game where the levels with sand and grass are kinda extras to enjoy after the "realistic" levels (and those are still relatively simple compared to what we have here), or if you just enjoy devs going balls to the walls with ideas and throwing you on a snowboard regardless.
The actual level design seems to have taken a hit. The first game had a nicely progressive difficulty scale, where the latter tracks were genuinely hard to stick on at all times. This game goes for a more Mario Kart approach where tracks are either very easy, or easy. Much less sharp turns, and more long straight sections. I assume the latter is to compliment the games new defensive features. When an item is about to hit you it will now flash when it's close, so you can jump over it (which was technically possible in the first game, but without the flashing it was impossible to time properly). You can also deflect items now too, by doing a small trick while you jump, to add some extra risk vs reward. These would have been pretty much impossible in the game game because jumping requires a straight path as you can't turn while doing so, and SBK1 had very few straight paths.
So it's not really a step forward or backwards. It's more of a replacement. They replaced more complex course layouts for a more complex defensive system, while compensating by making the course themes more interesting.
There's also an attempt at a story mode now. It's just a little cutscene after and before each race. They're kinda cute, but I wouldn't miss them if they weren't there. Also we get 3 bosses now ala Diddy Kong Racing. Some people hate them - I didn't mind them.
We lose the secret character from the original game, but a brand new character is added to the starting roster, while everyone else gets a redesign. This game adds 3 more unlockable characters of its own, and they definitely have that feeling of wacky 90's unlockables - a dog, a penguin and a little goblin thing.
Only a few new items were added, most of which are just variants of existing ones - the rocket is just a faster fan, the ghost item now has a version that hits everyone etc. But the wing item is new and ties with the rock as being the worst item in the game. It just makes you floatier to stay in the air longer, which is almost always worse than just landing so you can pick up speed again.
Unique trick inputs for each character are replaced with a skill-less "keep pressing A to keep doing the same trick" to get more cash. So boards now cost much more to keep up with the fact the player will earn much more money...despite items in-races still costing the exact same, so you never really end up in a situation where you can't get an item. They even buffed being poor because going through an item box without the cash won't cause you to crash anymore, you go through it like normal and just don't get an item. I just wish that if they were gonna throw all the money at us they could do something like let you hold items so when you go through the next box you pay more to upgrade the weapon. Having boards to buy with excess money is nice and all, but in the heat of the race earning 5000 coins with no advantage for them kinda sucks.
When you beat story mode you unlock expert mode, which lets the AI be more competent overall. Doing the levels again in expert will unlock a new board for each level beaten, so it's a nice incentive to replay. It isn't too hard, they just manage to deflect an item or two so it might take more to hit them. Overall still easier than Snowboard Kids 1 cheating SOBs.
The bosses on expert are another story. The snowman ain't too hard, but the dinosaur requires pretty perfect play. The last boss is just the most unhinged, demented load of BS ever programmed into a game. It literally just spams items at you non-stop. You can't deflect them, and they come too fast to jump over more than 1. The only reason I ended up beating it is because one of the boards you unlock through expert mode is the ninja board which gives permanent invisibility (which makes you invincible) in exchange for being very slow, which isn't an issue for this boss. That makes the boss TOO easy, so like... that can't be the intended method right? But I can't see how human beings could possibly win against cracked up Terminator, so is the only answer really to just make the boss a non-fight?
While the first game slowly lost the "snow" part of snowboarding until it became racing on grassy hills, this game pretty much takes off the mask straight away. Level 1 is your typical snow level, but level two goes off the rails and sticks you underwater. Level 3 is weirdly another snow level, with a light Christmas theme. And after that it's just new theme after new theme. Castles, haunted mansions and outer space!
Whether you like this or not will really prefer if you prefer a more down to Earth snowboarding game where the levels with sand and grass are kinda extras to enjoy after the "realistic" levels (and those are still relatively simple compared to what we have here), or if you just enjoy devs going balls to the walls with ideas and throwing you on a snowboard regardless.
The actual level design seems to have taken a hit. The first game had a nicely progressive difficulty scale, where the latter tracks were genuinely hard to stick on at all times. This game goes for a more Mario Kart approach where tracks are either very easy, or easy. Much less sharp turns, and more long straight sections. I assume the latter is to compliment the games new defensive features. When an item is about to hit you it will now flash when it's close, so you can jump over it (which was technically possible in the first game, but without the flashing it was impossible to time properly). You can also deflect items now too, by doing a small trick while you jump, to add some extra risk vs reward. These would have been pretty much impossible in the game game because jumping requires a straight path as you can't turn while doing so, and SBK1 had very few straight paths.
