Dinghy_Dog
36 reviews liked by Dinghy_Dog
THAT IS NOT SOLID SNAKE!!!
Eh.
That's really the core of how I feel about this game: Eh.
Before I go ahead, I'll lay my cards on the table.
I am an AC fan, but I wouldn't call myself a passionate one. I gunned the series in 2011 in preparation for Armored Core V (second-hand hype from a friend, you see) and moved on. A few years later, I did it again and fell in love with both AC4 and For Answer. Despite this love, AC has always been a C-lister as far as franchises I care about go, so I don't have too much personal investment in it.
AC6 is alright in some areas. Mech options are great, AC vs AC fights are toptier, music is exceptional, and it's pretty. I liked the ending fights and some of the story beats, really. This is a decent AC game, sometimes.
Unfortunately, this game succumbs to death by a thousand cuts as far as annoyances go. Some are pretty significant and near-omnipresent, while others are minor but still irritating.
I will talk about this game as two separate titles: AC6 - The Armored Core sequel, and AC6 - the Souls game.
I know some of you will groan at that, perhaps due to astroturfing by AC fans insisting that this game will be 'pure', or the devs' own insistence that they didn't bother including any Souls stuff. I believed both of them until I played the game.
As an AC title, AC6 sometimes has moments where it feels like the developers just get it. You're plonked in front of a gauntlet of enemies and silently told 'time to run it, nerd'. In these moments, the developers remember that AC as a series is first and foremost a puzzle game, with your mech potentially being the solution. Early on, these sections are a bit droll since enemies can't really hurt you and you oneshot them, but the threat level amps up later on and leads to some really engaging missions. The final missions on the route I chose were the peak of this, and are some of the finest in the series.
Unfortunately, they had no faith in their own game design, it seems. I know some more hardcore AC fans hate Repair Kits, but I don't - in theory, they allow the game to hit you with longer missions than the older games without you getting worn down just by sheer attrition, and it removes the demand for perfect play.
The actual issue is that the game introduces Repair Kits on top of both checkpoints and free trips to the Assembly when you die.
Despite the game and its tutorials insisting you should be adaptable and flexible in your construction, there's simply no need to do this. You can just beat your head against an immediate threat, hit a checkpoint, and switch to a completely different AC to tackle the next one. Or, get a consequence-free resupply before a boss. It completely torpedoes the need to make versatile builds, and oftentimes it's better to simply veer into the extremes of the speedy-tanky spectrum.
Also, a minor aside that I have no idea where to insert: Turning speed is still a stat but it has no bearing on your actual camera turn speed, leading to cases where you're locked onto an enemy but can't fire because your AC is still turning. It's... Strange? I feel like it was a decision made to make some fights clearer, but the end result is more annoying than anything.
Anyway, that's the AC portion of AC6 done with. Let's talk about the Dark Souls portion.
It is painfully, agonizingly obvious that parts of this game were - intentionally or not - designed to mimic the Souls formula.
There are two types of bosses in this game. The first are enemy Armored Cores. These are great. They're where the game excels with no-catches. They're fast, frantic and intense, doing enough damage to make you sweat but not enough to do 15k of HP damage in one attack. Each AC fight is a wonderful back and forth, and even the harder ones never really bothered me. Once I got gud, they were just pure instinct; dodging, countering and trading like my controller was part of my nervous system. True to form, seeing another AC pop up in the pre-boss cutscene was a delight. If every boss was these, I would give this game an easy 5/5.
The second type are Souls bosses. I'm not saying this due to the bosses being hard - because they're not. They're frustrating more than anything. Logically, they make sense: If AC missions are puzzle-gauntlets, then it's only natural the bosses are puzzles too, right?
Well, no. The Souls bosses are too much like their namesake, boasting obscene hitboxes and overtuned damage. While the AC fights will whittle you down and occasionally hit you with something painful, Souls bosses will decimate your HP and ACS (stagger) gauge with impunity.
Up above, I said that it was better to pick one extreme of the fragile-tanky spectrum and commit to it. With Souls bosses, it sometimes feels as though going fast is the only option. Tanky builds are simply too slow to dodge the bullet hell many bosses dump on you. Fuck dude, even faster builds get clipped by a few missiles.
Yes, there are ways to dodge a lot of these attacks, but nearly every Souls boss I fought in this game had a nasty habit of vaulting to the opposite side of the arena and unleashing one. Assault Boost did nothing, and even building for Quick Boost (dodge) resulted in me losing 30% health regardless. At first, I assumed it was just me. That the bosses were fine and I simply sucked.
But fortunately you can just replay bosses rather than having to NG+. So I experimented, practiced, made new builds, got gud and... Yes, the Souls bosses are just badly designed. They're an attempt by FromSoft to capture the spectacle of their more recent titles but without adjustments for the kind of game Armored Core is. This is especially obvious with a certain lategame boss, who myself and all of my IRL friends coined "Robot Malenia" independently. They are miserable, and I am deeply happy that the final boss of each ending is an AC fight. I know some will refute this, because every 'hard game' has people insisting that there's no such thing as bad design and that detractors are just bad, but no. These bosses are terrible, even when they work. When they don't (BALTHEUS), they're even worse.
I wish the Souls influence ended at the bosses. Instead, it affects the levels too. Not all of them, mercifully, but a fair chunk of them.
An average AC level is, as described above, a puzzle gauntlet. You spawn into an area with clearly visible enemies and have to carve the best path through while avoiding overexpenditure of ammo or loss of health. Sometimes the formula deviates, like with an escort mission or a stealth mission, but the core (hehe) is the same.
AC6 adds Souls levels to the formula. They're 'open' levels wherein the only real threat is ambushes. Endless ambushes. Ambushes from above, below, behind, in front, ambushes. It is every meme about Scholar of the First Sin made manifest. The very first one is kind of cool, in part because it has the Souls geography but the AC encounter design. It soon goes to shit, though. Towards the end there's 3 of these levels back to back and they feel like Miyazaki taunting me for believing the people who said there'd be no Souls in my AC. They're not even hard, just annoying. I personally love it when I interact with a combat log and immediately take 2000 damage from enemies that spawned in and used their heavier attack before I could humanely react.
The sad part here is that while the Souls bosses are a decent recreation of their source material - down to the awful canyon wide hitboxes - the levels are not. Ambushes are all they have, and their open space is filled with nothing. Occasionally, very rarely, you'll find a data log or a part, but these are few in number. In the early levels, there basically aren't any, which is a good way to condition players to ignore exploration and in turn miss out on some great AC components.
You might find my fixation on the Souls elements exhausting, and truth be told I agree with you. But the simple fact of the matter is that the Souls elements are hamfistedly shoved into the game in ways that're deeply annoying, and the Armored Core elements are just okay. For FromSoft's big return to their niche mecha darling, I frankly expected more - and I tend not to expect things hands down.
I could talk about the story, but it's merely there. It's alright. It didn't evoke any strong feelings or thoughts. Truthfully it was fairly predictable; if you're familiar with common sci-fi tropes, have played Daemon x Machina or have a pattern-seeking brain, you'll probably figure it all out by Chapter 2. As early as Chapter 3, I called all four of the major plot twists - one of which is NG+ exclusive.
It's told to you through stiff cutscenes, scenes of two characters talking vaguely, radio calls and exposition. And... All of it sucks, because the voice acting sucks. It's stilted, half-hearted, utterly droll and oftentimes goes on too long. It feels like the Three Houses cast reading someone else's fanfiction, just utterly droll. You have fucking Patrick Seitz in a main role and waste him like this? Come on.
It pains me to rag on this game so hard, because I direly wanted a modern AC game. An AC game where FromSoft dumped their newfound expertise, technical prowess and fat stacks of cash into.
