Shenobi
1998
The premier survival horror escape simulator, with a monster AI that was surprising and engaging and rather unmatched for the style of game until Alien: Isolation came around. I don't know if the game wasn't finished or what, but there were many items that had no purpose I was aware of and some areas felt a little unfinished.
I rate this game so highly because there are defining moments in gaming where you get immersed thoroughly and the way the AI for this game ramps up from area to area despite how basic it was for its time meant and still means a lot to me.
I rate this game so highly because there are defining moments in gaming where you get immersed thoroughly and the way the AI for this game ramps up from area to area despite how basic it was for its time meant and still means a lot to me.
This game was terrible about giving logical guidance and there was an exorbitant amount of grinding required to progress reasonably. That being said, the dungeons were a good time (although unfairly difficult in some respects, especially with the fake walls) and the soundtrack was one hell of a jam. Prossession of pieces of Dracula never felt so good.
This review contains spoilers
Short, short answer: When it's fun, it's really fun. When it's obnoxious, it's really obnoxious.
Longer answer: Well, let's break it down piece-by-piece.
Visually, the game is a mixed bag. Occasionally solid visuals get marred by horrible jagging and outlines (especially with characters), textures popping in and out that can sometimes happen so fast and repeatedly that it looks like a clinical in how to induce an inadvertent seizure, and the oft-mentioned draw distance problem coming into play, usually in the form of mons or other things you're specifically looking for not showing up until you're right on them. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it's always a fun time when you're crouching in a cave and can see white light pouring through the seams of textures that don't quite touch the ground properly (or worse in some cases).
The game is fine as audio goes. Cues for alpha mons, some fun area music, subdued music when crouching in tall grass -- it's all pretty nice. If I had one concern, it's a question of why music sometimes just isn't present in an area at all. My wife and I have both had points where we'd be moving around for long periods of time with no area music playing, only to have it start up all of the sudden out of nowhere.
Technical issues, I only ran into a few.
At one point, the game started lagging a lot, so I saved, only to have it crash about ten seconds later. Nothing intensive, was just walking out of Galaxy Hall and heading over to the item box.
Another issue is that turn order in combat sometimes doesn't care about said order anymore when you're facing multiple pokemon at once. I can't speak to any specifics, but I definitely had a fairly fast mon that was significantly higher in level than the three mons it was up against sit there through five actions after using an Agile attack that -- at least according to the turn counter -- suggested it should only have to wait through three actions. Had a few situations like this, but I can only speculate on some aspects of it and it largely doesn't make sense to me in the case of the example I cited.
USEFUL TECHNICAL ISSUE FOR PLAYERS WANTING TO GAME THE SYSTEM -- Was doing some trading with my wife to test the usual mons to see if they'd evolve on trades with or without items, and noticed something very peculiar. Essentially, mons that you traded to someone and had traded back to you counted as another new mon in your research list for the purposes of catching mons.
Having trouble with Request 17 wanting you to fill out a Cherrim entry completely? Get someone to evolve a Cherubi and trade it back and forth until you're done. Especially useful since they're (at least for us) a pain to find and Petal Dance -- the move it asks to see for research purposes -- isn't learned until near level 50.
Basically, if you have a friend and are willing to commit to back-and-forths for trades, you can knock out some of the more frustrating mons pretty easily to get your Research Level 10 quotas.
Regarding gameplay, the game really manages to feel both fun and irritating for me depending on any given moment. I actually enjoyed the sneaking around to catch mons far more than I thought I would, and battling is mostly fine.
Battles feel really binary, as it seems like mons are built in a stacked manner against a player who might bring mons that should be strong against them to the battle. A lot of strategy is out the window because certain things just aren't relevant anymore -- status effects are temporary (and gone after battle), setups (both field-based and stat-based) are temporary during the battle, and you will occasionally be forced into battles against multiple mons at once with no ability to hit all mons present (as far as I know).
