There's something very wrong with the town of Silent Hill.

From the offset a world covered in endless fog, the only life being those of the inhuman, the subconscious nightmares of a tormented soul.

You, Harry Mason, are trapped in this nightmare. You are just an average man, and you only seek to find your daughter, who went missing after your car crashed on the way into this deserted village.

The unknown creeps upon you with every step you make, harsh static signifying the grotesque have begun the hunt. Can you find your daughter? Will you find her?

The magic of Silent Hill in my personal opinion comes down to the inherent setup. You are playing an average person in way over their head.

Harry is not a Action Superstar, He isn't some magical badass granted the strength of ten men while trying to defend himself from the deadly flesh colored horrors that try to devour him. Harry Mason is a normal, run of the mill family man.

This is shown through many ways, the controls for instance. They are awkward and stilted, Harry turns with the grace of a cafeteria lady placing today's slop on your tray. When you run with him, touching any object in front of him will cause him to bump into it and stagger, which opens him up to be attacked by the enemy.

In any other game, this would be a point of contention but in Silent Hill it is a strength. The awkward nature of the controls is reflective of how awkward it feels to be Harry in this dire and confusing set of circumstances. He is just a regular person trying to find his kid, and in this foggy town, bumping into shit because you can't see it adds to the atmosphere.

The game is also very confusing, which is completely intentional. There will be times where the camera angles change to these very unique, dynamic shots that disorient the player. I think these work to give a sense of anxiety, since now you have to adapt to not being able to see certain things in front of you. Certain puzzles are very obtuse, and while this is a genuine complaint I have with the game, I think it does add to the air of confusion and terror as you begin to feel trapped and isolated in the various locations you visit.

Then there's the voice acting. Many would say it's as awkward and stilted as the controls, and once again I would claim that this is the point. Most characters, especially Harry, speak in a very uncanny, unnatural tone. It gives off this vibe that maybe nobody is what they claim to be, not even the very character we're playing. It makes you question the intentions of every character you encounter, and I think it works to add intensity to the experience.

And to cap it off, the brilliant soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka fits every moment perfectly. From the harsh industrial sounds pushing you where you must go, to the more calm yet sinister tracks, it adds a unique sense of terror to the experience.

Of course I do have a few complaints. Some puzzles are pretty obtuse at points, I think the Zodiac one in particular threw me off because I kept trying to figure out if the pattern was related to the months when it was in fact, an entirely different solution entirely. These aren't so much a problem nowadays since you can look up a hint to the solution if you need it, but I imagine playing the game back in 1999 and doing these might have resulted in some major headscratchings.

Then there's the Boss Fights. They're not good. I accept that they are not the focus of the game and that is completely understandable, but most of them aren't even really a challenge either. It's very much a "shoot them until they die" type of thing, with the only challenge being the boss fight against a corrupted character and that's only because they have a gun.

Want to know my biggest complaint though, and this may sound a bit strange but... the game has too many save points.

Yeah, that is easily my biggest problem with Silent Hill, is that I can over rely on save points and hell, the game even has separate checkpoints where if you die you just start from there. It feels a bit cheap and kind of takes away some of the horror aspect that games like Resident Evil introduced with both limited save points and just limited saves in general.

By the end of Silent Hill I had well over 30 saves, because I am a paranoid fuck, but I still think that limiting that for the player would have made the game even more intense with its horror. Maybe that's what Hard Mode does? I played Normal for this run and while it was challenging, having all those saves kept me from really struggling.

All in all I'm very glad I played this one first, since in truth I don't hear about this game nearly as much as Silent Hill 2, but I've really come to appreciate its vibey horror and just the general aesthetic of such a game.

I look forward to experiencing the horrors of James Sunderland next.

a lovely post-script in the tsukihime story - believe it or not, i actually ended up preferring kagetsu toya to the main tsukihime novel! there's far less to talk about thematically here. note that due to the nature of the story being told here as well as the relative nature of fan-discs in dojin projects, kagetsu toya should be looked at as a bonus scenario for fans rather than a proper entry within the canon itself.

following the events of tsukihime, shiki tono loops through the same scenarios under the same 24 hours over and over in the world of dreams, and what blossoms out of that is one of the most interesting progression systems i've ever seen in a visual novel. through repetitive short cycles with slightly altering paths, shiki is able to dive further and further into the illusory world of this dream, meeting up with friends, allies, and enemies from across tsukihime in a desperate search for the end of this dream, the identity of the dreamer, and the purpose it is trying to show him. that said, the drama here is far less than that of tsukihime, but i honestly think this benefits kagetsu toya's tone.

dream logic pervades and a hazy, dreamy midsummer day plays out ad nauseum while the looping metatext and surrealism shadow-puppet shiki's adventures through the looking glass. at times, lampshading with that classic dojin referential pastiche, at times sanguine and succint with truly japanese-centric humor and social pulp. nonsensical good morning messages from cast and crew pull the curtains back on another one of shiki's 45 days in a day.

somewhere along visiting those same sets of options once again i smiled to myself and thought, 'this feels so much like flower, sun & rain', which is an utmost positive coming from me, one of its most ardent fans. despite suffering from some similar shortcomings as the main tsukihime itself (was len's story ending that way really necessary, nasu?) i found myself truly falling in love with this game, and type-moon as a whole, during this game. the side stories and galleries of both fan art and colleague art (note to self; if ever i make a visual novel and it succeeds, do exactly this) all brought a smile to my face as well. kagetsu toya managed to take all of the eccentricities and in-betweens i loved about tsukihime so much and bolstered the experience all that much more. this midsummer's daydream is what's truly sold me on getting to more of their work.

