black mesa flip-flops between wanting to stay beholden to the original game with newer technology and re-contextualization from prior half-life games, and just completely putting a spin on HL1 - but the latter tends to present itself as the game's way, way weaker moments and it absolutely cannot be more frustrating how much they hold they hold this game back.

i can, at least, sing praises for how jaw-droppingly gorgeous black mesa is, especially given the use of the source 1 engine, in addition to just how masterfully the tragedy of the black mesa incident is shown. HL1 had already done a great job in that regard, but BM takes it to another level - extra dialogue, variations of scientists and security guards and added detail to every map make it feel much more like a real workplace, and the absolute tide-turner that are the surface chapters encompass the absolute stress and overwhelming despair of those who didn't make it during the HECU's last stand and eventual retreat so damn well through the soundtrack, setpieces and wonderfully acted radio transmissions blaring various marines' desperate pleas for help and last words. there's a section in around surface tension that really gets me - where a lone marine, echo-3 juliet, weakily calls out on the radio after his team gets ambushed by alien soldiers mortally wounds him. unable to heal himself, he ends up succumbing to his wounds over the radio.
it's little things like that which can go a long way to illustrate how majorly fucked up the black mesa incident was - an otherwise normal workday gone completely awry, dooming many people only trying to survive. HL2's looming presence also benefits the game greatly in this regard, with characters like eli and kleiner retroactively and seamlessly being integrated into the opening chapter, and also as you overhear emergency alerts progress further and further in urgency, to a point where the president orders a total evacuation of new mexico - foreshadowing HL2's threat of the resonance cascade being much, much worse than just a hostile takeover of black mesa.

the fun stops when black mesa isn't riding off HL1's coattails. for starters, multiple maps force you into routes completely different from the original game with the original sections barricaded for seemingly no reason - these tend to take FAR too much longer than the original level design and really just waste far more time
several puzzles and other sections have been significantly dumbed down which as a whole makes them far less uninteresting (and somewhat abandons the "think" in "run, shoot, think, live") - the entire vent maze in "we've got hostiles" is gone, the tripmines in surface tension are completely visible which eliminates you needing to clear them out and turns it into awkwardly tip-toeing around them (and praying you don't activate their hitboxes anyway - by the way, the surrounding areas with enemy encounters, including the helicopter are also completely gone), and on a rail's maze-like level design is now a pathetic straight shot because people kept complaining about it in the original game
the HECU are abominably more retarded compared to their HL1 counterparts - i'm pretty sure their AI is based off the combine soliders from HL2 and it shows in how crazily omnipotent they are, reducing most chances for you to sneak your way around enemy encounters like you originally could to make up for their brilliant strategy of "get directly into freeman's line of fire" - though this at the very least tends to be somewhat alleviated with the map design.

and then there's xen.

what the fuck happened here?
i think it's already one thing to completely turn xen's barely hospitable, logic-defying, foreboding wasteland into this pretty, serene, teeming-with-beautiful-life alien planet-looking area, and is it pretty? yeah, admittedly, it's one of the best looking maps i've seen in the source engine, but xen is supposed to be an interdimensional train station hurriedly converted into something the nihilanth's troops could live in. "oh but it's just a different interpretation" isn't an excuse - you might as well have sent freeman to an alien planet with BM's take on it.
that having been said, it wouldn't actually sour my opinion on BM's take on xen all that much if it wasn't dramatically worse than the original game's area in terms of level design.
for some reason, crowbar collective thought it wise to comically extend the playtime of HL1's most scorned chapters in an attempt to.. address those complaints? interloper alone can take up to a whopping two hours of basic-yet-repetitive "insert plug into socket" puzzles and visually aggressive combat sequences compared to the original's relatively short platforming sections. you're no longer turning the hunter gonarch into the hunted, you're now spending an hour running away from the damn thing before you tackle it head-on one last time. i don't understand why the devs decided xen needed to be this much longer - nobody does, really!

crowbar collective's ambitions end up souring the game at multiple points, and while i can't fault them for being passionate about the franchise and wanting to one-up half-life source by giving HL1 the remake it truly deserves, i can fault them for misunderstanding many things which make HL1 so good. the airtight pacing, the brain-scratching puzzles, the tense combat sections - black mesa is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination and i love a lot of when it does for HL1 storytelling-wise, but unless it's directly borrowing from valve's work, those three core values of HL1's gameplay really aren't done the service they truly deserve.

HEY YOU.

Having been way too long since I finished Kiwami, I elected it'd be easier if I just had a do-over on the Yakuza franchise and started from the very beginning with the original PS2 game as some friends have suggested. How does it fare?