So it's not really a step forward or backwards. It's more of a replacement. They replaced more complex course layouts for a more complex defensive system, while compensating by making the course themes more interesting.
There's also an attempt at a story mode now. It's just a little cutscene after and before each race. They're kinda cute, but I wouldn't miss them if they weren't there. Also we get 3 bosses now ala Diddy Kong Racing. Some people hate them - I didn't mind them.
We lose the secret character from the original game, but a brand new character is added to the starting roster, while everyone else gets a redesign. This game adds 3 more unlockable characters of its own, and they definitely have that feeling of wacky 90's unlockables - a dog, a penguin and a little goblin thing.
Only a few new items were added, most of which are just variants of existing ones - the rocket is just a faster fan, the ghost item now has a version that hits everyone etc. But the wing item is new and ties with the rock as being the worst item in the game. It just makes you floatier to stay in the air longer, which is almost always worse than just landing so you can pick up speed again.
Unique trick inputs for each character are replaced with a skill-less "keep pressing A to keep doing the same trick" to get more cash. So boards now cost much more to keep up with the fact the player will earn much more money...despite items in-races still costing the exact same, so you never really end up in a situation where you can't get an item. They even buffed being poor because going through an item box without the cash won't cause you to crash anymore, you go through it like normal and just don't get an item. I just wish that if they were gonna throw all the money at us they could do something like let you hold items so when you go through the next box you pay more to upgrade the weapon. Having boards to buy with excess money is nice and all, but in the heat of the race earning 5000 coins with no advantage for them kinda sucks.
When you beat story mode you unlock expert mode, which lets the AI be more competent overall. Doing the levels again in expert will unlock a new board for each level beaten, so it's a nice incentive to replay. It isn't too hard, they just manage to deflect an item or two so it might take more to hit them. Overall still easier than Snowboard Kids 1 cheating SOBs.
The bosses on expert are another story. The snowman ain't too hard, but the dinosaur requires pretty perfect play. The last boss is just the most unhinged, demented load of BS ever programmed into a game. It literally just spams items at you non-stop. You can't deflect them, and they come too fast to jump over more than 1. The only reason I ended up beating it is because one of the boards you unlock through expert mode is the ninja board which gives permanent invisibility (which makes you invincible) in exchange for being very slow, which isn't an issue for this boss. That makes the boss TOO easy, so like... that can't be the intended method right? But I can't see how human beings could possibly win against cracked up Terminator, so is the only answer really to just make the boss a non-fight?
1997
Snowboard Kids is such a gem. There may be relatively few tracks, but the ones that are here are huge, with an escalating difficulty and amount of general craziness going on. Track 1 is as basic a snowboarding course as you can get, while some of the later tracks involve snowboarding down grass, or through deserts, or a theme park.
The AI does have rubber banding, which like a lot of games of this kind with it, mean it's only really the very end of the race that truly matters. No matter what you do before then, they'll always be able to catch back up to you, so it all depends on if you get hit by something near the end. Especially as blocking options in this game are near non-existent. There's also some more blatant cheating going on, like hitting an opponent with an item, then as soon as you pass them they're throwing an item back at you, despite the fact they should still be stunned and in recovery mode.
Actual item variety is fun. Red items are all offensive and you use them all by just throwing them forward. But their effects vary quite a lot - you can freeze your opponent in ice, or turn them into a snowman so they can't turn, or force them into the air with a parachute... of course the rubber banding kinda makes all items work the same on them, while you yourself getting hit by a slower one, like the parachute, is devastating. There's also some kind of homing ability on at least some of these items, but how it works I have no idea, because sometimes it would work from quite far away and other times I could shoot just a few feet behind them and the item makes no attempt at tracking them.
Blue items are defensive and contain some of the best and worst items. For the best we have the pan item that is essentially just an offensive item but it affects everyone regardless of where they are and crushes them. This set also contains the rock, which is basically a banana peel from Mario Kart, except can't be used to block anything. It's most likely function is to make your next lap more annoying for yourself.
