Fans weren’t lying, this really is the best Sonic game we’ve had in years.

If you’re looking for a balanced review of the game, you won’t be finding one here. If you’d like more positive perspectives on the latest Sonic hotness, I’d highly recommend reading Pangburn and MagneticBurn’s written pieces on the game, as well as watching ThorHighHeels and Cybershell’s recent videos on it. This review will not discuss any story spoilers, but will vaguely touch upon the final few bosses.

Initially I had (unfairly) written the game off based on its truly awful press coverage, but it’s not like I had much faith in this franchise’s future anyway after getting a game as vapid as Sonic Forces. Though let it be known that I’m always willing to give something a chance, no matter how little I think I’ll like it. I hadn’t planned on getting to this for a while, but after my brother bought it on Steam out of the same curiosity for the game that I had, I knew I should probably just go ahead and play it. Now that I’m on the other end of the experience I think I’m even more concerned for this franchise's future.

After his last 3D outing this series was bound to take a sharp turn somewhere, but I think this genuinely might be Sonic’s most baffling course correction yet. True to its name, Sonic Frontiers stands as the dividing line between the older boost era of games and whatever empty path the series may decide to take next. This should be cause for celebration as I think everyone was essentially done with standard boost games after Forces, but I’m not convinced this open world zone approach is the right way to go if this series wants to stay on the cutting edge.


Over his career, Sonic has always been nothing if not a trend chaser, and that’s abundantly clear here. Shifting away from a straightforward progression though linear stages, Frontiers dumps you into a huge, empty map and sends you off on your way to do whatever it asks of you, knocking out dozens of menial checkmark tasks on your way to the next Thing. Generally you’ll be bouncing between haphazardly placed waves of enemies, puzzles that feel like they were made by a computer, and traditional boost stages in some of the most shameless methods of content rehashing I’ve seen in a long time. In-between these game-percentage ticks are the vast open fields themselves, letting Sonic stretch his legs a bit and run freely and mindlessly like the little rascal he is. After getting all the chaos emeralds on any given island (a process normally executed by fighting a boss to get a gear, using that gear to open a boost stage, playing the boost stage to collect keys, and using the keys to unlock emeralds), you’ll be thrust into a massive set piece pitting Super Sonic against a massive titan, and after beating the boss you’ll be ejected to the next island where the process begins anew.

It may sound harsh to explain this loop so bluntly and unceremoniously, but it’s not like I’m being totally uncharitable. This is the large bulk of what you’ll be doing during an average playthrough. Even among those who love the game, most would agree that a lot of the content in the open world itself can feel tedious at best or downright poor at worst, and I’d be inclined to agree.

Stopping dead in your tracks while zooming from place to place to complete another copy and pasted “puzzle” to fill out a map you’ve already explored is a recipe for disaster in any Sonic game as far as I’m concerned, and that's before you even consider the quality of the puzzles themselves. I think I’d be more charitable towards these if they were taxing in any way whatsoever, but they genuinely amount to turning your brain off for a variable period of time and getting rewarded with the mild satisfaction that you’re working towards a greater task in some small way. Sometimes you’re holding a button down for 30 seconds, sometimes you’re following a path around an obstacle course, sometimes you’re drawing a circle on the ground, sometimes it may even give you a slightly more valuable trinket as a reward for your hard work, but none of it will meaningfully latch onto you regardless. The game may as well just give you the stat boost / item for finding them (see also: looking at the marker on your map and running from one side of the map to the other to get to it) because the puzzles ultimately add nothing to the experience but provide a shallow time waster between story moments.


Let me slow down for a second, I know that these puzzles aren’t the primary draw of the game and it’d be foolish of me to pretend they are. This is a Sonic game after all, it’s always been more about the journey than the destination. Even the best 3D Sonic games are usually pretty fun to move around in regardless of any extraneous elements that may bog it down, so how is the movement in Frontiers? Well…

I’ll be upfront and admit that boost Sonic has never exactly been my thing, but there was a real opportunity here to transform this style of control into something that not only felt fresh, but managed to hold up the rest of the experience on its shoulders, flawed as the surrounding game may be. Against all odds, the system presented here managed to be possibly the most underwhelming iteration on this formula yet, but it’s not entirely the fault of the physics engine.

There was clearly an effort made here to give Sonic more tools to work with and add extraneous world elements to make field traversal flashier. but ultimately most of your experience will just be spent boosting everywhere if you’d like to get to your destination with any semblace of expediency or natural flow. It feels like most movement options (barring a few niche maneuvers like boost jumping off of a rail or other admittedly interesting speedrunning tricks for the Cyberspace stages) just punish you for trying anything other than the prescribed fun it wants to give you. Gone are the days of empty homing attacking to convert air acceleration into ground speed or spin dash jumping off a slope and shooting into the stratosphere, and in their place lie disconnected setpieces of rails and platforming challenges to stumble into and sit back in awe of. Admittedly, it can be rewarding in its own way to string these setpieces together in a way that can very occasionally bring me back to the beautiful labyrinthian nightmares of Sonic CD, but this type of traversal just is not my thing at all - boosting off a bump in the ground and entering a stiff arc in the air will never scratch the same itch to me as some of the crazy shit you can do in Sonic Adventure.

The elephant in the room regarding the openworld design is Breath of the Wild, a game that not only breathed new life into its own series back in 2017, but inadvertently spawned a wave of imitators that wouldn't pop up for at least a few years after the fact (you can’t make a game like Elden Ring in just a weekend). Sonic Frontiers is clearly drawing inspiration from this title, and while this isn’t a terrible thing on the face of it, I’m intensely bothered by the approach taken by Sonic Team. On the surface, both games are strikingly similar: A desolate, wide open map to explore, exceedingly simple puzzles sprinkled across the land, an emphasis on player growth in its collectables, and short cutscenes that add almost nothing but small moments of character growth to bolster the main plot. A common critique I’ve seen levied at Breath of the Wild over the years is that the land of Hyrule is boring to traverse, that nothing you do ever feels significant and that there’s nothing truly special to be discovered. I obviously resent this notion, but the reason why its crept back up in my mind is how Sonic Frontiers just feels like that imaginary game people have occasionally punched down on for 5 years. While many will bring up these two games in the same conversation primarily as a point of praise for Sonic, I feel like the core of each game couldn’t be any different.

