In the inevitable wake of another console generation, the new guard is objectively supposed to be better than the old one, right? Why spend time and resources making a new product if it doesn’t outshine the old one in every way possible? That was the impetus for Nintendo’s SNES console, essentially acting as an NES 2.0 that blew the previous system out of the water in every fathomable way possible. Comparing and contrasting the features between both the NES and SNES seeing where each system stacks up with one another would prove to be futile. Think of it like this; when playing the NES console, anything one might notice about the NES from the graphics, control, hardware, etc., the SNES surpasses it in every single category without question. It’s like debating the evolutionary stature between primates and man, and I don’t think I have to spell out which one the SNES is in this metaphor.

Many familiar Nintendo franchises that made their debuts on the NES jumped over to the SNES with flying colors. While many aspects of these franchise's entries on the SNES are better than their previous outputs on the NES, is it to a degree where the NES titles are rendered unplayable by comparison? I’ve claimed that Super Mario World is the ultimate 2D Mario title, but some aspects are unique to Super Mario Bros. 3 that still hold my attention. A Link to the Past is a more realized version of the NES Legend of Zelda, but this makes the game a long slog at times and makes me appreciate the simplicity of the NES game. All of these NES games retain a certain level of quality even if their sequels are flashier and are presented on a larger scope. The one SNES sequel to an NES game that does significantly improve upon every single aspect of its predecessor to the point where the previous game is rendered obsolete is Super Metroid. Super Metroid dwarfs the NES Metroid so much that it turned it into a speck of insignificant dust.

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of the first Metroid game on the NES. I felt as if the developers of the first Metroid bit off a bit more than they could chew, and the teeth of the minimal, 8-bit NES system were the equivalent of trying to chew a filet with crooked dentures. The NES simply could not deliver on the ambitious heights that Nintendo wished for the first Metroid, resulting in an inadvertently obtuse and tedious experience that grated on every one of my senses. A new console generation not only expands upon the successes of the previous one but also breathes new life into a franchise by giving it a stark advantage with the new hardware. A Link to the Past is arguably what Nintendo wanted the first Zelda game to be but was beset by the limitations of the NES’s hardware. Don’t quote me, but from what I can tell, the same prerogative was put in place for Super Metroid. The soft-reboot imperative of the SNES was put on full display with Super Metroid. The game may be a soft reboot of the NES Metroid by definition, but it feels more like a rock-hard, turbo reboot as far as I’m concerned.

Super Metroid is tangentially a soft reboot in the eyes of the eagerly creative Metroid fan such as I. More technically, it’s a direct sequel that carries on the plots of the NES Metroid and Metroid II on the Gameboy. Samus receives a distress call from the facility that she brought the baby Metroid to be experimented on in the last game. Once she arrives, she finds all of the scientists dead in the remnants of a shocking massacre. She finds the familiar space pirate Ridley with a tube that houses the baby Metroid, clutching it with his extraterrestrial talons. Samus fights Ridley for the baby Metroid, but he escapes and initiates a destruction sequence for the entire lab. Samus scurries away from the facility and follows Ridley to the planet Zebes to pursue the baby Metroid. While Super Metroid primarily acts as a revamped, fully realized version of the NES Metroid with next-generation hardware supporting it, Super Metroid is not without its level of ambition. The 16-bit era was still a time before video game narratives could deliver on the same caliber as a film. Yet, Super Metroid does astounding things with its presentation despite the limitations of the SNES’s hardware. The game opens with a relieving line about the last Metroid being in captivity. It’s the only spoken line of dialogue in the game, and it sounds decent considering it’s being uttered on a 16-bit system. The slideshow with text that recaps the series thus far is neat, but the real groundbreaking moment comes before the title screen. A terrestrial setting with dim lighting and eerie music pans back and forth to set the scene of the aftermath of slaughtering the scientists. The scene sets an aura of mystery and terror that directly contradicts the claim presented on the beginning screen. A pang of dread fills the player with this ghastly scene without the use of dialogue, showing that the mission the player will find themselves on will be a hectic one. Super Metroid will use this masterful “show, don’t tell” type of narrative in its presentation at many points in the game that are just as effective as the one in the beginning cutscene.

The one saving grace of the NES Metroid was its ability to convey the isolation of an alien planet with its graphics. Minimalism is a legitimate art form, but the type of minimalism the first Metroid conveyed was a coincidental factor of the primitive NES hardware. Intentional minimalism is one thing, but I have a feeling the effectiveness of the first Metroid’s atmosphere was entirely due to dumb luck. A new console generation naturally comes with an enhanced set of graphics, and I’ll take the frills of aesthetic progress over blocky pixels with sheer delight. What the developers did in the graphics department of Super Metroid was craft something that seems like what the first game intended to be. The biggest overall improvement is being able to discern the difference between each section of a given area, so the player no longer feels hopelessly lost and confused due to the fault of the graphics. The long corridors are rendered well enough that the player can see the crags between the earth and the vegetation budding from the soil. The insectoid aliens that crawl around these corridors are more discernible and no longer blend in with the foreground like camouflage. The more futuristic, robotic-looking sections are now full setpieces of space-age architecture. The HR Giger influence finally shows here with these sections. Norfair looks like the player has traveled to the center of Zebes, and the lava looks like a menacing hazard that seems about as uninviting as humanly possible. The graphical improvements that Super Metroid makes to the familiar areas of the first game are too numerous to fully detail. If it looks similar to the areas of the first Metroid, then it’s been revitalized to an exceptional degree.

The question is: is the atmosphere in Metroid still effective? Yes, but it conveys a different feeling. I’d say that Super Metroid exudes an aura, not of isolation but one of claustrophobia. As Samus deviates further from the wetlands of Crateria, the player becomes increasingly uncomfortable with every new area they venture to. The starting area of Crateria is hospitable enough to carry Samus’s ship for the game's duration. It can be used as a reference to where everything else on Zebes is located. Small alien creatures roam about along the walls and can be dispatched without any problem. Taking the elevator down to Brinstar will introduce the player to an area with two bizarre vegetation types. One is green and has engulfed the area in vines and pronounced green brambles. The other vegetation on Brinstar has a queer-looking, pink aesthetic that looks very delicate. These areas look more distinctive than the wetlands above and exude an alien ambiance. The depths of Brinstar feel very open, but The apex of this claustrophobic feeling are Norfair and Maridia, the two furthest places from Crateria and the most alien of the areas of Zebes. Norfair is so hostile that Samus needs a suit upgrade to traverse even the slightest bit of ground here. The atmosphere here is sulfurous, and the omnipresent threat of the stinging lava adds to the overall threat of this place. The depths of Norfair house some of the steepest hazards and the toughest enemies in the game. Maridia achieves a sense of claustrophobia through alternate means. Half of this area takes place in an underwater cavern, and the other half is like a celestial freezer where the chills seem just as severe as the heat on Norfair. The sense of claustrophobia is achieved by how dangerous and unfriendly the areas become the further Samus strays from the starting point. The tension becomes more and more palpable the further Samus descends into Zebes, making it seem harder to breathe.

All of the areas that make up Zebes are also superbly designed. I mentioned that the first Metroid was akin to a “proto-Metroidvania game.” Still, Super Metroid is the first proper Metroidvania game that all of the other games in the genre take inspiration from. The first Metroid has a design initiative like the first Zelda, which encouraged the player to explore to get lost. Super Metroid, on the other hand, encourages the player to explore until they get stuck. The design philosophy of the Metroidvania subgenre is that there are obstacles around every corner that can be solved with solutions that will seem obvious to the player. If they don’t seem obvious enough, the player is missing something vital to progression and will have to come back later when they find that easy solution. The player will search every route they can until they find a path that’s manageable to traverse through, logically pointing to that path as the intended point of progression. An example of this in Super Metroid is needing a suit upgrade to cross into Norfair. Unless the player is as dense as this area’s atmosphere, they might get the impression that they aren’t intended to be here yet when Samus’s life energy plummets quicker than a skydiving anvil. The player also can’t go back up to the vegetation area of Brinstar, so one might conclude to check around the Brinstar area closer to Norfair. They’ll fight Kraid and gain the Varia Suit, which allows them to withstand the atmosphere of Norfair. Once the player gains the speed booster, they can blow open the series of rocks located next to Samus’s ship on Crateria. Soon after, they’ll come across a room flooded with water where Samus can’t jump to cross the tall beam in the center. There’s a series of peculiar-looking cubes aligned up top that might indicate some importance in getting across the water, and the player has to locate this upgrade somewhere else. The beauty of the Metroidvania level design established here is that the player truly can’t get lost. For any obstacle that the player comes across, the solution is either in plain sight or the player will have to return at a later time. The player will always have at least one clear progression route, even if the first one they come across can’t be accessed quite yet. The design method always assures that the player will never halt to a complete stop and interrupt the flow of gameplay. It’s also satisfying to uncover an area that was obstructed once the player has the means to traverse it. The first Metroid relied too much on the ethos of Zelda, and the enclosed passageways that made up Metroid’s framework did not translate well with seamless exploration. The innovative design of Super Metroid puts up enough parameters without making the game seem restricted. It strikes a perfect compromise that works well with Super Metroid’s oppressive yet curious atmosphere.

It also helps that there have been many quality-of-life improvements to Super Metroid. The first Metroid would have benefited greatly from a save function, but the technology wasn’t readily available then. Save features became second nature in the 16-but era, so Super Metroid having one is no surprise. At least three rooms in each area of Super Metroid are reserved for a place for the player to save. Despite the violent waves that emit from the saving chamber, each room feels like a comfy place of respite from the hostility of the alien planet. Super Metroid also builds upon some of the features from Metroid II, namely the charging and ammo stations. Like the save rooms, these cozier locations appear off the side at least three times in every major game area. Visiting these places will replenish either Samus’s health or her ammunition, a sizable convenience compared to stocking up on both by grinding off weaker enemies in the first game. The only inconvenient aspect is that both the save rooms and recharge rooms aren’t always close to one another, making the player trek across the area if they don’t feel like camping next to one of those tubes with the insect enemies for five minutes to grind for health. I assume the developers thought incorporating both into one room might have made the game too easy, and the repressive feeling of withstanding the harsh elements of Zebes could’ve faltered. As it is, I never found too much difficulty in this regard, but the convenience would’ve been nice. Without a doubt, the most convenient quality of life improvement Super Metroid gives us is a map. Pieces of an area’s map will be uncovered as Samus explores, but the entire map will be revealed once Samus finds a map station situated like a charging/save station. The absence of a map in the first Metroid was the most frustrating aspect of that game. I understand that the intention was to make the player feel alone and helpless, like they were lost in space, but all it was doing was frustrating me beyond belief. The map makes sure that the player is never really lost and can always be used as a point of reference to where they have not visited yet. The inclusion of a map was the factor that made Super Metroid playable, and it has become an essential feature for every Metroidvania game that followed.

The advanced hardware of the SNES also gives way to making Samus feel much more capable. The iconic Nintendo heroine could finally showcase the full potential of her bounty-hunting prowess. Samus here feels much less stilted and far more acrobatic than her more pixelated, 8-bit self. Fundamentally, Samus’s controls and moves aren’t much different than they were on the NES. Samus can still squeeze into a ball, jump to heights to the point where she hits the ceiling, and execute multiple somersaults with the same questionable gravity. The differences Super Metroid makes to Samus are relatively minute, but they make a world of difference in the game. The most essential improvement upon Samus from a gameplay standpoint is the ability to aim at a 45-degree angle. While playing the first Metroid, I often had difficulties dealing with airborne enemies, especially ones that swooped down on Samus from above. I wished for a way to deal with flying enemies in a more indirect manner that didn’t force me to gamble with Samus’s health. Shooting manually from an angle that doesn’t require Samus to be directly under the enemy or parallel to it keeps the player at a manageable distance. I commented in my review of the first Metroid that the player seemingly had to exploit the game to progress or gain access to a vital item which I thought expected too much from the player. All of the items in Super Metroid can be obtained through logical means that seem like a natural course of progression. The player never has to perform feats beyond themselves in Super Metroid…unless they want to. The developers were in such a comfortable place with Samus’s control scheme that they secretly implemented a wall jump ability. Samus can either bounce between two parallel surfaces or off the same surface as another means to access high places. Executing the wall jump can be quite finicky, so practice makes perfect. Mastering this secret move can allow the player to blow through entire sections of the game and manipulate the natural progression of the game. Forcing the player to perform obtuse tasks is one thing, but allowing more advanced players to exploit the malleable design of Super Metroid adds a whole level of depth and control.

Samus is also made much more capable due to the extensive arsenal Super Metroid provides. All of the items from the first game return here, along with a plethora of more powerful additions to the already established items like the super missiles and power bombs. New items like the gravity suit and space jump experiment with Samus’s movement, progressively making her more fluid with each new power-up. The grapple beam allows Samus to get across gaps, and the spring ball conveniently allows Samus to bounce in ball form without needing to be propelled upward by a piddly bomb. New offensive features like the charge and plasma beam stack onto the familiar ice beam to make the default beam a force to be reckoned with while the spazer beam increases its accuracy. A new item that combines the innovation of Samus’s movement and unforeseen power is the speed booster which allows Samus to run at inhuman speeds, obliterating everything in her way (provided the path is long enough to build up speed). In the first Metroid, every new power-up Samus obtained made the player feel less helpless. The player went from being subdued in seconds to exploring the depths of Zebes with marginal ease. The additions Super Metroid makes to Samus’s arsenal make players feel like they can conquer anything on this alien planet. It’s the only proper way to feel while playing as the badass, one-woman space army that is Samus Aran.

The fluid controls and high-octane weaponry still don’t render Super Metroid an effortless excursion. These features simply give the player a means of dealing with the harsh conditions of Zebes, namely the enemies. Overall, the enemies here are much less relentless than the more pixelated ones that made up the first game. The space creatures here act more naturally in their home environment, with fewer per screen. The game compensates with the hostile space pirates that appear in every area and some enemies in the late game that can deal some serious damage. While the enemies of the first Metroid defended their hive like a swarm of angry bees, the bosses did not deal with Samus with the same passion and rancor. Like everything else in Super Metroid, the once pitiful, munchkin-sized Ridley and Kraid have been revamped as the intimidating, otherworldly behemoths they deserve to be. Kraid’s encounter has him bursting through the arena with Samus scaling a series of platforms just to meet Kraid at an adequate angle. The first Ridley encounter shows the space dragon in a more menacing light, but the scope this scene sets makes him even more formidable. His second encounter at the end of the game is the ultimate arc coming full circle. While the player finally has the necessary assets to deal with Ridley, the player will pump so much ammunition into him and still merely survive by the skin of their teeth. Super Metroid also offers a few new bosses with their Zebes strongholds. Phantoon is a giant ugly space testicle that is the bane of my existence due to one attack that I’m not entirely sure is avoidable. The well-known exploit in Draygon’s fight is another excellent case of the gameplay’s malleable initiative. The standout boss of Super Metroid for me is Crocomire, a sub-boss sandwiched in the fiery crevices of Norfair. The player has to unload enough missiles into his dopy mouth to push him into the lava. Once the player succeeds, he wails and cries as the flesh from his bones dissolves quicker than saliva on cotton candy. The outcome of this fight was so shocking and disturbing that I started to feel a tad remorseful.

