text by tim rogers

★★★★

I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!



The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.

Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:

Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”

This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.

This is hardly hyperbole.

Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.

What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.

The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”

Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!

The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.

And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.

This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)

Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.

Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.

Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.

At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because

1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.

Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.

Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.

Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.

All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.

Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.

Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.

ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW

I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..

In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.

Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.

You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.

Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.

Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.

Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.

There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.

I will explain the weapon classes briefly:

1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.

2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.

3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.

4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.

5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.

6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)

7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.

Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.

Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.

Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:

1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.

2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.

3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.

4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.

5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.

6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.

All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.

And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.

The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.

Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.

All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.

Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.

The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.

The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.





What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.

At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.

I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.

This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.

In other words:

Absolute highest recommendation.

–tim rogers

addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.

addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.

Beyond their obvious visual splendor, what really struck me about Boku Natsu 2’s fixed camera angles was how they create a unique relationship with time. In similar Japanese adventure games about mundane day-to-day life – your Shenmues or your Chulips – the clock is always running independent of you and this often creates situations where you simply have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the next scheduled event to happen. As top Backloggd scholars have pointed out, this can be oddly immersive in a way, as you scroll through your real-life phone or do something else around the house while you wait for the time to pass in-game. I’m not fully sold on these kinds of “time-wasting” systems but there’s certainly a lot of charm in how they represent boredom and alienation felt within the hustle and bustle of the city.

Boku No Natsuyasumi 2 is set in the rural countryside though, and as such its understanding of time is quite different from those games about city slickers. While there’s still a day/night cycle and a finite number of days before the game ends, time only advances when you move from one pre-rendered background to the next. Constructing the game this way, you still feel the pressure to spend your time wisely and traverse the world as efficiently as you can, but each screen is also its own pocket dimension where you can linger as long as you’d like. This is the real difference here: In Chulip, passive play is something forced onto you and an excuse for the player to stop paying attention to the game for a couple minutes. Sometimes you just miss a train and have nothing better to do but sit around waiting for the next one. In Boku Natsu 2 however, passive play is turned into an active choice. A conscious decision, as significant as any other, to do absolutely fucking nothing but drink in the sunset until that fireball finally goes out for good. At one point a character playing the guitar remarks that she feels like she’s been sitting in the same spot strumming the same song for 1000 years. And maybe she has been. These beautiful, fleeting moments can last forever if you’d like them to.

Like most of my favorite game narratives, Boku Natsu 2 is quite thin on actual plot and is instead a game about talking to loads of different people and slowly forming an understanding of character relationships and the world around you. And there’s a satisfyingly predictable rhythm to how it all unfolds; each character will have exactly two new things to say to you each time you see them, the many subplots of this game being fed to you a couple breadcrumbs at a time. Through it all, there’s an understanding that seeing and doing everything is completely infeasible. Minigames are too time-consuming and characters are spaced too far apart for you to realistically see half of what this game has to offer on a first playthrough. So despite the game’s large number of collectibles and sidequests, play rarely becomes something stressful or compulsive. As the in-game month of August wore on and subplots continued to pile up, I did start to feel less like a child on summer vacation and more like an errand boy for all the grown-ups around me. Though the game smartly chooses to wrap up its major character arcs a few days before the ending, which gives you a chance to decompress and play aimlessly for just a little bit longer.

Boku Natsu 2 is an unrelentingly pleasant game about nature, romance, and new life, but it never becomes too saccharine as there’s always the specter of industry, divorce, and death creeping in around the edges. The writing itself is wonderfully terse, full of frequently beautiful reflections on life and the world that feel achingly true to conversations between children and adults. Even when the story suddenly escalates during the final third and the player starts piecing together a larger picture that our 9 year old main character has no ability to process, Boku Natsu 2 always puts that 9 year old’s perspective front and center. Because at the end of the day, that perspective and innocence is why he’s able to mend the hearts and soothe the souls of everyone around him.

