Nintendo is never too keen on trying out new ideas for their poster boy Mario. Mario is their #1 asset that maintains their accessible marketability, the buoy that has kept Nintendo afloat for so long in the gaming landscape. Because of this, Nintendo feels adamant about taking risks with Mario in fear that deviation from the norm risks sinking the multi-million dollar vessel that they’ve built over decades of time. This is why multi-genre spin-offs of Mario are essential entries in the overall Mario series, offering intriguing ideas revolving around Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom increasing the ubiquity of his brand and keeping it from stagnating. I’m partial to the few Mario JRPG spinoff series because the genre’s broader narrative scope allows the developers to swell Mario’s properties to something more substantial. It forces Nintendo to make Mario step out of his comfort zone and dive into the deep end for a while after mastering all kinds of swimming techniques in the shallow end. Suddenly, the most recognizable video game character to ever exist in the medium feels fresh and interesting after generations of soaking itself in a bath of its own familiarities and pruning up as a result. However, there is a possibility that the JRPG series could also languish in their own idiosyncrasies eventually. Both the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series have multiple entries themselves, and there has to be some sort of cohesiveness between each entry to make them identifiable from one another. What happens when the series intended to break the cycle of tired tropes and ends up falling victim to the same fate? Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the second entry in the Mario JRPG series mentioned in the latter, is another JRPG game with Mario and his green brother Luigi sharing equal billing. The game has the same dynamic mechanics and humorous presentation that made Superstar Saga an excellent Mario adventure. However, perhaps the game is too close to its predecessor for comfort.

Initially, Partners in Time seemingly strays away from Superstar Saga’s identity with its plot. I never pegged Princess Peach as the eccentric type of royal figure that comes with the territory of having more fame and fortune than one knows what to do with and little sparks of boredom-inspired creativity, yet she decides to embrace her inner H.G. Wells and travels back in time using a rocket-shaped time machine manufactured by Professor E. Gadd (I guess he’s a Mario & Luigi mainstay at this point). However, her enterprising journey isn’t for recreation, The princess calculated a course to a period of the Mushroom Kingdom’s history where a race of sentient purple mushrooms called “Shroobs” enact a full-scale invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon anticipating Peach’s arrival, Mario and Luigi are instead greeted with the hostility of a rogue, hulking green Shroob, indicating that something has gone horribly wrong. Through another time portal that has conveniently materialized on the castle grounds, the plumber brothers plunge into the past and rendezvous with their youthful counterparts who are taking refuge from the Shroob invaders. Mario’s vocational duty of rescuing Princess Peach this time around involves crossing the plane of the fourth dimension, simultaneously saving the past and the present on an adventure with such huge stakes that the pairing with his brother needs to be doubled. Despite how many plot holes are seeped into the premise of many time travel stories, this one included, the topsy-turvy nature of time travel is a perfect new narrative device in the kooky and whacky Mario & Luigi series.

Beneath the excitingly intricate notion of time travel, Partners in Time fails to use its premise to its full potential. For one, all it amounts to is the same collectathon quest from Superstar Saga. The Cobalt Star is the power source for E. Gadd’s time machine, and it has been ruptured into five separate pieces. Retrieving these pieces is of utmost importance for the Marios and Luigis, for it is the only way to restore balance to the space-time continuum that all of this interdimensional galloping has caused and sever the unnatural connection between the two periods of the Mushroom Kingdom. This type of fetch quest should ring familiar to those who played the previous game, as the Beanstar was the former all-powerful plot Macguffin that spurred story progression. In saying that, obtaining the pieces of the Beanstar only became significant to the plot for the last third of Superstar Saga, while picking up the pieces of the Cobalt Star is an objective that spans the entirety of Partners in Time. I wasn’t all that enthused when Superstar Saga’s manic pacing came to a screeching halt when it introduced this scavenger hunt, so you can imagine my disappointment with Partners in Time inflating this typical task for the whole duration of the game. One could argue that committing to a single overarching mission gives Partners in Time a better sense of narrative organization, and splitting each individual trek for a piece of the Cobalt Star should recall the chapter-based pacing of the Paper Mario games which I professed to appreciate. Still, the Mario & Luigi games should exude a different tone from its thinner Mario RPG associate to establish its own tonal identity as the first game did. In terms of visuals and presentation, Partners in Time upholds the expressive, animated pixels that made Superstar Saga so charming. Yet, Partners in Time feels bogged down by its more stringent arc, as if the game is submitting to order by some bureaucratic gaming force that demands order and neatness. Superstar Saga’s wilder pacing that only acceded to plot regulations made the game more interesting because the wonky direction the game would dart through was unpredictable.

Toning down Superstar Saga’s erratic pacing with more construction is one thing, but streamlining the way in which the game goes about dividing its disciplined plot adds another worrisome layer of accessibility. The time rifts are endemic to the present-day Peach’s Castle, as her royal domain was ground zero where the dilemma occurred. Because the dissonance is confined to the castle, it's the only entry point to the past. While this makes sense, the developers use their realm of logic to dilute the overworld to a standard level hub. Portals to the past are located in each room of Peach’s palace, signified by a psychedelic swirl encompassing the diameter of a crater caused by the shaking up of time and space. The transport on the other side resides in a unique district of the Mushroom Kingdom in its glory days, and returning to the castle is a two-way backpedal through the same hole. Normally, I wouldn’t chide a hub so emphatically, especially considering that Peach’s Castle here meets the same exemplary qualifications as its other iterations. Still, I can’t ignore that Partners in Time presents a stark regression in this regard. The BeanBean Kingdom’s overworld that took a liberal helping from A Link to the Past’s Hyrule wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of an open-world environment, but it was the optimal inspiration point for a 16-bit adventure with a top-down perspective. Implementing an open landscape like the BeanBean Kingdom was a mark of excellent effort on the part of the developers, to integrate something with more spatial depth in a franchise that is usually content with simpler, more conventional hub areas (even if Mario popularized their widespread pervasiveness). In Partner in Time, we’ve reverted back to traveling to levels via a shrouded warping process that makes the player put the pieces together for the geographical rationale of the trip themselves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using Peach’s castle as a middle ground between all of the game’s areas again, but it's rather disappointing when the developers have proved that they can offer something more interesting.

At least the individual areas that stem from these portals still uphold the quality standard issued by Superstar Saga. Each area encompasses the journey to collecting one shard of the Cobalt Star, circling around the district back to the entry point either from a natural occurrence or comedic mishap once the task is complete. The Mushroom Kingdom’s areas that are under siege by the Shroob forces are a varied bunch, which signifies that the purple buggers have already seized large swathes of Peach’s monarchy in the short time since the initial invasion. The areas here solidify my comparative observations between the Mushroom Kingdom and their BeanBean neighbors, for we now witness the developers rendering the Mushroom Kingdom in its first Mario & Luigi outing. Toadwood Forest is another shaded wooded area that vaguely resembles that of Chucklehuck, minus the thirsty tree golem blocking the path to the objective. Gritzy Desert is another sand dune with some ancient mysticism sprinkled in, and Bowser’s Castle is a tutorial-level inverse of the climactic final area it served as in Superstar Saga. Besides areas that reuse level themes at a dissimilar angle, a few of the Mushroom Kingdom’s places of interest are fresh-faced destinations that share fewer similarities with BeanBean’s. Yoshi’s Island is newly rendered in the Mario & Luigi format, a particularly inspired choice considering this tropical offshore dinosaur villa is where the babies originated from. I don’t recall seeing the monstrous Yoob casting a shadow over the island with its drooping gut in Super Mario World 2, and I’m thankful for not encountering this abomination back then. Here, the core of his gaseous stomach also makes for an area with a riveting foreground. Navigating through the inner sanctum of the Thwomp Volcano is more involved than the other areas due to zipping and hopping around its floors to reach the exit point instead of a straightaway descent. Star Shrine sort of reminds me of Magicant from Earthbound with its otherworldly splendor and mandated tasks to get to its center. Overall, the Mario & Luigi level design still thrives with the abundance of puzzles and enemy variety whether or not the area motifs look suspiciously familiar.

The process of solving the puzzles in question is now divided between the paradoxical pairing of Mario and Luigi and their infant forms. The division of work is a collaboration between the teams of the adult brother and the baby brothers instead of swapping Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga. The grown-ups will throw the babies off their backs to allow them to journey off on their own as their own tethered duo, using their underdeveloped sizes to squeeze through crevices in an alternating sequence with the older brothers. When separated, the two teams regroup by hitting a block with a warp pipe symbol, summoning the duo not being controlled by the player. As useful as this seems, the baby's utility simply amounts to gaining hand-me-downs that their older counterparts used in Superstar Saga. Only the babies are granted hammers to drill themselves into the earth, which also means that Baby Luigi is the sole volunteer to whack an engorged Baby Mario when he gulps down too much water as well. Grown-up Mario and Luigi roll into a ball to flatten the babies like pancakes instead of using the hammers, but all this change does is highlight how team-intensive the moves on the field tend to be here. All of the moves are recycled from the previous game, only with Mario and Luigi violating child labor laws by making their younger selves perform half of the work. Really, the appeal of cutting the quartet in half by age brackets some of the time is to flaunt the two screens and doubled controller buttons of the DS. The flippable handheld was still in its infancy, and swapping between the screens when the babies are on their lonesome with their own button commands was something Nintendo thought everyone would marvel at back then. Personally, I’d rather have the characters perform some fresh, new abilities instead of reusing stale ones.

The double-screen gimmick is also highlighted in the combat. With comparisons to a 3D movie, the developers have implemented some cheap minute effects like a Piranha Plant enemy’s neck stretching out and shooting projectiles upward to fall on the brothers from above. Other than these neat little peripheral tricks, base combat is essentially the same as it was in Superstar Saga. Mario and Luigi still hop on enemies for offensive and hop over their projectiles and bodily rammings for defense. Mario and Luigi carry their respective younger selves on their back, and this isn’t a weighted burden as one would expect. In fact, Mario and Luigi should always come into battle with the babies strapped on their backs. While together, the babies use their hammers to counter damage by pressing their respective buttons, and the window of time holding the hammers before they strain themselves is much more lenient than it was in Superstar Saga. The babies can fight in battles involving Mario and Luigi but ideally, they shouldn’t have to. The babies only take matters into their own hands when their older self has fainted, which might give the impression that their life force is hanging by a thread and it's time to wave the white flag. Not only can the babies pull their own weight in combat, but their turns can be used to fully revive Mario or Luigi to get their feet back into battle. Evidently, the Mushroom Kingdom’s resources seem to be as bountiful as BeanBean’s, so the babies should always have a 1-Up in their inventory to stave off defending themselves from potential harm. Ultimately, this outcome upon defeat in battle acts as an unintentional safety net, an Aku-Aku-like shield that has the potential to never diminish. It never did for me. Because the enemy health pools also aren’t upscaled for this augmentation, Partners in Time manages to be breezier than an autumn afternoon.

But isn’t the lack of difficulty only an issue during the standard battles from the Shroob grunts and the kingdom’s various wildlife? Surely, the boss battles offer something more substantial and wouldn’t allow the brothers to slide by them so smoothly? On paper, the bosses in Partners in Time are more complex than the average Shroob underling because they require exploiting a weak spot to deal a sizable dent in their defenses. I especially enjoy making the Wiggler boss sickly and pale after slipping him a poison shroom Mickey into his healing beverage, or saving the Yoshi’s in Yoob’s stomach for them to drop a Chain Chomp boulder on the head of a ghastly Yoshi egg. However, the more engaging boss battles can revert back to a guerilla beatdown with a new feature: the “Bros. items.” These nifty tools in the item menu replace the convoluted Bros attacks and require an honed accuracy to use them effectively. Shells of the red and green variety are batted back and forth as they bounce off the enemy, and the same goes for volleying an egg that can make the enemy dizzy. The most powerful Bros. items are the cannonballs and trampolines, which incorporate both DS screens as the brothers flatten the enemy with the force of four swift landings. Needless to say, each of these Bros. items deals whopping amounts of damage, making quick work of each boss after their weak spot is exposed. I suppose this is what I asked for considering I griped that the bosses in Superstar Saga tended to overstay their welcome, but now I almost feel remorseful for doing these bosses so dirty like this. Also, the Bros. items are just as plentiful as the healing ones, so the game is practically incentivizing their use with their high stock.

Upon my reflection of what the Baby Mario brothers add to the Mario & Luigi gameplay mechanics, a record scratch sound interrupts my thought process as I begin to ask myself one important question: does anyone really like the baby versions of the Mario brothers to begin with? The last time that I checked, all Baby Mario accomplished was being an effective advocacy for abstinence for everyone who played Super Mario World 2 as he wailed in his helpless panic as Yoshi scrambled to retrieve him. Any offshoot of Mario Kart and sports venture that includes the babies dials back on their infantile proclivities to cry and whine at every waking moment, but their inclusion in the fray of competition always seemed like filler to me. Mario’s universe consists of a plethora of creatively designed creatures, and Nintendo thinks they can pull a fast one on us and pad the roster with the same characters portrayed at different ages and masses. The fetal forms of Mario and Luigi have never inspired feelings of true joy in Mario fans, and this is not only due to acting as glorified skins of the mustachioed men in overalls. I’ve said this a thousand times already, but Mario’s appeal is his wide accessibility. Games that fall under the “E for everyone” rating from the ESRB actually exhibit content that accommodates a wide audience instead of exclusively children. Still, there are games that are specifically catered to very young children. Including the babies as a focal point in any Mario game teeters on that accessibility threshold, for some adults might be put off by the babies doing the puerile things that babies usually do. The character dynamic between Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga is compromised because they both have to act as solid rocks to balance the babies. Mario and Luigi playfully interacting with the babies are fairly cute until the realization that they’re both playing with themselves creeps in and things feel weird ahem. So much of the humor their dynamic facilitated in Superstar Saga is lost because they’ve both been relegated to the roles of babysitters.

