Maybe this is just my perspective as a Nintendo child speaking, but the games catalogue of Insomniac Games always fascinated me from a distance for how...underdiscussed their games seemed to be, despite being regarded as classics. There's absolutely a vocal fanbase for Spyro, and an even more vocal fanbase for their later hit series, yet it was never quite one I was able to get a grasp on the consensus of - there was an understood agreement of quality yet never one true point to really anchor it down. And I hate to be part of the problem, but now with first-hand experience under my belt, I think I get what they mean: The original Ratchet & Clank manages to be a great game despite never truly excelling in any one area of design.

I try, with any game I play, to understand the objective and intent of the designers and artists behind the game during my time playing it - to reach a sort of agreement upon which to draw my analysis. This is part of why platformers are some of my all-time favorite games - their intent is usually immediately understandable as soon as you're given control. Mario is a toybox - games with a character able to do many things, with levels often made purely around the lowest common denominator, yet with a moveset sparkling with potential for freedom of expression. Sonic is a training ground - a set of mechanics that oft feel unwiedly and difficult to use properly, yet one with boundless potential for faster, yet faster times, with a ranking system always at the ready to push you to your absolute limits. Donkey Kong and Crash are an obstacle course - characters with dead-simple mechanics placed in contexts that ask the utmost of your capabilities as a player, of your mastery of every little interaction between the character and their world, with bountiful rewards given to those who can go the extra mile. Yet in my time demoing the original Spyro the Dragon, this sort of distillation felt damn near impossible to get done. Spyro could move fast, yet his levels lacked incentive to utilize it to its fullest. He could breathe fire, jump and glide, yet there's rarely more asked of you to do than those basic actions in isolation. And as I was playing, trying to think of yet one more think to note down...the level I was in had already ended.

And that's when it clicked for me - the secret ingredient.

The absolute greatest achievement of Ratchet & Clank, beyond its distinct art design, immaculate music, charming character writing and thematic core, is that a fast, steady pace is prioritized above all else. Ratchet & Clank, much like its dragonic ancenstor, doesn't truly push the envelope in any one particular area of its gameplay - its gunplay is simple, its jumps and platforming are not much more than fit-for-purpose, and its mobility is never one to truly let the player run freely about. Yet none of what Ratchet & Clank tasks its players with accomplishing ever takes long enough to where one would begin longing for more. Enemies can be defeated as quickly as they appear, and their deaths are punctuated with the oh-so-satisfying sounds of bolts - hard cash in the Ratchetverse - whizzing into the lombax's pockets. Atop every hill lays a new visually distinct, breathtaking vista - and after just four or five of those, you've circled back to your ship, seen a funny cutscene with entertaining dialogue, and gotten a new weapon or mobility upgrade. Particularly with the weapons, there's always something to draw your attention - "maybe I could try the Visibomb here?" "These enemies are all bunched together, maybe the Walloper would be funny to use here?" "Ooh, if I use the Mine Glove and then Taunter, I can draw enemies into the mines!" It's not so much that these creative options for combat are required nor rewarding to solve, but that it all adds to the feeling of the game always having stimulus of some sort at the ready.

It's easy to liken its constant sense of progression to a Metroidvania or RPG, but it althesame feels immensely befitting of the narrative the original Ratchet & Clank tells. The duo are an odd pair in this one, going from somewhat neutral on one another to bickering to becoming more genuinely trusting of one another, yet the everpresent constant that drives the dynamic is Ratchet's own hot-headedness, not in any way moronic yet always leading thoughts with the trigger rather than the brain. The easy comparison to make here would be toward Sonic the Hedgehog, yet for as much of a go-getter as he is, I've always had the impression that he's fully capable and willing to slow down and assess situations inbetween sprints: he's never been restrained in his life and knows when its okay to take it slow. Ratchet, meanwhile, is excited to finally be off his home, finally getting to see the world and let it guide his ship on his first real adventure - he never stops to chat or befriend anyone for longer than what's needed. It feels like a reflection of the game's own pace and structure, as if the environments we explore aren't necessarily seen in their entirety, but only in the pieces that Ratchet himself is willing to go through before being ready to hop off to the next fun world. The persona of a determined delinquent scrapyard mechanic also obviously lends itself further to the combat, as it never stops feeling exciting to mow down fools with the arsenal at your disposal.

If Ratchet is emblematic of the sheer sense of tempo, aggression and power given to the player throughout the game, then I suppose Clank represents the opposite aspects - the details that are easily missed, almost asking one to slow down to be fully appreciated. The absolute scale, atmosphere and visual detail of a world like Metropolis, the effects and animations of every gun and enemy, the differing architecture and sense of culture from planet to planet...though its a world that you can easily and quite enjoyably breeze through, its also one that doesn't shy away from letting the player smell the roses at their own leisure. I feel like this balance seeps into upholding just about every part of the game - the cutscenes are both funny because of the snappy and outright excellent dialogue, yet watching attentively can alert the player to so many little intricacies of how the universe and its people operate. How much a character like Captain Qwark says about the status, importance and exploitation of celebrities, how full-scale warfare sort of just happens in the background in several of the game's planets without any true sense of panic or surprise expressed by its inhabitants - as if its just part of their everyday lives to expect the world to turn upside down at the whims of their rulers. And crucially how, despite being a mechanic and a rebel in spirit, Ratchet remains subservient to a capitalist system - his collected scrap isn't material to craft weapons on his own accord, but currency for purchasing weapons as goods. Like your average punk-rock song, Ratchet & Clank knows, criticizes and shouts about the system that's restraining them, yet relishes in that rebelliousness as an aesthetic moreso than committing to serious discussion on the topics raised. It has important things to say and messages to be dissected by its players, yet the aforementioned Ratchet half of the game sees to ensures that such discussion never bogs down the game's pure intentions of being a fun video game for too long - what fun is punk-rock if you can't enjoy listening to it?

Put rather bluntly, Ratchet & Clank can often feel like a game of many half-measures: much like Spyro its influences are clear to see yet its commitment lays uncertain. Yet all of it is wrapped in an aesthetic, structure and pace that sparks of confidence, a pair of voices shouting at you to always keep going fast yet to also always appreciate the detail and care of the world. And though there are times where those two voices feel thoroughly at odds with one another, for a surprising amount of the runtime they truly do harmonize into an experience that kept me hooked.

Though I may not love Ratchet & Clank, the game feels as if it is truly in love with itself, and I can't help but find that admirable.

[Playtime: 14 Hours]
[Key Word: Rapidfire]

What does it mean to explore a world?

In a prior review, I discussed and explored my feelings on a world segmented into individual explorable levels, each so tightly-paced and dense in content that the joy of exploration never let up. A lot of collectathons strive to reach this kind of collectible-hunting nirvana, and its part of the DNA that they share with Metroidvanias. Indeed, there exist entire video games genres effectively based around the pure gameplay enjoyment of exploring virtual worlds.

Yet there’s always been a second side to that coin. A world as described above can’t often be described as a breathing one, can it? When every collectible is laid out just to tickle the player’s neurons right, all level design invites you to stay for just as long as is needed, every character created to fill a need, and so on. As pleasant as these worlds may be, its hard to shake the feeling of simply being a vacationer on a tourguide, a hero with a trail of breadcrumbs always guiding them toward the sword in the stone. And for all the faults the game may otherwise have, this is the area in which the original Shenmue truly shines: making you feel part of its distinctly living, breathing world.

After having the scene set by an opening cutscene, new players may realize just how little is given to them in the way of guidance. Navigating Ryo’s house alone can feel daunting, trapped by narrow passages with an extremely unorthodox, slow control scheme. Indeed, Despite an action-packed opening, what you’ll spend the next segment of the game doing can best be described as meandering. And you’re sure to have heard it all before in gaming discourse: Every passerby you see in Shenmue has a name, a personality, a schedule they adhere to, and hobbies and jobs that influence what they tell you. What’s effectively a point-and-click adventure game mixed with occasional fighting game segments turns into something entirely new once you realize just how little the game actually tries to help you in both areas. As Ryo Hazuki, the only things you can truly rely on are a notebook, a pair of shoes, and the roads they tread.

Though not a game with any sort of branching story, it is still one that understands and reacts to every little piece of the narrative, and one that truly wants you to pay attention to those small changes overtime. Just as every NPC has their own life, their dialogue evolves with each little progression made in the story, gradually giving Ryo the chance to hear the thoughts on every character as you approach the story’s dark truths. Yet for as much there is to find in Shenmue’s world, there’s no fast travel, no indication of what doing certain tasks will really achieve, no HUD beyond the clock on your arm and the road that lies ahead. Brimming with secrets, yet not privy to guide you to them: Its a game that, in the most pure form possible, strives to hide its gaminess, and wants you to simply engage with its world without thought to its objective.

That isn’t to say that a greater objective isn’t present, of course. The game tells an engaging mystery as you navigate Ryo from person to person, place to place, learning more about the circumstances of both his fathers death and their family’s place in the world. A lot has been said about Ryo’s stoicness and generally wooden expressiveness, but I don’t believe with any part of me that this was a writing error: The game is as much a story about Ryo solving a mystery as it is him slowly figuring out his place in the world. Ryo is a guy with a mission, yet time and time again during the adventure you’re reminded that he IS just a normal teenager - his classmates worry about him, the locals greet him with a smile and tells him to take care, and always warn him to be careful getting further into the dark world that took his father’s life. Through the slow mundanity of everyday gameplay, you get a lot of time to reflect on these things alongside Ryo as you walk the streets of Dobuita. Ryo really wants to avenge his father, but…everyone is so happy to just have him alive here, why can’t that be enough?

And I think that dilemma, that aspect of Ryo’s character, makes the kind of slow and meandering gameplay fit him so well. There’s such a brilliant clash from day and night in the game, going from visiting all the local residents and asking them about what’s been happening recently, to getting into fights in bars or sneaking into secret warehouses whilst avoiding cops. Much like Ryo’s own life, there’s two sides of the game playing out, one filled with excitement and danger and the other filled with love and tranquility. For as nice as all those action scenes are, and as well directed as the QTE sequences can be…many times I’d wish for them to end, just to be able to step foot in that beautiful little town again.

24 years on from its original release, it really can’t be overstated just how beautiful the original Shenmue still is. The character models sit in that perfect sweet spot between reality and abstraction, appearing as sculptured dolls with enchanting expressionwork, and the world they inhabit is filled with life around every corner. Its hard to not get goosebumps as night falls at 7PM, and get shown some absolutely beautiful shots of the area you’re currently in. The different parts of the world are so lovingly crafted, dense with life, that it becomes second nature to navigate this little world without the need for a map. Shenmue is, in fact, so confident in this that it flat out doesn’t give the player a map, outside of signs placed about scattershot around the world. All of this is topped off with beautifully expressive fighting animations as you engage in combat, with some of the most satisfying hit sounds you’ll ever hear in a game.

There’s something so fascinating about playing a game clearly filled with money and polish around every corner, yet still so confident in its own vision that its willing to completely shrug its shoulders upon being asked where to go next. Beyond the lack of a map, the game obfuscates how to really unlock its new fighting techniques, hiding some away until you’re able to fully utilize its button input. The game lets you, and encourages you to, pick up every single little trinket, open every single drawer, inspect almost every thing you can buy at stores, as Ryo physically picks it up - and never informs you on if this is something worth doing for progression or not. The game lets you buy drinks from vending machines and pick freely between several different flavors, again without ever hinting at its purpose in gameplay. The game features a full gallery of collectible figures, which you obtain simply by playing a gachapon machine with no clear end goal in sight. As said before, engaging with Shenmue is akin to engaging with a game that doesn’t want to be perceived as a game, or rather, like you’re literally stepping into the shoes of a teenager in a world just as confusingly unclear as ours. And sure, much like Ryo, you’ll get newfound determination when an objective is in sight: the Forklift racing segments pit you against 7 other forklift drivers in a makeshift race course and provide tons of adrenaline and excitement, yet… still leaves you unsure of what you’ve truly achieved at the end of each race.