Instead, they just dumped Sekiro into AC and called it a day.
[Post-google docs edit; Hi, that last line was just me kvetching about the game design, but it turns out AC6 was directed by a guy that was a design lead on Sekiro, so. Hey.]
That's really the core of how I feel about this game: Eh.
Before I go ahead, I'll lay my cards on the table.
I am an AC fan, but I wouldn't call myself a passionate one. I gunned the series in 2011 in preparation for Armored Core V (second-hand hype from a friend, you see) and moved on. A few years later, I did it again and fell in love with both AC4 and For Answer. Despite this love, AC has always been a C-lister as far as franchises I care about go, so I don't have too much personal investment in it.
AC6 is alright in some areas. Mech options are great, AC vs AC fights are toptier, music is exceptional, and it's pretty. I liked the ending fights and some of the story beats, really. This is a decent AC game, sometimes.
Unfortunately, this game succumbs to death by a thousand cuts as far as annoyances go. Some are pretty significant and near-omnipresent, while others are minor but still irritating.
I will talk about this game as two separate titles: AC6 - The Armored Core sequel, and AC6 - the Souls game.
I know some of you will groan at that, perhaps due to astroturfing by AC fans insisting that this game will be 'pure', or the devs' own insistence that they didn't bother including any Souls stuff. I believed both of them until I played the game.
As an AC title, AC6 sometimes has moments where it feels like the developers just get it. You're plonked in front of a gauntlet of enemies and silently told 'time to run it, nerd'. In these moments, the developers remember that AC as a series is first and foremost a puzzle game, with your mech potentially being the solution. Early on, these sections are a bit droll since enemies can't really hurt you and you oneshot them, but the threat level amps up later on and leads to some really engaging missions. The final missions on the route I chose were the peak of this, and are some of the finest in the series.
Unfortunately, they had no faith in their own game design, it seems. I know some more hardcore AC fans hate Repair Kits, but I don't - in theory, they allow the game to hit you with longer missions than the older games without you getting worn down just by sheer attrition, and it removes the demand for perfect play.
The actual issue is that the game introduces Repair Kits on top of both checkpoints and free trips to the Assembly when you die.
Despite the game and its tutorials insisting you should be adaptable and flexible in your construction, there's simply no need to do this. You can just beat your head against an immediate threat, hit a checkpoint, and switch to a completely different AC to tackle the next one. Or, get a consequence-free resupply before a boss. It completely torpedoes the need to make versatile builds, and oftentimes it's better to simply veer into the extremes of the speedy-tanky spectrum.
Also, a minor aside that I have no idea where to insert: Turning speed is still a stat but it has no bearing on your actual camera turn speed, leading to cases where you're locked onto an enemy but can't fire because your AC is still turning. It's... Strange? I feel like it was a decision made to make some fights clearer, but the end result is more annoying than anything.
Anyway, that's the AC portion of AC6 done with. Let's talk about the Dark Souls portion.
It is painfully, agonizingly obvious that parts of this game were - intentionally or not - designed to mimic the Souls formula.
There are two types of bosses in this game. The first are enemy Armored Cores. These are great. They're where the game excels with no-catches. They're fast, frantic and intense, doing enough damage to make you sweat but not enough to do 15k of HP damage in one attack. Each AC fight is a wonderful back and forth, and even the harder ones never really bothered me. Once I got gud, they were just pure instinct; dodging, countering and trading like my controller was part of my nervous system. True to form, seeing another AC pop up in the pre-boss cutscene was a delight. If every boss was these, I would give this game an easy 5/5.
The second type are Souls bosses. I'm not saying this due to the bosses being hard - because they're not. They're frustrating more than anything. Logically, they make sense: If AC missions are puzzle-gauntlets, then it's only natural the bosses are puzzles too, right?
Well, no. The Souls bosses are too much like their namesake, boasting obscene hitboxes and overtuned damage. While the AC fights will whittle you down and occasionally hit you with something painful, Souls bosses will decimate your HP and ACS (stagger) gauge with impunity.
Up above, I said that it was better to pick one extreme of the fragile-tanky spectrum and commit to it. With Souls bosses, it sometimes feels as though going fast is the only option. Tanky builds are simply too slow to dodge the bullet hell many bosses dump on you. Fuck dude, even faster builds get clipped by a few missiles.
Yes, there are ways to dodge a lot of these attacks, but nearly every Souls boss I fought in this game had a nasty habit of vaulting to the opposite side of the arena and unleashing one. Assault Boost did nothing, and even building for Quick Boost (dodge) resulted in me losing 30% health regardless. At first, I assumed it was just me. That the bosses were fine and I simply sucked.
But fortunately you can just replay bosses rather than having to NG+. So I experimented, practiced, made new builds, got gud and... Yes, the Souls bosses are just badly designed. They're an attempt by FromSoft to capture the spectacle of their more recent titles but without adjustments for the kind of game Armored Core is. This is especially obvious with a certain lategame boss, who myself and all of my IRL friends coined "Robot Malenia" independently. They are miserable, and I am deeply happy that the final boss of each ending is an AC fight. I know some will refute this, because every 'hard game' has people insisting that there's no such thing as bad design and that detractors are just bad, but no. These bosses are terrible, even when they work. When they don't (BALTHEUS), they're even worse.
I wish the Souls influence ended at the bosses. Instead, it affects the levels too. Not all of them, mercifully, but a fair chunk of them.
An average AC level is, as described above, a puzzle gauntlet. You spawn into an area with clearly visible enemies and have to carve the best path through while avoiding overexpenditure of ammo or loss of health. Sometimes the formula deviates, like with an escort mission or a stealth mission, but the core (hehe) is the same.
AC6 adds Souls levels to the formula. They're 'open' levels wherein the only real threat is ambushes. Endless ambushes. Ambushes from above, below, behind, in front, ambushes. It is every meme about Scholar of the First Sin made manifest. The very first one is kind of cool, in part because it has the Souls geography but the AC encounter design. It soon goes to shit, though. Towards the end there's 3 of these levels back to back and they feel like Miyazaki taunting me for believing the people who said there'd be no Souls in my AC. They're not even hard, just annoying. I personally love it when I interact with a combat log and immediately take 2000 damage from enemies that spawned in and used their heavier attack before I could humanely react.
The sad part here is that while the Souls bosses are a decent recreation of their source material - down to the awful canyon wide hitboxes - the levels are not. Ambushes are all they have, and their open space is filled with nothing. Occasionally, very rarely, you'll find a data log or a part, but these are few in number. In the early levels, there basically aren't any, which is a good way to condition players to ignore exploration and in turn miss out on some great AC components.
You might find my fixation on the Souls elements exhausting, and truth be told I agree with you. But the simple fact of the matter is that the Souls elements are hamfistedly shoved into the game in ways that're deeply annoying, and the Armored Core elements are just okay. For FromSoft's big return to their niche mecha darling, I frankly expected more - and I tend not to expect things hands down.
I could talk about the story, but it's merely there. It's alright. It didn't evoke any strong feelings or thoughts. Truthfully it was fairly predictable; if you're familiar with common sci-fi tropes, have played Daemon x Machina or have a pattern-seeking brain, you'll probably figure it all out by Chapter 2. As early as Chapter 3, I called all four of the major plot twists - one of which is NG+ exclusive.
It's told to you through stiff cutscenes, scenes of two characters talking vaguely, radio calls and exposition. And... All of it sucks, because the voice acting sucks. It's stilted, half-hearted, utterly droll and oftentimes goes on too long. It feels like the Three Houses cast reading someone else's fanfiction, just utterly droll. You have fucking Patrick Seitz in a main role and waste him like this? Come on.
