"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.

I miss the good old days of the 90s, when games weren’t so political. Where you could play a game like Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, about a meek worker class of aliens exploited by a ruling class for its labor, their culture erased by their employers to enforce their enslavement, to produce commodities and surplus value at an exponential rate destructive and self-consuming enough to that ruling class that they choose to make their next big commodity be the very flesh of that exploited work force themselves, until one hero alien is inspired to foment collective action against their capitalist oppressors, where he is encouraged to be as non-selfish as he possibly can and his very survival is determined by how many of his fellow workers he can rescue rather than merely escaping by himself, and also encouraged to embrace and utilize the traditional wisdom of his indigenous culture to do so. Nowadays you can’t look anywhere without being exposed to a bunch of woke and cultural Marxism.

(Demo abandoned)

What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?

"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).

As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.

Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.

So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?

This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.

The first SaGa game, one of my first JRPGs, and for my money, a total masterpiece.

Mechanically simple compared to where the series would go, this is still a genuine odd-ball to play, leveling an skills and equipment all twisted to be recognizable but not quite right; the first hour or two a head-scratching puzzle of "why is this happening? what is that? why can't I beat this?". I think this, in itself, is one of the beautiful things about this game. The journey to figuring it all out, coming to grips with out there systems, is a pleasure (and also the most difficult thing about the game) and once you do understand, you are encouraged to rip the game apart and bend those once confusing systems to your will. It's simple and quick and feels great.

Of course, while half of SaGa's joy comes from its mechanical uniqueness, the other half is thanks to Kawazu's elegant, simple writing. The first game in the series here has one of my favorite game worlds there is--multiple universes imagined as different floors in a giant tower--one responsible for several of the greatest moments I think exist in the genre (finding the first gun, arriving at the second world, the ending). But it isn't just grand moments and evocative ideas; miniature stories populate the game told in only a few sentences each, each one providing just enough for the imagination to run wild. It is a game that produces daydreams.

Bonus note about that ending: how awesome and wild is it that this little gameboy RPG from 89 goes so gleefully meta. It's smart, it's funny, it's sooo ahead of time, and it opens the simple storytelling of the game up in fascinating ways without weighing things down an inch.

SaGa 2 might outclass its predecessor in basically every respect (the jump in presentation and scope made in only a year is mind-boggling), but the simple, weirdo pleasures of this, the start of one of JRPG's greatest series, might reign supreme for me.

Probably the greatest NES game ever made, but this shouldn’t be a surprise, right? Super Mario Bros. 3 represents Nintendo at the peak of their creativity and technical prowess, with no competition in sight but still blowing the fuck out of everyone around them regardless. A peak so tall that not even Nintendo themselves have been able to make the climb since, at least for this sub-category of Mario games.

I’d rather not get hung up on what was “impressive for the time” since I wasn’t even a cell at its release and only played it years later from the early 2010’s and beyond, but this thing is just an absolute monster on every front. More mechanics, more abilities, more physics tricks, more tech crammed in the cartridge itself, all in 10 times the file size of the original Super Mario Bros. despite only launching a mere 3 years after that game. A save feature is the most obvious omission given its release window and massive campaign relative to other Mario games, but I have to believe they would have included it if they found it practical to cram into the cartridge. It’s an absolute marvel for the hardware, that much is clear, but I wouldn’t be singing its praises if it ultimately amounted to little more than a tech demo.

After a groundbreaking first entry and a successor that amounted to little more than an extra-challenging level pack, Mario 3 sets to evolve the series in every facet, from ancillary elements like the world map and progression, to the actual structure and pacing of the platforming itself. Where modern 2D Mario is most often concerned with the “introduce in safe space -> expand in challenging ways -> throw away idea and start fresh” cycle of design, it was really refreshing to go back to this one and see just how different R&D4’s philosophy was back then. Individual Worlds are still often differentiated by tone and trends in terrain like the repeated encounters with Big Bertha in World 3 or the labyrinth of pipes that make up World 7, but the actual meat of the platforming found in each stage is often ambivalent to the thought of gimmicks or setpieces.