I'm not sure to the full extent of which AI behaves in this manner, but some mons specifically formulate their turn AFTER you've dealt damage -- in the case of one particular legendary in the postgame, it would heal itself right after a hit would reduce it to red bar levels WITHOUT FAIL. Trying to balance your attacks to get it into the red so you can catch it? Better stack yourself up with a second free turn because you're going to need it (or in my case, just get tired of it and throw a ball while it was in the yellow and get lucky).
Wasn't fond of the bosses for the most part. My wife said that they're there to test your understanding of the mechanics of the game, but I feel like it's just another "thing" that they wanted to try out, as per the standard in Pokemon games. You never sneak around or try and catch the bosses, nor do you even really actively engage them with your own mons -- instead, you're required to play an arena dodging game for a bit until the mon either does something that stuns it and allows you to engage it with a mon, or it gets tired of going through its cycle of moves and lets you throw a mon then. Yeah, you're throwing stuff at it to weaken it the whole time, but that's not something you do in the wild with normal mons, either. And the reward for beating a given boss with a mon is to have a few extra seconds to throw more stuff at the boss.
Some of the patterns do result in a fun time (second boss for me, specifically), but it mostly just feels like a chore. I died to the third boss once because dodging out of the way resulted in me clipping against invisible walls because of the way the terrain is set up for the fight, so that's an added bonus!
If you are having trouble with them, you are given the option to restart the fight or even restart the fight with your current progress against that boss counted in the restart. Nice option to have for people having trouble, I guess.
Having an invisible stamina bar for your dash/sprint/run move seems weird, but since there isn't any stamina required for dodging, you can always dodge roll forward whenever your sprint runs out because it's slightly faster than your normal movement and a few seconds will recharge your invisible stamina bar.
There's some weird design decisions, like giving the player the option to drown after they've acquired the water mount -- if you're using a mount and hit the water, you automatically call the water mount...but if you just jump into the water, you have to choose to call the water mount or drown and get sent back to shore. This also applies to the flying mount allowing you to switch to a non-flier in mid-air and drop (potentially to your death) if you want to. Kind of weird that they allow it, but in a way, it did allow me to realize that you could use the climbing mount to move up a wall, let go, fly to rise higher, then cling to the wall and switch again to move up the wall slightly faster. Beyond that, still seems like some weird decisions.
I don't mind there not being any breeding or (as far as I know) player battling in the game, but it does kinda put a damper on my desire to push beyond just collecting all the mons up and through postgame.
I did like some of the design decisions for alternate forms for some mons (which I will not mention here, regardless of the spoiler warning). I did end up using a couple of them through the end and postgame sections because I kinda grew attached to them. STILL WAITING ON SOME NEW EEVEELUTIONS, CAN'T WAIT FOR 2037 WHEN THEY FINALLY GIVE US A NEW ONE.
So yeah, essentially...when I'm not fighting bosses (outside of the second one) or just occasionally getting ganked in a goofy way in combat, it's a pretty alright time. I think I died three times in total? Once to the third boss, once to the endgame boss, and once to trying to be a good Samaritan by trying to get someone's bag they dropped and falling off an invisible-walled cliff because they dropped their bag in an area I wasn't normally able to access because of incorrect mounts, but it didn't stop me from walking/sprinting/jumping up awkward textures until I was too high to save myself from falling. Whoops!
Can't imagine getting this on sale unless you get lucky with one of those rare 30% sales that happen like twice a year, so I'd say it's worth getting full price if Pokemon is your bag, but if you think you can hold off, keep an eye out for one of those rare sales and just wishlist it. It's fun enough, the lore they try to throw out there is interesting (at times), and you get some new forms of several mons that make for some more interesting team chemistry if that's your bag.
Longer answer: Well, let's break it down piece-by-piece.
Visually, the game is a mixed bag. Occasionally solid visuals get marred by horrible jagging and outlines (especially with characters), textures popping in and out that can sometimes happen so fast and repeatedly that it looks like a clinical in how to induce an inadvertent seizure, and the oft-mentioned draw distance problem coming into play, usually in the form of mons or other things you're specifically looking for not showing up until you're right on them. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it's always a fun time when you're crouching in a cave and can see white light pouring through the seams of textures that don't quite touch the ground properly (or worse in some cases).