It pains me to rag on this game so hard, because I direly wanted a modern AC game. An AC game where FromSoft dumped their newfound expertise, technical prowess and fat stacks of cash into.
Instead, they just dumped Sekiro into AC and called it a day.
[Post-google docs edit; Hi, that last line was just me kvetching about the game design, but it turns out AC6 was directed by a guy that was a design lead on Sekiro, so. Hey.]
This review contains spoilers
Breath of the Wild was a game I loved and I’m still very fond of. I think its weaknesses are pretty clear-cut and acknowledged by a lot of people, but the reason I still hold it in high regard is because of how cohesive it felt. Without sounding too corny or sycophantic, for a Nintendo who (especially at the time) were increasingly attached to an image of coddling and handholding, a Zelda game starting with the objective to “destroy Ganon” and declaring everything else to be optional felt like an important statement, it felt like a shift away from the streamlined, prescribed experiences of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and toward a vision of natural discovery, which landed for me because of how much it felt like the game was constructed around it: A breathing, living world, the sound of nature and the swaying of trees, puzzles revolving around non-discrete physics and grounded temperatures, world design intended to accentuate the simple desire to climb on top of things and jump off them, looking at something in the distance and thinking “I want to go there”. They were so committed to this vision that they abandoned the heroic, melodic field themes of the past in favour of something restrained, which was guaranteed to piss some people off. I’m under no illusion that Breath of the Wild was a perfect game, in fact, its an extremely flawed one, but as my tastes in games have aged and (hopefully) matured I’ve come to value thematic completeness over "content" more and more, which Breath of the Wild achieved, despite its flaws.
Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.
I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.
One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?
This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.
There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.
Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.
A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?
Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.
This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.
The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.
It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.
Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.
I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.
One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?
This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.
There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.
Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.
A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?
Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.
This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.
The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.
It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.
Resident Evil 4
2005
Resident Evil is one of my gaming blind spots. Prior to this I had never played one, largely due to a disinterest in horror. After seeing everyone play the remake in the past few weeks I finally decided to take the plunge into the original, and I'm glad to report that this game is excellent, even for a newcomer playing 18 years after its release.
All of RE4s parts are individually great, but what allows it to transcend is how they all complement one-another: Crowd control, resource management, and encounter design feed into and heighten each-other. Controlling a crowd in RE4 is an art, one with strict rules and procedures. Leon's tank movement means running away from enemies is a matter of turning and then running, highly incentivizing the player to stand their ground, and the crowd control mechanics are designed around this. Shoot enemies that get close in the head and they'll stumble back and allow you to kick them back into the enemies behind them, shoot enemies running at you in the leg and they'll eat shit and have to go through a very lengthy standing-up animation, coordinate it all to line up viscerally satisfying rifle collaterals on a line or shotgun shots and grenades on big clumps of enemies for maximum resource efficiency, a conveyor belt of micro decision-making that's prompted and heightened by the limited resources. Using the knife on downed enemies would be rote and boring in any other game but it's deeply satisfying here because it flows perfectly and you know it's saving you ammo. The classic gameplay dilemma of using your green plants now or waiting to combine them with a red one later, buying a first aid in the shop or saving up for upgrades, selling the treasures now for short-term funds or waiting to combine them for bigger gains later, all of it compounds with your performance in the combat. Take a lot of damage in one section and you might be on the back foot in healing items for a long time, your actions have consequences stretching far beyond immediate combat which lends each encounter real tension - encounters that feature such incredible creativity and variety. One room might have cultists firing flaming catapults at you in a long-range setting, the next might require you to send Ashley to open the way forward as you're tasked with simultaneously defending her and yourself at different vertical levels, the next might have you navigating a maze as dogs with a bullshit grab attack hunt you down, the bag of tricks seems to never ends and it rarely repeats an idea verbatim. In its best moments, every new room seems to ask you to approach things in a radically different way, despite Leon's relatively limited set of actions and tools. Remove the horror strings and the dark gothic setting and you would still have an incredibly tense game, all baked into the mechanics. The final ingredient elevating it to all-time great status is the camp, which is consistently hilarious. Leon saying "no thanks, bro" will repeat in my head forever, probably.
I didn't expect this game to be so hard! It's probably something experienced players gloss over, since the game becomes much easier once you know what you're doing, but this game kicked my ass, sometimes in ways that I felt crossed the line. The section where you get locked in a cage with the claw guy killed me about 20 times, and while I didn't mind the QTEs that much, the ones that instantly kill you for failing them just feel mean-spirited.
Three critiques I didn't have a good place for: Ashley was a massive disappointment, she says remarkably little throughout the game and I was expecting a lot more interaction between her and Leon. Also, these puzzles suck! You know it's bad when there's a slide puzzle - the bottom of the barrel of puzzles. Finally, the island section is a bit mixed, and veers too close to generic action in places, the worst offender being the helicopter section.
All of RE4s parts are individually great, but what allows it to transcend is how they all complement one-another: Crowd control, resource management, and encounter design feed into and heighten each-other. Controlling a crowd in RE4 is an art, one with strict rules and procedures. Leon's tank movement means running away from enemies is a matter of turning and then running, highly incentivizing the player to stand their ground, and the crowd control mechanics are designed around this. Shoot enemies that get close in the head and they'll stumble back and allow you to kick them back into the enemies behind them, shoot enemies running at you in the leg and they'll eat shit and have to go through a very lengthy standing-up animation, coordinate it all to line up viscerally satisfying rifle collaterals on a line or shotgun shots and grenades on big clumps of enemies for maximum resource efficiency, a conveyor belt of micro decision-making that's prompted and heightened by the limited resources. Using the knife on downed enemies would be rote and boring in any other game but it's deeply satisfying here because it flows perfectly and you know it's saving you ammo. The classic gameplay dilemma of using your green plants now or waiting to combine them with a red one later, buying a first aid in the shop or saving up for upgrades, selling the treasures now for short-term funds or waiting to combine them for bigger gains later, all of it compounds with your performance in the combat. Take a lot of damage in one section and you might be on the back foot in healing items for a long time, your actions have consequences stretching far beyond immediate combat which lends each encounter real tension - encounters that feature such incredible creativity and variety. One room might have cultists firing flaming catapults at you in a long-range setting, the next might require you to send Ashley to open the way forward as you're tasked with simultaneously defending her and yourself at different vertical levels, the next might have you navigating a maze as dogs with a bullshit grab attack hunt you down, the bag of tricks seems to never ends and it rarely repeats an idea verbatim. In its best moments, every new room seems to ask you to approach things in a radically different way, despite Leon's relatively limited set of actions and tools. Remove the horror strings and the dark gothic setting and you would still have an incredibly tense game, all baked into the mechanics. The final ingredient elevating it to all-time great status is the camp, which is consistently hilarious. Leon saying "no thanks, bro" will repeat in my head forever, probably.
I didn't expect this game to be so hard! It's probably something experienced players gloss over, since the game becomes much easier once you know what you're doing, but this game kicked my ass, sometimes in ways that I felt crossed the line. The section where you get locked in a cage with the claw guy killed me about 20 times, and while I didn't mind the QTEs that much, the ones that instantly kill you for failing them just feel mean-spirited.
Three critiques I didn't have a good place for: Ashley was a massive disappointment, she says remarkably little throughout the game and I was expecting a lot more interaction between her and Leon. Also, these puzzles suck! You know it's bad when there's a slide puzzle - the bottom of the barrel of puzzles. Finally, the island section is a bit mixed, and veers too close to generic action in places, the worst offender being the helicopter section.
