The hero we needed AND deserved. The one to save them all, as they say. Super Mario Bros.' legend has been retold countless times. It took part in reviving the video game industry as a whole and instantly became a timeless classic.

Super Mario Bros. is about as simple as you can get. Upon this most recent playthrough of mine, I was surprised at just how much fun I was having despite the game's simplicity. Every time I play this game, I feel a thrill that I can't say I feel with many other games. This game puts me on the edge of my seat in the best way possible.

The physics, while not seeming like much by today's standards, were revolutionary at the time. Coming off of Mario Bros., what I feel is a slippery mess in terms of its control, Super Mario Bros. controls like a dream. The advent of analog control with the jump button is a game changer. Combine that with the tight turn controls, and you set yourself up for a fun platforming adventure ahead of you. One minor issue I have with Mario's controls is how he gains speed. You'll notice that Mario goes from 1 to 100 on a dime, and if you're near bottomless pits or some other hazard, it's usually too late before you take damage, as Mario takes quite a bit to slow down/turn around.

Being one of the first of its kind, I can understand that the level designs weren't necessarily out there aiming to leave much of an impression on players save for 1-1. Most of the levels mold together in my head, due to the very small amount of level themes the game presents as well as the reusing of layouts at times. I'm also of the opinion that the inability to backtrack hurts this game a lot. There are a number of times where I'm either caught between a rock and a hard place, or I miss out on a mushroom because it ends up traveling in the opposite direction.

It amazes me just how much fun I had with Super Mario Bros. with the bias of hindsight being prevalent. It's a fun pick up and play game that can be beaten under an hour, and I rarely ever get tired of it. It's no wonder this game gets the praise and legendary status that it has, as I can only imagine how amazing it must have been to be able to play this game back in 1985.

8/10

when i think of ridge racer usually what comes to mind is smoothness (in both its mechanical and aesthetic prowess) and profound representation of real world context that races concurrently with the game’s own individual racers. even the first title as a rudimentary beginning still has the flair of that early-console-post-arcade mindset. jungly breakbeats of the era kick hard, perhaps being the only motivating factor to indulge at all.
rage racer sees this and for some reason decides to evolve the formula in ways that seem like they’d be no-brainers to AVOID implementing. was there any need for unnecessarily narrow corridors and roads that twist, turn, and bump up and down? racing is of course a test of reaction and muscle memory but this one leans way too much into the muscle memory factor. with the constant up-and-down-and-all-around attitude of the course design it’s basically down to memorization to survive these anti-racer extravaganzas. for some reason drifting also uncontrollably brings you to slower speeds and then manually tries to put you back into a fixed position while relieving you of all control. so much for perfect cornering.
look, i get what they were going for. cities lined up against waterfalls with roads along the countryside bridges etc etc; of course it works on paper but it’s failing to immerse me here especially when the track design conflicts with the logic behind it all. i understand these are “rage” racers who don’t participate in normal races, but it’s still possible to walk the ludonarrative fine line while making the gameplay fun. it’s a racing game. maybe it’s called rage racer because they knew how much people would rage at how unfun it can be sometimes. the soundtrack is nice but weirdly unfitting? i don’t know. i don’t think the actual game embraces late 90s immaturity as much as the soundtrack does.
we do get to see how the series evolved i suppose. i can definitely see where they built off of this for R4 and subsequent titles. this is just a boring and sometimes frustrating game to play. scuffed racer. jank racer. shit racer. Might Need A Remake. this is what this game is like

naked snake/big boss may genuinely be one of my favorite characters in this series behind raiden so far largely because of this game. you can very well see how the philosophy that led him to build outer heaven and zanzibar land takes root in how he was used - and how the boss was disposed of - simply to get the US out of hot water; it makes him become incredibly jaded by the end of the game and far removed from the devoted patriot to his mission and his country he was in the beginning. the events of operation snake eater turn him completely cold, contrasting with the joyful applaud of his puppeteers in the room as the president awards him his new title.
MGS3's character writing is unparalleled to the rest of the series in BB's relationship with the boss, EVA, and ocelot - who all prove to great characters in their own right - even if i still prefer MGS2's story overall. every relationship gets the time to fully develop and reach a logical endpoint, whether it be BB's struggle to open up to EVA turning into him prioritizing her dwindling safety over the mission by the time they escape from groznyj grad, or his somewhat-friendly rivalry with a young, inexperienced revolver ocelot ending in a mutual respect for each other, or both BB and the boss desperately trying to push the love between a mother and son away for the sake of the mission.
the boss could not be any more of a fantastic final fight and closer to this game - one last showdown against the woman who taught you everything you know in a bloodied field of flowers, minutes away from annihilation as the legendary vocals of "snake eater" play in the background. tight shit.

while i feel MGS3 is less tightly designed gameplay-wise than 1 and 2 due to the annoyance of sneaking around in certain areas like groznyj grad, the Metal Gear Special™ of telling a beautiful, profound and thrilling story i feel more than makes up for, despite its flaws, what is still the same tension-filled and satisfying gameplay metal gear is at its core.

what a thrill indeed.

MGS2 is a hard title to write about because there are already like, several 800 page essays about the game and its themes on this site alone, I’m not even factoring in video essays and other sites and articles. So why am I writing this regardless? Well, the answer is quite simple, I can’t get this game off my mind even a week after playing it, and as possibly redundant this review could be, I need to get it out there.
Playing MGS2 for the first time, after seeing a playthrough in my earlier teens and wanting to try it myself for nearly half a decade, was cathartic. I could not be more glad that I finally got to try this. While I was pretty terrible at the stealth gameplay even on the lowest difficulty, just the satisfaction of making progress and exploring every little nook and cranny of the Big Shell made it for me. While it doesn’t have the heavy winter night atmosphere of Shadow Moses that defined the previous game, Big Shell is beautiful in its quaintness. It’s simple but has effective coloring and theming, and honestly how could anyone hate the almost tranquill outside areas with the bright skies, blue oceans, and crying seagulls?
I mentioned that I watched a full playthrough of this game several years ago, and I actually revisited it recently to see if it held up. While I still enjoyed it, it felt surreal seeing that even in 2018 many people didn’t like or respect the direction that MGS2 took with its heavier reliance on themes than sensibility. “Overshot” was the description that hit me the most. While, sure, there are things about this game that are fucking ridiculous (honestly despite my high praise for this game I do have choice words about the Liquid hand thing), I think the absurdity was intentional and defines MGS2. It’s not for everyone, which I understand, but it seems that even just a couple years ago 2 was given a lot of shit for its direction, whereas now I feel that it’s almost universally praised as a masterpiece.
Lastly what I wanted to touch up on was how much I despise the nihilistic circlejerk that surrounds this game’s final codec call. While in the moment it can be crushing and feel like something to make the player feel used, it’s like people completely ignored everything that happened after the final boss. Or even in the codec call itself, where Raiden pretty much says “nah, I’m good” despite everything he’s been told trying to devalue him and dispose of him after his “purpose” has been fulfilled. Both of Snake’s speeches afterwards are the icing on the cake. Honestly during the rewatch of them I did shed a few tears, it hits a lot harder when I’ve given more thought into it and it's an uplifting message that leaves the story on a high note after the brutality of the final codec. Snake essentially goes “hey, there’s a lot going on and misinformation will spread, but don’t freak out yet, you’re your own person and you get to decide what you do or don’t believe in,” how you could see all that and then only hyperfixate on “kojima predicted the internet and AI lol!” is not only ignorant, but blatantly disrespectful to everything else going on. There’s more meaning to MGS2 and its main gimmick was not just “predicting the future.” It’s about individuality and finding what we believe in. Becoming nihilistic and focusing on all the bad in the world is exactly what the GW wants you to think. Why can't some recognize that?
It was nice finally going through this amazing, amazing game firsthand. I’m taking a bit of a break before I tackle 3 because I wanted to dedicate more time to thinking about this game. It’s something that I don’t think will ever leave my mind anytime soon. There’s a lot I didn’t cover here, and it’s simply because many people have already said it or I don’t even know where to begin in wording it, but I am totally up for discussion if you’d like to ask.
Thank you for reading, and a happy new year.
Choose your own legacy.
It’s for you to decide.
it's up to you.