To make matters worse, Partners in Time decides that every familiar character needs to interact with a younger version of themselves to bloat the list of secondary characters. A relatively youthful Toadsworth spends his time with his present self trying new ways to entertain a Baby Peach with amusing contortions that count as the brother’s team moves on the field. He also proves that Peach’s “protector” was still a total oaf before he became a senile old man, for they often fail to entertain the princess which results in her uttering a baby cry so excruciating that I put my DS volume on mute. Please cancel all Yoshi sequels that could potentially feature this character, please. Baby Bowser exhibits more personality as a spoiled little twerp, but all he does is confuse me because his design and voice mirror his son, Bowser. Jr. Padding the game with even more childish characters is grating enough, but the character that irks me the most bears no resemblance to any preexisting one. For some reason, the developers found it appropriate to give the suitcase in the item menu sentience with googly eyes and feet to boot and call him Stuffwell. He lugs around the pieces of the Cobalt Star, and I wish that was all he did. He also insists on popping up frequently to offer unsolicited guidance to the player on their objective, which is entirely unnecessary considering every objective is still clear as crystal. I would say that Stuffwell has the personality of a cardboard box, but that packaging apparatus would actually be far more interesting. The fact that the developers implemented Stuffwell to keep on the player’s side at all times in a desperate attempt to maintain his presence as a character is laughable, and his constant condescending input exemplifies the worst trope of children’s media. Fuck off, Stuffwell. Go help Dora the Explorer or something. Meanwhile, Fawful is making his presence remote in the underground sewers as a black market badge dealer that only the babies can access. Oftentimes, I’d visit him just to hear the sweet sounds of his grammatical errors. I’d let Fawful off the hook!

The Shroob forces aren’t all that colorful either. These demented, dwarfish mushrooms that look like someone forgot to add a pinch of chlorine to the Toad gene pool to clean the gunk out of it do not deviate very far from the standard model. The developers could’ve used the X-Naut army from The Thousand-Year Door as inspiration. Perhaps the Shroobs work more efficiently with a stronger sense of unity. By the end of the game, they’ve taken total control over the past version of Peach’s castle. The climactic build-up to the finale of Partners in Time is storming the palace and sending the Shroobs and their dinky Plan 9 from Outer Space saucers back to their polluted home planet. As seen in the first game, the difficulty curve completely ratchets up here, which made me fearful of the final boss at the end of it. The Shroob Princess is by and large the most challenging fight in the game with her forcefield phase and spider walker, but she’s not the final boss. The last piece that fully reforms the Cobalt Star actually houses the true heir to the Shroob throne, and she’s more sinister than her spare of a sister. The beastly Elder Shroob Princess is as daunting as Cackletta was in Superstar Saga, with her multiple phases progressively becoming more durable and unpredictable. An even bigger slight against the player is that if they die on the Elder Princess, they’ll have to tackle the grueling battle with her sister AGAIN as well. Thank God for the Bros. items for both of these fights, for I was sweating bullets the entire time. The developers learned from the fight against Cackletta. Apparently, saline would’ve saved me the trouble, for Baby Luigi’s tears are the substance that eradicates the Shroob presence from the Mushroom Kingdom. Interesting.

Given everything I’ve said, it should be apparent that Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time is rather underwhelming. It’s a by-the-numbers sequel that does very little to innovate on its predecessor except for doubling the playable characters, the items, and the screens the player can use as reference. It all amounts to practically nothing of substance. However, I wouldn’t go as far as to declare Partners in Time as another unfortunate example of a “sophomore slump.” It’s more like a student finishing a semester with a 3.0 GPA after sweeping the dean’s list their freshman year, a hard act to follow indeed. Still, achieving that average is a respectable accomplishment. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with Partners in Time because the Mario & Luigi foundation is so solid, and they’d have to botch it pretty badly to make me forsake it entirely.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Since the dawn of humanity, our society has always needed a scapegoat as a source of blame for the corruption of our young. Television on the whole was claimed to rot the minds of children since its inception in the mid-20th century, and the rebellious spirit of rock-and-roll soon after proved to be another nightmare for the halcyon post-war America that we desperately attempted to uphold. However, these ridiculous moral panics were but historical footnotes of the early information age by the time I was born, so I obviously didn’t experience them firsthand. However, the video games I played as a child were always a point of concern for my general welfare as an impressionable youth. Even then, I still wasn’t privy to the genesis point of the video game controversy when hundreds of soccer moms fainted at Little Timmy performing button combinations to unsheathe one’s spinal cord from their bodies in Mortal Kombat. No, my initial exposure to the anti-video game pandemonium was early in the sixth generation of gaming in the early 2000s when this little game hit the shelves: Grand Theft Auto III. Not since sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll has a three-word combination struck fear in the hearts of the perennially bored housewives and prudish, geriatric politicians of America. Considering how vocal the outcry was against this game, it seemed as if these authoritative figures would rather their children be influenced to become a degenerate hedonists rather than mirror the realm of murder and chaos found in Grand Theft Auto. Ever since the media conveniently discovered that the Columbine shooters were fans of games like Doom and Quake, attributing the exposure of video game violence to the foibles of adolescence became second nature to the stodgy older generations. Releasing Grand Theft Auto III two years later felt as if an encore of that horrific event was directly on the horizon. My own mother grounded me for two weeks in the fourth grade for watching a friend of mine drive around in this game for five minutes before school one day, as if simply being exposed to the game for such a short time would affect my ethical fiber like radiation poisoning. (I swear, that’s all I watched him do). The Grand Theft Auto epidemic was an irritating reality for gamers such as me, but I’m sure the then-small-fry game developer Rockstar Studios were eternally grateful for all of the inadvertent press.

But everyone would be remiss if they didn’t experience Grand Theft Auto III back then, for the franchise's third entry during the PS2’s infancy was a groundbreaking milestone in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto III’s titanic splash didn’t just provoke the wrath of parents and politicians: it ignited a revolutionary new wave of game design by popularizing the open-world genre and indelibly laying out the rules and regulations for all other developers to follow. Realistic polygons were only a surface-level aspect of the transition to the third dimension in the former generation that started it. After the initial period of setting the foundation, game developers were seriously expanding the possibilities of a 3D environment to radical proportions. The non-linear sandbox design popularized in the levels of fellow 3D trendsetter Super Mario 64 was enlarged to proportions that they could be reminiscent of environments from the real world, eliminating the problem of empty, ethereal graphical space found in the levels of the game from the previous generation. In fact, GTA III coalesced its areas so seamlessly that using the term levels out of the beginner’s book of the gaming lexicon now seemed inappropriate to assign. A staggering evolution in game design was taking place, and GTA III's contributions to this growth and change served as the substance behind the game’s bloodshed and mayhem. However, one would have had to experience GTA III in the short window of time of its initial release to appreciate what it did. Not only did the series sprout two sequels on the PS2 soon after that eclipsed its impact, but hundreds of imitators naturally emerged after seeing the tangibility of its content and design that translated to great success. In a way, GTA III is the Super Mario 64 of the sixth generation of gaming: an early innovator that skates by in retrospect because of its influence despite its myriad of glaring flaws.

A portion of GTA III’s appeal can be attributed to its cinematic flair. The franchise's influences stem directly from tons of crime fiction from other entertainment mediums, ranging from HBO’s television staple The Sopranos, heist films such as Heat and Reservoir Dogs, to the acclaimed filmography of Martin Scorsese. GTA III’s opening cutscene displays a bank robbery unfolding, with three culprits making their quick getaway. The female criminal at the scene of the crime, Catalina, leaves her boyfriend and fellow bank job accomplice Claude to die by shooting him point-blank while escaping the scene. Claude miraculously survives, but is the sole perpetrator apprehended and taken to justice. After being sentenced to ten years in prison, the Colombian Cartel seizes the armored van he’s being transported in, and the hostage takeover gives him and another prisoner “8 Ball” an opportune moment to escape custody. While the cinematic splendor on display here doesn’t rival the arthouse ambitions of, say, Hideo Kojima, the exhilaration of the bank robbery to introduce the game is an effective enough hook to intrigue the player immediately and set a precedent for the game’s chaotic tone.

Claude Speed, a name that is totally on his birth certificate and not the fabricated persona of a criminal/D-list porn star, is GTA III’s protagonist and the vehicle for the player committing a bloody holocaust in the city streets. Interestingly enough, Claude is another example of a silent protagonist seen so many times in a game that presents its story cinematically. Rockstar would learn their lesson soon after but here on GTA’s open-world debut, interacting with anything and anyone with a character that doesn’t make a peep feels completely unnatural. The silent protagonist trope should be reserved for platforming characters who only focus on tight gameplay and customizable avatars in RPGs. Through a particular perspective, Claude maybe works as a silent protagonist to immerse the player in the biblical chaos they can commit without any injected personability getting in the way. This was the developer's intention, right? No, they severely fucked this up.

The core of GTA III’s heightened non-linearity is to facilitate a sense of freedom, to unbound the shackles of video game discipline and order, allowing the player to run wild and let their hair down, or so to speak. One realization that dons over the player is that once Claude arrives at his safe house is that the rate of gameplay doesn’t halt when the player isn’t engaging in tasks that the game assigns them. The brilliance of GTA III’s design philosophy is that the player could potentially spend hours playing the game without even progressing the story with one mission, and it’s also likely that the player wouldn’t grow weary of their deregulated merriment. Playing a game with rules on the playground as a kid is all fine and dandy, but the free reign of using everything at your disposal on the slightest impulse tends to feel more joyous, no? The player is given the opportunity to perform acts of the game’s namesake and ride their stolen property around with a sense of recklessness like they’re in The Italian Job. Claude can engage in spontaneous fisticuffs with the unassuming pedestrians that roam the streets, or take the morbid route of ending their insignificant lives with the blast of his roulette of firearms. As one can expect, all this debauchery will alert the attention of the Liberty City Police Force, who will proceed to hunt you down like a pack of wild dogs. The alert level coincides with how tenacious their efforts will be in ousting your malignant presence from the streets, escalating to them sicing an attack helicopter and an army-grade tank on you if you refuse to comply. One may argue that the police penalty is a buzzkill to the adrenaline-fueled fun that the game fosters, but where would the thrill of committing crimes be without the looming consequence of legal blowback? Then again, the player is never forced to enact anything that would warrant this heavy rate of firepower unless they choose to.

Whether or not the player wishes to lay waste to Liberty City on their own time, I implore the player to at least frolic around to learn the layout of the game’s map. The most egregious aspect of GTA III’s rudimentary open-world design is the lack of a map. I don’t care if the game exemplifies the fetal stage of the open-world genre: no amount of reflective hindsight excuses omitting this essential feature from the game. The circular radar located in the bottom left corner of the screen only indicates the safe house and mission icons, but not the locations of the Pay-N-Spray garages or the Ammu-Nation stores. The reason why both of these stores are as imperative to find is that if Claude gets arrested or gunned down, he respawns outside of either a hospital or the police station with only the clothes on his back. The cause for both of these unfortunate outcomes is usually attributed to the police horde raining their fury down upon Claude or being unequipped to deal with the various gang factions infecting Liberty City. Not to mention, the player will constantly be subject to lethal carbeques because every vehicle in the game is as durable as paper mache. Eluding the police by changing the color of the car and stacking one’s arsenal to rival the gangbangers is the only possible way to survive the harsh streets of Liberty City, and obscuring these destinations from view on the radar makes the game unnecessarily more irritating. All the player has as a reference to where anything could be is a northern mark like a compass, but who do I look like? Magellan?

Learning the layout of GTA III’s map is an especially grueling escapade because the urban jungle the player is forced to commit to memory is rather drab. Liberty City is obviously a fictional American city because it doesn’t share a name with one from the real world. However, its similarities with The Big Apple almost veer into the uncanny valley. Like real-world New York City, Liberty City is divided into three islands that act as distinct Burroughs that the player has access to as the story progresses. One may argue that imposing barriers between the Burroughs negates a true open-world environment, but each individual island can stand on its own merits with its breadth. The starting island of Portland vaguely resembles both the New York Burroughs of Brooklyn and Queens due to its hilly elevation and the persistent presence of the metro station. Staunton Island is a comparatively more flashy, bourgeois metropolitan area like Manhattan. Shoreside Island ostensibly depicts the suburban sprawl of Newark, New Jersey. While the three islands are certainly inspired, they all lack a kind of urban pomp. Unique geographical features such as Portland’s Chinatown district, Staunton’s central park, and Shoreside’s dam give them enough distinction, but none of these sites pop and sparkle with that city magic. Many of these features feel slapdashed onto the map, obligations of what usually composes the city streets of America without any of the grand allure that makes spots like these enticing in real life. Around all these underwhelming “landmarks” are the typical tall buildings and cluttered streets that simply trace the bare minimum of urbanity. If New York was as generic as it is depicted here, I highly doubt it would be the most populated city in the country.