Sure, it may be true that not every single task you perform is Breath of the Wild is exemplary, the secret to their success is one word: freedom. The freedom to go anywhere, do anything, see new sights, play at your own pace, and tie it in a nice bow at the end of it all. There are more granular elements to the game I adore, like how truly alive the world actually feels, but the thing that stands out the most to me in this concoction of fun is how decision making affects the game on such a massive scale. It’s not just that the game gives you a stat boosting item for a large portion of puzzles, it’s that you have to make the choice between boosting health or stamina. The world can be vicious early on with enemy camps dangling good early-game rewards on a string just in your grasp, so upgrading health might be desirable. At the same time, having a higher stamina bar is all but essential to make some of the more treacherous climbs in the game, and may also inadvertently make some combat encounters easier on the defensive if you need a hasty escape plan. While both of these can be mitigated somewhat through clever uses of the cooking system, it’s this consideration for player choice and their long term consequences that really make Breath of the Wild special to me, and go some way towards recapturing what made the original The Legend of Zelda feel like such a magical bolt of lighting on the industry.

No such consideration exists in Sonic Frontiers. Every task feels like it's being done for the sake of itself, rather than acting as a vehicle for interesting engagements with the world. Stat boosting has no bearing on how you play the game and does nothing but make combat slightly less tedious, so those rewards you get for completing puzzles may as well not exist. Enemy encounters similarly feel slapdash, there was not a single fight in my 15 hours of playtime that instilled any excitement in me whatsoever and I was tired of fighting the same mobs and minibosses by the time I saw them more than once. I guess it must appeal to someone that there are hundreds of little things on the map that go in one ear and out the other, but it certainly doesn’t to me. Frankly I don’t feel like this new approach fits the playground philosophy of Sonic in the slightest, and unless they come into the next game with a fresh mind on how puzzles and combat are designed, I think this approach should just be scrapped altogether. If Breath of the Wild was Zelda’s come to Jesus moment, Frontiers is Sonic’s JESUS IS KING moment.

As I’ve tried to lay out so far, I have massive fundamental problems with this game, but what truly breaks my heart is every small crevice of the game that just blows its potential for no good reason. It feels like with every nearly decent idea Sonic Frontiers has, it somehow undermines it and makes you realize the whole thing was built on an extraordinary shaky foundation to begin with. Why go to the effort of divorcing the homing attack from the double jump, only to layer it over another opposing action anyway with the combo button? Why even force a stamina bar on you when it takes two seconds to enable infinite stamina? Why offer me the choice of pumping my stats into ring capacity when you simultaneously benefit massively if you can reach the maximum rings, making an increase in rings tantamount to wasting my time long term? Why dangle a defense stat in my face when I can spawn infinite rings at any point negating every single challenge in the game? Why would you design these massive bosses in a game with combat at the forefront only for me to fight every single one in exactly the same way. Why would you add a mediocre fishing minigame to your laundry list of side activities and skip out on the presentation side of it (the only good reason to have a fishing minigame), completely? Why include Big the Cat in your roster of side characters if Jon St. Jon’s goofy ass voice isn’t the one backing him up? Why include a parry if you can just hold it down indefinitely, defeating the entire point of adding a parry to your game? What’s the point of living if we are all just going to die?

Even beyond the gameplay itself, I never found the actual primary tasks you’re bouncing between to be very satisfying either. Between chaos emerald runs, you’ll be collecting island specific collectables to satisfy the needs of a few of Sonic’s friends, and will be treated to short cutscenes of banter between Sonic and the character in question. Occasionally these conversations will directly tie into or work to resolve the current events unfolding in the game, but oftentimes are just quick conversations about old adventures or ad libs about the current psyche of the characters. The writing of these scenes (and by extension the story as a whole) have honestly eclipsed all other discussion surrounding this game, and part of me understands why. It's clear Ian Flynn cares for these characters and wanted to push this series forward in a big way, nearly every scene feels far more grounded than what you’d find in an older game with even this same cast, and with every character interaction you can practically feel the love flowing from the heart of Flynn as he tries to humanize everyone to the best of his ability. I see why people are into his approach of character writing, but man it’s just really not my thing.

To me, the highest highs of this series were always founded on sincerity through the shmaltz and camp. It's not that you had to take it seriously, it's that it was all coming from a genuine place of earnesty to make something fun first, and to write a compelling character drama second. Even when Sonic is absolutely fumbling over himself trying to weave together an interconnected mess of a story, he still somehow manages to bring it all home with an absolutely legendary finale. I’ll admit that much of this may be down to personal taste, but none of the melodrama here in Frontiers really managed to resonate with me, and I think part of that may be due to the presentation and escalation of scale here.

One of my favorite elements to the older Sonic games, (and you’ll have to bear with me here) was the buildup and anticipation to Super Sonic. This was less the case in the 2D games as it served more as a completion reward more than anything, but with the transition to 3D came a far grander scope, and an attempt at narrative pacing. The key word there is attempt - I think most would admit the writing in Sonic games has never been Shakespearean - but the effort was certainly appreciated, and likely played a large part in how these games were remembered over time. Even the blindest of Sonic haters would have to admit that he rarely disappoints for the finale, and this shift where Super Sonic went from a cute in-game bonus to a crazy big payoff right before the curtain call was a brilliant move on SEGA’s part. I tend to be one who prefers intrinsic gameplay benefits over extrinsic ones, but the buildup to the inevitable Super Sonic encounter in every subsequent 3D Sonic game has excited me ever since I first finished Sonic Unleashed back in 2008. Not only was it a smart move to ensure players couldn’t steamroll the challenge of the game (assuming they didn’t also intensify the requirements to unlock Super Sonic), but also to make the game’s final moments land way harder than they could have if say, you had repeated access to Super Sonic at multiple points throughout the game up until that point.