Win or lose, it’s still just…another day at the job. Another safe, regular, uneventful day.

The days go by, and Ryo feels as if he’s slowly inching closer to his goal, but…is that progression really worth it? Like a Ying and Yang, both Shenmue and Ryo simultaneously want to remain leisurely confused in the place they call home, whilst also longing to boldly move forward in the world. In all the game’s calm moments, Ryo remains as focused as ever on hunting down the man who killed his father, consumed by a wish for revenge, and those close to him repeatedly try to tell him just how dark of a path he’s heading down. Yet Ryo stays so laser-focused on this one incident, because the Hazuki clan is the only thing in his life that ever processed to him as giving him purpose. Even with several good friends, a caring adoptive family, a community he cherishes, and eventually a stable job with coworkers he gets along with well, Ryo is just unable to disconnect himself from the clan, even if doing so would lead to a safer, happier life.

And I do genuinely believe there is a metanarrative of sorts here: We as players crave the excitement of fights and action scenes, and may end up more frustrated than at peace with the many times you’re encouraged to simply spend time in Shenmue’s world. Its almost unfathomable to suggest to players today that Shenmue’s lack of excitement is part of its appeal, because so much of what the industry wants is action, drama, excitement, tension, progression, and so on. Shenmue finds so much worth in the mundane, yet Ryo seems to reject it at every chance to pursue a dark truth, one that will undoubtedly make his life worse to bear, just for that sense of closure. And really, everyone wishes for some sort of closure: For instance, during the 24 years since the original game released, Shenmue fans too have waited for for an ending to Ryo’s story, with none in sight even after a kickstarted third game. But beyond that, we wish for closure in our day-to-day lives: To find a job that satisfies our every wish, to find something in life that never stops making us happy, to not keep getting fucked over by the shitty hands life deals us…

When you’re racing, your mind thinks solely of the finish line.
When you’re playing a game, you think solely of the progress made.
When you’re working, you think solely of the deadline.
And when you give yourself a goal, it’s easy to ignore all the beauty life has to offer, just for the sake of achieving it.

It can be hard, damn near impossible at times, to tell yourself to enjoy life for its pointlessness - to smell the roses not for an achievement, but for yourself. Shenmue tells you to relish those moments for as long as you can: To inspect every item, talk to every person, observe every building, listen to every cassette tape, and take as many breaths in its unforgiving, perfectly constructed world as you please. Because the boat to Hong Kong is a one-way ticket - once Ryo leaves, it’s too late for regrets.

[Playtime: ???]
[Key Word: Purpose]

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 03-04-2022

Playing the first Mario VS Donkey Kong recently, the spiritual successor to this game released nearly 10 years later, made me look back to this game with a lot of fondness. Its not really a stretch in my eyes to say that it is one of the most impressive Game Boy games, period. But I need to clarify to those unfamiliar with this game: Its more than just "really good, for a handheld title"- it's on par in terms of scope and quality with some of the SNES' finest, and genuinely has no right being as good as it is.

It's a game inspired by the original Donkey Kong, a game where your only action besides walking and climbing ladders is a pitifully short jump, yet it both understands what makes that gameplay fun, and expands your moveset and the variety of levels to make the game even more fun. 3D Mario would end up borrowing a lot from this game, with its focus on acrobatics and the like. Some levels in Mario 64 like Bob-Omb Battlefield and Whomps Fortress feel made with a similar level design philosophy, of climbing a tower with an arsenal of wacky jumps. But for as mindlessly fun it is to just waltz around in 64 its always felt unfocused in a way that doesn't click with me, mostly due to the low difficulty and lack of precise platforming that stems from stretching the levels out into explorable sandboxes.

Simply put, I'm the player who tends to prefer the "Secret Stages", "Time Rifts" or "Voids" a lot more over the explorative "main game" these kinds of 3D platformers tend to provide. And DK94 feels like a game made up solely of those more focused segments. By making a game that both has tight, focused challenges with precise jumps and tricky timing ALONGSIDE the stylish flips and vaults that let you clear challenges more effectively if you master their handling...it scratches a very specific itch in my brain, basically. I don't want to mindlessly compare this game to something like Mega Man Zero, of course, but it gives me that same feeling of satisfaction, from using cool movement in very confined and challening rooms. THIS is what I really like from platformers, and I find it really cool how well DK94 captures it.

Its obviously not anywhere near as fast as other movement-based platformers: A lot of levels are more about puzzle solving and timing things whilst on slower moving platforms, or finding ways to transport the key from its spawn to the door. But the concise design of levels never make it feel like a chore, and when compared to something like the Portal games it allows you to take in the entire room at once thanks to the sidescrolling perspective, minimizing moments of analysis paralysis and instead letting you solve problems whilst working toward them with the platforming.

Its such a solid foundation with such buttery smooth controls and physics (hell, it has a better sideflip than Odyssey!!) that I have a hard time finding fault with it. At its worst I'd say that the game drags a little by the end due to the excessive amount of content. That's something I noticed Mario VS Donkey Kong was able to improve upon with its benefit of hindsight, creating a nice form of variety with the Mini Mario sections at the end of worlds. Yet shockingly, even with 10 years of hindsight, that was one of the only things that the game truly improved on.

Despite that lack of hindsight, its platform, age, scale and stupidly grand ambitions to establish a whole new kind of Mario game, DK94 barely stumbles as a first entry. And that's the sign of something truly special.

Play Time: ???
Key Word: Peak

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 06-07-2021

This review's been a long time coming, but given how much this game borrows from Resident Evil 4, I wanted to play that game for just a smidge beforehand to see how they compare. I'm a ways off from beating 4, but it was an interesting comparison all the same.

So! You may recall that I was lukewarm on RE7 as a game. It was a great story and had atmosphere in spades, but lacked that kind of gameplay-driven horror and enemy design that made REMake and RE2 2019 such sublime games. RE8 isn't quite like either: Again, its an RE4-type game. That's honestly the direction I would have went with too if I was in charge of 8, and while it lacks a lot of what made that game's gunplay so sublime, it makes up for it by also mixing in elements from all past RE entries into a game bursting at the seams with variety.

But its variety in the good way, where everything still feels like Resident Evil. You get your RE3 Nemesis stalker in Dimitrescu's, brief ambient RE7 horror in the Bieniviento house, more typical RE2-style play at Moreau's, dangerous enemies in a threating maze at Heisenberg's a la RE1...there's even some love paid to RE6-style action near the end, and inbetween all of these major sections the base gameplay simply SCREAMS RE4 in the best way possible. While the 1st person camera isn't perfect for either action or horror, this game shows its utility in bridging the gap between them: The action of a first-person shooter that utilizes the horror that comes from that claustrophobic view.

It's a miracle the game ends up being as fun as it is whilst still stretching itself this thin, but it absolutely still is. Nothing about its gameplay is truly outstanding, but its all polished extremely well and in such large quantities of variety whilst still being paced well. So while I can see this not being everyone's FAVORITE RE game, I find it hard to imagine there are many RE fans who could outright dislike it. Playing on the "too easy" Normal difficulty, ammo was never really an issue, yet still remained satisfying to maintain and collect.

I have a few minor gripes, I suppose. Sprinting by clicking in the stick has never felt right in games, and I do still wish the game had some SOME extra depth to its gunplay, even something as simple as RE4/5's melee attack system would've sufficed. There's a lot they could've done to make the experience tighter toward either action or horror but the important part is that they NAILED the pace and progression, which are the two most important things to nail when your foundation is solid.

I'm also not sure if I'm entiiirely on board with the shop system, both here and in RE4? Though shop mechanics tend to make me anxious in most games without infinite money. I also still really don't like knife combat just as I didn't in 7 but I'm sure that's on purpose on some level. The story's great too: While 7's story was great in a self-contained way, it lacked a bit of that iconic Resident Evil camp. This game did a fantastic job tying 7 and this game to the rest of the series as well as making it a more enjoyable romp in general. Not much else to say here, reviews like this are like the least interesting for me to write because I pretty much just agree with what everyone else has said lol.

The game's fantastic!!! Though if I'm to be honest, I think I prefer RE2Make a slight bit more despite thinking its more flawed. RE2Make stumbles around haaaard in a few places. Puzzles aren't always great, the dark-hallway visuals kinda get samey, Mr.X overstays his welcome, the bosses are mediocre, et cetera. But its combat and map design are PEAK Resi: 8, whilst solid all around, lacks those highs. Resident Evil Village feels like a big banquet celebration of the series and sticks the landing despite trying to do so much. Its not groundbreakingly stellar in any one area yet unbelievably solid as an all-round package.

Playtime: 25 hours
Key word: Buffet

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 07-03-2021

I'll spoil it right out the gate: I dropped this game at Stage 5 out of 6. After getting the Anniversary Collection for pennies on Switch, and being an enormous fan of the Bloodstained Curse of the Moon duology, I figured I should try giving the original game that started it all a spin. And for being a game from 1986, the first four levels of this game hold up remarkably well! Enemy layouts remain very smart throughout, and stages are short enough to where restarting them when you're out of lives doesn't become a hassle, and can even be beneficial to do in order to get access to better Sub-weapons. Despite being such a simple game there's tons of mileage mined out of Simon's weaknesses as a character: Both the whip, jump and crouch have very clear drawbacks, and enemies feel designed like a rock-paper-scissors game around them. Fights with multiple kinds of enemies are sublime. An example of this is at the end of Stage 5. The player is presented with multiple Axe-throwing soldiers that walk backwards as you approach them, demanding steady forward movement alongside crouching and jumping to dodge the axes, althewhile interfering Medusa heads demand you to adapt those dodges to not line up with their patterns of movement. Every way Simon can move - forward, back, up and crouch, are tested in an organic way purely out of how two enemies work together, its fantastic.

Althesame, the subweapons feel comically unbalanced: The stopwatch feels as if it doesn't work on some enemies, the dagger is borderline useless, and the upward arc of throwing Holy Water sort of diminishes the value in of Axes somewhat. Despite that though, I found just the act of rotating between these tools dynamically throughout early stages provided enough variety to feel satisfying. The early stages of the game are so much fun because you're given juuust enough wiggleroom to experiment, to decipher out attack patterns and testing all the different ways to circumvent them with different weapons.

But when Stage 4 arives, it begins to show two of the game's big problems into the spotlight: Inconsistency, and lack of healing.

At the end of Stage 4, after a very well designed aerial assault segment, your fun is halted by four skeleton serpents. They have no rhyme or reason to their movements, shoot fireballs at an inconsistent rate that can come in angles near impossible to whip, and take an eternity to kill. The sick trick being that once they die, they either drop a surplus of sub-weapon ammo for the boss just ahead (very useful), or a surplus of money (very useless). What this effectively means is that, while Stage 4 is exceptionally well designed for the first 3/4ths of its runtime, its conclusion feels as if its entirely decided by luck. And, yknow, bullshit moments like this are usually fine in comparative games like Mega Man, because they tend to have an amount of mercy on the wounded player. Enemies will drop health pickups every now and then, and health pickups and 1UPs are strewn about levels, allowing even struggling players to feel as if there's hope in continuing to push through. Part of Castlevania's horror atmosphere comes from its refusal to do just this.

In Castlevania you get, at most, one (1) health pickup per level, which doesn't even bring you up to full health: Hell, it doesn't even restore half, its closer to 40%. If you get hit so much as TWICE total in the whole level, you will not beat the level with full health, and will enter the boss arena on uneven footing. And I'd be fine with a system like that in a game that didn't have the bullshit inconsistency problems from before.: This is, in a lot of ways, what the Curse of the Moon games do so well when playing Zangetsu-only. It takes supreme confidence in your game's design to pull off a system like it, but due to a few flubs, this game simply doesn't stick that landing. You effectively NEED save states to beat it.