Being not only the first in a 30 year old series but also the title that defined the entire SRPG genre, FE1 has held up to the test of time and remains an interesting and engaging experience.

To start with the story, FE1 tells a very simple and straightforward story but for it's time it was a noticeable step above many other Famicom RPGs. The thing that really sticks out to me is FE1's attempt to have sympathetic villains, most notably in the form of Camus. Most games at this time didn't really bother giving their antagonists much depth so it's nice to see FE1 try something unique.

One trait that sets it apart from it's contemporaries is it's protagonist, who isn't silent. In fact, Marth has more dialogue than just about any other character in the game. He just won't shut the hell up. Granted, Marth himself isn't that interesting of a character in this game but you can only really do so much on the Famicom.

I think the biggest problem with FE1's story is how it's presented. The lack of a world map makes it extremely difficult to follow along and it will probably take most people multiple playthroughs to fully understand what's even going on. Granted, I'm sure a lot of this was included in manuals that came with the game (which was extremely common at the time) but given that this game never released in english I don't have access to this.

Having a chapter-to-chapter story allows it to have a more complex and detailed plot compared to a lot of other Famicom RPGs, with a wide cast of characters which was practically unheard of at the time. FE1 tells a fairly basic story but does an efficient job at setting the baseline for the series as well as doing the best it could with the limited hardware it was allowed.

I feel that one of FE1's greatest achievements is it's accessibility. Strategy games have always been firmly planted in the niche end of gaming but the way FE works makes it so much easier to get into. Seeing your units engage others in combat and seeing how they perform makes it easy to grasp how everyone functions and what their roles in battle can be. There's also the fact that your units are actual characters rather than faceless pieces. Most characters in this game are severely lacking in any sort of characterization but simply having a name and face makes it easier to get invested in the gameplay.

Because it's up to you who you want to train and bring into battles, it makes every playthrough unique. I replayed FE1 recently and at one point Navarre (a unit who I wanted to use) was put in danger due to a critical hit so I had to place Cain in front of him to protect him, which resulted in Cain's death. That's a scenario that's unique to me and my playthrough and that's just 1 example. No other RPG at the time had variability like this in their experiences. At best you got control over how you built your party but you were still going through the same events as every other player.

Given that permadeath is Fire Emblem's most well-known feature, I should probably talk about it. I think FE1 does a good job of balancing the cast around this mechanic. You frequently get new, strong units and the one unit you can't lose, Marth, is ridiculously strong. This mechanic adds a lot of weight to the gameplay and the fact that you can feel the loss of a unit even from a gameplay perspective helps add tension to every battle. A lot of people hold disdain for permadeath, but FE wouldn't be the same without it. (For the record,I feel this way about permadeath in nearly every future game. I'm not going to bring this up in every review because I don't want to repeat myself. Just assume I feel the same about permadeath's inclusion unless stated otherwise).

The complaint I see most often levied at FE1 is its speed, or lack thereof. Yes, this game is slow. Yes, it can become an immense drag to play. But it's a Famicom RPG. all of them are slow. Especially strategy games given that their AIs are more complex and have more decisions to make. Compare FE1 to Famicom Wars. In FW, every turn would take several minutes because you literally had to sit and watch the enemy commander think. In comparison, FE1 is much faster. You have the option to turn off animations, enemy turns are faster, and the general speed of things like movement and menu navigation is smoother. It's far from ideal by today's standards, but if you're going to compare every game you play to games that came out within the last few years then why are you playing a Famicom strategy RPG.

There is one thing I think is inexcusable though, that being inventory management. It sucks. It's slow and tedious and makes the game feel like even more of a slog to play. Again, most Famicom RPGs had tedious item management systems but even compared to its contemporaries FE1 feels slow.

I think the presentation is a huge mixed bag. The music is excellent and while the battle animations are slow, they still look good. The maps and map sprites all look nice but the portraits are where FE1 struggles the most. Some are nice, but a majority are ugly as sin. That's not to mention how many characters reuse portraits, with the 4 Gordon recolors being my personal favorite example. Overall I would say FE1's presentation is pretty good but those portraits are really a sore spot.

FE1 is a great game. For its time it was an entrepreneur and today it serves as an interesting piece of history that's aged surprisingly well. For the first game in a long running series it does a good job of setting the standard for what a Fire Emblem game should aspire to be.

Gaiden is great. The story, gameplay, music, and visuals were all superb when it released and still holds up remarkably well today as well as having some of the strongest ludonarrative in the series.

The story is perfect for a Famicom game. A little context about the gods and "The infamous general Dozer has initiated a coup detat" is really all the setup you get and it's all you need. Celica's side is pretty similar. Something's clearly wrong with Mila, let's check up on her. It's far from an earth shattering story but I think it's quite a bit more interesting than the average Famicom game. The plot does get more complicated as FE2 progresses but because of the games structure, the pacing feels natural and there's a very satisfying buildup to the final encounter with Duma.

One of the more common criticisms levied at FE storytelling is how plot events have to be accompanied by a battle because that's how the video game is designed. Gaiden avoids this by having several smaller battles without any dialogue as well as breaks in between where you visit villages or shrines. Being even closer to traditional JRPGs also helps in this. Story scenes are no longer tacked onto the beginning or ends of battles, some of FE2's most important moments aren't even accompanied by a battle.

Last plot detail I wanted to touch on was it's connections to Akaneia. Having the Whitewings and Camus back (and playable for the first time in Camus' case) is cool and is a nice hint of what's to come in FE3.