A small room that borders Ridley’s second fight arena unveils a shocking revelation: the Metroid that was in captivity has broken free from its capsule. Samus then treks back to a corridor in Crateria and unlocks the route to the final area of Tourian. Immediately, this section should signal a dreadful sense of deja vu for anyone who has played the first Metroid. Samus will descend through misty, space-age vestibules using the ice beam to defend herself from an ambush of metroids. One of the metroids she encounters proves to be too sizable to vanquish, and it nearly kills her. Through flashbacks, it’s revealed that this is the Metroid from the capsule. It spares Samus because it remembers when Samus saved it during the events of Metroid II. The sense of deja vu will continue when Samus is confronted with an all-too-familiar setup of a long room consisting of blasters and bouncing energy ovals with a giant brain on the other end protected by a glass casing and rows of flesh tubes. The player may notice that this event is much easier this time, but this isn’t because Super Metroid is going soft on them. Blasting through Mother Brain’s forces like before only reveals her final form: a monstrous, bipedal creature with the stature of a T-rex. After unloading rounds of (super) missiles at Mother Brain, she unleashes a rainbow-colored ray of energy that the player must have enough health to withstand. All seems grim when Mother Brain charges another beam to finish Samus off, but the friendly Metroid from before stops this in the nick of time. Mother Brain kills the Metroid, but not before it harnesses its energy to Samus in the form of the hyper beam. Samus lays into Mother Brain with her new ability with a vengeance and defeats the foul beast, but not before Samus has to escape Zebes due to a countdown signaling its destruction yet again. Words cannot describe this final fight between Samus and Mother Brain, and I mean that quite literally. There is not a single line of spoken dialogue throughout this encounter, but the game proves it doesn’t need to be concise and emotionally impactful. The masterful presentation that piqued the interest of every player at the beginning comes in full form again, providing one of the best endings of the 16-bit era.

Explaining how Super Metroid is an improvement to the first Metroid is a rather trivial affair. This isn’t because the game has no merit as a soft reboot or a sequel. It’s QUITE the contrary. It’s simply because Super Metroid eclipses the first Metroid (and Metroid II) in every single fathomable regard that listing each improvement would be a waste of time. This is what I realized while writing this review. I could’ve simplified every example I gave for the sake of brevity and done something else with my life. It would’ve proved as effective as stating my points. What did Nintendo do to craft what is a prime example of a perfect sequel? In essence, not much. It’s the same space-age, horror-inspired game with a claustrophobic setting meant to convey feelings of isolation. Secrets can be found by meticulously searching, Zebes is still crawling with hostile creatures, and Samus is still utterly alone. I suppose all the first Metroid needed was another breath of life on a superior console to fully realize its potential. Super Metroid was the game Nintendo wanted to make but was bogged down by 8-bit hardware. They also had the gift of hindsight for Metroid’s second wind on a console. They used it effectively by buffing out the scratches and expanding on the first game as an exceptional sequel should. If not for the overarching plots between the first three Metroid games, I’d declare the first two games obsolete and champion Super Metroid as the first proper entry in the franchise. Metroid took the gold over Mario and Zelda this time.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Twenty is an awkward age for everyone, especially for an American. You’re two years into adulthood, and this is the first formal year graduating from your teenage years to your twenties. Being two decades old should feel like a milestone with perks, but it doesn’t. The milestone American ages are 18 and 21 for obvious reasons, 21 being the watershed age of adulthood with every other subsequent age flatlining in importance until 30 or arguably 25. Turning twenty means nothing essentially other than you aren’t technically a teenager anymore but are you more of an adult now than you were when you turned 18? It certainly depends. Despite two whole years of experience in either college, the real world, or some mix of both, two years either seems like an eternity since high school or seems just like yesterday. The latter of the two will even attempt to preserve their high school legacy and or be stuck in a state of whimsical nostalgia for their recent teenage years.

Nevertheless, twenty is an adult in the eyes of the law despite one’s personal experiences two years after high school. Because of this, twenty isn’t an ideal age for a coming-of-age story. By the age of twenty, the age that people come to has already come full circle. The stories that revolve around people in their early 20s are either entirely based on the college experience or completely removed from the same introspective adolescent stories that make up the coming-of-age genre. When I was twenty, I certainly felt different than I did in high school, but I didn’t exactly feel like an adult. I simply felt like a kid tackling a few new responsibilities with a more unfocused sense of direction. Is this what being a young adult is supposed to be like? I feel that the age of twenty feeling like less of a concrete year in one’s adulthood is a generational thing that has come about in the millennial/zoomer generations. We are a stilted group due to economic recession and technical alienation. Because of this, turning twenty is a piddly fizz to rocket off into adulthood, and all the twenty-year-olds can still be subject to the coming-of-age story. Night in the Woods is an artful, honest depiction of a coming-of-age story that resonates with the estranged twenty-year-olds of the 21st century.

Night in the Woods stars Mae Borowski, a twenty-year-old anthropomorphic feline returning to her hometown after dropping out of university. She takes a long trek through the woods on her way home after being abandoned at the bus station by her parents. Along the way, she contemplatively reminisces about the changes and familiarities in her hometown of Possum Springs since she’s been gone. The day after, she gallivants throughout the town to find that most of the townsfolk are wary of her return. Mae has a bad reputation for something she did years ago, but not one person in town explicitly says what Mae did to draw all of this collective ire from her neighbors. She reconvenes with Gregg, a friend from high school who is excited to see her. Both of them meet up for band practice with Gregg’s boyfriend Angus and Bea, another of Mae’s friends from long ago that doesn’t seem to be thrilled to see Mae again. After eating mediocre pizza in a diner, the gang encounters a severed arm on the sidewalk. This event is the catalyst to the mystery plot that makes up the core progression of the game’s narrative. Mae uses her time back in Possum Springs to uncover the mystery behind the arm while rekindling her relationships with her hometown friends.

The first thing that grabbed my attention about Night in the Woods was its peculiar animated graphics. The game has a visual styling that reminds me of a plethora of children’s storybooks I was exposed to at a very young age. Which ones? I can’t quite say, but that particular style of illustration was prominent enough during my impressionable years for Night in the Woods to remind me of it several years later. The most essential features of this illustrative style are the lack of pronounced outlines, minimalistic designs, a lurid but consistent color pallet, and the paper-thin aesthetic that highlights the game’s signature style. All the characters in Night in the Woods are animals that run the gamut of the animal kingdom. The denizens of Possum Springs range from canines, felines, bears, birds, reptiles, etc. The game, however, doesn’t reference the fact that all of these characters are different animals. The only instance it’s even hinted at in the game is when Mae finds a ball of yarn on a bulletin board, calling its placement here “condescending” while simultaneously playing with it. Non-anthropomorphic cats and rats are seen in the streets, and Mae’s neighbor’s dogs bark at her when she’s walking on telephone wires. Night in the Woods was never meant to be Zootopia for the young-adult demographic. The fact that the characters are animals is superfluous to their characterization and the story. This choice was likely due to cartoonish animals fitting the aesthetic style better than jagged, flesh-colored figures meant to resemble real people. Night in the Woods is also very dialogue-intensive, as most graphic adventure games are, but there isn’t a single line of voice acting between any of the characters besides some slight grunts that Mae sometimes makes. The lack of voice acting in a game like this might deter some players, but I think it aids the minimalist presentation. The presentation of Night in the Woods is both charming and inviting, and I haven’t seen anything quite like it in a video game.

Night in the Woods is a graphic adventure game, a genre that fits its minimalist design like a glove. Yet, the game feels much less stilted than most other games in the graphic adventure genre. Mae is a wily lass who traverses through the hilly streets and the steep wooded areas of Possum Springs by leaping to great heights and using her catlike sense of balance to walk on electrical wires to reach the tops of buildings and other foundations. A 2D platformer influence is implemented here with enough nuance to maintain its core as a graphic adventure game. Night in the Woods takes many instances to distract from its graphic adventure foundation. The game will often spontaneously break out into minigames. Most of these minigames involve an incredibly small task, usually with an unfamiliar first-person POV shot. These range from grabbing a piece of pizza off of a plate, stealthily stealing a pretzel from a vendor, feeding that stolen pretzel to a family of rats, to Mae electrocuting herself trying to ring up Angus and Gregg’s apartment. These instances are so simple and mundane that it’s difficult to apply the minigame label to them. They still appeal to them because they provide just enough to smooth out the pacing of the already minimalistic gameplay. Some other gameplay varieties Night in the Woods implements are much more involved, like the rhythm-based minigame where Mae plays the bass. She’ll get together with her friends for band practice, and a Guitar-Hero-like rhythm sequence happens. It’s acceptable to bomb here because Mae herself doesn’t know any of these songs coming into practice. This is a good thing because one song called “Pumpkin Head Guy” is quite a doozy. While most of these occurrences are fleeting, they break up the mundanity of the base game enough to the point where it doesn’t get stale.

Being mundane is usually associated with negative connotations, but this is not entirely the case with Night in the Woods. A humdrum sense of directionlessness is a core staple of the game's narrative. It took me more time than I am willing to admit to understand that reveling in the directionlessness was what gave the game its substance. Every day, Mae wakes up and frolics through the fix to six different sections of town. Progress in the game is made through hanging out with either Gregg or Bea, and afterward, Mae goes to bed and has an interactive, surrealistic dream to cap off the day. During my first playthrough, I’d have Mae make a beeline to Gregg at the Snack Falcon without stopping to smell any of Possum Spring’s proverbial roses. I’m not sure why I was so impatient with this game during my first playthrough. Upon my second playthrough, I spent much more time exploring the town and found something magical in every corner. I visited Mae’s mom every day at the church and watched TV with Mae’s dad enough times to uncover the tooth in the basement. I went on an adventure to an island of garbage and brought back some more things to decorate Mae’s room. I spent time with Germ and Lori, and the final hang-out with Germ at his house was wonderful. Of course, doing all the extra stuff the game offers will make any game more substantial, but my surprise was that doing all of this unlocked more dialogue sequences during the base game that I hadn’t seen before. What I initially thought to be tedium that distracted me from the progression seemed to aid the experience. The side content adding a hefty amount to the narrative was like Persona, but I wish I had this insight upon my first playthrough. Exploring all that Possum Spring offers enhances the experience to the point where I enjoyed it more than hanging out with Mae’s close friends.

The game I initially expected Night in the Woods to be similar to was Life is Strange, another graphic adventure game that I have a love-hate relationship with. Besides sharing the same overall game genre (except that Life is Strange is a triple-A game), both games revolve around a young adult female protagonist rekindling lost friendships, jotting down her experiences in a notebook, mature themes that coincide with a coming-of-age tale, and some supernatural elements sprinkled into the narrative. I came into Night in the Woods expecting the same cringe-inducing dialogue and lack of self-awareness that made Life Is Strange a riot, even though it was unintentional on the developers' part. After playing through the first act of Night in the Woods, I thought the “youthful” dialogue and the hipster-latent vibe would make for an indie, minimalist Life is Strange. The result was that I ended up appreciated the depth of these characters and their relationships with one another genuinely. Night in the Woods succeeds where Life is Strange doesn’t because the characters of the former aren’t portrayed like caricatures. For being a bunch of flat, anthropomorphic creatures, the main characters in Night in the Woods manage to feel more personable than the human characters of Life is Strange.

Mae is a much more likable protagonist than Max Caulfield because there is a sense of self-awareness in her character. Mae’s flaws are very apparent. She’s irresponsible, rudderless, immature, and has a pension for committing some misdemeanors for fun. These flaws might point to some fundamental defect relating to the main character, but she is still likable because all characters admonish her for these flaws. When the character presents many flaws at the beginning, it opens up a lot of room for character progression. Mae has a not-so-stellar reputation in her town because of an incident that occurred when she was much younger. The reason why Mae committed that heinous act years ago and the reason why she dropped out of college is due to a dissociative disorder that stems from the anxiety of growing up and eventual death. She felt alienated from everyone at college because they were doing adult things. Mae yearned for the nostalgia of a carefree youth that could be achieved by revisiting her hometown. She soon learns through the game that all of these things are inevitable, and she must acclimate to them to have a fulfilling life Mae is also funnier, livelier, and much more charismatic than the brooding, introspective Max Caulfield, which certainly aids her role as a protagonist.

Mae’s relationships with her friends are much more substantial than Max’s with hers. Of course, portraying a better friendship than the one between Max and Chloe isn’t exactly raising the bar, but Night in the Woods achieves this nonetheless. Bea, Gregg, and Angus are Mae’s three closest friends in the game, and spending time with each of them is the core of the narrative. Angus is only somewhat related to Gregg because Mae knows him from being Gregg’s boyfriend, so most of the time with him is connected to Gregg’s story. There are only so many days to spend with either Bea or Gregg to maximize their character arc, so the game incentivizes a second playthrough. If you can only fit one playthrough of Night in the Woods into your busy schedule, I recommend prioritizing Bea over Gregg. Gregg is delighted to see Mae when she comes back to town, but Bea can barely tolerate Mae’s presence. Bea and Mae’s strained friendship is alleviated through the player spending time with her, making her arc feel earned by the end of the game. The player will sense that something happened between Mae and Bea at the end even if they prioritized Gregg, but jumping to the end without seeing Bea in the beginning, feels uneven. Bea works at the Ol’ Pickaxe, the finest hardware store in Possum Springs. Her mother died some time ago, and her father is in a mental and physical decline, leaving her in an unfortunate position of doing all of the providing for her family. She resents Mae for her immaturity and her constant pursuit of capturing child-like nostalgia. During her hangouts, Mae does some mischievous things for Bea’s entertainment, and Bea gets a chance to let her guard down for a minute. Mae doesn’t put Bea in any danger or take her on some shady affairs as an accomplice like another certain duo of young women from a similar game (I’ll give you a hint: one of them has blue hair) The penultimate moment in Bea’s arc comes when they go to an out-of-town college party, and Mae does not make any effort to hide the fact that she isn’t a student there. It’s revealed that Bea comes to these parties and poses as a student to get somewhat of a college experience away from her wearisome life. Bea tells Mae that she envies her for getting a chance to escape the monotony of Possum Springs by going to college and taking it for granted. Once Bea’s arc is complete, Bea and Mae reach a mutual understanding, and their friendship seems secure again. It’s a poignant arc between two characters with different outlooks that converge nicely by the end.

It’s not to say that Gregg’s arc isn’t enjoyable, but he’s a little too much like Mae. Gregg is also immature and impulsive and yearns for his rowdy past. He has a job like Bea, but he spends most of his time there goofing off, putting cups over his ears to amuse himself. When Mae comes to town, she becomes a vehicle for Gregg to indulge his destructive side. They have knife fights, beat-up old cars, steal parts of old animatronics, etc. All of this is fun for both of them, but it turns out that Mae is a bad influence on Gregg. Gregg has been trying to grow out of his old, rambunctious ways, and he has his rock of a boyfriend, Angus, to aid him in his personal growth. Part of me wishes that Angus was a third primary friend to progress through the game with, but I suppose it wouldn’t make sense considering Mae is only acquainted with Angus through Gregg and isn’t an old childhood friend. It’s a shame that Angus only has any real volume in Gregg’s arc as late as the end of it. Mae, Gregg, and Angus all take a trip to a distant donut shop, and they both reveal to Mae that they will be leaving Possum Springs soon. Naturally, this upsets Mae, but Angus makes Gregg put his foot down and tell Mae that he wants to literally and metaphorically leave Possum Springs behind. This scene is a wake-up call to Mae in that even her partner in crime (or “crimes” as they both refer to it as an inside joke) has moved on and stopped chasing the nostalgia dragon. While Bea’s arc is a gradual ascension, the finale of Gregg’s arc is a gut punch. I wish there was a more subtle progression to this scene involving Angus.

