The more I think about Corn Kidz 64, the more I think I kinda hate it. Corn Kidz 64 annoys me more than any game I've played in recent memory, and I cannot tell if I dislike it from personal biases acting against it or if the game's just bad.

Let's get my compliments out of the way: I love the aesthetic of this game. It's super quirky and cartoonish in a good way, and the two goat kids have very cute and fun character designs. If I was an artist, I'd love doodling these two goobers. I like the OST too--reminds me a lot of Tonic Trouble which has an OST I think is good. I wouldn't go out of my way to hear it again, but it's nice.

The controls are...mixed. The control scheme doesn't feel very intuitive, but it can feel good to chain moves together. I think every part of this game's moveset is done much better in Pseudoregalia, but Corn Kidz 64 is serviceable. Specific moves feel weird and inconsistent, though. The headbutt (the move that the game is built upon) can be really finicky at times and outright unresponsive at others. Jumping out of it feels bad and like it's luck if I make the ledge grab or not. Similarly, the wall jump and wall climb moves also feel wildly inconsistent. I never feel like I am in control using these moves, and I can and will get bodied half the time I'm using the move. The reason I get bodied is because the worst mechanic in the game:

Fall damage. I would be hard pressed to say fall damage has ever been "good" in a 3D platformer, but I understand why it exists. The player gets penalized for a missed jump in two ways: The loss of progress and the loss of health. If you mess up enough times, your health goes away and you're back from square one. Nintendo 64 platformers tended to allow the player some kind of way to mitigate fall damage through skill-based means. For example, Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64 allow the player to attack mid-air to slow their momentum which can prevent fall damage, and Banjo-Kazooie lets the player crouch off a ledge to negate fall damage entirely. These methods can be strict in timing, but they can only make you deal with one punishment (the loss of progress) rather than both punishments.
Corn Kidz 64 makes you deal with both punishments as harshly as possible. The loss of progress feels meaner than most N64-era platformers because the level design bluntly sucks. The control scheme favors horizontally minded courses and feels good in those, but most of the game is aggressively vertical. Climb up a tower, climb up a church, climb up a spire, climb climb climb climb CLIMB. Even the horizontal sections usually put you above some kind of pit. Either way, when you fall, you fall for a long time and have to climb up even longer to get back to where you were. Because of the problems of the controls (not even getting into how some obstacles you interact with the headbutt can screw with you on their own), you are going to fall a lot. Falling leads to loss in progress, but you are also going to take damage. You get put in a falling animation quicker than any game from the era Corn Kidz 64 is inspired by except maybe Bubsy 3D. You cannot do anything to slow your descent. You do not have any move aside from headbutt to fix your mistake which usually can't recover. You cannot do anything but watch as you fall and fall until you crash into the floor and see most of your health depleted. You go through the tedious process of recovering your health, you trudge through the backtracking to go back where you were because shortcuts are few and far between in this game, and you go back to the same jump you failed the first time and might fail again. It's not fun. Because Corn Kidz 64 has linear objectives, you can't even go and do something else if you think the current objective is too much like most collectathons. You're going to make all these stupid jumps in a row and you're going to LIKE it. Combined with the sheer lack of clarity on where objectives are and the complete absence of anything resembling level design pointing you in the right way or even a hint system, exploring felt like a complete and utter chore and the platforming I was "rewarded" with felt worse.

The writing sucks too. Some jokes hit and got a chuckle out of me, but most of it feels way too juvenile and honestly witless for its own good. "Ha ha isn't it funny how the townspeople are all stupid pushovers? Ha ha isn't it funny that the church is full of owls who keep saying nonsense and pooping? Ha ha isn't it funny how the main character walks in on a woman bathing in mud?" The writing hits the same vibe as a bad episode of Invader Zim: Dull, meaningless le quirky gross-out humor written either by people who don't know how people talk or jaded adults trying and failing to understand why something they found funny as a kid isn't funny to an older brain and emulating that brainlessly. I'd say the game could have been written by a child if the dialogue wasn't so chronically online and, for a lack of a better definition, "zoomers writing Conker." (I originally wrote millennials in my original review, realizing too late that Conker was probably written by millennials.) People my age can and have written funny games, but this is not one of them. Any person laughing at the game probably laughs at fart with reverb or reposted Tumblr screenshots with an iFunny watermark at the bottom. Even if a game has a simple or no plot, I still need to care if the game has dialogue of any kind. Mario, Banjo, and Donkey Kong all have charming characters and worlds that feel vivid and real even if they're a cartoon. Corn Kidz's world feels like a joke, and the joke isn't even funny. A few setpieces are neat like the weird house and the spider grave, but everything else is either empty or undermined by the game trying to be le quirky. I don't want to keep exploring because I want to; I keep exploring because I have to find where the next impossible-to-find trigger for progression is.

Also, why even bother with a health system and death system if dying doesn't matter? Just respawn the player at a checkpoint if they fall in an obstacle course section. This alone would solve a lot of problems with the game, but the janky controls and obnoxious writing would still stay around.

I could probably think of more critiques, but the more I think about this game, the more I start to genuinely get a headache. I don't see what other people see in this game. Why would I want to play this game when I could play better feeling games with better level design? I'd rather play the games this game is inspired from rather than the half-baked inspiration.

Possibly the most charming RPG I've ever played. Live a Live has a bunch of heart and never lacks soul for even a second of its total, relatively small runtime. I clocked in at 25 hours and enjoyed most of it. My complaints mainly lie in the weird, archaic game design decisions that weren't ironed out in the remake, a few hit-and-miss chapters, and the cryptic facets of some stuff like accessing the Superbosses and pretty much all of the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter requiring an open guide to play optimally. Still, those complaints are relatively minor and I let myself be carried by the unique, singular charm of Live a Live and its many homages.

This is a perfect remake of the original in terms of the creators' original vision. I wish the creators' vision was less rough around the edges, but I love the game lumps and all anyway. I would gladly recommend this game to anyone looking for an RPG.