“Listen, doesn’t sitting on the swing make you feel like you can be a poet?”

the swinging package here is sewn up by three mechanics: the boost, the web zip, and the charge jump. in a modern design, the boost would inevitably be restrained by some kind of resource like a meter or a cooldown thanks to the idle nodding of designers seeing a chance to add an explicit limitation to the system. spider-man 2 doesn't need that; the boost's only mechanical restriction is that it can be used once per swing with no other catch. simply obtaining the speed that it comes with using it adds enough danger to traversal to avoid any need for an artificial check on its power. the web zip (once obtained) defrays this by opening up an escape hatch when you need to bail out. its ability to quickly change your angle and briefly cap your speed reins in runaway or unexpected swings. the charge jump overlays all of this with the ability to influence height out of the swing and weave in ground movement without losing momentum. it gives the player a variable amount of impulse based on how long it's been buffered, and it sits completely independent of the other moves, making it chargeable in the background while simultaneously swinging. these three beg not only multilayered decision-making, with fingers working independently to control different systems, but also robust split-second decision-making that keeps the player constantly juggling the three as the micropositioning constantly evolves.

that's primarily because the micropositioning (partially) controls where spidey's webs go, and it's nuanced to such an extent that you'll often have no idea what exactly it'll attach to or how you'll swing around its fulcrum. watch this quick speedrun of the pizza missions and you'll see even a world record holder overshoot objectives, muddle with awkward climbing angles, and get stuck inside a fire escape. this chaos persists even at lower speeds, so there's no point to holding yourself back; boost as often as you can and be prepared for disaster. the game's challenges accept this fact and run with it by featuring generously sized rings to run through without many "tricks" involved. in fact, most of the challenges would feel like filler if not for the volatility of the swinging system giving much-needed variety to what otherwise are checkpoints slapped inside city blocks. you're never expected to plan intricate routes through these because accepting inconsistency and learning to work around it is the core of the game's unique movement system. even simple additions to a challenge such as mandating wallrunning, loop-de-loops, or landing on the ground inside particular checkpoints wrinkle the necessary traversal in such a way that you'll remember one-off challenges days after you originally played them. these nuances are the crux of the game's appeal.

whether this sounds appealing to you in the long run depends on how much intrinsic enjoyment you can get out of this system without much structure surrounding it. its these challenges and the pizza missions providing most of your sustenance, and luckily they're available from mere minutes into the game. however, to further upgrade your base speed, expect to pay the piper by sleepwalking through ~4-5 hours of story-driven setpieces. it shockingly does little to play with your swinging chops and instead alternates extremely lax "get to the objective" segments with dull beat-em-up combat that rarely escalates beyond spamming the air combo and the contextual dodge. it luckily rarely veers into true frustration, but the fact that you have to engage with it all was a rather sore point to me. having to eat my veggies to enjoy my traversal dessert doesn't hit quite as hard when the dessert itself is a bit of an acquired taste, riddled with its own frustrations and inconsistencies. holistically the experience feels often more like something I enjoy dissecting in theory and less so in practice.

the similarities to gravity rush occurred to me while playing, as I outlined in my review of that game that it was also a bare-bones open world experience buoyed by its exciting traversal yet limited by rarely leaning into it outside of optional challenges. spider-man 2 is an even purer expression of that sentiment, with a washed-out, flat version of manhattan replacing the anachronistically rich hekseville and an even more wild and disorienting swinging system replacing the comparatively straight-forward gravity control. a game I see myself continuing to pop in to pick away at the remaining challenges, but not necessarily one that kept me enthralled.

In an industry that continues to blindly chase accessibility, I can't help but appreciate a game that unabashedly tells you to play "its way." Funny to imagine a game as acclaimed as this coming out today and being regarded as "dated" for being like it is. We no longer accept games that simply want us to play "their way," because "some people can't play that way!" Even funnier seeing the medium doggedly pursuing the status of "real art" even though they keep compromising it for the sake of appealing to all audiences. You know, even when the game is a violent action title. Ninja Gaiden Black hasn't endured in the same way that other action games have for a reason. Maybe "the game's way" is too hard, maybe the checkpoints are too far apart, maybe it doesn't have a manual lock-on feature. But it wants you to play "its way" for a reason. Too many checkpoints may trivialize certain encounters or make them blend together. Some encounters are intense battles which would be made far less threatening and engaging if they had the same stakes as a casual brawl while exploring an exciting new area.