I say that the relationships between Mae and her friends are the core of the game’s narrative, but the game would beg to differ. I mentioned before that Night in the Woods also has supernatural elements interwoven into the plot, like Life is Strange. These elements are relatively cohesive, but only to a certain extent. If the player has forgotten about the arm after a while, it gains some relevance at the end of act 2. During the “Harfest” Possum Springs hold every Halloween, Mae witnesses a kidnapping and follows the mysterious figure to the edge of town but cannot stop him. She thinks he’s a ghost for some reason and then takes Bea, Gregg, and Angus on trips to research ghosts on three separate trips (the player can only do two of them). During the events of whichever trip the player chooses, the “ghost” ambushes Mae and her friends. They follow it to the edge of town, where they witness a murder scene with many people dressed up like the “ghost.” These shadowy figures chase Mae down and wound her to the point where she’s comatose for some time. The next night after Mae recovers, they go back to the edge of town into the old mine, where the cult of figures explains that they meet down here to make human sacrifices to an eldritch god who, in turn, offers prosperity to Possum Springs. Mae believes that this divine being is the one she’s been dreaming about and is the cause of her dissociation problems. The cult explains that they snatch up the delinquents, junkies, low lives, and overall refuse of the town under the mindset that sacrificing them is putting them to good use. This explains what happened to Casey, a friend of Gregg’s that went missing some time ago. After refusing the cult’s offer to take their places in satisfying the being, a rather peevish member attempts to kill them because Gregg shot him with a crossbow arrow earlier. He plummets down the mine’s elevator, leaving every cult member to die in the mine by proxy.

As hair-brained as this supernatural element is to the narrative, it somewhat fits the theme of longing and an inability to let go of the past. Mae and her friends are all “grown-ups” by a normal definition, but it’s almost ironic how the older adults also long for the glory days. Possum Springs has been subject to biblical flooding, economic recession, and a steady decline in population over the years. The locals who were around for this time of prosperity yearn for those days to come back, but each year makes it seem utterly hopeless. The sacrificial rituals they conduct remind me of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. They believe performing these acts will magically bring them hope because any logical solution will not aid them in the long run. It’s not even clear if the beast they make sacrifices to even exists, but they’d like to believe that it does as a beacon of hope. Either way, they still throw people down a mineshaft to their deaths. This aspect of the supernatural element is fine, but what irks me about it is how it relates to Mae and her problems. It feels incredibly unnecessary to incorporate a supernatural element into Mae’s arc as the game was doing a fine job progressing it through organic relationships with her friends. After putting the cult to their dooms, Mae sends a touchy group message online, claiming that by vanquishing them, her dissociation is gone. Forgive me, but I don’t see any real correlation. If Mae’s dissociation is fixed, why doesn’t it seem that way in the epilogue? Mae gallivants around town per usual without any point of newfound clarity. Shouldn’t her arc conclude with her accepting the inevitability of growing up and starting her road to maturity like her friends? The whole eldritch being manipulating her mind seems like just another immature excuse.

After my second playthrough of Night in the Woods, I came to appreciate the game for more than just its quirky presentation. It feels like a very personal game to any young adult who is feeling dissociated from their peers and society’s shortcomings. As I’m writing this, I can honestly say that I might be feeling this as a young millennial/zoomer who feels a bit left behind, and I guarantee I’m not the only one who does. The game does have its flaws about the somewhat mundane progression, the shoehorned supernatural elements, and forcing the player to play twice to get a scope of the full story. In saying this, I’m still glad I played this game again because I started to cherish everything the game had to offer. It’s a unique coming-of-age tale that I’m glad was developed in the video game medium.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Can lightning strike in the same place twice? Of course, it can, and it often depends on the elevation of the place or objects that it’s striking. Why then is this question a common myth and or rhetorical question that people ask? It’s because lightning is an ambiguous force in which its effectiveness of it on the collective human consciousness relies on the random nature that lightning is perceived to have. No one would scurry indoors if lightning was a creature of habit, striking the same place over and over like that piece of land owed it money. I bring this up because it seems like Danish game developer Playdead was anticipating the same level of effectiveness by striking the same place twice with their lightning which was Limbo. Instead of making a sequel, Playdead followed up their 2010 indie hit with a spiritual successor called Inside. I make no exaggerated claim here that Inside is the same game as Limbo. I understand that indie developers may not have the big-budget, glossy attributes that triple-A developers have. Still, they at least have the ability to produce something discernible from their previous outputs. Inside is the same foreboding, linear odyssey of ambiguity crafted as a 2D puzzle platformer that Limbo was. The only difference is Inside has a crisper frame rate thanks to next-generation technology, and it has a less monochrome color pallet. I’d lambaste Playdead for releasing the same game twice, but there is something crucial to Inside that doesn’t make it a carbon copy of Limbo. Instead of diverting from the gameplay of Limbo to make Inside discernible from it, they’ve added more depth to the narrative to try to make something more substantial.


The uncanny resemblance Inside has to Limbo starts to become apparent from the beginning scene. A young boy in a red shirt sans glowing eyes is running around in the woods with an aura of panic and unease. The environment doesn’t look as alien and hostile as the one from Limbo, but the player will soon learn not to come to conclusions like this upon first impressions. A few yards into the forest, the kid comes across two guys talking to each other near a generator. The kid will briskly jump off of a ledge and snap a twig in the process. One of the men hears this and turns on a flashlight. If the player is caught in the flashlight’s reach, the men run after the boy and subdue him, and the player can’t do anything to escape their grasp resulting in a “death.”

Further into the forest, a dog will chase the boy down while barking violently and gnashing its razor-sharp teeth. If any of these dogs catch the boy, they’ll tear out what appears to be his trachea in a bloody mauling that signals the kid's obvious doom. Any of these things that are most likely familiar to the player would’ve been refreshing in Limbo but are far more threatening than anything in that game here. Inside is practically a stealth game in this regard. I claimed in my review of Limbo that it was not a horror game like everybody described it, but I would make somewhat of a case for Inside. I believe that all effective horror media needs to have some grounding in something that resembles reality. The world of Limbo was far too ethereal to hold any substantial weight in the realm of reality. The monochrome visuals and the ambiguity of everything in the game made it feel too much like a dream. As they say, a dream no longer becomes scary once the person wakes up. Inside is far more grounded thanks to the more realistic, albeit depleted-looking, world the protagonist finds themselves in. The environments in Inside are a little more domesticated and familiar to the player than the ones with the unvarying visuals presented in Limbo. The setting of Inside has a looming aura of oppression that gives the game its tension. The land that makes up this setting looks like it’s been sucked dry, almost like the mist that permeates this land is the exhaust from the tailpipe of the domineering machine that runs this place. Either the boy is a native of this land, or he’s on the outskirts of somewhere completely without hope, trying to find his way out or find aid. The horror here is not a naturalistic one where the land is inherently dangerous but rather a man-made terror with sentience. There’s something more harrowing about horror with an agenda rather than an environment that is just meant to be visually spooky.

Before I get ahead of myself trying to decipher the experience of Inside, I can’t properly review a game without even slightly discussing its gameplay, even if it’s a minute detail. As I’ve said, Inside and Limbo aren’t merely two games made by the same company. Inside is practically a carbon copy of Playdead’s last title in terms of gameplay. The player will run on a 2D axis sequentially with little interruption besides the platformer puzzles that add a hint of zest to the player’s journey. The platforming is minimal, and the player will most likely fail many times attempting to do these before they succeed. The description I just gave for Inside’s gameplay could easily be the one for Limbos, but there are a few differences. Inside feels much more lenient with its checkpoints and individual puzzles than its predecessor. After dying during a puzzle in Limbo, the game would take the player back into action without giving them a chance to prepare themselves. Inside, on the other hand, lets the player prepare for the challenge, which feels much better than the game propelling the player to their imminent dooms. Inside has fewer sections in which the player has to act fast before something kills them, but the few moments where these come to play are much better executed. Inside adds a few new features like controlling a submarine with a propulsion mechanic, swimming, and controlling a mass of flesh with its physics. One gameplay feature that is essential to the core of Inside’s vague narrative is the mind control feature. Limbo had a mind-controlling slug that would latch onto the player and control their movement, but Inside has turned this into a bonafide mechanic. The protagonist will latch their heads onto a mechanism hanging from the ceiling at many points in the game. This will trigger one of the innocuous, slouching pale people the protagonist encounters in swarms throughout the game who controls almost exactly like the protagonist.

Why is a mind control mechanic so pertinent to Inside? Because it highlights the core themes of conformity that the game conveys in its narrative. Discussing fascism concerning Inside’s “story” is relevant because the dystopian themes are readily present. However, merely dissecting the game and coming to fascism as a conclusion is scratching the surface. Inside makes the player consider what the ultimate goal of fascism is, and that is conformity to an extreme degree. The colors in the world of Inside are dismal and murky, but the comparatively vibrant red shirt of the protagonist stands out. This red shirt is a subtle symbol the protagonist wears to represent his role as someone in this society who is different. He’s a beacon of hope for this world and a reflection of how this world used to be before it fell to an unknown oppressive entity. The fact that the protagonist is a child might also have some semblance. All of the mindless drones that walk without any autonomy are bigger than the protagonist, so I’m assuming that they are all adults. Perhaps the conformity presented in Inside is a comment on the capitalist machine we all venture into as adults? Either or, there is an imperative on individualism and how government control seeks to eliminate it because they see it as a threat. I can’t think of any better way the game illustrates this other than the protagonist walking in unison with the zombified underlings, being punished for falling slightly out of line with their movements.

There is a standout portion in the climax of the game that is far more notable than the scene I just described. The protagonist will venture to what looks like a scientific facility with people in lab coats scrambling around a dim building with high ceilings. The protagonist will come across a pressurized rocket which turns out to be a trap. The protagonist gets sucked into an aquarium with a large group of people in lab coats observing him. The propulsion of the rocket engine has stripped the protagonist of his clothes, leaving him stark naked without his red shirt. In the center of this aquarium is a giant mound of flesh with various appendages held still in the water. Once the protagonist frees this abomination, he morphs into the mound, and now the player controls it. This odious mass of people breaks through the glass of its watery cell and wreaks havoc on the lab while the men in lab coats run away screaming. As the player tries their best to control this sentient blob, its journey breaks open a wooden barrier which causes it to tumble violently down the mountainside and come to a complete halt at a misty lakefront. This change of pace from playing as the boy was a total shock for me and probably for most who played this game. Suddenly, the player is manning the blob from Akira and demolishing everything around it while still maintaining the core gameplay the same. The blob even squishes a guy into a pulp and wears his blood like tribal paint (one of my favorite moments in the game, by the way). It’s a fun way to change up the gameplay after playing as the boy for so long. It’s also something that completely deviates from Limbo. Playing as this blob isn’t just for shock value but carries weight in Inside’s themes of conformity. What better way to illustrate people without their individuality as a giant globule of flesh? From the observation of it from the people in lab coats, this blob was a procedural experiment conducted to test the extremes of keeping people as a collective unit without any kind of volition. This collective is also the force that brings down their oppressors. This is something the kid couldn’t do on his own, so perhaps the game is suggesting that one must sacrifice individuality for a greater cause? It’s an ironic case of playing devil’s advocate to keep theories afloat for the player. As far as the ending is concerned, many people argue that it’s bleak. However, I feel as if the blob ending up at the bottom of a mountain on a beachside signifies that all of these people have broken free from their captors, albeit under less-than-ideal circumstances. Whatever Playdead was attempting to convey, this result from a heart-pounding climax is the perfect way to end the game.

Normally, I’d be completely underwhelmed and apathetic about a game that does not attempt to deviate from a previous one. Playdead saved a lot of money on Inside because it functions the same way as Limbo. It has the same gameplay, vague narrative, and artfully bleak undertones that I liked about their previous game. The thing is, I already experienced all of those things with Limbo. While playing through Inside, I couldn’t help but constantly compare the game to Limbo and try to figure out if the logical reason why I was enjoying Inside was simply that I liked Limbo to begin with. After playing through Inside again, I’ve realized that this might be a case of Limbo being a prototype for Inside. The substance of Inside compared to Limbo far exceeds it and left a bigger impression on me. My emotions dropped just like the blob did off the cliff and resonated with me more than the seemingly cyclical loop of Limbo. Playdead made the same goddamn game, and it managed to be slightly better than the previous one. As of writing this, Playdead has not released a third game. Don’t get too confident, guys. You can only get away with repeating yourselves once.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Sequels and franchises are so not punk rock. Then again, neither is sustaining one’s artistic career to the point where one can make a living. Yet, so many punk rock bands are guilty of making their once provocative, cutting-edge art into a commodity. No More Heroes, a game that proclaimed “punk’s not dead” on the developer’s logo, somehow exuded a punk rock ethos through the video game medium. Suda 51 surprisingly understood the punk rock ethos and translated that ethos into his crude, violent creation competently, making a parallel between the two. No More Heroes also did well for a Suda 51 game both critically and commercially, a surprise to anyone familiar with the man’s previous outputs. When a new IP in gaming warrants a certain amount of acclaim, what is the natural course of action? The developers make a sequel, and that’s exactly what No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is. No More Heroes 2 marks the very first sequel made by Suda 51, and the fact of this goes against any credence he may have had as a maverick, auteur game developer. Yet, that age-old adage “punk’s not dead” is STILL a part of Grasshopper Manufacturer’s logo. The word “punk” is even spelled with an X in place of the K to be even more irksome to those who are familiar with the phrase. I’m sorry, Suda, but you can’t brandish this phrase in a sequel. Suda 51 sold out, but this game makes it seem that he’s entirely aware of this. No More Heroes 2 is a sequel that shamelessly lavishes in the excesses of stardom due to the success of the first game. If the first No More Heroes is the depiction of wading through the muck, No More Heroes 2 is the act of shimmering in the limelight after moving on.

Years have passed since the first game, and the assassination association Sylvia established has reached a scale of international popularity. It’s reached a surprising point of legitimacy that has garnered the attention of well over 50 different assassins that are competing in the rankings. Travis, who spurred this boom in the organization’s popularity, is no longer a contender in the rankings after retiring from his top spot after the events of the first game. Hearing of his return is exciting for many of the new assassins who have joined the rankings for the sole purpose of avenging their loved ones who have been slain by Travis, including the first boss Skelter Helter. This includes Jasper Batt Jr., CEO of the Santa Destroy conglomerate Pizza Batt and first-ranked assassin in the league. In the years that Travis has been gone, the Pizza Batt company has taken a monopoly over Santa Destroy and has a dominant presence over the city. Jasper takes revenge on Travis by sicing goons after his best friend Bishop (the guy from the first game that runs the video store) and sends his decapitated head to Travis to taunt him. Travis then seeks vengeance for his slain friend and plans to do this by climbing back up the rankings to duel Jasper and reclaim his title as the top-ranking assassin by proxy. With a whopping 50 assassins to contend with this time, this sequel is a revved-up No More Heroes experience with much more to offer.