Ninja Gaiden Black
2005
I desperately want to be able to love this game, I think the fundamentals of combat are excellent and I deeply respect what it’s doing on that front. There’s a tendency in character action games, even ones I love (thinking of DMC primarily) for enemies to be relegated to being a punching-bag, whether they’re too passive or not really able to keep up with the protagonist's superior mobility. Ryu is one of the most mobile (and well animated) of them all - being able to wall run and flip over the heads of enemies while air-slashing through them, but it's cleverly counterbalanced by enemies having very quick attacks and especially grabs which can go through blocks without it being possible to react, which necessitates the constant use of that mobility to avoid being pinned down. In that sense it has a fighting game feel to it, simultaneously promoting good aggressive and defensive play. Those prone to getting frustrated would call untelegraphed, unblockable attacks “bad game design”, but its constructed in accordance with Ryu’s toolkit and gives the combat incredible stakes, often focused around who lands the first hit, and lends a very distinct thematic character to Ryu as a human at the height of training rather than someone with supernatural power, which is felt because the player has to approach combat in a similarly disciplined way. Other ideas like the essence mechanic, despite being poorly conveyed, are also very good and make charge moves actually useful when even in the best action games they’re mostly useless due to being so slow.
So why don’t I love it? I think as early as chapter 6, the game plummets in the quality of its level and boss ideas and never really climbs back up. Every platforming section feels finicky and frustrating, the ones where you have to platform while ranged enemies shoot at you feel particularly sadistic, the military base infinitely spawning laser drones that send you flying if they hit you takes my nomination for the worst of all. I don’t mind the general difficulty of the game but these sections are difficult in a way which is not interesting or enjoyable to engage with. The swimming chapter is another example of an idea so disconnected from what makes the core mechanics good that it's difficult to imagine anyone finding it fun. Bosses were also mostly pretty terrible. Bland and simplistic movesets aside, I feel this combat is very obviously complimented by opponents similarly sized to Ryu who will react to being hit, whereas the game is content to throw these massive boss monsters at you over and over again, even having the gall to recycle a very bad worm miniboss four times in quick succession. There seemed to be a commitment to having diverse scenarios but some of its ideas are awful: infinitely spawning phantom fish that lock you into a grab animation, fights vs tanks and helicopters with awful ranged combat, grab attacks in the final tower that pull you through the floor and make you slog through the same section again, and so on.
It's fashionable to bemoan the shift of action games away from exploration and worldbuilding and towards an endless stream of combat arenas but I'll be honest and say that I found the attempt at an interconnected world here pretty underwhelming, at no point did any of its lame lock-and-key puzzles or frictionless backtracking impress me. While I agree with the overall sentiment about CAG's neglecting the importance of their worlds, I would rather not return to this particular incarnation of it.
It feels pointless to complain about the story given that nobody cares but it’s kind of impressively bad and incoherent, Rachel is a particularly trashfire character design that feels like what outsiders to gaming have in mind when they deride the gaming sphere as juvenile and unserious and every cutscene that with her in it had me looking over my shoulder to quickly get the game off the monitor if someone walked in.
The camera is a common point of complaint with a lot of players. Its permanent inverted controls (+ a very awkward activation which I didn’t figure out for quite a while) already make it inherently weak but the game seems determined to construct environments that make the camera freak out in its winding, claustrophobic tunnels. There are frequent combat arenas where enemies will just spawn behind you, requiring you to either reposition or just try to guess what the enemy is doing, which feels like playing around a bad camera rather than actually engaging with the mechanics. Context sensitivity is another issue revolving around this. Interact and attack being the same button was particularly frustrating but in terms of the most frequent fuck-ups flying swallow is inconsistent both in activation and damage and will just sometimes hit an armored part of the enemy and do nothing.
My laundry list of gripes I can only lay out in a boring manner because it's not a unified problem but a sort of consistent stream of ancillary issues that stick themselves onto a very fundamentally sound core, and so I do come out the other end still favourable towards Ninja Gaiden Black, but I am disappointed that unlike a lot of people I respect on this platform I can’t really call it one of my favourites. I will say that I think the visuals of the game are generally very good and I could easily see myself appreciating it more on a second playthrough, but for now it can sit at a strong 7.
So why don’t I love it? I think as early as chapter 6, the game plummets in the quality of its level and boss ideas and never really climbs back up. Every platforming section feels finicky and frustrating, the ones where you have to platform while ranged enemies shoot at you feel particularly sadistic, the military base infinitely spawning laser drones that send you flying if they hit you takes my nomination for the worst of all. I don’t mind the general difficulty of the game but these sections are difficult in a way which is not interesting or enjoyable to engage with. The swimming chapter is another example of an idea so disconnected from what makes the core mechanics good that it's difficult to imagine anyone finding it fun. Bosses were also mostly pretty terrible. Bland and simplistic movesets aside, I feel this combat is very obviously complimented by opponents similarly sized to Ryu who will react to being hit, whereas the game is content to throw these massive boss monsters at you over and over again, even having the gall to recycle a very bad worm miniboss four times in quick succession. There seemed to be a commitment to having diverse scenarios but some of its ideas are awful: infinitely spawning phantom fish that lock you into a grab animation, fights vs tanks and helicopters with awful ranged combat, grab attacks in the final tower that pull you through the floor and make you slog through the same section again, and so on.
It's fashionable to bemoan the shift of action games away from exploration and worldbuilding and towards an endless stream of combat arenas but I'll be honest and say that I found the attempt at an interconnected world here pretty underwhelming, at no point did any of its lame lock-and-key puzzles or frictionless backtracking impress me. While I agree with the overall sentiment about CAG's neglecting the importance of their worlds, I would rather not return to this particular incarnation of it.
It feels pointless to complain about the story given that nobody cares but it’s kind of impressively bad and incoherent, Rachel is a particularly trashfire character design that feels like what outsiders to gaming have in mind when they deride the gaming sphere as juvenile and unserious and every cutscene that with her in it had me looking over my shoulder to quickly get the game off the monitor if someone walked in.
The camera is a common point of complaint with a lot of players. Its permanent inverted controls (+ a very awkward activation which I didn’t figure out for quite a while) already make it inherently weak but the game seems determined to construct environments that make the camera freak out in its winding, claustrophobic tunnels. There are frequent combat arenas where enemies will just spawn behind you, requiring you to either reposition or just try to guess what the enemy is doing, which feels like playing around a bad camera rather than actually engaging with the mechanics. Context sensitivity is another issue revolving around this. Interact and attack being the same button was particularly frustrating but in terms of the most frequent fuck-ups flying swallow is inconsistent both in activation and damage and will just sometimes hit an armored part of the enemy and do nothing.
My laundry list of gripes I can only lay out in a boring manner because it's not a unified problem but a sort of consistent stream of ancillary issues that stick themselves onto a very fundamentally sound core, and so I do come out the other end still favourable towards Ninja Gaiden Black, but I am disappointed that unlike a lot of people I respect on this platform I can’t really call it one of my favourites. I will say that I think the visuals of the game are generally very good and I could easily see myself appreciating it more on a second playthrough, but for now it can sit at a strong 7.
Purely judged as a remaster, this would easily be 5 stars. The overhaul does far more than a simple texture and resolution upscale. Almost every asset in the game has basically been remade from the ground up to fully utilize the hardware of the Switch, from the lighting and character models to even the polygon counts in the environments. Everything received a makeover, and as a result, you could easily mistake it for a native Switch title and it borderline looks like something that should require PS4-level hardware in order to play, but nonetheless magically runs on the Switch; all of this while maintaining 60 FPS to boot.
If there is any complaint I have about its graphics, it's mainly in the odd decision to redo Samus' arm cannon animation such that it's much more muted and stiff during movement now. Previously in all other versions, there was more of a sense of tactile sway when moving around in the game, and it was just generally more pleasing on the eyes. I am not sure why they felt the need to change this animation, but nonetheless they did, unless oddly enough, you select the pointer-based control scheme from the Wii trilogy, and then for some reason it defaults back to the old animation. It's a curious choice, but overall not enough to seriously deduct any points from the game. Tallon IV looks more gorgeous than ever, and the aesthetic they chose for the update, while slightly different, is mostly quite faithful to the game's original art direction.