This is why the approach found in Sonic Frontiers feels extremely flaccid to me. It's hard to get excited over an encounter that may have been the equivalent to smashing my childhood toys together had it happened in an older Sonic game, but when it gets repeated 5 times without any build up or escalation on subsequent encounters, it quickly loses its luster. At first I thought this may have been done to amplify the impending finale where we’d really do some mad shit with Super Sonic, but that's not the case. Instead you have two choices based on the difficulty you’ve selected: on Normal you can have a final boss that plays just like the final encounters on the previous 4 islands followed by a Super Sonic cutscene, or on Hard you can have that followed by an… Ikaruga inspired final boss? I know I’m normally the biggest blind defender of shoving shmup sections in games where they admittedly rarely belong, but there was such a missed opportunity here to blow the roof off the finale of the game and at least end with a bang, but I suppose that would require some amount of buildup to be paid off by a hypothetical section like this.

I don’t wanna rip this game away from anyone who’s having a good time with it, after suffering for years with no reinvention I can totally buy that this game would be the one that ties everyone together and brings back a feeling of hope for this series that hasn’t been felt on this scale since Sonic Generations. That said, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed this on any level. This genuinely might just be a case of me growing up and this type of thing not really being for me anymore, which would be a genuine shame if that's the case. This series that once felt like a cause for joy and celebration in my life now feels trite to me, like the ship is finally sinking and the Captain is trying everything in their power to keep the cruise afloat. I’m sure they’ll still find some way to wrangle me back in to see how the blue bastard is doing in the future, but there’s no doubt that the spark is starting to fade for me.

not exactly sure how interested i am in grinding out runs of this (it takes far too long for stages to really provide much friction, scoring doesn't seem to have an interesting hook, it suffers from having a prototypical f2p progression system that ensures playing the game a lot is enough to play the game more effectively, etc.) but it's a genuine shame a title this inventive from someone as generally renowned as yu suzuki will no doubt crumble to dust in the wind after it inevitably stops being supported after a few years. this is nothing new for mobile games i suppose, and it might just be that the control scheme of this one is more-or-less intrinsically tied to the hardware it was built for, but there's no doubt in my mind this game will inevitably die with the iphone.

no clue how this plays on mac - i just found out as i'm writing this that there's a version for that device - but the control scheme for portable devices genuinely delights me and honestly is enough to carry the whole experience for me. having to constantly handoff control of moving and shooting between hands is a really cool idea that i haven't seen elsewhere, and one that i don't think would translate quite as well to two analog sticks, at least not in quite the same way. it feels really cool to have a new game with juggling control of your character being at the forefront of the experience, so many modern titles are obsessed with having such modular and customizable controls that naturally lend themselves to easier preservation and portability, but rarely if ever provide an inventive play experience like one you’d see in a fucked up little mobile game. give it a fair shot and you might be surprised!

despite all that, the biggest surprise was easily the soundtrack and general sound design. whoever decided enemy plasma shots should sound like blowing bubbles while layering queen knockoff music on top of the whole thing deserves the nobel prize

(full disclosure, i broke a small personal rule of mine with this one and played this game’s remake, ninja warriors: once again, before the original release. in the end they were closer than i expected, but i figured it’d be important to share my position upfront as subtle biases are inevitable)

Kinda torn between a hard 3 and a soft 4 with this one, but don’t let my indecision fool you - this is quite an excellent 2D beat 'em up. At this point I’m close to saying the shortcut to making an enjoyable beat 'em up is to just add a million moves to the game, but Natsume’s approach to Ninja Warriors was a bit more thoughtful than that. There’s usually a good reason to pick one move over another in combat, which is mighty impressive for a game with popcorn enemies that die in just a few hits, and selecting a new character feels tantamount to switching the game cartridge entirely. Take Kunoichi and Ninja, the two characters I’ve played through the game with at the point of writing. When I heard that Ninja lacked a proper jump in a genre I had previously perceived as overly simple, I foolishly disregarded him for Kunoichi on my first run of Once Again, but in retrospect he honestly might be my favorite character in the game. While the main difference between basic combos may be nothing more than range and damage, every other layer makes the two feel anything but similar, even when they share a similar template in a general sense. Kunoichi’s jump vs Ninja’s dash, her rebounding air attacks vs his short offensive hop attack, the fact that Ninja can move while holding an enemy while Kunoichi cannot, etc. I could go on but the little details really add up and break up the experience of playing the game quite nicely. It admittedly sounds pretty basic on paper, but the suffocating waves of enemies and sharp boss design counter-balance the relatively simple mechanics to ensure every run feels fresh in some way regardless of which character you end up using. It's some really smart stuff.

Where I actually hit a bit of a snag was surprisingly with the meter management, and here’s where I have to unfairly compare the game to its remake that came out 25 years after the original. Since you only have two ways to spend meter here, and any second spent without a full bar puts you at risk of losing the whole thing in an instant, I found myself instinctually playing safe and holding onto my meter for longer stretches of time, until eventually using a bomb as a free escape tool when I inevitably but myself in a nasty situation. Maybe it’s my previous experience with Once Again talking here, but I was surprised at how much the loss of a cheap ranged attack affected the way I viewed and utilized the meter. In the remake each character has a ranged attack for a fraction of your meter (from what I can recall it has roughly the same cost as a metered combo ender), and while it can’t be understated how powerful these moves can be, I mostly find them compelling for how it shifts your perspective on every element of play. In both versions, a knockdown with a partially filled energy bar is enough to drain it, so no matter what you’re putting yourself at some risk by not filling the bar asap. However, since your metered options are far stronger in Once Again, the temptation to spend meter more frequently grows exponentially. Ranged attacks are simultaneously easy to burn thanks to their strength and relatively low cost, while still having a bit of long term risk associated with it every time you spend that meter, and this small addition leads to a hectic flow where you’re spending meter frequently to clear rooms efficiently while still being punished later on for poor meter management.