The physics generally work pretty great, though I find tight turns are near impossible unless using the character and board with the highest handling, which, ok yeah it makes sense they can do it, but I feel like it shouldn't be "either use the min-max for turning, or you can't do these courses".
Good game. Love the courses. Playing against AI can feel frustrating though since it just feels like nothing you do has any real impact. Or I rather, you're not fighting to get ahead, you're fighting to not fall behind. Because I noticed in a lot of races one AI will just rocket to the front of the pack and you'll never be able to catch them no matter what. It's like their rubber banding breaks and it gets stuck in "catch up" mode. I'm not sure if this is intended, such as when you fall too far behind, or what.
The AI does have rubber banding, which like a lot of games of this kind with it, mean it's only really the very end of the race that truly matters. No matter what you do before then, they'll always be able to catch back up to you, so it all depends on if you get hit by something near the end. Especially as blocking options in this game are near non-existent. There's also some more blatant cheating going on, like hitting an opponent with an item, then as soon as you pass them they're throwing an item back at you, despite the fact they should still be stunned and in recovery mode.
Actual item variety is fun. Red items are all offensive and you use them all by just throwing them forward. But their effects vary quite a lot - you can freeze your opponent in ice, or turn them into a snowman so they can't turn, or force them into the air with a parachute... of course the rubber banding kinda makes all items work the same on them, while you yourself getting hit by a slower one, like the parachute, is devastating. There's also some kind of homing ability on at least some of these items, but how it works I have no idea, because sometimes it would work from quite far away and other times I could shoot just a few feet behind them and the item makes no attempt at tracking them.
Blue items are defensive and contain some of the best and worst items. For the best we have the pan item that is essentially just an offensive item but it affects everyone regardless of where they are and crushes them. This set also contains the rock, which is basically a banana peel from Mario Kart, except can't be used to block anything. It's most likely function is to make your next lap more annoying for yourself.
The physics generally work pretty great, though I find tight turns are near impossible unless using the character and board with the highest handling, which, ok yeah it makes sense they can do it, but I feel like it shouldn't be "either use the min-max for turning, or you can't do these courses".
Good game. Love the courses. Playing against AI can feel frustrating though since it just feels like nothing you do has any real impact. Or I rather, you're not fighting to get ahead, you're fighting to not fall behind. Because I noticed in a lot of races one AI will just rocket to the front of the pack and you'll never be able to catch them no matter what. It's like their rubber banding breaks and it gets stuck in "catch up" mode. I'm not sure if this is intended, such as when you fall too far behind, or what.
2004
I still don't know the difference between a topspin or a slice shot. But this game is so damn smooth to play. The N64 game was good, but it often felt very clunky with the way the charge mechanic worked. In this game every movement of mine felt perfectly executed as intended.
The game lacks any kind of story mode again, which is a bit of a bummer. More excusable on N64 imo, but by now I feel like we should be getting at least some sort of content beyond tournament mode. I may be able to live with tournament mode, if not for how god damn easy it is. I am not tooting my own horn - I will happily admit I lost a few games in the N64 version despite only playing to the regular tournament (not touching the 'special' cups) - in this game it's entirely possible to go through the Mushroom and Flower cup, aka 2/3rds of the tournament, without the opponent getting a single point. They're just that bad. It isn't until the final of the Star Cup that you face anything that could be considered above mentally impaired, and even they're unlikely to do more than get you to deuce on a good day.
Beat the tournament with a character and you once again unlock a harder tournament, this time it's the "Star Tournament". Named so because beating the Star Cup gives the character you won with a star rank, which can be toggled on or off. This supposedly improves the power of their shots. In the Star Tournament every enemy is in star rank, and supposedly the challenge in general is increased, though I couldn't really tell as it's still way too easy to get points in just a couple of hits after the ball has been served.
Beat the Star Tournament and you unlock Ace difficulty for exhibition mode. I tried this out and...yeah, this is an actual challenge from the game, at least for a bad player like me. So the whole purpose of tournament mode is basically to unlock a level of difficulty that can actually be fun, and only use it in the mode that exists for people to boot up when they're low on time or something.
There's also a Gimmick Cup this time around, named so because this game introduces new gimmick courses. The gimmicks on these fields range from mild nuisances like enemies on the field, to ones that change how you play because the shape and size of the field keeps changing. Or it could be the Piranha Plant goop one, which is utterly terrible.