took some time to mull it over, but metal gear solid 2 is genuinely such a brilliantly crafted retort and strengthening of 1's ideas of human individuality to where yeah, i'd say this is the best metal gear game yet purely for how well written it is.

the patriots' ideas of an overabundance of information and conflicting and personal so-called "truths" are very well laid out and incredibly topical years later as most have pointed out, backed up by multiple events throughout the game. it's why the patriots being revealed to be long-dead is such a harrowing whammy of a reveal - solidus and ocelot were fighting against an idea that doesn't even fully and tangibly exist anymore.
and that is exactly what the patriots sought to prevent through the GW system, creating one singular "truth" through justified censorship so as to eliminate humanity from spelling its own doom in the confusion.
but i would actually heavily disagree on MGS2 being as cynical as most make it out to be.
thatmagicalmage couldn't have said it any better in their own review where laser-focusing on MGS2's prediction of a misinformation-ridden future misses how it is incredibly hopeful and loving of the human condition in spite of the negative consequences of free will - evidenced by snake's speech in the post-credits scene describing the importance of our works now that we pass on to the future, and raiden's own decision to live his own life not giving a damn about whether or not he's played into the patriots' hands as he's found his own purpose and what gives him satisfaction - and that is the ultimate triumph he could have ever had over the patriots. it's why i bring up MGS1 because it's very reminiscent of the lesson snake learned about choosing his own life to lead and the antithesis he and raiden play to the gene-devout liquid snake. and yet it doesn't feel like a rehash of MGS1's themes of the importance of individuality, it feels like an extension.
snake and otacon choosing to make their own impact through the anti-metal gear "philanthropy" organization in spite of their forefathers' warmongering efforts shows your path in life isn't beholden to the deeds of your ancestry, and raiden's inability to fall into despair by the hands of the patriots shows no matter how much one may try, no force in this universe has the ability or the right to control how you think or feel. the only person who can decide how you want to live your life is you and you alone, and there's no point in living without that individuality. because it's how we connect with other people.

fuck me, MGS2 is awesome. metal gear is awesome.

You ever end up writing a 3000 word rant on your biggest ever gaming disappointment?



It's August 19th, 2019. My last summer break before I go to high school.

My 15th birthday.

It was an ok day. Some trouble arised and I wasn't able to go to my grandpa's house with some friends like we were planning to, and as such I just spent the day at home with some family members coming over after dinner, nothing special (to the point where some old messages might lead me to believe something bad might've made me think it was my worst birthday ever? Honestly I can't remember, and it doesn't matter).

That is, until around 11PM. While I wasn't aware, gamescom was also taking place at around the same time, and one of the projects announced there would go on to impact me in a way nothing else has since.

As I was wiping out my phone, a youtube notification popped in. "Kerbal Space Program 2 Cinematic Announcement Trailer". I was ecstatic, to say the least. Literally the best birthday gift that I, someone who has always been a bit of a space nerd, at the time thought I had and would ever have. A sequel to one of my little gaming obsessions. A sequel with all the features I could ever want! Colonies? Interstellar travel? MULTIPLAYER? All out of the box? Quite literally the game of my dreams, and it's releasing NEXT YEAR? Holy cow that is amazing!...

3 years, 6 months, and 6 days later. It's February 24th, 2023. I'm now 18 years old, and the second semester of college (and what would then be the lowest period of my entire life up until the moment I'm writing this) had just begun, and as I'm watching the game of 15 year old me's dreams release in real time in early access, what had seem inevitable to me since the system specs had been released is now actually happening.

If you've heard even a single thing about it, you probably know. It's a mess. Hell I'll even say that "mess" is downplaying it. It was awful, actually horrendous. Probably the worst release of an early access game I've ever seen. Content wise? Worse than KSP1 in its beta stage almost a decade earlier. Performance wise? You might as well just break into actual NASA to get one of their supercomputers and even THAT probably wouldn't be able to break 60 fps with a 1000+ part ship. Stability/bug wise? Literally hundreds of bugs found right at release. From locations done by mesh just spawning in completely random locations near the ship, to clipping through the ground constantly, to wings literally falling off planes when spawning into the most noodliest rockets known to man. To the maneuver creator barely working, from orbits just... decaying over time??? I don't think I need to keep spewing hyperbole here, it was truly a mess.

And even ignoring the issues that I just listed given that admittedly those can be solved, what was there was just, very underwhelming? Take the art direction for example, it is genuinely baffling. Everything is way too damn reflective. The parts look like they're made of plastic. The kerbals themselves look more Minionized than ever before. The UI looks hideous and near unreadable (I get it it's supposed to emulate how modern cockpits look, but I think they just took the aesthetic without actually knowing why it is that way? Like the text is all pixelated because it's just cheaper to have low pixel count displays on those, that shit is NOT meant to be on an actual video game UI, and this is just one aspect of it). I guess shit like the clouds and the atmospheric scatter look alright? But I reckon even they know KSP1 mods did it better because they literally hired a modder that was doing a volumetric clouds mod for KSP1. What a shock. And god don't even get me started on the Kurzgesagt-lite tutorial videos like god I'll have plenty to say about the tutorials later trust me.

Needless to say, it was all very disappointing. Especially for me, as up until the system specs were released I was literally IN THE FRONTLINES defending the team from every naysayer, and deflecting every red flag thrown at me left and right with what I can only describe now as excuses. "Oh the Take2 takeover was mostly the fault of Star Theory's management! Most of the dev team still went through to the new team!", "Oh the game getting delayed more and more is a good thing! It's just COVID that messed everything up! (Even though by this point most video game companies have already sorted their shit together)", "Oh the game will not actually run this awful at launch! It's just the Unity Debug Mode that runs worse!". All excuses that I remember spewing to this day. And even after the system specs were released, even after the mess of the launch, I was still willing to give the game a chance, albeit now with cautious optimism instead of blind defending, but even that didn't last very long.

9 months and 27 days later. It's December 20th, 2023. I'm now 19 years old, writing this paragraph in the college hall as I wait for the last class of this semester, as the impending deadline at the beginning of January for the main project and the following exams loom over. I'm a different man. I've played a lot of games. I've read some VNs that might've affected me emotionally in ways they had no right to do. Life could be better but... heh, it also could be worse. Even with all the new worries and things I have to think about, despite all the times I've told myself I would move on from this game, I just... cannot. It persists in my little noggin. I mean, it's no wonder I've decided to write this now, given that the For Science update just released, and like, am I supposed to think it's good?