To clear the air, I don’t want to imply that one version of this system is a flat improvement over the other. JohnHarrleson made an excellent case for how the original game’s implementation of meter usage can be just as engaging in his review of the game, and Once Again owes most of its success to the excellent foundation laid by the SNES classic that preceded it anyway, but in presenting two games that are similar on the surface yet exceedingly different in execution, it’s only natural for everyone to develop their own preferences. Ultimately I think the most impressive thing about this pair of titles is how natural the evolution to Ninja Warriors and Once Again was, how tenderly changes were applied to the core game without completely morphing its identity. If I could change one thing about the remake it would be to include the original ROM on the disc, because while I ended up preferring Once Again on the whole, I don’t really think you’re missing out on a dramatically better experience by picking it over this. At this point Natsume has more than sold me on their personal flavor of arcadey game design and their ability to expertly reevaluate their old work in a new light, so I’m extremely excited to keep exploring their library and see what else has been slowly forgotten by the public over time.

Taking notes from the Tokusatsu flavor of Japanese capeshit, Hideki Kamiya didn’t just want to blow the roof off of his last superhero game, he wanted to blast a hole in the ozone layer and cruise on the border the farthest reaches of the cosmos. He’s never been content with just shooting for the stars, but this title more than any other feels like the truest expression of what he’s wanted to achieve with his games. Having a massive team of action game legends and publisher money from Nintendo all but ensured that the final product would come out with a Platinum-like sheen of creative polish, but as far as I can tell, The Wonderful 101 still managed to impress almost anyone who gave it the time of day in a way nobody was really expecting. There’s a reason the game is still, generally speaking, regarded as one of the highlights of the Wii U. In 2020, it even managed to conjure over $1.5 million in an effort to port it to modern platforms, absolutely crushing the goals set by its Kickstarter.

Naturally, it crashed and burned on release.

The game bombed hard. I don’t envy the position of trying to market the damn thing to general consumers, but on top of the comparatively-niche appeal of the action genre and an aesthetic that repulsed many who laid eyes on it, The Wonderful 101 also didn’t make the experience of getting into it very easy. It wasn’t universally panned by critics or anything - in fact it reviewed pretty well considering how low its sales were - but it’s fair to say most people didn’t get it. Speaking personally, it took me multiple attempts on two different platforms to get past the on-ramp, and even beyond that point it took some time to really click with me.

It’s a real shame having so many of its players bounce off the experience before they can even experience a fraction of what it had to offer, but I almost don’t blame them, at least in retrospect. It's a title that gives out what you put in, possibly more than any other game I’ve ever played. Not everyone is gonna be willing to sit down and give something this mechanically-abrasive a chance, especially if it wears the façade of being nothing but a kid friendly Nintendo romp. Late-teens dudebros aren’t gonna give it their attention, and It probably isn’t a game for grandma either, I get it. Having said that, I don't want this piece to scare anyone off from the game, far from it. If you’ve read this far you surely care about or are interested in the game in some regard (or have played the game before, in which case this specific passage isn’t super important (or just like hearing reading what I have to say ❤)), so if you haven’t closed the tab yet, hear me out:

I don’t generally like picking my absolute favorite things, it's way easier to just provide a list of things I love than to comfortably settle down with one thing, but this is kinda the exception. Without question, if you asked me what my favorite game is, the answer would be an easy one. The Wonderful 101 has it all for me: a colorful cast of characters, a gameplay loop I can’t find anywhere else, indulgent yet tasteful callbacks to the history of the medium of games, a heartfelt story, a campaign that never loses its luster, and a finale I can only describe as legendary. It’s the complete package. Some games may do individual things better, but no game does it all with quite as much fanfare. I unabashedly love it, and I want as many people as possible to give it a fair chance (or two), just as I did. The best things in life don’t come without hardships, after all.

Video games, especially those in 3D spaces, have often struggled to consistently convey critical information to the player when it's most often needed, and it's easy to see why. How do you give the player enough time to react to something coming into frame in a fast paced platformer or a racer? How do you differentiate a hole in the ground from being a safe drop or an instant death trap? Many potential issues can be alleviated through smart signposting and subtle signals to the player, but it feels like action games in particular have struggled with cameras more than most genres. All too often it's extremely challenging to keep everything in focus with multiple enemies on your ass while grinding against the terrain to navigate the field, and that's before you take into account a camera that might not play nicely with the level geometry and act in unpredictable ways. Thankfully, this isn’t an unsolved issue in certain corners of the genre.

Kamiya has proven time and time again that he knows how to create encounters that feel simultaneously frantic yet completely fair, and while his most consistent quality in this regard is his ability to design a large pool of enemies with extremely clear audio and visual tells, he also employs subtle tricks in all of his games to hold the combat together. Devil May Cry makes the level geometry transparent if it obfuscates the player's view of the action, Viewtiful Joe simplifies the chaos by playing on a 2D plane like an old-school beat-em-up while still keeping the intricacies of a fully fleshed out action game, and Bayonetta prevents most enemies from being able to attack from beyond the camera's point of view. All of these systems go a long way towards addressing potential issues with focusing on everything at once, but for my money, no game has presented a solution as bold and creative as the one found in The Wonderful 101.