Eventually, the player’s pension for senseless, unmitigated destruction will conflict with the fact that crime costs money. Maximizing the scope of a mindless murdering spree requires at least a fair amount of cash to purchase weapons, and the arcade-style method of ebbing away vehicles to the point of exploding and gaining a sum of money isn’t enough to finance all of the manic fun the player could be having. Naturally, the only way of earning a substantial income in GTA III is by putting Claude to work. Claude could steal a taxi and siphon the fare money from the poor Indian guy he’s co-opting the business from but really, the more organic way of earning income in the game is completing the story missions. Essentially, GTA III’s story missions are odd jobs assigned by Liberty City’s finest: the higher-ups of the city’s crime syndicate. Claude becomes everyone’s glorified errand boy in his mission to get to Catalina, maintaining his pure chaotic neutral position between the Italian mafia, the Yakuza, and the Jamaican Yardies strictly for his own benefit. These tasks range from escort missions via car, assassinations, property damage, etc. By completing these various missions, the player will be more than compensated for their troubles so they can make bigger bloodbaths on the streets.

Being that these jobs are assigned by the disgusting criminal toe scum beneath the feet of the city, almost every mission given to Claude is dangerous, deplorable, and highly illegal. Because of this thrilling combination of circumstances, GTA III’s missions tend to be quite challenging. The tasks are relatively short and straightforward, but the game goes the extra mile to grief the player with additional circumstances. If you’re too afraid to cause any sizable conflict on the streets for fear of facing the lashing of the law, get used to it. A pattern anyone who plays the game will notice is that the harder missions involve Liberty City’s boys in blue strong-arming Claude with everything they’ve got while the mission is still underway. Some notably bothersome moments involving the police abruptly exercising their authority during missions are running over a man in a seemingly impervious body cast in “Plaster Blaster” or bumping a car over and over to drop paraphernalia in “Evidence Dash.” The only way to elude the rampaging police force is to visit a Pay-N-Spray to throw off your scent, which is why obscuring their view on the map is cruel and unusual. Actually, I’ll kindly accept any vehicular mission over any that involve weapon combat with gang members. Getting up close and personal with a posse of armed malcontents in missions like “Arms Shortage” and “Grand Theft Aero” assures that their barrage of whizzing bullets will tear through Claude like tissue paper. Preparing beforehand by acquiring body armor will only make a marginal difference in defense, for its material is evidently made of bubble wrap and the targeting system for the guns is not exactly smooth or accurate. The sniper rifle is your best friend in this game and not only during the often maligned “Bomb Da Base: Act II” mission. Time is of the essence when committing a criminal offense, so many of the missions are given a strict time limit to complete. I’m convinced the developers meticulously formulated the perfect time to keep the player on edge during these missions and scrape out of that time by the skin of their teeth. Even if you outsmart the constraints of the city-spanning mission “Espresso 2 Go!,” you’ll still only ram into all nine espresso stands across Liberty City with under a minute left. The Asuka mission acronym “S.A.M.” is arguably the most frustrating mission in the game because it combines every excruciating element listed above. To top everything off, the missions in GTA III must be completed without any mistakes, for there are no checkpoints to bail the player out when they make a mistake or die. GTA III is a ruthless test of trial and error, and whether or not the game offers a fair, reasonable challenge is up to contention.

Performing the missions and furthering the story is also the only way to meet GTA III’s number of supporting characters. GTA III cast exemplifies the film noir tenet in that there are no good, moral characters to attach to and hope for their happiness and prosperity: only bad characters that fall on a spectrum of amoral behavior. The problem with every character in GTA III is not their scumbaggery, but that they’re all caricatures. The Leone crime family seems like a parody of every Italian mob ever depicted with their ritzy attire, restaurant place of operation, and overbearing mother figure yelling at a made man from a distance. Kenji is the classic Yakuza member, justifying the ultraviolence he commits with ancient Japanese spiritualism. At least it’s amusing and disturbing how aroused his sister Asuka becomes around Clyde the more death and destruction he causes. These characters might only seem as one-dimensional as they are because their relationship with Claude never surpasses a formal employer-client dynamic. I’m sure corrupt cop Ray and sleazy yuppie Donald Love lead interesting lives, but it’s difficult to peer into their characters in a deeper manner when it's all strictly business.

The business of all of these criminal figures at least begins to wrap around to something interesting around the second half of the game. After Claude’s relationship with the Italians is soured due to the Don’s wife Maria and her philandering, Claude enters the center of a drug trafficking ring involving all of the gang factions, shoveling SPANK around the city and attempting to occupy control. Things get rather contentious between the Colombians and the Yakuza when Claude whacks Kenji using a cartel car to set them up and take the blame. This escalated gang war only allows Claude to get closer to Catalina, which he eventually does at the cost of her murdering a scorned, grieving Asuka. The final mission involves following Catalina’s helicopter to a cartel base. Fitting for a final mission of a challenging game, the caveat to the climax of Claude’s revenge plot must be done without any purchased weapons or ammunition, as Claude must rely on cartel pickups. Why not just make Claude also do this mission stark naked while they’re at it? Catalina finally earns her comeuppance via a bazooka shell, but GTA III’s ending is not happy. A part of the mission was to rescue a captured Maria, who Claude decides to shoot as the screen goes black. Jesus, Rockstar. Maria was a trifling skank, but that’s just ice cold. Ike treated Tina with more dignity than that.

I could easily write off GTA III for being completely undercooked in every feasible department. The world is empty and bland, the controls are austere, and every mission is padded with unfair bullshit. All of the characters have the charisma of a gaggle of cockroaches, including the protagonist we’re intended to root for. However, I’ve come to a realization that maybe most of these discrepancies were intentional. It’s possible that all of GTA III’s attributes ranging from its world to its characters seem raw and generic because of the bluntness the developers want to convey. Through the game’s fabric, a sort of satire is subtly interwoven through the game’s active ethos. Perhaps the reason why Liberty City is an unflinching depiction of New York City without the superficial glitz and glamor associated with a bustling American metropolis. Claude as a silent protagonist isn’t a mistake made by sticking to traditional video game tropes despite the cinematic evolution of the medium, but only a stoic, unwavering sociopath could survive on the brutal city streets run by people who have no human warmth. The harsh ending indicates there are no happy endings here, only the next step in a cycle of violence and greed. It’s a bit of a stretch in divulging some sort of substance, and I don’t think any concerned parent would care in making their decision to keep it away from their children. Overall, GTA III’s substance is defined by its innovations, which were certainly awe-striking at the time. No other game tested a gamer’s subconscious ID that thirsted for animalistic impulses, nor was there one that facilitated it. GTA III belongs in a museum where we can give it all the respect it deserves but from an impersonal distance.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

I do not like Shadow the Hedgehog and yes, I’m referring to the character. I made this explicitly clear in my review of his debut title Sonic Adventure 2 because Sonic’s negative mode contrast doppelganger has always left a bad taste in my mouth. This should come as a surprise to anyone because Shadow is a character that catered to my age demographic during his prime. It’s hard to believe now, but the cultural landscape of the 2000s was oozing with edge. The trendy sports and reality television showcased a potential for people to be subjected to grievous pain, “Crawling”, “Bodies”, and “Down with the Sickness” were songs that were taken seriously, the bar for comedy was set to be as taboo-breaking as humanly possible, and the internet was an uncharted frontier of cutting-edge content that shocked society with both its breadth and graphicness. Compared to how restrained and socially-conscious everything has been since the mid-2010s, the years of my childhood and adolescence feel like a bygone era. Shadow the Hedgehog was designed with the intention of remastering Sonic for the new, edgy millennium, and the character successfully resonated with the youths of that time as planned. Even when I was a kid who was supposed to, however, I always thought that he was an uncharismatic jerk whose presence created a storm cloud of unnecessary, overwrought melodrama over the Sonic universe. This is why I avoided his self-titled offshoot game released in 2005 even though I was meant to eat this game up like an all-you-can-eat buffet. It didn’t help the game’s case that the general consensus was that it dug a deeper hole for 3D Sonic’s less-than-savory reputation. So you see, reviewing Shadow the Hedgehog is not a retrospective of how I perceive this game now than when I was a child like the previously released 3D Sonic games. It’s instead an instance of morbid curiosity finally instilled into me as an adult to find out if I was right in passing on this game long ago. God help me.

Shadow certainly is the most interesting Sonic character on the basis of background and moral standing. He’s got a checkered past, and the most damning thing about it is that he hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it consists of. Shadow the Hedgehog continues the same amnesia-addled mystery narrative that Sonic Heroes started with the character’s general uncertainty, and his past is only hazy to Shadow because the player is already likely privy to it from the events of Sonic Adventure 2. The only part of the mystery that will have the player scratching their heads is how Shadow still exists considering we all watched him perish in the cosmos over Earth’s orbit. Shadow’s mission in his eponymous title is to unravel the mystery of his existence, and our mission as the player is to see how deeply the developers retconned the climax of Sonic Adventure 2. All the while, Shadow must contend with an all-out war on Earth between the humans, a plague of black aliens, and an irate Dr. Eggman in the background. Shadow’s road to self-discovery is going to be a bumpy one, to say the least.

Shadow’s journey is also going to be rife with complications because he controls like absolute dogshit. People who write off all of Sonic’s 3D outings often claim that the shifty camera is the prime culprit in dooming the series to horrid mediocrity. Still, while there is some understandable merit to this criticism, no one took fault with Sonic’s controls (or at least not for all the 3D entries leading up to this point). In both Sonic Adventure titles, Sonic speeding through the levels was as smooth as a syrup enema, hence another reason why the transition to 3D for the blue blur was actually less muddled than most remember. If this is the 3D Sonic title that triggered the downfall of Sonic’s mobility for every subsequent 3D entry, I find it funny that he wasn’t even the one who caused it. Shadow moves with the grace of a college freshman girl drunk on a fifth of mango pineapple flavored Svedka, or to say that his general movement has zero amount of grace. This game’s version of Shadow would fail a sobriety test because he struggles to keep himself on a straight path. Any intentional deviations from a direct route result in swerving around with jagged dramatism, as if strafing while running was another aspect of Shadow’s amnesiac stupor. Shadow’s sludgy rate of acceleration hardly puts him on equal standing with Sonic’s lively speed capabilities either. While Shadow will not cooperate with the player, somehow, he will still constantly bump into enemies on the field as if his wonky trajectory is due to him being magnetized to them. Thankfully, Shadow only loses a modest sum of rings upon being hit as opposed to the standard penalty of losing all of them, but is this change due to the developers being fully aware that the player will encounter problems? What gives, Sega? Shadow’s lack of stability with his general movement is inexcusable and is the primary factor in the game’s poor quality.

Even though it doesn’t make a lick of sense, I guess every player should be slightly relieved because speed is not the name of the game in Shadow the Hedgehog. That is, unless the player is content with the game’s “neutral route.” The range of the six levels per campaign depends on Shadow’s actions in each level. A moral choice mechanic is implemented for each level in Shadow the Hedgehog, and a single campaign’s trajectory depends on the specific task completed. Three choices are presented to Shadow; hero, dark, and neutral, and the two opposite ends of that spectrum involve aligning with either Sonic and a number of his friends or the intimidating leader of the black aliens. Both objectives will be presented to Shadow near the beginning of each level with fairly clear instructions from either party, and Shadow will have to consistently cease his rate of speed to make a more meticulous effort in completing either task. Determining the route of Shadow’s journey on this basis is the most engaging and unique mechanic of the game, and strictly limiting the player’s route based on player choice is a great way to facilitate player choice. In saying this, it could’ve been executed a little smoother. At several different points in each level, the opposing faction of whichever task the player has assigned still pops their head up and automatically changes Shadow’s objective to their request. The player can change this in the pause menu but as we’ve learned from Ocarina of Time’s Water Temple, pausing the game to swap something out is the most vexing method of manual change. Besides that, both factions of “good” or “bad” irritate me to no end because Shadow will practically be accompanying them through the entire level. I’m either subjected to the inane chatter of a high-pitched Tails or Charmy the Bee or getting swimmer’s ear from Dr. Klaww in the shape of an evil octopus. Together, it’s like listening to a Brokencyde album, and that’s just gross.

There are a total of 23 levels in Shadow the Hedgehog, almost twice as many as the individual ones in the first Sonic Adventure title. However, the player will only experience six of them per campaign without the option to retrace one’s steps for a different outcome once the trajectory has been set. Let me just say that I fully appreciate the variety across the 22 levels featured in the game after being driven mad by repeating the same fourteen levels over four campaigns in Sonic Heroes. The player might get sick to death of playing the opening level of Westopolis, but at least there is a one in three chance that the following level will be fresh. However, until the levels were watered down and corrupted by both Team Rose and Team Chaotix respectively, the levels in Sonic Heroes were utterly enjoyable through and through despite the herculean length of some. Shadow the Hedgehog’s levels range from being promising to downright insufferable. Many level motifs are Sonic Adventure 2 reunions where we see the fallout of both Prison Island in radiated ruin, as well as some subsector of the Space Colony Ark. Crazy Gadget was an exemplary space level compared to standing and waiting to use the crumbling rubble of the ark to fall and use as platforms in Cosmic Fall. Glyphic Canyon levels offer some loops and other classic Sonic level tropes, but Shadow’s restrained velocity doesn’t result in the same electric thrills that result in Sonic blazing through them. I somewhat enjoy the vehicle-intensive levels because the hopping mech and military car somehow control better than Shadow does. I also admire Lava Shelter because it managed not to fuck up the grind rail gameplay. On the other hand, I loathe any level where Shadow has to follow an airship and destroy it, or kill every enemy in the level. Who thought the return of that god-awful Team Chaotix mission with the candles was a good idea? There simply aren’t too many exemplary standouts among the pack to compensate for the substandard ones.

