Imagine if they took Trouble Shooter and somehow made a better version of it somehow. Like imagine Trouble Shooter is a brand of sake you like. And maybe somehow somewhere, someone found like a much older and rarer version of that sake, and opened it up and poured it for you, and when you tasted it, it was at once familiar to you yet somehow much more refined and fulfilled, that much closer to actualizing its potential into exactly what it was supposed to be all along. It’s kind of like that, a much higher quality bottling of sake, a vintage even.

Not since “The Lord of King” have I seen such a limp wet towel of a Japanese original name for a game that was mercifully changed into something forgettably appropriate instead. “Crying”? Are you kidding me? Did you stub your toe at the same time you were coming up with that? What’s the sequel going to be, Giggling? Grow the fuck up, we’re calling it Bio Hazard Battle. It’s a battle, you’re fighting biological enemies, and yeah sure, I guess they’re a hazard to your immediate health. If you don’t like it, then you know who’s really going to be crying? The localization team, when they suddenly find themselves packing up their shit out of their offices because corporate just saw the sales figures for North America and realized no nineties boys wanted to buy a game called Crying. CRYING, for fucks sake

Exactly what I thought a SNES Jajamaru game would be for better or worse. Maybe a smidge too long, and what if I told you there’s an ice level with a slippery floor? 😮

I looked at a YouTube playthrough to figure out how to roll through a low hanging wall and I couldn’t help but notice how significantly better the music was than what I was playing. Mine sounded like a demo track, about twenty seconds long, and the same for each stage. Turns out if you go to the options in the main menu there are two choices: enhanced music and enhanced sound effects, which is very odd to me. “Whaddaya want, good tunes or good sounds? You CANNOT have both!” Also sucks that I found out only after getting a little more than halfway through 😔

I wanted this to turn out differently, I really did. I wanted to put more than 3.5 stars up there and write something goofy like “first giant fetish in New Super Mario Bros and now fursuits, what kind of deviantart-ass shit is Nintendo trying to get me into, there better not be any vore in Odyssey lol, lmfao even.” Unfortunately, such is not to be.

I’m going to level with all of you. I may seem like the kooky and lovable Gare that you all know and exactly 102 of you follow, but once you get to know me you’ll find out that I have the emotional intelligence of a toddler. That is to say I get ah, frustrated easily. I spent most of my childhood being told I was smarter than most of my classmates and naturally talented and I could do anything I set out to do, so now if I ever find anything difficult on the first try, anything at all, I get angry and give up. On top of that, I’m pretty sure I have high blood pressure. If I ever tried to play a single dark souls game I think it would literally kill me.

Having said that, I now understand exactly what I want when I play a game. I view them at this point like movies, that is to say for storytelling, writing and acting and the interesting juxtaposition of disparate elements. If there’s not really a story to it, then I want to experience all the levels while controlling the hero as if they are in the full capacity of their abilities and reach an ending where, even if they don’t technically “win,” it still wraps up in a narratively satisfying way. To me, games are stories, not sports. I can accept that sports are essentially sets of conventions and rules that one must practice to master, but I don’t agree that games are necessarily the same in this way. If some bullshit is going to get in the way of me experiencing a game all the way through, I’m going to bypass it one way or another, by cheats, by save states, whatever it takes. And if I can’t do any of that, I don’t play it. Simple as that.

A few things influenced this philosophy of mine, such as the above-mentioned tendency for me to temper tantrum. Another is that difficulty is artificial, a choice on the developer’s part, and often one rooted in condescension for the player, a desire to wring out perceived value in a $65 game package, or even porque no los dos. Another still is that I’m just aware I don’t have a lot of time. I’m well past half the age of threescore and ten that in the Dantean tradition is meant to be what all men are doled out in life by God Almighty if you’re into that, and I still have like over 300 games left on my list. I had 300 on there for the past four years! I want to play as many as I can but I mean, I want to do other shit too. I do really like RPGs, but I’ve played enough of them to the point where farming for gold is pretty much the same in all of them. Do I really have to spend an extra half hour around the town mashing the A button just to get some good weapons, or can I do something that brings me closer to the moment I get them faster, like folding two points together in an Einstein-Rosen bridge?