Locking the camera to an isometric perspective is one of the game's many design decisions that not only keeps the action legible at all times amidst the madness, but threads every element of gameplay together seamlessly while calling into question many of the standards set by games made before and after it, though I'm getting a little ahead of myself. As I mentioned before, action games are quick to become tense scrambles where you can not only lose mental control of the field, but literally struggle to control the camera and your character in the heat of the moment. Even in Bayonetta, a game I adore for the way it handles enemies in relation to its camera system, it's still very possible for it to get caught on a random part of the level and disorient the player. Given the chaos on screen in 101, it could have been extremely easy for this issue to rear its ugly head again, but thanks to the camera this is almost never an issue. Since you don't have to put physical and mental attention on camera control, it frees up the body and mind to focus on every other part of the game at once, so long as you have the fortitude to get past the initial hurdle of learning the mechanics and understanding how to read the field (a task that doesn’t take an entire playthrough to accomplish like some may have have led on).

At an initial glance the game might be hard to read, but upon further inspection you’ll quickly realize that the bright colors and zany designs only exist to assist the readability of moment-to-moment encounters, everything stands out against each other and the environments so well that you’ll never find yourself wondering what's going on once you know what you’re looking at. What may first be perceived as an overly-busy aesthetic that only exists to appeal to a younger demographic quickly justifies itself as an essential part of the play experience. It's a very freeing feeling to have such a common issue in the medium disappear so elegantly here, and while I’m not saying all cameras need to copy The Wonderful 101, any mediocre camera system stands out to me way more now that I’ve seen what can happen if you play with conventions even just a little bit.

This would probably be nothing more than a cool quirk if the action didn’t keep you on your toes, so thankfully the amazing enemy design keeps the game from ever feeling too bland. Nearly every member of the game's massive roster of enemies and bosses plays with arena control in interesting ways and almost always asks the player to juggle multiple conflicting tasks at once, something I crave in games such as this. For instance, you may have your focus on a tank that goes down quickly to a slow, heavy weapon, but other enemies might be quick enough to get hits in while you’re trying to take down a massive threat (it sounds simple, but exemplary enemy design isn’t the standard in action games it really should be).The top-down view also gives some breathing room for the level designers to make the arenas themselves treacherous in creative ways, helping to create encounters where even fighting basic mobs can be a stressful task. Very few encounters lose their appeal for me as a result, and for a title that runs far longer than the average action game, that's no small feat.

These factors individually are more than enough to set the combat way beyond the quality of most action games, and there are plenty of tertiary elements to the experience that make the campaign one of the best in the entire medium (way more than what I could reasonably fit into the scope of this review), but in my eyes, the golden thread that truly unites every element together beautifully and morphs the game into a masterpiece of action game design for me is the Wonder Liner.

Weapon switching is one of those mechanics that is always appreciated in an action game, but seldom implemented in a way that does anything more than give the player more tools to fight with. That last point might sound like an odd criticism to make, especially since we’ve seen what can happen if action games don’t implement some form of instant weapon switching, but it’s generally not something that’s interesting to execute on its own. While I wouldn’t say it dumbs down action games that utilize this system - the skill required to play them usually falls on decision making more than executing the moves themselves after all - it’s just an element to the genre that hasn’t seen much questioning or evolution since it started to make its way into titles that necessitated it. The act of switching itself doesn’t add nuance to a game, ”...it simply prohibits one set of moves, and enables a different set of moves.”. Rather than just settling on a button to cycle weapons, 101 takes a more creative approach.

Your squad of 100 Wonderful Ones is not just flooding the screen to flex the technical ability of a game console that was outdated before it even hit shelves, but is a key element to combat. They aren't just there to facilitate your massive arsenal of weapons, they are your arsenal of weapons.

Using the right analog stick, you draw out commands that signal your team to morph into different massive weapons, whether it be a circle for a fist, a straight line for a sword, or a squiggly line for a whip. It's like if you did a QCF motion in Street Fighter but instead of throwing out a hadouken, Ryu pulled out a gun. They really get creative with your arsenal and I’d hate to spoil it all here, but every weapon manages to not only fill out an interesting tactical role in combat, but also feels completely different to use as a result of the drawing system. This is already a lot to wrap your head around on your first playthrough, and this is before you consider what implications every other mechanic has on this one. If the game had the exact same combat mechanics with a traditional camera system, it wouldn't really work without further disconnecting the liner from the game world in some way (drawing on the lens of the camera or specific flat parts of the environment are common ways of addressing drawing mechanics in other games). It’s possible another system could also work here, but what I love about the solution presented in The Wonderful 101 is that it ties these otherworldly mechanics directly into the game seamlessly. You aren't just issuing vague commands for your team to follow, you're literally drawing out the shapes with a chain made of your heroes.

Even past the surface level details that the game absolutely excels at, this has massive ramifications on the flow of combat. Because the liner is a literal object in the world of the game, it's possible for enemy encounters to directly challenge your ability to draw each shape with efficiency. In a vacuum you may be good at drawing guns and hammers, but can you do it quickly in the heat of the moment? Or if a spiked enemy is blocking your path, can you draw the whip consistently in a different direction to not lose your team members? In a game like Devil May Cry it can feel like action and evasion are totally separate pieces of the combat, as it’s way easier to take your turn and juggle an enemy into oblivion, but not here. Enemies and stage hazards aren't just obstacles in moments of defense while you catch your bearings, but also during offense while you frantically try to get out different weapons and keep your advantage. Launching and comboing a stunned enemy is also a pretty involved task here, requiring a special stun state and your own ability to swap around weapons quickly, so unless you have a really strong grasp of the game you probably won’t be in a spot where danger is more than just a few feet away. It’s some really brilliant stuff.

