Beat it. Once. By laming it out on the final boss. So, not exactly the kind of mastery I think a review of this game actually deserves- but perhaps the biggest compliment I can give is that I wanted to start it again, immediately, picking a new character and replaying it on a harder difficulty.
A few stray thoughts:
- Maybe one of the best combat engines ever: Even raising my skill from bad to middling was a great deal of fun, going from meekly throwing out a special move once or twice every stage to pushing myself to abuse my defensive attacks for their i-frames and OTG properties, and having to play on the razor's edge until I regained my health as a result. It’s a great bit of balancing, all the resources and strategies you used to just beat the game, now recontextualized as you go for a high score.
- Even though I haven’t played the originals, a brief glance through the art gallery comparing the old enemy sprites to the new redesigns definitely had me feeling like this entry was a bit softer, none of the menace they seemed to have in the older games.
- Weird lack of voice acting in the cutscenes. I imagine it’s a non-issue 50 hours in, but it really does feel like a missing layer. Everything’s here- sound effects, music, but no dialogue. It may also be an issue of the presentation: had the game kept a retro style, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but make everything look so animated and it does draw attention to the silence. (As an aside, maybe why the VO in River City Girls felt so unnecessary.)
- The survival mode is a pretty brilliant bit of future-proofing; in an age of randomizers and challenge runs, it’s nice to see a developer acknowledge the desire for an evergreen bit of content. Reinforces my belief that, if possible, every game should include some kind of supplementary, score-attack mode.
May try to write something more cogent later.
A few stray thoughts:
- Maybe one of the best combat engines ever: Even raising my skill from bad to middling was a great deal of fun, going from meekly throwing out a special move once or twice every stage to pushing myself to abuse my defensive attacks for their i-frames and OTG properties, and having to play on the razor's edge until I regained my health as a result. It’s a great bit of balancing, all the resources and strategies you used to just beat the game, now recontextualized as you go for a high score.
- Even though I haven’t played the originals, a brief glance through the art gallery comparing the old enemy sprites to the new redesigns definitely had me feeling like this entry was a bit softer, none of the menace they seemed to have in the older games.
- Weird lack of voice acting in the cutscenes. I imagine it’s a non-issue 50 hours in, but it really does feel like a missing layer. Everything’s here- sound effects, music, but no dialogue. It may also be an issue of the presentation: had the game kept a retro style, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but make everything look so animated and it does draw attention to the silence. (As an aside, maybe why the VO in River City Girls felt so unnecessary.)
- The survival mode is a pretty brilliant bit of future-proofing; in an age of randomizers and challenge runs, it’s nice to see a developer acknowledge the desire for an evergreen bit of content. Reinforces my belief that, if possible, every game should include some kind of supplementary, score-attack mode.
May try to write something more cogent later.