Zelda fans are evidently hard to please. Since the series debuted to overwhelming, groundbreaking laudation in the third dimension with Ocarina of Time on the N64, a contentious breed of Zelda fans were unsatisfied with the subsequent entries. Majoras’s Mask was initially brushed off as a morsel of extra Zelda content on the N64, while The Wind Waker, the prodigal main entry to succeed Ocarina, shocked and appalled fans with its strikingly different setting and art direction. Meanwhile, the new top-down Zelda titles that recalled the pixelated games of the franchise's past, like the twin Oracle titles and Minish Cap, weren’t seen as contenders in carrying Ocarina’s mantle. While the following two 3D Zelda games were exemplary in their own rights and Nintendo’s gumption to deviate from Ocarina was admirable, Nintendo should’ve expected some blowback by alienating a large percentage of their consumers for the sake of artistic integrity. Nintendo decided to placate the deprived masses with one last hurrah on the Gamecube while simultaneously using the next 3D Zelda to usher in an exciting, revelatory era of the Nintendo Wii. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was the Ocarina of Time sequel, much closer to that expo trailer that aroused everyone’s attention in the year 2000. Zelda fans were again shaking with anticipation.

When Twilight Princess was released, the game was met with positive reception all around, including that of the disgruntled faction of fans. Twilight Princess was praised for acting as a loyal follow-up to Ocarina's core essence and narrative arc. It was the antithesis of The Wind Waker in aesthetic and ethos, making that game null and void in the eyes of many now that a “worthy” delegate had appeared to represent The Legend of Zelda past the primitive 3D era. Ocarina fanboys could shut their traps now that Nintendo made a game to pacify them, and they remained content for years. After some time passed, however, the general public started to view Twilight Princess in a different light. Nowadays, Majora’s Mask and The Wind Waker are both commended for their initiative in taking Ocarina of Time’s gameplay and narrative and expanding on it creatively, while Twilight Princess is often derided for not weaning itself off of Ocarina’s teat. Even during Twilight Princesses release, some of the detractors underwhelmed by Wind Waker still weren’t satisfied with Twilight Princess because it was too similar to Ocarina, and now they retroactively malign Ocarina for “ruining the franchise” because of the stagnating template it serves as. Jesus Tapdancing Christ, people. Would their complaints be quelled if Nintendo just ported an enhanced version of Ocarina for every new console? Actually, Master Quest did splendidly on the Gamecube, now that I think about it, but Nintendo would be damned to let these vocal dissenters keep Zelda in a cyclical loop until the end of days. Admittedly, Twilight Princess is explicitly more like Ocarina than the previous two 3D Zelda games. However, Twilight Princess is not some cheap imitation with glossier graphics. Twilight Princess overtly expands on Ocarina’s setting, themes, and progression and almost surpasses its obvious inspiration. Almost.

We can assume that the developers attempted to make Ocarina of Time look as realistic as humanly possible with the primitive graphical capabilities of 3D technology. Two generations later, developers no longer needed to use pre-rendered backgrounds to mask the unrefined polygonal textures of Nintendo’s first 3D system. The land of Hyrule in Twilight Princess upholds a cohesive graphical fidelity without using awkward, albeit endearing, pre-rendered backgrounds as the bandages to patch the visual blemishes. What Twilight Princess chooses to display with generations of polygonal progress is a tad drab, to say the least. Any team of developers that strives to craft a game with “realistic graphics” always seems to lack the hindsight that in time, the visuals will age as gracefully as a withered prune. This problem became prevalent in the sixth generation of gaming as the refurbished 3D graphics gave developers enough confidence to earnestly render proportional human bodies and facial features with its characters. Sadly, except for Resident Evil 4, most games of the sixth generation that attempted to depict a sense of realism in their visuals now look shockingly crude. Alternately, games of this generation that adopted a more stylishly splendorous art direction, The Wind Waker as a prime example, could arguably contend with the graphics of games being released at the time I’m writing this. Every 3D game of the fifth generation looked primitive regardless of the developer’s artistic intentions, so it’s difficult to discern whether Ocarina and Majora’s Mask's rough aesthetical charm is a fortuitous coincidence. Given the severe backlash The Wind Waker received, because many felt that a cartoonish aesthetic wasn’t appropriate for a fantasy epic as opposed to Ocarina, we can infer that Twilight Princess is the logical evolution to Ocarina’s graphical tone. If this is the case, I fail to see the grandiosity of depleted colors, murky tints, and flat textures. Maybe I can blame Resident Evil 4 for popularizing realistic visuals that look victim to historic flooding, persisting for an entire generation. Still, I think it’s funny that The Wind Waker, a game derided for its visuals, looks far better than what Ocarina would most likely have looked like if it wasn’t on Nintendo’s first (competent) 3D console.

I suppose I should’ve made a disclaimer earlier that I have only played the Wii version of Twilight Princess, and it’s the version I’m basing this review on. Both the Gamecube and Wii versions of Twilight Princess are equally as definitive because they were released on the same day. In some cases, however, the exact same game is made radically different between the two because of the controls. The Gamecube version plays it safe by copying from the control scheme of The Wind Waker, an advantage of being the second Zelda title on the same console. The Wii version did not have the same privilege as it was assigned the daunting task of proving the functionality of the console’s main motion-control-centric peripheral. Considering how fervid Zelda fans tend to be regarding the sanctity of the franchise's foundation, implementing motion controls for a mainline Zelda title at the Wii’s inception demonstrated some seriously brass, meteor-sized balls on Nintendo. It didn’t help that fellow Wii launch title Red Steel, was doing its best to affirm people’s skepticism that motion controls were an ill-conceived idea. Unlike Red Steel, Twilight Princess succeeded by keeping the motion controls simple. Link’s primary weapon of choice already somewhat resembles the Wiimote, and all the player has to do is swing it gingerly to execute a sword swipe. Attaching the nunchuck to the Wiimote provides full analog control, Z-targeting, and a few extra moves with the sword. It’s mandatory to use the nunchuck to play the game, but my intention in highlighting its capabilities is to showcase how simple, and accessible Twilight Princess's control scheme is on the Wii despite how unorthodox and intimidating the Wii’s controller first seems. Swiping the sword while locking onto enemies usually resulted in Link doing that stab move multiple times instead of slashing vertically as he normally would, however. Fun fact: the Wii version’s map is mirrored as a roundabout way to shift Link’s usual left-handed sword wielding to the right to accommodate western players who are typically right-handed. A citation is needed for how Nintendo came to this conclusion, for my ambidextrous American self probably could’ve handled it. Still, I suppose holding the Wiimote in one’s left hand to retain Link’s preferred placement would’ve been awkward.

Nintendo was obviously confident in the Wii’s controls because the Wii version of Twilight Princess continues The Wind Waker’s greater emphasis on combat just as the Gamecube version does. The Wind Waker advanced Link’s fighting prowess because the rudimentary basics of 3D combat were established in Ocarina, and now they could revel in the potential finesse of using a sword. Even with motion controls at the helm of Link’s kinetic abilities, Nintendo assured that they wouldn’t regress the series. Twilight Princess is the first 3D Zelda game where Link doesn’t possess a playable instrument in his inventory. The method in which Twilight Princess transfers the music mechanic is rather unconventional, as is the way it expands on Link’s abilities with the sword. Howling Stones are small, arcane-looking structures with hollow circles in the middle, found erected from the ground on hills and other elevated stretches of land. Approaching these as Wolf Link will cause him to howl a familiar little tune that reverberates across the sky, but only if the player can memorize the three notes variables along with how long they are sustained. Echoing the melodies of Hyrule’s past will transport Wolf Link to the heavens of Hyrule, where a glowing, golden wolf joins Link in a chorus of howls and then requests that Link meet him somewhere on Hyrule’s map. Upon meeting the wolf, he’ll lunge at Link and transport him to an incorporeal realm where he reveals his true form as a skeletal warrior with hulking armor. Rumors speculate that this is the undead spirit form of Link from Ocarina and Majora’s Mask. Yet, I only remember the Wind Waker Link having masterful dexterity with a sword. Either or, the adroit ghoul will teach Link one move with the sword per Howling Stone.

Some learnable skills like the Jump Strike and Helm Splitter are taken directly from Wind Waker, only now they no longer have to be an opportunistic rebuttal to a countering strike from an enemy. Comparing how these skills were utilized in The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess approaches these skills even more tepidly than the previous game. The series pension for lenient damage intake still doesn’t foster the capabilities of Link’s newfound combat aptitude, and at least using these moves as counterattacks in The Wind Waker required more skill from the player. Link can still mow down armies of moblins with only one heart container depleted. The game never adds greater combat challenges because unlocking these moves are optional. Why wouldn’t the player want to execute flashy, gymnastic feats to defeat foes? Combat is still fluid and responsive even with motion controls, and I suppose I can be thankful for this all things considered. It’s still disappointing, considering there was nothing suppressive about the motion controls anyways, so they could’ve offered a meatier combat experience once again and didn’t.

Motion controls also translate well for many other tools in Link’s arsenal. The “mote” part of the Wii controller’s cutesy nickname connotes pointing it at the TV like a remote control. This peripheral function makes it perfect for aiming, which fits perfectly for the slingshot, bow and arrow, and clawshots. When these weapons are equipped, a conspicuous red target is shown on the screen, which helps the player guide their aim, with a yellow indicator present for clearer accuracy. The lantern from the top-down games makes its 3D debut here, illuminating dark passageways and igniting candles with a finite oil source that can be refueled at certain cauldrons or for a small fee from a guy with an afro in the Faron Woods. The Iron Boots feature new magnetic properties, and Link doubles his clawshots akimbo style, latching onto a series of scaffoldings and moving around like Spiderman. If the extra additions to familiar items sound like a tantalizing evolution, wait until you see the new items. Twilight Princess offers a varied array of new toys that stretch beyond the expectations of what is possible for Link to use on his quest. The Gale Boomerang is a blustering rendition of the regular ol’ boomerang that sucks in foes with its miniature cyclone grip and manipulates wind-power turbines connected to platforms and locked doors. The Hawkeye increases Link’s accuracy with the bow to the extent of a sniper rifle, and flailing the barbarically large Ball and Chain around demolishes both enemies and weathered structures. The most outlandish of these new items is the Spinner, a top that Link rides on that carries him through a series of grids off the sides of walls. Needless to say, it’s a fan-favorite item. 2006 marked a burgeoning future for the Zelda franchise, and these new items are this pinnacle. They are a blast to use, and the game gives them plenty of implementation.

Twilight Princess also introduces the matter of controlling Wolf Link, Link’s dimensional counterpart similar to his bunny form in the Dark World of A Link to the Past. Unlike the docile rabbit representing Link’s purity of heart, Twilight Princess sees Link transform into a carnivorous creature that coincides with this game’s prophetic notion that a mangy beast would aid in saving the land from evil’s grasp. The player will become efficiently acquainted with Wolf Link early in the game through consistent use. After a certain point in the game, the ability to organically switch between Link’s two forms is unlocked. Naturally, Wolf Link possesses certain qualities that human Link does not, including remembering smells, following a scent trail, and talking to animals. Link’s partner is only corporeal, while Link is a wolf which allows her to direct Link onto a series of high reaches and perform an attack that targets multiple foes while locked to a spatial radius. Swiping the Wiimote like a sword swing will cause Wolf Link to leap at an enemy, and pressing the A button will execute a larger leap that also adds Wolf Link lunging his teeth into an enemy for extra damage. It’s not as natural a translation as the Wiimote to the sword, but it still functions properly. Wolf Link was marketed as Twilight Princess's central gimmick, something unseen in the franchise used as an eye-catching hook to differentiate between this game and the older ones. However, those of us who remember Majora’s Mask beg to differ on Wolf Link’s supposed ingenuity. Wolf Link functions the same as any of the transformation masks in Majora’s Mask, a means to diversify the gameplay engaged through circumstantial moments. Wolf Link is satisfactory because he doesn’t become the game's focal point, a reasonable trade-off for mixing new forms of gameplay with the old.

The last time we saw the land of Hyrule in its traditional form, it was a vacuous field of nothing but grass with only slight peaks of hilly elevation. It was nothing but a monotonous, bland valley between the districts that fall under the same jurisdiction. Surprisingly, I often see the same criticisms for Hyrule Field in Twilight Princess, even though the developers have mended this problem sufficiently. Hyrule Field is not intended to be congested with creatures or off-road attractions, for a hub should still act as a median point separating all notable areas of interest. Besides simply increasing the size of Hyrule Field, the addition of trees, bridges, rivers, varied terrain, and consistent enemy placements on the map makes Hyrule Field mirror the similarities of the rolling, commodious badlands seen in the real world. Another change that aids Hyrule Field feeling more natural is that the nucleus of Hyrule has been shifted to Castle Town, the metropolitan capital of Hyrule that mirrors the marketplace from Ocarina, only busier with more expansive urbanity. If Castle Town is a more adequate nucleus due to its epicenter nature, then Hyrule Field functions well as its metaphorical outer wall.