Then there’s the other aspect of Shadow’s gameplay that everyone knew an entire paragraph would be dedicated to because it was the major selling point of the game. Shadow’s role as Sonic’s edgy rival in Sonic Adventure 2 buttered up all the acne-ridden pre-teens enough, but it was time to dial his coolness radar all the way up to eleven. When I saw my first indication that Shadow was getting his own game on the front cover of a 2005 issue of Nintendo Power, I couldn't believe my eyes. Not only was Shadow revved up on a bitchin Harley like he’s James fucking Dean, but he was holding a fucking hand cannon in his left hand. I was gobsmacked. Despite my shocked incredulity, what I was witnessing was true. Guns are a main mechanic in Shadow the Hedgehog, the cherry on top of any edgy sundae. Shadow will pick up the misplaced firearms from enemies he has vanquished and use them of his own volition until the ammunition runs out. If that happens, picking up another gun to use is as simple as replacing a stick to walk with on a hiking trail. The guns range from pistols and AKs to the more fictional space blasters usually found in the scrap remains of Eggman’s robots. As fucking sick as Shadow looks strapped with a loaded gun, unfortunately, it all falls apart in execution thanks to the awful controls. Good luck aiming without a targeting mechanic while Shadow is zooming around like a hornet huffing raid fumes. The player will have to resort to primarily using the guns for combat because the trademark homing attack is both pitiful and unresponsive in this game.

Guns weren’t only introduced to make Shadow the Hedgehog moisten the pants of pre-adolescents or test the limits of the new E10 rating introduced by the ESRB that the game ultimately received upon release. They are indicative of the more mature direction the developers decided to take for a more complex and dignified character like Shadow the Hedgehog snickers loudly to self upon typing this statement. Or at least this was the developer's sincere intentions that faltered into being Shadow the EDGEhog, a hilarious observational joke that absolutely NO ONE has ever made. In addition to the guns, Shadow also swears like the big man he is. None of these utterances surpass baby’s first curse words like “hell” and “damn,” but I’m still in disbelief that these words are present in any licensed Sonic property. Shadow asking himself where that DAMN fourth Chaos emerald is always got a chuckle out of me, and the same goes for when he tells Eggman he’s “going straight to hell” as a threat before one of their fights. My favorite unintentionally(?) funny line is when Shadow uses the age-old simile of taking candy from a baby to convey how easy taking another Chaos Emerald will be. Then, he has to elaborate that he condones such an action because he’s the baddest mofo alive. Being a grouchy misanthrope is one thing, but this crosses the line. Who wrote this shit?

So does Shadow the Hedgehog’s narrative offer anything of real substance besides abysmal attempts at making Shadow seem cool? Well, the myriad of alternate endings to each campaign should at least make the player somewhat curious. Shadow’s journey to discover the truth leads him to the shocking revelation that he’s a clone of the original Shadow made by Eggman. Or at least this piece of information is only shocking to Shadow and anyone who hasn’t played Sonic Heroes, and that game revealed this twist with much more subtlety. The seven Chaos Emeralds are still out and about for all megalomaniacs in the Sonic universe, and the three general paths revolve around who gets to reap the benefits of Shadow’s emerald hunting throughout the story. The neutral path sees Shadow selfishly seizing all the Chaos Emeralds for himself to truly fulfill his arc of being the “ultimate lifeform” he touted for himself in Sonic Adventure 2. Even the hero and dark routes lead to practically the same outcome, with the only deviation of who Shadow screws over. He leaves the Black Arms leader to rot in the true hero story, and the same fate befalls Sonic in the dark route. In one ending, Shadow and Gamma kill Eggman execution-style as the screen fades to black. Jesus Christ, Sega. Only in the semi-hero ending does Shadow feel remorseful for his past (I don’t forgive you, Shadow). I am not willing to go to the lengths needed to unlock the absolute ultimate true ending where Shadow uses all of the Chaos Emeralds to destroy the alien menace with an audience of all of Sonic and his friends seeing this act of true altruism unfold in awe. It involves objectives needed to be done across every single level that I do not have the strength or patience to stomach. I will gladly settle for Shadow’s newfound confidence in whichever choice he makes.

At the end of the day, Shadow the Hedgehog is difficult to take seriously. Instead of providing a deep, profound character study for Shadow, the result of Sega putting Sonic’s hottest new character in the limelight made an already flawed character a total laughingstock. The story, the gun mechanics, and the brooding presentation reek of trying too hard to appeal to a specific age demographic that it comes off as pandering. Still, with this game as my example, I think the true culprit of 3D Sonic’s downfall is a rushed development period. This has been well documented with future 3D Sonic bombs, and one could make an example out of Sonic Heroes released before this game. Shadow the Hedgehog, in my mind, is the first truly bad 3D Sonic game, but it’s not because the game lacks passion. Specific elements of Shadow the Hedgehog such as the malleable story trajectory are admirable, and some of the levels show real promise. If the developers had the time to hone Shadow’s shoddy controls and the way the levels juggle their objectives, Shadow the Hedgehog could’ve been a solid 3D Sonic game. With its overall direction in mind, I’m not sure that even a competent Shadow the Hedgehog would’ve won me over, but at least there would have been a dedicated number of Sonic fans defending it.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Over the past few years, I’ve used a plethora of positive adjectives to describe Dark Souls. Deep, rich, revolutionary, challenging, spell-binding, sublime, life-affirming: these words only scratch the surface of the exaltation I’ve given to FromSoft’s seminal action-RPG series. However, one delectable description I would NEVER earnestly give Dark Souls under any context is cute. Actually, the franchise is fairly grotesque. The franchise prides itself on upholding a grim, pensive atmosphere marked by the immense decay of the game’s world and all of its inhabitants with little hopeful reprieve. Gigantic, rabid rats, Blighttown swamp ogres, the demons residing in the volcanic ruins, to the often emaciated state of the main protagonist will all turn off each player’s collective appetites. Don’t even get me started on the pulpy, arcane grotesqueries from Dark Soul’s gothic cousin Bloodborne. In the more sexual context of the word cute, I can’t think of a better example of a moment in gaming that made everyone’s penises retract in fear and disgust like an alarmed hermit crab than the reveal of the bottom half of the supermodel spider beast Quelaag. It’s as if the developers were pulling a sick prank on the player, swiftly reminding them that nothing in Dark Souls is pretty or pristine. Fortunately, Dark Souls doesn’t have to be cute, for the impact the series has had seems to translate its idiosyncratic mechanics rather than its aesthetic attributes. Indie developer Finji decided to see what “cute Dark Souls” would look like with their 2022 title Tunic, and it translates fairly well.

I should also add that Tunic takes more than a liberal helping of elements from The Legend of Zelda as well. This second parent in Tunic’s genetic code shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the article of clothing is the dress of choice for the plucky fox protagonist depicted on the game’s cover art, mirroring the hero of time’s iconic wardrobe like an excitable kid on Halloween. Besides The Fox’s outfit as a cheeky reference to Link, Tunic’s gameplay is a marriage between Dark Souls and Zelda, which is a concise relationship because Dark Souls comprises plenty of Zelda’s gameplay attributes itself. However, I did say that Tunic’s gameplay featured a fusion from both series as opposed to sedimentary layers building onto Zelda’s gameplay supporting its descendants at the bottom. Tunic borrows the Soulslike combat, level design, and difficulty curve, but what does Zelda contribute to the game’s foundation? Tunic’s developers seem to have dipped their feet into the classic Zelda philosophy of relatively free-reign exploration, a significant mark that divides the top-down 2D games and the more linear, narrative-focused 3D titles. With this slurry of gameplay elements, the developers evidently wished to craft Tunic as a sprawling adventure title with thin limitations on roaming around the intricate world that is filled to the brim with surprises.

While Tunic’s influences are an important factor in its general makeup, my starting thesis on this game was based on how it formulated something adorable from the Dark Souls foundation that was originally glum and twistedly malformed. From the first screen of Tunic, it should be obvious how the game’s art direction diverges from any aesthetical property in Dark Souls. The fantasy land of Tunic’s setting looks like it's composed entirely of rubber along with its inhabitants but in a child-like bouncy castle way instead of its grayish organic material. It’s a wonder that enemies don’t make squeaking sounds upon being struck by The Fox’s sword. Everything from the assorted trees and tall grasses, to the steep hills, and towering structures resemble the pieces of an intricate playset. It’s reminiscent of the cartoonishly bulbous visual style Nintendo implemented for the Link’s Awakening remake on the Switch, except that Tunic doubles down on consistently depicting everything with a cherubic tint as opposed to only certain elements. Yet, all of the arcane edifices across Tunic’s world still seem grand and imposing. Tunic’s art direction strikes a tasteful balance between the strikingly sublime and the endearingly whimsical. Also, The Fox who vicariously gives the player a grand tour of this world is definitely a contender for the cutest video game protagonist next to Kirby, Yoshi, and Yoku from Yoku’s Island Express. While the visual aspects of Tunic are obviously constructed to make the game look charmingly adorable, the game’s atmosphere surprisingly exudes an ethereal mystique. Because a game that features such soft, spongy aesthetics carries this sense of wonder, it shows that Tunic’s presentation has layers.

Tunic’s taking of Zelda’s sense of exploration is readily apparent from the starting screen. The fox awakens on a beachy shore with zero context of where he is with less of a clue of which direction to take. What the player can figure out for themselves is they are in dire need of a weapon to defend themselves with, as the flopping land tadpoles and the piggish, Ganon-esque knights seen in the overworld are not the friendly sorts. This first quest to procure one’s means of both offense and defense should provoke memories of the first Legend of Zelda title, as Link is dropped into the fray of Hyrule without the necessary tools to survive. Or, it could also conjure up recollections of the Chosen Undead scurrying around the boss in the Northern Undead Asylum before being granted weapons, an opening sequence that is most certainly influenced by the initial state of vulnerability from the first Zelda game. Unlike both games, there isn’t an old man in a nearby cave to pass off his sword out of concern, nor are his devices in the close quarters of an enclosed area like the asylum in Dark Souls. The Fox has to make do with a pitiable stick as his first weapon before reaching the sacred grounds of the sword, and he doesn’t obtain his shield to accompany the sword on his opposite hand until after the first boss is defeated. The supplementary length to obtain the sword and shield is indicative of Tunic’s habit of keeping the player in the dark. Tunic is intentionally cryptic like classic Zelda and Dark Souls, but Tunic seems to amplify the esoteric elements to an absurd degree. On top of having the player roam around the map like a buzzing fly due to a lack of direction, the developers have pulled a Christian Vander (the drummer and leader of the French progressive rock band Magma) and constructed their own language to detail the game’s various attributes. Don’t bother breaking out the Rosetta Stone because it’s all a mesh of cuneiform hieroglyphics that even the developers couldn’t decipher. Of course, this chicken scratch gibberish purposefully obscures any context clues to maintain that aura of ambiguity. Because the game tears away at any hope of easy answers, every step in Tunic can be super miscalculated. I mostly appreciate the effort to foster a relatively non-linear environment ala Zelda 1, but some aspects of this direction aren’t accommodating. Because Tunic features a fixed wide-view camera perspective, it’s difficult for the player to peek at cracks to excavate in the 3D landscape, and some of them are pertinent paths to progression. Also, whenever The Fox does find himself in a cramped crevice, the silhouette the player sees doesn’t really aid in guiding them through it. Meticulously looking for the right path is difficult enough on its own.

How does one have any hope to navigate through the world of Tunic if everything seems so obtuse? Pressing the select button will pop up the game’s manual, a 56-page guide to conquering every challenge and uncovering every hidden secret. Once again, a sweet wash of nostalgia should rush through any player of a certain age because the in-game manual is an homage to the physical manuals, magazine walkthroughs, and strategy guides that gamers of yore were forced to seek out when a game threw them for a loop. The manual’s pages are strewn across Tunic’s overworld as a core collectible, and each page is stacked with hints from head-to-toe on the intricacies found in the game. It sounds like a blessing, but the rotten caveat is that most of the manual’s contents are written in the developer’s made-up mumbo-jumbo language. The manual’s details regarding the thorough history of the game’s lore, information on the various trinkets and goodies, and how to navigate through the more sprawling area of the hub and its surroundings are muddled in linguistic nonsense. Some of the contents of the manual have splotches of English so the player doesn’t have to discern the tips and tricks solely by visual context. Gee, thanks, developers. Now I’ll breeze through this game in no time. Also, a virtual manual does not translate to the same kind of utility that a physical manual did, as it’s quicker to bookmark a notable page and open it while playing a game instead of flipping through pages with the D-pad. At the end of the day, the utility of the manual is negated by the advent of the internet, the destroyer of all antiquated larks that were not available at the time when physical gaming aid was relevant. Whether or not you believe the manual is useful or not, one still can’t deny that it features some gorgeous illustrations.

Still, the manual does adequately depict each step of the game’s progression, albeit construed in an asinine manner. The fox’s first primary quest is to ring two colossal bells on opposite sides of the map. Sound familiar? As if swiping the combat and the cryptic exploration from Dark Souls wasn’t enough, Tunic also copies the game’s first quest as well. No, the player will not witness what Quelaag would look like as a buxom balloon animal complete with tasteful censorship before ringing the second bell. In fact, traveling from one side of the map to the other doesn’t display the same type of descending progression that made the bell-ringing quest from Dark Souls so invigorating either. What keeps Tunic from plunging into the cheap imitation territory is that it has constructed the same type of level progression. I’ve always been in awe of how each area of any FromSoft-developed Soulslike game treats progression and checkpoints, and it’s even more impressive when another developer implements them competently. From the starting point of an area’s shrine, Tunic’s rendition of the bonfires, checkpoints are technically dispersed via shortcuts. The fox will unlatch bridges and unlock doors after a certain point to use indefinitely if the challenges prove to be too hectic and he dies as a result. The player is met with the same level of satisfaction and relief skating past former obstacles along the way to the goal in the exact same way it’s presented in Dark Souls. As for the second quest involving procuring three differently colored jewels to open a gate, this quest is seen across so many games that no one can determine its origin point (although both Zelda and Dark Souls feature a similar quest quite often).