These gimmick courses can be played without their gimmicks... but only in exhibition mode. In Tournament mode, non-gimmick cups will all be played in exclusively in the 3 Peach Dome fields, which are basically just normal-looking Tennis fields. You also need to unlock the gimmick fields for use in exhibition mode via winning the gimmick tournaments. I'm starting to feel like Nintendo really thought players would love to just spend hours upon hours playing matches on what is essentially the quick-play mode. Which I guess if you're playing with friends could be true. But for a single player experience that's generally used for practice and maybe warm-up exclusively.
The mini-games in this game are all top tier though. So many great ideas, and they're actually appropriately challenging too.
One aspect that did disappoint me was the character roster. Don't get me wrong, this is a perfectly fine roster, maybe even good by the standards of the time. But the first game has a roster that felt decently sized for an N64 game, and had so many wild card picks. This game removes some characters (Birdo, Baby Mario, Toad(?!) & Donkey Kong Jr.) and only adds 5, for a total of a net +1. The new choices aren't even that interesting, with Diddy Kong and Bowser Jr. just kinda been auto-includes in any spin-off at this point. Wiggler is a great choice though. Fly Guy is an...odd one, especially when combined with the fact Paratroopa is made a secret character now instead of default, so two of the four unlockable characters are just flying versions of regular ones. The funniest part about this to me is how despite Fly Guy and Paratroopa being intended partners, the regular Koopa and Shy Guy aren't. Shy Guy is partnered with Boo, while Koopa is partnered with...Yoshi? Because Birdo, Baby Mario and even Toad were all removed.
At least now when you play doubles in tournament mode you get to pick your own partner, instead of it being auto-assigned like the last game.
I've gone this far without even talking about the power shot mechanic. Great in concept, each character has an offensive power shot that is basically hard to return and may cause your own character to be stunned when hitting it, or a defensive power shot which can return the ball from anywhere on the field. Each character also gets a fun personality-filled animation for each type of shot (Waluigi literally creates a flowing river and swims to the ball for his defence shot for some reason). The quandary is obvious - do you use your offensive shot to try and get an easy point, or do you save it to save yourself from an otherwise lost point?
The issue with it is these power shots charge up so damn fast. I don't know the mechanics of it, but you and your opponent will both be charged after about 10 seconds after serving. It does briefly reset when a new serve begins, but unless you just used your power shot, you can expect it to be ready again in like 3 seconds. This means any kind of question around it becomes moot. Just spam it if you want, it'll be back again soon. Of course the AI loves to do just that - in fact they will even constantly use the defensive shot even in times when they could easily hit the ball without it (and in doubles matches, I've seen people use defensive shots when their partner is literally just about to hit the ball). Since defensive shots are purposefully easy to return, every time they do this you're almost guaranteed a point just by hitting it back, even without using your own power shot, which is always an option anyway because of charge time.
The whole thing should have been a great idea that made you think about how you use the mechanic. Instead it just drags to the game to a halt, constantly pausing it to show the 5 second animations. I pretty much entirely stopped using it except when necessary - which was rarely ever because as I said, the AI in tournament mode won't really pull any moves that get the ball into a spot you can't reach, until the finals of the last cup.
Oh and you can turn off power shots... but only in exhibition matches.
The last complaint I have is with that whole star rank thing I mentioned. You unlock it for a character by beating Star Cup...but ONLY in singles. You don't even get it for beating the Star Tournament (which is set up the exact same way, but has different names for the cups), despite this literally exists purely to fight star'd opponents. There's 6 total tournaments you can play - Regular, Gimmick and "Star", with singles and doubles for each. You can get star rank for your character with only a single one of these. Yeah, even beating Star Cup in doubles won't give it to you. The challenge tournament isn't even hard itself, so to ask players to have to play the even easier version 18 times if you wanted to do it for every character is crazy.
So yeah. The game plays absolutely incredible. It's so smooth, responsive and fun. The graphics hold up, the Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion theming is strong. Mini-games are great. But the game is just so easy that it's actually boring to play, with the only way to get a challenge, or even play on a better variety of fields without needing their gimmicks, being to play exhibition matches. That might be OK for some people, but I always like to feel like I'm progressing to something in a game, which exhibition matches don't do. Probably fantastic with friends, but a shallow single player experience.