Like, I haven't played it. Even with all the alleged performance improvements and the nice graphs their twitter account shared, I still doubt the game would break 60 at the lowest settings, so why even bother trying? And as I see ksp youtubers celebrating this update like the greatest thing to ever happen since sliced bread, I can't stop thinking to myself... is the bar that low?

Like, as far as I am aware the update is just... heating that as far as I am aware is worse than it was in KSP1 in certain key aspects (like visually for example, the heating effects look hideous), a "story mode" that is just the missions in the original career mode without the testing part missions and with """"""""""funny"""""""""" dialogue, and a progression system that is just... what the original's was 10 years ago (oh, but now some experiments take time! truly revolutionary and not at all a minor feature of many in the Kerbalism mod of the original, truly impressive Intercept).

And yes, there were a ton of bug fixes and optimization updates too, but there were also allegedly some regressions regarding other issues and... I'm gonna be for real, how much more can this game even BE further optimized?

One of the reasons I stopped defending this game at all is when I found out about something truly shocking, at least for me. One of the main appeals this game as a concept had was the fact that, well, it was an entirely new game! New game then, means new codebase, and if you know anything about the first KSP game, then you know a complete rewrite of the codebase was not only expected, but necessary for this game to run well, let alone handle multiplayer. HOWEVER, THAT WAS NOT THE CASE! As it turns out, data mining an Unity game is piss easy, and everyone quickly found out most of the codebase for the backend stuff was taken straight from a beta version of KSP1 (NOT EVEN THE MOST RECENT VERSION), so I guess this new game is at the end of the day just a glorified KSP1 mod, OOPS! A decision that was surely made at the time to cut cost on hiring actual engineers, has now backfired immensely given that now whoever poor bastard is working on this game over at Intercept has to worry about a decade of tech debt on a codebase made by a guy who wasn't even a programmer by trade at the time, fucking amazing! Amazing gambit sir Nate! Like are we seriously expecting the game that can barely handle a current late game save file at an acceptable frame rate (given a review from a KSP youtuber that I watched that got the new update early) will be able to handle shit that will be expected in a late game save of the game in its planned final state like:

- A lot of colonies running at the same time with multiple logistics paths of resources being transported left and right.
- A ton of interstellar mother ships which will probably have THOUSANDS OF PARTS EACH, WITH EACH PART BEING SIMULATED INDIVIDUALLY ALL THE TIME because yea thats a thing that totally should've been carried over from the first game (and not even mentioning that at the moment every single ship is being fully simulated at the same time regardless of what you're focusing on)
- And on top of all that, MULTIPLAYER, because yea THIS GAME, THAT IS BUILT ON TOP OF A CODEBASE THAT IS INCAPABLE TO HANDLE SUCH THING WITHOUT DOING A REALLY HACKY JOB, IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE MULTIPLAYER REMEMBER???

God what a fucking mess. And like I keep coming back to how they kept the old code base from the og game because... that's just a mentality that permeates throughout the entire game! Remember the noodly rockets bug I mentioned earlier? Well I LIED because it wasn't a bug actually it WAS A FEATURE. Local genius Nate Simpson apparently thought that the noodly rockets of the original game were... part of its identity!! So they kept that! And made it even worse! Together with a bunch of other flaws that really shouldn't have been in this brand new shiny game!! INCREDIBLE!!!

It's like these people are so scared of doing an actual sequel that they instead just default to doing everything the way the old game did, although maybe that's more due to laziness and lack of actual direction and not them just loving the og game that much. And the stuff they change/add... isn't that good either!!! Like the UI, forget how it looks, it's just so clunky and cluttered. Like what was wrong with the part info window? Why does everything need to be locked in a fucking list now that I have to scroll through instead of being able to organize everything the way I want across the screen? Why is the navball in a corner??? Isn't one of the big principles of UI/UX design that the most important elements always need to be at the center of the screen? If you wanted to make space to make it easier to see the rocket you could've just put it slightly to the side but still at the center! Why is the SAS assist command this ugly ass circle with a 3d model representation of your ship's orientation??? I already know what these symbols mean! Put these on a list that takes up less space like in the original! And if someone doesn't know what those symbols mean, then find a better way to do so because honestly i don't see how the way they've done it helps either. It's a goddamn mess.

And the priorities are just so all over the place. Even disregarding the fact that this game was very clearly not meant to be released in Early Access given that they've been working on every feature at the same time until close to launch instead of just building a good foundation first??? There's just so many... baffling decisions. Why are there so many simple QOL features missing? Why did we have to wait so long for a TWR reader in the VAB even though, as far as I am aware, that's literally something you can do in a spreadsheet in like 5 minutes. Or god the tutorials... why are there even tutorials in this early access release??? You know, the period where anything can change at any moment's notice??? Why not do those close to the full launch when everything is already set in stone?? Why waste resources on animations you might not even use by the time the game is feature complete??? And regarding the tutorials themselves they just suck. Disregarding the annoying ass YT Kids sounding narrator they are literally just .mp4's followed by the KSP1 tutorials again. No innovation, might as well just watch a Scott Manley video and learn the game that way instead (which some dudes from the PR team have LITERALLY SAID TO DO WHEN PEOPLE WERE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE TUTORIALS like god have I already mentioned how bad their PR team was throughout this entire ordeal? Genuinely such a lack of professionalism that I rather not get into it). You literally have the opportunity to do... idk?? Cool interactive lectures on physics concepts? You know?? Taking advantage of the fact that this is a VIDEO GAME?? But nah youtube videos have worked up until now let's just do that inste- GOD THIS GAME SUCKS THIS GAME REALLY SUCKS SO MUC

...ok I guess I could talk about stuff I like?? Uhhhh the sound design in general is excellent, props for that. Uhhhh the planets look nice? Not as good looking as some mods I've seen of the original but you know, they still look alright. And I guess being able to build multiple ships in the same workspace regardless of orientation is a good QOL concept? Wish it worked better tho...

... Look, I don't like to be negative, just look at my rating graph in my profile. Like god I literally gave UDG a 6/10 despite the fact that that game by all accounts sucks really fucking bad. Whenever I hate, I'm most likely just being deeply ironic at the main discord server I talk in, it's just not my thing to do unironically most of the time.

So... Why am I even giving more energy towards this game than seemingly its entire management team did? Why am I even bothering writing this 3000 word review about a game in a series that only I care about in all the friend circles I frequent? How many likes is this even gonna get? Five? If that?...

I guess it just comes down to what I said in the beginning. Even after this long, the space nerd kid still inside of me still wants... well not this game but the idea of this game to come to fruition. I want to be able to build giant complexes in distant moons. Building giant motherships which part towards far away stars, as I awe at both the immensity of the cosmos, and the beauty of the small specks floating through its milky vastness of nothing. For some people space might be frightening, but for me it's not. For me this setting itches that primordial instinct of mine that urges me to go out, find things, explore the unseen, and that makes me both afraid, and utterly attracted by the unknown. It's something I really wished to have but, this game ain't it. And I know about games like Outer Wilds and No Man's Sky that are kinda like that (if anyone uses NMS as a counter argument towards my sentiment that KSP2 has no future I'm crushing your skull with my bare hands btw), but... I guess there is simply nothing quite like Kerbal Space Program... I do still need to play those games at some point tho lmao.