The gameplay is where I believe this game really shines though. The lack of physical barriers in maps results in greater emphasis being placed in how you move your units, how you use terrain, and how you use what few barriers are present in each map. There's also the placement of enemies, which is often used to replace ambush spawns. For example, instead of 2 cavs spawning out of nowhere, they start waaaay far away from everyone else so that you know they're coming and when they'll be there. The enemy composition is also used to strengthen the ludonarrative. My absolute favorite example of this in the series is Grieth's Citadel in Celica chapter 3. You start outside of a heavily reinforced fort and need to break your way through their front lines using the whitewings and ranged attackers and then deal with the monsters summoned by the cantor before dealing with Grieth himself. It all comes together so perfectly and like damn, I really am storming an enemy fortress.

Like FE1, the soundtrack once again kicks ass and I think the visual presentation of this game is a huge step up. Finally, every playable character has a unique face and they all actually look good. They pull this off by only reusing parts of each portrait as well as limiting the amount of portraits for antagonists. It results in a much more memorable cast that's a lot easier to grow attached to because you don't have 3 Gordons (blessed though he may be).

The only problem I have with the game is its treatment of the female characters on Alm's route. Every single one of them has to be rescued before they join you which is unfortunate because Celica's side is free of this problem and is fairly progressive for a 1992 game. Est is the only female character who must be rescued, and she's being rescued by other women. Monkey's paw or whatever. I've seen people speculate that this might have been intentional, with Duma representing the extremes of masculinity and Mila of femininity, but the true machinations of Kaga cannot be understood by us mere mortals.

In regards to that last sentence, another possible reason for the stark difference between Alm's and Celica's campaigns could be for meta narrative purposes. Alm's route is traditional to an extreme. You play as a man who rises up to fight an empire, saving damsels in distress along the way. The gameplay reflects this, with the majority of battles (especially early on) consisting of you fighting generic knights in grassy fields. This leads to encounters feeling samey and the maps blending in with one another. Compare that to Celica's route which does much more to distinguish itself from the typical fantasy story. It features a woman as its protagonist and the only damsel in distress is rescued by other women. This experimentality is also seen in the gameplay. You start of with several mages and the map design feels like it was made to take advantage of the archers increased range (boat maps being the notable example) which results in a more engaging experience that really forces you to appreciate Gaiden's unique elements. The environments are also more varied and memorable. You go from a cemetery to a sea to a desert and then a forest which makes for a more interesting adventure. Whenever I replay Gaiden I find Celica's side to be much more enjoyable than Alm's which may be the result of Kaga crafting them as such to convey to the player the merits of taking risks and not sticking to tradition when designing games. Perhaps that's the case, or perhaps I'm just deranged.

So, yeah. Gaiden's really really good. It's a shame that so many view it as the worst in the series without really giving it a fair chance, but thankfully there are people equally as unwell as I who I can confide in about my love for this game.

Edit: I will be getting "most liked Gaiden review on backloggd" engraved on my tombstone.

Hyper Demon is basically just Doom Eternal for people who liked Eternal’s shift towards being a ‘game-y game’ but didn’t like how it executed its mechanics.

Both games try to combine Ninja Gaiden’s high difficulty and hyper aggressive enemy design with fps combat, creating stylish action games focused on RAW EFFICIENCY - killing enemies faster than they can kill you. Whereas Eternal took influence from MMO combat with cooldown management, infinitely replenishing resources, frequent healing, and damage rotations - Hyper Demon takes influence from minimalist arcade games, focusing on simple tactical trade-offs, routing, and long term risk/reward with a small but multi-faceted toolset.

An easy example is by looking at the first enemy you meet in the game - a Spawner (don’t know the official names, sorry). You can instantly kill the Spawner with a long-range laser, kill it with a melee attack to grant an instant speed boost, or kill it with your daggers to drop an item box.

If it drops an item box, you have 3 options -

1. Destroy the box with a laser to spawn a large swarm of homing daggers, automatically killing any nearby enemies

2. Destroy the box with a dash for a speed boost

3. Destroy the box with your daggers to spawn GEMS

Anyone familiar with Ninja Gaiden’s essence system knows exactly how this works. Pick up the essence gems to level up your weapons (HD does this automatically, no need to buy things from a menu) or destroy the essence to charge up a UT high damage super attack (in this case a big-ass laser beam). You’re balancing the short-term value of laser attacks vs the long-term value of powering up your weapons. And it’s not like you can stockpile these lasers - just like NG, you either use it or lose it.

BUT THEN, you have to consider aiming the laser directly at an enemy vs aiming the laser at the ground, splitting the shot to stun multiple enemies simultaneously.

The other enemies are also interesting to fight against! Larvae are trivial if shot from afar but function as jump pads if you dash into them, giving you a reason to get close. Spider enemies are annoying because they absorb any essence you leave on the ground, but if you deliberately leave them alive for long enough, they‘ll spawn explosive canisters that can be shot to decimate waves of enemies (and the explosions are bigger if you use a laser). There are also Snakes which are mostly harmless, but if you leave them alive for too long, they’ll block access to slow-mo power-ups by surrounding them with impenetrable steel tails (and the power-ups themselves can be sacrificed in place of Essence if you want to shoot a fat laser). Enemies spawn in large groups, so you always have to consider ‘What enemy should I keep alive? Who’s my biggest priority right now?’ There are even more enemy types in the game, but those will be a surprise for anyone who can survive for more than 2 minutes (much harder than it sounds!).