All this, after becoming aware of how much I needed a personal set of tenets like this after my roommates heard me through my room during the pandemic, worked well for me for a long while, until I decided that for better or worse the switch was going to be the one modern console I’d have for the time being. When you download a game on the switch, you see, you can’t get rid of it, it’s on your profile forever. Which means that, if I happen to download something that I’m not aware goes against my personal policy until it’s too late, like maybe Hollow Knight for example, I can’t stop playing it. It’s always in my redownload page if I ever want to redownload something else. The save file is always backed up in the Nintendo cloud. It’s always there. It’s torture for me, tearing out my hair getting through bitch mantises and fuckmoths and Celeste spike rooms, then going online and being exposed to the worst debate that will never end. For eternity, until the aliens visit the ruins of our fallen civilization, one side being like accessibility for us is going to in no way whatsoever diminish the sense of accomplishment for you, and the other being like lmao it’s not for you crybaby, go play Kirby or Mario.

I purposely got a bunch of Mario and Kirby games this year expressly for this reason. I wanted to chill out for a couple months. Super Mario Bros Wonder was great for that. Then I played this.

Lives in Mario games are a staple since time primordial, but in recent years, and especially in Wonder, they’re more of an afterthought, probably because the green mushroom and coins are so iconic they still need a token reason to be there. I went into 3D world viewing lives with the same nonchalant attitude I had for them in Wonder, and around the beginning of the first stage in world three maybe, I had about forty lives. When I beat the stage, I had three. Turns out you’re more mindful of them when you lose them over and over again. Everything seemed to be a middle finger right in my face, from the levels to the slot machines never paying out, to the magical golden train disappearing after I casually died on it seconds after starting it, to hating the very appearance of small Mario, losing powerups as often as I did and finishing seemingly every level hatless and looking like some horrible chubby little Dutch boy. I began to get frustrated again, maybe not hollow knight levels, but enough to where I thought I maybe shouldn’t be. How much of this was just me, and how much of it was, you know, it’s kind of consistently a pain in the ass to gauge exactly what direction you’re jumping and/or shooting a projectile in, in a way that 3D land, which no one here seems to like, almost never is?

Well, an interesting-for-about-three-minutes YouTube video suggested that maybe it was me. It was about how Mario games are designed to be as difficult as you choose them to be, with more difficult routes over easier ones, little optional features to keep you going if you’re stuck somewhere, and whether or not you decide to play as Luigi. I guess that’s what I did, because I decided to get all the stamps and green stars, the staple of every Mario game since 64 (and also I played as Luigi a lot. Luigi’s my favorite, I love Luigi, I personally identify as Luigi, the fuck Nintendo, why would you make the openly-gay Mario brother the hard mode character). But the problem is, it’s not really optional, is it? Just like Hollow Knight on my switch profile, it’s always there! Right in front of you, every time you go to any level, “did you get the stars? Did you get the stamp? Did you remember to flagpole sitta?” It involved me dying a few times, sometimes deliberately sending Mario into hot lava with not a small amount of satisfaction, until I could get the sparkly tanooki suit (funny enough, at one level the suit actually prevented me from getting a star, as it destroyed a thwomp you needed to jump on to reach it). “Gimme the suit, I don’t have time for this,” I said to the game over and over again. Because what choice do you really have? You can no more ignore those hollow star-shaped slots in each level than you can “Makeba” playing on a ten hour loop or someone constantly poking you in the back of your head. Just ignore it? You sound like the switch support rep I spoke to who told me “just don’t ever redownload games.”