All of the branching districts of Hyrule we’re familiar with from games prior are far more realized than they were in Ocarina, and this isn’t because of the graphical enhancements. Kakariko Village is a dusty wasteland that actually looks like it resides below a volcano, and the trek up Death Mountain to the Goron’s civilization feels substantially more harrowing. Lake Hylia is a behemoth basin situated so deep in the sunken crevices of Hyrule that Link must plunge into it from atop a bridge. The only means of returning from it is via being shot out of a comically-sized cannon. The Sacred Grove near the Faron Woods is even more mysterious than the Lost Woods, and the Gerudo Desert is particularly arid in its atmosphere and layout. These landmark Hyrule destinations are now incredibly fleshed out and detailed, thanks to years of progress in gaming hardware. My only slight grievance pertaining to neo-Hyrule is with poor Epona. Riding around Hyrule’s hub on Link’s trusty steed was a lifesaver in Ocarina, but her time in Twilight Princess is entirely situational in the early game. At the halfway point, Link’s partner grants him the ability to mitigate travel with a warp option, and as much as I adore Epona, warping around pretty much any location on the map is too convenient. Link can’t even summon Epona unless he finds a blade of grass to blow her song into that is only found in certain spots, and the horse whistle item that gives him full access isn’t given to him until very late in the game. Uh…thanks? I hate to say it, but the ol’ gal would be more useful at a glue factory.

With all of the enhancements Twilight Princess implements in mind, it should be a no-brainer that it excels over Ocarina of Time. Unfortunately, Twilight Princess exudes other undesirable traitsTwilight Princess mainly falters in its attempt to outshine Ocarina because its initiative to broaden Ocarina’s properties tends to bloat the narrative. Every new Zelda adventure begins with our hero, Link, in his humble place of origin before his existence is elevated by prophetic circumstances. Link is not a preadolescent boy in Twilight Princess but a young man in his late teenage years, similar to the age he was in his adult form in Ocarina. He also lives among other human beings as a country bumpkin in the rustic southern district of Ordon instead of fraternizing with the stunted Kokiri elves that reside in the shadiest parts of the forest. I guess the reveal that Link is a Hylian instead of a Kokiri is the Zelda equivalent of revealing Samus as a woman: it’s a revelation that is effective only once. Because Link is an adult throughout the entirety of this iteration, he is tied to more labor-intensive obligations, unlike his child predecessors, who sat around idly twiddling their thumbs until opportunity struck. The unfortunate aspect of Link’s farm-centric adulthood is that it has to be subjected to the player. The player spends the first hour or so of Twilight Princess performing Link’s chores and other mundane tasks, such as herding some stubborn goats into a pen, retrieving a bassinet that fell into a river, and returning a cat to its owner by catching the cat a fish that it covets. Fishing in Twilight Princess is reasonably more functional than it was in Ocarina, but the game still makes the mistake of emulating the tedious wait of catching a fish similar to real life. Grab a beer or another frosty beverage because it’s going to be a while. I understand that the impetus of this prologue is to highlight the juxtaposition between Link’s humdrum lifestyle and the epic scope of the hero’s journey he will partake in for the duration of the game. Still, Ocarina and Wind Waker already accomplished this without an elongated slog of boring tedium. It’s an off-putting way of introducing the game that excruciatingly drags on for far too long.

Starting slowly with the prologue at least gives the player the benefit of the doubt that once it’s over, the rest of the game’s momentum will rocket into the stratosphere without fizzing out and plummeting. Unfortunately, they’d be wrong. The prologue is emblematic of Twilight Princess’s pacing issues. While none of the pacing upsets in Twilight Princess delve as deep into being mind-numbing as the prologue, hefty exposition is often inserted in between dungeons. Any Zelda veteran will express that the dungeons are the piece de resistance of The Legend of Zelda, and any Zelda game that meanders from the dungeons for lengthy periods has to compensate with something substantial like in Majora’s Mask. It also helped that the side content in Majora’s Mask can be approached with an illusion of freedom that comes with the three-day cycle. Twilight Princess, on the other hand, forces the player through long swathes of restricted linearity supported by the narrative, especially in the earlier sections of the game.

Link’s call to adventure is relatively exciting at first as the backwoods rube gets an opportunity to deliver a package to Castle Town, the big apple of Hyrule, where Zelda resides. His golden ticket is granted to him a bit unceremoniously with a knock on the head by a band of Moblins that ransack Link’s village and kidnap every child resident. He attempts to save the children when he awakens from his stupor. As he furthers closer into a mystifying light their captors have entered, he alarmingly transforms into a wolf and gets captured himself. Inside the cell his captors have tossed him, a peculiarly curvy imp named Midna rescues Link from the lonesome prison in exchange for his servitude. The imp rides around on Link like a toddler does the family dog through the sewers and across the castle rooftops until they reach Zelda’s chamber. The series' titular princess is seen leaning over a window in her quarters, veiled in a cloak to either protect her from the outside elements or conceal her identity. Light and dark have converged over Hyrule and have blanketed the land in an otherworldly mystical…well, twilight. The culprit is Zant, who usurped Zelda’s throne and reduced Hyrule’s denizens to ephemeral spirits that wisp in the glow of twilight. With Midna’s guidance, Link must return the favor to Zant and restore Hyrule to its regal, prosperous self.

The restoration process of Hyrule is what the content between dungeons is mostly comprised of early in the game. Link and Midna seek out the Tears of Light, globules composed of both light and liquid found within the insides of Shadow Insects scattered around the Twilight Realm. After collecting sixteen tears per district in the luminescent grapevine called the Vessel of Light, the district’s respective light spirit will use the completed set to reinvigorate that district to its original earthly state. Because the Twilight Realm encapsulates the district before its reformation, the player is meant to complete this task as Wolf Link without the ability to revert back to his human self until the process is done. The Shadow Insects also can only be detected via the keener sense of a canine, so human Link would be hopelessly clueless anyways. Still, these sections of Twilight Princess feel awfully restrictive. As stated before, Wolf Link’s effectiveness as an alternate form of Link is in diversifying the gameplay, not supplementing it. Human Link develops and adapts like in any other Zelda game, while Wolf Link’s base attributes are never upgraded or expanded upon. Sure, Wolf Link is utilized throughout the game, and his instinctual talents are always an asset. In saying this, the nature of Wolf Link is still a curse, and a prevalent facet of this curse is feeling less capable as a quadrupedal animal rather than a human being with flexible limbs and opposable thumbs. Once the player descends into the pernicious air of the Twilight Realm, there is no escape until the mission is complete, meaning that there is no chance to abscond from the confined path the game places for the player. The freedom of exploration that Zelda fostered in its early days has been stifled exponentially.

One aspect of these sections that I enjoy is the Twilight Realm's atmosphere. It suspends Hyrule in a state of still purgatory, ethereally depicting Hyrule as if it were a dream. Matter flows upward like rainfall in reverse, and the outside light that permeates through the conductive color prisms creates a tint of sepia tone to add to the realm’s mystical nature. The spirits of human beings seen in this state are not the spectral remnants of the deceased, but their greenish, feathery forms that lack a mortal substratum look as if they could disseminate into the ether of the Twilight Realm at any given moment. Perhaps the spirits are willfully wispy as a means of protection, hiding away from the grizzly Shadow Beasts and aerial Shadow Kargaroks that patrol the Twilight Realm’s haunting grounds. The Twilight Realm is controlled chaos in that anything tangible in reality seems to hold no substance or dominion. The stillness and dearth of organic substance evoke a potent melancholy fitting for the land’s common quest of collecting tears. Some claim the Twilight Realm gives credence to giving Twilight Princess the title of the darkest Zelda game, but I still have to make an objection using Majora’s Mask as an example. The intended aura of gloominess conveyed through the Twilight Realm is effective, but it falters compared to the creepy subtleties from Majora’s Mask that get under my skin. It’s like comparing The Crow to the works of the Marquis de Sade, and the more disturbing content of the latter is likely to stick with you rather than the portentous former.

Thankfully once the player accomplishes bringing gleaming hope to Hyrule, they are treated to the greatest lineup of dungeons seen across the entire series. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Link must conquer three dungeons in the former half of the game with elemental themes coinciding with the various races around Hyrule. The first three dungeons here even follow the direct course from Ocarina as the order is a forestry tree dungeon first, molten Goron dungeon second, and watery Zora dungeon as last. Even though we’ve seen this trajectory countless times at this point, it does mean that Twilight Princess is bereft of fresh ideas. These dungeons are more complex and varied than the Ocarina counterparts they draw comparisons from. The Forest Temple (no relation to the one from Ocarina) involves rescuing a group of caged monkeys that aid Link by creating a makeshift monkey rope that gets longer for each monkey Link saves, helping him over the dungeon’s spacious gaps. Goron Mines is a more linear dungeon, but magnetizing the iron boots and trekking through the mines while defying gravity is too cool. Lakebed Temple is a culmination of the centralized design of the Water Temple and the water flow mechanics of the Great Bay Temple. The dungeons in the latter half of the game, when Link must collect pieces of the Mirror of Twilight, also exhibit this level of quality. The crypt-like Arbiter’s Grounds is traversed through by sniffing out the locations of four cheeky Poes that have stolen the flame source from the main door that leads to the dungeon’s boss, and this offers the best employment of Wolf Link’s abilities in the game. The esoteric and pristine Temple of Time uses straightaway backtracking well to retrieve a statue with the Dominion Rod from the far end of the temple that is intended to sit parallel to its twin at the colossal door near the entrance to unlock it. City in the Sky is a breathtaking marvel situated in the clouds that would make Hayao Miyazaki proud, even if its residents are those obscene Ooccoo creatures that look like you’d want to put them out of their misery. My favorite dungeon that Twilight Princess has to offer is the arctic Snowpeak Ruins because of how unconventional the trek is through it. The yeti that resides here is making a soup for his sick wife and is missing a few essential ingredients for the most delectable pumpkin broth. They direct towards the piece of the Mirror of Twilight they hold, but Link’s mission keeps getting sidetracked with every pointed direction, inadvertently leading to more of the soup’s missing ingredients. This dungeon is downright silly and refreshing for this frequently dismal game.

The selection of bosses in Twilight Princess is also outstanding. Similar to the dungeons they reside in, each boss guarantees that Link will use the item he received in some capacity, which is what cements their excellency. Gohma, the phobia-triggering giant spider, has made numerous appearances across the series and uses a combination of the bow and arrow and the Dominion Rod to crush its thorax with the might of a gigantic stone hammer. Morpheel from the Lakebed Temple reminds me of Morpha from Ocarina of Time in that Link yanks its vulnerable, fleshy core with the hook/clawshot, with a dozen tentacles added so the player can’t camp for their opportunity like with the Morpha fight. Morpheel’s second phase reminds me more of Shadow of the Colossus, as Link clawshots onto Morpheel’s weak spot and stabs his sword into it as the hideous beast swims around the aquarium arena. Argorok is a steel-plated dragon who terrorizes the timid Ooccoos in their sanctuary, and Link must face him at his eye level to end his reign over the sky by ascending the ground via hooking onto Peahats during a wicked storm. Everyone’s favorite fight, myself included, is the reanimated dragon skeleton Stallord, whose strengths as a boss relate to the player’s use of the Spinner item. These are arguably the most electrifying bouts in a game that is filled with them, and their effectiveness as fun bosses lie in the scale of their mass and the wide breadth of their arenas. Conquering these foes may not be too challenging, but the immense scope brought about by all of its elements makes them genuinely epic.

While the dungeons and bosses in Twilight Princess are exceptional, the game doesn’t give them as much precedence to make way for a more character-centric narrative, the core of the game’s wider stretches of exposition. The player grieves through the insufferably unstimulating portions of the game to familiarize themselves with Twilight Princess's rich roster of characters. Link’s time in Ordon Village in the sluggish introduction helps the player get acquainted with his fellow farm folk. Ordon Village consists of a few adult characters that lead a resistance militia, namely a guy who commands a falcon. More important than the adults are the children of Ordona, who have a more substantial narrative precedence. The gang of rugrats is a breakfast club of personalities: the brash and excitable Malo and his stoic, chubby little brother Malo, the bratty, vain Beth, and the sensitive Colin. All of the children admire Link to some extent, but Colin kisses the ground Link walks on. Instead of being annoyingly sycophantic, Colin transcribes his hero worship to motivate him to emulate Link’s feats of heroism. He gets this opportunity when greasy, grotesque Moblin army general King Bulbin returns to Kakariko Village in an attempt to recapture the children. Colin pushes Beth out of the stampeding Moblin warthogs and gets captured as a result. After Link saves Colin, he sheds his meek demeanor as he’s met his goal of becoming a valiant hero. This moment was intended to be poignant, but Colin’s arc is fulfilled far too early in the game before the narrative relegates these kids to Kakariko for the occasional visit or side quest. An even more shoehorned effort to make the side characters applicable to the narrative is with Ilia, the only other teenager from Ordon besides Link. Some romantic chemistry between her and Link is implied before she is captured, and the process of restoring her memory after her kidnapping leaves her as an amnesiac is a task that spans longer than rescuing the kids. Still, the eventual resolution to this quest flounders because it seems secondary to the big picture. I would’ve allowed an overt romantic dynamic between Link and Ilia here, for it’s the only way the character would’ve worked. It's not as if Link's heart belongs to Zelda, even with the hero arc implications.