The game lacks any kind of story mode again, which is a bit of a bummer. More excusable on N64 imo, but by now I feel like we should be getting at least some sort of content beyond tournament mode. I may be able to live with tournament mode, if not for how god damn easy it is. I am not tooting my own horn - I will happily admit I lost a few games in the N64 version despite only playing to the regular tournament (not touching the 'special' cups) - in this game it's entirely possible to go through the Mushroom and Flower cup, aka 2/3rds of the tournament, without the opponent getting a single point. They're just that bad. It isn't until the final of the Star Cup that you face anything that could be considered above mentally impaired, and even they're unlikely to do more than get you to deuce on a good day.
Beat the tournament with a character and you once again unlock a harder tournament, this time it's the "Star Tournament". Named so because beating the Star Cup gives the character you won with a star rank, which can be toggled on or off. This supposedly improves the power of their shots. In the Star Tournament every enemy is in star rank, and supposedly the challenge in general is increased, though I couldn't really tell as it's still way too easy to get points in just a couple of hits after the ball has been served.
Beat the Star Tournament and you unlock Ace difficulty for exhibition mode. I tried this out and...yeah, this is an actual challenge from the game, at least for a bad player like me. So the whole purpose of tournament mode is basically to unlock a level of difficulty that can actually be fun, and only use it in the mode that exists for people to boot up when they're low on time or something.
There's also a Gimmick Cup this time around, named so because this game introduces new gimmick courses. The gimmicks on these fields range from mild nuisances like enemies on the field, to ones that change how you play because the shape and size of the field keeps changing. Or it could be the Piranha Plant goop one, which is utterly terrible.
These gimmick courses can be played without their gimmicks... but only in exhibition mode. In Tournament mode, non-gimmick cups will all be played in exclusively in the 3 Peach Dome fields, which are basically just normal-looking Tennis fields. You also need to unlock the gimmick fields for use in exhibition mode via winning the gimmick tournaments. I'm starting to feel like Nintendo really thought players would love to just spend hours upon hours playing matches on what is essentially the quick-play mode. Which I guess if you're playing with friends could be true. But for a single player experience that's generally used for practice and maybe warm-up exclusively.
The mini-games in this game are all top tier though. So many great ideas, and they're actually appropriately challenging too.
One aspect that did disappoint me was the character roster. Don't get me wrong, this is a perfectly fine roster, maybe even good by the standards of the time. But the first game has a roster that felt decently sized for an N64 game, and had so many wild card picks. This game removes some characters (Birdo, Baby Mario, Toad(?!) & Donkey Kong Jr.) and only adds 5, for a total of a net +1. The new choices aren't even that interesting, with Diddy Kong and Bowser Jr. just kinda been auto-includes in any spin-off at this point. Wiggler is a great choice though. Fly Guy is an...odd one, especially when combined with the fact Paratroopa is made a secret character now instead of default, so two of the four unlockable characters are just flying versions of regular ones. The funniest part about this to me is how despite Fly Guy and Paratroopa being intended partners, the regular Koopa and Shy Guy aren't. Shy Guy is partnered with Boo, while Koopa is partnered with...Yoshi? Because Birdo, Baby Mario and even Toad were all removed.
At least now when you play doubles in tournament mode you get to pick your own partner, instead of it being auto-assigned like the last game.
I've gone this far without even talking about the power shot mechanic. Great in concept, each character has an offensive power shot that is basically hard to return and may cause your own character to be stunned when hitting it, or a defensive power shot which can return the ball from anywhere on the field. Each character also gets a fun personality-filled animation for each type of shot (Waluigi literally creates a flowing river and swims to the ball for his defence shot for some reason). The quandary is obvious - do you use your offensive shot to try and get an easy point, or do you save it to save yourself from an otherwise lost point?
The issue with it is these power shots charge up so damn fast. I don't know the mechanics of it, but you and your opponent will both be charged after about 10 seconds after serving. It does briefly reset when a new serve begins, but unless you just used your power shot, you can expect it to be ready again in like 3 seconds. This means any kind of question around it becomes moot. Just spam it if you want, it'll be back again soon. Of course the AI loves to do just that - in fact they will even constantly use the defensive shot even in times when they could easily hit the ball without it (and in doubles matches, I've seen people use defensive shots when their partner is literally just about to hit the ball). Since defensive shots are purposefully easy to return, every time they do this you're almost guaranteed a point just by hitting it back, even without using your own power shot, which is always an option anyway because of charge time.