...Or at least that’s what the game would lead you to believe. No More Heroes 2 is rather a sequel that trims the fat from the first game instead of expanding on it like most sequels tend to do. This seems unexpected due to the fatty number of ranked fights the game alludes to, but this isn’t the case. The larger number of assassins is merely a ruse for the sake of the narrative. The actual number of assassins the player fights in No More Heroes 2 is only a few more than the number of assassins from the first game. Travis begins ranked at 51, but he jumps through the rankings seemingly through multiples of five and ten in the blink of an eye. Some of Travis’s friends even step in to take care of some of the rankings for Travis, which somehow is still a legitimate victory for Travis. This doesn’t mean the player sits out on the action just because Travis gets to. The player gets to play as both Shinobu and Henry for at least one fight. Playing as Henry feels smooth and capable, but Shinobu is wrought with issues, mainly her jump controls. The platforming section with her in the bank vault was such an infuriating affair that it made me curse the day I was born. Adding more playable characters is a common trend in video game sequels but is this trend appropriate for a subversive, artful game like No More Heroes? In a way, yes, but there is a consequence to this. The premise of the first game and the structure of its narrative is flippantly twisted in the sequel. The rankings in the assassin league once provided No More Heroes with a concrete objective, and every rise up in those rankings gave the player a sense of accomplishment. The sequel seemingly offers a smorgasbord of assassins for Travis to decapitate but pulls the rug out from under the player by having the game frolic through the rankings and calling in substitutes at times. This fast-forwarded approach to the foundation of the first game is executed with a total sense of disregard for the ranking system. The negative impact is that beating an assassin and going up in the rankings feels much less impactful.

The impetus for doing this probably wasn’t just to disappoint the player, however. It seems like establishing the assassination league exactly how it was in the first game means that it’s the core of the franchise. Travis slaughtering his way up the rankings is as idiosyncratic with No More Heroes as Mario saving Peach from Bowser or Samus regaining all of her powerups. Suda 51 is still aware that this has been done before, which certainly can’t be said about any of his previous games. A sequel has to borrow assets from a previous game and use it as a crutch. Suda 51’s games don’t use crutches; they sporadically bounce around the constructs of a normal video game, leaving traces of spunk in their wake. Alas, No More Heroes 2 is still confined to a sense of familiarity from the first game in its role as a sequel. This familiarity would have signified a dearth of the creativity Suda 51 is known for, but he compensates for this by making the game into a farce. Suda 51 plays with the idea of a No More Heroes sequel by making the game slightly more irreverent in every aspect. This way, making a sequel doesn’t sacrifice the creative integrity Suda 51 is known for. No More Heroes 2 flaunts its role as a sequel with a self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek attitude that reflects a refreshing sense of self-awareness.

The quantity of the assassins in No More Heroes 2 was a mirage, but does the restrained number of assassins make up for this in terms of quality? Overall, I’d say no, but only in comparison to the first game. The assassins in No More Heroes 2 never reach the level of excellence of Bad Girl from the first game, but they still stand as unique challenges with a myriad of creative flair. However, the assassins don’t reach this level of quality until a certain point in the game. Until Travis reaches the tenth rank, the assassins he comes across are somewhat forgettable. Between the tenth and fiftieth rank, Travis only fights a mere five bosses, discounting the tutorial boss and the optional boss. While these bosses come with interesting designs, many of them are much too easy to be memorable. The tanky apparition Matt Helms has a hefty presence and an unsettling aura complete with a creepy baby mask, yet he doesn’t resonate with me all that much. Charlie MacDonald’s fight involves battling him in a mech made of cheerleaders, but the control scheme of the mech Travis uses feels far too simplified for the victory to be rewarding. I wish the mech Travis uses in this fight was used more than once for a more difficult fight, but its sole fight here is a waste of potential. The middle point of the game where this slew of underwhelming boss encounters accelerates is a fight between Dr. Shake, the brain cannon from the first game that Travis was swindled out of fighting by Henry. Defeating Dr. Shake catapults Travis to the tenth rank when the bosses ramp up in quality. Some standouts are the Japanese warrior Ryuji (even if the beginning segment with the dueling bikes sucks) and the Doctor Octopus-like Alice Twilight. Mimmy is not a ranked opponent, but the challenge she presents, combined with the absurd surrealism of her fight, makes her encounter notable. While these bosses in the upper echelon of the rankings are better than the ones before Dr. Shake, the game can’t seem to retain a consistent challenge.

Assassins in the top ten like Margaret Moonlight and Vladimir Taktarov are just as underwhelming as the first few assassins, despite their unique traits. Some easy bosses in the first game, like Death Metal and Harvey Volodarrskii, but they still resonated with me. I think the bosses in No More Heroes 2 feel comparatively lukewarm due to the less concise narrative that coincides with the bosses. Each boss encounter in the first game feels like a stepping stone in the game’s progress, and the bosses are personalized with great depth, like the gunmen from El Topo. Fighting hoards of goons before facing the boss gave each assassin a higher stature. In the sequel, the squadron of goons before the boss is either absent, seemingly skippable, or divided out like a horde mode. The developers didn’t trim the fat in this regard as they just supplemented the weight of the first game’s bosses with empty calories.

One positive way No More Heroes trimmed the fat of the first game and succeeded is the absence of the open world of Santa Destroy. The map of this sleazy California-Esque city has been streamlined into a menu that opens once Travis exits the hotel. In this menu, a white, opaque overlay of the city with icons that represent notable destinations. These destinations include the Area 51 clothing store, Naomi’s garage, and a gym owned by a flamboyant man named Ryan, who looks like a cuddlier Freddy Mercury. Odd jobs can also be accessed through this menu, and “revenge missions” are located at the bottom of the menu after they are unlocked. Accessing these locations is as simple as pressing a button, and I couldn't be happier. As wild and lawless as Santa Destroy seems, navigating through it in the first game was a drab experience. Constantly driving from place to place was always grating and tedious and was easily the worst aspect of the first game. The menu presents here in the sequel is quick and simple, and there is zero tedium while traversing through Santa Destroy. One might argue that this heavily simplified method of traversing through the game is a downgrade from the open-world of the first game because the open-world aspect could’ve been improved upon, considering the technology to expand the open-world genre grew between the first and second games. Implementing something so simple in place of the open world in a generation that sought to expand the parameters of gaming’s potential seems like a digression for the medium. Considering I never yearned for the open world of the first No More Heroes while playing this game, the simpler approach they decided on turned out to be more palatable. The core gameplay of No More Heroes never depended on the open-world aspect for effectiveness, so its omission is not detrimental to the game.

I also never yearned for the way the first game used currency to progress through the game. To unlock the next ranked fight, Travis had to earn a substantial amount of money and deposit a large quantity of it in an ATM. The primary method of earning a large sum of money was performing various odd jobs like picking up coconuts, erasing graffiti, and filling up cars with gas at a gas station. These odd jobs provided a fresh alternative to break up the gameplay to them initially, but they grew tired of several plays of them to raise enough money to progress through the game. Driving from the job center to the job’s location in the lifeless overworld was another factor that made these jobs all the more grating. Not only does the streamlined level selection of No More Heroes 2 do away with the tedium involved with driving, but No More Heroes 2 offers much more enjoyable odd jobs. These oddjob minigames are consistently stylized in the vein of 8-bit games from the NES era, consisting of rudimentary gameplay and sound design. The large variety of minigames presented here includes sucking up different kinds of pests in a vacuum as an exterminator, laying a series of pipes in a timed puzzle game, delivering pizzas in a Pole Position type game, and preparing steaks for irascible fat men. There are also minigames involving catching coconuts in a net, laying down tiles of different shapes, and picking up trash in space. I played these much less than the ones I previously mentioned. This 8-bit style also bleeds into the training aspect of this game. Two retro-styled minigames are presented in the gym to upgrade Travis’s strength and increase his maximum health.

I don’t think the developers incorporated all of these retro-pastiche minigames as an homage to a bygone era. Rather, I think the developers initially developed only one of these like an NES game, which proved to be more enjoyable than any of the jobs from the first game. The only job that hasn’t been treated to a retro flair is the scorpion pick-up job from the first game exactly how it was with an added medical treatment whenever the player gets stung. It wasn’t the worst job in the first game, but it’s easily the least enjoyable task presented here, highlighting how much these minigames have improved. While I begrudgingly made my commute to these jobs before fighting the next assassin in the first game, I replayed all of the minigames in No More Heroes 2 gleefully. The ironic aspect of these more enjoyable odd jobs is that the money Travis makes from doing them doesn’t count towards progressing through the game. Travis now gets to pocket all of his earnings without having to deposit a large sum into an ATM, possibly due to the increased funding the assassin league has because of the ramp in popularity. Travis now has a heaping amount of disposable income at his leisure to shop for clothes, train at the gym, and buy upgrades for his beam katana at Naomi’s garage. The grind to ascend to the top of the rankings that was such a huge part of the overall foundation of the first game is also thrown to the curb along with the rankings. I understand why the tedium of doing odd jobs was present in the narrative themes of the first game, but I vastly prefer the variety of retro romps in the sequel simply because they are more fun.

The quality improvements to the gameplay and general objectives in No More Heroes 2 are fantastic, but what kind of foundation do they hold? The ending of the first No More Heroes did not seem like it was open-ended to a sequel, so it arguably wasn’t necessary to extend Travis’s story to another game. Because the opportunity to bank off the success of the first game came knocking on the doorstep of Grasshopper Manufacture, the narrative presented in the first game had to be extended with the same characters. Most would argue that the sequel's narrative is nothing but cotton-candy fluff, an uninspired story devised to fuel what is now a standard video game franchise instead of a personal work of art. As I said, the developers seem to carry themselves here with a sense of self-awareness. A voice in the beginning cutscene of the game says that “the assassins' world has become a commodity,” which puts everything into perspective. All-new, cutting-edge forms of art eventually become a commodity at some point. Punk rock, for example, resonated strongly with disenfranchised young people back in the late 1970s. It garnered a massive audience, and any business would be foolish to not capitalize on this. The Clash didn’t become known as the “only band that mattered” with just word of mouth alone. Like the stadium-filling bands that rebelled against, the punk bands became the new trend of commercial success. Many punk bands hit that self-destruct switch, but derivative forms like new wave and (to a lesser extent) post-punk got to bask in the heights of glory that the initial punk scene created. The same happened in the 1990s with the grunge explosion and the industry overtake of alternative rock. The justification Suda 51 seems to have for making a sequel to No More Heroes is that all art, no matter how abrasive, obtuse, or non-commercial, is still a commodity manufactured by a business.

No More Heroes 2 is parallel to the peak of fame a once underground artist gets to while attempting to become accustomed to the new industry trends they helped popularize. After becoming the top-ranked assassin in the first game, Travis Touchdown is renowned worldwide as a legend in his craft. Whether the people he faces admire or want to bathe in his blood, they still easily recognize him. Travis inspires young people to become assassins and, more shockingly, has a legion of groupies Travis finally getting to have sex with Sylvia is the biggest spoiler of the entire series. No final boss can top that. . Travis is a fucking rockstar now, even though he’s still the same crass, anime-loving degenerate he always was. I suppose the ethos of “punk’s not dead” is carried on by Travis and not the game itself. He tries to be loyal to his passion and his roots, but he finds that this is difficult now that what he does is a legitimate business. The UAA is now a giant bureaucracy that Travis has discrepancies with. Once Travis defeats Ryuji, he feels reluctant to deliver a final blow because he respects Ryuji as a warrior. Sylvia then decides for him by comically filling him with a whole round of machine-gun bullets because killing your opponent is the rule of the game. Travis doesn’t comply with this and screams “fuck your rules” in her face.

Sylvia is now the callous business leader ready to drop her talent at the drop of a dime once they become useless to her. Jasper Batt Jr. is the personification of industry moguls that reminds me of Swan from Phantom of the Paradise. He’s a pint-sized, bald wimp of a man with an ego the size of his empire. The multi-phased boss's fight against him is another testament to this. He’s an exaggerated depiction of many real-life industry fat-cats that make art a commodity and the lack of real respect they have for the artists. The peak of fame and career prosperity doesn’t just apply to the music industry but also to any other industry as well like the one that published No More Heroes 1 and 2. We can wish for a figure like Travis to rebel against this callous bureaucracy, but it’s not wise to bite the hand that feeds you.

There’s a million-dollar question relating to No More Heroes 2: do all of the extra frills added as a sequel make for a less substantive experience? The tedium relating to odd job grinding in the first game was a large detriment, but I understood why this was interwoven in the narrative. While I consistently enjoyed No More Heroes 2 more than its predecessor, I felt it had less to say in its wacky story and presentation. While I managed to pull some insight from No More Heroes 2 as I did from the first one, a lot of what I said is a bit of a stretch. There’s plenty more in this game that I couldn’t connect to as an allegory of big industry because it was way too confusing. Then again, maybe I’m the type of person Suda 51 is taking the piss out of for taking No More Heroes too seriously by reading too much into it. Travis transforms into a fucking tiger, for christ's sake. My final verdict is that No More Heroes 2 is the more favorable game between the two. At the end of the day, video games are supposed to be fun, and my wish for No More Heroes without the tedium came to fruition in its sequel.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

The “walking simulator” is a relatively new phenomenon in the gaming realm. They are an amalgamation of the adventure, puzzle, platforming, and simulator game genres without leaning too heavily into one of them. They are minimal by design compared to other game genres, showcasing narrative, characters, dialogue, and tone over action and gameplay. One would think that the widespread popularity of these types of games signals that the game industry has finally committed to just starting to make films by stripping away most of the gameplay. However, most of these “walking simulator” games are made by indie developers. Perhaps these games have been churned out frequently over the past decade because developers with a small-scale budget can still offer something with substance and spectacle. Frictional Games, the Swedish indie developer, seem to have a grasp on making an effective “walking simulator,” as seen with the smash hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent from 2010. The minimization of the gameplay proved to be incredibly effective in terms of evoking horror in the player. It reminded us that great horror is intended to make the player claustrophobic and defenseless against what lurks in the dark; something was forgotten in the waves of action-horror games that littered the 2000s. Soma, their 2015 follow-up to Amnesia, translated all of the best elements from Amnesia into the domain of science fiction. In doing this, Frictional Games upholds their horror idiosyncrasies with Soma, delivering something as frightening as Amnesia in a different setting while offering something more substantial.

One of the more substantial factors of Soma compared to Amnesia is its riveting narrative. The narrative in Amnesia was intentionally vague, seemingly for the title’s namesake, but was supported by mystique, atmosphere, and spectacle. All of those elements support Soma’s narrative as well, but I feel they are more effective due to the humdrum opening of the game. Simon Jarrett, a young man living in modern-day 2015, wakes up on a sunny, picturesque day in his apartment in Toronto, Canada. He attends an experimental cranial scan to soothe his traumatic brain injury. He drinks his revolting medicine and steps into the doctor’s chair like any mundane checkup. When he sits in the chair, however, the scene of a simple checkup plummets faster than a bird shot out of the sky. Simon is transported to a dark, industrial landscape foreign from the sunny skies of 2015 Toronto. In Amnesia, the player hadn’t a clue where they were, but at least the player had a suspended sense of belief due to zero context about the mysterious foreground. Soma, on the other, handsets up a domestic setting for the player just to eject them out of a sense of familiarity. The player is as startled and confused as Simon is. As a result, adding a certain level of intrigue to the game’s story and characters.