One thing that Tunic leaves alone is the RPG mechanics from Dark Souls. The Fox will leave behind the remnants of his mortal shell at his last place of dying, but recovering it only replenishes a small sum of money lost. Still, the gold and blue doubloons are valuable because The Fox will need a heaping amount of items to use at his disposal. Many of the items can be found in treasure chests on the field, but the player will most likely burn through them and have to purchase them from the skeletal spirit merchant found in the overworld’s windmill. It’s with this aspect of the game that the Zelda influence eclipses Dark Souls, for the plethora of items The Fox has in its inventory is meant to diversify combat and puzzle solving as opposed to being nifty in slight circumstances in Dark Souls. The phantom merchant sells offensive weapons such as firebombs and dynamite so that The Fox can blast away at groups of enemies from afar, while the freeze bomb can be used to subdue stronger singular enemies by encasing them in a coat of ice for a brief period. Fruits of the plum and berry variety restore health and magic respectively, while the more elusive hot pepper increases The Fox’s attack power. For my money, the most useful item the merchant has in stock is the decoy doll, which enemies will center on with as much focus as a cat has for a laser pointer. All of these items are meant to supplement the primary sword weapon, while the other primary weapons The Fox obtains could arguably replace the sword. The player could easily swap all of their melee eggs into the magic basket after a certain point in the game. The Magic Staff pelts enemies with an abundant amount of energy bullets while the ice daggers can freeze enemies just as effectively as the ice bomb item. Eventually, The Fox will come across a shotgun to blast away enemies with magic power at close range, and yes, the image of wee little Fox using a shotgun is as hilariously mismatched as it sounds. The Grapple Hook’s usage for traversal is fairly self-explanatory if you’ve ever played even one Zelda game, but it can also be used to lasso in enemies who annoyingly insist on attacking at long range. With one of the ability cards, the player can swap their health-restoring potions for mana restoration. The choice of magic over melee is as close as Tunic gets to a role-playing option with combat, and the pervasive range of magic items present here helped me escape my melee build comfort zone I usually abide by in Soulslike games. It reminds me more of Zelda because those games encourage using everything the player has at their disposal, while Dark Souls usually forces the player to be faithful to one play style.

I had to diversify my playstyle in Tunic more drastically because the game’s bosses are the true sources of agonizing defeat. Enemies in Tunic vary in viciousness, but each boss is a bitch and a half. The Guard Captain is a gigantic copy of his tinier minions The Fox has been fighting, so dealing with him is a cakewalk. However, the mighty mechanical duo of the Garden Knight and Siege Engine The Fox fights sequentially serve as the game’s first steep roadblocks. I blame the fixed camera for my lack of peripheral reference when it comes to dodge rolling, and shielding their attacks totally depletes all of my stamina. Soulslike bosses are challenging enough, but approaching them in Tunic in the same fashion when one’s sword and shield cannot be upgraded or replaced should be reconsidered. The offerings The Fox makes to increase his stats only do so much. This is why alternating between melee and magic is so important to succeeding with Tunic’s combat, and this especially became the case for the later bosses. The Librarian located at the peak of the Great Library barely gave me any opportunities to strike him with the sword due to him constantly hovering over the perilous arena, and the leaders of the Scavengers kept darting away from my attacks with great swiftness. Becoming accustomed to dealing out brute force and waves of magic akimbo style proved to be the only permissible method of success with Tunic’s bosses, and this mixed direction that I wasn’t used to in Dark Souls made every win a little more gratifying.

I’ve established that Tunic has substantially emulated so many properties from Dark Souls, but what about the series pension for grim outcomes to resolve an adventure? For as cute as the game is, is it merely an enchanting ruse for the game to make the gut punch of a finale more visceral? In a way, this is indeed the case. The central lore figure of Tunic’s world is the incorporeal, cerulean fox housed in the central chamber of the overworld’s map. Dividing the tall, golden doors with the first quest and placing the colored keys in the arcane contraption with the second unveil the solid layers to the apparition at the center. The towering blue fox dressed in a satin gown known as The Heir is the game’s final boss, but she is not to be faced immediately. She strikes down our hero with a swipe of her potent blade, and The Fox is reduced to a ghostly form. After this intentional failure, the spirits of the land’s former foxes hang around the grounds as the fox travels to various memorial sights of these former foxes to regain his strength in the increments of the five increasable assets. He can fight The Heir with the reduced stats he has at hand, but only the foolish would dare to do so. In fact, it’s recommended that the player take their time to exhaustively search for every one of the game’s collectibles in this purgatorial state because putting in the extra effort will mitigate fighting the final boss. If the player collects every page of the game’s manual, approaching The Heir again will result in her accepting the manual with a similar sense of glee and pride like a child gifting something hand-crafted on Mother’s Day. Completing the manual is still a bafflingly difficult task with having to dissect each of the game’s hidden codes with the “Holy Cross” (the D-pad, if that wasn’t clear). The recitable Konami code, these ain’t. Conversely, coming home empty-handed will prompt The Heir to attack with sheer force. This two-phased boss will use rapid sword swipes, energy bursts, and an unhealthy dosage of the glowing, purple corruption matter found in the Quarry to reduce The Fox’s health bar to the size of a fingernail. Tunic doesn’t offer an easy outcome either way, but I still recommend seeking out the pages for a better ending. Curing The Heir is a more interesting ending rather than the recycled Dark Souls resolution of becoming the new martyr in a cyclical process to uphold the new world, which is what happens when The Heir is defeated. Considering how the game looks, I could use something more heartwarming to cap it off.

Transforming Dark Souls into something adorably winsome was the easy aspect of Tunic. Translating all of the properties from the series was the real meat of the matter, and Tunic seems to have processed them efficiently. Still, the extent to which Tunic goes about showcasing these properties gets a tad irksome, especially in regards to obscuring information with nonsensical language along with the clashing perspective that comes with a fixed camera. Also, as the game progressed, it became evident that Tunic borrowed so much from Dark Souls that the game almost literally became Dark Souls with only a visual discernibility. The classic Zelda influence with its loose exploration limits and item management are the saving graces in Tunic that keep it from being a Dark Souls pastiche, only with a cuddly world instead of a gnarly one. At least Tunic seems to have a profound understanding of what makes Dark Souls effective, so I still left Tunic with the same sense of satisfaction.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Indie and triple-A video games seem to be coexisting splendidly. Both types of studios in modern gaming are released as frequently throughout the year, both can be purchased on the same number of multiple modern platforms, and the critical accolades between the two budgetary factions seem to be dispersed evenly for those who are deserved, without any bias from any media outlets preferring one to the other. The video game landscape we live in is a flourishing melting pot where any gaming preference can be satiated thanks to the variety we now have at our disposal. Gaming has finally reached the same level of prosperity as the music and film industry, increasing the number of yearly releases from all over the globe as a result. With all of this in mind, however peachy the notion of gaming’s ubiquity is, it’s a wonder that the triple-A titans aren’t more concerned with how indie releases are creeping up on them. The kings of the medium such as Nintendo in the east and EA in the west have earned their thrones due to their significant influence and longevity, a factor that the indie kids can’t compete with due to their comparatively newer presence in the gaming landscape. Also, their more recognizable brands through building their immanence brick by brick over time allows these triple-A developers to spend a more extravagant budget with their release, arguably the most synonymous factor in what defines a triple-A game these days. Still, indie games are quickly moving in on their territory, but they don’t seem a bit perturbed. I guess the triple-A studios can confidently surmise that no matter how popular and acclaimed indie titles tend to be, a developer with a paltry budget can never compete with the length, spectacle, and bevy of content they can produce for one title. Therefore, the triple-A fat cats can rest comfortably knowing that they’ll always have the public in their pockets. However, one grandstanding indie game should have them sleeping with one eye open, and that game is Hollow Knight.

On the surface, Hollow Knight doesn’t seem like the ideal indie title to strike fear in the hearts of big business. Australian developer Team Cherry took their endearing flash game “Hungry Knight” and formulated it into a Metroidvania title upon its fully-fledged final release, along with changing the descriptive H word in the title to the more mystifying “hollow.” What would most likely make the legion of triple-A developers make an obnoxious chorus of pshaws upon hearing this description is that Metroidvania games are cheap and simple from a production standpoint. Despite the critical acclaim the genre has received, most Metroidvania titles seemed to have been relegated to the inferior hardware of the portable consoles that merely supplemented their console contemporaries, as the more modest capabilities of these handhelds felt more appropriately designed for the inherently 2D Metroidvania genre. It wasn’t until the eighth generation of gaming in the mid-2010s that the Metroidvania genre had a reinvigoration in the gaming landscape with indie titles like Axiom Verge and Ori and the Blind Forest. Suddenly, games in a genre associated with the limited perspective of yore were sharing the limelight with the grand 3D spectacles.

There are plenty of admirable entries in the new wave of Metroidvania games, but Hollow Knight possesses a specific attribute that these more traditional Metroidvania titles didn’t. What is this killer app that Hollow Knight weaves into the fabric of its gameplay? Dark Souls: the triple-A series that I’ve been touting as the gaming messiah for the 2010’s decade. Even though Dark Souls is produced by a triple-A company with the mechanical and graphical prowess of a game fitting the modern gaming standard, Dark Souls’ influences stem from the then unfashionable Metroidvanias, RPGs, and action-adventure titles of gaming’s yesteryears. This range of influences is most likely why Dark Souls was a crisp breath of fresh air in the triple-A climate that was injecting cinematics into the gameplay like botox fillers. One can infer that Dark Souls’ success contributed to at least a fraction of the revitalized spark of interest for the Metroidvania genre, as it was a triple-A game that infiltrated the mechanically milquetoast triple-A climate with a mix of a Metroidvania design philosophy and its own brand of idiosyncrasies. Because Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania that incorporates a hefty heaping of Dark Souls in its mechanics and world design, the game has a clear advantage over its peers. However, I must disclose that Hollow Knight was not the first title of the Metroidvania Renaissance to feature Soulslike characteristics, for I can hear Salt and Sanctuary clearing its throat to call attention to itself. Unlike Salt and Sanctuary, Hollow Knight isn’t merely a derivative Dark Souls clone with a regressive perspective shift. Hollow Knight’s deeper understanding of what makes Dark Souls an effective, gratifying experience is really what elevates its quality on equal standing with its primary influence.

While Hollow Knight may not feature graphics that rival James Cameron’s Avatar like the standards of modern triple-A titles, only someone who is legally blind wouldn’t describe Hollow Knight’s aesthetic as visually splendorous. Like fellow 2017 indie title Cuphead, Hollow Knight’s art direction is crafted with hand-drawn animation. If you thought illustrating a cartoon frame by frame was an absurdly cumbersome endeavor, imagine doing the same process with layers of overlapping binary code to contend with. For that integration alone, Team Cherry earns my sincerest sense of admiration. In saying that, Hollow Knight’s visuals still ascend past the novelty of simply showcasing this kind of uniquely painstaking artistic achievement. If I had to assign a specific style of Hollow Knight’s overall aesthetic, “twee goth” would be an accurate summation. A dour, defeated sense of melancholy permeates throughout the land of Hollownest. Still, the lurid, light-hearted animation on display sort of negates the garish and brooding aspects of a goth aesthetic while retaining that heightened sense of romanticism. Colors running the gamut of the rainbow are consistently portrayed in deeper hues to uphold that sensation of doom and gloom. This aspect of the visuals is certainly impressive considering the eclectic range of biomes that compose the country of Hollownest. Whether it be the twinkling twilight of the Howling Cliffs, the lush verdure of Greenpath and the Queen’s Gardens, to the ornate architecture of the City of Tears, a sublime beauty encapsulates the setting and leaves the player awe-stricken. Even the rank shithole of the Royal Waterways or the creepy, dark catacombs of Deepnest still exude a sense of wonderment. It could also be that light filter that gives each area an ethereal quality, but I think Hollow Knight’s visual achievements can be attributed to more than this simple implementation. More impressive is the acute attention to detail on display in Hollow Knight’s world. Backgrounds present a widespread scope of what looks like miles of its inhabitable stretches. Crystal Peak is situated between a massive geode of valuable pink gems that protrude from this high-elevation area of Hollownest. The Hive displays a valley of sweet honeycomb glimmering brightly in the distance. Both backgrounds are still illustrations that could fit appropriately in the finest of animated features like the stunning Disney’s Fantasia. In the foregrounds, not one speck of visual detail is compromised. Soil has never looked so rich and loamy in gaming, and one can even marvel at the fine craftsmanship of the manmade decor that comprises the City of Tears. Benches in real life can’t even compete with the detailed design quality of those in Hollow Knight. A less talented developer would’ve meshed the gradience between the foregrounds and backgrounds, but Team Cherry consistently balances the two to create an incredibly decadent, mystical world. Gorgeous doesn’t even begin to describe the graphics that Hollow Knight bestows.