Which brings us to what caused me to drop the game: Stage 5, home of Death. Death's boss fight is another of inconsistency: Projectiles that home in on you at angles you can't possibly hit them unless you have dead-eye aim with the Cross or Axe, but using those weapons means giving up on dealing damage to the boss itself, who's most aptly dealt with using Holy Water. The stage itself simply lacks wriggleroom: In the Curse of the Moon games, all different subweapons could be found regularly in stages, which encouraged mixing and matching different characters' kits to get through in a way that suits you! The challenge presented may have been difficult, yet still felt as if it in the player's hands. By comparison, the only possible Holy Water drop in the entirety of Stage 5 is within the first 5 seconds of the stage.

Which sometimes just gives you a dagger instead.

Its a damn shame the game turned out like this: And believe me, half my playtime with this game is Stage 5, I truly wanted to overcome this legendary game. In the end, I cannot bring myself to genuinely recommend it in its totality. Its brilliantly executed in core mechanics but gets carried away later on: Castlevania takes your trust, and fucks off. I could beat the game with save states, sure, but if the only way to get around the game is to flat out rig it in your favor, then I simply believe the game is not worth it.

Playtime: 4 hours
Keyword: Unreliable

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 15-05-2021

The culmination of all Layton goodness is about as good as you'd expect it to be. I think I've gotten a sufficient Layton fix by playing this initial trilogy and it was a comfortable and fun ride throughout. I find it hard to find much of interest to comment on in this series of games because, well...the main point of them is to provide brain-teasers, and those are almost always good regardless of the connective tissue holding them together.

I would at least say that the puzzle selection this time feels more "focused" than that of previous games? There's arguably a lack of variety here, but in return you're given a lot of iterations upon the same, fun puzzles that grow gradually more challenging. Block sliding puzzles, puzzles about interpreting and dissecting statements, and the puzzles of moving character across a grid of sorts being the main stars of the show, as they remain fun throughout. The game runs less of a risk of becoming annoying when giving you this more consistent stream of content, but there is still of course an appeal to the absolute variety found in Pandora's Box. It's also worth noting that a lot of puzzles in the game go the extra mile to actually be connected to the clock/time theme of the game as a whole, which is a welcome surprise that helps make the experience feel more cohesive than prior games.

Regarding that connective tissue, story-wise, the game's a really fun romp just as always. The core mystery was one I found a lot easier to process and get to the bottom of on your own compared to the borderline asspull presented in Pandora's Box, and it struck the balance between unbelievable and solvable very well. Its a fun story, and all the new and old characters intermingling is just fun to behold.

I'd say I have two main issues with the narrative as-is, with the first being that I don't think the story is given enough build-up to feel properly climactic. To cram arguably three different villains into the same story to focus on, alongside presenting both a main plot and a subplot that tries to connect itself to the past games in the series, whilst using precious little of those past games as any form of springboard... So many plot elements are introduced just in this game, despite it having the same ~15 hour runtime as the prior two smaller entries. Past the first game the developers should have been keenly aware that they were creating an expanding franchise, and I believe there was ample opportunity to place narrative seeds in Pandora's Box that could then be built upon in this game. That feels like what they wanted to do with Flora, yet it amounts to nothing across all these games. There's a hint of this with Don Paolo too, which makes it all the more bizarre to me that they didn't commit to an interconnected narrative further if they were already dipping their toes into it.

The cramped feeling of the narrative plays into my second issue, which is that the ending feels quite rushed together given the actual consequences of what the villain accomplished. A lot of the ending is spent on sympathizing for the villain, understanding them, and providing forgiveness, yet...they were shown mercilessly killing hundreds of London civilians, and do not get reprimanded for it in any way. You couple that with how some plot aspects just feel full-on unexplained, and the ending left a kind of funky taste in my mouth in a way the prior entries never did.

I know it might be weird to read these paragraphs of complaints and see me still land on a 4-star review, but its as I said before - in my eyes, the story is effectively nothing but connective tissue to the core appeal of these games. On that level, the game succeeds in spades, with terrific music, visuals, cutscenes, voice acting, and above all else great puzzles. Lost Future on the whole feels like a game that really wanted to tie the series to a close with the best game in the series, and it certainly achieves that in terms of raw quality. Yet I end up wishing that its ambition in the story, and the narrative across all three games, could've felt more focused.

[Playtime: 20 Hours]
[Keyword: Overachiever]

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 05-21-2021

Been sitting on this one for a bit, and it was always bound to be an interesting experience. If I hadn't been playing the whole series for the first time with my roommates, I'm not sure if I would've ever even gotten to playing this entry, but here we are.

That isn't to say I didn't end up liking the original Danganronpa in the end: Despite my feelings on it as a whole, it was still a series of interestingly written murder mysteries to unravel with fun characters. It feels almost difficult to dislike that inherently. Regardless, Trigger Happy Havoc did still make me feel plenty of sour feelings toward it. Be it a combination of the perverse edge to its writing, how insensitively it treated a lot of subjects it recklessly tackled (including just death in general), and a lot of minor annoyances gameplay-wise piling up. Yet the more I mull it over, after having thought about and rummaged on both games, I can't help but prefer that first game over Danganronpa 2, despite both games essentially sharing the same issues listed. Its as if playing second game and seeing all of my issues weren't just remaining, but even further emphasized, made me realize just how much there was I liked in the first game that's now nowhere to be seen. Again though, I'd still say I enjoyed the second entry on some level, because interestingly written murder mysteries with wacky characters are just hard not to enjoy, but...it began to feel misguided, in a sense. It was as if the goal with this sequel was to simply make MORE intricate mysteries with MORE wacky characters, without properly considering how that direction could hurt other aspects of the game and the experience as a whole.

What this new direction mainly results in is the loss of Trigger Happy Havocs more..."grounded" atmosphere. Sure, its characters were all still degrees of eccentric, yet it all felt somewhat rooted in reason: I could, both in the moment and retrospectively understand why a character was presented the way they were. Sakura, for instance, isn't just comically ripped for the sake of providing a comedic visual; she looks that way as part of her character, having felt the need to excessively train in order to prove to an old-fashioned family's values wrong. Or Celestia, who hated the reality she was born into that she became obsessed with changing it through any means necessary, resulting in her fabricating an eccentric persona for herself and becoming rich through gambling, resorting to any means needed to discard of her old self. You compare those kinds of established characters to someone like Hiyoko from Danganronpa 2, who's...a child who's crass and needlessly cruel to others, because that's unexpected and random. And while the second game certainly has its highs in the cast such as Ibuki, Fuyuhiko and Sonia, the overall theme carries through subtly even with them. For as annoying as a character like Hifumi may have been in the first game, and for how exaggerated his appearance is, he's althesame a very human character, someone who could very well exist in the real world - which was always part of Danganronpa's appeal to me. Doesn't help that over half of the sequel's cast wound up either being uninteresting, one-note or just annoying, with a lot of them seeming as if they were created just to drive home cool murder mystery ideas (Nekomaru, Peko, Mahiru). And sure, the murders they were made to fit into are fun to dissect, but as characters themselves, interacting?

"More human" is the best way I could describe the aspects where I prefer the first game in general. For as played out as the seven deadly sins are, the motives in Trigger Happy Havoc were all clear, understandable - again, human. One character wants money. Another is insecure and rash, acting recklessly in the moment. Just about all the murders in the second game either feel like "solutions" to issues that could've been solved without murder, or involve flat-out insane people (or both at once), neither of which end up feeling satisfying to solve and mostly just feel like a half-baked attempt at stringing a theme together with a weaker cast.

Naturally this extends to the overarching story itself. The supernatural elements in the story, which were my least favorite part of the first game's narrative as well, are cranked up to a higher degree in the sequel. Even then, executions and an AI aside, most things in the first game felt as if it "could happen". In the sequel, Komaeda alone is pretty much superhuman, effectively breaking the notion that the "Ultimates" are just experts in their field and not just borderline superpowers. The issue extends beyond just feeling less grounded: when you start introducing such loosely defined superhuman powers into the story's main cast, it feels like anything is possible for them. If Komaeda has the luck to have anything go his way, at all times, why would things at any point in the story go against him?

There's a lot of ambition in Danganronpa 2 to be sure: To make a bigger, grander and more wild game than before. You absolutely won't be bored playing it to be sure, helped along by the gameplay additions and tweaks from the first game. In terms of the trials, its a real mixed bag. Logic Dive is a fun addition, Hangman is better conceptually but levels are ruined by the terrible reticle speed, Panic Talk just flat out is worse, but Rebuttal Showdown is both pretty good and an inspired concept, UI issues aside. Overall my UI issues with the Nonstop Debates on the whole remain, I don't think being unable to see what Truth Bullets you have equipped without covering up the entire screen in real-time with the bullet menu is a fun "challenge" (especially now that your bullet count is doubled by default). Something that lays out the bullets horizontally at the bottom of the screen, akin to a news broadcast, would've let you still see your bullets without obscuring your vision. That or just, yknow, have the Pause menu's evidence list show which in the list are currently being used, instead of forcing you to cross reference two seperate menues of the same items? :/

I dunno. I have a lot of thoughts on both of these games but I think its pretty clear that their style, and the further direction of this sequel, are just not for me. I'm glad I've gotten to play them but I don't think dwelling on them further will do me much good. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is, just like its predecessor, a game about unravelling murder mysteries, and that in of itself is still fun. I just kind of wish they went about it differently this time.

[Playtime: ???]
[Keyword: Misguided]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heads up, this review may have a different feel than others I’ve done recently - I got the idea to write it while procrastinating and wrote it all in one pass out of sheer frustration.

The best way I can describe Pokémon Sword and Shield is that they’re games that fight against your ability to have fun with the solid Pokémon mechanics that are there. It was after I watched my roommate try and fail to enjoy their time with Alpha Sapphire, that I realized the crucial issue Pokémon's gameplay formula has always had: Its entirely built on game knowledge. If you know the opponent’s Pokémon, know the strengths of your own Pokémon, know what moves your opponent’s Pokémon may do and how to counter it, and know which Pokémon are worth raising versus which have no potential, the series’ groundwork is one of the most flexible, deep and experimental RPGs ever made, highlighted even further when you add self-imposed challenge rules such as the famous Nuzlocke on top to truly make the experience rewarding.

The problem is that the games have never been good at conveying that knowledge, and rather than work to fix it, have worked increasingly hard to provide bullshit workarounds to let you survive the game.

Because each player’s team and game knowledge is going to vary wildly, the bar of difficulty is lowered to ankle height, with gym leaders never sporting more than 3 Pokémon, often with only 3 moves each as to not overwhelm and surprise. Because players may not be able to remember what attacks are good against what types, or remember what types some Pokémon are, you’re told by the game which moves are super effective once you’ve met the opponent’s Pokémon even once - not even captured them, just if you’ve even one time encountered them in any context. Because not every Pokémon is good or viable (despite the fact that they seemingly cut the National Dex for the sake of “balancing”), there are a plethora of options given to the player to let them win through brute-forcing, such as Affection. And crucially, because every player doesn’t feel like committing to raising Pokémon they have no idea will be worth doing so with, the EXP Share is turned on at all times and exponentially raises the amount of EXP handed out to you across the game, leaving you with a thoroughly overleveled team if you don’t deliberately switch teammates in and out and keep an eye on what level you’re “supposed” to be at. When Game Freak presents players with a square piece to fit in a square hole, rather than trying to teach them how to rotate the piece to fit in the hole, they hand the player a collection of power tools to drill their own bigger hole.