Well, I guess there's that, if any aspiring dev teams want to make a name for themselves, maybe make the coop aerospace sim everyone wants! If you start now, maybe you'll be able to announce it in the same week as the inevitable apology from Nate about how multiplayer just "aint possible" and how they're instead just releasing the game as is (aka, soft canceling it and moving on to another fandom to grift).

And to any low level Intercept Games developer that just read through this, I really am sorry. I am sorry that you probably have to tolerate a bunch of passionless, directionless managers as you try to salvage whatever you can of this mess. In a way this is really what's wrong with the current industry. Not predatory microtransactions or buggy early access releases. Nah those are just symptoms. What is truly wrong is how much of this industry is led by people that just do not care for this medium, and only care about filling their pockets while the low level developers pull 24 hour shifts in order to pull yet another broken mess through the finish line. But while I could continue to wax poetic about the systematic problems of capitalism, I guess that's a bit out of the scope of this review.

I think that's everything I have to say about what is undoubtedly my least favorite game of all time, and I really hope I don't need to talk about it ever again (unless they somehow manage to turn this ship over, which as I elaborated, I don't think they will). May y'all have a pleasant day, and to end this review, and I mean this completely sincerely...


Fuck off Nate Simpson

This is by far the most unique and interesting horror game I have ever experienced. It's criminally underrated, tough as nails, and best of all, it's genuinely scary. Easily the best horror title I've played yet.

The permadeath system is fantastic. I love that when you get bitten, there is no coming back. All of the weapon skills you have obtained, and your survivor score are completely reset, which creates huge tension when you want to avoid failure. It makes death actually mean something, and it makes even the most common grunt zombies a legitimate threat, something I don't think any horror game has done before or since. With the combat, you're capable of dealing damage and getting the job done, but you aren't superhuman. The combat system makes you feel vulnerable, but not to the point where combat becomes a repetitive mind numbing slog like in Silent Hill 2. This ties into the survival part of survival horror: you need to plan ahead, take it slow, and use the resources you have wisely because they're very scarce, and I think this is ingenious design coupled with all the other mechanics I mentioned. Not to mention, when you die, you need to track down your previous now infected survivor to get your stuff back, which is a really cool and interesting fresh spin on these typical zombie games, almost like a roguelite esc take on survival horror.

The Wii U gamepad is what really sells this however. You need to constantly glance down at the gamepad screen to do a whole myriad of tasks: check radar, scan for potential loot, inventory management, picking locks and hacking doors, and so on. The thing is when you do this, the game itself doesn't pause, so the infected can easily have a chance to sneak up behind you and try to kill you, forcing you to multitask different things at once. This adds huge amounts of tension to the game, as while you're doing anything with the gamepad you're vulnerable at all times. It really does feel like an experience you can only get on Wii U.

As for the rest of the game, the atmosphere is top notch, and really sells the feeling of complete ruin and isolation. The fog penetrating certain areas, the crows flapping all over, the screams echoed in the distance of far off infected, the grunge of the decaying London subway system and sewer tunnels, it's all handled wonderfully, and areas that take it one step further (such as Buckingham Palace and The Nursery) are done even better. The music is surprisingly very well made as well, more of a somber soundtrack with a few instances of heavy tense techno. On top of the main campaign, there's also a fun multiplayer mode that has the gamepad user control a hoard of zombies, spawning them and leveling up and gaining new perks as the match continues, while the pro controller player plays a survivor, killing the infected in a variety of game modes.

However, I do still have some issues even with a game as great as this. The game is a tad on the short side (only about 10-15 hours for a single campaign), the loading times can be frequent and pretty bad, and the game visually could stand to be improved even though I think it looks great as is. Regardless, please consider checking this game out on Wii U, it is an extremely underappreciated gem.

Replayed this on hard/classic and this is NOT it bro
The one that everyone feels obligated to mention “saved the franchise” which sure, I appreciate, but I’m ngl Awakening only saved this series financially, from a gameplay perspective that credit goes to Conquest easily, replaying this game on hard mode with permadeath just made it apparent how weirdly and/or badly the maps and enemies are designed. Hard mode in this game just straight out sucks, stat bloated enemies and same turn reinforcements in a game where it feels like terrain bonuses don’t even matter is the absolute worst, not helped by the GBA emblem level amount of enemy spam. Map design doesn’t help either, as a lot of them aren’t even maps and are just “big open field with enemies” or “indoor map with enemies,” and objectives that mostly comprise of “KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM”.
Around chapter 5 I had the realization that all of these units pale in comparison to the sheer snowball of a unit that is Robin. Yes, you can solo Awakening with any character if you want, just like FE4 or FE8, etc, but at least in those games, it felt like your non Sigurds or your non Seths could still contribute and still had a nice unit feel. And while that still sorrrta works on normal mode, it really doesn’t on hard mode because of the aforementioned stat bloated enemies. So, clearly the solution to this is to snowball all your squishy, non Robin or Frederick units up by grinding in the skirmishes, right? WRONG. Because, in hard mode, skirmishes comprise of ridiculously strong enemies, we’re talking like maps FULL of prepremoted enemies as early as chapter 5 which SUCKS. I really wanted to train up a whole team for this game but I absolutely did not have the patience to grind through all this, so I had my ultimate solution.. The Robin Juggernaut. 2 units deployed every map, class change Robin to sorcerer and around mid-game stock up on nosferatu and simply watch. I did not deploy a single other character for the rest of the entire game after chapter 10-ish, because I didn’t feel like grinding in my fire emblem game. Also worth mentioning how Robin becomes even more busted by using the game’s pairup mechanics which by itself is an insanely unfair advantage to have over the enemies (Fates would fix this by having enemies also be allowed to pairup), have Robin and Chrom pairup and you will basically never have to worry about the latter’s safety.
My play time this run totalled at 4 hours. How? Because I simply became so bored by the end, I turned off all battle animations and just started skipping enemy phase because what was there to see? And before you tell me that I wouldn’t have been bored if I did full deployment and used all my characters, I’ve done that before in my first run of the game, and my thoughts were IDENTICAL around the same point. It’s not a strategy game. It’s a JRPG on a grid, which I just don’t like outside of Sacred Stones and Echoes to an extent. The game tries to trick you into thinking it’s a TRPG with side objectives on maps by throwing in treasure chests on some maps but don’t fall for that, they’re just meant for you to waste your turns and be murdered by same turn reinforcements. It’s all just pointless.
Skipped the story too. I usually don’t reread story in a replay of an FE game unless it’s FE4 but even if I usually did I would’ve skimmed over this one most likely. I don’t hate the story of Awakening but it’s just not my thing, and lacks any sense of cohesion or interest outside of one thing: Lucina. I love Lucina fire emblem. Other than that? Plot that is trying WAY too much and saying WAY too little. It’s got the FE7 problem where shit just kinda happens and you roll with it but without the genuine feeling of going on an adventure like that game. I think the inclusion of the world map ultimately hurts giving the story a proper sense of scale, it’s fine in Echoes but in this game I feel that it takes away the feeling of being on a long journey with these characters, earlier entries usually had no map and it cemented a feeling that you can’t go back, only forward. Idk how else to describe it, but yeah Awakening doesn’t really have that.
My score for this review is more reflective of playing on hard mode or above, I’d drop a 6 at the highest in the context of normal mode but like- Awakening purely lacks anything I like about fire emblem other than the characters (which this game does have quite a few I really like!) I understand why IS went this direction for the sake of general appeal and hey, if you like this game, I’m happy for you! I’m sure if this was my first FE especially if I was like 13-15ish I would’ve loved it, but it wasn’t, and I don’t. It’s just kinda okay at best for me, and I can’t see myself replaying this unless it’s out of spite or seeing more of the gen 2 kids. Not for me.