I’m not gonna list every decision you make in a run (I haven’t even talked about all of the movement options like bunny-hopping, fakes, or shotgun jumping) or go over its commitment to fairness (great sound design + spherical projection provide near perfect information) but hopefully you can see how every interaction is about making a deliberate trade-off that can subtly snowball over the course of a run. Routing what enemies you want to kill and how you want to kill them has a lot of depth! And this is all tied together with a simple scoring system where you lose points every second but regain points anytime you kill an enemy, forcing you to play as aggressively as possible if you want to maintain a high score. I’m absolutely in love with this game, and can see myself chasing high scores for the rest of the year. If Eternal rubbed you the wrong way (or you just want an alternative to Ultrakill’s Cyber Grind), then I highly recommend Hyper Demon!!!

Okay,

I've dabbled into a lot of Character Action games for the past three years and was excited to finally give this one a swing since the 3D Ninja Gaiden games are the only few CAGs I have yet to explore, but after finishing this one I can't help but find myself having very mixed feelings on it. I feel like an insane person for not liking this as much as I should, considering how much praise this game gets around the CAG community, and while there are aspects of NGB I like a lot, I couldn't help but be a little dissatisfied with this one.

That disappointment stings more for me considering I took a full week trying to get the game physically and pulling out my old Xbox only to find out my Xbox's disc drive stopped working when I was testing it, an issue notorious with old Xboxes. The Xbox is kind of a worthless console, like if this thing didn't have Halo I'd probably prefer owning a Dreamcast. Couldn't emulate this game either because Xbox emulation is still very far behind and unstable. But luckily I still had my 360 laying around (until I realized I had no controllers for it so I had to spend another 30$ on one) so I could finally play it. Thanks Microsoft for at least having decent backwards compatibility on your platforms. This'll be the one credit I'll give you, you evil bastards.

Tangent aside, finally booting up this game after all the trouble I went through had me on the edge of my seat. The game makes a strong first impression. This is hands down one of the best looking Xbox games and it still holds up fairly well to this day with the exception of overly shiny, plasticy looking character models common in the 6th gen era of consoles, but even they have a higher polygon count not seen before from that era. The most notably impressive aspect is the animation. Ryu’s movement and attacks have a perfect amount of weight and impact to them. Whether you’re running on walls, doing the Izuna drop, or doing a fully charged Ultimate Technique, the game never stops selling you on the idea that Ryu is this badass skilled ninja. His weapons also have some of the most visceral sound effects in any CAG I’ve played. The swords have this loud comical slicing sound upon every hit while the flail’s whipping sounds always made it fun to, well, flail around. The presentation of this game cannot be understated and the fact the game always runs at 60FPS (arguably the most necessary inclusion for these types of games) is beyond impressive. On a technical level, Ninja Gaiden Black is still a mind-boggling marvel.

The game also makes it apparent how different it’s combat is almost immediately from it’s competition. You notice right away Ryu’s moves have quick start up frames but a ton of end lag to them, necessitating every attack to be a commitment and inviting enemies to punish Ryu upon missing, and enemies don’t let up, they’re dynamically aggressive and hit like bulldozers. Ninja Gaiden Black enemies see you from a country mile and will make an immediate B-line towards Ryu upon smelling him. They’ll charge in numbers, dodge/jump over your attacks, grab you if you’re blocking for too long, throw projectiles or shoot guns at you etc. This makes every encounter an immediate threat to be dealt with, but upon successfully killing them you get rewarded with Essence, a multi-purpose item that either gives you currency, health, or Ki charges (a limited use special move Ryu can use), but what’s interesting is charging a strong attack near these will absorb them and decreases the time needed for an Ultimate Technique, a super powerful move that does devastating damage and makes Ryu fully invincible during the animation, but normally requires a long charge up time to activate them. Normally these Essences are picked up automatically near Ryu, but if Ryu is blocking they won’t be collected, allowing the player to choose whether to take them for their bonuses or absorb them with a strong attack for a quick UT. This turns the combat encounters into a gigantic split-second decision making balancing act where the player upon every kill has to decide whether to collect their earnings, heal, refill their Ki, or sacrifice all of that for a more aggressive option in combat. All of this makes Ninja Gaiden Black’s combat stand out from other CAGs I’ve played, and on paper this makes for a really engaging combat system. Here’s the thing though, as I got more comfortable with how NGB works, I found I liked these ideas more in isolation.

The reality is because a lot of Ryu’s normal combos aren’t rewarding enough to justify them in normal use, it railroads a lot of the combat into doing the more obviously viable options. A lot of Ryu’s combos surprisingly don’t do a ton of damage, can’t deal crowd control very well, and carry a lot of end lag baggage with them, making them feel flimsy and weak to throw out. Except for one: The Izuna Drop. For the low cost of 100 Essence at the shop, Ryu gets a combo from a light > strong attack launcher that puts him in the air to execute it more safely, instantly kills whatever is in it, and does a small AoE when he lands on the ground to deal damage around Ryu which makes him more safe upon landing. This works for every human-sized enemy in the game, and while the Izuna Drop is indeed the sickest move in video game history, I begrudgingly became rather tired of looking at the same animation for the 200th time to set up essences around me for UTs with every Ninja/Soldier/Human-sized fiend demon thing that approached me. To compensate for this, you sometimes have to fight larger sized enemies with super armor moves or weak flying enemies that ask you to think more outside the box, but even they have a samey feeling strategy attached to dealing with them. Because UTs reward is so massively safe and strong, this makes fighting the larger enemies like the dinosaur fiends or zombies with full UTs the more sane option and the same can be said after killing a few smaller enemies and waiting for the rest of them to charge into a UT. I see a lot of praise go towards the humanoid enemies in this game like the Spider Ninjas, but not these enemies and because none of them are fun or interesting, and don’t get me started on the command grabbing Ghost Fishes that spawn in front of you in swarms and can pin you down and loop you if you don’t mash fast enough. For about 90% of the encounters in this game I found myself rolling back and holding Y near essences to watch the same five second animation over and over again or positioning myself to do an Izuna Drop on a human enemy over and over again, and after a while I couldn’t help but find the combat surprisingly dull and stale, no matter how cathartic that Izuna Drop animation is.