This feeling of being forced to play a way you don’t want to extends beyond excessive handholding, all of which I was somewhat able to work around. The game’s big feature is the Wild Area, which is a rather nice inclusion in that it lets you find a bunch of different Pokémon in a new way - which was especially fun with the rules of my Nuzlocke giving me two new area catches from every gym. That’s all well and good, but it couldn’t just be left as a neat oddity to be explored at the player’s own pace: Through the Raid Battles and the purchasable rewards you get from participating in them, Game Freak is essentially forcing you to spend more time in the Wild Area than you would otherwise want to. What makes this system differ from optional challenge areas such as the Battle Maison is that the rewards are things that have historically always been obtainable throughout the core campaigns and were crucial in making the most out of your teams - good attacks. TMs are still in the game, but have gone from a big toolbox of interesting moves to housing some of the most gimmicky, garbage attacks in the series - Rock Tomb, Whirlpool, Electroweb, Mega Punch, Charm, and so on. Several Pokémon I’ve consistently loved using were left sitting on the bench because I simply wasn’t able to provide them with the moves they’d otherwise thrive with using, because those moves were locked behind a gimmicky new game mode - and are also single-use, meaning that you’ll need to grind this game mode FURTHER in order to actually get several uses of those good attacks.

Despite the widespread notion that the EXP Share is great for keeping grinding out of the game, this shows that it was not in Game Freak’s interest to minimize grinding in the game in general, but to just force you to play the game their way instead. With each game, more “quality of life” is added that just pushes the series further and further away from the stellar core mechanics and gameplay loop that it should be highlighting, to promote the most sandpapered and inoffensive “look at the flashy colors” experience possible. People had issue with getting stuck in routes, and finding HMs annoying? Let’s not think of a smart way to solve this, and instead just make every route a complete straight-shot from start to finish with zero engaging design. People found going back to the Pokémon Center to heal tedious? Nevermind the fact that its crucial to conveying the narrative difference between safe-space towns and the great unknown of the wilderness - now the player just has complete access to their entire PC of Pokémon at all times, meaning that if anyone gets hurt, they can just tag out without any issue. For the first time in the entire series there is no Elite Four OR Victory Road - the endgame challenge is effectively just one trainer battle at a time. Nothing is added to substitute for the loss in engagement that comes from sandpapering these rough edges: They may have been double-edged swords, but now there’s no blade in either direction.

What really stings about all this is that there is a genuine attempt behind it all to keep Pokémon going as a fresh experience lying in the background. Player models are all gorgeous in their lighting, modeling, shading, and animation, the environments not part of the Wild Area are almost all absolutely gorgeous in their framing and environmental design, the new creature designs and several of the new attacks are top-notch design ideas with unique playstyles, the pool of available Pokémon is plenty varied much like it was in Kalos, and the atmosphere of gym battles truly is unmatched in the series. The earlygame’s theming really is somewhat unique for the series, as after four games straight of over the top storylines about preventing the end of the world the focus is finally brought back on the interesting back-and-forth that can be brought from just wanting to be the strongest. You have Leon, the strongest trainer who rose to fame from nothing, contrasted with Chairman Rose, the well-liked millionaire with just as much influence yet far less earnestness in how they got there and what they do with that power. You’ve got Hop, Bede, Marnie and yourself, all with different goals, a group rivalry that echoes the best parts of Black and White’s Cheren and Bianca. And with each gym battle, you’ve got a stadium of adoring fans, watching the new generation of Pokémon battlers rise their way to the top with genuine awe, showing that anyone can become adored through sheer force of will.

And then the game still turns into a save-the-world plot by the end, and Chairman Rose was actually just an irredeemably evil man.

Pokémon Sword and Shield want to commit to new ideas, yet don’t know how to. They want to make the game more inviting to new players, yet can’t do so without encouraging them to just not pay attention to the game’s mechanics. They want to make a truly stunning first impression on HD hardware, yet still have tedious individual textboxes display the names of attacks not during - but before - the attack actually happens, still with ridiculously long animations to match. They want to be open world games, yet can’t be assed to make it a substantial enough part of the game to make players want to explore it without holding essential items hostage behind it. And they wanted to write a story about a group of new generation trainers clashing ideals to learn more about themselves, but couldn’t resist diverting far too much attention toward a forced disaster story that ends on the moral that you in particular are actually far greater of a trainer than everyone else because you stopped the end of the world. I’ve played through this game twice and I still don’t fucking know what Marnie’s personality is supposed to be, but I sure do know every individual detail of the Darkest Day now. Thanks, Game Freak.

[Playtime: 80 Hours]
[Key Word: Noncommittal]

In an optional, visually stunning level in the early Jungle world of the game, players can peek through the leaves and foliage to see pirate ships, docked by the beach in the distance. That same beach and those same pirate ships make up the scenery for the game’s second world, and as you progress further through it you notice more and more how the ships are showing up torn and mangled to pieces. By the end of the world, the weather grows stormier and a huge octopus appears from below the surface, gruesomely tearing ships apart in the background of the stage before challenging the big ape himself.

Donkey Kong Country as a series has never placed any real focus on its storytelling, yet as all its fans will tell you it is shockingly good at being atmospheric and moody. And while Returns specifically often gets buried inbetween the praise for the original trilogy and Tropical Freeze, I find it excels at this in a sort of unique way - by having the entire island truly feel like one big, cohesive entity. The scenario I described earlier is never called attention to, yet takes place over the course of about 10 levels, with each step being a very gradual shift from one environment to the next whilst still adhering to their worlds’ visual themes. While many other platformers strive to impress you with their creativity and variety, I find there’s a beauty in trying to make each level feel like a natural progression of the world - that it’s not simply a collection of fun video game environments, but the natural extension of a living, breathing world.

The “Returns” subtitle doesn’t feel like its simply there to denote the franchise coming out of hiatus, but to quite literally describe the game as the first since the series’ inception to truly place the focus on Donkey Kong Island itself. There’s no kidnapping, no journeying, no drastic environmental change - this game, even more so than the original 1995 game, is about showing you the ecosystem and inhabitants of Donkey Kongs home. This is part of why I find the Tiki Tak Tribe to be such a good antagonistic force for the game: rather than turning the conflict into just a brawl against an invading faction, their brainwashing powers mean that now every part of the island is hostile and out of balance to serve someone else’s agenda. Whilst the Tikis take control of an inhabitant of each of the island's areas to serve as the game’s bosses, each area in the game is also befitted with one or more natural rulers outside of this - the Squeekly bats of Crowded Cavern are left completely undisturbed by the mole miners of the cave area, the horde of Muncher spiders in the forest devour anyone who gets close, and a large eyeball-robot observes your every move in the Factory level, seemingly manipulating your progress forward. Throughout this involuntary tour of the island, it feels as DK is constantly intruding on the’ territory of these rulers, disrupting the natural ecosystem and flow of life, to quell a conflict they barely seem aware of. The harmony between rulers and the natural state of the island has been disrupted by the Tikis, all for the sake of them believing their own king is the one who deserves to rule the island as a whole.

So then, with all that said - who’s the ruler of the Jungle?

That’s right - Donkey Kong.

What makes the grueling difficulty of this adventure in particular feel so rewarding to overcome is that, similar to Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it truly feels as if the great ape is asserting his absolute dominance with every world he conquers. Frail as he may seem with only being able to take two hits, he moves with such a visceral weight, slamming onto the heads of enemies with both fists and hitting the ground with a slight thud every time he lands. It’s theorized that a big part of why Donkey Kong himself was sidelined in the Country series in favor of his extended Kong family was due to the difficulty in nailing both the weight and size of this character – play the original Donkey Kong Country, and you’ll notice DK’s silhouette drastically changes when he’s standing still, running, and jumping, which leads to a somewhat inconsistent feel moving the character around. To have this grand return of the character not only emphasize his weight and power, but also seemingly theme the entire story around reasserting his rightful place as ruler of the island, just feels absolutely perfectly befitting. Yet he defeats the king of the Tikis atop DK Island’s volcano, not to claim any sort of dominance or rule of his home, but to return things to the way they were before, and reform that balance of nature. Indeed, in both narrative and design this Return is not here to say that the new should rule and the old has no place, but that all kings have their place in the world.

There are a lot of very valid reasons as to why the game isn’t as fondly remembered as the rest of the series, mostly attributing to Retro Studios’ unfamiliarity in designing for the genre. A big one is the way collectibles are handled, an area the game falls completely flat on compared to how perfectly the trilogy handled it. The puzzle piece system may be a cute way to unlock concept art, but when these somewhat-short levels can have up to nine puzzle pieces on top of the KONG-letters, suddenly the pacing in stages come to a screeching halt. It’s cool that you’re consistently rewarded for pattern recognition, of seeing a stray banana just barely off-screen and following it to reveal a hidden path, but with up to 13 collectibles per stage you’re just bound to miss one lest you check quite literally every possible hiding place one could be in. That means moving left at the start of every level, scraping against every possible wall, collecting every single banana, blowing on every dandelion, and intentionally dying in every split-path just to give yourself the opportunity to double-check the other path. The KONG-letters are far stronger collectibles in terms of how the game is themed, as they’re consistently rewarded to you for actively platforming well and utilizing DK’s abilities to the fullest rather than for having the keen eye of an explorer. The fatigue that can set it from feverishly looking for these collectibles may only enhance the somewhat repetitive level progression: Imagine the feeling of mastering everything a level has to see, only to realize that the next feels virtually identical aside from having a focus on bouncy flowers now.

The game sticking to the standard visuals of its area relatively closely may again be a remnant of Retro’s work on Metroid Prime - rather than indulge in whatever crazy level concept the team could think up for a one-off level akin to Super Mario 3D World, each level is given a sort of purpose on the island, a significance that forms part of the whole. At first, I questioned the sudden appearance of a pirate ship level in the Ruins area, since I was already well past having beaten the Beach area. It was only after I played the level and later reached the world’s boss that the dots connected: The pirate ship level focused on firing explosive bombs, and the boss of the area is a great bird who hoards a collection of explosives all to itself. This not only lets the level serve as great preparation for the properties of these explosives, but can easily be pieced together to form worldbuilding theories, of the pirate crew bargaining with this greedy hoarder to gain access to this artillery. There’s even a great care placed on moving Donkey Kong from area to area, as the first level of most worlds opens with a brief moment of letting the player transition out of the old area into the new, showing for instance the overgrown edge of the caverns leading naturally into the Forest area.

Beyond all of this analysis and babble, the game remains a great platformer first and foremost. The game is still extremely successful at providing that rewarding escalation of challenge that DKC has historically done so perfectly, paired with controls with tons of speed potential. Even though the Wii version in particular has been derided for its Wii-isms, I can’t stress enough how often I feel it genuinely adds to the experience. From your own shaking matching the intense pummeling DK lets out onto the Tikis at the end of each world, to the Wii remote speaking giving you direct and gloriously satisfying sound feedback to each enemy you bop and collectible you get, to genuinely feeling the weight of the handslam attack…

Okay, so maybe the simple, primitive part of my brain took over just now, the part wanted to just call this game a fun, well paced, good platformer from the start without doing this silly literary analysis. And, well... who am I to challenge the king of the jungle?

[Playtime: 8 hours]
[Key word: Reclaim]

This review contains spoilers

In my written reviews, I like to end with a “key word”, to summarize my entire experience with a game into something that sticks with you easily. Keeping what this word is secret until the end, I feel, gives the experience of reading the reviews a kind of cute tension, of trying to figure out what the word will be as you read through. But for this game, one single word was so prominent for the entirety of the experience, that I feel I need to write the review around it.

Because as I was playing Great Ace Attorney 2, the word that kept popping up in my head was “justification”. This isn’t to frame the game in a bad light, nor in a good light, but that much of the game felt as if it was trying extremely hard to justify both itself and the game its a direct follow-up to.