The game is fine as audio goes. Cues for alpha mons, some fun area music, subdued music when crouching in tall grass -- it's all pretty nice. If I had one concern, it's a question of why music sometimes just isn't present in an area at all. My wife and I have both had points where we'd be moving around for long periods of time with no area music playing, only to have it start up all of the sudden out of nowhere.
Technical issues, I only ran into a few.
At one point, the game started lagging a lot, so I saved, only to have it crash about ten seconds later. Nothing intensive, was just walking out of Galaxy Hall and heading over to the item box.
Another issue is that turn order in combat sometimes doesn't care about said order anymore when you're facing multiple pokemon at once. I can't speak to any specifics, but I definitely had a fairly fast mon that was significantly higher in level than the three mons it was up against sit there through five actions after using an Agile attack that -- at least according to the turn counter -- suggested it should only have to wait through three actions. Had a few situations like this, but I can only speculate on some aspects of it and it largely doesn't make sense to me in the case of the example I cited.
USEFUL TECHNICAL ISSUE FOR PLAYERS WANTING TO GAME THE SYSTEM -- Was doing some trading with my wife to test the usual mons to see if they'd evolve on trades with or without items, and noticed something very peculiar. Essentially, mons that you traded to someone and had traded back to you counted as another new mon in your research list for the purposes of catching mons.
Having trouble with Request 17 wanting you to fill out a Cherrim entry completely? Get someone to evolve a Cherubi and trade it back and forth until you're done. Especially useful since they're (at least for us) a pain to find and Petal Dance -- the move it asks to see for research purposes -- isn't learned until near level 50.
Basically, if you have a friend and are willing to commit to back-and-forths for trades, you can knock out some of the more frustrating mons pretty easily to get your Research Level 10 quotas.
Regarding gameplay, the game really manages to feel both fun and irritating for me depending on any given moment. I actually enjoyed the sneaking around to catch mons far more than I thought I would, and battling is mostly fine.
Battles feel really binary, as it seems like mons are built in a stacked manner against a player who might bring mons that should be strong against them to the battle. A lot of strategy is out the window because certain things just aren't relevant anymore -- status effects are temporary (and gone after battle), setups (both field-based and stat-based) are temporary during the battle, and you will occasionally be forced into battles against multiple mons at once with no ability to hit all mons present (as far as I know).
I'm not sure to the full extent of which AI behaves in this manner, but some mons specifically formulate their turn AFTER you've dealt damage -- in the case of one particular legendary in the postgame, it would heal itself right after a hit would reduce it to red bar levels WITHOUT FAIL. Trying to balance your attacks to get it into the red so you can catch it? Better stack yourself up with a second free turn because you're going to need it (or in my case, just get tired of it and throw a ball while it was in the yellow and get lucky).
Wasn't fond of the bosses for the most part. My wife said that they're there to test your understanding of the mechanics of the game, but I feel like it's just another "thing" that they wanted to try out, as per the standard in Pokemon games. You never sneak around or try and catch the bosses, nor do you even really actively engage them with your own mons -- instead, you're required to play an arena dodging game for a bit until the mon either does something that stuns it and allows you to engage it with a mon, or it gets tired of going through its cycle of moves and lets you throw a mon then. Yeah, you're throwing stuff at it to weaken it the whole time, but that's not something you do in the wild with normal mons, either. And the reward for beating a given boss with a mon is to have a few extra seconds to throw more stuff at the boss.
Some of the patterns do result in a fun time (second boss for me, specifically), but it mostly just feels like a chore. I died to the third boss once because dodging out of the way resulted in me clipping against invisible walls because of the way the terrain is set up for the fight, so that's an added bonus!
If you are having trouble with them, you are given the option to restart the fight or even restart the fight with your current progress against that boss counted in the restart. Nice option to have for people having trouble, I guess.
Having an invisible stamina bar for your dash/sprint/run move seems weird, but since there isn't any stamina required for dodging, you can always dodge roll forward whenever your sprint runs out because it's slightly faster than your normal movement and a few seconds will recharge your invisible stamina bar.