The titular knight in Hollow Knight is also fitting for the charming and whimsical world he resides in. I can imagine the individual design for Hollow Knight’s protagonist being a particularly sensitive matter. In a game whose universe consists of a smattering of insect types, placing the wrong kind of creepy crawly at center stage for the duration of the game could’ve unsettled most players. The Knight, who I can assume is his official title since he does not have a canon name, is a perfect compromise that will not trigger any bug-related phobias. The scrappy little guy’s bug phenotype would confuse even the most experienced of entomologists, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes The Knight so appealing. The Knight’s character design is more akin to an amorphous ghost crudely attempting to take the form of an insect rather than one that exists in the natural world. That diminutive stature, the curved, white horns sticking out of his skeletal cranium, and the vacuous craters intended to be The Knight’s eyes encapsulate its state as a husk creature perfectly. Yet, all of these physical characteristics are also what make The Knight adorably charismatic, like a puppy who stumbles around while it walks. Memorable video game protagonists before the 2000s used to have something of a “mascot potential,” and I could imagine The Knight from Hollow Knight appearing on cereal boxes and as the model for gaming figurines and plushies alongside Mario and Sonic.

More important than his fun-sized stature and pale complexion is how The knight controls. Fortunately, The Knight wonderfully excels in this department. Combat in Hollow Knight is the simple slashing of The Knight’s “nail,” which The Knight unsheathes from his sidearm in a quick flash. Many Souls enthusiasts might decry the fact that The Knight is limited to this insectoid sword substitute as opposed to the bevy of blades at the player’s disposal in that series. Still, I can assure you that this shiny, sharp tool is more than enough for the duration of the game. The player will consistently assess every enemy encounter by the speed and distance of the nail and dodge accordingly until the enemy is dead. Once the dash move is learned, defense maneuvers during combat are made easier. Swiftly juggling attacking and dodging as The Knight is always a smooth process that makes the player feel like a masterful warrior. On top of slashing the nail horizontally, The Knight can also strike upwards and downwards to cover all necessary offensive angles. Performing the downward nail slash mid-air is also a common traversal tactic in tense platforming challenges in which the momentum is difficult to maintain. Perilous sections such as these are littered all over the foregrounds of Hollownest, and the player must use a combination of the dash ability, the adze-like Mantis Claw, and the extra lift of the Monarch Wings to dart through some of the tensest platforming segments seen in the Metroidvania genre. Fortunately, Hollow Knight is on the same scale of fluidity as the precision platformers these sections borrow from, as every mistake can honestly be chalked up to the player’s lack of tact rather than the game's technical incompetence. Roaming around the land and laying waste to its denizens feels so liberating because The Knight is such an acrobatic force of nature.

There are indeed simpler parallels between Hollow Knight and Dark Souls that don’t require extensive, borderline pretentious analysis to connect. Hollow Knight’s most applicable commonality with Dark Souls is its stiff penalty for dying. Checkpoints across Hollow Knight’s dense and diverse world are in the form of benches, the equivalent to the bonfires from Dark Souls where the player can contemplatively rest while their health is restored to its maximum capacity. Also like the bonfires, their position as checkpoints is strictly enforced when it comes to the player’s likely numerous deaths. Even if the player has trekked from one point of the map’s prime meridian to the other, if they weren’t observant enough to seek out a new bench or neglected to consider the ramifications of not resting at one, the game will automatically catapult the player back to the last bench miles away from where they were vanquished. Needless to say, it’s a real bitch to retread all that ground to restore one’s lost progress. To make dying seem more like starting from square one, another borrowed aspect from Dark Souls is that the player’s collective experience points materialize as a lost item at the player’s last dying spot to incentivize them to revisit their place of failure. In Hollow Knight, The Knight’s progress takes the form of a floating black spirit with an eerie musical cue indicating its presence. The shadowy effigy will even slash at The Knight like an unruly git, making the player feel especially pathetic when struck by it. Hollow Knight emulates the penalty system from Dark Souls competently, but it doesn’t have the same high stakes. Hollow Knight forgoes the RPG-leveling system from Dark Souls, so the player will retrieve their cumulative amount of Geo, Hollownest’s currency, when they defeat their floating phantom. Considering how vital experience points always are in Dark Souls to surviving the game’s brutal challenges, recovering the Geo needed mostly to purchase a few items in the early sections of the game doesn’t garner the same sense of urgency.

However, the state of being “hollow” in Hollow Knight after being torn asunder from their spirit essence feels like more of a handicap than it is in Dark Souls because the healing potential is halved. Hollow Knight’s healing mechanic is Team Cherry’s own creation, and it is one of the game’s standout mechanical attributes. In the top left corner of the screen situated alongside The Knight’s units of health like a bass clef on a sheet of music is the healing gauge. As The Knight strikes any type of enemy, a modest amount of a milky liquid I’ll just refer to as “bug juice” is stored in the gauge. It’s as if a factor of The Knight’s askew mortal coil gives him vampiric powers that allow him to literally drain the life force of his enemies. After accumulating enough of the translucent substance, The Knight expends the juice in the gauge, restoring a single unit of health by one-third of the gauge’s maximum. Dying will shatter the gauge in half and also make the stored gratuity of the three bonus reserves useless. Comparisons to the Estus Flasks from Dark Souls arise when observing how the healing system is practical in combat. Holding down the heal button in Hollow Knight requires a meditative state of brief stillness that leaves The Knight vulnerable to more damage, interrupting the flow of combat as abruptly, if not even more so, as taking a swig of estus in Dark Souls. Finding an opportunity to heal during a hectic boss encounter is one of the most harrowing occasions in Hollow Knight, and seeking out that narrow window factors into a boss battle as much as the chance to deal damage to it. Having the player’s potion amount coincide with their attack output is brilliant, as performing well in battle will consistently be rewarded with compensation. The underlying trick, however, is when to reap the benefits.

Being confined to one weapon doesn’t mean that there is no gameplay variation in Hollow Knight. The customizable aspect of Hollow Knight’s gameplay takes the form of charms, badges with their own special attributes. Charms are found across Hollownest with the same shimmering glow as any other item, and they can also be purchased from various merchants for a fee, namely from the flamboyant blob Salubra in the eastern corner of the Forgotten Crossroads. Charms can be equipped at any bench, and the player’s selection of charms coincides with the amount of “charm notches'' relating to an arbitrary cost. Increasing the total amount of charm notches can also be done by searching in hidden corners on the map as well as purchasing them from Salubra. However, Salubra will only deem The Knight worthy of possessing more charm notches if the player has a varied mix of them in their arsenal. It makes sense considering that only someone who uses these charms would warrant an addition to their capacity. I don’t know why someone wouldn’t bother with the charms because their aid makes a world of difference. The player can stack a selection of charms to make their nail as long as a rapier or increase The Knight’s rapidity to the point where they’re running circles around foes. One charm build will turn The Knight into a glass cannon, while another build will conversely assure that The Knight will never sustain even a scratch of damage. Mixing and matching the charms is the closest that Hollow Knight gets to a role-playing mechanic, something that certainly made the gameplay of Dark Souls invigorating. Like the myriad of builds correlating with the attributes in Dark Souls, not one combination is inferior to another as long as the player can use them to pave their path to success.

Using charms also comes recommended because Hollow Knight is quite a difficult experience. Comparing Hollow Knight to Dark Souls in every paragraph should have already implied this revelation, so be prepared to grit your teeth and schedule a confession time during Sunday mass to come clean about all of the unholy curses you’ll shout in the struggle. Tense combat combined with sparse checkpoints is one thing, but the third ingredient in the mix that really elicits dread is the intentional blindspots on the map. The crucial aid in excavating the sprawling lands of Hollownest is not something that is automatically generated. Once The Knight stumbles upon (literally) uncharted territory, they must find the map maker Cornifer who will sell The Knight his map of the area at a meager price. Where Cornifer is located in the area is anyone’s guess, which is why digging deeper into a new area without a reference can be daunting. Sometimes, he’s hanging out near an area’s soonest entry point. Still, because each area has so many intersecting pathways, the player will inadvertently unlock the entire map layout before encountering Cornifer. In times when the latter scenario occurred, I’d scramble frantically down every corridor in an attempt to find Cornifer, even if I found a bench that cemented my place here beforehand. Every time I discovered a trail of discarded papers that lead me to hearing Cornifer’s jaunty hum, I was relieved beyond words. Some may argue that forcing the player to roam around in the proverbial dark like this is unfair, but I find the process of finding the map and filling in the blanks after some organic exploration to be invigorating.

On top of scrounging about an individual area, there is still the overarching progression of Hollow Knight that comes with discovering every new area. Again, I must draw comparisons to Dark Souls because of the overlap in their approach to progression. Then again, Dark Souls shows clear inspiration from the Metroidvania genre in this regard, as one could make parallels between the quest to ring the bells and Metroid’s descent down a hellish rabbit hole. Dirtmouth, the tranquil hub of Hollownest, resides at the world’s peak as most areas of interest are located south like the docking grove of Crateria. Forgotten Crossroads and Greenpath are both appropriately more hostile than the respite place that they stem from, yet not enough to distract the player from delving into the game’s doleful tone. One could even compare Greenpath to the Undead Parish for how deceptively pleasant the area seems despite the challenges it poses. It is after defeating the central boss of Greenpath that the player is faced with a trifling dilemma with their intended trajectory. It’s more likely that the player will come across the jellyfish-filled Fog Canyon before the untamed wilds of Fungal Wastes as intended since it borders Greenpath. This area is not meant to be explored this early in the game, but the game judges that the player will come to this moment of clarity without overtly spelling it out for them like when Samus’s health disintegrates in Norfair or being bombarded by skeletons at the graveyard adjacent to the Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls. What tipped me off was the fact that Cornifer was locked behind an impenetrable black border and that the jellyfish cores dealt twice the damage upon exploding. I adore it when Metroidvania games present situations like these because they are indicative of the genre’s nuanced design that flirts with liberal progression confines.

City of Tears is the metropolitan capital of Hollownest The Knight finds next, and I can only assume it got that name from how morose the area looks with perpetual storm clouds constantly showering the area in rainwater. Any cityscape area in a Soulslike game would normally garner parallels to Anor Londo, but the City of Tears is not the pinnacle of The Knight’s first major quest. The City of Tears is easily the largest area of Hollownest, so the developers decided to have the player revisit a whole other district of the capital at any given point in a clever way to still establish that the city is an essential destination point. One could compare the City of Tears to Irithyll of the Boreal Valley because of its contrasting relationship with the Royal Waterways to the latter’s dungeon area, illustrating a dichotomy between fancifulness and filth in close quarters. The claustrophobic dankness of the Royal Waterways along with its neighboring webbed labyrinth of Deepnest definitely showcases that The Knight has profoundly plunged into the bowels of Hollownest. Soon after descending even further, The Knight must leap all the way back up past even the point of Dirtmouth to acquire an ability from Crystal Peak to finish his first quest. Sound familiar? Thank God for the determined stag beetles that The Knight can use as his transit system. They are the true heroes of Hollow Knight. Oh, and the more industrialized tramway that leads to the Resting Grounds where the second main quest is given is useful too, but that's a sensitive topic for the Stags

Once The Knight has sunk to the ground floor of Hollownest, they don’t find grandeur like arriving at Anor Londo. The deepest depths of Hollownest lead The Knight to the Ancient Basin, a sterile place that feels like The Knight has accomplished their arduous journey only because of how still everything is compared to the progressive hostility for every previous area. Beating the Broken Vessel here, an infected knight cut from the same cloth as the protagonist, is the middle point that starts the second half of the game along with arriving at the Resting Grounds. As anticipated, the overlapping quest in Hollow Knight’s second half almost mirrors the second half of Dark Souls. Using a sacred tool called “the dream nail,” The Knight must seek out three significant figures called “the dreamers” who have been locked behind a seal in their eternal cryogenic chambers and penetrate their subconsciousness. These three are located all across creation in Hollownest and can be approached in a non-linear order like the Lord Souls, signifying that the game has become significantly less restricted due to the progress made during the first half. The content of the second quest screams the first Dark Souls, but the resulting action reminds me of the midway point of Bloodborne when the moon takes a dip in a lake of blood. Lore and story are as superfluous to the overall Hollow Knight experience as it is in any FromSoft title, as the setting and atmosphere do enough leg work to immerse the player adequately. Any occurrence and how it pertains to the lore is only given context by the player’s own incentive to delve deeper. Still, it’s hard to ignore the terrible new condition of the Forgotten Crossroads in the second half of the game. The looming force of despair that has rendered Hollownest to its apocalyptic downfall is something called “the infection,” which takes the form of an overwhelming mass of pulpy, bulbous orange matter seen previously in the Broken Vessel fight. No longer is Dirtmouth’s first underground level a moody turnpike but the ghastly sight of a tumorous, tangy breeding ground of disease. The basic thugs and winged grunts that reside here are now more formidable and feral, combusting after being defeated to signify their unnatural state of existence. Thankfully, this infection is contained to Forgotten Crossroads and not the other areas as it would be tiring dodging the explosive impact of every downed enemy. As it is, the disastrous condition of the Forgotten Crossroads effectively illustrates how severe this infection is, making the player concerned for the wellbeing of Hollownest and what is going on behind the veil of vagueness.