Ultimately, I got through it. I chilled out and got the hang of the slot machine, racking up lives again, and realizing that I should save the bells for the parts where I really need to climb up to get something. I couldn’t believe that after the last castle, complete with a bowser fight, there was STILL one more bowser world to go, and my heart sank when, after painstakingly collecting stars and stamps all throughout, I found out that there are four long-as-shit special world super-hard “get skullfucked land” levels full of more of them, which I will never in a million years even hope to collect. Nonetheless, I rescued the fairies or whatever (I also coincidentally on the same day finally beat the last boss in Metroid Dread, who by the way is fucking bullshit, it’s like four tiers and if you lose one you have start back at the beginning).

Look, on the one hand, I love Mario, and short of like a Mario hentai snuff game I’m gonna like anything Mario does. But on the other hand, Wonder made me happy the whole time, and 3D world made me mad. It’s a pain in the ass to play, but maybe it’s my fault too? I dunno man, 3.5 stars I guess. I’m also being told that in Odyssey you can choose to play the entire game with Mario clad only in his underwear. Sigh…

I was already aware of the foolishly-implemented leveling system here and I found a patch that supposedly gives double exp, so I fully intended for this review to be like “this is why you patch your roms, folks! Games from before the PSX era were inherently built to be unfair and waste your time, you can actually enjoy them now, who cares if it’s not on original hardware, you don’t have thousands of dollars for that and also one of my friends is now telling me his eyes are frying because of the blue light in his crt monitor, so it isn’t worth it anyway!”

Except I played it, and either the rom patch is straight up lying or this game is indeed still confirmed: #fuckingbullshit. It’s cute and fairly short (or would be without the leveling at least) but there is already hard-to-control attacks, enemies with a lot of hit points and attack patterns that are hard to navigate, and near the end of the game there is… wait for it… an ICE PALACE with a SLIPPERY FLOOR!!!! 😄😄😄👏👏👏👏 A patch that fixes the grinding for this game should make it so that simply playing and facing whatever baddies come to you will adequately level you up so you don’t have to interrupt the pacing and farm for spear-chucking garlic clove exp. As far as I can tell, the only thing the patch does here is just make it even more confusing as to what level you think you’re supposed to be at before you face a boss. For the second-to-last boss you have to collect a secret item that is his supposed weakness, and even after using it on him I was still hitting him with nothing. I don't want to play a game you tell me is patched and still have to deal with Dragon Ball Z-ass dialogue that's like "you, a level 11 sissy boy, you dare to challenge ME, I who have reached the highest echelons of level 15? Come back when you've advanced at least three more levels and your little vampire wrists are a little less limp."

If I had liked this after all my review would have been something like “the good guys eat tomatoes for health and the bad guys use garlic to attack, but maybe if they learn to set aside their difference and work together, I bet they could make a delicious marinara sauce.” Instead, I'm afraid I now have to settle for "hm, I guess I learned that I should really trust Jenny from now on."

Played this one first before some kind of glitch broke the game right before the entrance to the final dungeon, so I just found a save file for the original GBA and beat it there. Sucks too, I had some stupid good battle chips 😔

It "fixes" the original far less than one would like to think. The map is helpful, but there's still awful backtracking, so now you can just see where you have to stupidly backtrack to. I don't care for the voice clips either. It's basically just "jacking in!" every time you jack in and 'fight good, mega man!" every time you fight but in Japanese and kind of poorly recorded, and I also don't really like the voice clips calling him "Netto-kun" and the text calling him "Lan" either. The extra mission is fine, I guess? The best I could say it wasn't too long an interruption of the main campaign. The extra half star comes from how really real fuckin nice it is to Operate Shooting Star instead of Mega Man near the endgame. Hold down the fire button to rapid fire, automatic charge shots, and that lock-on? Hoo baby. You don't even need any area grab chips! Load up on swords and these viruses are fcukin dead in the water.

Also it bears repeating, but DR GODDAMN WILY??!!?!?!?!?!?!!!!

Give it up, man.