Figure this would be as good a time as ever to make an updated “then vs now” review of Sonic Frontiers since the final batch of DLC has finally been released. Truth be told, my overall thoughts have fluctuated on this game, but only ever so slightly. It basically went from an 8.5/10, to an 8/10, back to an 8.5/10 after the Final Horizon update. Not much has changed on that front. I didn’t mention this in my prior review but to my complete and utter surprise, the director of this game, Morio Kishimoto, had then recently (before the game’s release) created a Twitter account and had been regularly interacting with fans. Not only that, he had been regularly asking for fan feedback on what he can do to improve his product and work. Forget about this being Sonic for a sec, when has a situation like this occurred for any AAA game studio? Let alone one overseas? Of course, everyone bombarded him with the typical “it should be more like Sonic Utopia” schlock which…bleh. But nevertheless, there was some genuine advice for improvement people on Twitter tossed around for Frontiers and (eventually hopefully) future iterations of this “open zone” concept, whether it be aesthetics, mechanics, etc. If anything, I’m just really glad Frontiers has become extremely successful. Maybe not so much in terms of critical reception (it’s decent, sitting at 71 on Metacritic last time I checked but I also stopped caring about Metacritic scores as I’ve often vehemently disagreed with a vast majority of the scores given out, whether for games I hate or games I love) but more so in terms of awards won, sales (currently the best-selling 3D Sonic game of all time), fan reception, and most surprising of all, it helped boost Sonic’s already dwindling popularity in Japan, something that was a personal goal of Kishimoto. I’m just really glad to see him happy that his hard work payed off. I may not be a fan of all of Kishimoto’s work mind you (for every Frontiers and Colors, you get a Lost World and Forces), but I can’t deny he’s a very hard-working leader that genuinely cares about Sonic and strives to improve in everything he does. One Way Dream is emblematic of this. So, I guess it’s time to go over not only my current thoughts on the game now that the quote unquote Honeymoon phase is over, but also each of the individual updates as they came out and how they affected the game as a whole, as there has been quite a few quality of life improvements in regards to these 3 updates.

As for the game itself, I still really enjoy it. Running around the open zone area, chaining moves together to seamlessly leap between grind rails, hills and springs never got tiring. The obstacle courses themselves aren’t anything spectacular (at least in regards to the beginning of the game anyway) but they’re also incredibly bite sized and require at least a fair degree of player control over automation so they’re overall pretty enjoyable. I’ve even started to enjoy the Cyberspace stages to a degree. Like, don’t get me wrong, they still aren’t great and they have loads of problems, but like most Sonic games I guess the fun comes in the form of working around or flat out abusing the jank to blast through the stage as quickly as possible. Still would play Gens and Colors any day of the week over these. Unleashed uhh…depends on the stage I guess because some stages are actually way more fun in Cyberspace. Still think the story is easily the best we’ve had in terms of any of the games, and the soundtrack is still utterly incredible man. Tomoya Ohtani did a fantastic job on everything here, I can’t think of a single song on this soundtrack that I DIDN’T enjoy. Even the cutscene music is great. There are definitely a lot of problems and faults but overall, I still have a great time with this game and it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had with a 3D Sonic game in a long while. While I’m looking forward to what they end up doing with this formula in the future, the official Sonic twitter account (I know it’s called X now but let’s be real nobody is calling it that LOL) announced that Frontiers would get multiple waves of content updates. A lot of it sounded vague and uninteresting (what even would be “new Koco”? Would it literally just be Koco with new funny hats on and that would be it?) but the addition of different challenge modes and new playable characters?? I don’t think we’ve had playable characters with substantially different abilities from Sonic in a 3D game since 2006 (there was Black Knight but even then, not really). Of course, these were all free content updates so I kept my expectations relatively low because of this, but to my surprise these free updates ended up offering WAY more substantial content than I ever could’ve known. Buckle down if you wanna keep reading because this review is gonna be a LOOOOOONG one:

We’ll start with the first update, the lightest one content wise. We got a photo mode, Juke Box, a Battle Rush mode, and a Cyberspace challenge mode alongside a slew of quality of life improvements that I’ll get to in a bit. The photo mode is…meh. Nothing special, but functional; does what it needs to do and that’s really about all I can say about it. From the teaser it made it look like we could have Sonic emote and pose like the Spiderman 2018 photo mode which would be incredibly funny if that were the case, but sadly we don’t get that. We get a few filters and a weirdly kinda restrictive camera, but despite that I’ve seen some really great pictures taken using this feature so I guess at the end of the day it works fine enough. The Cyberspace challenge mode and Battle Rush mode are where the true content lies anyway. Cyberspace challenge is, more or less, exactly like how the Egg Shuttle functions in Sonic Colors: a massive gauntlet of all the Cyberspace stages back to back, trying to beat each of them as fast as possible. Like Egg Shuttle, it’s a fun little side thing to do that I felt the game always should’ve had from day 1 so I’m glad to see it return here. Battle Rush is also a big gauntlet, but this time against every single common enemy, mini boss, and Titan from each island. Due to how limited Frontiers’ combat is I didn’t get a lot out of this, but some enemies I had to figure a roundabout way to take them down quickly for a good rank. It’s also nice that it allows you to refight the Titans as this wasn’t something you could normally do in the base game. Each mode grants you a little bonus upon S ranking each: for Cyberspace Challenge mode, it unlocks the ability to Power Boost in Cyberspace. While this admittedly is pretty cool, I didn’t feel a huge difference using this as the Power Boost in Cyberspace is still a lot slower than it is in the Open Zone (as is the regular boost). Battle Rush S ranks unlock Extreme difficulty, a mode where you can’t upgrade your stats and everything kills you in one hit. It’s a novel idea (basically the equivalent of a DMC Hell and Hell mode for Sonic) but it’s still not really THAT challenging and you don’t even get any acknowledgement for beating it. No achievements, no cosmetics, nothing. Pretty underwhelming if you ask me.