But if I wasn’t straight up bored by the lack of options in combat, I was frustrated with the design decisions that the game was built around. The most obvious complaint being that Ryu has a 3rd person manual camera throughout but lacks a hard Lock-On mechanic similar to games that predates NGB like Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry and the game’s soft Lock-On is not really intelligent, making it a real hassle to reposition the camera in the middle of combat to see the enemy only for a move to miss because Ryu wasn’t targeting the correct person, or if he was targeting anything at all. I’ve grown more and more disdain for manual cameras in CAGs that aren’t Bayonetta or God Hand (But even Platinum Games had to compensate for Bayo’s camera by making it so enemies don’t attack you unless they’re on screen, despite that game both having a soft and hard lock-on. This is why the isometric camera in The Wonderful 101 was good, people! Because you didn’t have to manually adjust the camera to see what you’re fighting! It just simply displayed everything on screen! It was just too “different” for you guys to appreciate!) so this is like a CAG nightmare for me. It also doesn’t help that the game doesn’t really care where these enemies are placed. A lot of praise is given to this game for it’s Resident Evil-esque level design, but the cramp hallways mixed with the aggressive enemies makes it so you will get side-swiped by enemies running at you with an attack near a corner or shot at by a bullet across the level on a first playthrough. It’s like they designed the map first and made the decision for the game to have hyper-aggressive AI after. The most funny example I found highlighting this haphazard enemy placement was at a save point in chapter 6 I walked out and was immediately surrounded and hit by three Spider Ninjas that were spawned just a little off-screen from the save point. This was the only example of this happening near a save point to be granted and may have been intentional for this one save point, but stuff like this happens in normal play nearly all the time, especially in the city missions.

Speaking of the city, let me bring back that Resident Evil-esque exploration into the spotlight again. A lot of praise is given to it’s lock and key design similar to those games, but here I don’t like it. Because this game is chapter based, when a chapter ends there are a lot of times the game doesn’t give you good direction on where to go next unless you’re in a linear set piece chapter. You kind of just have to stumble around the city to look for a key item that just might be relevant to the current chapter you’re on. (Some of these items you grab don’t even get used till the end game like the stone tablets.) and some methods of getting them are clumsy. Like in chapter 5 you’re supposed to go into this bar and the guy tells you that you need a ticket to get in. I’ve walked around the plaza for a while fighting the same enemies respawning over and over again only to figure out I was supposed to go into Muramasa’s shop and buy something to trigger a cutscene of him giving me the ticket, even though before I triggered the “need ticket” cutscene I actually visited Muramasa’s shop beforehand. I have no idea why he couldn’t just give me the ticket when I visited his shop for the first time, but it made the realization all the more frustrating when unintuitive flags like this show up in the game’s progression. The level design also makes the chapters long dude, like I was clocking in about 30 minutes to an hour each chapter, ballooning the runtime to about 17 hours on my first playthrough (HowLongToBeat reports around 16 ½ hours.) making this the longest CAG I’ve played so far. Even The Wonderful 101 which I always hear criticized as being too long is only 14 hours, and that kind of pacing for an action game like this is grueling and tiresome! Chapter 11 is all about fucking swimming in water for half an hour and then the boss fight shows up and it’s Doku, your rival fight the game built up to! In a level where you barely have combat encounters for the entirety of it! Why!? This is like Jeanne 4 being after the 40 minute After Burner level in Bayonetta levels of bad here and nobody talks about it! At least let me dry off my boots a little.

The boss fights in Ninja Gaiden Black is kind of what kills this game the most for me personally. One of the things I love the most about CAGs is how many of them come up with very unique and interesting boss fight concepts to test your mastery of the game’s mechanics. They’re usually my favorite parts in each of these games, especially rival fights that pit you against an opponent that mirror the strength of your character like Vergil from Devil May Cry, Jeanne from Bayonetta, Azel from God Hand etc. Good boss fights alone is what gets me coming back to replay these games, and I think here in NGB they’re all kinda bad! Don’t think I can name a single one I liked except for maybe Alma, because she dodges around your attacks dynamically which forces you to deal with her attack animations and punish them quickly, which can lead to her getting knocked down for more attacks on her deleting mass chunks of her health bar. Everything else though are either kind of boring like the boss in Chapter 4, or the bone dinosaur, or the dragon, or the rehash fights of the tentacle monster or the elemental worms (You hit a big thing that doesn’t flinch and dodge it’s slow super armor attacks at the right time.) or boss fights in the military base chapter where you fight two tanks and a helicopter where all you do is shoot arrows at it with your bow and roll away to go refill them. (Boy I hope that's not a trend in the sequel!!!) and then there's just fights that don’t make a lot of sense even after beating them? Doku was easily the biggest disappointment for me because he not only highlights how limited your combat options really are in this game with his arbitrary windows to deal damage to him without him blocking. (Speaking of which, you get this jumping dive attack with your Dragon Sword called “Flying Swallow” that kinda breaks the game, and Team Ninja knew this so they made the bosses simply not take damage from it, rather than just rebalancing the move better. Lol.). It was incredibly frustrating to go after him with a laggy attack while he was throwing his sword only for the sword to magically appear back into his hands, blocking the attack and punishing me before I got a chance to dodge roll. Very unsatisfying rival fight, and then you get to fight him again in his spirit form with a worse arena and camera! Aw yeah now this is gaming!