There's some weird design decisions, like giving the player the option to drown after they've acquired the water mount -- if you're using a mount and hit the water, you automatically call the water mount...but if you just jump into the water, you have to choose to call the water mount or drown and get sent back to shore. This also applies to the flying mount allowing you to switch to a non-flier in mid-air and drop (potentially to your death) if you want to. Kind of weird that they allow it, but in a way, it did allow me to realize that you could use the climbing mount to move up a wall, let go, fly to rise higher, then cling to the wall and switch again to move up the wall slightly faster. Beyond that, still seems like some weird decisions.
I don't mind there not being any breeding or (as far as I know) player battling in the game, but it does kinda put a damper on my desire to push beyond just collecting all the mons up and through postgame.
I did like some of the design decisions for alternate forms for some mons (which I will not mention here, regardless of the spoiler warning). I did end up using a couple of them through the end and postgame sections because I kinda grew attached to them. STILL WAITING ON SOME NEW EEVEELUTIONS, CAN'T WAIT FOR 2037 WHEN THEY FINALLY GIVE US A NEW ONE.
So yeah, essentially...when I'm not fighting bosses (outside of the second one) or just occasionally getting ganked in a goofy way in combat, it's a pretty alright time. I think I died three times in total? Once to the third boss, once to the endgame boss, and once to trying to be a good Samaritan by trying to get someone's bag they dropped and falling off an invisible-walled cliff because they dropped their bag in an area I wasn't normally able to access because of incorrect mounts, but it didn't stop me from walking/sprinting/jumping up awkward textures until I was too high to save myself from falling. Whoops!
Can't imagine getting this on sale unless you get lucky with one of those rare 30% sales that happen like twice a year, so I'd say it's worth getting full price if Pokemon is your bag, but if you think you can hold off, keep an eye out for one of those rare sales and just wishlist it. It's fun enough, the lore they try to throw out there is interesting (at times), and you get some new forms of several mons that make for some more interesting team chemistry if that's your bag.
2015
Not sure what the hate is on this game -- it looks great, the story is enjoyable, if not a little saddening at times, and the combat is silky-smooth. Did people get their feelings hurt in the arena or something?
The sequel was a huge drop in quality and one giant fan-service dump. This was a great experience, though.
The sequel was a huge drop in quality and one giant fan-service dump. This was a great experience, though.
1989
Obtusely difficult, but fun game. Also, writing this so I can tag a friend and let them know that band name from the Scott Pilgrim movie really was a callback to this.
A regretful abandonment in this case -- I somehow stumbled upon a bug in this game that crippled my ability to play the game reasonably anymore. Essentially, I had been running from fights that were either too easy or just frustrating and not worth the time for awhile and had built up an unusually high counter value for running.
I don't know if the bug is relative to that value, but when I was at sea, there was a point where I would start getting encounters every couple seconds and it was physically impossible to run from any of them anymore -- not because I'd taken advantage of the ! feature and was incapable of running. These were prompts that I should have been able to run from that would drop me right into battle without any hesitation, and with about ten times the frequency of the encounter-plagued sea travels of Suikoden IV.
The rest of the game up to that point had actually been fairly fun, but I'll probably never play this again. A shame.
I don't know if the bug is relative to that value, but when I was at sea, there was a point where I would start getting encounters every couple seconds and it was physically impossible to run from any of them anymore -- not because I'd taken advantage of the ! feature and was incapable of running. These were prompts that I should have been able to run from that would drop me right into battle without any hesitation, and with about ten times the frequency of the encounter-plagued sea travels of Suikoden IV.
The rest of the game up to that point had actually been fairly fun, but I'll probably never play this again. A shame.
The first stage's music is gloriousness. THE END.
1979
We had the paddle controls for this game and as a kid, I'd usually pull them out just to give this a whirl and I was never interested beyond a few minutes. Even games like Frogs and Flies had more going for it than the goofy paddle control gimmick.
Definitely not worth the time (or the paddles).
Definitely not worth the time (or the paddles).
1992
The first big fighting game to try and teach you about blocking with a button instead of pressing backwards from the direction you were facing. The gore was a neat concept, but didn't really make the franchise stand out to me as being better overall.