Among all Twilight Princesses characters, the one that holds the greatest importance exists in a role that makes this fact astounding. When discussing the partner characters that aid Link on his adventure, most of them aren’t even worth the breath one would exert with this practice. They are not characters but tools with vocal cords like a GPS or the Siri feature on a smartphone. The only reason I discussed Navi in detail for Ocarina was her irritable infamy, more than any substantial role she had in the story besides interrupting Link’s slumber at the beginning. Midna functions the same way as the other partner characters in the series past. She’s helpful in the field with a select few aspects, she nags Link about his primary goal, she can be used for quick travel, and none of the information she gives is remotely useful when the player asks when they are uncertain of how to approach an obstacle or what their course of action is. Yet, she greatly transcends the wooden, strained role as Link’s assistant because, for the first time ever, the partner trope is as fully fleshed out as any other character, if not more so. Midna is the most expressive character the series has seen so far, and I’m not exclusively alluding to her toothy smirks and snarls. Midna supersedes Tetra in sass, constantly making snarky comments to Link to jokingly undermine his mighty hero role as she’s an immortal being from another dimension that sees him as an insignificant meat bag. As the game progresses, Midna begins to shed her contempt for Link as he proves his worth to her and the human world by proxy. This illuminating character development strengthens Link’s relationship with her. Midna’s passion for reclaiming her rightful throne and saving her people from Zant's grubby, traitorous hands makes her exude a palpable fervor that I didn’t know was possible for Zelda characters. Unlike the slight concern I expressed for the children of Odon, moments where Midna was in peril had me on the edge of my seat. Wolf Link carrying Midna’s motionless, pale body after she’s attacked by Zant, made me charge urgently through Hyrule Field without even stopping to attack the enemies along the way. During the final battle with Ganondorf in his most intimidatingly evil iteration yet, Midna uses her full power to destroy him, only for Ganondorf to come out unscathed, holding Midna’s fused shadow headpiece as a hunting trophy. Plunging my sword into the wicked swine as a finishing blow and watching him writhe in agony felt so satisfying to avenge Midna. Ultimately, she resurfaced as her true androgynous self and took the breath away from all of us, especially Link, whose stunned expression warrants one last ribbing from Midna, and it’s such a fantastic moment. The game explicitly refers to Midna as the titular “Twilight Princess,” just in case we’d confuse the subtitle for Zelda. Even if they didn’t remove all doubt, Midna out charismas the series namesake to the point where Zelda becomes practically irrelevant. Zelda who? Who cares?

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess marks a grandstanding evolution in the franchise's history without even considering the implementation of motion controls in the Wii version. Ocarina of Time was a mechanical source that bled into the fabric of Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker. Perhaps those game’s subtle pinches of Ocarina’s salt didn’t taste acerbic enough for most Zelda fans, as their clear places as Ocarina’s successors went over their heads. Twilight Princess, on the other hand, uses the properties of Ocarina as subtly as a group of kids stacked on each other posing as an adult to sneak into an R-rated movie. The overall product of Twilight Princess is precisely what fans wanted from the 3D Zelda title that would surpass Ocarina as the rightful heir to its throne, and this notion was unequivocally felt when it was released. I’m certainly glad that Majora’s Mask and The Wind Waker are treated with more respect nowadays after their initial upset, but why does their newfound appreciation have to be at Twilight Princess's expense? Twilight Princess was the grandest Zelda game of its time, almost as if it had been in production since Ocarina of Time was released. Twilight Princess extrapolates on everything Ocarina presents and proverbially fills in the sizable cracks with caulk that compounds the narrative, gameplay, characters, and world design. Twilight Princess excels in the facets of Ocarina that I enjoyed, like the dungeons and bosses, and exceeds them spectacularly. Unfortunately, some of the fillings overflowed and made a mess of the game’s pacing, and it’s jarring enough to knock it down a few pegs. Twilight Princess should have triumphed over Ocarina of Time, but I can’t help but doubt this claim the more I ponder it. Still, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, without comparing it to its predecessors, deserves all of the initial praise it received, and I’m one Zelda fan who isn’t going to change my mind with this sentiment.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

What seems to be the key ingredient to succeeding with any new intellectual property? Put a fluffy little animal front and center. It could be a dog, rabbit, or even an alpaca to cater to that niche audience of irreverent hipsters and or the vital Latin-American demographic. But really, it’s best to stick with a domesticated creature, and which fluffy animal seems to have tapped into the collective consciousness the most efficiently? Cats. The little buggers have persisted as the dominant pet in the entertainment landscape. Also, there seems to be a prevailing trend of interest in putting furry animals in mechanical marvels like mech suits. Is it the dichotomy between the size of the cat and the mech that grasps people’s interests, or is it the pairing of something cute, organic, and mostly harmless with something horrifyingly cold and destructive? Whatever the core appeal is, indie Metroidvania title Gato Roboto shamelessly taps into this phenomenon by placing a cute little kitty in the most futuristic of kinetic death machines (and the clever wordplay in the title also grips that bankable Latin-American demographic as well. Nicely done). The question that remains is if Gato Roboto can still craft something of substance while showcasing this arguably cheap gimmick as the crux of its foundation.

Surprisingly, a cat piloting a mech suit as the premise for a game is an inspired decision. That is, it would be a downright laughable one if it were the premise of a game in any genre other than Metroidvania. It’s been well documented that Metroid’s primary influence is the iconic 1979 science-fiction horror film, Alien, hence the female protagonist persisting through the darkest crevices of a hostile space environment with indescribably terrifying creatures galore to contend with. While Ridley was an obvious case of main character syndrome in her respective horror film, she wasn’t the sole survivor from that mission like the annals of pop culture have often wrongfully noted. Lest we forget that an adorable orange tabby cat named Jones (nicknamed “Jonesy”) used his small size and his advanced cat-like nimbleness to evade the Xenomorph and escape with Ripley. Given that this cat managed to cross the proverbial finish line of survival with the movie’s only notable human character, I’d say that cats have proven themselves to be competent space warriors. Kiki, the eponymous “gato,” crashes her master Gary’s spacecraft on an alien planet after he receives a distress signal. As either a punishment for wrecking his ship and or an excuse to sit on his lazy ass and cheer from the sidelines, he tasks Kiki with trekking out to find the source of the dissonance.

Gato Roboto’s visual style presents an interesting idea. Many Metroidvania titles obviously ape the core design philosophy of Nintendo’s flagship science-fiction series, but Gato Roboto almost begs the question: “what if the Metroid series began with the first game’s protagonist as a mirror of Jones instead of Ripley?” Gato Roboto delves into this deep hypothetical with its intentionally minimalistic aesthetic. Most Metroidvania games are inspired by Super Metroid rather than its NES predecessor because the latter was so primitive that it would be more appropriate to refer to it as a treatment for the genre rather than a rough draft. Yet, one saving grace from the first Metroid game was that its rudimentary minimalism exuded the sparse eeriness of space effectively, even if it was inadvertent on the developer’s part. Before Gato Roboto, I had never played another Metroidvania game that tapped into this deferred aspect of Metroid’s makeup. However, Gato Roboto decided to approach this minimalistic factor from Metroid with black and white pixels, since 8-bit graphics had become kitsch in the years before its release. Nothing is prominently defined here on this space station Kiki finds herself, and the prevailing darkness of the background with the ghost-white properties of the foreground evokes that same sense of isolation and confusion as the first Metroid did.

Gato Roboto doesn’t only borrow assets from the first Metroid game. It seems that Gato Roboto has taken a helping from the underrated GBA title Metroid Fusion in how the game approaches its level progression. Similar to that game, the hub of the facility branches down to five distinctive areas: the aqueducts, the heater, the ventilation, and the incubator. The final path will take Kiki to the laboratory, but a sentient supercomputer will lock this area from Kiki until she completes the missions in the other ones. Each area is distinctive enough, but I remember criticizing Metroid Fusion for using this type of progression. I think that Gato Roboto can get away with this form of streamlined progression because it's a new IP, and it doesn’t have to meet the colossal standards that a pioneering icon like Metroid does. That, and the game never explicitly points to a direct objective on the map, spoon-feeding progress at every waking moment. Gato Roboto still respects the player’s intelligence and allows them to become acclimated to the Metroidvania staple of using the map as a consistent point of reference. If the game insisted on not having a map as a call back to the first Metroid game not having one, that would be a differently dreadful story. Also, like with any competent Metroidvania, exploration will also reward Kiki with health upgrades and cassette tapes that not only grant the player additional color pallets for the game’s graphics but a certain number of them can be traded for weapon upgrades.

Blaster Master, another NES contemporary to Metroid whose place as an early Metroidvania title is more contentiously disputed, is also an evident influence on Gato Roboto. Simply put, Kiki can exit the mech and roam around the grounds with her own gameplay mechanics like the protagonist of that game. Although Kiki might need to exit the mech to crawl through the tight spaces of ventilation shafts or prove that cats can swim if they are coaxed into it out of a desperate situation, leaving the suit behind comes with a severe caveat. Kiki’s naked state will render her completely vulnerable to enemy harm, and she’ll be decimated in one hit which sends the player back to the nearest save room. This dynamic between all three gameplay modes in Gato Roboto is a constant that shakes up the Metroidvania gameplay. The mech suit is the only one of these granted with consistent upgrades, but its capabilities never superseded the use of Kiki or the submarine mech used for underwater combat. Gato Roboto’s variation between the three modes is somewhat refreshing in a genre where one character gradually becomes the almighty being of power and traversal by the end with all upgrades on hand. Even with this dynamic dividing the aptness of the modes, Gato Roboto is still on the easier side of the spectrum thanks to save rooms being littered all over the facility.

Enemies in Gato Roboto are easily dealt with because they are all animals with weak defenses against laser blasts and rocket launches. However, there is one rat whose various machines serve as the game’s more formidable bosses. He appears with a new deadly device for each area, and his encounters are the only source of challenge the game provides. As the story progresses, the player becomes privy to how this mouse has the supernatural ability to talk and where his persistent vindictiveness for Kiki stems from, for it’s actually not just a cheeky point of subversion of predator and prey. Throughout the game, Kiki finds audio logs like Bioshock where a mad scientist details the struggle of preserving the life of his sick dog. Apparently, the beacon that sent Gary’s ship crashing down was a ruse from the mad scientist to enact his evil plan of swapping bodies with Gary, for his consciousness is currently trapped in the rat. After he succeeds with Gary, the mad scientist also has plans to swap his dog’s consciousness for Kikis. He fails in one epic final duel with Kiki, but Gary’s body is never recovered. Who knew a game starring a cat in a mech suit could also have an interesting plot with a sympathetic villain?

To conclude my thesis that wondered if Gato Roboto was more than the sum of its parts, the answer is a clear yes. Gato Roboto is an excitingly fun Metroidvania that harkens back to the genre’s minimal roots while presenting enough deviation from the genre’s tropes to craft something refreshing. Some may decry it’s too short and easier than most Metroidvanias, but I think the compact experience is more short and sweet than fleeting. It’s a game with a cat in a mech suit, for god’s sake. Lighten up and live a little.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Donkey Kong was almost a relic of Nintendo's ancient history. The classic Donkey Kong arcade game was Nintendo's individual achievement back in 1981, but the introduction of the NES later in the decade ushered in a golden age for Nintendo as they became the dominant video game console producer. New IPs became the backbone for Nintendo's glory days and the character of Donkey Kong was left in the dust. Nintendo became a household name in only a few short years that it seemed unbelievable that they had anything to do with the Donkey Kong arcade game. For the longest time, Donkey Kong was relegated to Nintendo's pre-history. As influential as the Donkey Kong arcade game was, the NES period was a bad time to not get any limelight in Nintendo's back catalog. Ten years after the arcade game, Donkey Kong Jr.'s inclusion in the first Mario Kart game for the SNES was like Mr. Game and Watch's inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Melee; as a lark to showcase some obscure, historical Nintendo characters among more popular ones. It's insane how long Nintendo left Donkey Kong in the proverbial attic during their golden years. It might have been this way if a certain British game developer had left this unchecked. If you like Donkey Kong as the brawny, tie-wearing ape as we've come to know him, then you have Rare Studio's 1994 SNES game Donkey Kong Country to thank.

You might ask yourself this question: what was the impetus of resurrecting the titular ape of a classic early 80's arcade game? Donkey Kong just throws barrels and kidnaps people's girlfriends. Donkey Kong isn't exactly a complicated game with complicated characters. How could he fit into the landscape of the 16-bit era? Not to mention, Jumpman, or Mario as you might know him, had greatly transcended his role into bigger feats of saving girls from giant reptilians instead of giant apes since his first outing in 1981. Mario had completely separated himself from his first video game role so drastically that the fact that he was ever referred to as Jumpman seems like an esoteric trivia factoid. Obviously, a game two gaming generations later wouldn't be the same as it once was. The template for Donkey Kong Country wasn't to expand on the classic arcade game or the titular character but to emphasize the "country" part of Donkey Kong Country to give audiences a sprawling world that made sense putting Donkey Kong in. The presentation of this game, whether it be the level design, the music, or the unique art style, made this game stand out above the rest of its contemporaries and cemented itself not just as a comeback for Donkey Kong, but also as one of the hallmark games on the SNES.