Look, I get it, I get that there's a lot of people who are really into this game. Whether I watch videos of it, scroll through reviews, or talk about it in Discord servers, there's a lot of people who herald this game as "THE GOAT" or "ONE OF THE BEST XBOX GAMES" or "ONE OF THE BEST CAGS" and yeah I get it, there's still a lot to like about this one. It's presentation is slick and sharp like a katana blade, the game does it's best to give Ryu all the grace of a badass ninja whether he's running on wall to wall or elegantly finishing off crowds of enemies in rapid succession. Putting all my grudges with the combat aside, there's a genuine satisfaction in stumbling into a room with seemingly infinitely spawning enemies and after clearing it being rewarded with a health upgrade, it triggers all the dopamine receptors in my brain most of these dumbass games give me. But like any other blade you use for too long, I found it to dull out on me after a while. Annoyances I've had with the combat and level design kept rearing their ugly heads over and over again and I just kept wanting the game to be over 4 hours ago and yet Team Ninja kept insisting to throw more gimmicky sections for another half hour chapter at me. I know this review is probably my longest and rambly yet, but as I said, this is what the game did to me: it made me feel like an insane person bro! So many times this game made me turn over my shoulder and look at my library of CAGs I could be replaying that arguably does a lot of the things this game does but better. I thought about replaying this game on Hard mode before writing this down, but then I thought about fighting those fucking Ghost Fishes again and figured I'd take my internally planted advice and go replay Bayonetta instead.

Sorry guys. :/

Can’t believe Dunkey really tricked nine million gamers into thinking The Last Guardian was this broken dumpster fire devoid of any fun or joy. Shaking my head. The gaming community really let me down with this one, maybe some other content creator a decade later will realize it was actually good when it’ll be +120$ on retro game store shelves.

Okay, being more rational here, I’ve always found the mixed reception of The Last Guardian to be rather puzzling. You’d think the third game from industry legend Fumito Ueda, the man behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, arguably two of the most influential PS2 games ever, would come out with more enthusiasm behind it after its infamously long nine-year development time, spanning a whole console generation. But quite literally the opposite happened. The game was so divisive on its release by critics and audiences it’s no surprise nobody wanted to be the guinea pig that invested their time and money into it. Many of its detractors claimed this was because Trico, the big animal companion and the main mechanic of the game, was unresponsive and unreliable too frequently, giving the player more lack of control than necessary and making playing the game more frustrating than it needed to be. Which I’ve always found that odd because I feel lack of control has always been a major theme in Ueda’s games?

In ICO, you play as a little boy trying to escape a big castle with a girl named Yorda who doesn’t speak the same language and can’t make the same jumps or climbs as you, yet is relied upon to open certain doors to progress your escape. You cannot progress without Yorda, you have to work around her limitations to solve puzzles and protect her from the occasional fight with these shadowy figures. If you go too many rooms too far away from her, you risk her getting captured which kills you. So you have to escort her a lot of the time by hand or yell for her to get her to come to you, which her AI has never really been the best to be honest? It was to the point where Team Ico moved development of the game from the PS1 to the PS2 so they can have more processing power to get her to work and it can still be a bit bumbly and finicky at times. In Shadow of the Colossus, you were this warrior who wandered into a forbidden land to make a deal with a deity to resurrect a girl named Mono from the dead by riding to and killing 16 Colossi, these impossibly towering creatures made of stone and fur. You had to climb on these things and find their weak spots to stab as you wrestle with the overwhelming forces of gravity of these massive creatures trying to shake you off, which oftentimes means you have to hang on for dear life for what seems minutes on end before you can keep climbing as you watch your stamina bar get lower and lower, creating more dread of falling off and having to get back on again. It’s not as if oppression by removing control from the player has never been in Ueda’s previous work before, and these are often aspects I’ve seen praised in these two games, myself included. However, I think these are often overlooked when talking about The Last Guardian because there’s always a sense that you have more kinds of control over your own actions in those games at the end of the day. That you are the one who can hold Yorda’s hand and take her where she needs to be most of the time, that you are the one who made the decision to climb upwards on the Colossi at the most inopportune time. Ueda’s games have always had this near-perfect balance of making the grand scenario more and more learnable while still grounding the player in the reality they’re really in.

This is why I feel The Last Guardian was a harder sell for many people. While I argue the journey itself is more tonally lighthearted than his previous work, The Last Guardian is by far Ueda’s most oppressive feeling game. The boy is not The Wanderer, he’s not even Ico, he’s just about as small and frail as Yorda and can only make the smallest of jumps, hang on the tiniest of ledges, and can push only certain objects around in terrain that scales from tower to tower in a journey that asks you to go higher and higher up the clouds. You more than ever have to rely on your partner Trico, this massive impossible mix of a cat and a bird probably the size of a small house. Only she can make you reach heights you otherwise can’t and make those impossible jumps from tower to tower. Trico is probably the most convincing animal in a video game I’ve ever played, but to some, that’s a burden they can’t deal with. Trico will get hungry so you have to look for barrels sometimes to feed her, Trico will get flustered when she attacks these strange inanimate stone guards so you have to pet her to calm her down, Trico gets scared of these glass windows with eye-shaped designs on them so you have to find a way to destroy them even if you have to do some insane parkour to get to them, Trico will sometimes just flat out ignore your yelling commands by design taking longer to do what the player may see as the simplest of jumps. While Trico is the most relied-on partner character ever in an Ueda game, the boy still has to escort and command this man-eating beast from place to place to solve puzzles or to platform around large jumps. In other words, it’s ICO again, but this time the roles are reversed.