The whole thing should have been a great idea that made you think about how you use the mechanic. Instead it just drags to the game to a halt, constantly pausing it to show the 5 second animations. I pretty much entirely stopped using it except when necessary - which was rarely ever because as I said, the AI in tournament mode won't really pull any moves that get the ball into a spot you can't reach, until the finals of the last cup.
Oh and you can turn off power shots... but only in exhibition matches.
The last complaint I have is with that whole star rank thing I mentioned. You unlock it for a character by beating Star Cup...but ONLY in singles. You don't even get it for beating the Star Tournament (which is set up the exact same way, but has different names for the cups), despite this literally exists purely to fight star'd opponents. There's 6 total tournaments you can play - Regular, Gimmick and "Star", with singles and doubles for each. You can get star rank for your character with only a single one of these. Yeah, even beating Star Cup in doubles won't give it to you. The challenge tournament isn't even hard itself, so to ask players to have to play the even easier version 18 times if you wanted to do it for every character is crazy.
So yeah. The game plays absolutely incredible. It's so smooth, responsive and fun. The graphics hold up, the Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion theming is strong. Mini-games are great. But the game is just so easy that it's actually boring to play, with the only way to get a challenge, or even play on a better variety of fields without needing their gimmicks, being to play exhibition matches. That might be OK for some people, but I always like to feel like I'm progressing to something in a game, which exhibition matches don't do. Probably fantastic with friends, but a shallow single player experience.
This review contains spoilers
It's obvious this game learned from the reception of the past game. While a loop does occur again in this game, it's only done once, and in a much less tedious way. In fact it's done in a way that continues the series rare yet utterly brilliant, fourth wall breaking moments (you get a couple more of those).
We get a whole bunch of new classes to get excited about and test. For a while I didn't unlock any old jobs (other than Freelancer which is still the starting one), so I assumed they were just replaced, especially as many of the new ones seemed to directly compete with Bravely Default's jobs - Bishop is an obvious White Mage for example. However all but like 5 jobs from the last game return, and while some of those do have an equivalent in the new list, there's a couple that don't. I can't think of any jobs that play like the Salve-Maker for example.
The way these old jobs were implemented was my favourite part. The devs must have known that players wouldn't find as much fun in unlocking old classes they've played to death before, so they turn them into side quests, which already makes them optional. But going further than that, each side quest makes you go through the choice of 2 jobs from the past game, given in the form of a moral dilemma involving the characters who were originally fought for those jobs in the first place. I love this because there are times when you might think "Well morally I agree with this person... But I prefer this class, so that'd mean I'd have to disagree with my morals to get it". Of course you can get every class in the game, but you only get the option to redo the quests for the second choice much later with the time loop. Come to think of it, I have no idea what'd happen if you chose the same option each time to get the same class... Maybe the other would be missed forever?
Luckily the replay of the side of these quests skips the majority of the set-up, since our characters already know what's going on. You generally just go to the dungeon, meet up with the characters and Edea explains she already knows everything and you make your choice. I did notice the replay with the murder mystery was very weird, as our characters were still completely surprised at the killers reveal, despite them already knowing this. It seems they just play the same "resolution" cutscene for the given choices regardless of whether it's pre-loop or post-loop, which is fine for most of them, but that just makes this one a bit of a standout. A very minor one though.
It's not just jobs, you'll experience both new and old locations and enemies too. Even the party is made up of 50% new and 50% old characters. Though the plot itself, and the main villains are all unique to the game.
Also this game continues Japanese media's fetish with food. Almost every other cutscene is just about food.
We get a whole bunch of new classes to get excited about and test. For a while I didn't unlock any old jobs (other than Freelancer which is still the starting one), so I assumed they were just replaced, especially as many of the new ones seemed to directly compete with Bravely Default's jobs - Bishop is an obvious White Mage for example. However all but like 5 jobs from the last game return, and while some of those do have an equivalent in the new list, there's a couple that don't. I can't think of any jobs that play like the Salve-Maker for example.