The game begins as Donkey Kong is crestfallen at the sight of his massive banana hoard stolen by Kremlings, the alligator-like main enemies in the game, and Donkey Kong has to venture out into progressively more uncharted territory to get his banana hoard back. It seems like a silly setup until you realize that Donkey Kong is a giant ape and the only way he could be motivated to go on a daunting journey is bananas, not sex. After all, Donkey Kong's girlfriend, Candy Kong, helps you on your quest by providing the occasional save point. She definitely seems much more of a formidable person to capture than the frangible Princess Peach. Stealing a monkey's banana hoard is as low as taking the love of his life (which in this case, the love of his life is bananas, not his girlfriend, so I guess it's not on equal standing). Aiding Donkey Kong in his quest is his best buddy Diddy Kong. You simultaneously play as both Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong throughout the entirety of the game. In this case, Diddy and Donkey Kong are on equal standing in this game in terms of screen time. Diddy isn't just Donkey Kong's Luigi in that his existence doesn't fulfill a multi-player role for your younger sibling. Donkey Kong and Diddy balance each other out quite nicely. Where Donkey Kong is bulky, Diddy Kong is nimble. Donkey Kong can defeat a larger array of enemies because of his larger stature and Diddy Kong can access more of a level because he can jump higher. Both character's attributes are required to traverse through each level, so you'll always have to be careful because once one character is hit, they gasp and run away until you find another barrel to bring them back. The dynamic between Donkey Kong and Diddy is so simple, yet works so well in the game that it's practically perfect. Many platformers with more than one playable character around this time were repainted clones, but Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong legitimately feel different when you are playing as either of them. The contrast between the two makes the player utilize the strengths of each character wisely and also makes them careful which character is upfront before they get hit. Not to mention, both characters move incredibly smoothly and there are plenty of ways to traverse the levels as either character when you only have one of them. There is also a bevy of animal buddies that you can find at almost every level. Each of them is different animals with their own unique attributes that control just as smoothly as the two main characters (although I swear I made too many unfair missteps with that damn frog). The smoothness and variation of control are a testament to what makes a solid 2D platformer especially with as many playable characters as DKC has.

Before discussing the strengths of how the levels in Donkey Kong Country are designed, one just can't overlook the game's aesthetic. Instead of using 16-bit graphics as per the usual SNES games, Rare implemented pre-rendered 3D graphics and compressed them into 16-bit graphics to fit on the SNES. They look like the bridge between the then-current generation of graphics with the future of what was to come in the next generation of early 3D games. It's a style that is stuck in a state of purgatory between these two eras, but this is for the benefit of the DKC series because it makes the series look distinctive. This tactic also makes the DKC series the best-looking games on the SNES. I was always somewhat deterred by the graphics of the 16-bit era because they often look very "drawn on" thus looking very dated. I find the 64-bit graphics charming and the once rudimentary 8-bit graphics have become their own distinctive graphical style over the years, so the era in between still looks a little awkward to me. DKC's graphics don't quite fit the common aesthetic of its era, but it's all to it's the benefit. For some reason, the style still looks fantastic. Every character, whether it be the playable characters or the varied animal enemies, looks so animated and expressive. The backgrounds are lush and practically look like paintings and the foregrounds are just as vividly clear. Why didn't other game studios think of ever doing this? Accompanying the lush, sprawling world of Donkey Kong Country is the soundtrack, an element to this game that is just as important as the graphics. David Wise did an outstanding job at perfectly capturing the right mood for every single level in this game. A highlight track for me is "Aquatic Ambiance" because of how mesmerizing it is. As far as I'm concerned, it's up there with "Aquarium" from "The Carnival of Animals" as far as effective watery music pieces go.

The world, or should I say country, of Donkey Kong Country, is divided very similarly to Super Mario World. The hub world is a map of the entire game divided into seven or so sub-worlds each with a varying number of levels. The first Donkey Kong Country game on the SNES is much more consistent with the overall level themes than the other two in that it maintains its overall jungle/rural tone. It only deviates from this theme later in the game in the factory levels, but the factories are still overrun with kremlings and other animals from previous levels making it seem like the factory is still rooted in the rustic world of this game instead of contrasting it. Like other 2D platformers, the objective is to get to point A to point B. Donkey Kong and Diddy can jump on enemies and roll into them giving the player a nuanced way of defeating enemies rather than just using one tactic in conjunction with getting through the level. Ropes are strewn around the levels to climb further and to dodge enemies on a rail, tires act as springs like in Sonic the Hedgehog, and barrels will launch you in any direction. The barrels are definitely the defining platforming feature of the DKC series. Utilizing the barrels in levels would evolve as the series went on, but I think they were used the best in the first game. The barrel sections are tense and require the greatest use of one's reaction time. You cannot make any mistakes in this game when it comes to the barrel sections.

On the map, Donkey Kong has other friends that aid him in his journey besides Diddy and his animal friends. There is the aptly ape named Cranky Kong who is a tiny old curmudgeon that lives in a cabin. He doesn't so much help you as much as he calls you a candyass and tells you about a challenge involving beating completing this game in under an hour, a feat that he apparently did long ago. Cranky is apparently the original Donkey Kong from the arcade game as an old man, and the modern Donkey Kong that we're all familiar with is his grandson which only makes me ask questions about what happened to Donkey Kong Jr. The aforementioned Candy Kong will help you similarly save your game to Super Mario World in which you have to unlock the save point after a certain number of levels. Lastly, there's Funky Kong that lets you travel to different areas of the map.

You'll get to know Funky and Candy Kong really well from saving at any possible point and stocking up on extra lives. You're gonna need them because this game and the rest of the Donkey Kong Country games have a reputation for being quite difficult. It almost reminds you that this game was developed by the guys that made Battletoads. Although not as consistently frustrating as Battletoads, DKC has an incredibly steep difficulty curb as early as the second world with the notorious "Mine Cart Madness" level. Up until this level, the platforming was pretty fair and the obstacles could be readily combated without much trouble, but this level throws all of that out of the window. For the entire level, you are forced inside of a minecart that constantly keeps moving and never stops. You'll have to efficiently time your jumps at every step, there are stationary mine carts to jump over, and kremlings will be coming at you from the opposite direction. What's funny to me is that somehow, this level is much more difficult than the mine cart level much later in the game. It's the level that separates the men from the boys and after this, the game never gets easier.

Like classic Sonic the Hedgehog, the root of the first DKC's difficulty comes from the "blindspot" difficulty. DKC oftentimes makes you memorize the placements of the pitfalls and enemies because passing them smoothly requires a lot of trial and error. There are pitfalls at every corner in this game that can be quite challenging to get through. Oftentimes, the game throws more gimmicks at the player like a level on a conveyor belt and a level that is mostly in total darkness. Tons of different types of enemies come at you from every angle each with a unique tactic to kill you and the hitboxes are oftentimes questionable. I felt like I needed a referee to debate my untimely death every other time I died trying to jump on an enemy. "Mine Cart Madness" even has a fake-out kremling after the developers know you've taken a breath of relief. The worst offender of these blindspots is "Poison Pond" in which taking the incorrect route will ultimately result in the Kongs getting hit. It doesn't help that the correct paths are filled with gyrating tires with little elbow room to dodge and the final part of this level has fish coming at you in every single space that it's practically a bullet-hell section. The game makes damn sure that the player never gets accustomed to dealing with the obstacles in this game unless you know how to overcome every single one of them. Fortunately, the game gives you ample opportunity to stock up on extra lives through mini-games and banana collecting. The bananas in this game act like the coins in Mario in that collecting 100 of them will reward you with an extra life. They mostly come in singles, but there are plenty of bananas that are stacked in tens. The abundance of bananas in the levels shows a nice sense of self-awareness from the developers in that they didn't want to leave the player high and dry with the steep difficulty of the game.

The levels in this game are certainly daunting, but the same can't be said about the bosses. In fact, the bosses in the first Donkey Kong Country are pitifully easy. You know it's troubling when you strain yourself over the levels and a boss fight seems like a place of relief. The bosses are essentially larger versions of the standard enemies and they only take a few hits to defeat. The boss before King K. Rool is a giant black barrel with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it and it's just a simple boss gauntlet. The barrel doesn't even hurt you when it slams down on the ground. King K. Rool, the final boss of this game and the Bowser of the DKC trilogy, is a different beast altogether. Instead of going down after a few cheap hits, King K. Rool is a formidable foe with a few different phases that will test all of the abilities you've been using throughout the game. All of the blindspots in the game will also prepare you for the bizarre kremling kredits that roll after you think you've defeated King K. Rool before the final phase of his boss fight. I'm ashamed to admit, but he pulled me into a false sense of victory when these credits rolled and he stomped me into the ground. I feel like an absolute idiot for not getting the hint from the credits considering the Rare staff all have kremling names. I figured they were all foreigners.

Donkey Kong Country totally revitalized the character (or technically, revamped Donkey Kong as a younger, more acrobatic version of the arcade game character) and forever made Donkey Kong one of the prime faces of Nintendo's extensive back catalog. As for the game itself, it takes the influences from other 2D platformers of the time and still delivers something unique. The art style and music are still just as captivating as they were when the game was released more than 25 years ago, and it's also one of the smoothest and diverse games of the time in terms of movement. This game is now rightfully considered a classic, but for me personally, everything that made this game stand out was vastly improved in the next two games in the franchise.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

I don’t think there is a clearer example of the trilogy pattern in gaming than the first three Resident Evil games on the PS1. What I’m referring to, if you’ve never read one of my reviews before, is the arc of quality that fluctuates over three games in the same series and the pattern one can discern of how the IP grows and evolves. The first game introduces a template of the franchise’s tropes, while some gameplay mechanics tend to be inherently rough-hewn and unrefined due to lacking the hindsight of a debut effort. For the sequel, the second title is granted a treasure trove of hindsight, and they use this to smooth out the coarse gameplay elements with a far better understanding of the franchise’s idiosyncrasies. This results in the peak of what the first game established by flourishing its framework to an outstanding degree, crafting the finest experience the franchise has to offer. The third game is then released as an opportunistic endeavor to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle effect generated from the second game’s positive reception. Instead of finding ways to perfect the already solid source of the second game, the third game tends to add some overblown elements while streamlining the gameplay for the sake of accessibility. It indicates that the developers have slightly overstepped and that it’s closing time for the series. I did not overtly mention the first three Resident Evil games in this explanation, but I’m sure that anyone who has played every game in this PS1 trilogy knows that this subsequent progression of games fits it like a glove. Of course, I realize that placing RE 3 in this position already sets a negative precedent for this review, so brace yourselves for paragraphs criticizing how Resident Evil 3: Nemesis took the franchise’s survival horror properties and adulterated it with the overblown sins a threequel usually commits.

Technically, from a narrative standpoint, RE3 is a direct sequel to RE2 only on the basis that the number in the title is the successive follow-up in numerical order. We do not witness how the T-Virus outbreak has expanded beyond the parameters of Raccoon City and the Arklay Mountain outskirts with global panic ensuing in the streets. Apparently, the singular situation in Raccoon City seen in the second game was so monumentally cataclysmic that we needed ANOTHER storied account from yet another perspective. The person’s point of view, however, should come as a pleasant surprise as it's S.T.A.R.S. member Jill Valentine from the first game. Chris’s backpacking conquest across the pond was evidently a solo venture removed from his police adjacent outfit, so Jill is an unfortunate victim of circumstance in the Raccoon City pandemic, who did not fully anticipate this zombie pandemonium occurrence if her comparatively tarted-up civilian clothing is any indication. Her mission now is to use her special training as an advantage in surviving the chaos.

Jill not only gets the special distinction as the first returning Resident Evil protagonist but one that soaks up the entirety of the spotlight as the sole primary protagonist of RE 3. There are no mirrored events to Jill’s in another campaign playing as another character. Only one playthrough of RE3 with the little lady from S.T.A.R.S. is necessary to grasp the full breadth of the game’s story. However, I still somewhat recommend playing RE3 twice as a lark to experience what should be the soonest of Capcom’s “bright ideas” to spot that were implemented for the third game. Capcom has decided to (literally) cut out the middleman and omit the normal difficulty selection as an option, offering a “hard” difficulty for the seasoned Resident Evil veterans and an “easy” difficulty level for the flock of newbies that they anticipated would now be interested in playing their popular survival horror series. Despite how it may initially seem, forcing the two types of players to accede to what is a stark division of skill levels isn’t completely baffling. One could argue that someone who has survived two outings in a hostile, zombie-infested environment should challenge themselves by ramping up the stakes of their third excursion. On the opposite end of the spectrum, uninitiated players should keep it breezy so as to not taint their first impressions of the series and deter them from all other Resident Evil titles as a result. I chose to play on hard not only because of the rationale listed above but to also preserve any somewhat tangible gamer credibility that I suspect I might have (but probably don’t). As it turns out, with a few exceptions, RE3’s hard mode doesn’t ratchet up the base difficulty from RE2’s normal mode too drastically. Jill begins her trek out of the city with a pistol carrying a modest sum of ammunition as Leon did, and she must collect the formidable firearms as the game progresses. On the flip side, easy mode is so facile that it's hilariously condescending. The player is automatically blessed with a submachine gun, a first-aid pack, an infinite number of ink ribbons, and a whole other bunch of goodies. The developers forgot to include a bib and highchair for anyone playing on this difficulty, but perhaps they couldn’t have fit those in the finite inventory. I kid, of course, but my sincere issue with the unbalanced choice of difficulty here is that a normal difficulty is the solid base of any game’s intentions. Whenever I play or replay a game for a review, I always pick the normal (if difficulty options are offered) option, even if it’s a game I’ve played religiously and am exceptionally skilled at. Without this option, I cannot ascertain what the game is truly attempting to prove with its gameplay, which is why the normal mode is impeachable while the other options aren’t.