Of course the pitch of “you move an animal around that will act like an animal” was only going to appeal to the most committed to its premise, and it being Ueda’s longest game meant more people were going to fall off of it before they got a chance to see its conclusion. But I feel that aspect also overshadowed discussion of other issues the game has to be honest. You can practically feel its nine years of ambitious development time when the game starts to barely contain its targeted 30fps threshold. The environmental flourishes and details around Ueda’s legendarily creative architecture are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and as you get higher and higher up the clouds you see more and more of what you maneuvered around down below, but sometimes I feel this hyper fixation on its details mixed with its advanced lighting system can obfuscate puzzle information more often than it needed to, and I feel Team Ico knew this, which is why the game relies on its tip systems too much. There are not only button prompts that appear frequently on the top right of the screen to give clues on what you can interact with, but narration from the boy's perspective will appear similar to Shadow of the Colossus if the game detects the player being on a puzzle for too long. It’s kind of a shame that Ueda’s games still feature these immersion-breaking UI elements present and criticized in Shadow of the Colossus for years with no real way of turning them off, but I feel the game would’ve only been more frustrating on a first time playthrough if they weren’t there. Then there are the occasional physics engine issues that the game will stumble upon, while I found the physics complied with me more than most Havok engine games do to be honest, I did have a moment in my playthrough where when Trico jumped the boy was suddenly teleported upwards which made me fall towards my impending doom, so it’s by no means perfect even if I had a better time with it. The camera is by far my biggest issue with the game. It’s this fickle mistress that only focuses on what it wants to. Sometimes it’ll autofocus on Trico, or the ledge you need to jump on, and sometimes you have to adjust it yourself. Sometimes the camera will get stuck in tight environments with you and Trico which will reset itself with this awkward cut to black which can repeat over and over again rather than just clipping out of bounds to give the player a better view from behind similar to God Hand. The Last Guardian's technical ambitions from its AI to its environments can be seen from a distance as impressive, but its lack of gracefullness at times can also be seen as its downfall, and it’s no wonder why the game had the hardest time sticking with players the most.

It… might be my favorite Ueda game?

It might be too early to tell as I’m writing this, but it just feels right to say. This game just did it all for me. While ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are up there as some of my personal favorite games, I feel The Last Guardian is the most successful in what it sets out to do: to bond the player with its partner character. I never really particularly cared for Yorda or Mono or even Agro as much as I wish I could despite those characters being the central emotional core of the story. While I appreciate the former for its wordless communication between Yorda and Ico along their journey, I can understand the criticisms against the latter. It’s hard to place the corpse of a woman you’ve never interacted with in front of the player and expect them to care, which is why I feel players connected with Agro the horse a lot more since it’s someone you used to venture around the place even if all you did was ride on it and commanded where to go. Trico is that but taken a step further. Yes, Trico acts like a big dumb animal, but somehow managing to get her around these dark tight corridors with traps or these sky-bound vistas feels like accomplishing little miracles one at a time. The game features Ueda’s most creative puzzle design yet, asking the player to constantly think with Trico in mind, and it’s where the rooms where you are alone without Trico are the most pulse-pounding anxiety-inducing. Without that protection from Trico, you are more in danger from other threats like the stone guards or extreme heights you can’t fall on Trico as a failsafe. About halfway through I looked at Trico less like an obstacle and started to look at Trico as the guardian she really is. And you know what I think?

It’s rad as hell! And it’s fun! Seriously! Every time you get Trico to do her earth-shattering cat pounce from one stone pillar to the next it feels like this major accomplishment that the two of you managed to pull off. Every moment you have to climb around Trico when she sees an eye-shaped glass window hung by a stone tower and then get there by doing some mind-bending platforming as you look down at the stomach-churning distance between you and the ground (no seriously, jesus christ lol) and having to jump all the way down on her back is so immensely intense but pulling it off to progress just works. Every time Trico saves you from an army of mysterious stone guards is the ultimate “sick ‘em fido” of video games, yet the game always reminds you to comfort Trico after with a few pets, and maybe pull out a few spears thrown at her body. It’s this dedication the game has with these moment-to-moment connections between you and Trico as you two help each other out closer and closer to the end that makes the later moments where she starts to break design conventions all the more convincing and powerful. The Last Guardian to me is a game of little accomplishments up to the grand finale.

The Last Guardian is not a perfect game, and it’s hardly one I can see the casual player really sticking with very long. Even I had moments where I wished Trico would comply with me more and wished the game’s framerate didn’t give me a headache, but the last three hours of this game to me are borderline perfect, climaxing to Ueda’s strongest story beats yet, somehow managing to top himself with his best ending yet (a man already known for crafting the best endings ever). All the coincidental frustration I had with The Last Guardian seemed fleeting and diminutive. By the end of it, I was more frustrated at being reminded of its dismissive reputation that caused me to hold it off this long. The Last Guardian should be a testament to Team Ico’s mastery of storytelling through game design, rather than be left in the shadows of its predecessor's legacies, but even if it stays within those shadows of obscurity forever, I’m happy to have stuck with the journey through The Nest, atop Trico’s feathery back.