Lastly, we have Juke Box mode. I didn’t really know what to expect from this mode, at most I just kinda expected a spot on the islands where you can listen to every piece of music from the game. To my surprise, this ended up being like Sonic Generations, where you unlock a slew of tracks from across the Sonic franchise and can play any one of them while roaming around the Open Zone areas. There are jukebox notes scattered around the islands much like the memory tokens and collecting one unlocks a random song. I think it’s really cool how they managed to implement exploration elements with a silly extra such as this, and it also makes areas like Rhea Island a little less desolate as now there’s a few hidden notes to collect outside of the giant towers. It does certainly change up the atmosphere whenever you play a song from a different game; Seven Rings in Hand in particular goes hard on Ares Island. Also, shout out for putting all the island movement themes to collect as well, so we can play any of our favorite movements on any island we want instead of being stuck on the 7th movement at all times. On top of all of this, there were also a slew of quality of life improvements: one of which being that they finally, FINALLY fixed Elder Koco. Now you can exchange all of the koco you’ve collected all at once and put them into either speed or ring capacity instead of needing to do it one at a time, thank GOD bro that was agony. They’ve also added a button combination to instantly restart Cyberspace levels which is a great feature, and they’ve also allowed us to turn off the Starfall slot machine entirely. I personally think you could still HAVE the slot machine in the game without making it obtrusively slapped into the center of the screen, but whatever I guess, glad they gave us the option. A lot of these were problems that many people criticized and I was kinda surprised they even added these options at all. It really did show that the team was listening to feedback, and given Kishimoto’s statements at the time, it seems we were gonna get a lot more in the next update. Overall this first update was WAY more than I thought it was gonna be to my utter delight. If this was the direction the updates were taking, then the next couple of updates were really going to be something to look forward to.

The next update, as expected was even beefier; adding even more quality of life changes, new challenges and even a brand-new ability, one that Kishimoto himself had been teasing for quite a while now. Might as well get the Sonic’s Birthday stuff out of the way first as it’s the least impactful part of the update, you basically have Sonic in goofy birthday attire and the entire Starfall Islands are decorated like that one Pepto Bismol Walt Disney World cake castle from 1996. Everywhere you go, wrapping paper, streamers, balloons, presents as far as the eye can see. The Koco you collect and your trapped friends still within the haunting confines of their digital prison take the time to put on a cute lil party hat or two. Even the HUD is infected with colorful birthday noise. It’s not something I care for personally but it is pretty funny to look at. The best part about this cosmetic update is that it comes with a new music track that’s essentially a DJ mix of a variety of different Sonic songs not found in the Jukebox update which is pretty cool. I always appreciate Neo Green Hill when I hear it. No, the true meat of the update begins with the Action Chain challenges. Essentially, scattered around the islands are these challenges you activate where the goal is to essentially do as many things as you possibly can within a time limit: engaging with springs, rails and the platforming around the island, battling enemies, doing tricks, collecting rings, all while collecting yellow orbs to boost your score multiplier. It’s a pretty interesting side mode to participate in, and while it is fun, I do have some issues with it. First off: there absolutely did not need to be 10 of these things on each island minus Rhea, that is BEYOND overkill and at times kinda turns these little side challenges into a chore if you wanna do them all. Second, fighting minibosses breaks these challenges in half. If you can build up a decent score multiplier and rush over to a guardian and kill it, it’s pretty much a guaranteed S rank. Still though, I did end up liking the addition and I hope if it comes back for future entries they find ways to improve and innovate off of it. Of course, the challenges themselves are one thing, but if you manage to S rank all of them on every island, you unlock the Spindash. This is something that Kishimoto had teased for quite a while, we even found some leftover data that revealed in game tips about the Spindash back in update 1. Now that we finally have it, uh…I can definitely see why they locked this move behind S ranking all the Action Chain challenges because HOO boy.

The Spindash is completely bonkers broken in Frontiers. It’s like a mix between SA1’s Spindash (in terms of how high and far you can launch yourself with it) and Lost World’s Spindash (where it’s more of a second form of boost in a way). Essentially, it’s like the boost already in Frontiers, just objectively better in every way. It’s just as maneuverable with the ultra-tight turning Frontiers already has, it goes just as fast (if not faster), you can use it whenever you want while moving or standing still (you don’t even have to rev it up if you don’t want to), it has a hitbox and damages enemies, it consumes the boost gauge just like the boost, and the biggest feature of all? You aren’t constantly glued to the ground at all times. When you use the Spindash, you absolutely LAUNCH off of inclines and ramps. You get so much airtime and distance with this thing it’s borderline ridiculous. Now, normally I’m not really that engaged with the whole “fly through like half the stage by going off a ramp” mentality, but I feel it works here for a couple of reasons. Reason 1 is that being glued to the ground at all times was kind of a big problem Frontiers had in general and reaching things like memory tokens in unintended ways is pretty amusing. Reason 2 is that this is essentially an endgame unlockable: something you don’t have equipped by default and something you have to put the work into getting. As a crazy game breaking toy that the game essentially goes “ok you’ve won, have fun now”, I think I can allow it. The quality of life improvements further enhanced this by allowing a slider for air deacceleration and no deacceleration when boosting through the air. While I think this is fun to play around with, this sadly only applies to boost jumps and not your regular jump, which means moves like the drop dash are still affected and jumping after hitting a dash pad still kills your speed. Honestly, and this can apply for the next game too, all I want is the equivalent of the short hop from Gens, Colors, and Unleashed. The ability to keep your speed while lightly jumping to clear small gaps feels immeasurably good to pull off, I dunno why they ever got rid of this ability to begin with.

The final “big” addition this update introduced are the new Koco. Like I said before, I didn’t’ really know what to expect when this feature was teased because…well, what was I even SUPPOSED to think? They gave us nothing to work with at all. However, to my utter shock, these new Koco ended up being the best part of all of update 2. Yeah, INCLUDING the Spindash. These new Koco are big bois with fancy getup and costumes, and when you collect them and turn them into the Elder Koco, it expands your boost gauge stamina. While this feature is kinda negated by just cylooping an infinity symbol and having temporary infinite boost, it’s still a cool upgrade that I’m surprised they didn’t already put into the game prior. That’s not even the best part though, as to get to these Koco, you need to complete the huge platforming challenge tied to them, similar to the platforming challenges already scattered around the island. The difference being that these platforming challenges are way harder to clear in comparison. Some are a reaction-based test, some have tricky moving platforms over the edge of the map, some are miniature puzzles in a way that you need to figure out to progress, some have massive wall running sections with tons of spiked balls and hazards to avoid with strict timing. I had a REALLY fun time acing these, in fact I found them so fun I often ended up going through them again even after I collected the Koco. IMO this is honestly how the platforming challenges should’ve been throughout the game, or at the very least they should’ve thrown them in there from the start and mix them with the ones already in the game. I love a good challenge and while I didn’t find these hard or anything, they definitely had me engaged throughout. Easily the best part of the new update. Aside from the air deacceleration, the only other QOL changes they added were actually also pretty substantial. You got things like disabling the cinematic camera for your skill tree moves, which I didn’t really mind so I kept them on, but then you have the ability to disable the music distortion when boosting in the Cyberspace stages which I was super happy to see added (which, by the way, was a suggestion I offered to a Sonic affiliated person on Twitter back when update 1 dropped. You’re welcome 😉). They also added an island progression screen, showcasing everything you’ve completed on each island and what % you have that specific island complete. It counts everything, from side stories, island puzzles, Cyberspace portals, and yes, even memory tokens. It’s essentially something only added for 100% completion nuts such as myself, and as I’ve already 100%ed everything prior, seeing those completion screens light up was truly worthwhile. What’s more, if you do end up 100%ing every island, you even get a special cosmetic reward for doing so (Sonic gets a crown. That’s about it. It’s literally exactly like Kingdom Hearts and I love it for that)! The extent to how beefy update 2 was, even in comparison to update 1 was nothing short of impressive. All that was left was the final content update, later dubbed “The Final Horizon”. All that was left to do was wait.