Understandably, this is where The Wonderful 101 lost a lot of players. It asks so much of the player at the start compared to its contemporaries, but speaking personally for a second, pushing past the hump and "getting it" was easily one of the most satisfying feelings I've had in any game. If you keep at it and don't let losses discourage you, eventually you'll reach a level of mastery where you don't even have to think about how you'll be able to get the shapes out. It's very similar to the learning experience of learning a fighting game character's moveset, different motions may feel alien at first, but give it some practice and it'll quickly become 2nd nature. That may be why I was willing to stick with the system and give the game a chance - I'm not exactly a stranger to fighting games - but I don't believe the genre is required reading to enjoy this game on any level. After all, it probably has the most forgiving continue system I've ever seen (arguably to a fault in some regards) so you'll never find yourself grazing up against an insurmountable challenge on your first playthrough like you might in a different action game. The story is also just an absolute blast, so even if you haven't found your sea legs yet with the controls, you'll surely forget about any bumps in the road after you slice through a skyscraper that's just been thrown at you with a sword made out of human beings, or picked up a giant [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] everything around you only to see a massive [REDACTED] open up in [REDACTED].

Now, in any game with ambitions as lofty as those found in The Wonderful 101, cracks are bound to show eventually. There are plenty of tiny criticisms I've accrued after two years of playing the game (A few that have jumped out to me being that it doesn’t mix as many enemy types in combat as I’d like, or how you aren’t able to utilize motion inputs like stinger and rising into multi-unite) but nothing that outright ruined the game for me. Having said that, the thing that leaves me scratching my head the most is the progression system.

A pervasive thought I see in discussion around the game is that your toolkit at the start feels extremely limited compared to other action protags. There’s a few reasons why this could be (not least of which being the need to gradually ease players into its systems at the start without overwhelming them too much) but I will concede that it makes starting a new save after unlocking everything a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. While I appreciate how insane it is that every single Wonderful One levels up individually while still contributing to one massive level up system, it takes far too long to unlock certain key abilities that would show off the combat's potential far more quickly. There's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to buy key moves like stinger, rising, and cyclone with O-Parts and Wonderful Credit Cards, or god forbid offer a cheat code to level up your squad to unlock other upgrades sooner on subsequent save files. It doesn't help that this bizarre progression system is tied to a game where every weapon is so limited on its own, relatively speaking. Even just compared to Kamiya's last big action game Bayonetta, dial combos have been completely removed leaving just one main combo and a few extra moves for each of the game's massive spread of weapons (the whole experience of the game justifies this I feel, but on paper it really does seem rather limiting).

Beyond the design of the base game itself, the remaster on modern systems has also seen some bizarre changes and frustrating bugs, but despite what a certain Nintendo-adjacent YouTuber who didn’t play more than 30 minutes of the game would tell you, these actually have nothing to do with the peripheral you use to control the game. Some genuinely great changes like further tutorializaion on your basic block and dodge are nearly canceled out by old standard moves requiring an unlock, specific enemy interactions not getting fixed from the original game or getting messed up in the new version, and a massive list of bugs and glitches that keeps growing by the patch with official support that feels deafeningly silent at the moment. I’d still recommend the remaster over the Wii U version for the boost in performance alone, but for the past two years it’s been exceedingly frustrating to tack a “but” to many of my statements while recommending it to certain people. Even though many of its biggest issues aren’t something a new player will experience on a first playthrough, it’s still something that’s hard for me to ignore when discussing the game.

But…

I don’t care. Despite every issue I’ve mentioned or omitted, despite how weird of a thing it is to get into, and despite knowing deep down in my greasy heart that this isn’t something that everyone will be able to latch onto, I just don’t care. I love this too much to care. Everything comes together to make an experience so impactful that those small hardships feel like they were never there to begin with. The mini-games act simultaneously as cute callbacks to other games as well as being genuinely fun little skill checks in their own right, it’s still one of the funniest games out there from the written jokes to the visual gags throughout the game, it has the greatest quick-time event of all time with no contest, even the story feels really sharp and thoughtful. It really is the ultimate “greater than the sum of its parts” affair to me. You have no idea how refreshing it is to play something as full of life as this when the actual world we’re currently living in just feels like a shithole nightmare that exclusively beats down on those forced to participate. It truly feels like this game has more love for the joys of life than any other. It feels like it actually loves itself. And that's what it’s all about, right?

If The Wonderful 101 has taught me anything, it’s that it takes teamwork and perseverance to push through hardships in life. You never know what will be thrown your way, how you’ll push through it, or who you’ll have to push through with. But with the combined forces of everyone’s strength, it genuinely feels like even the impossible is possible. It’s not just about closing your eyes to the darkness and looking back to your childhood where you could ignore the evils of the world, it’s about learning how to grow together and push beyond what holds us back, both collectively and individually. Sometimes it will be difficult, and it may be hard to want to keep going, but it’ll be worth it in the end. It’s all about seeing the good in life and lifting up those around us so they can do the same. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of that.

is this really a win for klonoa? namco puppeteering his corpse with the prospect of future games that may not deliver or even get made? i'd rather this series die if this is the quality we can expect from it.

nevermind the obnoxious practice of holding series' hostage like this, it's deeply upsetting that the only compromise we get is a butchered representation of what came before. because god forbid people play old playstation games that "look dated" next to other games releasing today despite there not being a good way to experience how the original games were presented to begin with. you'd think more people would push back against this; especially considering the cries for more klonoa content from those who grew up with this series, but to my surprise basically everyone seems to be eating this up no questions asked. every few years this happens, an old series gets a spark of life in miserable fashion and sometimes it leads to something greater, but even with the best outcome i think its a bad precedent to set. sure crash bandicoot 4 crushed all expectations and is in the running for best game in the entire series, but it rubs me the wrong way that it came as a result of scrubbing away the hard work done by the original developers back in the late 90's.

i understand that much of this stems from publishers more than developers (it's not like they've been very forward thinking when it comes to the preservation of old games to begin with) but when companies demand stringent deadlines with no regard to quality control of course the product will come out half baked, no matter how much love was behind the wheel of it. i don't have a bird's eye view on the development of this project, but i can't imagine it was enjoyable or flexible to work under. even if their hearts were in the right place, theres no chance they had the tools needed to really do this series the justice it deserves.