As the game progresses, the circumstances surrounding Simon’s bizarre occurrence become much more interesting. It’s easy to assume that Simon is simply dreaming and that what the player is experiencing is Simon’s frazzled mind in a comatose state. Thankfully, the writers for this game didn’t appease the player’s easy first conclusion. Instead, Soma’s story is a whirlwind of science-fiction existentialism that directly relates to the subject of reality about the Phillip K. Dick quote that opens the game. Once Simon finds his way around the dark facility, he discovers that the year is 2104, and he’s been transported to a futuristic, underwater society called PATHOS-II. He is relieved when he contacts someone named Catherine, who is located in another facility on PATHOS-II. Once he finds Catherine on the Lambda site, he is disappointed to learn that she is merely a robot. Specifically, she is a robotic scan of someone who worked in PATHOS-II, and she lives artificially. She explains that decades ago, Earth failed to stop a comet from colliding with Earth, resulting in an apocalyptic decline for human society and the species itself. The only survivors are the workers of PATHOS-II, who are slowly attempting to reconstruct humanity with the WAU system as an overseer, but all of the workers are dead as well. Simon transplants Catherine into his Omnitool as they venture onward to uncover the ARK, a project conducted by the WAU as the last hope for humanity. During his journey, Simon learns that he, too, is an artificial being. He died way back in 2015 during the brain scan, and his file was saved from being transported to a deceased co-worker of Catherine’s. Yet, Simon is oblivious to this until he discovers it. Simon then transports his being again into a machine capable of descending further into the abyss of the ocean floor, leaving his previous body behind. He finds the ARK and destroys the WAU in the process. Simon’s destination is the Phi site, where he downloads Catherine and himself into the ARK as it blasts into space. Unfortunately, his present consciousness did not transmit into the ARK nor Catherine’s. Simon and Catherine have a heated altercation, and Catherine’s AI fractures, leaving Simon alone in the abyss. Meanwhile, the transmitted versions of Simon and Catherine have successfully entered the ARK. They now exist in a land of serenity that is orbiting the forsaken Earth.

Initially, I never expected to be floored by Soma’s narrative. I had just figured
the most obvious of set-ups and thought Simon was going to have a Wizard of Oz moment where he has a bad dream during the brain scan, and he recognizes a few faces as he wakes up. The likely scenario of traveling to the future and returning with a hundred years of insight didn’t tickle me either. When Simon peruses the recordings and finds the graduate doctors frustrated at themselves for killing him during the procedure. Simon wasn’t in a hundred-year slumber; he was in a state of oblivion due to being dead, resurrected due to futuristic technology that even we in the 21st century cannot fathom as a possibility. Once this revelation occurred, I suddenly began to become invested in this game’s narrative. The concept of suddenly having one’s brain and consciousness turned off like a light switch for almost a century strikes at the core of existential terror. We as people do this for an average of 6-8 hours a night, putting our consciousness in a state of oblivious purgatory as Simon did. The huge difference is that it’s unlikely that we could be awoken almost a century into the future, but the concept of waking up somewhere unrecognizable with no concept about how much time has passed in the context of Soma is horrifying.

The game plays with the concept of consciousness about existence constantly. With technology, the researchers in the PATHOS-II system are essentially jolted back to life at any given notice. The conscious mind of a deceased worker is mechanically revived for a couple of minutes just to manipulate a passcode out from him. After that, he’s gone again with the simple click of a button. Catherine doesn’t exist unless Simon attaches his Omnitool to a monitor. These monitors are found in most places, but Catherine’s existence relies on technology and Simon has all the control is a bit unnerving, to say the least. It brings the player a sense of existential dread to think that one’s personhood and existence are just a matter of a file uploaded to a computer. When Simon transports his body, the one he’s been piloting since he woke up is sitting dormant in an operating chair. It’s up to the player whether the current Simon euthanizes old Simon or not, and this sequence makes the player consider the reality of consciousness the game wishes to explore. Soma uses the idea of consciousness and existence so flippantly with science-fiction tropes. The ability to perceive one’s humanity with senses and consciousness is depicted so trivially here that it’s quite discomforting. Given that this is a post-apocalyptic scenario, perhaps the narrative suggests that this artificial existence is the only means of preserving humanity as technology progresses. Even the immaculate landscape on the ARK is an artificial simulation. I think this idea of consciousness could only have been executed properly in the video game medium because of the first-person perspective. We, as the player, are only familiar with Simon’s voice and relative background. We only glimpse his futuristic, robotic body once in a shadowy reflection, discounting seeing it in a lifeless state after transporting his consciousness to another unit. The first-person perspective often utilized in video games is the easiest way to convey this sense of consciousness compared to every other visual medium.

I wasn’t expecting to get invested in Soma’s characters as I did. High-concept science-fiction stories tend to be light on characterization so as not to distract from the science-fiction narrative. Still, I was pleasantly surprised that Soma managed to create substantial characters. Simon is the epitome of an everyman character, catapulted into a scenario beyond his reach. His situation garnered a sense of sympathy from me, especially when it was revealed that he died a century ago and was now an artificial life form. His dialogue is relatively mundane, but his voice actor does a great job at personalizing it, so Simon’s personality isn’t as robotic as his body. His unorthodox relationship with Catherine also adds a great amount of characterization to Simon, and I suppose that extends to Catherine as well. Both of them are practically the only substantial characters in the entire game, so it’s nice that these characters develop a certain rapport with each other. They banter, argue, joke around, etc. like normal people, and their conversations act as a source of levity. During the final sequence of the arc, when Simon’s data was buffering in the five-second time window, I had my fists clenched in suspense along with Simon, hoping for the best, something I never expected to do with his character near the beginning. This makes the game's ending all the more gut-wrenching as I dreaded thinking about the lonely, cataclysmic existence Simon is about to face. Their relationship is also cleverly disguised as a love plot which is not explicitly detailed in the game. They are two lonely souls in the same hostile environment who build a relationship with one another because of it, an easy set-up for a romantic angle with two characters if I’ve ever heard one. I’m glad that the game did not make this the prime trajectory in the game, as it would’ve been distracting, but the game’s conclusion with both of them on the ARK leads me to believe Simon and Catherine’s relationship shifted into an Adam and Eve scenario.

While the narrative is the backbone of Soma, there is still a video game to be played here. Frictional Games most likely didn’t strain themselves in this department as Soma plays almost exactly like Amnesia. It’s a first-person “walking simulator” that combines adventure game progression with a Half-Life-Esque physics engine sans the physics puzzles. The player is also rendered utterly defenseless against any enemies they might come across, a minimal choice for the intended fear factor. The Omnitool is the main device at Simon’s disposal, but it cannot be used to ward off futuristic sea creatures. The progression in Soma is not based on puzzle solving but rather tinkering around with everything and checking every nook and cranny for anything of importance. The player gets a sense of this as early as Simon wakes up and has to rip up everything in his apartment to find his disgusting brain fluid. As engaging as puzzles usually are in games, I suppose a puzzle-intensive game would distract from the artistic goals of the developers. I’m trying to be open-minded by wrapping my head around what a “walking simulator” is supposed to accomplish, considering the effective qualities. I don’t mind that the gameplay was relatively sparse because it served its purpose to progress Soma’s strong narrative. The only criticism I have regarding this is the underwater sections. Often, Simon will wade through the trenches of the Atlantic to get to another section of PATHOS-II. The first time the player has to do this, it has a certain spectacle. However, this does not retain upon the fourth or fifth time the game drops the player in one of these sections. Frictional Games should’ve adopted the Bioshock rule of keeping the underwater setting as a consistent backdrop.

Soma also borrows the same kind of monsters from Amnesia and the same methods of dealing with them. As I mentioned before, Simon is defenseless against these strange creatures, so the practical solution is to hide from them and shimmy around when he can. The creatures will make throaty, squelching noises and bellow high-pitched yelps to notify their presence. Simon’s visor also becomes erratic and hazy the closer he gets to the monsters, signifying that they are close by. The monsters are also attracted to light, so the flashlight should be strategically used along with when to bust a move. The obvious drawback to this is that the abandoned facilities of PATHOS-II are incredibly dark, so navigating through them while trying to avoid monsters is more aggravating than hair-raising. These claustrophobic corners also prevent the player from running away from these monsters, something at least feasible in Amnesia. While the monsters in Soma are legitimately scary with many tense moments around them, I’m not sure they are necessary. The core horror of Soma is in its existential narrative, so it doesn’t need any of the leftover monsters from Amnesia for it to be an impressionable horror game. I guess the developers got scared and figured people would be put off by a horror game that doesn’t offer tangible monsters, so they added them for safe measures. Soma also comes with a “safe mode” without any monsters, which is intended as an easy mode. However, most people see it as the optimal way to experience the game without distractions. I played the normal mode for an authentic experience, but I could see myself siding with this opinion.

I was gleefully surprised by what Soma had to offer. The premise of a game being a “walking simulator” was a strong detractor initially, and the first few hours of the game fulfilled my already low expectations. As the game progressed and the story started to unfold, I became heavily invested in the world, characters, lore, and narrative of Soma. It’s a heavy game where subtle horror creeps into the player’s mind and makes them consider their surroundings like any effective piece of psychological horror should do. Unfortunately, this sense of subtlety is marred by the developers getting cold feet and trying to offer the same thrills as their hit previous title Amnesia. Soma proved that it didn’t need monsters to be effectively scary (although the sections with monsters did raise my blood pressure). The moments from this game that sticks in my mind aren’t hiding from walking scrotums with barnacles on them but the state of human consciousness and how it makes me who I am, something that might keep me up at night. Maybe I’ll replay this game on “safe mode” to fully relish Soma without any unnecessary distractions one day, and I’ll fully appreciate the game.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

I feel as if Capcom and Konami have this unspoken rivalry with each other. Both are arguably gaming’s most prominent third-party developers that have been active since the early days of console gaming. Both of their notable slew of franchises are some of the most popular and critically lauded in gaming history, supporting the range of systems both companies have been featured on. There are distinctive parallels between their franchises that might hint at some friendly competition. Where Capcom has Ghost n’ Goblins, Konami has Castlevania. Where Capcom has Breath of Fire, Konami has Suikoden. In the late ’90s, however, Capcom was sitting pretty on the throne of the survival horror genre with their breakout hit Resident Evil. Capcom sat on their royal seat with their legs crossed, held up in their mighty fortress with the smuggest of grins on their faces. From the top of their perch, they taunted Konami saying that Solid Snake was a hamster and Richter Belmont smelled of elderberries. Okay, that isn’t exactly what happened, but the success of Resident Evil inspired Konami to conjure up their own survival horror game to compete with Capcom. A lightbulb appeared over the director of Konami's head as he gathered a pack of misfits from the Konami offices, a talented but contentious bunch with a taste for the esoteric and the macabre. They were the cool kids' table that even Hideo Kojima wasn't allowed to sit with. This team of developers at Konami was known as “Team Silent”, a codename relating to the team’s final product: Silent Hill. With Silent Hill, Konami did more than just offer an experience that competed with Resident Evil. Silent Hill was heralded with the status of the scariest game of all time. Playing Resident Evil might have caused some people to get startled whenever they heard a bump at night, but playing Silent Hill kept people from sleeping, rocking back and forth in the fetal position with the lights on. Several generations later, with many sequels under its belt, the first Silent Hill somehow maintains its landmark status as the king of interactive terror.

Whenever I discuss a game from the early 3D generation, I feel inclined to talk about how well it’s aged. I don’t feel like contesting the preserved qualities from other past generations, but it always makes a point to mention this for this particular generation. Perhaps this is because this generation has always seemed antiquated to me. After all, I grew up with the generation that succeeded it, which greatly refined primitive 3D graphics. There wasn’t a grace period where games from this era looked cutting edge as they’ve always looked awkward and rudimentary to me. Silent Hill is no exception, as the game has aged like cheese. The graphics are unrefined and pixelated, the character models are stiffer than cardboard, and the voice acting is some of the most endearingly bad voice work from an era synonymous with terrible voice acting. I cracked on Hideo Kojima, but Team Silent could’ve used some of the presentational prowess he used in Metal Gear Solid. However, Silent Hill is a rare case in which these dated aspects are not a glaring detriment marred by the progress of the medium of gaming. Somehow, these aspects preserve the effectiveness of the fear factor Silent Hill is renowned for, making it just as effective as it once was decades ago.

As with Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill’s graphics and voicework are not necessarily synonymous with its overall presentation. Metal Gear Solid did a wonderful job depicting an artful espionage story despite the limitations of the PS1. Over time, the stronger qualities of the game still retain their effectiveness. Silent Hill is intended to be a spine-chilling, psychological horror story meant to explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. Silent Hill does not achieve this through the presentation but through masterful pacing that feels like a nightmarish progression. This is achieved as early as the infamous opening scene of the game. Harry Mason, the poor sap in for a wild ride, to say the least, wrecks his car in the middle of the night, trying to swerve away from what appears to be an adolescent girl in the middle of the road. Once he recuperates from the accident, his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl goes missing. He follows what appears to be his daughter as she disappears.

The blinding fog is a suitable base to set up the ominous setting, but this scene gets much worse. Harry follows Cheryl into a narrow alleyway, where he spots the bloody remains of an unidentifiable creature. This odd, ghastly encounter gets progressively weirder and more hair-raising as Harry continues to trek down the alleyway. Suddenly, the alleyway gets calamitously dark, and Harry finds himself in a blood-splattered maze formed from rusty, metallic fences. At the center of this maze is a decaying corpse that looks like it was crucified on the barbed wire of the fence. Little creatures with knives appear to kill Harry, and he has no means of defending himself from them. The gate he entered won’t budge, so he also has no means of escape. Once the creatures kill him, Harry wakes up in a cafe feeling incredulous about whether or not the experience he just had was merely a dream. The players just experienced the most harrowing beginning of any game up to this point. The progression of this sequence is exactly what a nightmare feels like. It starts with a base level of discomfort as the scene gets more perilous to a climactic point of sheer terror. The player feels as shocked and disoriented as Harry when he wakes up in a cold sweat. This unparalleled opening sequence isn’t even the pinnacle of the horror of Silent Hill. Believe it or not, it gets much scarier after this.

Objectively, Silent Hill’s age conspicuously shows through every facet of its presentation. It’s endemic to the primitive blemishes of the PS1 era without much of it aging gracefully two decades later. This is the case for most PS1 games, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. However, what does come as a surprise is that not only do the dated aspects not deter the experience, but they aid it. A key element to a lot of effective horrors is ambiguity. Resident Evil’s enemies were all recognizable creatures that reflected people's fears in real life, either in an exaggerated size or scale. As hair-raising as facing a giant, man-eating snake or the living dead in eerily lit corridors, the fear factor on the player only extends to their discrepancies with these creatures. Silent Hill is much more psychological and knows that the key to horror lies in the fear of the unknown. Team Silent’s creativity flourishes in the nightmarish creature designs seen throughout the game. Every first encounter with these creatures will most likely warrant the player screaming, “what the fuck is that?!” with wide-eyed bewilderment. All of the creatures in Silent Hill are tormented-looking figments of this town, with some even having uncanny recognizability. Many creatures also have a percentage range of skin on their bodies, a disturbing aspect of their designs. Some of the monsters look like unfortunate burn victims, and others, like the dogs and the flying creatures in the overworld, have no skin. The skinless creatures in the overworld resemble dogs and what appears to be something of a pterodactyl, covering all ground in the town, so the player never feels safe. The enemies inside the various barren buildings in Silent Hill are even creepier. Most of them resemble humanoid beings like the small creatures in the school or the nurses/doctors in the hospital, but they are anything but human. These enemies are abominations from the creatively dark minds of the Team Silent offices. These enemies are hostile toward the player, but they aren’t vicious and bloodthirsty. Their demeanor seems tormented and as if they lack mental faculties. They act as if they wish to be put out of their misery. When the player hits them in defense, they make an anguished cry and writhe on the floor once they are beaten down. The player is relieved that the threat is down, but they are still uneasy about what they just encountered. The bosses resemble bugs, but even the most knowledgeable entomologist couldn’t decipher what species they are. The dated graphics aid the uneasiness because it’s difficult to discern what any of the enemies are. This was most likely intentional because their designs are so ghastly. If the graphics were clearer, the effectiveness of the enemy encounters would falter as a result. It’s unnerving that players can’t decipher what’s coming at them, especially after decades of graphical progress.