Yakuza's greatest strengths, in my opinion, lie in its presentation and the commendable job it does for laying out the groundwork for later series to build on. There's this grittier, more edgier feel to the game than later entries that I think went absolutely lost in Kiwami. The dark, moody colors of 2005 Kamurocho, the primitive yet still impressive graphics (which can't really be replicated, truthfully), the raw, punchy sound design and even the potty-mouthed yet still charming English dub give the game this unique flair not seen in any of the Yakuza games I've played sans maybe the sequel. Especially give the soundtrack a listen, as they only further accentuate Yakuza's style through the rock-heavy funky tunes as you beat people to a bloody pulp.

I quite like Yakuza's story, to touch on it briefly. Kiryu's a bit funny in this game as they were still getting a feel for his character and thus he's a bit more aggressive with others and even hilariously flirtatious in some substories - not to fucking mention the thousand fucking F-bombs he fucking drops throughout the fucking English dub. It's relatively simple compared to other Yakuza stories from what I can tell but still an entertaining and heartfelt one. And for the record, I disagree with Nishiki being all that much weaker in this game than he is in Kiwami - granted, the added scenes in that game do help us get a better feel for his situation after Kiryu gets sent to the joint and the spiral of despair his life became afterward, but I think the PS2 game still does a good job of showing how much he means to Kiryu as a friend, plus his insecurities and tiredness of being upstaged and compared to Kiryu that molded him into the power-hungry, desperate-to-prove-himself man he became through scenes such as his reunion in Serena and the final confrontation he has with Kiryu and Yumi.

However, where I think the game starts to fall apart is on the gameplay side of things. To be clear, I don't hold a lot of its shortcomings against it all that much for obvious reasons, but they're just as obviously still worth pointing out.
The combat is rough, for starters. While satisfying to land hits due to the absolutely meaty sound design of Kiryu fracturing a man's skull whole, that's IF you can even land your shots; the lock-on is incredibly unreliable as often you will find yourself completely missing when you shouldn't have, leaving yourself wide open. This, and the fact that when fighting more than like, five enemies at a time I found myself highly prone to getting hit-stunned and having the shit beaten out of me by three different enemies with no room to recover. You can unlock moves to alleviate this, but you shouldn't have to.
There's also.. not much to do in Kamurocho? Perhaps I'm used to Yakuza being so loaded with content and if so that's on me, but I found myself more often than not just bee-lining it to the next objective rather than taking the time to explore since all you can really do is.. get yourself drunk? Check out a substory or two? But then this game also has an odd mechanic where you can only do one substory at a time, so.. yeah.

But I think I can still appreciate Yakuza all the same for being an impressive and charming first step, even if the sum of its parts is rather flawed. It's still a decent game at the end of the day, and a more overlooked Yakuza game that in spite of everything I just lambasted it for, still deserves more attention.

KILL THIS ARROGANT MO THER FU CKER.

Where Yakuza shone, its sequel shines way brighter, and even shines on the areas not touched by the first game's light.

This game's greatest area of improvement over its predecessor is in the combat. I have my grievances with Y1's combat; although it can be mitigated, there's no doubt in mind it was extremely rough still. Anything that wasn't a 1-on-1 fight could, at times, prove itself to be a pain in the ass due to the somewhat awkward physics and unreliable lock-on. I didn't hold it against the game as it was a first attempt, but I hoped it'd be improved on.
Yakuza 2 takes the wishes I had for it to get better and soared high above my expectations. In addition to the fixed lock-on system meaning you can finally count on your punches to land where you want them to (provided you're not just straight up missing people), the pace of combat has also been noticeably sped up. There's more an emphasis on the flow you can achieve while fighting enemies, especially evident when you unlock double and grab finishers to dish out more damage in tandem with reversal moves to beat down the next guy in your sights; by keeping this flow, you minimize the chances the enemy gets to land a hit on you, becoming a god of the arena like the badass Kiryu is. This proves Yakuza 2 not only rights where the first game's combat went wrong, but also goes out of its way to capitalize on its strengths and make something far greater out of it.