Indeed, its kind of a first for Shu Takumi to write a game so thoroughly reliant on you having experienced a prior game to understand it, and in many ways it allows this particular entry to shine in ways the series never has. Though the stories of games like Trials and Tribulations, the Investigations series, and Spirit of Justice shine far brighter with prior series knowledge, they were all still written to be complete, understandable stories in their own right - their villains, heroes, arcs and storylines are properly set up within themselves, and are moreso “enriched” with said prior knowledge. This is in complete opposition to The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures, a game that ended up ballooning in scope enough to where it had to be divided up into two halves of a greater story. When The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures became a game made up almost entirely of unsatisfying buildup, then this follow-up wants to be nothing but satisfying payoff.

Fundamentally then, the sequel exists to justify that first game being as meandering as it was, and the answers to many of those questions and the way they’re delivered are among Ace Attorney’s greatest ever moments. For a series already lauded for its explosive pitch-perfect finales its remarkable just how well Naruhodo’s adventures wrap up, and that is in large part due to just how well it was built up. Despite being my favorite game in the franchise, Spirit of Justice in comparison stumbles to wrap itself up due to needing to both build up and resolve a conclusion worthy of ending the entire series within just one game. Here, meanwhile, all the pieces were already in place, and the game is able to have a much more satisfying pacing resolving it all as a result. Additionally, characters from the first game are built upon and fleshed out naturally, in a way that feels like a natural extension of that first game rather than needing to grow to suit the whims of the new game. That’s not something I ever disliked in the main series, but it was refreshing to experience character growth that felt so thoroughly natural based on events that were long foreshadowed beforehand.

The promise of this kind of game, one able to exist solely to pay off what its predecessor set up, is remarkable, and the game shows many times just how well it works. Which makes it all the more baffling to me why they chose not to stick to it wholeheartedly. As I said before, “Justification” doesn’t just mean retroactively justifying the first game’s content, but actively justifying choices that seem to go against the intended vision. Simply put: If the intent of the game is to resolve what the first game started, why do we still need to go through a tutorial of all the game’s mechanics? Why, in this game about giving us answers to a game all about questions, is the first thing we do an almost complete non-sequitur from what that first game set up?

I’ll be blunt and say that the first two cases of this game are among the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel cases in the series for me – they are shamelessly disconnected from what the game sets up in all but extremely minor ways, yet those few connections are emphasized to a ridiculous degree to make it feel important. The game’s first defendant, Rei Membami, appears prominently in the game’s key artwork, and is said to be a close friend to Susato, who gets a playable debut in this game. Additionally, my favorite character from the first game, Inspector Hosonaga shows back up – I was giddy as I started this first case, yet as I played further into the game I realized just how inconsequential it all was. Susato taking her own action into the courtroom is never built further upon, Hosonaga ends up accomplishing nothing at all, and – get this – neither him nor Membami show up for the rest of the game. In the end, all the first case ends up being is a way to tutorialize the player paired with some fun fanservice, a case that makes up a ton of reasons for the player to experience it yet doesn’t make any of those reasons feel satisfying to the player. Hosonaga never shows up past this case because he’s working in Japan and the rest of the game is in Britain. Susato’s playable debut is to justify tutorializing the player again. The little plot importance of the case is to explain what happened to the first culprit of the first game, a plot point so brief it could’ve easily been included in idle talk across the rest of the game (which, it honestly kind of is already).
The second case in the game, meanwhile, is only “important” because its a followup to the first game’s filler case, making the two important to each other yet completely inconsequential to the first game’s story. With The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro, its disconnected nature could be chalked up as a calm-before-the-storm meant to mainly provide worldbuilding, yet with this new game we’re seven cases deep and still being provided with complete clown antics rather than progressing the main story or addressing any of its loose ends.

It pains me that so many parts of this otherwise excellent game feel held back by strange story choices like these, choices made with justification that runs counter to the idea that this game is meant to be a continuing story from the first. One of the shining stars of the first game was Gina, a pickpocketer turned detective-in-training who was set to carry on the legacy of Detective Gregson after he got himself in hot water in the game’s last case. This game wants to explore Gregson further however, and because it can’t guarantee that players have actually played the first game and know who he is, Gregson is let back onto duty despite literally cooperating with a murderer just a few months earlier. Though I ended up loving what they do with Gregson here, it left Gina with the extreme short end of the stick, as half the time I wish I could’ve spent with her went toward an effectively finished character.

The embodiment of all of these choices is Kazuma, a brilliant yet confused and aimless character that you really get the feeling they struggled to incorporate back into the series. The case of his death in the first game, The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band, is that game at its absolute lowest, with an important and charismatic character dying to the hands of a completely avoidable misunderstanding from a scared child. Since the sequel needed him alive, the case was transformed into this strange conspiracy to keep Kazuma alive, which leads to him getting amnesia and being shipped to Hong Kong…and then magically finding his way to Britain. You participate in one case against a masked apprentice who is very obviously Kazuma, and as soon as the case is over he regains his memory yet stands opposed to our main characters due to a case from many years ago. Kazuma’s importance was already revealed to us in the end of the first game, yet bringing him back to life in this bizarre roundabout way…it befuddles me, yet the game stands proud knowing its just justified yet another story from that first game that wasn’t great on its own. Everything has to resolve something from the first game, yet at the same time bizarre choices are made to ensure newcomers aren’t confused.

It’s all so frustrating, because when the game knows what it wants to be, it really fires on all cylinders. Case 3 in this game is a contender for the best put together case in the entire series, building on previous characters whilst being a compelling story in its own right, and just being a damn fun mystery to boot. It feels as a proper Ace Attorney case should, and is only enhanced by its predecessor rather than feeling as if it needed to be built to only work with – or without – its presence. The issue with the first two cases isn’t even the mystery solving, or the characters, or their self contained story, as those are all pretty okay in their own right, it’s that they don’t fit the game in any sort of way whatsoever and had to be wedged into the game with any justification possible. The game’s first two cases and overall narrative lows only sting so bad because I know this franchise, this series, and this writer, are capable of being so much better than it, which the first two cases even show themselves. As is, the games don’t work as standalone due to the first game’s complete mundanity and lack of payoff, and they don’t work as a pair due to the dreadful pacing of this second game’s first act. It truly is unfortunate how all the games released past that original trilogy are mired with development issues, given how many of them reach the absolute highest highs the series has ever had.

By the time the game had reached its final act, the game was doing exactly what I expected of it yet constantly exceeding my expectations, with twists and turns that felt perfectly foreshadowed yet never spelled out, and narrative beats that truly change several characters involved in the story. Several moments flat-out gave me goosebumps, yet for as caught up in the hype as I was, the thoughts of justification still lingered in my mind. This came to ahead with the resolution of Barok van Zieks character arc, the prosecutor across both games who’s as likable as he is hateable with the blatant prejudice he holds toward the Japanese. The lack of progress in his character was one of the biggest signs that the first game was left an unfinished story, but his resolution here is simultaneously fantastically woven into the greater story and feels forced at the same time. It feels as if they knew the outline of what to do with him, yet also felt a need to justify his racism into nothing but a simple issue from his past to quell complaints from the first game’s detractors. It was when I reached this point that I realized just how conflicted my feelings on this game were, contradictions between thinking the story was excellently written yet simultaneously feeling its forced and unnatural.

Regardless of it all, I’m of course glad The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve even exists, that it survived the troubled development with not many more issues than a slightly confused identity. The game is as far from bad as you can come, and I’m immensely grateful for how well it ended up sticking the landing by the end. Yet at the end of the day, I think the thing I appreciate most about the game, is that it shows Takumi still has it in him to one day pull off that perfect Ace Attorney adventure.

It’s elementary, my dear Takumi!

[Playtime: ???]
[Key Word: Justification]

My last review covered Resident Evil 5, the game tasked with officially succeeding a landmark title in gaming. But that task took three whole years and a new console generation to bear fruit, a timespan so huge it allowed hundreds of games to deliver their own takes on RE4's incredible groundwork in the meantime. The combined successes of Halo, RE4 and Call of Duty set the stage for blockbuster gaming's future – a future of cinematic, ebb-and-flow, health-regenerating, tension-filled cover shooting action. A future that, the longer we've been in it, the more its become derided. "Hide-and-seek" shooters have effectively dominated the gaming landscape to a boiling point, forcing either complete reinnovation or stagnation in the franchises still using it. It almost seems as if the cover shooters that have stuck around for any long period of time only do so due to putting so little emphasis on it, from Uncharted's big focus on high-octane spectacle and story to Resident Evil's joyride of horror setpieces and ever-changing core gameplay formula. A game focused solely on making the best cover-shooting action possible just doesn't seem sustainable for a brand anymore, with the ones still stubbornly holding on getting labeled as stale and tired. The age of pure cover shooting is, for all intents and purposes, ending.

Which puts the original Gears of War in a very strange spot, doesn't it? Its arguably the franchise that truly kicked the formula's use into high gear, the game cited by Uncharted's developers and more as the direct source for their own gameplay. Its held as one of Xbox's most popular and critically loved franchises, yet as the times have changed, Gears has stuck to its guns – Gears 2, 3, 4, and 5 have kept the foundation laid down by the game that started it all, despite all the games it influenced having now grown tired of it. The reputation of Gears of War now seems to be that of a stagnant time capsule, a franchise not able to move on into the modern day and forever haunted by the smell of Doritos and mountain dew.

This entire tale of moving on with the times breaks my heart, because the reason Gears of War never moved past its initial gameplay foundation, is because its a damn near perfect foundation.

(Yes, its finally time to talk about the game itself!)

The most common issue I've experienced with cover shooters, both inside of Gears and out, is that there's little to no tension to be found when both parties are just sitting in a camp taking potshots at each other. Part of what makes shooting so interesting in games is how you manage your own position in relation to the enemy alongside having to aim, but when it essentially just becomes a waiting game – either for the enemy or your own health – there's no engagement left anymore beyond pointing and clicking. The issue here is simple: If both camps can get away with just sitting safely in their bunker until they win, there's no reason for either of them to want to move out. The brilliant thing about Gears of War is that, in contrast, it feels like EVERY design choice is made with the idea of making you want to further approach the enemy. The series' most iconic weapon, the chainsaw-riding Lancer, is the perfect demonstration of this. Despite being the go-to long range Assault Rifle of the game, it takes an entire magazine of bullets to down a single average enemy Locust, who usually come in hordes of a dozen and can take cover just like you. Yet get close to one, and you can use that beautiful chainsaw to destroy any single foe with a delicious glorykill animation. No ammo cost, no cooldown, no conditions. The only drawback to using it is that it requires you move right up to the danger yourself.

What Gears is saying through this design is that you can usually survive by staying safe, unloading Lancer bullets into enemies one by one... BUT you'll be showered in rewards and dopamine the more you dare to assert your dominance over enemies. The game commends long-range play, but celebrates close-range play. The controls also feed into this: You're not an acrobatic speed demon, but can still sprint, dodge roll, and most importantly enter cover from several feet away by sliding into them. It creates a genuinely brilliant balance, where the ability to go fast is limited only by your skill and ability to assess your situation, yet the movement controls themselves are so simple – they only use one button – that anyone can start experimenting with them whenever. And what gives the game's best firefights so much excitement is that you're not the only one affected by all the design above. Enemies, too, come with shotguns, Lancers, and a carnal wish to come as close to you as possible. That's one of the main reasons why I think the auto-regenerating health actually works for Gears, as the intensity of battle means that you often need to actually earn those calm moments of regenerating health back, find those pockets of time when nothing is approaching you. If you sit in cover for too long, the enemies will start advancing, and before you know it you'll be swarmed.