What is seriously included in the player’s inventory as a housewarming gift are two tutorial journals that detail every single new aspect that the developers have implemented for RE3. If they felt it necessary to implore the player to read a manual’s worth of text to prepare them for their playthrough, you know the great lengths they went to keep the franchise's familiar formula from stagnating. The result of their efforts is new mechanics and attributes that substantially change the fabric of Resident Evil’s gameplay, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s for the better. For starters, the player might notice what looks like a grinder contraption straight out of shop class in their inventory. One of the journals states that this is the Reloading Tool which is used to craft ammunition with three different types of gunpowder coinciding with the handgun, shotgun, and grenade launcher. One might raise a concern that this new utility mixer will take up valuable space in Jill’s inventory, a stationary position due to ammo pickups regressing into their unprocessed forms. Fortunately, the usual packs of bullets are still located abound on the Raccoon City streets, so carrying around the damn thing at all times won’t be necessary. However, it still comes recommended if Jill has a square of inventory space to spare because the high-caliber ammo the Reloading Tool can craft is highly effective. The journal tells Jill to keenly look for sizable red objects in the foreground, for shooting them with one bullet will cause a fiery explosion that could potentially blow a swarming pack of zombies to kingdom come, a nifty method of ammo conservation. The explosive barrels will definitely spark a “eureka!” moment for the player, for their prevalence as auxiliary offenses in first-person shooters makes their inclusion here a borderline cliche. The bombs that cling to the wall, on the other hand, confused me for health stations for a second, so I guess familiarity is important. Arguably the most significant alteration to the gameplay is the addition of the dodging mechanic. If timed correctly when unarmed or holding a gun, Jill will duck, jump, or roll out of harm’s way. A skill-based way to better mitigate potential damage seems like a helpful inclusion except for the fact that the timing window on the dodge is incredibly strict when done intentionally and surprisingly swift whenever executed on accident. That, and the type of dodge maneuver Jill performs is seemingly random, which can result in Jill backing herself into a wall and leaving herself far more vulnerable than before. I appreciate that these interesting mechanics drive a discernible wedge between RE3 and the previous game. Still, their awkward and somewhat unnecessary presence is somewhat of an indication that the Resident Evil foundation had already been honed to perfection in the previous game and all these new implementations do is complicate things. However, RE3 does feature a number of quality-of-life improvements that I genuinely appreciate, such as making the items more conspicuous in the foreground, a button designated to pull up the map, and a maneuver that swiftly turns Jill around instead of robotically turning her body like a mannequin on a pedestal.

The Raccoon City setting is something that should’ve been reworked entirely as opposed to being augmented like the game’s mechanics. I fully realize that the game’s events run parallel to those of Leon and Claire from the previous game, so placing Jill in the same predicament makes sense. Still, I fail to comprehend why Capcom thought the Raccoon City epidemic needed an additional point-of-view when the events had been exhausted after two almost identical campaigns. As it stands, RE3’s depiction of this doomed city is a reversal of how RE2 coordinated it. The city streets where Leon rushed through to reach the police station are now the primary place of excavation to escape the unremitting madness. Jill also revisits the police station briefly, albeit a truncated version of the precinct with new impenetrable barriers to signify that this takes place in the aftermath of Leon/Claire’s campaigns. Not only does the game fail to refresh the rehashed environments from the previous game, but treating the city streets that were once rightfully a straightaway trek the same as an exquisitely floored establishment is the most fundamental flaw with RE3’s direction. Sure, the worlds of Metroidvania games, the 2D cousin of the survival horror genre that shares the same sense of utility-gated progression, tend to be a collective of areas that vary in topography and thresholds of claustrophobia. With this logic, a Resident Evil map could flourish with the same design philosophy, but RE3 proves that this can’t be the case. The Raccoon City roads simply can’t transcend their initial workings as a linear series of paths no matter how many back alleys and piles of wreckage are impedeing Jill from crossing over the boundaries that the developers have placed. The richly labyrinthian constructions with their multiple stories that have served the series well in the past have been flattened to the ground floor, stretching across the broad radius of a metropolitan area. The breadth of a cityscape makes the backtracking of a survival horror game incredibly tedious, marching to and fro for a marathon’s length of retreaded steps to reach one objective. Any floor of an establishment from the previous two games, no matter how lofty, was never more than a few sets of hallways with several branching rooms as one would realistically expect from an architectural standpoint. I criticized the police precinct setting when it was still a centerpiece in RE2 for exuding too much of a domestic atmosphere for a horror game, but at least it was modeled just as exquisitely as the Spencer Mansion. The developers even had to separate the city into two “uptown” and “downtown” districts with two distinct maps, admissible proof that a linearly designed, sweeping environment does not gel with the survival horror genre.

It is not until the second half of the game where Jill crashes the railcar she’s using to flee the Raccoon City scene that the game provides the player with some truly impeccable survival horror settings. The clocktower is the kind of enclosed, gothic construction that I was craving as a potential successor to the Spencer Mansion, enhancing the dark, eerie atmosphere akin to the first game’s iconic stomping grounds with that desperately needed graphical maturation. The neighboring cemetery park is a competently restrained outdoor area compared to the urban streets of the city, and the underground laboratory efficiently refurbishes what is now a series motif. To heighten my feeling of engagement and admiration with these latter-half areas, they also include puzzles that are bonafide brain teasers, something that the second game was lacking.

Of course, the definitive difference and unique signifier to RE3 is the character on the right side of the full title’s colon. Before entering the gate of the police station, the gameplay will be interrupted with a cutscene of Jill’s S.T.A.R.S. ally, Brad Vickers, getting horribly and forcibly impaled by some fleshy tentacle of a colossal monster wearing a trenchcoat. Once Nemesis, the monster in question, refocuses his attention on Jill after decimating his previous victim, he’ll acutely stalk her like a lion does to a wildebeest for the duration of the game. Upon hearing the premise of an intimidatingly invulnerable tank of an enemy pursuing the female protagonist, one might wonder why Mr. X’s skin has been melted to a Freddy Krueger crisp because the previous game already toyed with the idea of placing a hostile, formidable figure with seemingly impenetrable defenses on the field for the player to contend with. In RE3, if one couldn’t infer his top-billing from the title, Nemesis has a larger presence here than the former superhuman stalker ever did. Nemesis is a T-Virus Terminator that will trounce any target he sets his sights on. On top of his hulking body that is as durable as Kevlar, Nemesis charges at Jill like a raging bull even in the tightest of corridors, as if he’s Frankenstien’s monster composed out of the corpses of the NFL’s finest linebackers. If Nemesis is unable to reach Jill and fling her around like a ragdoll, he’s strapped with a rocket launcher that he will not hesitate to use even in the tightest of indoor corridors to assure that Jill’s ass is grass. Not every encounter will involve the choice-based prompt either, so I suggest running like hell and forgetting about the potential rewards he might drop if you manage to subdue him. All of the evidential context surrounding Nemesis should make him a player’s worst nightmare, but there is something about his determination and overpowered attributes that conjure up feelings of irritation and frustration rather than fear. Nemesis popping in unexpectedly to give Jill a thrashing felt more like encountering your school bully in the hallways and making me groan with painful anticipation. There needs to be an aura of creepy subtlety to elicit a scare factor with this type of villain, something Mr. X already accomplished splendidly.

However, what is terrifying is the fact that Jill will be forced to fight this burnt-looking behemoth twice. His final fight in the laboratory should be prepared for like any other final boss, but the other one occurring at the clocktower beforehand is a traumatic experience. The front lawn of the tall tower is the arena when dueling Nemesis, and Jill will be cramped up against the surrounding walls and the burning debris of a helicopter while she is limping from an unavoidable status effect given to her during the cutscene that introduces this fight, giving Nemesis ample opportunity to have his way with Jill more so than in any standard encounter with him. Get ready to exhaust all ammunition and master the finicky dodge maneuver, because this is what is expected from the player for this fight. Also, pray a few times just to be safe. After being taken to the cleaners far too many times by Nemesis, I could not revert to my last save and explore the clocktower meticulously for any missing items, for the cutscene locks Jill to the top of the tower. This kind of action-intensive fight is not suitable for a survival horror game with tank controls and limited supplies. This encounter seriously made me consider restarting the game on easy difficulty and or abandoning the game entirely. So congratulations Nemesis, you are the newest inductee to the exclusive club of video game bosses that have made me whine like an upset puppy and raise my blood pressure from furiously screaming obscenities. Don’t pat yourself on the back with a sense of pride: if I had some sort of statuette of Nemesis, I’d imbue it with voodoo magic and shoot it point-blank with a revolver and burn the remnants.

Surprisingly enough, or maybe not so much if one reads deeply into Resident Evil’s linear notes, Nemesis is not the main antagonist of the game of his namesake. The apex of villainy across the Resident Evil series is and has always been the Umbrella Corporation that caused this entire mess. In fact, Nemesis was created by Umbrella as a countermeasure to eradicate all members of S.T.A.R.S that might blow the whistle on their involvement with the zombie pandemic, hence why all Nemesis can gravelly utter is the name of the organization. But Nemesis isn’t the only Umbrella associate out on the prowl tonight in Raccoon City. Jill will meet three members of an armed Umbrella task force assigned to dispose of anything infected by the T-Virus and rescue any remaining civilians. Jill is right to be untrusting of anyone who bears the symbol of her mortal enemy, but she must work alongside these guys due to running low on options for lucid human interactions to aid in her escape mission. It turns out that only one of the three men is an unscrupulous bastard, and that’s their leader Nikolai. This Soviet army veteran treats the whole T-virus epidemic as a front for business, willing to exterminate all that keep him from financially benefiting from it including some of his own men. Shoot this guy down with a bazooka when given the opportunity. Speaking of which, the other two Umbrella mercenaries are so disgusted at Nikolai’s callousness that they defect to aiding Jill instead. Carlos, one of the men who becomes the game’s secondary protagonist, takes a temporary role as a playable character in a hospital section where he retrieves a vaccine for an infected Jill. We see less of the other noble mercenary, Mikhail, on account of his grievous wounds, but sacrificing himself to save Jill on the cable car is certainly a noteworthy action of decency, right? Besides Wesker, these three men give the Umbrella corporation a face to attach with, and the reference we obtain from the mixed bag of interactions and intentions between them illustrates a complex moral quandary for what was previously an enigmatically evil force in the franchise. Perhaps the same complications of duty versus dogma can parallel real-life factions with bad reputations.

If I’ve played any third game of any franchise beforehand, and I certainly have, then my experience with Resident Evil 3: Nemesis should come as no surprise. The unification of Resident Evil’s tropes and mechanics seen in RE2 made it a tough act to follow, which can be said for most sophomore sequels for a number of franchises. Still, quelling the sensation of yearning from fans after they’ve played the peak of the series by rounding it out with a third game is always a requisite, even if these last hurrahs tend to overflow the foundation with additional attributes. Most of the additional attributes that RE3 wove into the fabric of the franchise are flawed at best and infuriating at worst, and I wish I could avoid the bad ones as deliberately as the unyielding monster at the center of the game. The best aspects of RE3 that make it a worthy entry are improving on the elements already in the franchise that Resident Evil 2 lacked, such as challenging puzzles in eerie environments instead of all the window dressing they figured would make a substantial difference. With a few noteworthy gripes withstanding, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is still an effective note to end the franchise’s reign as the champion of survival horror on the original PlayStation.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was the perfect swansong for the N64. What better game to send off the console other than with a crass, anarchic romp that wiped its ass with the family-friendly foundation that Nintendo facilitated and by the third-party developer that arguably made the greatest contribution in cementing its accessibility? Unsuspecting consumers assumed that Conker’s Bad Fur Day was yet another innocuous 3D platformer due to its Rareware pedigree and the fact that the game featured a furry, anthropomorphic protagonist. However, they were all flabbergasted at the game’s true colors underneath its intentionally squeaky-clean surface, even though the game box art featured an M-rating along with a disclaimer explicitly stating that this was not a game for children. All the while, Conker is holding a frothy mug of beer with his disturbingly voluptuous girlfriend, Berry. Even if someone is experiencing Conker’s Bad Fur Day knowing full well that the game is intended for mature audiences, the content is still pretty shocking. Rare created a game that shifted the light-hearted tone of their smash hits Banjo Kazooie and Tooie on its head without altering the cherubic visuals, inflicting obscenities on its storybook fantasy world and the cuddly characters that reside in it. Conker’s Bad Fur Day snuck in viscera and vulgarity into the pristine 3D platformer genre like a trojan horse, and uneducated parents were mortified when they inadvertently exposed their children to it. Grand Theft Auto III, another game released in 2001 that also garnered levels of contempt from the PTA boards around the world, at least made it obvious that children shouldn’t play it. On the other hand, Conker’s Bad Fur Day villainously duped parents with a level of deception that shattered their trust in the gaming industry, even though Nintendo did its best to warn them. All controversies aside, the provocative premise of Conker’s Bad Fur Day made it a breath of fresh air. The N64 was overflowing with many bright, cutesy 3D platformers thanks to Super Mario 64. The adult content of Conker’s Bad Fur Day acted as a self-effacing parody to signify that the genre had stagnated and needed to be buried alongside the console that harbored them. If Conker eviscerating the N64 logo with a chainsaw in the game’s introduction isn’t emblematic of its ethos, I don’t know how they could’ve conveyed it more overtly (okay, maybe Banjo’s severed head hung up on a plaque over the bar in the main menu). No one will argue against Conker’s legacy as a subversive title, but whether or not the game is up to snuff with its fellow 3D platformers mechanically is a point of contention.