And so now here we are, the third and final major content update for Sonic Frontiers. Might as well start talking about the DLC of which this entire Backloggd page is about, right? This DLC is a major rehaul of all of Ouranos Island, as many felt the ending to Frontiers was lackluster and rushed (which I certainly do agree). This update content wise is absolutely monstrous. If you thought the previous 2 updates were content packed, you haven’t seen ANYTHING yet my friend. This DLC, on average, took me about 10 hours to beat, roughly 15 (give or take) to fully 100% it. The fact that this content update (which, I must reiterate, is 100% free btw) managed to be WAY longer in length than freaking Sonic Forces, a paid 3D Sonic game, is mind boggling. There’s so much to do and talk about that I should probably break down the different topics in order from what I feel is the most important downwards. Let’s start with the new playable characters: again, considering this was a free content update I didn’t expect much from them, I mostly just kinda expected a reskinned Sonic with some new moves sprinkled here and there, but no, they did it. They actually COOKED here. I was flabbergasted when playing this DLC man, you have no idea. For the record, I’ve never been against Sonic’s friends being playable again in a 3D space, it’s just that more so every time they’ve tried to implement different playstyles they’ve almost all failed so spectacularly. With this game, I can thankfully say we’re on the right track now.

I’ll start with Amy first, as she was by far my favorite to play as out of the 3 which is just ABSURD. I can’t believe I’m saying this but they actually made Amy, AMY of all characters, fun to play as in a 3D Sonic game!!!!! I just can’t believe it, I really can’t. Gone are the days of a painfully slow character with boring level design, limited movement and a laughably worthless antagonist chasing after you, and gone are the days of an even SLOWER character with pitiful combat, a momentum killing double jump, and a pointless invisibility technique; all of that garbage is now behind us thankfully. Amy in Frontiers is not only speedy like Sonic (all of them are in fact) but her aerial mobility is second to none. She jumps super high, has a triple jump and can glide after the 3rd jump using her tarot cards. Moreover, this glide also carries your momentum, so you can cross tremendous distances if you were already going fast beforehand. And if THAT weren’t enough, she has a bounce stomp like Sonic, with the difference being this one sends you WAY higher into the air and slows your fall. The amount of height and aerial control you have while playing as her is just absurd and it feels extremely good to just jump around as her. If there’s anything I don’t like about her, though, it’s her combat. All of her attacks are performed using her tarot cards, which feels weird. Like, I’m fine with her tarot card glide and all that, but having her attack using her cards instead of her hammer (which is only used for the quick cyloop equivalent) is a decision I still don’t fully understand. That’s not even really what I don’t like about her though, it’s more so the fact that her combat style was just not designed for this game’s enemies; or at least, not the enemies in The Final Horizon update specifically. Her attacks at a glance are more so constructed to deal with multiple enemies at once, whether it be her multi-homing attack or her card spin attack. Even with her poison debuff parry she still isn’t as good at dealing damage as the other characters. If it weren’t for Sonic’s superior combat arsenal and quick Cyloop, I’d go as far to say Amy would be my favorite character to play as in Frontiers as a whole, which, again, is just crazy to me.

Next up is Tails, and while he is very fun to play he can be a bit of a mixed bag in some areas. His flight is, unfortunately, not as good as it was in SA1. There’s a little delay at the beginning of the flight (though it is cool looking) and it only goes up to a set height depending on what elevation you start the flight at. It still feels good to fly around overall but I do wish we could get the SA1 flight in an open zone environment, that would be pretty cool. His main form of attack is, perhaps unintentionally very humorous. He just sorta chucks wrenches at you. Very angrily. Just add in the metal pipe sound effect for further improvements (thank you to whoever made that a mod btw). The attack functions similarly to the dummy ring bombs from Sonic 06, except these are so much better in every way. For one, throwing them from a standstill feels far less slow and clunky in comparison, you’re not forced into a poorly handled first person view, it has a clear arc with how you throw it, you can throw it just as fast while airborne, you can even effectively block projectiles with it (which is a challenge you do on one of the new platforming challenges). You can later nab an upgrade later to charge the attack and send it flying, creating a cluster of wrenches that not only deals multihit damage to enemies but also acts as a platform to jump on. He has his combat purpose as a fairly mobile flying character with ranged attacks to poke at enemies from a distance. So far, he is fairly fun to play as, though nothing spectacular. However, by unlocking the max ring boost from his skill tree, Tails uses the Cyclone from SA2 and completely breaks the game in half. I’m not even kidding you, this thing is utterly ridiculously broken (in a good way). Perhaps this is why they limited Tails’ flight the way they did, as this grants the ability to freely fly and gain altitude as you see fit, all at incredible speeds. Combine this with infinite boost and you can pretty much skip almost every single one of Tails’ platforming sections with a couple of exceptions. He even gets to use the thing as a laser cannon attack. If only Tails had this version of the Cyclone then maybe the mech stages in SA2 wouldn’t have sucked nearly as much. Unsurprisingly this thing is a blast to just fly around the island. Yeah yeah, it’s broken and kinda throws challenge out the window but again, I’ll allow it. It just FEELS good to fly around the island at mach speed.

Finally, we have Knuckles. He’s certainly still rougher than the rest of them, but he unfortunately isn’t the best of them. He can glide and climb walls as you would expect but both of these aspects to his character come with a big asterisk at the end. Like for instance, yeah, he can “climb walls” but unfortunately only context sensitive walls. He can climb the green surfaced walls that Sonic can, and he can also climb exclusive red walls that only he can climb. That’s about it. With that being said, just like Sonic’s wall running his climbing controls very good and it’s very fast but I still wish you could climb any surface that you’d normally slide down on. He can also glide but the gliding feels all sorts of wrong. He has a huge startup animation before he takes off and his steering is awful, SA2 gliding this ain’t. It’s not as bad as like, the gliding in 06 with how that one gets stuck on walls, is a set speed and loses altitude way too fast. This one, like Amy’s tarot card glide, keeps your speed depending on how fast you were going beforehand, and you can later nab an upgrade that allows him to glide much faster indefinitely without even losing altitude. I just don’t get the point of the delay or the bad turning. There is a funny tech you can do to somewhat alleviate the turning issue, however. If you mash the glide button repeatedly, you spam the startup animation and stay in place somewhat, and from there you can turn in the direction you want to travel in instantly. You can watch footage of me performing it here. That being said though, when it comes to combat there’s nobody else I would want to pick. His attacks at first might not look like the deal a ton of damage, but therein lies his debuff parry that lowers defenses. Combine that with his regular 3 hit combo, stomp and drill attack and enemy health bars in this game absolutely MELT, which is especially impressive considering how much they’ve beefed up the enemies in general in this DLC which I’ll get to later. In hindsight I should’ve expected Knuckles to be the strongest out of all of them but it is very satisfying nonetheless seeing these bullet sponge mini bosses drop like flies when using this guy. Even though he still has issues, I still managed to have some fun using him.