Minor nitpicks aside, Metroid Prime Remastered is a technical marvel to behold. However, a game is more than just graphics and eye candy, and while Prime Remastered brings plenty of this in spades, gameplay is still equally important, and an aspect that I think the fanbase has far too often overlooked when it comes to its many flaws.
For instance, many Metroid fans will vigorously rail against the so-called "pixel hunting" sections of Other M for being tedious, frustrating, and time-wasting affairs, but curiously have nothing at all to say about the MANDATORY artifact hunt at the end of Metroid Prime, which serves as nothing more than pure multi-hour-long filler with no upgrades or rewards for collecting other than to just gate your progress to the final boss. Nor do fans have anything to say about the numerous backtracking sequences in general during the latter half of the game, as well as the excessive over-abundance of scannable objects; most of which have very little interesting to say or add to the story, unless you're the type of person who enjoys reading random articles on Wikipedia for fun. I would surmise there are no less than 50 scannable objects within the opening space station section alone, which if one were to scan and read them all, could easily balloon the length of this prologue segment from 15 minutes to instead well over an hour. As far as I'm concerned, any complaint regarding Other M's pixel hunting sections comes across as disingenuous without also acknowledging these far more egregious time-sinks in Metroid Prime.
Furthermore, Prime is often lauded for its "bold" decision to switch to a first person perspective in its transition to 3D, yet at the same time fans will often downplay any discussions surrounding Prime's gunplay and combat because it draws attention to the fact that the game doesn't actually benefit at all from this change in perspective. After all, what does Prime truly gain from switching to first person? Certainly from a platforming and mobility angle, all this does is hamper Samus' movement, making her more sluggish to control. This is especially apparent if you compare this to Metroid's other recent (and much superior) release, Metroid Dread. Samus is far more agile and fluid to control in Dread, making the act of movement in itself fun to just hop, flip, and swing around as you please. With Metroid Prime on the other hand, Samus chugs along at the pace of a Resident Evil protagonist, but without half as interesting or challenging combat to make up for it. She even outright loses her screw attack and speed booster abilities, and switching to morph ball mode takes at least twice as long as it does in Dread because the camera has to adjust to a third person view.
So if Samus doesn't gain anything from the movement side of things, what else are we to expect than surely a greater emphasis on gunplay and combat? After all, this is where a first person perspective tends to excel. Yet anyone being truly honest with themselves knows that Metroid Prime's gunplay pales in comparison to the likes of Halo: Combat Evolved or frankly any sufficiently competent DOOM clone. It just doesn't feel all that good. Functional, yes, but ultimately pretty bland by comparison. Samus' weaponry is fairly limited compared to other shooters, and most encounters merely involve locking onto the target and letting the camera handle the rest. There's rarely any aiming involved.
This is the point where someone may be quick to exclaim "Metroid Prime is not a first person shooter though! It's a first person adventure, you see." But as I've already noted earlier, if the goal of the game is to place a greater emphasis on exploration and adventure, then wouldn't it be prudent to make the actual act of movement or, well, adventuring, feel more fun and satisfying, not slow and tanky as it is in Metroid Prime? Also, if it was the developers' intent to de-emphasize the shooting in order to focus on more adventurous elements, then why is it that the phazon mines largely consist of a series of hallway fights with inflated-health space pirates, or infuriating phazon-infused metroids? Why are the boss battles some of the longest in the entire series, with the Metroid Prime in particular clocking in at roughly half an hour on average (and that's assuming you didn't die and have to start all over)? At the end of the day, we are often forced to engage with the game's combat mechanics for extended periods of time and there's simply no excuse why those mechanics couldn't be more fun or interesting.
Calling this game a "first person adventure" as a means of sweeping its mediocre gunplay under the rug is not doing the game any favors, because whether we're comparing its platforming and movement mechanics to other metroidvanias or its gunplay and combat to other first person shooters, it doesn't stack up on both accounts. Which just brings me back to my original point: why does this game need to be in first person? Are the small gains to immersion so important that we literally have to weaken all aspects of the gameplay for it? I'm sorry, but being able to see rain droplets trickle down my visor does not even come close to making up for all the gameplay sacrifices made here.
To the extent that the first person perspective offers any genuinely unique gameplay aspects at all, it is in the introduction of visors. Yet in practice all of the mechanics these visors bring to the table feel more like chores than satisfying new abilities. As I already mentioned, the scan visor amounts to nothing more than a glorified Wikipedia browser and creates massive pacing issues in a game that already suffers from many pacing issues, and the other visors do nothing more than make cosmetic changes to how you see the environment around you; most often in ways that only make it harder to see what you're doing, so you just want to get through with it quickly and turn the visor back off. Literally the sole new feature that Prime's first person perspective offers is just a nuisance more than anything, so there's no point to any of this.
The truth of the matter is, we now know through developer interviews that the only reason this game ended up in first person was because some business brainlets over at Nintendo of Japan insisted that Retro Studios should do this in order to make the game more appealing to a western market. It had nothing to do with presenting an interesting new gameplay angle to the series; it was just a marketing gimmick for the west. That's it. And Retro's devs rightfully fought against this decision quite aggressively, but eventually Nintendo won out. It's honestly astonishing that it was an error on Nintendo's part, as usually they have better instincts than western developers when it comes to gameplay considerations, but this was a rare case of the reverse. It's a shame Retro didn't push back just a little harder; things could have turned out so much different.
Yes, I just spent over half this review fixating on Prime's first person perspective, but it's because this single design choice influences every other aspect of the game in ways that I think many vastly underestimate, and it cannot be overstated how much it detrimentally affects the core Metroid formula. Solid platforming and movement is central to any good metroidvania, and it's very hard to translate those mechanics to a first person environment. Imagine how disorienting it would be to play a Mario game entirely in first person for example. Sure you might be able to get it functional, but any slightly more sophisticated moves like backflips or mid-air ground pounds would feel pretty awkward not being able to see the full environment around you. Inevitably many aspects of the gameplay would be compromised, and with Metroid it's no different. It's simply not a good idea, which makes it especially frustrating to me that the fanbase has so thoroughly latched onto this as the definitive 3D Metroid formula.
If Prime Remastered receives criticism at all from anyone outside of myself, players tend to focus on its lack of checkpoints or fast travel. However, I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of where its real problems lie, as any proper Metroid game should never need any of these additions. After all, the numerous hallway fights with space pirates in the phazon mines wouldn't be such a slog if the shooting in the game actually felt fun, and the artifact hunt wouldn't feel half as laborious if Samus could move as nimbly as she does in the sidescrollers. Part of the fun of a good Metroid game is basking in the immersive atmosphere of its world and wanting to spend more time exploring every last corner for hidden secrets, but this gameplay loop only works when the movement mechanics match the quality of the world design. Backtracking never feels like busywork in Super Metroid because speed boosting and screw attacking my way through Brinstar never grows tiresome. So the key to fixing Metroid Prime isn't making it easier to skip over content, but to actually make that content fun to engage with in the first place.