no matter the circumstances though, this is what we're left with. a botched collection of beloved titles that, for the foreseeable future, is the only way to comfortably play these for most people. i'm not upset that it's overpriced or not stuffed with extraneous crap to justify the cost, i'm upset that this is the standard for preservation the industry is setting for itself. who cares about the game's legacy and how it impacted people, just slap a name on it to excite fans looking for to rekindle memories of better days gone by.

best case scenario we get a new sequel out of this collection and it really delivers on fan expectations, but is that really the lesson to be learned here? treat the past as a frivolous step to success so we can move onto the next new shiny thing? i can't help but feel deeply cynical over the industry if this is how we think we should celebrate the past. klonoa deserved better

A profoundly misunderstood classic that manages to impresses when stacked up against other games of the time, and effortlessly clears most modern attempts at being a satisfying action game. Even beyond the innovation on display (nobody was doing it like Capcom back in the late 90's/early 2000's) I'm consistently swept off my feet at how enjoyable this game is, even after around 8 personal playthroughs and 21(!) years of further innovation and inspiration in the medium. Dante may be a tad heftier than your modern action protag, but it has the side-effect of forcing you to constantly stay glued to encounters in a way I haven't really seen before. You must consider every step you take and every action you make, it's electrifying. I don't have any ill will towards Itsuno for reinventing the series like he did --who wouldn't after being tasked with scraping together the scattered remains of the last title and still having it come out like crap-- but there's still something here that later entries still have yet to recapture for me. It may not have the glitz and glamor of it's many sequels, but what you get instead is one of the most well considered, tightly paced, and highly rewarding gaming experiences out there.

Takes me back to the days of screwing around on school desktops trying to find something to play to pass the time while I was supposed to be working. Miniclip was usually my site of choice, and while it was reliable enough, it was usually filled to the brim with pages of crap to sift through. Occasionally though, you'd find that one diamond in the rough that feels like it was made by someone who, at some point in their life, probably dug through shovelware in the past looking for something fun to play. Someone who just wants to slip into something cozy for a bit and have a nice time.

Sadly, experiences like that are much harder to come by these days. Not only has Flash compatibility been scrubbed clean from modern internet browsers, but scrolling through community posted games looking for buried treasure on something like Steam to scratch that same itch has a bit of a stigma tied to it these days. Fundamentally, the process isn’t too dissimilar to the one in your old computer lab, but now that a price tag is usually involved on top of the responsibilities and time loss that come with adulthood, people don’t really want to bother anymore. Why would anyone want to sift through thousands of asset flip pieces of software when they can just download the latest Sony cinematic adventure?

I think the practicality of old browser games is mostly a thing of the past by now, but it seems as though that era will still live on, at least in spirit. At its core, The Ramp is just like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, with the caveat of being shrunken down to the size of a single screen from an isometric perspective. What does the game have on offer other than this? Nothing! If you’ve played THPS and have seen any footage of this game, you know exactly what to expect. It's more akin to a distraction than anything. I’m not familiar with the developers or their intent behind the game, but I suspect their goal was to create a simple pick up and play game not too dissimilar to the ones you might find on Miniclip or Nitrome. At its price on PC some players may scoff at such a package, and while it is admittedly a tough sell compared to most, I can’t help but adore how it recaptures the spirit of its contemporaries, whether it meant to or not.

Can't say this has too much staying power for me personally, as these days I'm usually looking for something with a bit more meat on it's bones, but I don't think it needs to. The Ramp exists in its own little virtual realm, somewhere between playing THPS and doing kickflips with physical Tech Decks on a coffee table. I wish there were more small games like this that are just comfortable being quaint little projects from passionate developers on the same wavelength as their players. It's a delightful little time capsule that takes me back to a simpler slice of time and space where games were past the point of being considered child’s playthings, while still holding onto a bit of that childish whimsy that came from playing with toys in your spare time.

Despite how my taste has evolved over time to prefer gamey-games rooted in arcade sensibilities, I still really struggle with sticking to many older arcade games. They're usually games that I'm able to appreciate and have fun with from time to time, but am always intimidated by in some way or another. Nevermind the fact that I've never been any good at them to begin with, being stuck in a never-ending loop of repetition to test my endurance has never been my preferred way to play (this may also be why I've been really into shmups lately to scratch my arcade itch, their difficulty is nigh impenetrable at the start, but after some practice, runs usually become 30 minutes to an hour at most). Even in more modern games that encourage score-chasing like Bayonetta, I love how inviting they tend to be to pick up for an afternoon and try to get the best rank on a level or two.

Now I don't want to be dishonest and say that none of this applies to old arcade games, that just wouldn't be true. Take the original Pac-Man for example: I can rarely get past the 6th level (let alone make it to the kill screen) without floundering and losing all my lives, but I'd be lying if I said the act of trying to beat my personal best wasn't invigorating. I understand the appeal of a game that can go on forever if you're skilled enough, I just personally lack the dexterity and mental fortitude to push my runs just that little bit longer for more than a few runs at a time. I think this is part of why Pac-Man Championship Edition is so innately appealing to me.

The most obvious change in Championship Edition is the addition of a hard-set time limit, something that undoubtedly changes the fundamental flow and pace of the game, but one that makes it easier to crack into for a more casual player like myself. It's way easier to justify starting a run of an arcade game when you know definitively that an end is in sight, and that it's easy to attain. In the case of CE, it means that each run becomes far more sharp and focused in the short-term, compared to the long-term goal of the vanilla game potentially being shot down and erased in a few quick mistakes. Aforementioned failure just feels better when runs aren't super draining.