If you asked me, I’d say the defining trait of Mario 3 is its density. Rarely in all of its 90 levels does the game ever give you a moment to breathe, frequently subjecting you to brief dopamine hits of platforming gauntlets to blast through before moving onto the next level. While in a lesser game this could lead to ideas passing right through the player’s subconscious, effectively getting tossed away and lost to the sands of time before you hit the credits, Mario 3 sidesteps this in some pretty clever ways.

Firstly, the game is pretty tough, at least by Mario standards. This is something I never considered as a kid growing up with Super Mario USA as my still-pretty-shitty version of Mario 2, but you have to understand that this is the developer’s follow up to The Lost Levels, not Doki Doki Panic. Mario 3 never gets anywhere close to the cruelty of that game, but this connection reassured me that no, I’m not just bad at the game, but Mario 3 was actually getting kinda tough. Since dead air is all but eliminated and fine control over Mario requires more skill than ever before thanks to the addition of P-Speed and the lack of extended tracks to easily get there, most moments take more mental input on average from the player to lock in on and get through, so even after getting through the game spread out over the course of a few days in-between impassioned sessions with Ninja Gaiden Black (a game that has occupied all available brain space this past month), I doubt any moment will stand out as alien to me when I revisit the game in the future.

Beyond the surface level difficulty, I think the biggest triumph of these levels is the brisk pace in which you get through them. Levels are frequently over and done with in under 30 seconds, and since no moment is wasted, it feels like less of a commitment to munch through them in quick succession after either a full reset or even just a game over within a world. I can absolutely see this becoming the type of game where I just boot it up for a few minutes to mess around in a few levels, only to get caught in its orbit and run through the whole thing in an afternoon, that magnetic sense of flow and pacing is something I find difficult to maintain in a ~3 hour game, but Mario 3 nails it with absolute grace. It’s revealing to me that this is the only(?) 2D Mario that features absolute no checkpoints within any of its levels, further lending to how sticky the full layouts of stages tend to be in the game. Turns out it’s way harder to remember small slices of geometry within a stage if it lands in the half you won’t have to play through nearly as often to succeed completely.

As you progress through each of the 8 Worlds and new arrangements of locales spring to life on the route to the castle, it always feels like a completely fresh journey awaits as soon as you land. The idea of bringing in a world map was probably born of the desire to bring more flavor to progression as well as to house your item inventory, two things that surely smoothed out the flow of play for a wider demographic of people, but surprisingly, laying out a route in disarray has a cool side effect on potential failure. The most obvious benefits to world layouts are the ability to hold secrets and skip levels, but it’s the wipe of progress that comes from a game over that really perked my ears up on this recent playthrough.

Rather than simply wiping all your progress, Mario 3 slowly peels back the world with shortcuts and new routes that open after passing certain milestones or using specific items, with the distinction that main number levels will still be reset when all lives are depleted. If you had to start fresh each time in a challenging section of the game, it could potentially lead to repeated runs becoming more exhausting to play through. While I personally enjoy gauntlet challenges in games as I find them to be interesting tests of endurance when done well, it can get tiring pretty fast (unless, again, you’re as suffocating as say, NGB).

With the middle-ground approach found here, I think it more easily satisfies all types of players rather than catering to one side of the fence. After tearing down a fortress you can start skipping levels you may have already completed, but crucially, they still remain open if you want to go back in for power ups or extra lives. If game overs had truly no downside, walls of progression could potentially drain you of all your resources and become all the more frustrating to push through when you have nothing left to fall back on, but here, you always have time to rethink your approach and plan for your next attack. Alternatively, if your nuts are fat you can always smash your head against the wall more quickly by going straight to these tougher sections, ultimately leading to a faster pace and more rewarding level completions. While it admittedly comes into play mainly at lower skill levels (let’s not kid ourselves, Mario 3 isn’t that hard of a game all things considered), it’s still a consideration I greatly admire. And besides, high level players still get to enjoy the simple pleasures of the map, such as the increase of tension late in the game or the joy of cleaning out an entire screen of content without heavy failure.