This is just one example of Ninja Gaiden Black teaching you to play "its way." Once you've begun playing "its way," you become one with the systems. Every attack is punishing so dodging them is always satisfying. There aren't rigid attack windows, you must dynamically react to every enemy to begin your ultra-crunchy violent massacres. You need to be committed to your decisions, every move has weight and can determine whether you live or die, but everything is so quick that the amount of possible decisions is never compromised. The game becomes a simple matter of reacting and attacking, pushed forward by a perfectly paced campaign through an intriguing world with the best visuals of the entire generation. It becomes almost hypnotic...

The acceptable shape of "hard games" has grown small. They have lock on, they have generous I-frames in the form of a big dodge roll, they have little 6 pixel platforms surrounded by spikes, they have big flashing symbols telling me the dangerous attack is about to hit, they have little 30 second checkpoint loops so that I don't have to waste my time replaying a section i beat, they present all information with absolute clarity, they make sure I have enough resources so that I don't need to think about it. These things are not bad but they are so common it becomes limiting. If a game breaks the formula, it's fake difficulty, fake difficulty is when the game is difficult in ways I don't like, making it fake.
Ninja Gaiden has enemies who will grab you for blocking too much, the grab has almost no tell, you simply need to be aware it's a risk. Ninja Gaiden has enemies who will pelt you with exploding knives for daring to be in the same room as them, that's not their only attack it's just a thing they'll do. Ninja Gaiden gives you a dozen attacks that'll insta kill just about any goon in the game if you know where to apply them. Ninja Gaiden does not have a lock on, it would simply cause problems. Ninja Gaiden remains thrilling even as your expertise grows because it demands you remain mindful of enemies that you understand perfectly. I forgot to make a punchline for this one.

My original addendum got deleted because I made a rude comment about Arzest and Sonic Team, so I'll omit that and just cut straight to the point:

Trip Mode is an utter travesty that only magnifies this game's problems.

While compared to the character-specific levels that are in the main story, the levels do use far more of Trip's moveset, this is countered by the fact that these levels are so haphazardly designed in ways that are incredibly dickish with no other purpose. The levels in Trip mode actively relish in bullshit, like springs that send you straight into instant death or having you fly into an enemy you couldn't see, which results in these levels feeling more prolonged than they already are.

While using Trip and the increase in obstacles does result in more usage of powers like Slowdown or the Beanstalk, these are still made situational because if you got all the Chaos Emeralds in the main story (which you likely would have given the game gives you ample opportunity to do so), you will have access to Trip's Super Form, which allows you to fly infinitely, taking the piss out of everything.

If it were just this, I would likely have kept my rating the same as I did initially, but the bosses are where Trip's Story truly falls apart. They're more prolonged and still have all of the problems that made them miserable in the first place. In my previous review, I had a comment that said that me saying "waiting in a Sonic game" is terrible. Still, my argument here is when the bosses are designed in a way that actively disregards your time and forces you to have to take an inactive role in damaging the boss, what else am I supposed to think other than that it's a waste of my time? Some of these bosses have downtimes where you can't damage them that range from 5-15 seconds and sometimes upwards to 25 seconds. On the Carnival Zone Act 3 boss, I spent 20 seconds in Trip's super form on top of the boss, unable to damage it. That's not good boss design, especially not in a franchise like Sonic, where in previous Classic entries, it was a viable strategy to try and multi-hit the boss to end it as quickly as possible.

The worst offender of all is Fang the Sniper, who, through some miserable circumstances, has been given the worst boss fight I've seen in a Classic Sonic game. The first fight with him isn't good by any means and has active sections just centered on wasting your time, but the second fight with him in Trip's Story is just one of the dullest, obnoxiously designed fights I've seen in this series, and I am not ashamed to say I haven't beaten it.

It is nothing but instant kill attacks and time-wasting. It is so utterly dull that I wonder what the developers were thinking, making such an atrocious waste of time. Not to mention, it's two phases for no real discernable reason. This brings me to my complaint about unlimited lives: They don't help.

The fact that I get no downtime between boss attempts serves to be more infuriating than helpful, and to top it off; it's fucking redundant in a game that HAS A HUBWORLD WHERE YOU CAN JUST WALK AND START THE STAGE AGAIN. It gives the devs an excuse to keep plopping out these miserably designed stages and fights that serve nothing but to infuriate and agitate.