The effectiveness of the dated graphics also extends to the foregrounds as well. Even if someone hasn’t played Silent Hill, they are still aware of the dense, blinding fog that has become synonymous with the series. The fog is meant to accentuate the creepy atmosphere with a wintry mix accompanying it for a better effect. It’s not only used to create a mood with an aesthetic. When Harry is moving around in the town, the player might notice that the fog is so thick that they cannot see more than ten feet in front of them. This is because the developers could only program so much in the overworld with the graphical limitations that they implemented the fog to compensate. The developers only rendered what they felt was necessary for the player to see directly in front of them, resulting in the player constantly having a restricted range of sight when traversing the town. One can assume that if the developers weren’t so constricted, the player would be able to have somewhat of a lucent view of the town of Silent Hill. Traversing through the overworld of the town is leagues more hectic with the fog, obviously because not being able to discern what dangers surround the town gives the player more anxiety. It’s also much more likely to get lost due to being unable to see around. Without these technical limitations, Silent Hill may not have even had the pea soup fog the series upholds.

Inside buildings and structures, Silent Hill compensates for the technical limitations with complete darkness. This is not the candle-lit, luminescent eeriness that lights the night in Resident Evil. Silent Hill is where even the moon is too afraid to shine, which greatly affects the strained atmosphere of any nighttime setting in the game. Once Harry wakes up in the cafe, he finds a flashlight on the counter. The player won’t find the flashlight useful sprinting across town but will never want to turn it off once they scurry through one of the town’s abandoned buildings. It even surprised me that the player can turn off the flashlight, considering there is never any respite from the complete darkness in these buildings. Even more surprising is that the game is spookier once the player turns off the flashlight in these areas. The developers render more of the foreground for the player than in the overworld, but the player only sees what is directly in front of the minute lighting provided by the flashlight. Anything the player would see with the flashlight on is the stuff of nightmares, alarming them while they are forced to see them progress onward. Turning the flashlight off is somewhat relaxing comparatively, despite the complete darkness. Horror games are not intended to be set in broad daylight, but most horror games before Silent Hill at least established a spooky mood with some gothic lighting. Calling Silent Hill spooky would be a laughable understatement. The darkness here is a void of despair, demanding that the player navigates through lengthy swathes of the game with minimal lighting. Because the fog was implemented due to limitations, I can only assume that the darkness here was also due to this.

The dated controls also factor into the effectiveness of Silent Hill’s horror just as much as the dated graphics. Rigid movement controls in early 3D games were so common that they were dubbed “tank controls” by gamers, and these were especially common in early horror games like Resident Evil. Though they felt uncomfortable and unnatural compared to real movement, they enhance the horror factor of these games because they make the player feel more vulnerable. However, moving like this as the super-soldiers of Resident Evil didn’t make sense because all the characters seemed capable of physical prowess. Harry, on the other hand, is a mere writer and a poor schmuck who is a victim of circumstance. He’s an average joe with a non-physically intensive career path (I would know), so the tank controls appropriately fit him. His run is only slightly quicker than his walking speed, he flinches when he bumps into a wall, and he swings his weapons like he’s never even picked up a baseball bat once in his life. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine were assigned to deal with the horrors of Resident Evil because they could deal with the challenges. Harry Mason, on the other hand, is put in a situation far beyond his element, which is a testament to true survival horror.

The only dated aspect of Silent Hill that is a detriment to the overall experience is the voice acting. Bad PS1-era voice acting can be endearing, like in the case of the first Resident Evil, because the game exudes a campy tone anyways. The same cannot be said for the dark, spine-chilling experience that is Silent Hill. Harry Mason is intended to be a joe-schmoe, everyman character, so his voice is intended to be plain. Considering the situation and what he’s up against, one would think he’d be a tad more emphatic. Instead, his lines are delivered as blandly as humanly possible no matter the situation. Harry experiences the most blood-churning, visceral horrors in gaming history, and all he can utter are inquisitive musings like “what is that?” Meanwhile, the player is even afraid to process what they just experienced. Perhaps the lack of vocal energy is supposed to emphasize Harry’s every-man status, but I find fault with this. As a fellow everyman myself, my skin would be blanched at the horrors of Silent Hill. I guffawed a couple of times Harry opened his mouth to ask himself what was going on, an unintentional source of levity, I’m sure. Other characters like police officer Cybill and Dr. Kaufmann express their lines with the same monotone, deadpan delivery. I could argue that this dissociation between the characters and the player is due to a hint of surrealism, but I just don’t buy it. The bad voice acting is similar to many other games from this era.

As a survival horror game, Silent Hill borrows many of the fundamentals from Resident Evil. The common tank controls have already been established, but Silent Hill also borrows the same sense of survival strategy from Resident Evil. The main thing to consider in any survival horror game is scarce resources. While Silent Hill doesn’t implement the same cramped inventory system as Resident Evil, ammo is even more deficient, and there are no juggernaut weapons like the revolver and grenade launchers. Harry’s arsenal includes standard firearms, such as a pistol, shotgun, and hunting rifle. The last weapon isn’t even available to the player until more than halfway into the game. Harry also has a selection of melee weapons, such as a lead pipe and a large red hammer. The melee weapons are used to conserve ammo but vary in effectiveness against enemies. The player’s health is also indicated with the exact three color schemes as Resident Evil. Health items, on the other hand, are simplified as there is no botanical mixing involved. Health drinks restore a small portion of health, medkits a medium portion, and ampoules restore a large portion of health. The health items are also as scarce as ammo is. The player will stumble upon all these items organically, but I felt the need to explore the overworld and find items to prepare for the challenges ahead. This is something I never felt necessary for Resident Evil. A unique aspect that wasn’t in Resident Evil was the addition of a radio. The game mitigates the total darkness in various sections by giving Harry a radio that signals that monsters are nearby. The device ensures that although the player might not see the danger, at least it cautions them that it’s close. The sound the radio makes is just as harrowing as the marginal light from the flashlight as its ring pierces the eardrums of every Silent Hill veteran. The player also has the option of turning the radio off like the flashlight, and I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would turn that off either.

Silent Hill isn’t just Resident Evil with a psychological tinge. Silent Hill was obviously built from the survival horror template that Resident Evil established, but Silent Hill is its own beast. Team Silent is obviously a group of people with a smattering of eclectic influences, all of which are incorporated artfully into this game. Some notable influences are obviously horror films, but specifically horror films that dabble in surrealism. The design of the “otherworld” resembles the hellish illusions from Adrian Lyne’s film Jacob’s Ladder. The premise of a quaint town with a dark, surrealistic underbelly is reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The game also takes aesthetic inspiration from the works of Junji Ito and Francis Bacon. Arcane elements from various religions are also implemented into the game, mostly as references and parts of the puzzles. To flaunt their artistic knowledge even further, the streets of Silent Hill are named after famous science fiction authors, the three keys found in the overworld are named after characters from The Wizard of Oz, and the three teachers at the elementary school are named after members of Sonic Youth (a reference that made me giddy when I first saw it like the complete dork I am). These demented Japanese hipsters wanted to express their influences to make something of a highbrow horror experience. Konami tasked them to compete with Resident Evil and didn’t underestimate the collective literate acumen of these people to take this survival horror template and run away with it.

In terms of gameplay, Silent Hill might also take inspiration from games outside of the survival horror sphere like The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Silent Hill’s Zelda influence seems apparent in the way the town is designed and the progression that takes place throughout the game. I’ve been referring to the town of Silent Hill as the game's overworld because it’s very similar to something like Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It’s a hub with interconnected paths with a few minor stops in between. Nothing in the hub is too consequential to the progress of the game, but rather a space between all of the landmark areas and a means to travel between them. It’s a relative space to revel in the potential of early three-dimensional design. The only difference between Hyrule Field and Silent Hill is that instead of a spacious field with a small number of enemies and many obvious routes, Silent Hill is a hectic, dingy hellhole where enemies run rampant and where there are zero obvious routes. Many of the paths in Silent Hill that seem obvious are blocked off and impenetrable. The factor of Silent Hill’s world and progression that reminds me even more of Zelda is that the landmarks Harry visits trying to find his daughter remind me of the dungeons from the Zelda series. I’ve even caught myself referring to the school and the hospital as “Silent Hill dungeons” because their Zelda influence is obvious to me. Once Harry enters these places from a path in the overworld, navigating them becomes a large precedent in progressing the game’s story. Each building comes with a separate map different from the one in the overworld that exclusively gives the player a layout of the entire building. A good number of the doors in each building will be either locked without any hope of opening or opened with a key from another room. This gives the player the incentive to explore as many rooms as possible while keeping a mental note of what is in every significant room. Progressions through the buildings are done by finding keys to the locked doors and solving puzzles. Any Zelda fan will recognize these aspects because they are the makeup of every Zelda dungeon. One difference is that the puzzles Silent Hill presents can be a tad perplexing. The puzzles usually offer hints in the corner of the room, but the clues are presented in the least straightforward ways possible. There is no reason to overthink these puzzles as they are simpler than they seem, but I still feel that Team Silent made the puzzles a little esoteric to further flaunt their credentials.

The Symphony of the Night influence might be more of a stretch, but it still seems applicable here. For those who are unaware, the second half of Symphony of the Night has the player exploring the same castle, this time with the map literally flipped on its head with new challenges. In Silent Hill, the same is done through the “otherworld”, a horrifying, uncanny nether realm that represents the darkest regions of the human psyche. Navigating through the dark, abandoned Midwich Elementary was scary enough, but it’s Candyland compared to the otherworld. Harry enters the otherworld for the first time through a clock tower in the courtyard of the elementary school. It suddenly starts to rain, and an arcane symbol appears in the middle of the courtyard to signal that something has changed. In the hospital, every room seems impenetrable until Harry enters the elevator. At first glance, there are only three floors, but more glances will add a fourth floor, another entrance to the other world. This moment is so subtle, but it’s one of the scariest moments in the game. The otherworld has a few harrowing idiosyncrasies no matter what area it’s mirroring. It’s a jet-black, industrial hellscape painted with rust and blood. Hanging, massacred corpses of unknown origin drape over the otherworld like ornate decorations. The only foundation keeping Harry between his life and plummeting to dark oblivion are metallic cages and rusty, industrial steel. The otherworld is a surrealistic nightmare made to make the player uncomfortable and fuck with their heads.

Unexplainable phenomena like Cheryl calling Harry on a disconnected phone and a disturbing sequence showing Cheryl’s visage on a series of televisions is an onslaught on the player’s senses. Once the player enters the otherworld for the first time, they’ll get a dreadful sense of deja-vu as they realize this is the makeup of the nightmare sequence in the beginning. Silent Hill’s masterful pacing and progression into the rabbit hole of a nightmare has occurred once again, but this time Harry can’t just jolt himself awake. The player has to work with the nightmare, navigating through it, uncovering the exit, and earning respite from it, and that’s a distressing affair. One particular dungeon at the end of the game called “Nowhere” is a dungeon that takes place entirely in the otherworld. It has the same ghoulish features as anywhere else in the other world, but it’s the longest otherworld section in the game with nowhere to turn back and no map to aid the player. The absolute darkness, surreal design, and the industrial clings and clangs and dentist drills of the soundscape were enough for me to utter “...make...it...stop...” whispered under my breath with sheer discomfort. Never has any section in any video game made me this unnerved and uncomfortable. “Nowhere” itself is an achievement in horror gaming.

It also helps that Silent Hill’s plot is one of the most horrifying premises in horror media. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the premise of this game didn’t meet any controversy and censorship upon its release. As Harry searches for Cheryl, he starts to uncover the dark history of this town, and it’s quite graphic, to say the least. He meets a frazzled older woman named Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him an artifact known as the Flauros to protect him from the monstrosities that plague the town. He then meets Dr. Kaufmann, a doctor specializing in exorcisms, and Lisa, a nurse who strangely lives in the otherworld section of the hospital. Harry then starts chasing a girl who looks like his daughter Cheryl but is actually an adolescent girl named Alessa, Dahlia’s daughter. She is a dead ringer for Cheryl, and that’s because Cheryl is the reincarnation of Alessa. Alessa’s body was immolated in a ritual conducted by the evil cult based in Silent Hill that Dahlia is a member of. The ritual was intended for young Alessa to give birth to Samael, an arcane demon that the cult worships that will bring forth an age of darkness upon the world. Complications occurred, causing the ritual to fail, and part of Alessa became Cheryl, Harry’s adopted daughter. However, Alessa’s spirit remained in the town and manifested in the otherworld. All of the terrifying things in the otherworld are symbols that mirror Alessa’s anguished cognition, such as the mean kids in school and her distaste for bugs. Even the nurse Lisa is a ghostly apparition manifested as a memory of the nurse who cared for Alessa in the hospital. This plot takes elements from The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and manages to be as shocking as both. That is one messed up little girl.



Silent Hill’s story has multiple endings like other horror games before it. Once Harry completes the “nowhere” dungeon, Dahlia and Alessa are found in the center of a spacious, dark room, ready to execute the ritual again and birth Samael. Depending on a few circumstances that have to be met, Cybil and Dr. Kaufmann are here as well. The “bad ending” has Harry defeat an incubator, and Cheryl is dead for good, leaving Harry crestfallen. The “good ending” involves Harry fighting the rebirthed Samael, a bug-like version of the dark angel Baphomet. He’s also an incredibly cheap boss with a lightning bolt attack that I’m convinced is undodgeable. I tanked this boss with my health items, but it was still an aggravating fight. The game even gives the player some leeway, and Samael dies if the player enters the fight with no ammo. Once Samael is defeated, either way, Alessa has reincarnated again, and Harry leaves with Cybil to raise another version of a rebirthed Alessa. Given the sequels of this game in retrospect, the good ending is the canon ending, but I found that the bad ending was a more appropriate gut punch to such a visceral experience.