While the advent of 3D titles as well as later 2D Mario games are clear canvases for expression from the big N, always keeping this series fresh some 40 years on, so much of their success is owed to this game in particular. You could say the existence of a level hub and level skipping are probably the traits Super Mario 64 are best known for on a wide scale, but they weren’t designed fresh for that game, they started here. It’s not just a case of a game introducing cute ideas for later games to perfect - though a compelling case can and has been made that Super Mario 64 is one of the best to ever do it - it’s a case of a game truly perfecting every pillar of design it tackled. I’m not sure I’ve played another 2D Mario (or maybe Mario in general) that feels so alive and well-realized as this. Beyond its influence for future games, beyond how impressive it stood for the time, beyond how important it is culturally, it nails perhaps the most important trait of a game like this. It’s just really god damn fun to play. For my money, it passes with flying colors and soars into the skies of perfection. It’s Super Mario Bros. 3, man.

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

Naturally, it crashed and burned on release.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

You know, I can almost envision a reality where this game received the notoriety it so clearly deserved, and it wouldn't take much strain to imagine. Given the time period in which the game launched, it had everything it needed to click with anyone who laid eyes on it: a bright and colorful cast of characters that felt ripped right out of the system they were made for, a story of super heroes fighting off an alien invasion during an era where The Avengers were exploding in popularity, quirky gameplay mechanics you'd come to expect from a company like Platinum Games, an all star team of action game designers who had the experience and passion needed to bring this crazy concept to life and flourish, the works. With Hideki Kamiya at the helm, there was no chance this game could possibly fail, regardless of the system it was launching on.

So what went wrong?

Clearly something didn’t click with people despite Platinum’s best efforts. There are many reasons this could be the case (unorthodox control scheme, confused marketing, niche appeal of the action genre, etc.) but it would be difficult to pin down one specific thing that turned people away.

In my eyes however, what matters most is not that the game lacked something to wrangle in the highest number of potential customers, but that the game did not restrain itself in what it sought out to do.

Let me set the scene for you: June 2020, one of the worst years in recent history and it refuses to let up. Due to the recent shutdown of my job given the status of the world at that time, I had devoted a lot of my free time to playing games, as many others in my position likely do as well. Everything in my life is starting to drag, and I can tell nothing will get better any time soon. However, there is a momentary glimmer of joy coming my way. The Wonderful 101 recently had an incredibly successful kickstarter, and having heard many positive things about the game, I decided to give it a blind shot. Many of my favorite games were action games, so while Platinum didn’t have a perfect track record in my experience, I was interested in trying something I knew so little about. Even if it was disappointing, it probably had some interesting elements to dig into.

I didn’t expect my expectations to be shattered like they were after finishing the game.

I’ve never played a game before that appealed to all my sensibilities like The Wonderful 101 does, and even after nearly 200 hours of play, I’m still picking up on new things to love that I never noticed before. I won’t bore you with the semantics, but every element of the game is emblematic of everything I love about the medium. The story felt cartoonish and stupid in all the best ways, the gameplay presented incredibly distinct systems to set it apart from other action games while tackling problems about the genre in interesting ways I had never considered before, and the whole experience was uncompromising in it’s vision in a truly inspiring way.

In many ways, The Wonderful 101 made me feel like a kid again and ignited a passion for life in my heart at a point where everything felt so aimless and dark. As this global pandemic slows down and eventually fades into nothingness, I’ll be sure to leave a lot of things from this era in the past, but this game is sure to stick with me for years to come.