Referencing Dark Souls for the umpteenth time, why should the player care if Hollownest succumbs to the debilitating scourge? Isn’t a heavy sense of nihilism supposed to be conveyed in its lugubrious atmosphere like Dark Souls? Despite the lingering sorrow expressed in Hollow Knight’s atmosphere, it does not stem from a place of futility. Unlike the sullen land of Lordran, we sympathize with Hollownest’s plague instead of treating the matter with contempt as if the land somewhat deserves it. This sympathy stems from Hollow Knight’s cast of NPCs that The Knight encounters on his journey. I’ve already expressed my fondness for the scribe Cornifer, and I’ll express the same for his weary wife Iselda that mans their shop in Deepnest. Sly is another merchant in Dirtmouth who is quite adept in nail combat. The other nail masters are the passionate sort, with the nailsmith requesting that The Knight slay him with the ultimate nail he receives from upgrading it to its fullest potential to feel the effects of the perfect weapon he's waited his whole life to forge. God damn, now that’s passion! The Grubmaster in the northern corner of the Forgotten Crossroads is very grateful for rescuing his cute little grub cubs, who are the game’s long-standing collectible. What he does with them all after The Knight collects them all I dare not spoil, for it’s as hilarious as it is shocking. Other NPCs are more nomadic like the overly eager warrior-wannabe Cloth and the masked pill bug Quirrel. These NPCs will aid The Knight sporadically for one boss fight, so their relationship with The Knight stems from a sense of respect. Then there are the NPCs whose side quest lines revolve around coming to their rescue, specifically the pathetic and ironically named “Zote the Mighty.” He obviously doesn’t see the irony in his name considering how brazenly arrogant the snot-nosed shrimp is. Saving him twice from the dangers of Hollownest only results in him scolding you for “interrupting his triumphant victory.” Batting around this whelp like a ping-pong ball in the Colosseum is pure catharsis. The only person who buys into his ego-fueled drivel is a timid bug girl named Bretta who The Knight saves from the southernmost corner of Fungal Wastes. Still, even the irksome NPCs are brimming with personality and charm. They’re much less cynical and caustic than the NPCs of Dark Souls, and even the exception of Solaire contracted the madness by the end of the game. Every NPC in Hollow Knight is precious and is the reason why Hollownest is worth saving.

Of course, I was going to go the distance to uncover the true source of the infection anyways because, like any solid Soulslike game, I wanted to experience every boss the game offered. Hollow Knight’s selection of bosses is an outstanding approximate of at least thirty. The most significant duel pertaining to the progression of the game’s story is against Hornet in Greenpath as you follow her through the green bramble patches. Hornet is Hollow Knight’s half-sister who is determined to protect the sanctity of Hollownest and test The Knight’s worth in aiding her on her mission. The dreamers themselves aren’t boss battles, but fights like the tanky Watcher Knight guards and the thick and gooey jellyfish Uummuu provide a challenge before the main quest objective can be accomplished. The mimic Nosk in the hidden crevices of Deepnest is downright creepy, and the Soul Master’s fake out leading to a second phase of his fight genuinely caught me off guard. The player’s adrenaline will be pumping during the God Tamer fight as it’s the pinnacle challenge of the exhausting final colosseum enemy gauntlet, and the gank boss dynamic between the man and his beast is as effective as Ornstein and Smough. My personal favorite fights in the game are the Mantis Lords and the Dung Defender for different reasons. The Mantis Lords are arguably the first true “brick wall” challenge of the game as the boss becomes progressively tenser as you memorize the patterns of three formidable mantises attacking you at once. Upon defeating them, you feel as if the newfound respect the mantis colony of the Fungal Wastes gives you for conquering their masters is entirely deserved. As for the Dung Defender, I can’t help but fall in love with the man’s jovial demeanor. I can’t judge him too harshly for his dirty hobby because of the pure, unbridled enthusiasm he expresses for it. In fact, he’s so damn charismatic that he’ll make you want to take a dip with him in the feces for a fun time. I feel remiss for the bosses I had to gloss over, for there isn’t a single dud in the bunch (except for Zote as a joke boss).

If the staggering number of bosses is too overwhelming for you, you’ll be relieved to know that most of them are optional. Now that I think about it, it’s amazing how much of Hollow Knight’s content isn’t consequential to finishing the game. Hollow Knight has the most liberal progression of any Metroidvania game I’ve played, taking the genre’s already loose parameters and making the main game seem bare bones without all those meaty additional objectives. Entire areas such as the Kingdom’s Edge and Queen’s Gardens can be totally omitted, along with tons of boss battles and side quests. I implore everyone to play Hollow Knight to its full extent because the game will not feel satisfyingly finished without it. The cumulative total of Hollow Knight’s full efforts will result in unlocking the game’s final boss and the source of the world’s contagion: The Radiance. If The Knight heads directly to the Temple of the Black Egg after murdering the dreamers in their ethereal headspace, they’ll fight the titular hollow knight. Although he’s important to the lore as a martyr for sealing away the infection, he’s a strangely easy final boss which might perplex some players. Only by fully filling the dream nail with essence and taking it down past the Ancient Basin to The Knight’s otherworldly birthplace known as “The Abyss” will The Knight don the Void Heart key to unveil the Radiance. The true final fight will occur if The Knight uses the dream nail on The Hollow Knight when pinned down by Hornet, and this avian demigod is as formidable as she seems. After absorbing the Radiance essence, the saddest of the multiple endings will occur as Hornet looks back on The Knight’s severed head laying cracked wide open on the ground. In Dark Souls, either ending puts the protagonist in a position of power no matter the outcome. Here, the death of the protagonist is the ultimate sacrifice that needed to occur in order to truly save Hollownest, something that the Pale King failed to realize in his attempts to merely shut the Hollow Knight in with the source. The other endings where The Knight either takes his brother’s place or joins him in his crucifixion-esque chains compound the cyclical nature of the problem instead of solving it. Where in Dark Souls there is no solution, the fact that Hollow Knight offers one at a great price shows the game’s sentimental, optimistic core as opposed to being trapped to endure endless despondency.

It might be irritating to some that I’ve spent every paragraph of this review comparing Hollow Knight to Dark Souls but hey, the writing is written clearly on the wall with graffiti. Despite how much Dark Souls makes up the foundation of Hollow Knight, the game is anything but a flavorless pastiche of Fromsoft’s series. Hollow Knight saw the building blocks made from the giant towers made from both Dark Souls and the Metroidvania games and built the Burj Khalifa out of them. Does this analogy connote that Hollow Knight eclipses its influences, making it the grandest example of its genre? Arguably, yes. Hollow Knight is a pristine experience without the same blemishes that marred its inspirations in every single aspect. Gameplay as rich as cheesecake is implemented in a breathtakingly bountiful world that beguiled me into going the distance to save it from utter destruction, and that world is filled with a bunch of bugs for Christ's sake! The fact that this masterpiece was developed by only a trio of people with a shoestring budget shows that there are gods among us, and they’re held up in a game studio in Australia. Hollow Knight doesn’t competently emulate its influences made by major developers: it blows them out of the water with an atomic bomb. Because of this, Hollow Knight is the Macbeth of indie gaming that could kill the kings of the triple-A industry.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Rejoice, fellow Metroid fans; for once Metroid Prime was released to mark Metroid’s debut in the third dimension, and the franchise didn’t crawl back under its dark, damp rock for another decade of hibernation. At least, this was the case for a while until Metroid once again upheld its reputation as the Snorlax of Nintendo’s franchises: massively conspicuous, yet disappointingly dormant. Nowadays, it’s uncertain whether or not Nintendo will follow up on Metroid’s third wind after another ten-year interval of silence, a worrisome state for Metroid fans everywhere. Back in the 2000s, however, it was a fantastic time to be a Metroid fan, as the tidal wave of Metroid Prime’s success reverberated for the duration of almost two whole gaming generations. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was the direct successor to the first game’s newfound glory, and the game was released in the time of a standard sequel as opposed to a whole life’s worth of events passing by the time Samus reappears. Metroid Prime 2 was also as exemplary a 3D Metroid title as the first, advancing what is typically a 2D game one polygonal space beyond itself and doing so masterfully. Yet, Metroid Prime 2 wasn’t met with the same level of awe-stricken delight, as the public merely deduced it as a sequel that fulfilled all of the expectations that the first game established. I suppose Metroid Prime 2 had an inherent disadvantage. People were no longer catastrophizing over the troubling notion of Metroid Prime’s American developers and their ambitions murdering the franchise in cold blood, but anything in Metroid Prime 2 couldn’t have been as astonishing as the first game since we had seen the template the developer referenced to craft it. Also, this was the first Metroid sequel on the same console as its predecessor, so both look and feel wildly similar to one another. Still, Metroid Prime 2’s sequel status meant that the game could relax and use the comparatively less pressured development period to do what a sequel does best: grease the loose screws from the first game that are still wobbly.

Because Metroid Prime is a direct sequel to the first game, the game’s events take place after the final resolution of the first game instead of flirting with their sequential releases in a Zelda-esque nonlinear timeline as the first Prime title did. However, most people who played the first Metroid Prime wouldn’t be able to even guess the opening conflict of the second game, as the sequel’s main antagonist was only revealed to those who had meticulously taken the effort to scrounge up every missile upgrade and scan an encyclopedia’s worth of Tallon IV lore. For those of you who felt content facing the final boss with a marginally less capable Samus, a being formed from the dark antimatter Phazon called “Dark Samus” rises from the wreckage of Metroid Prime’s demise. This shadowy apparition isn’t only referred to as “Dark Samus” due to her (it’s?) uncanny resemblance to the bounty hunter and dark complexion. The Phazon-fueled phantom is malevolence incarnate, with a mission of desecrating all natural life and causing Samus a lot of grief in the process. Dark Samus plans to enact a terrible catastrophe on the distant planet Aether, a place where Samus must trace the signal of a distress call. Aether used to be the thriving civilization of the human-moth hybrid creatures called the Luminoth, but have suffered an apocalyptic fate similar to the crumbled society on Tallon IV. The noxious threat to Aether is the Ing, tar-black bullies with parasitic natures so pernicious that it spells doom for any planet they come across. If the harrowing sequence displaying the Ing slaughtering an entire fleet of space mercenaries is any indication, the threat that they pose is tremendous. The Ing have all but wiped out the Luminoth people, except for one of their spiritual leaders named U-Mos who resides at the helm of Aether’s Great Temple. He instructs Samus to connect the other energy controllers located across Aether’s three other districts, for this unification will restore the planet’s vital energy source. While the premise of Metroid Prime 2 is eerily similar to that of the first Prime game, the Ing are a more tangible presence that makes them a more interesting force of great evil.

In order to cross the four invigorating streams of light in Aether, Samus must first find three keys that open the door to the dark version of that area’s temple. The Ing have usurped the energy from these temples, and Samus must retrieve the energy to the light world counterpart to the rightful Luminoth owners. This consistent collection process is a perfect segway to discuss Metroid Prime 2’s main improvement over the previous game, and that’s its level design and sense of progression. Backtracking is often perceived as a negative aspect of the Metroidvania genre and in gaming in general. While I’m often a staunch defender of backtracking, especially in the Metroidvania genre due to its specific design philosophy, roaming around creation in the first Metroid Prime admittedly did become rather tedious. Objectives were jotted on the map via signal transmission, and they usually led to retrieving one of Samus’s misplaced suit upgrades. The player had the freedom to meet this objective at their own pace, but the game often inhibited other paths of progression until the main one was met. Traversing to this plotted point on the map would often force the player to take the Bataan death march across Tallon IV’s five districts just to immediately make the same grueling journey back to where they were when given this objective to use the new upgrade. This frequent escapade is why the area of Magmoor Caverns became especially tiresome, acting as Tallon IV’s molten mezzanine. In Metroid Prime 2, individual objectives are endemic to the current area Samus finds herself, whether they be obtaining a gadget or finding the three keys to unlock the door where the dark energy controller is located. This is the standard level progression for each area, and the comparatively contained design makes the pinnacle objective feel more climactic with a satisfying sense of completion. All the while, each area is stacked with those rich Metroidvania elements that make the genre so enticing. Aether’s world map is also constructed like a pyramid, which means that each area has an elevator that conveniently leads to the others in the rare instances of backtracking. Samus will still receive notifications to guide her on where the next point of progression is, but they happen much less frequently, only when the game feels as if the player is hopelessly lost after straying from the intended route for some time. No longer does it seem like Navi has intercepted a satellite transmission that beams into Samus’s suit.

In addition to triumphing over the first Metroid Prime’s areas in terms of progression and overall design, Aether’s districts are also superior in their aesthetic merits. Each area of Tallon IV was visually stunning, especially for being the first three-dimensional rendering of a Metroid world. However, anyone who played Super Metroid will notice some eerie similarities between Metroid Prime’s areas and those of the franchise's then-last 2D outing. The Tallon IV overworld was another watery grove as Crateria where Samus felt comfortable using the area as the docking bay for her ship in assuming that the only force of nature attacking the spacecraft is the inclement weather. Magmoor Caverns almost proves that Metroid cannot refrain from implementing a claustrophobic area revolving around dodging pools of lava similar to the classic example of Norfair. Metroid Prime 2 proves that the franchise isn’t a one-trick pony in crafting areas in outer space that are appropriately tense and imposing. Right off the bat, it’s difficult to describe the topographical layout of the Temple Grounds. The perimeter outside of the Great Temple that intersects every other area at different angles is an arid canyon composed of some borderline expressionist architecture caked in layers of insect webbing and eggs. The atmosphere the aesthetic conveys is not the same as the long period of decay since prosperity like in the Chozo Ruins. Rather, it feels like Samus has found herself in the beating heart of some extraterrestrial insect hive. It’s difficult to discern whether or not the area looks this way from the Luminoth’s initial design, or whether this is now the breeding grounds of the lesser creatures that inhabit the area because of how barren it has become. It’s a far cry from the placid wetlands where Samus usually keeps her vessel in and if I were her, I’d worry about returning to it entangled in a ball of web the size of a boulder.