I'm not finishing Trip mode; I've decided that, ultimately, it isn't worth it. Super Mario Wonder comes out today, and while I got fucked by the shipping, so I'm not getting the game for an extra day, I know that it will be far more worth my time and effort to play.

I have always been a Sonic fan since I was a three-year-old boy playing Sonic 2 for the first time. But if this is how Classic Sonic will be treated from now on, with this level of hollowness and utterly unpleasant design choices, then I firmly believe it should have died after Mania.

If this is the road we're going down, I hope I never see another Classic Sonic game as long as I live.

In all the time building up to this game and Mario Wonder, I have constantly argued about what "soul" means for a video game. To have a "soul" means to have substance, a reason to exist in the first place, something of inherent value. There are many games I would argue that have a vast "soul," Fallout New Vegas, Lobotomy Corporation, hell, even something like Tsukihime has some value buried deep down inherently. So the question then becomes, what does a game with no "soul" look like?

Enter Sonic Superstars.

While this game may have the facade of Classic Sonic down, it lacks any of the charm that makes any of those titles feel fresh and exciting. Every stage feels dead and lifeless as if they were put into an AI Sonic Level generator and shat out like pig slop; All the most generic and bland concepts. We have bitchless Green Hill, we have bitchless Chemical Plant, We have bitchless Death Egg Zone, everything so utterly devoid of true originality.

None of these stages brought any semblance of joy to me, even with the physics being relatively similar; going through these vapid, boring worlds left me tired and unhappy. While the game isn't offensively bad in the way that something like Sonic 4 is, it represents an arguably worse issue: Pure Unadulterated Mediocrity.

Starting first with the Chaos Emeralds, while the Special Stages are mostly mindless nonsense, the Chaos Emeralds have functions beyond granting you your Super State. Each Emerald has individual powers, a concept not seen since Tails' Adventure on the Game Gear. In theory, these would all be very cool, but in practice, almost all of the abilities are situational at best, and borderline useless otherwise.

What is the purpose of the Vision power when the game doesn't blatantly tell you to use it? Fucking nothing, absolutely nothing. The ability to turn into water is so situational, given that most of the areas in the game don't have water, and it isn't even that helpful when used. I guess the beanstalk one is helpful, but if you play Tails (like me), it doesn't serve much purpose. The ones I got the most use out of were the Screen Nuke (the first one you get for some reason) and the Slowdown Power. The slowdown power was helpful in particular instances in boss fights, and well, the Screen Nuke is part of why this game isn't even worse in my eyes because let's talk about the bosses.

Sonic Bosses have never indeed been the pinnacle of boss fights, especially in Classic, but usually, they were a relatively speedy process. Superstars decides to nix that and make it so that bosses can only be damaged at certain times, removing the strat of multi-hitting a boss that the older games and even Mania used. This results in fights where you must wait before you can do anything. Waiting in a Sonic Game, indeed, we have reached the point of stupidity I didn't think was possible. The Screen Nuke exists because it can essentially chain hits on bosses, annihilating them to make them less lengthy… Not that it matters because some of these later boss fights start getting so long you'd wonder if you're playing Sonic or a JRPG.

Not to mention this game still falls into annoying tropes I hate, like random shmup level near the end of the game that plays like shit and wastes your time. Hell, at one point in the final level, the game has you go through the same four level gimmicks in a row, like three fucking times, and then the next act have you do it all backward; I cannot make this shit up.

I'm sure all this will come across as foaming at the mouth, but you must understand I love Sonic. Sonic is my favorite platformer franchise, and I am so sick of seeing it fall back into mediocrity when games like Mania prove that this franchise can move forward. But here at Arzest, I can see the only thing being moved forward is level gimmick after level gimmick, hell there was even a Gimmick Programmer in the fucking credits.

There are other things I could say: Unlimited Lives is stupid, the character-specific and fruit stages are literal wastes of time, the music is forgettable minus the one Tee Lopes track, and every level looks boring.

The profound lack of soul comes from the fact that Sonic Superstars is what happens when you make a mass-produced Sonic game, gentrified Sonic the Hedgehog. All you have are some dull level concepts and a bunch of wasted potential.

To think I wanted to make a video comparing this game to Mario Wonder… I have to scrap it because it'd be like comparing a Coughing Baby to a Hydrogen Bomb.