Regardless of how you may feel about the final product, what can’t be denied is that The Wonderful 101 is everything it wanted to be and didn’t settle for less. And for the time period when it came into my life, that’s all I needed it to be.

It is crazy to me that to this day, there have hardly been any games that have attempted to replicate or work upon what was created here, because this is a really special game and it still holds up to this day. It is very janky and looks weird but mechanically it actually does its job very well, and the amount of different dialouge that you can hear and different ways the story can end is really impressive for the time. It is just so charming and so endearing that I look past the odd ball moments, like how Tripp feels about melons haha.

I think this is well worth experiencing at least once.

I'm just retooling a review from elsewhere with this, but I think it's the most I have to say about this game and this series.

Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal weren't the best work Game Freak had to offer as video games. The Kanto region is a cool way to top the experience off, but once the wonder of stepping back into it wears off it's ultimately unpopulated and missing any real attractions past a boss gauntlet. The battle system doesn't push R/B/Y's too far forward. The low level curve is terrible to play through, evidence of the game's rushed and troubled production. And in a horrifically poor design decision so many of the cool new Pokémon are trapped in the post-game, robbing you of what makes a new Pokémon journey so exciting. Even from a music perspective, I'd maybe say Black/White had the objectively "better" soundtrack? It made the transition to a modern electronic style without compromising the Pokémon sound; G/S/C's soundtrack was merely evolution of a winning formula.

Despite the games' flaws, forum keyboard warriors have raved since the dawn of Web 2.0 about Gen II. Their battlecries bellow: "Gen II was the best generation!" "Stepping into Kanto will forever be the best thing in a Pokémon game!" "Gen I but better!" "Night/day!" The inane arguments rage into eternity. I know - I was one of those saps tilting at windmills on GameFAQs. But why? Why do we hold this inferior game so close to our hearts?

To other zillennials the hype for EVEN MORE POKEMON behind this game could be a ubiquitously happy memory of the pervasive optimism in the 90's and that '00-'01 bonus round that bred Pokémon before the everyday edgy brown grit aesthetics of the mid 00's were dumped into the media young nerds consumed. Nostalgia lets us regress to a younger view where Satoshi Tajiri's design didn't seem so escapist; a landscape of exploration, of collaboration, of unfettered freedom to blaze your own trail with friends. The notion that even when you think your journey is done, there's the rest of the world to discover - with even more to return home to! Maybe that's the shared siren song dragging us back to Gen II?

Nah. Here's a spicier take to snap you back to the present with alllll those feelings intact: every one of those emotions were firmly rooted in, and still drip from, the glory of the GSC soundtrack. Stop trying to farm upvotes on here or reddit about which generation is best, and go find a well-mixed recording of this soundtrack. Play it from start to end. Even if the nostalgia itself doesn't resonate, the ~117 tracks between these 3 cartridges are just as wonderful, majestic, melancholic, triumphant, eerie, tranquil, competitive, and satisfying today as they were 20 years ago, despite - or maybe due to - its primal simplicity. It pushes the GBC sound system with more dense and varied sounds and arrangements, emulating kotos and shakuhachis to paint Johto's traditional Japanese countryside style. The entire rearrangement of Red/Blue's soundtrack complements the Kanto backdrop, framing its sparsely produced map instead as a quiet country past its tale, events already transpired, its king atop its summit awaiting your challenge... Masuda and Ichinose stuffed all that emotion between the seams of 3-4 MIDI tracks, playing out of a piece of 90's tech for children. They nailed it. Is that not the coolest fucking shit? With the humble Game Boy sound hardware, it holds the narrative of the journey all on its own. But you still need to get those tracks to play back; the actual game, through all its flaws and imperfections, still pieces that magical adventure together.

