I wanted to give this game a 4.5 out of 5, I really did, but man, this game has me conflicted.
It has some of the best story, characters (special shoutouts go to my man Fu who is the best antag in the series) and it has the best iteration of Travis in the series alongside TSA), gameplay, enemy design, and some of the best boss fights in the whole NMH series, but it has the most barren open world with barely anything to do in or barely any sidecontent to speak of (looking at you Neo Brazil, which is just a big area with a couple of towers and nothing else :skull:), meh minigames, the artstyle and graphics don't look anywhere near as good as the original Wii games, even the gameplay feels a bit lacking in terms of moveset variety despite it being fun as hell, and several of the characters like Shinobu, Bad Girl and Midori get shafted HARD with barely any screentime to speak of, and the cool stages from NMH get replaced with these lowkey repetitive mini-stages that are spread throughout the open world, like yeah the stages in NMH2 were boring, but why not try to fix what was broken?
There's so much missed potential in here that was caused by Switch hardware limitations and budget issues, and you can tell that Suda and his team at Grasshopper Manufactured cared immensely about the series and had a blast making it, that it's just so sad to think about how it didn't reach the peak the studio wanted this to be, especially considering this is the finale to Travis's story, and because of all this, it's kind of a dissapointing one.
It has some of the best story, characters (special shoutouts go to my man Fu who is the best antag in the series) and it has the best iteration of Travis in the series alongside TSA), gameplay, enemy design, and some of the best boss fights in the whole NMH series, but it has the most barren open world with barely anything to do in or barely any sidecontent to speak of (looking at you Neo Brazil, which is just a big area with a couple of towers and nothing else :skull:), meh minigames, the artstyle and graphics don't look anywhere near as good as the original Wii games, even the gameplay feels a bit lacking in terms of moveset variety despite it being fun as hell, and several of the characters like Shinobu, Bad Girl and Midori get shafted HARD with barely any screentime to speak of, and the cool stages from NMH get replaced with these lowkey repetitive mini-stages that are spread throughout the open world, like yeah the stages in NMH2 were boring, but why not try to fix what was broken?
There's so much missed potential in here that was caused by Switch hardware limitations and budget issues, and you can tell that Suda and his team at Grasshopper Manufactured cared immensely about the series and had a blast making it, that it's just so sad to think about how it didn't reach the peak the studio wanted this to be, especially considering this is the finale to Travis's story, and because of all this, it's kind of a dissapointing one.