The Last Guardian is a game of accomplishments, and much like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, stands just as tall as those games do, as the achievement it undoubtedly is.

I wanna start by saying that this game comes about as close to my perfect aesthetic as I've ever seen, really the only other thing that comes close is Mirror's Edge. This is a personal thing that has made me instantly fall in love with the environments in this game and particularly the early levels which feel like the devs took images from my brain as I fall asleep listening to drum and bass and turned it into my dream game. In terms of visuals its an easy 5 stars from me, the reflective blue glass oceans, sheen white surfaces and vibrant skies are a treat on the eyes.

I do wish the game has more video quality options to really crank it up in high fidelity however one of the benefits of this game is that its very accessible on lower end hardware so if your PC is trash its still worth getting this game.

So the game is about running time trial levels and using cards, cards act as equipable weapons and also discarding them allows your character to perform advanced manouvres like dashing, slamming, grappling hook shot etc. It's less of an FPS and moreso a puzzle game where you manage the resources of a level. At first glance a lot of reviewers notice that movement is VERY floaty, you jump fairly high and the gravity is quite low so you saunter down gracefully, this might seem to clash with the fast pased movement and indeed some reviewers noted their displeasure at this but it's necessary for a couple of reasons: firstly it means you can make mid air shots and turns with more time and precision and secondly it adds value to the movement mechanics where you slam and dash; it makes you think about using resources to bypass the low gravity and finish levels quicker vs keeping those resources for a later part of a level and descending more slowly. So if you are put off by floaty movement I would advise to stick with it, you'll have opportunities to really hammer down great vertical distances as the game progresses.

The gameplay loop really clicked for me and I felt determined to Ace every level and collect all the in game gifts which are scattered around. Some may criticise the game for it's linearlity and convenient placement of cards but you can really see what a delicate balancing act it is to have a game offer enough freedom to go outside the levels intended path to get a better time when you need to gain at least some gold medals to progress the game at all. Being able to stick to a path and still progress the story is essential and in that sense sticking to the linear levels is probably how a lot of people who don't necessarily find value in the challenge might decide to complete the game and for them they need a way to still enjoy the story content, it would be a bad idea to lock the story behind more lateral soeedrunning knowledge.


That said the game does offer a selection of hints which show the player small time saving skips to get the ranks they need to progress which I think is a nice touch that teaches the player to think strategically about the level design and encourages the player to find their own methods of time saves. For people like me who want to keep optimising our runs and pathing theres a lot of oppertunity to take different approaches to levels and really master the mechanics of the game. It's a hard balancing act and I think the game does a good job of being easy enough so that casual players can see all the content whilst offering something more for determined players.

Throughout the levels you can find gifts that you can give to characters that advance a Persona-esque social link system, this is a great way of tying the story to the gameplay whilst offering some nice downtime to speak to characters. However in Persona where spending time with people was meaningful and lead to interesting side stories most of the dialogue here is meaningless and usually involes the characters getting up to some zany antics like pranking other characters or being horny or something pointless, nobody really learns anything and even well into the late game these extra dialogues don't advance the plot in any meaningful way, it's mostly just a distraction and a way to show off the characters quirks and their personalities, which wouldn't be an issue if they were interspersed with more meaningful events but as it stands theres too much dicking around. There are also a few challenge levels specific to each character which is nice and the main story beats are unlocked through snippets of memories where the player character recalls something plot specfic.

FYI it should briefly be mentioned that completing these gift interactions does change the outcome of the game.

The Player character, Neon White, has amensia and is picking up the pieces to his past. He is sent to heaven as an assassin to fight demons on gods behalf and earn his place in the afterlife where meets Neon Yellow, Violet and Red and they're all a bit cagey in letting him in on what happened to them in a past life. In terms of story content I wanna keep this spoiler free but it's a bit of a hit and miss, the characters have their own personalities and the voice acting in this game is very good but the dialogue is not great. You can tell the writers went to great effort to make the character interactions have a bit of personality and banter to them but quite frankly that's all they have, it's quite frustrating at times because the character interactions serve as quite good emotional beats for White and it is heart warming to see these characters get along but the plot is so contrived. There is at least 3 macguffins and bullshit rules that get invented on the spot for the sole purpose of wrapping up the story. The whole plot really needed some work, I think the characters could have had the same emotional impact that they have without so much extraneous dialogue and the plot could have been given more context and consideration.

I don't want to come out of this review making it seem like the issue with the plot is too detrimental to the overall game experience but it can't be ignored when it serves as the players motivation for completing the levels. I wouldn't say that the story should be excluded and in fact I'm happy that the game gives the player the oppertunity to chill out between chapters and hang out with the homies, rather I think there are some aspects of the story which needed a bit more completion and tidying up, I think a dlc with more levels and a compact side story would be hugely welcome.

Before I finish I just want to comment on the music briefly, it's superb. Composed by Machine Girl its an absoloute joy to listen to in game and outside of the game, I highly reccommend checking out the soundtrack on Machine Girl's bandcamp because it's a top notch collection of breaks, dnb and indsutrial sounds.

Overall I was really impressed with Neon White and I'm going to keep playing it, post-game there are a number of difficult challenge runs and you can go back and try to beat the developer score levels that make the game worth replaying. If you're looking for a visually stimulating, fast-paced first person game with a hint of puzzle solving and platforming then this is definerely worth a look.