This game is far from the best in the series, sure. I do not care. I adore it. There's plenty of things that I'm still fond of from my youth that I can maintain a critical standpoint on, but I'm long gone for Pokémon. Nostalgia and bias will always color the memory and emotions surrounding things dear to our young hearts, and for me that's less about the Pokémon series or games themselves - it's a dinosaur of a franchise that's always too afraid to invent instead of iterate in the chase for EVERYone's money. (Gotta catch 'em all!) My undying love for it stands instead with its stellar library of music; there is absolutely nothing that conveys the simple, kiddish optimism in the journeys these soundtracks tell, and it makes me feel forever young. Right here at Gen II is the peak of it, and even as a continuing, jaded member of the Church of Pikachu I doubt any other entry will ever have music that strikes closer to my heart than a lovely rendition of the National Park theme.

so suck on that, xx_SephirothLover1998_xx

looper is an arcade minigame from the 2024 brazilian game "Astro Pig", and I will proceed to review it. full disclaimer: I personally know the devs, and some of them are my friends. however, if you think this disqualifies my opinion because I'm just going to say stuff to warm their heart, rest assured that it's the exact opposite: I imagine this is not the type of opinion that they want to hear. just imagine if you invited someone to your house, worked your ass off making them dinner, and then they spent the entire afternoon admiring a single olive you cooked; that's basically what's happening here.

hear me, though: it's the best hecking olive you're ever going to taste.

in looper, you control a ship. or, more accurately, you try to control one: this asteroids-ass polygon moves forwards indefinitely, and the only move you have is choosing in which direction to shoot its cannon. said cannon is so powerful that, once you shoot it, the ship's direction changes to the complete opposite direction -- this is the main way you move, by exploiting recoil. after you figure this simple action out (which is the only action you have), the game's two main goals become clear as day: collect little diamonds that appear in random places throughout the screen (like snake's apples), and avoid the little circles that pop up randomly and result in a game over if you touch them.

"sounds pretty simple to me", you say, and in a way you are right -- but also very wrong. because the first thing that becomes apparent is that controlling this ship is hard as shit: humans are simply not built to calculate angles with such precision and in such short-notice: sometimes a diamond seems ripe for the taking, but -- oh no! --, you missed it, and then you try to correct it, and you end up making things worse. or you plot your path towards the next diamond with great accuracy, but lo and behold a hecking circle appears and you need to move out of its way lest you hecking crash, but -- oh no again! -- you died anyway because in trying to avoid the first circle, you crashed into a different one....... so collecting and avoiding, though simple to describe, are goddamn hard, and the game simply doesn't let up -- it spawns more and more circles as time goes on, making it even harder to survive, and it even spawns a second enemy type at some point (an arrow that works just like the circles, but is much faster)...

and then you start to notice some weird stuff.

whenever you collect a diamond, the ship gets a short-lived "bubble" that destroys any enemies on your path -- like pacman's big pellet, or mario's star. this gives you some way to fight through the evolving chaos of the game, and encourages you to not just plot a path towards the next juicy diamond, but do so in a way that maximizes the circles and arrows you're going to encounter soon after. it's very elegant, you think, how they took one object and forced it do two jobs at once (both carrot you eat and stick you beat with). and in a way, the movement action follows the same philosophy, does it not? since it serves both as your movement, and as your way to shoot...

wait, what are we shooting again?

oh GOD they're not circles they're BULLETS. you're shooting YOURSELF.

yes, you heard that right: you're the one hecking up your life in this game. because every time you move, every time you shoot your teeny little weeny cannon, you bring into existence another one of these circle-bullets that you hate so much. that's why the game gets harder as you advance: not because of some scripted difficulty curve, or because of the introduction of some new enemy or mechanic, but simply because they're catching up to you -- the mistakes you made while you were young.