The rate of deviation Temple Grounds makes from Metroid area tropes may seem compromised by the following Agon Wastes and Torvus Bog, seeing as they share strong similarities to the areas from the previous Metroid Prime. However, this is merely a surface-level observation. At first glance, Agon Wastes recalls the sandy remains of the Chozo Ruins, with Aether’s own new line of scavengers taking advantage of their desolate ecosystem. Torvus Bog is yet another Metroid wetland situated in the far west region of Aether, making us all wonder why Samus didn’t choose to rest her spacecraft here as usual. Upon exploring these districts of Aether, the initial comparisons stemming from their aesthetics will shift to comparing both of them to Phendrana Drifts. The snowy peak of Tallon IV showcased a particular design in which the frost that covered the organic, breathtaking outside contrasted with the hazardously dim corridors of the Space Pirate Laboratory, and both sections of the area were of relatively equal space. Entering Agon Wastes from the Temple Grounds presents the vast desert wasteland which seems even more sterile than the former Chozo metropolis. After excavating through the land’s rocky cliffs and strangely translucent, holographic foliage, the good ol’ Space Pirates have made their presence known by erecting another laboratory on Aether that houses the same breed of metroids found on Tallon IV. Persistent bastards, aren’t they? Agon Wastes chooses the best-designed area from the previous Prime title to introduce another dune-oriented district instead of replicating the one we were already acquainted with, along with improving on its inspiration by making the area more navigable with a more circular layout. That, and we can all be grateful that the laboratory here never loses its power source, so Samus doesn’t have to wander skittishly through the dark. Underneath the marshy surface of Torvus Bog is the area’s hydrochamber, a pumping station submerged almost entirely in the brackish backwash of the bog’s constant drizzle. While the parallels between how Torvus Bog borrows from Phendrana’s design are less obvious than Agon’s, the contained industrialized section of the hydrochamber still rivals the perimeter presence of the overworld. Also, the Grenchlers are more viscous versions of the Sheegoths in a temperate climate. The one area in Metroid Prime 2 that draws no direct comparisons is Sanctuary Fortress, and its sheer originality makes it the stand-out area of Aether. This cybernetic city in the sky is arguably the most futuristic section of any Metroid game. An electric, neon aura permeates through its abstract aesthetic, and its architecture with wide chasms and a series of elevators makes its overall design just as convoluted. Even though looking out on the lights below the area contradicts its placement with the rest of Aether, it only heightens its intended magnificence. Aether’s muted color tone also gives it more character and aids in the cohesiveness of the world as opposed to the varied level tropes seen across Tallon IV’s districts.

Of course, the most essential dichotomy illustrated in Metroid Prime 2 is the one between Aether’s light and the dark realms. Not since A Link to the Past has Nintendo implemented this dynamic as a method of dividing a game’s world and narrative with this classic contrast. Unlike A Link to the Past, Metroid Prime 2’s dark world does not comprise the harder second half of the game, and the surreal weight of this otherworldly dimension does not transform Samus into her fursona either. In fact, Samus must consistently work with both the light and dark realms in conjunction with one another after she finds the first portal in the Agon Wastes early in the game. Shifting the light and dark worlds throughout the game highlights a layered relationship between both realms. For example, a bridge in Torvus Bog is inconveniently facing the direction opposite the door needed to progress through the area. Only by warping over to the dark world and activating the switch with a power bomb will the bridge turn to the optimal direction. A similar progression sequence occurs in the hydrochamber when Samus must change the trajectory of a laser in the dark world to erode the earthy rock obscuring a passageway. Dead ends in the light world will often be exceeded via visiting the dark world and its slightly deviated map, and the dark world possesses just as many hidden items and upgrades with its indigo-hued map. The developers put in the extra effort to present a deeper connection with the two opposites of Aether besides lazily making the dark world an exact replica but with an aesthetic of being baked alive in an antimatter pressure cooker.

Given that the dark world connotes a sense of evil dissidence, it should be evident that Aether’s dark side is more difficult to traverse than its realistic counterpart. Retro Studios has paved Metroid Prime’s difficulty curve after the first title hit a gaping pothole in the Phazon Mines. Every subsequent area encountered in Aether is reasonably more challenging than the previous one, even if there are some interspersed sections that will still cause some ire. The dark world, on the other hand, manages to have a waning difficulty curve opposite of the standard one in the light. At first, the insalubrious air of the dark world will corrode Samus’s health as quickly as if she slipped and fell into the lava of Magmoor Caverns. Fortunately, the developers decided to aid the player in this brutal atmosphere by implementing domes of light that cover a limited radius of the ground that steadily restores Samus’s health. Whether or not the source of light is a fleeting burst or supported by a crystal with constant illumination, Samus will be forced to shelter herself from the elements of Aether’s bizarro realm in order to survive. While I appreciate the consideration of this safety net by the developers, I’m sure every player nursed the dark world’s health pools like charging a phone’s battery. If the opportunity to fully replenish one’s health is readily available, then I’m going to relish that advantage, even if I embarrassingly realized that the reason why I felt these spots of respite were tedious was because of my insistence on abusing them instead of any real gameplay fallacies. Still, the need to use these enclosed light bubbles as umbrellas become less necessary as the game progresses because adapting to the pernicious environment is often an automatic reward. Samus’s suit upgrades will grant her more durability, as her health will deplete at a more leisurely pace. At the end of the game, U-Mos will grant Samus total invulnerability to the dark world’s poisonous air quality, a satisfying conclusion to the game’s central difficulty arc. Still, couldn’t he have made Samus impenetrable at the beginning, which would’ve been more practical for his dire situation? Is that Glinda the Good Witch in a moth costume?

The dichotomy between light and dark in Metroid Prime 2 is such a pertinent theme that the game even weaponizes it. Gone are the elemental beams accompanying Samus’s standard blaster on the C-Stick from the first game. Instead, Samus uses two separate beams that expunge dark and light energy respectively, with the late game “annihilator beam” combining the two like a chocolate-vanilla swirl. As to be expected, the light beam is super effective against enemies that reside in the dark world, and the same goes for the dark beam in the light. These two beams aren't as balanced as they might seem, however. The primary reason for this is due to both beams having ammunition as opposed to the inexhaustible power of the beams in the previous Prime game. Replenishing ammo is made uncomplicated by simply using the opposite beam on an enemy or cache, but my main grievance with the new beams stems from their utility of them. Naturally, the light beam will be used in most circumstances in the dark world as the Ing’s kryptonite because these enemies here are far more formidable in an environment that is already draining Samus’s health just by standing around in it. In the light world where the enemies are less daunting and the base environment leaves Samus intact, why would anyone expend their dark beam ammo when the regular blaster works just fine? Using the dark beam only comes recommended in the tensest of circumstances. I can’t help but be amused at the irony of how unbalanced the intended yin-yang relationship is between these two beams. Later in the game, color-coordinated enemies are introduced to force the player to use the beams equally, but it feels very shoehorned. It’s also irritating that I’m forced to use ammo to open the light and dark blast doors. Again, ammo is plentiful, but I must gripe about the unfairness of it like an old man seeing a tax on his bills that wasn’t there before.

Fortunately, the alternate beams from the first Metroid Prime are the only weapons that have been replaced. Every one of Samus’s gadgets such as the missiles, power bombs, and grapple beam make their return after they proved to be functional in the third dimension. Showcasing all of Samus’s handy tools in the first Metroid Prime was rather impressive seeing them in a whole new dimension, but that initial wonder diminished upon seeing them again here. Lest we forget the tools in Samus’s inventory that were omitted in the first Prime game, for the developers figured they would’ve been too obtuse to translate. I’m happy to report that Retro Studios took another chance at those items and have now rendered them successfully. The most glaring omission from Metroid’s leap to 3D was the absence of the Screwattack, Samus’s end-game whirlwind weapon that weaponizes Samus’s somersaulting while defying the laws of gravity. This upgrade’s utility in Metroid Prime 2 is mostly used for traversal rather than combat, as the perspective shifts like it does when Samus is in ball form as Samus can glide for five energetic long jumps. While the Screwattack here does not make Samus into a force of pure destruction, soaring over chasms with some expertly timed jumps still exudes that feeling of power. The often wonky wall-jump mechanic coincides directly with the Screwattack as the same precision is needed to hop from side to side in only a couple of scenarios. I’m just happy that they managed to implement these competently to achieve the rounded Metroid experience in 3D.

Metroid Prime 2 also adds plenty of new items and upgrades besides the dueling beams. Samus’s missiles have always been able to be fired in bulk with the Super Missile, yet they’ve never had the rapid-fire power of Samus’s standard beam. That is, until Metroid Prime 2 introduced the Seeker Launcher, which uses the 3D targeting system to lock on up to five missiles at multiple targets. Because the action in Metroid Prime is quick, standing still in order to lock onto multiple enemies is completely impractical, so the Seeker Launcher is disappointingly intended mostly for opening a few special doors. The Gravity Boost upgrade that allows Samus to move flexibly underwater without the liquid weight now comes with the added perk of a jet pack of sorts that boosts Samus upward for a short time, something greatly appreciated in Torvus Bog’s hydrochamber. The Thermal Visor has been replaced with the Dark Visor which reveals hidden platforms and enemies. It’s quite nifty when dealing with the frequent encounters with the Dark Pirate Commandos, infected Space Pirates who serve as the equivalents to the Chozo Ghosts who are arguably more irritating due to their increased durability. The Echo Visor is interesting enough, but I still scratch my head at its contradictory simple, and complicated uses in unlocking doors. Metroid Prime 2’s upgrades are a mixed bag of improvements and odd implementations that should’ve been considered a bit better.

Whether or not the item at hand is old or new, they are all locked behind a boss battle. The full extent of the Ing’s thievery sets up this game’s premise of Samus suddenly being deprived of all her fancy gadgets, this time recollecting them with a vengeance. The developers evidently thought that even though they mitigated the backtracking from the first game, the player still had to earn these upgrades somehow while simultaneously compensating for the paltry number of bosses in the first Prime game. Unfortunately, the smattering of bosses on display here reinstates a warped difficulty curve that the levels managed to avoid and is the true source of frustration with Metroid Prime 2. The first egregiously stiff boss battle in the game is the Boost Guardian, a standard Ing enemy who uses Samus’s ball accelerator to erratically ricochet around the arena. The most challenging factor of this fight is that there are no light pools to heal Samus anywhere, leaving her uncomfortably vulnerable. The dominant Alpha Bogg at the core of the hydrochamber provides the slimmest window of opportunity to damage him, charging Samus with violent impact and punishing the player severely for trying to correct their mistakes by dodging. The Spider Guardian is a boss situated entirely in a series of ball-form tracks, and the unfair precision and time needed to zap the rolling bug are what makes this fight a fucking nightmare. I’d like to put the Spider Guardian in a tube and shove it up the ass of the developer responsible for this fuckness and see how he likes the boss battle playing out in his intestinal tract. It doesn’t help that failing on the two previously mentioned bosses sends Samus back to a save room miles away from the encounter to add insult to injury. Yet, The Power Bomb Guardian boss after the Spider Guardian is insultingly easy. The bosses that have snatched up Samus’s upgrades might be a sign that the quality bosses of the first game were more adequate than the quantity of them seen here. Fortunately, Metroid Prime 2 still provides top-notch bosses with the penultimate area bosses guarding the dark energy controllers, with the arachnid android Quadraxis providing an engaging level of deep circuity that makes his fight delightful.

Still, each boss in Metroid Prime 2 is inherently lower in precedence compared to Dark Samus. She’s a looming shadow over our protagonist in a deeper sense than just her supernatural state of existence, and the game conveys this throughout the game. Samus first fights her enigmatic doppelganger as early as Agon Wastes, where her stature is relatively equal to Samus with a few unique tricks to throw the player for a loop. At the Sanctuary Fortress, Dark Samus becomes more daunting as she’s much more difficult to take down. It’s interesting to see that Samus’s rival is gradually getting stronger in tandem with the player’s progression with Samus. Still, the slight unpredictability she puts on display in her encounters implies that Dark Samus still has one slight leg up on Samus, retaining that sense of dread with seeing her. After another tedious excursion of obtaining nine keys to open the door to the final boss in a quest that mirrors the one from the first game, Dark Samus even eclipses Emperor Ing as the game’s final challenge, and the grand poobah of the sludgy pests will make the player splurge all of their dark and light ammunition. Unlike the colored signals that signify Emperor Ing’s points of vulnerability, Dark Samus is so unpredictable that she’ll leave the player in a state of panic as her weapons do middling damage to her at best. That, and the classic Metroid escape timer has been reinstituted and is counting down rapidly during the fight, putting an insane amount of pressure on the player like no Metroid game has ever done before. Even when the player figures out how to damage Dark Samus, good luck trying to absorb all of her Phazon blasts without damaging Samus in the process. This frenzied fight is a perfect way to cap off the powerful rivalry between the two Samuses, and the only appropriately difficult final duel for the most difficult Metroid game.

My last statement might introduce a new argument to the table that needs addressing: is Metroid Prime 2 the hardest Metroid title. Was its elevated difficulty intentional on the part of the developers, and is that what gives it the clear advantage as the quintessential 3D Metroid game? I can’t definitely answer the first question, but I must state a clear nay to the latter. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is on equal standing with the first game on its own merits, which stems from both positives and negatives. Retro Studios improved upon so much from the previous game but steered too far from a few aspects that were so strong in the first Metroid Prime. When I gripe about the world design and the steep arch that is the Phazon Mines, I start to commend the second game for making its world design more accessible and building a more accommodating difficulty curve around it. At the same time, being slaughtered by an unfair boss battle and using ammunition to open a door makes me yearn to return to the simpler times on Tallon IV. Debating whether or not Metroid Prime 2 surpasses its revolutionary predecessor always reaches an impasse. Still, the fact that Retro Studios could replicate their enormous achievement in gaming again while also making it indiscernible from their last game is extraordinary in itself.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com