Rare didn’t just whip Conker out of their ass when they sat down to devise the components of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Squirrels are certainly an appropriately adorable animal, but it’s questionable where they fit on the hierarchy of cuteness next to cats, dogs, or even other woodland critters. Conker was once a budding IP Rare introduced by making Conker a playable character in the 1997 N64 title Diddy Kong Racing. The Conker IP debuted on the Gameboy Color with Conker’s Pocket Tales, a simplistic action-adventure game marketed towards a very young demographic, as one would expect from a game featuring a cartoon squirrel. Rare was initially developing a fully-fledged console follow-up on the N64 titled Twelve Tails: Conker 64, but the early reception was less-than-enthusiastic. Developers were worried that kiddy Conker would wilt under the overcasting shadow of Banjo-Kazooie, for the game mirrored the inoffensive, mirthful atmosphere of the Banjo games to the point where it seemed derivative. In order to give Conker an identity of his own, Rare pulled what Hannah-Barbera did with obscure 1960s cartoon superhero Space Ghost and reinvigorated him into the realm of maturity, albeit with crude humor as opposed to dry, off-kilter absurdism. Immediately, Conker’s Bad Fur Day illustrates the squirrel’s transformation in the opening cutscene when he leaves his girlfriend Berri a message from a bar payphone to tell her he’s coming home late so he can buy another round with the boys. He gets sloppy drunk, ralphs on the ground, and loses himself in a drunken stupor. Whether it's a matter of lying to his girlfriend or binge drinking, Conker is clearly an adult putting himself in adult situations.

Ironically, Conker’s Bad Fur Day excels the most in the least edgy aspect found in the game, and that’s its surface-level presentation. The most fortunate thing about being the last hurrah in a console’s lifespan is having the advantage of hindsight paved by the shortcomings of your predecessors who were busy finding their way through uncharted territory. In the annals of gaming history, there hasn’t been a more arduous terrain to trek through than buffing out the cracks of 3D graphics in the N64 generation. Conker’s Bad Fur Day couldn’t transcend the rudimentary snags that beset the N64, or at least to the point where the player could clearly discern every strand of fur on Conker’s body. After five years of developing early 3D games on a console that looked like blocks of airbrushed chunks of cheese, Rare flaunted their experience in developing for the N64 and made a game that proved to be the pinnacle of the system’s capabilities. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is, bar none, the most gorgeous N64 game from a graphical standpoint, something unexpected from a title that brandishes such vulgar content. The graphics here don’t look too unfamiliar to the typical N64 aesthetic, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day pushes itself beyond its contemporaries through an elevated scope. I’ve always claimed that early 3D games that adopted a more fantastical, cartoonish style looked the most appealing. The developers could render something fittingly unrealistic under the confines of early 3D instead of attempting to emulate actual humans and real-world environments to expectedly lackluster results with such games as Goldeneye. Conker’s Bad Fur Day could essentially function as an interactive cartoon like all of its fellow 3D platformers, but the secret ingredient lies in taking the wide scope of some of Banjo’s levels and using that design consistently. The area of Conker’s Bad Fur Day that acts as the nucleus of the game’s world is a hub whose grassy valleys and hilly peaks create a diverse range of elevation, making Conker look small and insignificant. Interior areas such as the gothic castle and the prehistoric chamber are magnificently spacious, and the inner sanctum of the dung beetle’s operation is like a poopy Paradise Lost. Even the cliffside waterfall in the tutorial section looks splendorous. The best levels from the Banjo games were those with a wide proportional setting and expansive parameters. Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes something relatively cohesive with the same design philosophy. With a few refinements to the shape and tints of character models and settings, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes it apparent how far the N64 has come since Mario was hopping on a series of colored blocks in the N64’s infancy.

Another contributing factor to Conker’s stellar presentation is its cinematic flair. The game doesn’t present itself as if Hideo Kojima is at the helm, but like with its graphics, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes due with what the N64 obliges and delivers spectacularly. A substantial portion of Conker’s Bad Fur Day’s humor is delivered through dialogue during cutscenes interspersed between gameplay moments. On the screen, dialogue is presented through speech bubbles, a fittingly comic touch that accentuates the game’s cartoon visuals. Bubbles with text that pop up on the screen never overflow and become jarring because the text refreshes with every spoken line, and conversing characters are never shown on the screen simultaneously. As you can probably guess, a strong facet of the game’s vulgarities is the foul language that spews from the mouths of the characters. Funny enough, Conker’s dialogue is saintly compared to every single NPC character's colorful stream of verbal sewage. Maybe this was done to make Conker seem more like a stranger in a strange land, a hostile environment marked by inhospitable rudeness. Either way, the language in Conker’s Bad Fur Day is caustic enough to make an aging schoolmarm say seven hail marys. Another surprising choice from the developers regarding the dialogue was to censor the word “fuck.” Don’t worry: the mother of all swear words is used frequently by the characters in a myriad of varieties, but any utterance of the word is bleeped like it’s on TV with a series of violent characters obscuring the word in the speech bubble. Somehow, keeping the overall language PG-13 by censoring “fuck” makes the game sound more explicit, with the grating sound of the bleep ringing louder in the player's ears than if they kept the dialogue as is. I’m surprised none of the NPCs ever told Conker to see you next Tuesday if you catch my vernacular. Rare is a British company, after all. Speaking of which, a mere three voice actors deliver the profane lines, and they all struggle to mask their British accents. Some voices, like Conker, occasionally seep in a British inflection on what seems like an accident, while others, like the dung beetles, sound like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Whether or not the voice actors are making an attempt to veil their accent, the cadence of the line deliveries consistently sounds like the voice is an improvised impression that is slowly deflating. Do not expect vocal performances with range or emotion; I’ll give the developers the benefit of the doubt that perhaps it’s another mark of the game’s wacky eccentricities rather than bad direction.

Also, do not expect Conker’s Bad Fur Day to amaze the player with an extravagant plot. Conker’s mission throughout the game is just to find his way home, like a scatological Homer’s Odyssey. Conker’s journey is a roundabout trek through a no man’s land where each step onward won’t lead him closer to his goal but provide another distraction with its own secondary arc. Any characters Conker comes across have a perfunctory presence whose transient impact on the story leaves no lasting impression. Sections of the game’s story are listed in chapters, divided by notable scenes like how the aforementioned Greek epic is structured. Similar to how everyone remembers individual parts of The Odyssey, such as the bout with the Cyclops or avoiding the Sirens, the player will similarly recognize the events of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The pinnacle moment of each chapter is obtaining dollars: hopping, cigar-smoking stacks of money that serve as the game’s one collectible. Adult Conker is a man’s man who is motivated by money, alcohol, and poontang, so of course, all three of these things are featured in his mature breakout title in some capacity. The cutscene that triggers when the player collects these wads of cash shows Conker’s pupils shifting into dollar signs as they scroll up in his head like slot machines, with Conker expressing an ecstatically wide, toothy grin. If you’ve played any other 3D platformer game, you’ll know this is a nod to the brief, victorious celebration that a character performs when they earn another one of the main collectibles (Super Mario 64, Banjo, Jak and Daxter) and Conker’s expression never fails to amuse me. I’ve heard that collecting the money unlocks new areas and progresses the game, but I found this inconsistent. Judging from the placement of these chapters in the main menu, I completed the section with the barn way before the game was intended, and the game did not direct somewhere else on the map.

I’d claim that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a deconstruction of the archetypal hero’s journey, like the cash collectible is for gaming tropes, but I feel I’d be giving the game too much credit considering the half-assed conflict scenario they conjured up. Meanwhile, the Panther King, the mighty monarch of this land, notices a problem while sitting on his imposing throne. The table on which his glass of milk resides is missing a leg, and he cannot hold it due to its irregularity. His scientist advisor deduces that placing a red squirrel as an alternative for the missing leg is the only logical solution, for a red squirrel is the optimal size and color. The Panther King’s weasel army sets out to capture Conker so their snarling highness can drink his milk in peace. Is this really the best source of conflict you could come up with, Rare?

Perhaps I can’t be too critical of the game’s arching plot because it seems evident that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a series of events that serve as a collective. Because the nature of this kind of story is episodic, a good ol’ highlight reel is needed to detail Conker’s finest moments. Calling Conker’s Bad Fur Day crude is a statement that even Captain Obvious wouldn’t bother to utter. Each chapter in the game involves a fresh slew of characters and scenarios, so the game has plenty of opportunities to be uniquely offensive. For those of you who are particularly squeamish, chapters like “Windy” and “Barn Boys” feature the visceral combustion of precious farm animals. Conker feeds an irritating rat so much cheese that the gas built up by lactose causes him to inflate and explode like a watermelon, while the cows are disposed of by the ramming of an irate bull after they defecate enough for the dung beetle’s liking. Several local villagers are abducted by Bat Conker in “Spooky” and are liquidated by a spiky, medieval contraption in a room of the Count’s mansion as a means for the ancient vampire to feast on their gushy remains. Conker sacrifices an infant dinosaur he hatches to gain further access to the “Uga Buga” level, where a giant stone slab crushes the adorable beast into bloody mincemeat. To be fair, the creature had blood on his hands as he devoured every caveman in sight until he was pulverized. If blood and guts don’t turn your stomach, Conker’s Bad Fur Day also offers up a slew of raunchy moments involving intimate bodily fluids and lewd, sexual content. One of Conker’s adult vices that I briefly touched upon was alcohol, and the stupid bastard didn’t learn his lesson from the night before. In two sections, guzzling booze from a keg will get Conker sloppy drunk, and the objective is to unzip his pants and douse enemies with his piss. Do I need to comment on the content involving fecal matter any further? Actually, the shit in Conker’s Bad Fur Day stacks up so high that it hits the fan with The Great Mighty Poo, a magnificent mass of sentient poo so grand that it developed a singing voice to match its immense size. This boss fight that also factors as a musical number is one of the greatest boss fights in gaming history, and I will not dispute this claim with anyone. There is no explicit nudity in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but the game still teeters with the western world’s most touchy taboos. The Boiler Room boss inside the vault brandishes a pair of iron testicles that Conker must wallop with a set of bricks. The fight against Buga the Knut, the king of the cavemen, involves making his pants fall down like King Hippo, only this neanderthal isn’t wearing underwear, and Conker must make the miniature T-Rex he hypnotized chomp off chunks of flesh from his big, naked ass. After that, Conker takes a crack at his tall, buxom cavewoman, for the well-endowed sunflower he encountered earlier weirded him out (as it did for the rest of us). Look at Berri and tell me with a straight face that she’s a dynamic character and not a trope of sexual objectification (you can’t). People nowadays might take offense at a Beavis, and Butthead duo of a paint can and brush bullying a pitchfork into hanging himself, which he fails because he doesn’t have a neck.

The million-dollar question on the content of Conker is if it is still funny after all these years or if it was funny, to begin with. During the late 90s and early 2000s, comedy’s initiative in raising the bar included the foulest and most deplorable things that media in the past wouldn’t dare to display. One could probably compare Conker’s Bad Fur Day to South Park, for they both broke ground in the vein of depravity for their respective mediums around the same time. However, Conker’s Bad Fur Day doesn’t mold its crude humor into a satirical substance like South Park tends to do. All we can do with Conker’s content is marvel at how these perversities managed to elude the censors for shock value. On top of the shlock, the meta humor, film references, and other humor tropes common at the time make me groan. The A Clockwork Orange Kubrick stare and the D-Day recreation from Saving Private Ryan are effective, but I’ve seen these parodied countless times. Am I not seeing the comedic genius because I am experiencing this game twenty years after it was released? The most amusing aspect of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is how much it borrows from Looney Tunes as its prime source of cartoon inspiration. Conker is essentially a more sociopathic Bugs Bunny, treating all the people around him with sarcastic glee and derision. Just substitute a beer for a carrot, and the word “maroon” for “wanker” and the resemblance is uncanny.