Prime's design is incredibly devious because it's so good at tricking players into thinking it's much better than it actually is through sheer bedazzlement with its production values and atmosphere. Despite all my complaints about the first person perspective, lackluster combat, and sluggish movement, most of this is subtle and slips under the radar at first to the average player. The game distracts you with its absolutely stunning visuals and casts a hypnotic spell with its impeccable soundtrack, all the while initially being careful to not make enemies too aggressive or annoying, and mixes in some solid puzzles for good measure. But by the time players encounter the back half of the game and are bombarded by a barrage of frustrations from the likes of the chozo ghosts, phazon mines, artifact hunt, and obnoxiously lengthy final boss battle, the idea has already solidified in their minds that Metroid Prime is a great game, and even if they end up quitting from the extreme padding before they reach the end, all they'll likely remember is that strong first impression. Yet we must be willing to point out how problematic these gameplay elements are because I truly believe they are holding back the franchise from greatness.
Contrary to what some may believe after reading all this, I criticize this game because I love Metroid. I expect better of Metroid. It deserves better. I think we can have a 3D Metroid that has all the shiny bells and whistles of a AAA production, but without sacrificing the quality metroidvania gameplay that equally made this series so special. Just free Samus from the chains of first person already. I promise you, there are many, many more ways you can design a 3D Metroid game besides this or Other M. Imagine what it could be with the speed and fluidity of Dread combined with the jaw-dropping immersive visuals of Prime. Sadly with Metroid Prime 4 now on the horizon, I fear we may be in for another couple decades of this franchise being held back by a stale and deeply flawed formula.
But, at the end of the day, Metroid Prime is a competently made game with impressive visuals and an atmospheric soundtrack that all lives up to the franchise's pedigree. It's just too bad that it couldn't be more than only competent and very pretty to look at.
If there is any complaint I have about its graphics, it's mainly in the odd decision to redo Samus' arm cannon animation such that it's much more muted and stiff during movement now. Previously in all other versions, there was more of a sense of tactile sway when moving around in the game, and it was just generally more pleasing on the eyes. I am not sure why they felt the need to change this animation, but nonetheless they did, unless oddly enough, you select the pointer-based control scheme from the Wii trilogy, and then for some reason it defaults back to the old animation. It's a curious choice, but overall not enough to seriously deduct any points from the game. Tallon IV looks more gorgeous than ever, and the aesthetic they chose for the update, while slightly different, is mostly quite faithful to the game's original art direction.
Minor nitpicks aside, Metroid Prime Remastered is a technical marvel to behold. However, a game is more than just graphics and eye candy, and while Prime Remastered brings plenty of this in spades, gameplay is still equally important, and an aspect that I think the fanbase has far too often overlooked when it comes to its many flaws.
For instance, many Metroid fans will vigorously rail against the so-called "pixel hunting" sections of Other M for being tedious, frustrating, and time-wasting affairs, but curiously have nothing at all to say about the MANDATORY artifact hunt at the end of Metroid Prime, which serves as nothing more than pure multi-hour-long filler with no upgrades or rewards for collecting other than to just gate your progress to the final boss. Nor do fans have anything to say about the numerous backtracking sequences in general during the latter half of the game, as well as the excessive over-abundance of scannable objects; most of which have very little interesting to say or add to the story, unless you're the type of person who enjoys reading random articles on Wikipedia for fun. I would surmise there are no less than 50 scannable objects within the opening space station section alone, which if one were to scan and read them all, could easily balloon the length of this prologue segment from 15 minutes to instead well over an hour. As far as I'm concerned, any complaint regarding Other M's pixel hunting sections comes across as disingenuous without also acknowledging these far more egregious time-sinks in Metroid Prime.
Furthermore, Prime is often lauded for its "bold" decision to switch to a first person perspective in its transition to 3D, yet at the same time fans will often downplay any discussions surrounding Prime's gunplay and combat because it draws attention to the fact that the game doesn't actually benefit at all from this change in perspective. After all, what does Prime truly gain from switching to first person? Certainly from a platforming and mobility angle, all this does is hamper Samus' movement, making her more sluggish to control. This is especially apparent if you compare this to Metroid's other recent (and much superior) release, Metroid Dread. Samus is far more agile and fluid to control in Dread, making the act of movement in itself fun to just hop, flip, and swing around as you please. With Metroid Prime on the other hand, Samus chugs along at the pace of a Resident Evil protagonist, but without half as interesting or challenging combat to make up for it. She even outright loses her screw attack and speed booster abilities, and switching to morph ball mode takes at least twice as long as it does in Dread because the camera has to adjust to a third person view.
So if Samus doesn't gain anything from the movement side of things, what else are we to expect than surely a greater emphasis on gunplay and combat? After all, this is where a first person perspective tends to excel. Yet anyone being truly honest with themselves knows that Metroid Prime's gunplay pales in comparison to the likes of Halo: Combat Evolved or frankly any sufficiently competent DOOM clone. It just doesn't feel all that good. Functional, yes, but ultimately pretty bland by comparison. Samus' weaponry is fairly limited compared to other shooters, and most encounters merely involve locking onto the target and letting the camera handle the rest. There's rarely any aiming involved.
This is the point where someone may be quick to exclaim "Metroid Prime is not a first person shooter though! It's a first person adventure, you see." But as I've already noted earlier, if the goal of the game is to place a greater emphasis on exploration and adventure, then wouldn't it be prudent to make the actual act of movement or, well, adventuring, feel more fun and satisfying, not slow and tanky as it is in Metroid Prime? Also, if it was the developers' intent to de-emphasize the shooting in order to focus on more adventurous elements, then why is it that the phazon mines largely consist of a series of hallway fights with inflated-health space pirates, or infuriating phazon-infused metroids? Why are the boss battles some of the longest in the entire series, with the Metroid Prime in particular clocking in at roughly half an hour on average (and that's assuming you didn't die and have to start all over)? At the end of the day, we are often forced to engage with the game's combat mechanics for extended periods of time and there's simply no excuse why those mechanics couldn't be more fun or interesting.
Calling this game a "first person adventure" as a means of sweeping its mediocre gunplay under the rug is not doing the game any favors, because whether we're comparing its platforming and movement mechanics to other metroidvanias or its gunplay and combat to other first person shooters, it doesn't stack up on both accounts. Which just brings me back to my original point: why does this game need to be in first person? Are the small gains to immersion so important that we literally have to weaken all aspects of the gameplay for it? I'm sorry, but being able to see rain droplets trickle down my visor does not even come close to making up for all the gameplay sacrifices made here.
To the extent that the first person perspective offers any genuinely unique gameplay aspects at all, it is in the introduction of visors. Yet in practice all of the mechanics these visors bring to the table feel more like chores than satisfying new abilities. As I already mentioned, the scan visor amounts to nothing more than a glorified Wikipedia browser and creates massive pacing issues in a game that already suffers from many pacing issues, and the other visors do nothing more than make cosmetic changes to how you see the environment around you; most often in ways that only make it harder to see what you're doing, so you just want to get through with it quickly and turn the visor back off. Literally the sole new feature that Prime's first person perspective offers is just a nuisance more than anything, so there's no point to any of this.
The truth of the matter is, we now know through developer interviews that the only reason this game ended up in first person was because some business brainlets over at Nintendo of Japan insisted that Retro Studios should do this in order to make the game more appealing to a western market. It had nothing to do with presenting an interesting new gameplay angle to the series; it was just a marketing gimmick for the west. That's it. And Retro's devs rightfully fought against this decision quite aggressively, but eventually Nintendo won out. It's honestly astonishing that it was an error on Nintendo's part, as usually they have better instincts than western developers when it comes to gameplay considerations, but this was a rare case of the reverse. It's a shame Retro didn't push back just a little harder; things could have turned out so much different.