This entire rock-solid foundation is what Gears as a franchise has been using for 16 years now, and I hope you understand just what makes it so appealing compared to the cover shooters that later wound up stagnating the formula. But then...what is it about the first game in particular that makes me think of just it so fondly?

I mentioned it briefly earlier, but the game has a very uniquely spooky vibe, which is where the RE4 influence is felt the most. The actual story of the game really doesn't matter so much as the world it sets up, one completely void of hope, where everyday people hate both the Locust monsters and the tyrannical government that allowed them to emerge to begin with. It's commendable that despite having "of War" in the title, Gears doesn't really celebrate the act of warfare, yet also doesn't try to make you feel guilty for participating in it. Marcus Fenix, our protagonist, never feels sociopathically trigger-happy or like a patriotic soldier, because he's essentially forced into his position, and lets his bitter distain for the government be known at every turn. He's a bitter grump with a dark sense of humor, which contrasts really well with the rest of the crew keeping their chin up more often. He wants humanity saved as much as anyone else, but won't shy away from pointing just how much everyone has fucked up to get to this point.

I think the overall pacing is also a huge part of why this first game really lands with me. Despite its limited pool of weapons and enemies (8 and 6 respectively), the game is still entirely about its shooting gameplay. Instead of breaking the pace up with vehicles or platforming, almost every firefight in the game has something about it making it stand out. For instance, Act 3 takes place in the Locusts' home caves, leading to stuff like shooting enemies in a moving minecart, or the spooky abandoned mining base above ground with ambushes at every corner. Act 2 is easily my favorite – vampyric bats called Kryll devour anyone who stays in the dark for too long, including in the middle of firefights. This means that as you're fending off Locust, you also need to find ways to literally light a path ahead, usually by shooting explosive tanks tucked away in nooks around the arena. Its extremely impressive how much confidence the game has in its core gameplay, that it never feels the need to break it up with dumb minigames or side activities completely detached from it. All the variety in the game still exists WITHIN the excellent gunplay, and there aren't many games I can think of that succeed at that. The closest the game gets to breaking the pace up with something else is when characters talk between segments, which'll sometimes force you to slow down to focus on the dialogue. Given the dialogue is written so well, and that conversations tend to be as snappy as possible with little fluff, these really aren't as intrusive as you might think. If anything, they're the perfect tiny breather you need inbetween firefights.

The original Gears of War is at its absolute best when it feels like a big strategy game played in real time over-the-shoulder. When maps are laid out in a way that lets you approach them in a zillion different ways, when you need to manage enemies far off and close by, big and small, your own health and the health of your teammates...and when you finally figure out how to make all the pieces fit using whatever tools you happen to have available to you, without dying once, it feels bloody fantastic. Be it the Imulsion Rig in Act 3, the stairs to the Fenix estate in Act 4 and then later the horde-esque defending of that same house later in the story, or the many encounters with the terrifying one-shot Boomers, the game keeps finding ways to engross you in absolutely mastering its combat. The problem then, as discussed before, is that its sequels, the genre and rarely sometimes even the game itself, seems to want nothing to do with that.

Yes, a big selling point for the series and genre as a whole ever since this game released was the ability to play through the entire campaign in co-op. Having the exact same game available to you in cooperative play doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but it can’t be overstated just how much that affects the fundamental design of the games in this series. If the single-player story is about tactically managing yourself and your relation to a slew of different enemy positions, weighing the pros and cons of which weapons to bring and which enemies to approach, then co-op slices all of those decisions in clean half. Two persons means two full sets of weapons for every situation, two meatbags drawing enemy attention in different directions, and – crucially – twice as much firepower against those enemies. After having played the entire series in singleplayer, getting to play this original game in co-op really opened my eyes to just how much duller the experience becomes once the tension of dying is almost entirely sapped away. That, of course, isn’t exactly helped by the literal revival mechanic that co-op exclusively features, basically ensuring that as long as the two players communicate, progress would eventually be guaranteed. It was surreal, seeing each of those legendary fights I described just a moment ago, some of which took me up to half an hour of genuine strategic planning and execution, breezed through in the second attempt.

I don’t want to make it seem like I think co-op ruins the game or was poorly thought through, because its evident it was something the developers were aiming to design the game around from early on. All across the game, the level design has tons of clever cooperative moments scattered throughout and it works to the strengths of the game's themes. But it changes the entire dynamics of play from an intense, masterfully designed tactical shooter, to something you play with your pal over a bowl of popcorn and casual conversation. As the Gears of War entries went on, and more shooters were released to chase its coattails, this second playstyle seemed to become the desired ideal, reaching a boiling point with Gears of War 3’s entire campaign being woefully designed around four person cooperative play. And while Gears of War 3 is a fantastic, well-produced, entertaining and beautifully directed end to the trilogy, it’s also a game with a whole new enemy type specifically designed to one-shot players with little warning, so that any of their three co-op buddies can revive them. This design meant that even in the single-player, now the AI has to act as a substitute for co-op players and work to revive you too. What once was an option select between two playstyles, to play either seriously on your own or casually with your friends, has effectively become just one.

That tactical brillance of the original Gears of War has technically not gone away, as even the developers seemed to have realized how the third game was a step too far and reverted back to the more traditional design of the first two games come Gears of War 4. And thankfully, for those few nerds out there like me, every game in the series includes an option to reload each individual firefight from the start, allowing me to at least simulate a challenge like the original game had. It’s because of this that I’m able to appreciate the design brilliance still left in games like Gears of War 4 and Gears 5, enhanced greatly by just how polished and robust the combat has become over the years. But just that I have to fight to recapture that feeling at all – that the industry has simultaneously oversaturated yet completely distanced itself from the kind of shooting gameplay that Gears of War established so perfectly…while I do find it kind of funny, I also just find it kind of sad.

[Play Time: 4 Playthroughs (Original/Co-op/Ultimate/Ultimate Co-op)]
[Difficulty: Hardcore]
[Key word: Overshadowed]

My last review covered Resident Evil 5, the game tasked with officially succeeding a landmark title in gaming. But that task took three whole years and a new console generation to bear fruit, a timespan so huge it allowed hundreds of games to deliver their own takes on RE4's incredible groundwork in the meantime. The combined successes of Halo, RE4 and Call of Duty set the stage for blockbuster gaming's future – a future of cinematic, ebb-and-flow, health-regenerating, tension-filled cover shooting action. A future that, the longer we've been in it, the more its become derided. "Hide-and-seek" shooters have effectively dominated the gaming landscape to a boiling point, forcing either complete reinnovation or stagnation in the franchises still using it. It almost seems as if the cover shooters that have stuck around for any long period of time only do so due to putting so little emphasis on it, from Uncharted's big focus on high-octane spectacle and story to Resident Evil's joyride of horror setpieces and ever-changing core gameplay formula. A game focused solely on making the best cover-shooting action possible just doesn't seem sustainable for a brand anymore, with the ones still stubbornly holding on getting labeled as stale and tired. The age of pure cover shooting is, for all intents and purposes, ending.

Which puts the original Gears of War in a very strange spot, doesn't it? Its arguably the franchise that truly kicked the formula's use into high gear, the game cited by Uncharted's developers and more as the direct source for their own gameplay. Its held as one of Xbox's most popular and critically loved franchises, yet as the times have changed, Gears has stuck to its guns – Gears 2, 3, 4, and 5 have kept the foundation laid down by the game that started it all, despite all the games it influenced having now grown tired of it. The reputation of Gears of War now seems to be that of a stagnant time capsule, a franchise not able to move on into the modern day and forever haunted by the smell of Doritos and mountain dew.

This entire tale of moving on with the times breaks my heart, because the reason Gears of War never moved past its initial gameplay foundation, is because its a damn near perfect foundation.

(Yes, its finally time to talk about the game itself!)

The most common issue I've experienced with cover shooters, both inside of Gears and out, is that there's little to no tension to be found when both parties are just sitting in a camp taking potshots at each other. Part of what makes shooting so interesting in games is how you manage your own position in relation to the enemy alongside having to aim, but when it essentially just becomes a waiting game – either for the enemy or your own health – there's no engagement left anymore beyond pointing and clicking. The issue here is simple: If both camps can get away with just sitting safely in their bunker until they win, there's no reason for either of them to want to move out. The brilliant thing about Gears of War is that, in contrast, it feels like EVERY design choice is made with the idea of making you want to further approach the enemy. The series' most iconic weapon, the chainsaw-riding Lancer, is the perfect demonstration of this. Despite being the go-to long range Assault Rifle of the game, it takes an entire magazine of bullets to down a single average enemy Locust, who usually come in hordes of a dozen and can take cover just like you. Yet get close to one, and you can use that beautiful chainsaw to destroy any single foe with a delicious glorykill animation. No ammo cost, no cooldown, no conditions. The only drawback to using it is that it requires you move right up to the danger yourself.

What Gears is saying through this design is that you can usually survive by staying safe, unloading Lancer bullets into enemies one by one... BUT you'll be showered in rewards and dopamine the more you dare to assert your dominance over enemies. The game commends long-range play, but celebrates close-range play. The controls also feed into this: You're not an acrobatic speed demon, but can still sprint, dodge roll, and most importantly enter cover from several feet away by sliding into them. It creates a genuinely brilliant balance, where the ability to go fast is limited only by your skill and ability to assess your situation, yet the movement controls themselves are so simple – they only use one button – that anyone can start experimenting with them whenever. And what gives the game's best firefights so much excitement is that you're not the only one affected by all the design above. Enemies, too, come with shotguns, Lancers, and a carnal wish to come as close to you as possible. That's one of the main reasons why I think the auto-regenerating health actually works for Gears, as the intensity of battle means that you often need to actually earn those calm moments of regenerating health back, find those pockets of time when nothing is approaching you. If you sit in cover for too long, the enemies will start advancing, and before you know it you'll be swarmed.

This entire rock-solid foundation is what Gears as a franchise has been using for 16 years now, and I hope you understand just what makes it so appealing compared to the cover shooters that later wound up stagnating the formula. But then...what is it about the first game in particular that makes me think of just it so fondly?

I mentioned it briefly earlier, but the game has a very uniquely spooky vibe, which is where the RE4 influence is felt the most. The actual story of the game really doesn't matter so much as the world it sets up, one completely void of hope, where everyday people hate both the Locust monsters and the tyrannical government that allowed them to emerge to begin with. It's commendable that despite having "of War" in the title, Gears doesn't really celebrate the act of warfare, yet also doesn't try to make you feel guilty for participating in it. Marcus Fenix, our protagonist, never feels sociopathically trigger-happy or like a patriotic soldier, because he's essentially forced into his position, and lets his bitter distain for the government be known at every turn. He's a bitter grump with a dark sense of humor, which contrasts really well with the rest of the crew keeping their chin up more often. He wants humanity saved as much as anyone else, but won't shy away from pointing just how much everyone has fucked up to get to this point.

I think the overall pacing is also a huge part of why this first game really lands with me. Despite its limited pool of weapons and enemies (8 and 6 respectively), the game is still entirely about its shooting gameplay. Instead of breaking the pace up with vehicles or platforming, almost every firefight in the game has something about it making it stand out. For instance, Act 3 takes place in the Locusts' home caves, leading to stuff like shooting enemies in a moving minecart, or the spooky abandoned mining base above ground with ambushes at every corner. Act 2 is easily my favorite – vampyric bats called Kryll devour anyone who stays in the dark for too long, including in the middle of firefights. This means that as you're fending off Locust, you also need to find ways to literally light a path ahead, usually by shooting explosive tanks tucked away in nooks around the arena. Its extremely impressive how much confidence the game has in its core gameplay, that it never feels the need to break it up with dumb minigames or side activities completely detached from it. All the variety in the game still exists WITHIN the excellent gunplay, and there aren't many games I can think of that succeed at that. The closest the game gets to breaking the pace up with something else is when characters talk between segments, which'll sometimes force you to slow down to focus on the dialogue. Given the dialogue is written so well, and that conversations tend to be as snappy as possible with little fluff, these really aren't as intrusive as you might think. If anything, they're the perfect tiny breather you need inbetween firefights.