Arguably just as noteworthy a positive is the game's story. While the first game found itself near squarely focused on Kiryu's relationship with Haruka and the mystery of the missing 10 billion yen, Yakuza 2 plays with many more narratives than just furthering Kiryu's end goal with an occasional detour; many different storylines to do with different characters are set up, all finally being resolved and converging into the the stakes at play during the finale. What may sound worryingly convoluted is handled insanely well; every storyline gets the focus it needs to and nothing felt undercooked. Nearing the end of the game left me in utter shock at the reveals the game built up to and how it all tied into Kiryu's conflict with Ryuji Goda and the Jingweon Mafia.
A major strength also within the story is the re-contextualization of old locations and plot beats you visited back in the first game. It's only been a year since the events of Y1, yet it feels like so much has changed while you were gone. Seeing a place like Serena abandoned, knowing it was once Kiryu's favorite spot where he could hang out and drink with his late childhood friends.. that shit hurts, and it hurts bad. It also makes it just more genuinely nice to see what characters like Date, the Stardust crew, and even prior minor characters had been up to during the year-long break. This passage of time working in the game's favor seems like something Yakuza will play around with in spades according to this and my time with the third game, and that makes me pretty happy because I love the world of Yakuza that's been built so far.
At the heart of it all is Kiryu's budding relationship with Osaka police officer Kaoru Sayama. Originally somewhat of a foil to Kiryu upon her introduction, over time you get to watch the two understand each other more and beginning to care deeply for one another, inspiring them both to be better people by the end of the game through the trials and tribulations they face and the heart-to-heart moments they have together. Their relationship is what makes moments like the scene of Kiryu in the rain at his lowest point so masterful; he rejects the thought of deserving death as an atonement for his past actions and moves forward with a new lease on life, all thanks to Kaoru's words and how much he means to him. And plus, it's all set to some sweet-ass tunes.

It's not uncommon for a sequel to improve on the original, but it's spectacular to see it happen this well. I haven't even mentioned the kickass OST, or gone in-depth into the wicked moves you can pull in combat, or the additional areas, activities, and substories that make the world of Yakuza so much more fun to explore. But your time is as valuable as mine, so I'll leave you with this: Yakuza 2 is amazing, and will no doubt prove to be a highlight of my journey through this series.

Part of what’s been drawing me toward JRPGs as a genre as of late has been the way different games emphasize different parts of its core. For as similar as many JRPGs look on the surface - battle systems, overworlds, big stories and big numbers - there’s always a lot of choices made by individual development teams on where their game’s full focus should lay. Because if the aspects I just listed all have one thing in common, its that they’re all often aiming to be as big and vast in scope as possible. In stretching the focus of a game’s development too thin to achieve the highest quality across all aspects, many games wind up biting off more than they can chew, and become flawed, bloated messes as a result.

This is, in part, what made Paper Mario: Color Splash so intriguing to me. It, along with its much-derided prequel, was one of the first instances I’ve yet seen of a JRPG franchise actively aim to re-pivot their focus to a drastic degree.

The quality of a newer Paper Mario game can never really be discussed without first addressing the series’ first two games: Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. These games, much like Super Mario RPG before it, adapted the complexities of normal JRPG combat into a fantastic, streamlined, yet still nuanced and fun set of systems to welcome Mario fans to a more tactical form of play. Celebrated as the games may have been, something was definitely lost in that transition from platformer to JRPG - Though combat is smart and cleverly thought through, the worlds that tie them together are often barren in design, nothing more than a means to deliver more battles and more narrative. The focus of the original Paper Mario games was placed almost entirely on combat and story, while turning level design and the player’s interactions with said levels into somewhat of an afterthought.

Though its easy to write the series' third game off as merely an experimental side-game, its hard to play Super Paper Mario without getting the sense that the developers were unsure where to take their RPG sub-series after its first two entries. They’d succeeded in making an RPG combat system that was simple to understand but deviously fun to play around with, yet in the process of doing so abandoned almost everything that defined the act of playing Super Mario. That is of course the nature of spin-offs in some sense - to offer a different play experience to the real thing - yet I can’t help but feel as if the developers at Intelligent Systems felt frustrated in their inability to do more with the Mario branding as part of their games’ DNA. And despite a bumpy first attempt in Paper Mario: Sticker Star, I do believe they captured something special in their second go around at this new direction. Five games in, and Paper Mario was finally beginning to rediscover its own voice.

The amount of flack that Sticker Star and its following sequels would receive was inevitable, as the areas in which they evidently failed are the ones that Paper Mario used to succeed effortlessly in. The combat mechanics in all three games are half-baked at best and completely mindless at worst, as even the genuine effort to present more depth to combat in Paper Mario: The Origami King ended up messy and poorly thought through. All three games are infamously lacking in narrative depth, with conflicts so simple that two of them simply involve Bowser harnessing a new power to cause mayhem without ever evolving beyond that. The Origami King’s effort to place a new antagonist in charge doesn’t do much to change that the story is tragically one-note in progression and depth. This shallowness applies to the cast of characters the games sport, with the amount of total new characters introduced across all three games sitting below double digits. Once again The Origami King pushes its head against the ceiling more, with more distinctly characterized bosses and temporary party members, yet its held back by the amount of compromises each of these characters come packaged with in their execution.

As the latest entry in the series and the one pushing hardest to overcome its weaknesses, you may be surprised to find that I’m less fond of The Origami King than far safer Wii U game its a sequel to. This brings us back to what I discussed at the very start of the review - the troubles in stretching a project too thin, and for developers to pick a direction and stick with it. While all of The Origami King’s efforts are commendable, I find it leads to a somewhat messier and less clear-cut experience on the whole compared to Color Splash.