The way these old jobs were implemented was my favourite part. The devs must have known that players wouldn't find as much fun in unlocking old classes they've played to death before, so they turn them into side quests, which already makes them optional. But going further than that, each side quest makes you go through the choice of 2 jobs from the past game, given in the form of a moral dilemma involving the characters who were originally fought for those jobs in the first place. I love this because there are times when you might think "Well morally I agree with this person... But I prefer this class, so that'd mean I'd have to disagree with my morals to get it". Of course you can get every class in the game, but you only get the option to redo the quests for the second choice much later with the time loop. Come to think of it, I have no idea what'd happen if you chose the same option each time to get the same class... Maybe the other would be missed forever?
Luckily the replay of the side of these quests skips the majority of the set-up, since our characters already know what's going on. You generally just go to the dungeon, meet up with the characters and Edea explains she already knows everything and you make your choice. I did notice the replay with the murder mystery was very weird, as our characters were still completely surprised at the killers reveal, despite them already knowing this. It seems they just play the same "resolution" cutscene for the given choices regardless of whether it's pre-loop or post-loop, which is fine for most of them, but that just makes this one a bit of a standout. A very minor one though.
It's not just jobs, you'll experience both new and old locations and enemies too. Even the party is made up of 50% new and 50% old characters. Though the plot itself, and the main villains are all unique to the game.
Also this game continues Japanese media's fetish with food. Almost every other cutscene is just about food.
1999
Kickin' soundtrack. Neat idea for a game in general, but one that I feel should have stayed in arcades, as there isn't enough content to justify a console release (considering the arcade and console are different it's kinda weird they don't have separate pages here).
I actually spent most of my time in Crazy Box, trying to master all the various moves. The game does a terrible job at teaching you these, so you're best off looking online. I ended up clearing every challenge and...I still don't really get a lot of it. When it comes to drifting I have no idea what the heck is going on. Sometimes I'll do a perfect 90 degree drift and stop exactly where I want, other times I'll spin around a full 360 degrees and go sliding 5 miles away from where I wanted. The crazy dash was easy enough to get to grips with, though I found that doing it while starting was consistent, doing it while in motion was surprisingly difficulty - on the other hand the "limit cut" move which is a bigger speed boost but more mechanically difficult to pull off I found very easy to do consistently.
So even though I cleared all these challenges meant to teach me the advanced moves, I barely even know how some of them work shrug and don't even ask me about stuff like crazy drift stops.
When you do get to grips with these you go into one of the two maps the games has and just kinda do the same thing over and over. That's why I think it works better in arcade. At least for me, beating my own record over and over isn't an incentive, so once I'd gotten S rank and the credits on both maps, I didn't feel like there was much reason to keep playing.
The amount of branding is kind of funny, and combined with the music and overall vibes really cements itself as a time capsule of the late 90's/early 2000's.
Physics were all over the place. It felt like even the smallest physical object could bring you to a complete halt, get you stuck in some weird hitbox orgy or toss you a mile off course.
Great arcade game. Not all that great for a console game...especially for the sixth generation.
I actually spent most of my time in Crazy Box, trying to master all the various moves. The game does a terrible job at teaching you these, so you're best off looking online. I ended up clearing every challenge and...I still don't really get a lot of it. When it comes to drifting I have no idea what the heck is going on. Sometimes I'll do a perfect 90 degree drift and stop exactly where I want, other times I'll spin around a full 360 degrees and go sliding 5 miles away from where I wanted. The crazy dash was easy enough to get to grips with, though I found that doing it while starting was consistent, doing it while in motion was surprisingly difficulty - on the other hand the "limit cut" move which is a bigger speed boost but more mechanically difficult to pull off I found very easy to do consistently.
So even though I cleared all these challenges meant to teach me the advanced moves, I barely even know how some of them work shrug and don't even ask me about stuff like crazy drift stops.
When you do get to grips with these you go into one of the two maps the games has and just kinda do the same thing over and over. That's why I think it works better in arcade. At least for me, beating my own record over and over isn't an incentive, so once I'd gotten S rank and the credits on both maps, I didn't feel like there was much reason to keep playing.
The amount of branding is kind of funny, and combined with the music and overall vibes really cements itself as a time capsule of the late 90's/early 2000's.
Physics were all over the place. It felt like even the smallest physical object could bring you to a complete halt, get you stuck in some weird hitbox orgy or toss you a mile off course.
Great arcade game. Not all that great for a console game...especially for the sixth generation.