The original Gears of War is at its absolute best when it feels like a big strategy game played in real time over-the-shoulder. When maps are laid out in a way that lets you approach them in a zillion different ways, when you need to manage enemies far off and close by, big and small, your own health and the health of your teammates...and when you finally figure out how to make all the pieces fit using whatever tools you happen to have available to you, without dying once, it feels bloody fantastic. Be it the Imulsion Rig in Act 3, the stairs to the Fenix estate in Act 4 and then later the horde-esque defending of that same house later in the story, or the many encounters with the terrifying one-shot Boomers, the game keeps finding ways to engross you in absolutely mastering its combat. The problem then, as discussed before, is that its sequels, the genre and rarely sometimes even the game itself, seems to want nothing to do with that.

Yes, a big selling point for the series and genre as a whole ever since this game released was the ability to play through the entire campaign in co-op. Having the exact same game available to you in cooperative play doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but it can’t be overstated just how much that affects the fundamental design of the games in this series. If the single-player story is about tactically managing yourself and your relation to a slew of different enemy positions, weighing the pros and cons of which weapons to bring and which enemies to approach, then co-op slices all of those decisions in clean half. Two persons means two full sets of weapons for every situation, two meatbags drawing enemy attention in different directions, and – crucially – twice as much firepower against those enemies. After having played the entire series in singleplayer, getting to play this original game in co-op really opened my eyes to just how much duller the experience becomes once the tension of dying is almost entirely sapped away. That, of course, isn’t exactly helped by the literal revival mechanic that co-op exclusively features, basically ensuring that as long as the two players communicate, progress would eventually be guaranteed. It was surreal, seeing each of those legendary fights I described just a moment ago, some of which took me up to half an hour of genuine strategic planning and execution, breezed through in the second attempt.

I don’t want to make it seem like I think co-op ruins the game or was poorly thought through, because its evident it was something the developers were aiming to design the game around from early on, shown evidently in how the level design has tons of clever cooperative moments scattered throughout. But it changes the entire dynamics of play from an intense, masterfully designed tactical shooter, to something you play with your pal over a bowl of popcorn and casual conversation. As the Gears of War entries went on, and more shooters were released to chase its coattails, this second playstyle seemed to become the desired ideal, reaching a boiling point with Gears of War 3’s entire campaign being woefully designed around four person cooperative play. And while Gears of War 3 is a fantastic, well-produced, entertaining and beautifully directed end to the trilogy, it’s also a game with a whole new enemy type specifically designed to one-shot players with little warning, so that any of their three co-op buddies can revive them. This design meant that even in the single-player, now the AI has to act as a substitute for co-op players and work to revive you too. What once was an option select between two playstyles, to play either seriously on your own or casually with your friends, has effectively become just one.

That tactical brillance of the original Gears of War has technically not gone away, as even the developers seemed to have realized how the third game was a step too far and reverted back to the more traditional design of the first two games come Gears of War 4. And thankfully, for those few nerds out there like me, every game in the series includes an option to reload each individual firefight from the start, allowing me to at least simulate a challenge like the original game had. It’s because of this that I’m able to appreciate the design brilliance still left in games like Gears of War 4 and Gears 5, enhanced greatly by just how polished and robust the combat has become over the years. But just that I have to fight to recapture that feeling at all – that the industry has simultaneously oversaturated yet completely distanced itself from the kind of shooting gameplay that Gears of War established so perfectly…while I do find it kind of funny, I also just find it kind of sad.

[Play Time: 4 Playthroughs (Original/Co-op/Ultimate/Ultimate Co-op)]
[Difficulty: Hardcore]
[Key word: Overshadowed]

Since its release, Resident Evil 4 has been one of the most celebrated video games of all time, and it’s a project that its creator Shinji Mikami holds dear. It was in a way his magnum opus, as he left the series behind as soon as it was released, his parting message to the franchise he helped spawn. So after putting everything he had into it, only to then suddenly step away from Resident Evil entirely, its likely that that fateful question started bubbling within the rest of Capcom.

“What’s next?”

How do you not only follow up this groundbreaking, industry-redefining, classic game, but do so without any help whatsoever from the series’ captain? Is it really safe to take big, sweeping risks without as much of an understanding of what truly defined the series, as its original creator had? After three years of development, Resident Evil 5 sought to answer that question with a game that’s simultaneously exactly what one would’ve expected, yet still daring and likable.

To me, Resident Evil 4 has always felt as if it wanted more than anything to boldly move forward, to move on from the past and embrace a new status quo. Beyond its wholly new playstyle, its the first game in the series not to be set around Raccoon City, and the villains of those first games are dissolved off-screen before this entry even starts. There’s no item boxes, level design is linear, you’re well rewarded for killing enemies rather than encouraged to avoid combat, the cutscenes are action-packed and feature Quicktime events - were it not for Leon, Ada, and a general zombie-virus theme, this could have passed for a wholly new franchise entirely. Its a bold direction that only truly worked due to the confidence Mikami had in the project, and its a confidence that Resident Evil 5 is very lacking in in comparison. But let’s set it straight: Having that degree of confidence is not always a good thing. Though exploring new frontiers is fun and celebrated by all, its also a dangerous, lonely venture, one that can lead to making terrible mistakes or change someone far too drastically. For as important as it is to innovate, it’s just as important to remember and celebrate your roots, and I find that to be Resident Evil 5’s most defining attribute. It takes 4’s bold steps and innovations, its new style and feel, and weaves connections with it to the old world and characters we once knew from the original trilogy. Just look at our protagonist: It's Chris Redfield! By taking the protagonist of the very first game, and putting him in the playstyle of that bold new direction, it really communicates the wish to bring all walks of Resident Evil together for the future.

Honestly, even though the gameplay sticks quite close to what 4 established, I'm impressed by how different Chris and Leon feel to play almost purely from the overall personality these two games exude. Leon has always been a one-man team, originally not by choice but it led to him becoming a spy, working in secret. Thus his game really does reflect that, with RE4 having a somewhat lonely, quiet atmosphere, and gameplay that most often rewards precision and strategy. Chris, meanwhile, is more experienced than Leon, ever since RE1 he was working with a team and valued charging through with no men falling behind far more than stealthily and effectively clearing a mission. Having dedicated his life to fighting for far longer than Leon, he feels more powerful in a way, delivering punches and takedowns that are less about safely and stylishly executing foes and moreso just about asserting as much force as possible over them. And though they’re likely coincidental, the system changes made to the game also make it feel a lot more in-line with Chris’ armyman personality. You don’t get calming moments of focus and thinking when choosing what weapon to use or heal yourself, as the item menu can exclusively be accessed in real-time: That both makes the gameplay far more tense and exciting, and gives Leon’s way of handling items a sense of connection to him as a character.

The main system change I was referring to though, and the thing this game is easily best known for, is cooperative play. It’s something the series had dabbled in before - funny enough, the prequel game starring the girl Chris helped in his debut title, was about cooperation across two characters. But that was more like taking turns controlling each character, whereas Resident Evil 5 jumps head-first into full-on 2-player action, and if you don’t have a second person around I’m sure the AI made the experience miserable. Indeed, working together fits Chris like a glove, and they weave it into the story really well, but you really aren’t getting the full picture until you play this game with someone else. Even in the hampered split-screen mode I had to use for my own playthrough (seriously, look it up, it’s disgusting) the raw fun of fighting zombies as two people cannot be overstated. Resident Evil 4 was already a fantastically mechanically dense game, with weapons affecting enemies in different ways and combat often being presented as a big maze of options to consider, and 5 takes that exact blueprint and amplifies it with two players in mind. One player can headshot an enemy close to the second player to stun it and letting the second player melee, one player can pass on herbs or grenades to the other who may be in dire need, or both can work together to corner enemies in a way to minimize their options of escape. This is an area where sticking so close to what 4 set out to do really paid off - every mechanic that worked great in 4 still works amazingly here in 5, often times even enhanced when with another player.

“Tense action” is the term Capcom themselves use to describe the over-the-shoulder Resident Evil games of the 2000s and early 2010s, and its a term I really like. Because even with Resident Evil 4, the amount of freedom given in aiming and the high octane action of both the gameplay and cutscenes firmly established it as different from the survival horror roots of the franchise. Indeed, neither Resident Evil 4 nor 5 are about survival, and their horror has diminished substantially because of it…yet tension still remains due to how easy it still is to be swarmed, and how many split-second decisions you always need to be making to ensure you won’t get screwed over later in the game. In a Halo or a Gears of War, though enemies may be oppressive, you’re also fully allowed to simply spray them with bullets, to simply hide to recover your health back up or to do completely reckless but effective strategies with your free movement. What kept Resident Evil 4’s bold step into the future still feeling like Resident Evil was this restraint, keeping things tense, and its why I don’t feel either 4 or 5 “killed” the series: Both games are still very successful in creating stress and tension in the player. The best segments of the game are when you’re stuck in a maze of houses and alleyways, with enemies sprawling out of every crevice, and that isn’t because it allows you to go as hog wild as possible with strategy or feel as cool as possible, but because it creates genuine tension in both players. What if you get too far separated and can’t heal each other as effectively, or what if one gets cornered, or if there’s crucial items to be found in a side path both of you ignored? I’d argue that between 4 and 5, while 4 had a very healthy selection of interesting gameplay twists, in terms of raw core-gameplay content 5 delivers in far greater spades. The standout moment of 4 is the introductory Village fight, and 5 is as if half of the game was just variations and remixes of that fight, in the best way possible. That may once again be showing just how safe 5 prefers to play it over how daring 4 was, yet both games still feel so true to what Resident Evil has always wanted to be: Tense, scary even, yet oh so satisfying to master. Even though the action has been dialed up further and further, inside gameplay and in cutscenes, it feels like a natural progression of the series has been building toward, and in a way shows a kind of growth in the characters you’ve been following for so long.

And that brings us…to Wesker.

God, I fucking love Wesker. I know that Resident Evil 4 is the golden child with the gaming community, and its place is rightfully deserved, but…its story and characters do not hold a candle to Wesker’s performance alone in this game. He ties things full circle, bringing the next installment of the series with a decade-old rivalry with Chris, and does so in spectacular fashion. I honestly think the entire story is great for what it is, it both builds on the Resident Evil world in ways 4 was too distant to want to do while also reintroducing concepts from both 4 and older games in the franchise to really feel as if all of those adventures built up to this. All the encounters with Wesker are the best moments of the game, yet all the new villains and factions are memorable in their own right, just feeling like new pieces to a greater puzzle. The game also looks beautiful, not even just for the time and hardware it was on but to this day: The harsh sunlight and barren, yet beautiful towns of Africa are both striking on their own and play off of 4’s nighttime rural Europe perfectly. The two games bounce off of each other so well as a whole that it’s hard to believe that they’re separated by three years and a totally different director.

And for all the praise I’ve given it here, it sadly is hard for the game to shake that “new director”-feel. While its merging of old and new is almost always met well, there are those moments that absolutely push it too far - the boring turret sections set atop cars and clunky cover-shooting sections feel almost cowardly, borrowing wholesale from the other contemporary western shooters of the era. It’s that lack of confidence again, as if they couldn’t quite decide on if they should do the old, the new, or what the rest of the industry was doing, and decided to do them all in somewhat equal doses. That is what will always keep this game looming in Resident Evil 4’s shadow despite arguably surpassing it in most areas, yet it’s not exactly the worst fate to end up second fiddle to one of the greatest games of all time. Really, its an absolute miracle that the game remains so likable while being so scatterbrained, and it was largely thanks to having such a perfect foundation to build it on. Yet it moves with such love for itself, for the entire franchise, both the legacy and the offshoots, that it just feels like one big family holiday reunion.