2012
This game might actually be pretty good -- I loved the first Xillia game. I just don't like having a silent protagonist, given how much personality Tales characters typically bring to the table. Emoting responses occasionally in one direction or the other just isn't good enough for me to get into this game. That being said, I might come back to it at some point anyway.
At least with AC2, I just got kinda bored with the game. One of the first features I was greeted with early in the game was people spawning a few feet off the ground and then dropping into place before continuing their walking paths. It only went downhill from there.
Some of the power-up ideas in this game are brilliant and the Ikaruga-esque combat style of element-swapping to absorb damage and gain back MP is fun and makes for some excellent boss designs.
The arrow puzzles are a little off-putting, though -- not because they're particularly bad (other than one section late in the game that's mandatory), but because they kinda detract from the action-centric feel of the game. I appreciate trying to find a way to incorporate Deedlit's archery skills, but maybe have the bows do more with their arrows based on the bow type (a few bows fire more arrows or use homing arrows as examples). Players should be encouraged to use the bow, but aside from the mandatory puzzles or optional ones, there's no real need to use the bow.
The game's a little on the short side and enemies are a mixed bag, ranging from complete pushovers to absolutely obnoxious depending on their placement in rooms (looking at you, Mummy Masters alongside those flying gargoyles with both of you immune to opposite elements). For the most part though, enemies are just a very poor-paying XP obstacle on your way to bosses.
I won't speak on the boss design, other than to say that the difficulty range is all over the place, but I still approve of them for the most part. There's some really fun ideas at play in there and I would liked to have seen a bit more gameplay length to maybe offer a few more creative boss ideas on top of what was already there. Some moves are shared between bosses, but that didn't really bother me.
Overall, the game is fun but very short -- I clocked about 7.5 hours with nearly all rooms explored. Definitely worth checking out at least once but if Metroidvanias aren't your thing, consider waiting for a sale -- it's a solid one, but it's not a must-buy for your average gamer who just wants to check out a random given game.
The arrow puzzles are a little off-putting, though -- not because they're particularly bad (other than one section late in the game that's mandatory), but because they kinda detract from the action-centric feel of the game. I appreciate trying to find a way to incorporate Deedlit's archery skills, but maybe have the bows do more with their arrows based on the bow type (a few bows fire more arrows or use homing arrows as examples). Players should be encouraged to use the bow, but aside from the mandatory puzzles or optional ones, there's no real need to use the bow.
The game's a little on the short side and enemies are a mixed bag, ranging from complete pushovers to absolutely obnoxious depending on their placement in rooms (looking at you, Mummy Masters alongside those flying gargoyles with both of you immune to opposite elements). For the most part though, enemies are just a very poor-paying XP obstacle on your way to bosses.
I won't speak on the boss design, other than to say that the difficulty range is all over the place, but I still approve of them for the most part. There's some really fun ideas at play in there and I would liked to have seen a bit more gameplay length to maybe offer a few more creative boss ideas on top of what was already there. Some moves are shared between bosses, but that didn't really bother me.
Overall, the game is fun but very short -- I clocked about 7.5 hours with nearly all rooms explored. Definitely worth checking out at least once but if Metroidvanias aren't your thing, consider waiting for a sale -- it's a solid one, but it's not a must-buy for your average gamer who just wants to check out a random given game.
2005
I regret that I never got a hold of this game before multiplayer died out...I loved the original Perfect Dark and really wanted to play this with people online.
1994
There might be something really good here but the game feels like a slog at times. Every scene transition is several seconds long (including to and from battle) and battles feel really slow.
Although leveling might make a difference, it feels like smithing your weapons is more important than levels (other than extra HP). Might go back to it again someday, but as it stands, I'd rather play through some other games in my backlog ahead of this.
Although leveling might make a difference, it feels like smithing your weapons is more important than levels (other than extra HP). Might go back to it again someday, but as it stands, I'd rather play through some other games in my backlog ahead of this.
2006
This game is oozing style in all the good ways. I'm not a fan of waggle controls and drawing as such, so my wife tore into this game and never let go in my place. I should probably play the remaster at some point.