Yes, I just spent over half this review fixating on Prime's first person perspective, but it's because this single design choice influences every other aspect of the game in ways that I think many vastly underestimate, and it cannot be overstated how much it detrimentally affects the core Metroid formula. Solid platforming and movement is central to any good metroidvania, and it's very hard to translate those mechanics to a first person environment. Imagine how disorienting it would be to play a Mario game entirely in first person for example. Sure you might be able to get it functional, but any slightly more sophisticated moves like backflips or mid-air ground pounds would feel pretty awkward not being able to see the full environment around you. Inevitably many aspects of the gameplay would be compromised, and with Metroid it's no different. It's simply not a good idea, which makes it especially frustrating to me that the fanbase has so thoroughly latched onto this as the definitive 3D Metroid formula.
If Prime Remastered receives criticism at all from anyone outside of myself, players tend to focus on its lack of checkpoints or fast travel. However, I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of where its real problems lie, as any proper Metroid game should never need any of these additions. After all, the numerous hallway fights with space pirates in the phazon mines wouldn't be such a slog if the shooting in the game actually felt fun, and the artifact hunt wouldn't feel half as laborious if Samus could move as nimbly as she does in the sidescrollers. Part of the fun of a good Metroid game is basking in the immersive atmosphere of its world and wanting to spend more time exploring every last corner for hidden secrets, but this gameplay loop only works when the movement mechanics match the quality of the world design. Backtracking never feels like busywork in Super Metroid because speed boosting and screw attacking my way through Brinstar never grows tiresome. So the key to fixing Metroid Prime isn't making it easier to skip over content, but to actually make that content fun to engage with in the first place.
Prime's design is incredibly devious because it's so good at tricking players into thinking it's much better than it actually is through sheer bedazzlement with its production values and atmosphere. Despite all my complaints about the first person perspective, lackluster combat, and sluggish movement, most of this is subtle and slips under the radar at first to the average player. The game distracts you with its absolutely stunning visuals and casts a hypnotic spell with its impeccable soundtrack, all the while initially being careful to not make enemies too aggressive or annoying, and mixes in some solid puzzles for good measure. But by the time players encounter the back half of the game and are bombarded by a barrage of frustrations from the likes of the chozo ghosts, phazon mines, artifact hunt, and obnoxiously lengthy final boss battle, the idea has already solidified in their minds that Metroid Prime is a great game, and even if they end up quitting from the extreme padding before they reach the end, all they'll likely remember is that strong first impression. Yet we must be willing to point out how problematic these gameplay elements are because I truly believe they are holding back the franchise from greatness.
Contrary to what some may believe after reading all this, I criticize this game because I love Metroid. I expect better of Metroid. It deserves better. I think we can have a 3D Metroid that has all the shiny bells and whistles of a AAA production, but without sacrificing the quality metroidvania gameplay that equally made this series so special. Just free Samus from the chains of first person already. I promise you, there are many, many more ways you can design a 3D Metroid game besides this or Other M. Imagine what it could be with the speed and fluidity of Dread combined with the jaw-dropping immersive visuals of Prime. Sadly with Metroid Prime 4 now on the horizon, I fear we may be in for another couple decades of this franchise being held back by a stale and deeply flawed formula.
But, at the end of the day, Metroid Prime is a competently made game with impressive visuals and an atmospheric soundtrack that all lives up to the franchise's pedigree. It's just too bad that it couldn't be more than only competent and very pretty to look at.
It's good to be playing new games again [Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space...]
2002's Metroid Prime was my introduction to both the Metroid series and the search-action genre it spawned, and as far as first impressions go, I can't fathom it going much worse. I had such an unpleasant time with the game that I convinced myself I just didn't like the genre as a whole and cordoned myself off from it for nearly two decades. However, after playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night back in 2019, I finally found the motivation to sit down and run through the classic 2D Metroids, and I thought they were pretty damn good.
I think it's important to reappraise things. After all, people grow and tastes change. I thought I hated Metroid, but now I am one of the initiated, immersed in Samus Aran's struggles and excited to get lost in strange, alien worlds with her. With the announcement of Metroid Prime Remastered, I thought "Holy shit they're charging 40$ for this, huh?" and went back to picking lint out of my belly button between rounds of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai. About two weeks later I saw actual footage from the game and realized it was a more substantive overhaul than I initially thought, and I shifted my thought process to "you know, there's no better time to replay this game than now." So I promptly bought a site-to-store copy from Wal-Mart which was cancelled because they ran out of stock, then I drove over to Gamestop and they were also out of stock, then I called the other Wal-Mart in town and they were out of stock, and then I went to Target and they had precisely one copy left which I bought for full price along with a Spectra Pro Controller because I refuse to ever play another game with those dogshit Joycons ever again and oh my god finally... Metroid Prime. It's been a long road.
Metroid Prime's opening aboard the space pirate's research station is one of the most iconic sequences from gaming's sixth generation. Every beat was immediately recognizable, as comforting and familiar as visiting a childhood home. Even the ensuing two hours on Tallon IV are remarkably smooth, with near perfect pacing and excellent level design that subtly guides the player onto the game's critical path, acclimating them to Samus' ever-expanding kit of suit upgrades in a way that is deliberate yet never overstated. Needless to say, I found a good groove with Metroid Prime early on and started to question what negatives I ever saw in it to begin with.
Having finished the game only a couple weeks prior, my friend Larry Davis has been pontificating to me about how bad Prime is. Worse than Other M, even! I disagree with that because not a single minute of Other M is good, and I've encouraged him to go through the arduous process of whipping a Wii out and refamiliarizing himself with that nightmare, but his greater point that Metroid Prime is a game that only becomes more agonizing the further you progress is one that I agree with 100%. The Phendrana research facility was my personal turning point, and the area that I feel highlights a shift in Metroid Prime's rhythm that is for the worst and which persists until the credits roll.
Backtracking is a pillar of this series, and it is not something I have an issue with inherently, but the way it manifests in Prime feels like it exists to pad time. Upon gaining the thermal visor, you must trudge your way back out of the research facility and march a considerable distance across the map to find your next objective, with little changing along the way other than a few rooms now have the lights off. Whereas the opening two hours has very fluid and naturalistic pathing that doesn't tread on your agency, the remainder of Prime sees you zig-zagging between distant locations with very little sense of where or why. It's like someone at Retro threw a dart at a map to determine where your next upgrade is, with even less consideration given to making the run there enjoyable.
Making things even more tedious is the fact that most areas are designed around specific one-time combat encounters and events. What was once a thrilling set piece is now a hassle that far more encourages you to simply zip past enemies and carry on, assuming you even can as a considerable amount intentionally create bottlenecks to force you into a fight. Unfortunately, combat feels patently underwhelming. Enemies are incredibly spongy and derivative, and the only real strategic element late in the game entails switching to the correct color-coded beam to take out elemental-infused rehashes of previously fought pirates and Metroids. Fun fun fun fun.
Metroid Prime Remastered does make a number of improvements over the original game, at least. The most obvious is in appearance. This might be the best-looking game I've played on the Switch. Environments feel much moodier and more atmospheric, and I really love the soft lighting of locations like the Chozo Ruins. Metroid Prime has always had good art direction, but the increased fidelity really helps it shine. I can only imagine how much better this would look on current hardware, but it's impressive for a game that's a generation behind. That said, I have heard from at least one friend who is far, faaar more familiar with Metroid than I am that the filters for the various visors are straight fucked. He claims the thermal visor made him physically ill, and although I did not have quite that severe of a reaction to it, the processing going on for the thermal and X-ray visors is so intrusive that they rob them of their functionality.