More impressive is the way CE adapts and modernizes the original design document of Pac-Man without feeling like a completely different experience. Less pellets on screen at once that are compressed together means progress is snappier and less time is spent traversing through empty lanes, the ever evolving layout prevents runs from becoming tiresome and makes it harder to autopilot, and only refreshing one half of the maze at once means that players are forced to move back and forth constantly with meaningful intent. All of this under the pressure of a time limit and the ever-present yet obfuscated scaling speed of the game makes each run a frantic test of your ability to juggle a dozen different tasks at once. As a good example, in vanilla you may want to camp the maze and line up every ghost next to an Energizer to maximize your points, but in CE you don't have time to waste so you should frequently just take whatever chance you can get to use it. But if you ever do line everything up correctly it feels far more satisfying to achieve in a timely manner. Same goes for chaining energizers for a long ass combo, I don't think I've felt anything as electrifying as managing to gobble up 10 ghosts in a single combo in quite some time. Every little adjustment feels simultaneously tasteful to the original intent of the game while still acting as the perfect bullet point on an already arguably perfect game. How many games like this can you think of that only subtly iterate on the original and end up feeling definitive? That'd be like the 2D Mario games feeling conclusive after New Super Mario Bros. or something, I can't think of many examples where this has happened outside of this.

Despite being a little dry on content, Pac-Man Championship Edition is a game I can tell I'll be playing for a very long time, and might just be my first meaningful breakthrough into the original game. Nothing substantial was removed from the transition from vanilla to CE so skills acquired in one should theoretically carry over from one to the other for me. I think the sign of a truly masterful iteration is one that smooths out the original experience without completely invalidating it. One that feels modern while still keeping it's old soul in one piece. CE won't stop people from playing vanilla, hell it won't even stop Namco from continuing to make Pac-Man games, but as it stands, I think this is the most impressive mic-dropping moment in the gaming industry, and I don't foresee this being more than a once-in-a-generation moment.
Seriously though I have no clue why it doesn't at least include an optional endless mode, that alone would likely justify this as the definitive Pac-Man game and would genuinely make everybody happy. There's no reason it shouldn't be there. What the hell man. Port this to Steam so somebody can mod it in Namco!!!

edit: yeah so apparently this is getting ported to steam and new platforms in like a month and i had no idea lmao, y'all better buy it when it drops just saying

Recommended by Dusty Vita on this list.

While Marvel vs. Capcom was an enchanting concoction of two disparate corners of pop culture that created a fighting game experience you couldn’t find anywhere else, Capcom vs. SNK 2 leans in the opposite direction and sets out to create the perfect mechanical marriage of the two without sacrificing any element that made them special to begin with. In fact, I’d argue that it does a more interesting job in combining the gameplay of the source material than any other crossover fighter I’ve played.

Like any good crossover, the roster is sure to satisfy basically every fan of the genre, but CVS2’s true claim to fame is it’s brilliant Groove System. By selecting one of six presets styled after Capcom and SNK respectively, the player is able to tweak the game’s feel to their liking by essentially adding and subtracting mechanics depending on the Groove. Do you like Third Strike and the exhilaration that parrying gave? Pick P-Groove! Do you yearn for MAX mode and the dizzying movement options that made King of Fighters so interesting? Try N-Groove! Are you someone like me who really enjoys the custom combo system of Street Fighter Alpha? A-Groove is the one for you. Each style also completely changes how your meter works, so in essence, you basically have 6 versions of every character in the roster that aren’t insignificantly different. With an insane number of options and even some amount of mechanical overlap between certain Grooves (for example, 3 of the 6 Grooves feature rolling as an option) There’s basically no chance the player can’t find something they’ll like.

Here’s the catch: for each team, you only get ONE Groove choice. This isn’t like MVC where each character gets their own assist that changes the composition of your team, you just get one. They could have easily opened the floodgates and let the player customize every single character to their liking, but this little restriction makes the act of building a team way more interesting to me. It’s a small yet significant way to nudge the player towards experimentation and makes the construction of each team feel meaningful. Without it, it’d be too easy to pick what feels comfortable and just assign each character a Groove that fits in with their original design.

Another small wrinkle in the team building process is the Ratio system, though this is something that works in the background compared to the immediate changes Grooves make. Before the start of the game you have the choice to customize the size of the team, with sizes ranging from 1 to 3 team members. In an effort to balance this, you’re also tasked with assigning the strength of each team member using 4 points, with each point making the character way stronger and tankier than before. As someone pretty new to the game, I can’t speak on the competitive viability of picking a small team size over a larger one, but like the Groove system, I suspect it just depends on the characters in question and the taste of the player.

The aesthetic of the game is probably the one element to the game that deserves the most “objective” scrutiny. It’s no secret that Capcom liked to reuse sprites from older arcade games for their insane crossover titles (not surprising given the size of these rosters) and while at it’s best some of the sprite styles blend together and help make the aesthetic cohesive, a lot of times it makes certain sides of the roster feel really out of place.

Outside of a few characters that clearly needed a graphical facelift, the whole vibe of the game is so cohesive that a few blemishes tend to fall by the wayside for me. Being a post-Y2K game, it’s no surprise that the whole package feels like an exercise of friendly competition more than a battle for glory. The televised tournament setting present throughout every aspect of the package ties the mood of the game together for me and calls back to the setup of The King of Fighters Tournaments present in that series very nicely.

While Capcom vs. SNK 2 is a game that admittedly doesn’t scratch all of the competitive itches I may be looking for in a fighting game, it feels so complete and confident in it’s execution that I can’t help but love everything that its going for. I think I’d go as far as to say that it's one of the best casual fighting games for this very reason. If it feels like this writeup feels more like a surface-level examination of the game’s features more than anything, it's because it nails everything a first timer would probably cling to upon trying the game, and that's why I find it so endearing.

It may not have the craziest combos of any crossover or the most consistent sprite work of the era, but it makes up for all of this by being one of the most accessible, inviting, and overall jovial packages in fighting games. It has something for everyone, and that might just be the trick to get more people into the genre I love so much. You don’t need to dumb down the mechanical breadth to appeal to a casual demographic, you just need to make a game that can make someone go “Wow, that game looks cool as hell, I should play that”.