I can forgive the dated humor in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but I cannot overlook the game's severe mechanical problems. One would expect an adult-oriented 3D platformer to offer more of a challenge, but I feel Conker provides one unintentionally. Overall, the game is fairly lenient, with difficulty in terms of approaching obstacles and with error. In another attempt to jab at video game tropes, actions in the game are reserved for “context-sensitive pads” seen everywhere with the letter B. A lightbulb will appear over Conker’s head, and he’ll proceed to whip anything out of his ass to solve a problem. Usually, these instances are pretty straightforward. The video game trope of multiple lives is explained by a diminutive, churlish depiction of the Grim Reaper once the player dies for the first time. Apparently, a squirrel is an animal with multiple lives like those blasted cats he despises, and extra lives are tails hanging off of random places around the map. To stave off bothering Grim, tabs of chocolate are displayed as the game’s health item, totaling up to a maximum of six. Chocolate is everywhere, and thank the lord because Conker constantly depletes it due to falling. Even the most tepid of tumbles will hurt Conker, which isn’t fair, considering he’s a character with the power of flight. The player can execute a high jump and glide for a short distance, hurting Conker. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourselves. The chapter of “Bat’s Tower” was especially tense because of this. On top of this, aiming Conker’s flight trajectory is a finicky task due to Conker’s base control feeling like years of drinking have made him half-paralyzed. Add a restricted, uncooperative camera in the mix, and the game reminds me less of Banjo Kazooie and more of Super Mario 64. Ouch.

Controlling Conker already sounds bad enough on a base level, but it’s made much worse anytime the game features anything outside the realm of platforming. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Notorious examples include swimming underwater in the vault and the blistering lava race, but these end quickly as opposed to the game’s shoddy shooting controls. Getting rid of the hostile dung beetles at the beginning with a slingshot is an early sampler of these, and it’s uneventful due to the sluggish speed of the bugs. The hive turret is sort of uncooperative, but the one-shot damage of the bullets does enough to compensate. The pinpoint accuracy needed to kill the zombies in “Spooky” is excruciating, but it’s only a small factor of the entire chapter. The lengthy period of the game that makes shooting a core mechanic is the WWII-inspired “It’s War.” War is hell enough, but having to mow down gangs upon gangs of evil Tediz as a one-man army feels like we’ve plunged into the seventh circle. The shooting controls in Conker’s Bad Fur Day are some of the most slippery and unresponsive I’ve seen across any game I’ve played. The Tediz do not have to adhere to piss-poor controls, so they’ll easily bushwack Conker while he’s lining his sights. This especially becomes a problem during the chapter’s escape sequence on the beach, where the Tediz can obliterate Conker with one bazooka shell, whereas Conker has to stop and carefully aim. This chapter made me feel like I just underwent a campaign overseas and started feeling the stages of shell shock. Conker can't be a renaissance man if he already struggles with his main mechanic.

I’ve given up on making sense of Conker’s plot, but the ending of the game bothered me. Once Conker returns from war, the weasel mob boss wants him and Berri to complete a bank heist, and this operation is a full-on Matrix reference, complete with all of the action sequences we’ve seen parodied to death. At the end of the vault is the Panther King, who has become impatient waiting for Conker and decides to face Conker himself. Unexpectedly, his contemptuous scientific underling has slipped his boss a mickey in the form of yet another film reference: the xenomorph from Alien who bursts from his chest. Not an alien with a striking resemblance to H.R. Giger’s creation, but the alien itself. How did Rare not get sued? Conker even duels the alien as the game’s final boss in the yellow mech and says, “get away from her, you bitch!” when it hovers over Berri’s lifeless body. The fight proves too formidable for Conker, but before he is torn to shreds, the game freezes as Conker uses this opportunity to request more accommodating circumstances for this scenario. He decapitates the xenomorph with a katana and succeeds the Panther King as the land’s royal leader. A postmodern meta moment like this is not surprising, but placing it in the game’s climax feels rather contrived. Then again, the game’s plot was already contrived. One thing I like about the ending is swinging the xenomorph by its tail in an homage to the Bowser fights in Super Mario 64. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most clever reference in the game.

It goes without saying, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day certainly stands out from the rest of its 3D platformer contemporaries. The game perches itself on the tower of backs made from its N64 brethren to poke and prod their foundations while excreting an unspeakable cocktail of piss and shit down their trail. Games like Super Mario 64 and Rare’s Banjo games walked so Conker’s Bad Fur Day could run, and the game has shown through its presentation that it can run pretty fast. Unfortunately, the game did not have the stamina or gaming competency to do the hundred-yard dash, making it a fellow contender instead of the undisputed king. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a case of style over substance, and even then, the smutty style that launched it into the stratosphere is a bit too sophomoric and is ultimately a product of its time. Nevertheless, Conker’s Bad Fur Day is still a unique experience not for the faint of heart, and rest assured that there won’t be another game like it released in the future.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

One popular topic of conversation usually reserved for a focus group or a conversational ice breaker is which of our artistic achievements we’d present to visiting or invading extraterrestrials if the opportunity arises. For this hypothetical scenario, we are the arbiters of refined culture, disregarding the adulation of works with several accolades under their belts and peerless acclaim that would objectively serve as representation. So really, the choices ultimately boil down to one’s own personal favorites. A small, but fervid, selection of one’s objective taste regarding this question is quite distressing if one ponders the implications of such a task, for the alien species might not perceive the works with the same level of enthusiasm and see an individual's preferences as indicative of the entirety of humankind. Or, they could just be unfeeling philistines ready to annihilate or enslave us at the pull of a laser gun trigger regardless of what we’ve accomplished in the realm of art and entertainment. For us gamers, the scope of this hypothetical scenario has to be scaled down, for we already have trouble convincing other human beings that video games are a legitimate art form as is. When Roger Ebert, arguably the most famed and respected critic across all mediums much less his signature forte of film, was still alive and active, gamers attempted to sway the dean of critique to a more favorable viewpoint on whether video games were a bonafide form of artistic expression by suggesting that he play Shadow of the Colossus. Of course, being an obstinate old man at the time, he refused to humor any inkling of expending any of his valuable time and energy on such a “trite” and “pedestrian” form of entertainment. In my perspective, I think Roger Ebert was afraid of being proven wrong and losing an iota of his credibility upon his eventual reflection. Not only would I suggest that the haughty figures of older generations seek out Shadow of the Colossus to change their viewpoint, but I’d confidently bestow the game to any race of hostile aliens as a surefire way to prompt them to lionize us as masters of the universe. You’ll be thanking me if this ever becomes a reality. Shadow of the Colossus is one of the essential artistic pillars in the timeline of gaming’s history, equivalent to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses or Francois Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows. All arguments debating the place of video games in the esteemed echelons of fine art alongside its fellow entertainment mediums should be thrown completely out of the window, for Shadow of the Colossus proves the elevated potential of the interactive medium more effectively than any other game before it.

Revealing that the developers behind Shadow of the Colossus are Team Ico might garner an initial understanding of how the game achieves its magnificent artistry. Using their debut project Ico as a reference, the mission of this maverick Japanese studio is to trim the fat of the typical video game to an almost monastic degree, a “subtraction design” philosophy as specifically coined by director Fumito Ueda. Admittedly, video games commonly feature HUDs that aid the player’s understanding of the game’s scrupulous details and character status through a perpetual visual reference. While the necessity of such implements is warranted for most games, they do arguably diminish the immersive elements of gaming with a layer of artificiality. Using the Legend of Zelda series as a primary influence, Team Ico sought to strip the action-adventure base of the series and thematic fantasy tropes down to the marrow. Without the display of a health bar, maps, or an arsenal of items in the menu, Ico acted as an emaciated version of Nintendo’s iconic franchise for every single contextual aspect of the game. Still, I’ll be damned if Ueda’s minimalist design ethos didn’t effectively render something engaging, ironically accentuating all of the puzzle and platforming attributes we know and love from a series such as The Legend of Zelda by diluting their apparentness. Like the project of Team Ico’s namesake, Shadow of the Colossus also strives to evoke an aura of epicness through a meticulous waning of gaming’s excessive elements. However, Shadow of the Colossus did not compromise on that bombastic video game flair as Ico did in some aspects. Somehow, despite its continued ascetic efforts, Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most epically awe-striking video games that I’ve ever played.

What better way to ignite the player’s intrigue initially than to present yet another opening sequence with implied high stakes shrouded in a veil of ambiguity? I would comment that this type of introduction is a standby method for Team Ico to engage the player by piquing their curiosity just like Ico, but the context behind Shadow of the Colossus’s plot is admittedly a smidge clearer. Between the immaculate cliffs of a nameless, naturalistic landscape, a young man, who we dub as “Wander,” rides a charcoal-black horse with a fierce sense of determination. Upon entering an ancient temple fit for a pharaoh's tomb, the young man dismounts his horse and unloads his cargo onto the main chamber’s altar. Unraveling the cloak reveals a girl whose lifeless mien and ghostly skin complexion signify that she is freshly deceased. After unsheathing a glowing sword to fend off the bothersome black spirits that strongly resemble those from Ico, a discarnate voice perks up and informs the boy that resurrecting the girl may be possible via the usage of his reflective blade. With the transportation aid of his loyal steed, Agro, Wander must scour the outer limits of the land to find sixteen Colossi and slay them all as a chivalrous knight does to a dragon. Only by undergoing this daunting escapade will Wander allegedly restore consciousness to whom he presumably loves dearly. How am I privy to all of this exposition you may ask? Because the introduction duly provides it. After Wander places the girl on the altar, a disembodied mask tells us that the setting is a sacred realm foretold to revive the dead, explaining Wander’s impassioned efforts to travel to this remote, abandoned sanctuary. Perhaps the developers couldn’t let the player rely on their likely preconceived notions that this effete guy wearing a hairband is far more sinister than he seems and is going to great lengths to dispose of the body of a girl he has murdered. Some players would find the whole premise too heinous to continue onward. Either or, Shadow of the Colossus promptly exposes its context compared to what little was provided for the beginning of Ico. Hell, the introduction here features more dialogue than the entirety of Ico. This might give the impression that Shadow of the Colossus isn’t as narratively obtuse as Ico, an unfortunate sign that the developers got cold feet and decided to appease the commercial masses. Still, the absurdly lofty overarching objective at hand here for a seemingly unfeasible reward that Wander accepts without expressing a hint of skepticism presents an air of disconnect between the player and the narrative’s intentions. In the grand scheme of things, the player is still kept in the dark about what is really occurring. Also, surely the premise of rescuing a princess who is already dead subverts the hero and damsel in distress roles more cleverly than Ico did. Ladies, get yourself a little Romeo like Wander, who will trudge through death-defying odds like conquering over a dozen different beasts as big as Beverly Hills mansions for you with no questions asked even if you cease to exist (actually, don’t; for I cannot live up to those standards).

If Ico served as a prolonged, squalid depiction of a typical Zelda dungeon, Shadow of the Colossus extends the radius of Zelda’s breadth to the franchise’s open-world aspects. Naturally, because Shadow of the Colossus is a 3D game whose setting consists of the same topography as Hyrule’s first polygonal rendering, I must compare this game’s world to Ocarina of Time as I tend to do with all obvious successors that use it as a template. Discussing similarities between Shadow of the Colossus’s forbidden realm and Hyrule Field is more apt than the usual comparisons, for the few Shadow of the Colossus detractors gripe that its world is far too “empty and stiff” to hold their interest. What amuses me is that this criticism is exactly what I’ve always applied to Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time, even though I always consider some semblance of clemency for its pioneering primitiveness. While I can understand why these negative descriptors could be assigned to the world of Shadow of the Colossus, they fail to recognize the intended scope of this barren wasteland. You see, the forbidden lands and Hyrule Field present a contrast between empty and “empty,” and you’ll just have to follow along to grasp my point. If we use the example of Hyrule from A Link to the Past, the kingdom’s overworld should be a sprawling environment with diverse terrain and a point of interest around every corner whether it be in plain sight or “a secret to us all.” All that Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time amounts to is a mossy vestibule stretched out to the appropriately spacious diameter of a hub. I stated that Ocarina of Time didn’t sacrifice much in translating all of its refined 2D elements, but the Hyrule overworld is the most apparent compromise Zelda had to make during the complicated transition to the third dimension. When the technology has progressed where rendering an empty hub world is an endeavor fueled by artistic vision as seen in Shadow of the Colossus, the minimalist imperative can produce something spectacular. Outside of the towering temple where Wander begins his quest, the surrounding perimeter is a green grassy knoll surrounded by a blockade of canyons and chasms. Finding a route around the inconvenient environment in opposite cardinal directions will lead Wander to rocky cliff sides that resemble the shores of Dover or a fallow desert area parched by the comparative lack of moisture. Lying between the two radically different environments are sections with lakes, ravines, groves, and dimly lit forested areas where traces of sunlight only peek through to the floor. While the overworld here certainly checks off more ecological boxes than the flat field in the center of Hyrule, the entire landscape is so bereft of any activity that the silence is disconcerting. Besides the clip-clopping of Agro’s hooves, only the wind is an instrument in this close to absolute zero decibel soundscape. The atmosphere is so desolate that it's as if Wander is the very first lifeform, much less a human being, to set foot on this untouched, pristine landscape like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Wander’s surroundings are so removed from all traces of civilization that it’s almost as if he’s fabricating them in a dream all to himself. It would explain the perpetually ominous clouds overhead that never crescendo into precipitating, something sublime that accentuates the breathtaking view. The meditative undercurrent of this uncanny world is quite refreshing considering that several other Hyrule Field followers congest their hub settings with a little TOO much hustle and bustle.