because that's what this is about, isn't it? about mistakes. looper is a game where time does not fix everything: every mistake you make endures on, forever, until you personally deal with them. this is in stark contrast not only to most games -- where time brings change, good or bad --, but also to life, where the ghastly veil of death serves to all as the only certainty in our future. looper massively subverts that: in it, time exists, but only as an impotent side-character -- necessary to move the plot forward, but powerless besides. your mistakes are not erased by time, they only inch forward. are they coming closer? farther? hard to know -- you gotta carry on and find out. in fact, your mistakes are not even erased by SPACE, beautifully enough: once they disappear out of sight, they reappear in a different place, just as deadly as before -- but with a new spice of unpredictability, since it is hard to predict in the heat of the moment where exactly they are going to appear (which leads one to avoid the screen edges like the plague).

to be fair, time can mess you in looper, BIG time -- but in a subtle way that I find very beautiful. remember those little arrows I mentioned earlier? they do not spawn randomly either: they are the ghosts of diamonds you did not pick. that's right: in looper, not only "doing stuff badly" is a mistake, but not doing anything is even WORSE, since it spawns mistakes that are faster and therefore harder to predict. the procedural rhetoric is so goddamn motivational, it's like if ian bogost had a zen phase instead of writing political op-eds that no one reads

in some ways, I think looper is as elegant as tetris -- another game about mistakes that endure forever, in which the only way to correct them is to do something right for a change. but tetris is planning with a little sprinkle of reaction speed, while looper is reaction speed with a little sprinkle of planning. this makes tetris more accessible for the majority of players (and easier to lose yourself into, since the early game is so slow at first), but at the same time I still think looper is the most "elegant" of the two, due to its fewer assumptions and overall duality. someone get this to keith burgun's door

the crown jewel here, though, must be looper's starting screen. as described above, figuring out looper's mechanics was a big part of my experience, however it did not need to be so -- it is all explained on the starting screen, after all, if you know how to read it.... on this starting screen, the ship is still, and as you press A to start the game, some little jingle-dance happens that I did not understand at all, but that later became clear as day: what happens is that the A is the same button as shooting, so the ship shoots horizontally, and as you go in the other direction, you end up picking a surgically-placed diamond, which leaves you invulnerable long enough to destroy the bullet you shot as you started the game. that's it: all the game's mechanics shown to you in the space of 2 seconds. it's the idea of the "tutorial" not as a series of steps to be concluded, but as a book teaching you how to read: once you are able to understand what's written, you do not need it anymore. the tutorial as an inside joke that gets repeated until you, too, come to understand and laugh at it. the tutorial as a jab at someone who asked for a tutorial

looper is a dual game. shooting is your way to move around, and part of the reason why you need to move around. diamonds must be collected and, if you take too long, must be avoided. you are both the player and the one responsible for messing up the player's life. it is so elegant and simple that I am inclined to believe that it is not a game one builds -- rather, it's a game one discovers, perhaps under a bush in the infinite space of possible games; a rare tome in the ludotheque of babel, nested between "nintengnomes" and pokémon vietnamese crystal 2. it's only fair, then, that you must too find it, and gaze upon the stars...

As a long-standing fan of Zer0 Rei's 3D art (which I have been using as my desktop wallpapers for years), I was curious about this game when I saw it recommended on an Errant Signal video. Then, after reading someone compare it to Outer Wilds on a Steam Review, that curiosity became an instant purchase.

Sadly, the game does little to deserve that comparison. There is a strong veneer of mystery here, built through its cryptic presentation (the story is vague and abstract, the achievements are full of random symbols, the main menus mostly contains no words); however, it does not take long for that mystery to completely evaporate. Because pretty soon after starting your game, you encounter levels that are literally "find three switches and activate them to proceed" -- one of the most basic level design patterns that you can probably think of. And it's level after level of this kind of thing. Sure, they introduce new mechanics to shake things up, but oatmeal with topping is still oatmeal.

So although Venineth wants you to feel like you're controlling a mysterious alien mechanism incomprehensible to human minds, you actually just feel like you're playing a videogame.

The game is visually incredible, make no mistake, and controlling the marble is sometimes frustrating but still very fun. It's the level design that dropped the ball here -- and as you probably know, in a marble game dropping the ball can be quite fatal..............