Controls are improved as well, though with a couple important caveats. By default, the game now has dual stick support, allowing you to play Prime like a normal first-person game.To be fair, in 2002 this sort of control scheme had yet to be codified, and I can only think of two games off the top of my head that supported it: Quake 2 for the PS1 and Timesplitters, I believe, although if you wanna stretch it, GoldenEye technically did if you wanted to do some real freak shit and whip out a second controller. (Correction: Halo: Combat Evolved predates Prime by a full year, and I consistently forget this.) However, you can tell that Prime was not built around this more free-wheelin' control method given how targeting still seems to be the most efficient way to approach enemy encounters, though having total control over the camera otherwise makes exploring Tallon IV feel more immersive. On the other hand, I do have some beef with how combo-weapons are mapped. You have to charge your weapon and tap the missile fire button, which requires you to awkwardly paw the controller with your middle finger on the trigger and index on the bumper. This is opposed to, for example, just having it set to charge a combo-weapon by holding the bumper itself. It's archaic and unnecessary and dampens its utility in a fight, which - in all fairness - is probably the point.
By hour four of ten in this game that has no business being longer than five, I started to think about how Metroid Prime is so clearly a game made by an outside studio, not because I have that knowledge in my head already but because that's how it feels. There's a reverence for the material, but a lack of understanding on what makes Metroid feel good that can only be communicated through its shortcomings, and the way it fumbles crucial elements like the routing of its critical path. Playing this again 21 years later has not given me an appreciation for Metroid Prime outside of the quality of life and graphical improvements the remaster has made. It has only reminded me of why I steered clear of the series and genre for such a long time after. Two stars for being Metroid Prime plus an additional half star for looking purdy.
We eat the sacred cow and together we burn.
2002's Metroid Prime was my introduction to both the Metroid series and the search-action genre it spawned, and as far as first impressions go, I can't fathom it going much worse. I had such an unpleasant time with the game that I convinced myself I just didn't like the genre as a whole and cordoned myself off from it for nearly two decades. However, after playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night back in 2019, I finally found the motivation to sit down and run through the classic 2D Metroids, and I thought they were pretty damn good.
I think it's important to reappraise things. After all, people grow and tastes change. I thought I hated Metroid, but now I am one of the initiated, immersed in Samus Aran's struggles and excited to get lost in strange, alien worlds with her. With the announcement of Metroid Prime Remastered, I thought "Holy shit they're charging 40$ for this, huh?" and went back to picking lint out of my belly button between rounds of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai. About two weeks later I saw actual footage from the game and realized it was a more substantive overhaul than I initially thought, and I shifted my thought process to "you know, there's no better time to replay this game than now." So I promptly bought a site-to-store copy from Wal-Mart which was cancelled because they ran out of stock, then I drove over to Gamestop and they were also out of stock, then I called the other Wal-Mart in town and they were out of stock, and then I went to Target and they had precisely one copy left which I bought for full price along with a Spectra Pro Controller because I refuse to ever play another game with those dogshit Joycons ever again and oh my god finally... Metroid Prime. It's been a long road.
Metroid Prime's opening aboard the space pirate's research station is one of the most iconic sequences from gaming's sixth generation. Every beat was immediately recognizable, as comforting and familiar as visiting a childhood home. Even the ensuing two hours on Tallon IV are remarkably smooth, with near perfect pacing and excellent level design that subtly guides the player onto the game's critical path, acclimating them to Samus' ever-expanding kit of suit upgrades in a way that is deliberate yet never overstated. Needless to say, I found a good groove with Metroid Prime early on and started to question what negatives I ever saw in it to begin with.
Having finished the game only a couple weeks prior, my friend Larry Davis has been pontificating to me about how bad Prime is. Worse than Other M, even! I disagree with that because not a single minute of Other M is good, and I've encouraged him to go through the arduous process of whipping a Wii out and refamiliarizing himself with that nightmare, but his greater point that Metroid Prime is a game that only becomes more agonizing the further you progress is one that I agree with 100%. The Phendrana research facility was my personal turning point, and the area that I feel highlights a shift in Metroid Prime's rhythm that is for the worst and which persists until the credits roll.
Backtracking is a pillar of this series, and it is not something I have an issue with inherently, but the way it manifests in Prime feels like it exists to pad time. Upon gaining the thermal visor, you must trudge your way back out of the research facility and march a considerable distance across the map to find your next objective, with little changing along the way other than a few rooms now have the lights off. Whereas the opening two hours has very fluid and naturalistic pathing that doesn't tread on your agency, the remainder of Prime sees you zig-zagging between distant locations with very little sense of where or why. It's like someone at Retro threw a dart at a map to determine where your next upgrade is, with even less consideration given to making the run there enjoyable.
Making things even more tedious is the fact that most areas are designed around specific one-time combat encounters and events. What was once a thrilling set piece is now a hassle that far more encourages you to simply zip past enemies and carry on, assuming you even can as a considerable amount intentionally create bottlenecks to force you into a fight. Unfortunately, combat feels patently underwhelming. Enemies are incredibly spongy and derivative, and the only real strategic element late in the game entails switching to the correct color-coded beam to take out elemental-infused rehashes of previously fought pirates and Metroids. Fun fun fun fun.
Metroid Prime Remastered does make a number of improvements over the original game, at least. The most obvious is in appearance. This might be the best-looking game I've played on the Switch. Environments feel much moodier and more atmospheric, and I really love the soft lighting of locations like the Chozo Ruins. Metroid Prime has always had good art direction, but the increased fidelity really helps it shine. I can only imagine how much better this would look on current hardware, but it's impressive for a game that's a generation behind. That said, I have heard from at least one friend who is far, faaar more familiar with Metroid than I am that the filters for the various visors are straight fucked. He claims the thermal visor made him physically ill, and although I did not have quite that severe of a reaction to it, the processing going on for the thermal and X-ray visors is so intrusive that they rob them of their functionality.
Controls are improved as well, though with a couple important caveats. By default, the game now has dual stick support, allowing you to play Prime like a normal first-person game.
By hour four of ten in this game that has no business being longer than five, I started to think about how Metroid Prime is so clearly a game made by an outside studio, not because I have that knowledge in my head already but because that's how it feels. There's a reverence for the material, but a lack of understanding on what makes Metroid feel good that can only be communicated through its shortcomings, and the way it fumbles crucial elements like the routing of its critical path. Playing this again 21 years later has not given me an appreciation for Metroid Prime outside of the quality of life and graphical improvements the remaster has made. It has only reminded me of why I steered clear of the series and genre for such a long time after. Two stars for being Metroid Prime plus an additional half star for looking purdy.
We eat the sacred cow and together we burn.
Got to Part 4 and just said nah, no thanks. Cleaning up the design from Nioh's extreme bloat is a good impulse, it made SoP probably TN's best action RPG to date, but in this game its been cleaved to the bone with nothing left to make up for it. Obv ripped from Sekiro, the new parry system that combat orients around is just not exciting, it's trivial to simply mash light attack on normal enemies until they go into their unblockable, bait it, deflect, and move on. There's very little tactical variety even when you meet new enemies or bosses, and like their previous games the encounters are liberally copy pasted thru the game. The Nioh games always looked bad and had bad stories but at least went for some kind of distinct visual atmosphere, this game is Grey Cave City. They're large levels, but all there is to find is extremely lame useless loot and flag points that magically give you a bigger number so you can actually deal damage to enemies. All this could be tolerable if the game had solid feel, but it has that weird modern Team Ninja Jank where enemies barely react to your hits so it feels more like you're just doing canned animations into them rather than actually fighting them. It just compounds with the problem of how little tactical variety there is, weapons feel samey, martial arts feel samey, there's some kind of RPS system in place but spamming fireballs seemed to work every time for me. Never forgive Koei
Grand Theft Auto V
2013
Mediocre describes the game, a fantastic singleplayer story only really weighed down by lackluster, simplified mechanics. Onlines a mess, stay away at all costs.
Grand Theft Auto V
2013
overrated trash that kids are still buying to this day.
if u want anything to change, speak with ur wallets.
if u want anything to change, speak with ur wallets.