If you’re the jittery type who cannot stand to bask in the beguiling ambiance for longer than necessary, you should be relieved to know that Shadow of the Colossus will always present a set goal of finding one of the Colossi somewhere in the overworld. One would think the sheer size of these mobile mammoths or the thunderous echos of their footsteps in the still silence of the setting would make the process of sussing out their locations easier than finding VD on a dive bar’s toilet seat but never will Wander spot one of these beasts from his peripheral. To direct Wander towards the locale of the current colossus assigned by the detached voice that speaks backward from the temple’s sunroof, he must raise his sacred sword skyward and reflect the sun’s rays like a solar-powered compass. If the radiation resembles a straightforward beam as opposed to a scattered burst, then that indicates that the colossus can be found in that general direction. This adjunct appliance to the sword seems like it completely mitigates the searching section of the hunt, but this beacon is no GPS. The narrow, singular reflective ray does not account for the aforementioned arduously conspicuous and unwavering geomorphology. Circumnavigating around the terrain in an attempt to close in on a colossus will always prove to be a meandering charade. Good luck finding the equivalent of the sword’s “reception” if the route to a colossus includes traversing through a forest or a narrow section of a canyon. However, as diverse as the terrain is throughout this world, one convenient aspect of the map is that it is relatively compact. Traveling to either opposite of the ecological spectrum, whether or not Wander will find himself smack dab in a colossus’s domain, will never take more than approximately a few minutes. The player should be relieved considering that Wander will automatically be teleported back to the temple because the voice above has apparently declared it as the omphalos of the operation. The game’s progression is constructed as a rinse-and-repeat process, but at least the restrained spread of the forbidden lands has made arriving back to the general vicinity of the next colossus less tedious. Unfortunately, reflecting light off of Wander’s sword won’t double in aiding the search for the crystal-tailed salamanders and the hearty yellow fruit hanging from the trees, shooting them with Wander’s pink bow with a limitless supply of arrows and consuming them to increase his maximum stamina and health respectively. However, Wander is already compensated with these stat boosts for slaying a colossus, so the grueling trouble of finding these infinitesimal things across the map should be discouraged to even the most devout completionists.

While the aura of traversing through the world of Shadow of the Colossus is drenched in layers of lethargy and interminable tension, the path of conquest is always exciting because of what lies at the end of every route. Besides the notion of successfully maneuvering over the world’s formidable terrain, simply encountering any of the colossi in their earthly domicile is its own reward. Upon encroaching on the territory of a colossus, a cutscene will trigger that showcases the magnificent marvel of extreme biology in its full glory. The “shadow” portion of the game’s title is not a minor allusion to enliven potential buyers with mystique: the colossi are gargantuan enough to eclipse the sun from Wander’s view and even chill him with the shade emanating from their…well, colossal immensity. When in the vicinity of a colossus, the serene tone of the overworld staggeringly catapults immediately into adrenaline-pumping action as if an alarm clock abruptly awakened Wander. While the stark commonality between these beasts is their physical enormity, their environmental conditions have granted them all distinguishable physical adaptations. The first colossi, Valus, features the anatomy of a minotaur creature, standing on two legs to support his massive, lumberjack frame. Sharing his relatively humanoid posture are the column-wielding Gaius, the geezer with a white, ZZ Top beard Barba, and the gravely serious-looking Argus. Still, they all approach the uninvited guest that is Wander differently during battle. Quadrupedal colossi include the wooly Quadratus, the crudely shaped equine creature of Phaedra, and the tortoise-esque Basaran. Other colossi’s characteristics are defined more by their environments. The laser-tusked Pelagia, giant gull Avion, and the electric eel Hydrus all reside along the area of a watery channel or basin, integrating themselves with their aquatic surroundings in varying degrees, but each of them obviously resemble radically dissimilar species. The same dichotomy of colossi types is also found in the desert area of the map, with Dirge burrowing beneath the sand while the sand snake Phalanx (my favorite of the bunch) gracefully soars above it high up in the sky. Surprisingly enough, there is even a trio of miniature colossi with Kuromori, Celosia, and Cenobia. Despite their relative dwarfism compared to their towering colossi brethren, these three are still scaled to the sizes of rhinoceroses with the same level of aggression. The Colossi are a wonderfully assorted bunch of imposing creatures, and whatever common ancestor they all share that has passed down their glowing eyes and arcane armor has formulated sixteen of the most imaginative monsters ever seen in the gaming medium.

Essentially, Shadow of the Colossus is a glorified boss gauntlet with intermittent travel sequences in between each colossus that allows the player to simmer in their latest onerous accomplishment. To divulge the rich gameplay mechanics involved in taking all of these colossi down, I’d have to reveal their puzzle-oriented secrets, and spoiling them would be a disservice to any prospective players and the colossi themselves by sullying their intimidating allure. All the input I can communicate is to not fear using the superior speed of Agro during a few fights and not to underestimate the smaller colossi. One encompassing aspect of defeating the colossi is that all of them will require scaling their mountainous bodies to subdue them. This intimate aspect of the fights is the game’s defining idiosyncrasy, and the prospect of climbing a colossus and riding its backside like a flea on a mangy dog is as exhilarating and unnerving as it sounds. Finding an entry point to scaling their ginormous forms is where the puzzle aspects of the gameplay are relevant, and this may involve taunting them with the bow and arrow or outsmarting them into fracturing their armor. Still, I cannot say which colossi these methods apply to. Once Wander manages to exploit their vulnerability to ascend upward onto the colossi, he must raise his sword as he would to find these beasts in the overworld to expose the tender points of their body signified by a glowing sigil. I guess this modestly-sized blade rivals the might of Excalibur because thrusting it in the designated exterior parts of the colossi will make them groan in agony and gush blood like a sieve. Wander’s only concern at this point is continuing to balance himself on the colossi as it thrashes around trying to knock him off, for they are intelligent enough to register that this puny man is trying to murder them and are rightfully upset. Even though it's illogical from a biological standpoint regarding some of the aquatic colossi, each of their bodies will at least have a clump of fur to cling onto to retain Wander's advantageous position.

Converging a level dungeon and its boss into one fully-fledged experience? Team Ico’s rumhamming of video game attributes is pure, masterful brilliance. Still, the turbulent interactions with the colossi remind me of one prevalent complaint some players share regarding the game’s controls and presentation. Truthfully, Shadow of the Colossus is rather sluggish, operating on a framerate that makes the character movement seem as if it's running in slow motion. This becomes an issue whenever a colossus knocks down Wander and will take what seems like an eternity to recuperate. Sometimes, select colossi will take advantage of Wander’s vulnerability and beat him down until he has been eradicated. The camera also tends to have a hard time holding onto the colossi as Wander does, which can also cause him to make a fatal mistake. These hiccups would normally devastate a game’s overall quality, but I trust that a fraction of Shadow of the Colossus’s imperfections is a deliberate effort from Team Ico. Because the framerate is glacial, it allows the player to feel the full, intended impact of the colossi. Whenever one of these brutes slams its feet into the earth, the shattering of the frame rate that occurs makes defeating them seem like an insurmountable undertaking. Flopping about by the hem of a colossus’s wooly coat in a languid frame of motion effectively highlights how removed from the ground Wander is up top of a colossus like the steep altitude is making his oxygen dwindle as quickly as his stamina gauge. While the presentation is technically unacceptable, one can’t deny that the linear qualities of shoddier mechanical performance make the gameplay resonate with the player.

The immediate falling action of shedding a colossi’s mortal coil with too many critically deep sword plunges should also resonate with the player. After the expedition of locating the colossus and the mental strain involved in finding a way to extinguish it, one might think that executing the seemingly inexecutable would inspire victorious feelings of joy. Alas, the scene of the colossi’s eyes turning blank and its body collapsing into the earth evokes a potent melancholy. Sure, we accomplished the task at hand, but at what cost? The archetypal story of man conquering beast stems back to at least the Middle Ages to Beowulf and Grendel, and it’s deemed as one of the most courageous feats that defines a man as a hero. Can we really assign Wander to the same celebrated category of men? Sure, this is technically his role if we apply what little context we’re given to the heroic tropes we’re all familiar with. Still, one cannot earnestly follow along with narrative tradition when these docile colossi have inflicted no harm on any other living being or the environment before being provoked by an invasive pest. And was the effort truly worth it when every short-term reward is Wander being knocked unconscious by ghastly tendrils that violently penetrate his body? The brilliant aspect of conveying this is that the game never overtly tells the player that Wander is the real monster in a game filled with them like a contrived plot twist. Through subtle clues, Shadow of the Colossus flips the classic hero versus monster story on its head where the concentrated blood flow gives the conflict some well-considered clarity. When these beautiful, majestic colossi cease to exist at our hands, we all wonder if real-life poachers who kill animals on earth have souls.

In reality, Wander is too insignificant to be the hero. From the beginning, he’s been nothing but the subservient tool to the temple’s undetectable landlord who has been praying on Wander’s desperation. His hinting at how to handle all of the colossi at idle moments during their encounters shows he has too much invested interest in seeing all of them fall, which cannot be a good sign considering the unclear correlation between riding the world of the colossi and the resurrection of Wander’s girlfriend. After finally facing the last colossi, a vertical behemoth named Malus whose head practically brushes up against the clouds, Wander does not travel back to the temple to celebrate his achievement with champagne and ice cream. An even more subtle detail in highlighting that Wander’s actions are injurious is that they are having a toxic effect on his well-being. By the fifteenth colossi, Wander will be covered by so many blue lesions, you’d think he was zombified. When the final colossi has been conquered, Wander is no more. He is a vessel for the ancient demon Dormin, the identity of the voice whose soul had been fractured into sixteen pieces and kept in the colossi as a drastic measure to stave off his return. For the past few cutscenes in between colossi, a group of villagers have been slowly approaching the temple and have managed to cross the bridge by the final cutscene. They are aghast to see that Wander has fulfilled the endeavor of reviving Dormin, chiding the boy for his foolishness. When Dormin fully encapsulates Wander, the player gets the chance to play as a colossus and smash the group of men into a paste. However, the men are wise and know exactly what must be done in the case of Dormin’s return. By throwing Wander’s sacred sword into a pool of water, it creates a ravaging vortex that pulls Wander in, ending Dormin’s reign of mayhem before it had a chance to begin. The men hightail out of the temple, with the bridge eroding from the vortex’s ferocity as a positive sign that entering it and interacting with Dormin will be harder to perform.

Somehow, despite Dormin’s deceptive promises, the girl who has been comatose throughout this whole ordeal awakens from her slumber and finds an infant in the pool who is implied to be a reborn Wander. I’m quite puzzled at how the girl has regained sentience when it seemed proven that she would never see the light of day again because all evidence was leading to Wander running a fool’s errand. The fact that he persists onward just to fail miserably at the end and die is what makes the game’s resolution beautifully tragic. Then again, he admittedly did bring all of this misfortune on himself, for not even Orpheus was this much of a zealous romantic. Like Ico, the fatal blow that befalls the protagonist is treated to a hopeful epilogue to keep the player’s spirits up. I can handle tragedy well enough, but I can admit that plodding further allows the player to consider their experience more after they turn the game off. Really, Agro returning to the temple on a limp leg was all the levity this ending needed. Her fall off of a crumbling bridge before the final colossi is genuinely the most devastating scene of the game, and seeing that she (or at least I’m assuming it's a she considering there is no visible, foot-long horse genitalia protruding from its crotch) survived made me cheer delightfully.

Speechless. Utterly speechless. This was my stunned reaction to witnessing the falling action of Shadow of the Colossus and its resolution. In all honesty, my mouth was agape through most of the duration of Shadow of the Colossus because the game is nothing short of extraordinary. Team Ico’s austerity is still on display here as it was in Ico, as seen in the game’s open world and the liberal loosening of the game’s narrative leaving the context up to the player’s interpretations. Still, dialing back the strict abnegation of gaming’s frills and thrills for Shadow of the Colossus resulted in a game far more compelling than Ico, while still retaining plenty of artistic triumphs that I admired about the developer’s previous title. Shadow of the Colossus is beautiful in every sense of the word: from the captivating climate of its uninhabited, windswept world, the titans to topple, to its poignant liner notes that make the player ask questions when the protagonist doesn't bother to. At the helm of this emotional rollercoaster is a unique gameplay mechanic that I don’t feel is hyperbolic to call it a visionary feat of innovation. If your character ever finds themselves gripping to the body of a herculean foe to skewer their weak spots, it means that Team Ico is collecting royalties. Does Shadow of the Colossus need more convincing that it should be an essential game to play for gamers and non-gamers alike? I don’t believe so.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com