Color Splash has a complete waste of a combat system and a very shallow, uninteresting story. Yet with those two things set aside, I find that the developers were instead able to place their focus on refining everything else as part of the package. The reduced scope in comparison to its sequel feels almost directly related to the game’s biggest strength: Color Splash is overall a fantastically snappy, well paced out adventure. By using the level-by-level structure of Sticker Star to its advantage, it gives each section of the game a very clearly defined start and endpoint, allowing a breezy journey befitting of the game’s vacation-island theming. Part of what really helps sell the pace is the core mechanic of coloring in the environment across every level, effectively a set of collectibles strewn about every part of the game like Star Coins in New Super Mario Bros. Levels can now not only just be beaten, but 100%:ed with little hassle, and seeing a flag raised across each of the many levels in the game never stops being satisfying. The amount of visual variety also helps, as the game’s color palette is as varied as its title would suggest and never lets up on creative, pleasant environments for Mario to bounce between. The entrance to a water-themed prison base turns out to be an out-of-nowhere underwater game show, a train heist is stopped before it can begin by the passenger’s need to stop for a meal Mario has to help cook up, the haunted mansion sits next to an aristocratic park flooded with poison - when paired with a surprisingly open-ended structure in level progression, it never feels as if you’re in one environment for too long.

It’s through stuff like this that the shift in focus compared to the Paper Mario games of old is most apparent: The level design is impressively fun across the whole game, asking the player to be perceptive, do simple platforming, solve puzzles, and occasionally have fast reflexes, to clear individual levels before moving onto the next. Even though combat depth may have careened off a cliff, this amount of effort placed into the game’s level design is a far cry from the endless sets of corridors that filled The Thousand Year Door. It becomes all the more interesting to think about when compared to the aforementioned Super Paper Mario, which despite its similar efforts to de-emphasize the RPG-ness of gameplay, still couldn’t find much of a purpose to its gameplay-first design and wound up falling back on an engrossing narrative first and foremost. I believe it speaks magnitudes to Color Splash’s strengths that its able to remain engrossing and genuinely fun for its entire runtime without much of any overarching narrative for the player to follow.

Color Splash sets out to give players a fun time exploring a big world split up into bite-sized chunks, and does so with buckets of charm. Every level in the game is home to some sort of setpiece that makes it stick out in your mind, or further sells a joke that could’ve well just been presented in a dialogue box. Huey as a character isn’t anything particular as a companion to Mario, yet his comments keep the tone of the game consistently gleeful - though the actual events driving the conflict could have easily been framed as gruesome and serious, the game remains content in just giving you a good, harmless experience. The game is outrageously funny across the board: be it through slapstick or sharp writing with pitch-perfect localization, it never lets too many moments go by without almost wringing a smile out of you. This commitment to a feel-good experience is part of why I can’t really be too upset with the combat system being as flimsy as it is: The game bends over backwards to ensure that you never have a tough time with combat, handing out cards and paint at every step and always clearly communicating what specific Thing-cards are needed to beat each world’s boss. Really, with all three aforementioned resources, it’s almost as if the main purpose of the combat in the game is to drive you to explore even more - a feedback loop of rewarding your exploring with faster and less tedious battles.

I’ve grappled with this concept ever since I first started thinking about the JRPGs I liked and disliked - a good combat system isn’t really needed to make a good JRPG, so long as things are built around it. Most JRPGs offer easy modes that turn combat into a complete formality (Pokémon practically forces you into it), yet these playthroughs are still enjoyed by the fun found elsewhere in the game. Then again, a game like Final Fantasy XIII manages to catch scrutiny for its lack of world design, despite having one of the best combat systems in the franchise. A lot of people simply don’t gel with the balance between combat and non-combat being tipped too far into one direction, yet I often find games become far less impressive on the whole when the two end up worse than they could be due to each other. Had Final Fantasy XIII had layered, intensely designed dungeons with layers of movement mechanics and collectibles to watch out for, a player’s focus would diverge from the actual meat of the game in the combat - the player’s attention would be spread almost as thin as that of the developers. And while I'm not arguing that Color Splash would've been a worse game had it had an actually interesting combat system, I do believe the developers chose the right thing to prioritize.

In the end, Paper Mario: Color Splash isn’t a game meant to blow you away as the JRPG that solved all the genre’s issues or hurdles, nor one meant to awe you with its scale. Much like the Wii U itself, it sits contently in the corner knowing its downplayed ambitions were enough to make some people happy. And I’m glad to be one of those people.

[Play Time: 30 Hours]
[Key Word: Content]