Konami knew they had something special with Silent Hill. They let the creative juices of their most eccentric employees roam free, conjuring up something that made Capcom scurry away from their horror throne, squealing like a little girl and hiking up its skirt while it was running away. Silent Hill isn’t just a horror game; it’s an experience that has left an impression on every gamer. It’s an experience that highlighted our collective fears of the dark and presented new terrors to give a fresh meaning to them with creativity and artful surrealism. It’s an experience that tickles at our almond-shaped amygdalas and gives us a horrific sensation that people in 1999 didn’t know was possible. Like many early 3D titles on the PS1, it’s showing its age like the liver spots on an old man’s head, but somehow the meat of the experience transcends the looming inevitability of passing time. Only a true masterpiece can accomplish this, and I can confidently give the first Silent Hill that prestigious title.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Words cannot accurately describe the extent of the 2005 phenomenon that was Resident Evil 4. It was video game Beatlemania. I wasn’t even a single-celled organism during the height of Super Mario Bros. and was far too young to be aware of Ocarina of Time’s prime impact, but I had a front-row seat to the spectacle that was Resident Evil 4. It was released internationally within the first few weeks of 2005, making 2005 seem like the year of Resident Evil 4 as an animal from the Chinese zodiac. Throughout the entire year, all I’d hear about from publications, G4TV, and friends was how Resident Evil 4 was the second coming of Christ. My best friend growing up finished Resident Evil 4 fifteen times during 2005. Fifteen. Fucking. Times. Nintendo Power was getting eager at the end of 2004 to cover the first glances of the Nintendo Wii and its rumored early titles in 2005, but all of that was pushed aside because of the all-encompassing force that was Resident Evil 4. Can you blow off the heads of deranged villagers and precariously lunge yourself through the glass of two-story windows in the new Zelda game for the upcoming console? No? Not interested. The publication even listed Resident Evil 4 as the second-best game of all time to ever appear on a Nintendo console the year it came out, second only to Ocarina of Time. I’m certain they wanted to list RE4 at #1 but felt conflicted about putting a game from a third-party developer at the top spot. I’m sure the temptation was killing them. Resident Evil 4 became the new “greatest game of all time,” and I only relished it from a distance. I was only nine years old at the time, and my mom would have fainted if she caught me playing it. At the time, I was merely a bystander to the pandemonium of praise Resident Evil 4 was garnering, and I felt a bit envious of everyone that got to experience it firsthand. A few years later, when I was thirteen, my mom loosened up a bit and allowed me to buy my copy of Resident Evil 4, and its initial hype had dissipated by then. After experiencing what everyone was raving about a few years prior, did Resident Evil 4 deserve the hype? Yeah, it’s a pretty fun game.

The context for Resident Evil 4 was not something I was privy to when the game was first released. Despite the number in the game’s title, I hadn’t considered the previous games in the franchise when I was younger. I don’t think anyone can properly discuss the overall impact of Resident Evil 4 without comparing it to its predecessors. Resident Evil 4 is also a much-needed changing of the guard for the series. Throughout three games on the PS1, the survival-horror genre that Resident Evil helped pioneer had run its course. The series experienced the typical process of franchise fatigue that comes with a trilogy of games. The first Resident Evil was a rough template, the second was a refinement of the established template that became the most realized title, and the third game experimented with new mechanics while sort of meandering due to not being able to compete with the peak second game. Countless franchises have experienced this type of progression, which usually results in a well-rounded trilogy of games if the developers decide not to churn out uninspired, lackluster sequels. Capcom was guilty of this by excreting several spin-off games after RE3 that exhibited only the shallower aspects of the series for supplementary material. As for the course of the main series, Capcom initially made the wise choice of attempting to venture off into new territory and leaving the Resident Evil franchise dormant for some time. They wanted to create a franchise that was more action-oriented than Resident Evil, and this direction gave birth to Devil May Cry. Certainly, DMC was an ideal action-oriented blend of horror and camp Capcom sought to create after Resident Evil ran its course. However, Capcom proved that the Resident Evil well hadn’t run fallow quite yet. While DMC had an impact in its own right, Capcom didn’t put all of its ideas for an action-oriented horror game into one basket. They decided to start anew with Resident Evil 4, immolating its legacy and letting newfound inspiration mold the ashes. Believe it or not, as much overwhelming recognition RE4 gets, there are a few naysayers. Resident Evil 4 was so different from the trilogy of games on the PS1 that it bred contempt from Resident Evil purists that bleated on about how it wasn’t a proper Resident Evil game. To some, a Resident Evil game outside the realm of survival horror was blasphemous. While the game feels completely different, RE4 still maintains the essence of a Resident Evil game. Despite its clear differences, RE4 is a sensible evolution for the series that implements the best of the franchise’s strengths.

By the fourth game from any franchise, the tropes of a series become all too familiar. Every long-running franchise runs the risk of getting stagnant. After three games, an overhauled remake, and an influx of new survival horror franchises inspired by Resident Evil, the survival horror genre became too commonplace. Resident Evil 4 would’ve most likely had nothing new to offer if Capcom decided to maintain the fidelity of the survival horror genre. After all, the ludicrous premise of Resident Evil 4 could only have worked with the more audacious action-horror genre. Leon, a returning character from the PS1 trilogy, has been tasked with rescuing the president’s daughter from an evil cult in Nowheresville, Spain. This plot is a joke, right? It’s the most exhausted, cliche action plot that could’ve been devised by the biggest hack writer stooge in Hollywood. Fortunately, I’m confident that Capcom made the set-up with a sense of self-awareness because Resident Evil 4 is hilarious. It’s not unintentionally hilarious like in the case of the first game. If the overhauled REmake is any indication, the first Resident Evil was intended to be a chilling, atmospheric nightmare, but it was marred by the foibles of early 3D gaming. The subsequent Resident Evil games followed the template of the campy first game making the unintentional cheese factor an endearing aspect of Resident Evil. The fourth game revels in this, acting as a tongue-in-cheek farce of Resident Evil’s narrative and presentation.

The premise is not only what makes Resident Evil 4 a high-octane romp. What better way to further illustrate the game's ridiculousness than its protagonist. Leon S. Kennedy is no longer the impressionable boy on the worst first day of work imaginable. He’s now a seasoned veteran in kicking ass, enough to be assigned as a one-man army patrol out to trek through dangerous territory essentially by his lonesome in a presidential affair. He also looks like a poster of him would be hung up in a teenage girl’s room along with Hello Kitty and K-Pop superstars. This pretty boy faces the horrific dangers of intercontinental Europe with snide confidence, snickering, and cracking one-liners like a poncey-haired Duke Nukem. He also has a pension for making flirty comments with any woman he sees similarities to the aforementioned 90’s first-person shooter icon. Former Resident Evil protagonists were shocked and horrified by the circumstances they found themselves in, but Leon isn’t even slightly perturbed by what he’s up against. On the rare occasion that he faces something that snaps him out of being glib, he still faces that situation with an overconfident demeanor. The motherfucker doesn’t even speak a lick of Spanish, ordering around the natives in plain English and mispronouncing Luis as “Louis” like the big American clod he is. Leon is bold, brash, and oozes the testosterone-filled presence of Snake Plisken or John McClane. He is unabashedly ostentatious, seemingly a total deviation in tone from the survival horror genre from the first three games. Yet, he’s a perfect protagonist for Resident Evil. His presence is all-encompassing to the action and irreverent nature of the game. We shake our heads at Leon at first due to his lack of subtlety compared to how he was in RE2 or the other protagonists, but he makes us realize something about the series. We realize that there is something inherently absurd about having a supersoldier mow down the legions of the undead and expecting it to be scary. Chris and Jill are just as capable of performing the feats of physicality as Leon is, but Leon’s portrayal here is shockingly more honest and self-aware.

It helps that the supporting characters in Resident Evil 4 are also flippant cliches of both the action genre and the franchise as a whole. Luis is a researcher working on a coveted serum on the outs with Saddler. From his job description, one would expect him to be a brainy, ineffectual type like Otacon from Metal Gear Solid. However, he is essentially an olive-skinned version of Leon with a Spanish accent. He exudes the same confidence, macho bravado, and sleazy banter with women. He also dresses like he’s a male stripper. Ashley Graham, the president’s daughter, is a textbook example of a damsel in distress. She’s as helpless and innocent as they come, making Princess Peach look capable by comparison. Ada Wong returns from RE2 as the clearest example of a femme fatale character. She exudes so much elegance, mystique, sensuality, and moral ambiguity that it’s a wonder how there isn’t a smokey saxophone score accompanying every scene she’s in. The villains in this game are just as cliche-ridden and or wacky. Los Illuminados cult leader Saddler is the typical foreign villain with disdainful contempt for America. His right-hand man Chief Mendez is a stoic brute that pops up to toss Leon around and take his lunch money. He’s a perfect henchman with the most menacing of glares to boot. The castle's ruler is Salazar, a royal in a prestigious Castillian bloodline and associate of Saddler. He’s a jaundiced-looking dwarf who dresses like Napoleon Bonaparte who simultaneously looks ten and seventy years old. These characters run the gamut of being either glaring cliches or too silly to take seriously. The beauty of this is it creates a tonal consistency. This gives off the impression that this game doesn’t take itself very seriously, and neither should the player. We’re all supposed to revel in having fun with the game instead of marveling at some horror spectacle.

Fun is the operative word describing the key factor of Resident Evil 4’s success. No longer was the emphasis on walking down dimly lit corridors in close corners with things that go bump in the night. The newly established action-oriented gameplay allowed players to eviscerate those horrors with little haste. This is aided by a myriad of innovative game mechanics that were not only new to the franchise but seemed new to the video game medium. One of these is the third-person fixed camera angle that follows Leon’s right shoulder at all times. Action is triggered by holding down a trigger that will allow Leon to shoot with another button. A red laser will indicate the line of fire with Leon's guns, emphasizing the bigger importance of accuracy. The smoothness of this will differ between consoles. While it’s comfortable with the initial Gamecube release, the same cannot be said for the PS2 controller or any other console this game is available for. This gives Leon a capable trajectory, but it has its limits to prevent it from being too easy. The third-person shoulder view also has a fixed camera angle that restricts the player’s peripheral vision. This restriction is aided by the fact that Leon cannot move while aiming his gun. In this view, his range of sight is more restricted here when in an instance where he needs to be vigilant. The enemies always come in packs and will ambush Leon on all sides whether he can see them coming or not. Often, the numerous enemies in Leon’s line of fire will be too overwhelming, so the game adds a sweep kick option to subdue a large number of enemies. There is also a suplex move Leon can execute, but this is mostly here for laughs. Because of the limitations, the player will need to keep their guard up and rely on other senses like sound to survive the onslaught of enemies. This makes for a tense experience despite the more spacious foregrounds.

Another new gameplay feature popularized by RE4 is the “quicktime events”. These are button combinations the game will spontaneously plop onto the player to initiate an action. From 2006 to about 2014, these were everywhere in gaming thanks to RE4’s impact. They didn’t even have a name when RE4 implemented them into its gameplay. They caught on like wildfire and were haphazardly utilized. Other developers figure that these could be used to lazily supplement gameplay, minimizing the gameplay elements to a simple pressing of a button with marginally accurate timing. I’d argue that Resident Evil 4 is the only game that uses this feature accurately. Because of Leon's restrained movement, these timed action commands supplement them during appropriate segments that allow him to move beyond his normal capabilities. This aids in maintaining the action-packed pace of the game. It’s only enacted in times that require a quick movement or in a sudden jolt to dodge something. Running away from the giant stone Salazar or swimming away from the Del Lago lake monster makes sense to press a button erratically to simulate running or swimming. Dodging the hidden attacks of Verdugo while he swims through the sewers makes sense to implement a quick button combination. The game never uses this mechanic as a lazy way to simplify the gameplay. Even when the game allows the player to use a quicktime event during the El Gigante fights, they are optional. As for implementing them during some cutscenes, I think it’s a good way to constantly keep the player’s guards up. The game will swiftly teach the player never to put the controller down.

A more familiar gameplay mechanic new to the Resident Evil franchise is escorting an NPC, colloquially known as an “escort mission”. Given that the game's premise revolves around rescuing a teenage girl, an escort mission style of gameplay was a given. Many gamers are not fond of this gimmick, which is no exception. The president’s pride and joy are also a prestigious pain in the ass even for the most emphatic of RE4 fans. Ashley is completely helpless as one would imagine an opulent teenage girl to be in a dangerous situation. If Ashley gets killed or taken too far off-screen by an enemy, a game over occurs. Her shrill cries for Leon to help her if she gets taken away by an enemy also conjure up unpleasant memories of a winging Baby Mario from Yoshi’s Island.

Contrary to popular belief, I think RE4 implements the escort mission better than most games. Because Ashley is helpless, the game always puts her at a close distance from Leon to keep watch on her, so she never ventures far. It’s better than the dumb AIs that insist on aiding the player during an escort mission. A section in which the player gets to control Ashley for a short act in chapter three even maintains Ashley being helpless for consistency even with quicktime events. In instances where the action might be too heavy to keep track of Ashley, she can hide in a containment unit until the raucous is over. While I am playing devil’s advocate for this, it is completely understood why Ashley grates on people’s nerves As Leon and her ride into the sunset on a ski boat at the end of the game, Leon rejects Ashley’s proposition to have sex. This is probably due to Ashley being underage, but I’d like to think it’s because Leon was as annoyed with her as the player was.

The items and weapons will be the most familiar thing from the franchise. Ammo is still scattered in peculiar places, and the player will still use their botanical knowledge for health along with the familiar first-aid sprays to heal their wounds. The major difference is that these are much less scarce than in the survival horror Resident Evils. This makes sense, considering RE4 is an action-intensive game. The thought of being conservative with one’s resources does not fit the thrilling pacing presented here. However, it doesn’t mean that the player should carelessly blast away with the shotgun at any given moment. As previously mentioned, enemies come in hoards, and one shot with the more plentiful pistol will result in most enemies clutching their eyes in pain like Leon just shot them with a paper hornet. The player should still be wary of how much ammo they use. The limited inventory system that irked me in the previous Resident Evil games has been transformed into an item map. Guns, health items, ammo, and grenades have to fit into this map on the menu like the player is playing Tetris with Leon’s arsenal. It’s a creative way of organization, and an upgrade can be purchased to fit more items. Where can one buy these upgrades? I’m glad you asked because this leads to talking about my favorite character in the game: the merchant.

A cloaked individual with a hoarse, cockney accent will follow Leon at most points in the game. His presence is so wide that it feels like there is more than one guy. Purchasing health items, weapons, upgrades, etc. is useful, but I love the merchant because of how friendly and polite he is. He’s a swell chap; he is. His enthusiasm while the player is perusing his wares is also quite endearing, especially if Leon purchases a rocket launcher for one-time use. The only thing he doesn’t sell is ammo which is strange considering I’ve seen stacks of it in some of his locations. This is done to emphasize the importance of conservation. While it’s a returning aspect from the previous games, its different direction does not sully its importance.

One thing to make clear is that Resident Evil 4 is not a parody game satirizing its franchise and the survival horror genre. Despite its silliness, Resident Evil 4 remains a genuinely unsettling horror game. One prime reason is the common enemies that appear throughout the game. Resident Evil purists may gripe on and on about the total omission of zombies from a Resident Evil title, but I find the villagers of RE4 to be much more unnerving as enemies. The villagers seem to have all of their faculties intact, but there is still something off about them from the get-go. Once Leon arrives in their village, the first villager he comes across meets his question about Ashley’s location with the swipe of an ax, to which Leon then has to subdue him. Villagers will congregate throughout to lay waste to Leon with axes, pitchforks, kitchen knives, and even sticks of lit dynamite. The man with the chainsaw wearing a potato sack on his head acts as the village juggernaut to quickly eviscerate Leon, a drastic method of disposing of him. If that fails, the villagers will try to run Leon down with a truck, crush him with a giant rolling boulder, etc. The monks in the castle will constantly mumble eerie musings in Spanish and laugh maniacally even if they don’t know Leon is present. It’s easy to attribute the malevolence of the hollowness of the undead and savagery of animals from previous Resident Evil games, but the consciousness of the villagers and monks here adds a disturbing layer to their roles as enemies. These enemies are way smarter than zombies and animals, and their advanced AI allows them to climb up or reposition ladders and even shimmy out of the way of Leon targeting them with his gun. They are far more capable than the enemies we’ve seen in other Resident Evil games. There is a bit of intrigue as to why these Spaniards desperately want to eradicate Leon from their rustic world. Is the malice motivated by xenophobia because Leon is perceived as a brutish American dolt? Could this conflict have been solved peacefully if Leon even bothered to learn their native language?