At the end of the day, it was working together that saved Resident Evil - both in-universe, and out.

[Difficulty Used: Normal]
[Playtime: 15 Hours]
[Key word: Collective]

Hatred stems from disagreement. And disagreement, in turn, most often seems to stem from misunderstanding. Its the absolute rawest form of negativity, meant to communicate said disagreement as loud and clear as possible.

You cannot hold proper discussion on this game without first acknowledging just how deep in its predecessors shadow it lies. Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time&Darkness – and later Sky – was such a perfect followup and incredible game in general, both refining everything Rescue Team had established whilst also holding heaps of content to dig into that gave the game its own identity. Aside from a wonderful, charming story of growth and self-confidence, it features an absolutely massive world that's just begging to be explored, with difficult optional missions galore and oh so many Pokèmon to find. It was a brilliantly rewarding gameplay loop paired with a well-paced, meaningful story, that resulted in a damn near perfect game, beloved by 2000s kids the world over.

So when the expectations thus became higher than ever for the series, not just to keep raising the bar of quality but also to debut the series into a new era entirely on the 3DS, it seems obvious in hindsight that the results would never live up to those high standards set. Yet it was worse than that - as the game released, with every review that came out that I read as a teen, it seemed more and more like the game had fumbled the ball entirely, missing every crucial point that had made Explorers so perfect. "Only 140 Pokèmon?!" "No hunger bar?" "Next to no postgame?" “No personality test?” The issues just seemed like they mounted on and on, for a series I had come to believe was infallible. Sure enough, Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity had been released – and I Hated it.

But looking back, there’s a lot there that doesn’t really seem to add up. I and many people my age loved Explorers, sure, but…critics never really did, with most official reviews of the time giving the game middling scores. So back then the critics were wrong, but…now they were right? Or were the critics always right, was Explorers always a mediocre game? The answer is less black and white than it would first seem.

When I described Explorers earlier, I noted that it didn’t just have a good story, but a meaningful story. My word choice was deliberate: my reading of Explorers is that it’s very specifically a story about individual’s self-worth and their quests for validation. Your partner is weak and cowardly, and wants to prove themselves to the world by being a successful explorer, achieve their dream through essentially climbing a corporate ladder. Together you end up working at the Wigglytuff’s Guild, and whilst you do end up on speaking terms with all of your colleagues, they’re still just that, colleagues. Doing missions day by day, challenging yourself to take on harder ones in dungeons you’ve already been to, really does convey a sense that you’re getting better at this job: The reason stacking missions together to fell them all in one swoop feels so good is the same reason it feels good to turn in multiple assignments in a single day, or why it can feel so good to get paid extra for your labor at a 9-to-5 job – What I’m getting at is that Explorers is a game very much about finding self-worth in a capitalist system. It’s not a scathing critique of the system, but it nonetheless shows the flaws within it: Your life becomes that of routine under your bosses, you’re forced to put up with obviously manipulative and toxic co-workers, and even with your nice co-workers your relationship with them never goes beyond solidarity for doing a good job. Most of the game’s pathos and many of its mechanics feed into this theme, in a way that makes the entire game come together extremely well. Even as the story turns to an adventure to save the world, the focus remains strictly on half a dozen key characters and their trials within that conflict.

But did you notice what I did in that paragraph? With the game’s theme established, I was able to turn what would otherwise be interpreted as issues in the game, into things heightening its thematic throughline. You need to revisit Dungeons a lot, many prominent characters are shallow and one-note, a lot of the game is spent doing the same things over and over, and crucially: The easy dungeon-crawling gameplay honestly isn’t all that fun. What critics may have found fault in, fans clicked with. It's akin to how those who grew up with the survival horror games of the 90s understand the value tank controls added to those games, whereas new players often feel more like they're an issue to work around. When a game's goals are understood, its issues can turn to strengths, and disagreement slowly dissipates.

I don’t want to frame this review as if everyone who’s critical of Gates to Infinity are just plebians who don’t understand it. Hell, there’s a lot about the game that makes me enjoy it less than Explorers at the end of the day. My point with all of this is that it’s been a very important playthrough for me specifically in terms of reflecting on how I evaluate media. Because now that we’ve established how perceived faults can work to strengthen a game’s thematic core and overall narrative, I’m going to put the cards on the table and make my case.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is a game made in direct response to its predecessor, that turns all of that game’s ideas inside-out and shows the benefits of veering in a completely opposite direction. That’s right - since Explorers was a game about capitalism, Gates to Infinity is thus a game about communism. Buckle up.

We’ll start the same place we did with Explorers: Your partner. Though its easy to perceive the Partners in the Mystery Dungeon games to all be copy-pasted stand-ins, its immediately noticeable in comparison to Explorers just how much more lively and energetic Gates to Infinity’s partner is. They have a genuine dream not of self-success or becoming stronger, but to bring other people together, for the sole purpose of helping each other live happier. In Explorers, “enemy Pokémon” were framed as a necessary obstacle to work around to succeed in missions, an unfortunate side effect of the world’s collapse but one the Guild would only help solve by punishing those branded as outlaws. Gates to Infinity’s focus on community meanwhile reframes them as being angry, lost souls, that you help give a new home in your Pokémon paradise. The main plot at the start of the game even centers on you and your partner helping hurt people like Gurdurr and Scraggy overcome their faults, whilst also befriending those willing to help build this community like Emolga and Dunsparce. Suddenly these people around you aren’t tools or passerbys, but genuine friends, characters with arcs and dynamics and reactions to the world. You don’t have a job demanding you do as many missions as possible, so the requests you do one-by-one in this game are framed as your team having a genuine desire to help others, with the thanks gained mainly being materials that feed into town building. By just changing the reward so subtly from money to materials, the loop of doing missions has gone from being self-fulfilling to being toward the betterment of a community, a group of people all helping each other to form a better world. It's not a game about exploring new frontiers so much as it's a game about bettering the home you've built.

Do you see what I mean? Once it clicks that Gates is deliberately trying to show the other side of the coin that Explorers gave us, it lets you appreciate most every decision made in Gates to some extent. View cynically, the townbuilding gameplay is just a gimmicky distraction from the core gameplay loop - but viewed within what the game is trying to do, the townbuilding flat out becomes part of that loop, as you’re now doing missions to help build it rather than to better yourself. Dungeons aren’t so massive in size in this game just for padding, but because you’re gonna need every scrap of money you can find from them to buy what material resources cannot. You’re unemployed, after all! And since they want you to cover so much ground in dungeons, hunger would become a hugely annoying issue. Arguably, its existence before was mainly just to encourage you to keep moving through dungeons to get work done, which would again clash with the game’s direction. Take any controversial change made from Explorers to Gates to Infinity, and I would gladly argue there’s a thematic reason there that helps the story and overall gameplay experience click together better.

But I’ll drop the deep-goggles for a bit and just say, simply: Playing the game is still pretty fun. It starts out a bit slow, but overtime you get to appreciate a lot of the quality of life done to evolve the gameplay of the series forward. Moves can level up, meaning if you have a niche-use move with low damage or accuracy, you can keep using it and eventually be rewarded for your efforts. While there’s less Pokémon to choose from, in return all the Pokémon you do encounter are allowed to evolve whenever rather than having to wait for the postgame, and that leads to you forming a greater connection to them. Explorers made the teammates a bit disposable given that they would inevitably lag behind, but in Gates they’re both allowed to evolve and gain EXP even without participating in battles, which is both a great boon for building your own teams and also feeds into the game’s themes of community - Okay, I’ll stop! You can now access any of your four moves without opening a menu, which is the kind of streamlining this menu-reliant series absolutely needed. You absolutely CAN still deep dive into menus and item descriptions if you so choose, but it’s a lot more avoidable now compared to in the prior two games and the menus themselves have a much more beginner-friendly UI. Combine that with the aforementioned shared EXP with all your recruited members and lack of hunger, and I felt a stronger drive to be experimental in this game compared to Explorers, where I’d usually rely on one Set move and a bunch of Max Elixirs to make battles go by as menu-less as possible. Going further with this I think some of the controversial changes discussed prior actually do have benefits for the gameplay, with the limited Starter selection sticking out to me as the most interesting one. There’s now less choice, and the lack of a personality test makes the story’s shift from focusing on individuality clearer than it’s ever been, but in return the five available Starters feel like they’ve had the game balanced specifically around them. For instance, in the dungeon Forest of Shadows, taking place at a point where the player and partner go off solo on a dangerous mission that’s about to make things turn for the far worse in the story, every single Pokémon there exists to “counter” one of the available starters, making it a difficult Dungeon to traverse no matter who you play as. Plus, each of the starters are now a lot more distinct from one another to play as: Oshawott gets moves like Encore and Fury Cutter for a slow-burn massacre, which gives it a wholly unique playstyle from Tepig, who relies on Flame Charge and Rollout to quickly overwhelm.

To keep things spoiler-free, I’ll just say that the story does evolve in a very interesting and enjoyable way. The evil presented in Explorers stemmed from two people’s individual feelings of insecurity and self-doubt spiraled into chaos, whereas in this game we’re shown the results of what a poor, unhealthy community can result in. People who stick together because they feel rejected from the rest of the world, and using that negativity to push hatred toward others…it’s a bit corny, maybe, but I really do think it works, and it was an easy way to make the villains sympathetic despite their actions. Though the story works well, I can’t act as if it’s all perfectly executed: its pacing really is the main thing holding the game back for me. The start of the game is a lovely slow-trickle where the plot and the townbuilding feel like they're of equal importance, yet by the second half the story starts taking so much prominence that it becomes overwhelming. When you're taken away from Paradise for about eight dungeons in a row, sure you could argue that the game is intentionally trying to make you miss home and long to return to your community, but…it kinda takes that a bit too far. I love all the characters you meet though, Munna, Hydreigon, Virizion, they’ve earned their places in my heart right alongside Grovyle, Dusknoir and Wigglytuff from Explorers. I also love how every Mystery Dungeon game makes the origins of your human-turned-Pokémon player-insert character a key point of intrigue and that they tie it into the overall theming of the story. You’d think there would only be so many ways to tell the story of a human being sucked into the Pokémon world, yet the small variations in how its executed really do go a long way and made this game’s ending hit all the harder.

Small variations in how a similar idea is executed…it’s wild that for a series so often derided in its main series for being stagnant, that this one spinoff spawned so much discourse for the complete opposite reason. But I can’t really defend it all the way through: As a sequel to Explorers, it really is woefully lacking in content. While the lack of connection you hold to the outside world works wonders for the tight-knit homey feel of the story, it leads to you not really caring about exploring the rest of the game once that story is beat: There’s no real drive to become better, and without an evolving narrative townbuilding becomes more of a chore. Even for how much I’m willing to forgive Gates to Infinity, it was just never going to be able to live up to Explorers’ high bar. But I’m happy that the developers seemingly knew that going into development, and chose to make an excellent opposite-approach rather than try to one-up themselves. Even then, they really did succeed greatly in some areas - I think the jump to 3D is absolutely breathtaking for instance, adapting the environmental design of the old games’ pixelart to 3D ludicrously well and the soundtrack is enchantingly good. With the unbelievable workload already placed upon them to basically recreate the series’ fundamentals onto a 3D framework, I’m amazed they still decided to make such a boldly unique-feeling entry in the series.

Though my few issues remain, the disagreement between me and ChunSoft has dissipated, and my understanding of the game has improved. And I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong.

[Playtime: 51 Hours]
[Key word: Misjudged]