That mystery goes right out the window at the start of the second chapter when Leon encounters a common villager twitching vigorously, and his head pops off to reveal something of indescribable horror. The Las Plagas are the reason for the villager’s hostility, an ancient parasite that takes control of the host’s body and mind. These beings have been harvested by Saddler, and he’s using them to control the denizens of rural Spain, acting as their leader with total dominion over their being. As usual for second/third world countries, religion plays a factor in these people’s lives. Saddler has cleverly prayed on the poor village folk’s volatile nature and has raised himself as a “prophet” in the eyes of these people. Leon literally being saved by the ringing of a church bell, ceasing all attacks from the villagers is a clear indication of what these people value overall. This allows Saddler to brainwash these people into submitting to being carriers of the virus, having unsavory side effects as a result of it. These monstrous Plagas beings rival the disgusting creativity of David Cronenberg’s creature sketchbook. They pop up randomly due to shooting the heads off of enemies, a gamble the player must consider. One Plagas is a series of tentacles with one long one swinging a blade; one looks like a pale centipede that devours heads, and one an acid-spitting insect attached to a mound of flesh that goes rogue once the mound has been destroyed. The first encounter with one is shocking and remains shocking even with frequent occurrences. An extra layer of inquietude is added when the player realizes that the hostile villagers are victims in the grand scheme. They were humble village folk operating uncomplicated lives who had met a grisly fate they couldn’t prevent.

An even deeper layer of discomfort is added once the player realizes that Leon and Ashley are doomed to the same fate. The impetus for Ashley’s capture was to infect her with the virus. It's Saddler’s way of penetrating mighty America by gruesomely adulterating a symbol of American purity: an innocent, affluent teenage girl. Leon is infected when he gets knocked out and tied to Luis in the first chapter. He starts coughing up pints of blood and conjuring up these horrific illusions. Saddler informs him of why this has happened once Leon finds Ashley and laughs at their grim despair of becoming a puppet to him and the parasitic being. Considering how shocking every Plagas encounter is with the enemies, it’s scary to think that the same fate would fall onto Leon and Ashley. Even if Leon successfully brings Ashley home, America has to contend with an invasive virus that will cause a global epidemic. Treatment for this virus is complicated and still in the prototype stage, making Leon and Ashley’s situation dire. The body horror elements matched with the sense of urgency make for a compelling narrative that makes the player feel on edge. The story also verges into cosmic horror territory because Saddler, Chief Mendez, and Salazar have infected themselves with the Los Plagas virus to transcend their beings into mightier, incomprehensible forces.

The tension of whether or not Leon and Ashley will overcome the grim odds with the virus grows more uncertain because of the game’s longer playtime. The length of RE4 isn’t as long as I initially remember, but it sure does feel prolonged due to the pacing of the game. RE4 is like a horror video game version of Lawrence of Arabia, an epic divided into several acts that detail specific things in the story. The first chapter of Resident Evil is the search for Ashley and the second chapter involves Leon escorting Ashley out of the village to meet at an extraction point. The acts that make up these chapters constantly involve new scenarios for the player that maintain a sense of intrigue. It’s not that blasting the heads off of peasants never gets old, but providing new environments and situations always gives RE4 that grand, epic scale. It also helps that each act has an appropriate length and also equal in length. This is sort of compromised in the third and fourth chapters of the castle. The castle is a more restrained area, and while the eerily lit vestibules and corridors of the castle have spectacle, traversing through them after a while can be a slog despite the array of challenges. The fifth and final chapter takes place on an island at the core of Saddler’s keep. This chapter is a little more underwhelming than the previous ones due to being all too familiar now. Leon will once again blast the heads off of Saddler’s Spanish underlings, who will stop at nothing to kill him with no new methods to do so in an environment that is much less effective than the village or castle. The saving grace here is the newly introduced Regenerators/Iron Maiden enemies, creepy abominations that are difficult to extinguish. The first encounter with one in the lab freezer is one of the tensest moments in the game. However, these enemies do not pop up very often, as having too many of them would break the quick pacing of the gameplay. These enemies need to be brought down with meticulous;y-aimed gunshots. The climax must be the cherry on top of any grand epic story. In this case, it varies. Saddler revealing his true form is something to behold but feels unsatisfying due to how easy he is to defeat. Leon doesn't even need the rocket launcher Ada throws at him to finish him off. The more satisfying climatic portion is when Leon and Ashley ride off on Ada’s ski boat into the sunset while the island crumbles. It’s a cliched but effective ending to one hell of an adventure.

The more frivolous nature of Resident Evil 4 is not what deters Resident Evil purists. I also don’t think it’s the narrative because I’d argue it’s more horrifying than anything from the previous games. No, I think what causes this discourse is that RE4 feels so removed from the rest of the franchise in terms of continuing what was established in the previous games as an arc. RE4 is set during a post-Raccoon City turmoil. The events are referenced as soon as the game begins, but merely as references that make it seem like eons ago for all the recurring characters. Those recurring characters like Leon and Ada feel more like references from previous games rather than elongated characters grown from past experiences. Enough time has passed that Krauser, a familiar character to Leon and Ada, can get away with feeling unfamiliar to the player because of how distant the events of the first three games feel. Umbrella is no longer an imposing force that has anything to do with the atrocities occurring here. Wesker is only mentioned slightly once Leon figures out that Ada is working for him to recover a sample of the virus to use for his own benefit. She gives him an ineffective, botched version of it to screw him over. With all of this in mind, one could argue that this didn’t need to be a Resident Evil game. As stated before, Capcom did want to branch off from Resident Evil, and the gameplay, tone, and characters are enough to signify this, but I’d argue against this. Umbrella was never the core of Resident Evil, and neither were the members of S.T.A.R.S. Resident Evil as a series is about the downfall or perversity of the state of humanity due to the pride and avarice of a mighty corporation. There is no real difference between Wesker and Saddler, as both are the megalomaniac forces behind two separate outbreaks to spread their power and influence worldwide. While the zombies and European peasants are what our heroes shoot at, it’s ultimately the powerful establishments that are the real villains. In the case of Resident Evil 4, that premise is executed with grandiose pomp rather than the atmosphere. Resident Evil 4 proverbially swings around its big dick like a helicopter in the faces of its predecessors and the people who think they are the arbiters of what makes a Resident Evil game. It’s big, dumb fun with enough refinement and substance to support it. It’s no wonder why this game caught on like wildfire. Resident Evil 4 kicks ass, and considering the wide availability of the game, it’s not too late to find out why for yourselves if you haven’t already.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Giving one of the mightier enemies from Ghosts N’ Goblins their own game is bizarre enough. Extending that game to a full-blown trilogy that spans three different consoles is something to behold. That is what became of Capcom’s menacing, flying devil Firebrand as the Gargoyle’s Quest trilogy closed out with Demon’s Crest on the SNES in 1994. Demon’s Crest is by and large considered to be the best installment of this trilogy. With the added flair of being featured on the graphically superior SNES, this common assessment is understandable. While this game garnered more praise than its predecessors, Demon’s Crest still flew under the radar throughout the SNES’s lifespan, giving it a “hidden gem” reputation. This could be attributed to the fact that Demon’s Crest doesn’t bear the same namesake as the previous games, but it’s not as if the previous two entries are highly regarded. Demon’s Crest is the shining example to those few who have played this franchise. It’s a shame, really, because Demon’s Crest holds so many exemplary features to just be confined to cult status.

The narrative of Demon’s Crest is a simple enough premise that establishes the game's lore. In the Demon Realm that makes up the setting, six crests with different elemental properties are scattered across the land. If combined, the six crests accumulate enough power for someone to conquer entire worlds like the Chaos Emeralds. Firebrand has all of the crests at the beginning, but the crests are stolen by another demon named Phalanx. Firebrand must adventure across the land of Demons to recover the six crests and defeat Phalanx before he harnesses their power and takes over the realm.

For being condemned to relative obscurity, Demon’s Crest blows many other SNES titles out of the water in many aspects. For one, the presentation here is fantastic. The grandiose fantasy world of Demon’s Crest is depicted with a range of lurid colors with an impressive amount of detail. As early as the first level, the misty water surrounding the dark bog with leafless trees evokes a spooky atmosphere. Skeletons can also be found entombed in dirt casings to give off the impression that this is an ancient land with a horrific history behind it. One section of a level has Firebrand soar over a platformless sky, and the color scheme between the layers of clouds with the sun setting over them is utterly sublime. The submerged ruins consist of towering columns with gothic gargoyles pouring green water from the tops of them, flooding the ruins with the remains of a city in the background. These are a few major examples, but every level of this game has the same consistent, A-grade attention to detail and graphical output. The gothic spectacle presented here makes the one in Super Castlevania IV look half-assed and amateurish by comparison. It’s a high compliment considering Super Castlevania IV is one of my favorite games on the SNES. The character animations also uphold the same impressive attention to detail as one can hardly detect the 16-bit pixels behind the animated sprites. One example is the dragon boss that chases Firebrand at the very beginning. It’s a marvel of detailed animation. The player can discern every fissure of flesh deteriorating from its bones.

Playing as Firebrand is also quite the spectacle. He’s a muscular demon that can fly and shoot fire from his mouth, so I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t want to play as him. Those few with some discrepancies might feel like playing as an imposing beast wouldn’t offer the player any challenge. He’s a big red pain in the ass in the Ghost’s N’ Goblins series, so one might assume that he’s overpowered, resulting in a facile experience. Admittedly, Demon’s Crest is not as hard as Ghosts N’ Goblins, but what is? It’s not as if Firebrand is continually perched in the sky, breathing fire down at knights that take a mere two hits to die. He’s in the demon realm now and an even more hostile place that Arthur probably couldn’t endure for more than two seconds. The environment has been upscaled to appropriately fit Firebrand’s stature. His standard offensive power is shooting fire from his mouth. While it’s fairly effective against enemies, the player has to be somewhat accurate with their shots due to the less-than-firepower speed of flaming spurts. Firebrand also has a headbutt move, but it’s only used to destroy objects in the immediate background. Firebrand can also hover in the air after jumping for as long as the player desires. In the previous games, the ability to hover was finite, making platforming challenges perilous in some cases. One could argue that being able to hover in the air forever may make the game easier, but the game opts for something else completely. Instead of platforming challenges, the game tries to overwhelm the player with enemies from all angles. Firebrand’s hovering will often be interrupted by flying enemies careening towards him, or an ax lobbed at him from below. Firebrand can only also hover over heights he can jump, which aren’t far off the ground.

As his base level, Firebrand still has one of the most versatile movesets of the 16-bit era. The main objective of finding the crests even increases Firebrand’s versatility even further. With each crest obtained, Firebrand gains another form that coincides with the element it’s named after. The earth crest form allows him to break large obstacles by charging into them and spit a wave of energy that ripples on the ground. The air crest allows him to fly upward. One would think this would complete Firebrand’s flight range, making him unstoppable, but the air form only flies upward incrementally instead of continually, making it somewhat awkward. The water crest allows Firebrand to swim. It’s the lamest crest in terms of offense but considering all other forms take damage from water, it’s made incredibly useful. The one crest that does complete Firebrand’s move set is the time crest. The form is essentially a stronger base Firebrand rendering the initial Firebrand form obsolete. Once I received this form, the game did start to feel much easier. The challenging boss battles that were once tests of endurance went down in seconds thanks to this form, and I’m not sure I benefited from this.

Each of the crests in this game is retrieved from thoroughly exploring each level. This is also how the player finds health upgrades, urns to carry potions, and talismans that give Firebrand specific perks. With all this exploration-intensive progression, Demon’s Crest should’ve been a Metroidvania game. Sure, Demon's Crest came out in 1994. Super Metroid hadn’t laid the foundation for the genre yet, and Symphony of the Night hadn’t popularized the genre. However, there were already games before Demon’s Crest that had a vague understanding of seamless world design and a Metroidvania-esque sense of progression (Ufouria: The Saga, Wonder Kid), so I can surmise that possibility for Demon’s Crest appropriately. I don’t expect the developers of Demon’s Crest to be visionaries. All the same, I wish they had done something different with the overall cohesion between levels because what they came up with isn’t great. The previous game opted for a traversable hub world for Firebrand to walk around with the sublevels. It kind of came across like the towns from Zelda II. The main map in Demon’s Crest is a tiny mode 7 maps that Firebrand flies around in, swooping down to start the levels. The world map is easily the least attractive part of the game, and controlling Firebrand here is nauseating. He mostly misses the marked areas, and directing him back to the areas feels like using tank controls. A seamless design between these levels would’ve been a giant improvement. Considering the game already has the player backtracking between them to uncover items and crests they couldn’t get to before, a Metroidvania-styled world would fit this game like a glove.

The world map also makes progression confusing to follow. The player can access the first four levels of this game at any time, giving the illusion that they can be completed in any order like in Mega Man. The game does not make it clear that while this is true, each level has different paths that need to be searched to progress through the game. I had gone through the first four levels thinking I had beat them, but I still felt like something was wrong, and I wasn’t ready to fight Phalanx yet. Upon discovering that sometimes crests and essential items were found off the beaten path in each level, more levels were unlocked, giving me the impression that I was finally on the right track. How was I supposed to know this without a map or any direction from the game? The progression in this game isn’t free-flowing and non-linear as it seems; it’s actually obtuse and sloppy. Fighting Phalanx is also available right from the start, and defeating him without receiving all the crests will prematurely end the game, also giving the player the “bad ending.” Let me ask you this: if Dr. Wily’s castle was available from the start and the player was able to defeat him, why would the player be punished for doing this when the game gives them a chance to? It’s like putting a steak in front of a dog and batting them with a newspaper when they start to eat it. The dog will be upset and confused like any player in this game. It’s not like the directive to not do this was apparent.

Demon’s Crest is a prime example of a hidden gem in the SNES library. It may not be as readily recognized or lauded as Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, or Chrono Trigger, but it’s a game that’s worth the effort to uncover and play. However, does it deserve to be ranked among the greatest in the system despite its lack of notoriety? Sadly, no. The strengths of this game cannot be overstated. It’s a gorgeous 16-bit platformer that offers a lot with its short playtime. Plus, Firebrand is a delightful character to play due to his eclectic moveset. However, I cannot excuse the progression of this game as I find it unfair to the player. The world here had a potential that the developers were too near-sighted to see. As a result, Demon’s Crest had the potential to be one of the greatest games on the SNES but falters due to its shortcomings. Maybe this game is best suited as a suitable alternative to play when they get tired of Mario and Zelda. However, I think this game should at least have more acclaim than its parent franchise, Ghosts N’ Goblins.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com