The structure of the Final Horizon is very interesting. Essentially, you start playing as the 3 new characters do a variety of things, whether that be the new puzzles scattered around the island, fighting WAY tougher minibosses, platforming challenges to find either Koco that give you a huge amount of XP to level up your skill tree, or Koco that reveal a large chunk of the map. There are objectives to find for each character but for the most part I explored what I could to upgrade and complete a variety of challenges. The platforming challenges themselves are REALLY well done, maybe a bit messy in terms of looks and aesthetic as they’re fairly obtrusive and blocky, but they essentially brought back the new Koco challenges and ran with the idea for every character. These were all a lot of fun and crafted some fun challenges around each character. The game swaps between each character automatically after a certain number of objectives have been completed. Sonic doesn’t really get any platforming challenges in the traditional sense like the other 3: instead, he gets a variety of new Cyberspace stages to play with and tower climbs that lead to Master Koco trials. I’ll get to the Cyberspace stages in a bit, I wanna first talk about the Towers because oh my LORD. They basically took the tower climbs in Rhea Island and cranked them up to 11. They’re way harder, way longer, and the platforming is even more satisfying than it was beforehand. I played on hard mode throughout the DLC (I heard that some level design elements change with easy and normal mode) and I loved every single one of these tower climbs, they were genuinely fantastic. This can apply to a good chunk of this DLC, but they really toned down the automation and fully expect you to do a lot of the platforming this time around. I will say though that they should’ve provided more safety nets on these towers for people who aren’t that good at Sonic games on easier difficulties, as once you fall off the tower you have to climb all the way back up from scratch. I personally didn’t mind this as I never really fell off apart from a couple of mistakes I made on the final tower. In any case, once you get up to the top of these towers, you need to participate in the Master Koco Trials. These are combat trials against a handful of supped up enemies that you need to complete within a time limit. They were fine, nothing outstanding but nothing too amazing either, just fun to have something new to do. The Tower climbs are really the true standout with Sonic if I’m being real. The Cyberspace stages also got a pretty big change. The Cyberspace stages in the DLC are remixed versions of Cyberspace stages already in the base game previously, with familiar layouts mixed with brand new design, new objectives, and some absolutely incredible music remixes. Like for instance in the remix of 1-7, you play with a ton of cars lined up everywhere for you to bounce on and the entire stage has moon gravity. Or you could play with a bomb on your head and you race against the clock to collect stopwatch icons to slow the countdown, race against a shadow clone of Tails, constantly pick up canisters of Rocket Boosts which works similarly to how boosting used to work (in that it kills enemies). Not all of them are winners, the one that has a speed gauge that increases the longer you boost and makes you explode if you Spindash wasn’t very fun, but these feel like more means of experimentation for future titles so I’m glad most of them are still very fun to go through. The lack of automation also applies to these levels, there’s a lot of ramps you can go off of by spindashing and to my shock even the loops aren’t automated! The camera does the whole fangame thing where it follows Sonic from behind which I’m not really a fan of but regardless it’s very weird to see non-automated loops in a 3D Sonic game. The side objectives are different too. Clearing with an ideal clear time is still a factor of course, but you also have the return of the numbered rings from Lost World and the silver moon medals from Forces. Thankfully the numbered rings aren’t as braindead as they were in Forces, as acquiring all of them in a row can be quite tricky at times. They’re spaced out in an out of order sequence on a series of tight platforming that often you need to go a real roundabout way of getting, and in the case of 4-H, they’re spaced throughout the ENTIRE stage, meaning if you miss even one, you need to restart the entire level again for another attempt. The silver moon medals are also much more challenging to get than Forces, though their structure is more similar to that game, being relatively close together and needing to be collected quickly. There are also objectives where you need to rescue animal buddies but these SUUUUCK. You need to locate them, pick them up piggyback style, and carry them over to the marked area to “rescue” them. Not only are your movement options gone when you do this, which means the jank controls of Cyberspace don’t really lend these objectives any favors ESPECIALLY when platforming over bottomless pits across small boxes, but it completely snaps the pace of the stage in half. I really don’t wanna see these types of missions come back again, I’ve had my fill.

The guardian minibosses have been ridiculously beefed up this time. Not only do they hit way harder and attack in much faster, more erratic intervals with brand new attack patterns to boot (Spider Tank and Caterpillar don’t even get their gimmicky sections anymore), but they’re way tankier too. Even with a maxed-out Sonic it took kind of a while to down some of these guardians. The changes to these minibosses are not necessarily the most gracefully handled thing out there though, a lot of them are kind of a goofy mess to fight, particularly the ones that just sorta sit there and vomit projectiles at you endlessly, but Ninja+ was great fun, Tower+ is bonkers crazy and zips around like a bat out of hell, Ghost has brand new fights with the different platforming structures around it (I particularly liked the one where you need to traverse a maze to get to its pillars), I even enjoyed fighting Tank+ for as messy as it was. I also appreciated that they made the Starfall event actually kinda fun this time! Instead of a slot machine blocking your screen and the only reward you get being purple coins, the starfall items are instead replaced with Koco, and Red and Blue seeds of defense, and picking one up gives you a TON of them at once, making this event a must do to instantly max out a character of your choice, or at least getting close to maxing them out. I also enjoyed the story being told here, Sonic using the Master Koco trials to turn his Cyber corruption into a form of power, while his friends end up feeling what he felt throughout the entire game. I particularly enjoyed the side story interactions where they end up explaining a lot of the architecture of the Starfall Islands and what they were used for, and even explained things that didn’t really need to be explained. I particularly found it humorous that the floating rails, springs and platforms in the open zone aren’t really there at all and Sonic is only hallucinating them due to being high on Cyberspace. I guess the only major things left to talk about are the final Master King Koco challenge and the true final boss. You wanna talk about a major difficulty spike? Look no further than the Master King Koco challenge. You need to fight against every Titan boss in the game back to back (minus Supreme for obvious reasons), with a max of 400 rings and no way to refill it, level 1 stats, and the only way to parry their attacks is with a perfect parry (which for this and the final boss on hard mode, is a frame 4 parry window instead of the infinite hold to parry we’ve had prior). This challenge was simply too much for so many people. Even on easier difficulties where the parry window is a lot wider, a lot of people couldn’t even finish this mode. While I was able to beat it on hard mode eventually (I even did a flawless run on hard mode before writing this review), I can definitely see why this game never had a tighter window to parry attacks. Particularly with these Titan fights, their attacks just aren’t well telegraphed to be able to react in a split second at all. Wyvern is especially bad with this. It twirls around in so many different ways before attacking and some attacks just sorta…happen in an instant; and to make matters worse, parrying is the ONLY WAY to deal damage to this guy. I think there should be a compromise if future games are going to have combat systems with a parry: shrink the parry window down to be tight, but not like…frame 4 tight lmao (the one on easy mode for instance would be fine for a regular parry), and for those who hit a perfect parry get rewarded with the slowdown that comes afterwards. IDK, just spitballing ideas here.

All that’s left is the true final boss. The thing this entire DLC has been slowly building up to. You’ve completed all the trials, awakened a new hidden power within Sonic, all of your friends have gathered the Chaos Emeralds, and after a brief match with Supreme (sadly was not changed), The End itself comes down, transforms the Titan into an eldritch multiarmed abomination, Sonic awakens his hidden power, and the true fight begins...

The true final boss is a mess in so many different ways. The camera is probably the worst it’s ever been, CONSTANTLY getting obscured by the trees that are in front of the fight, actively blocking your view of the energy orbs you need to parry. The boss is also weirdly unintuitive (what makes this funny to me is that 100%ing everything in the DLC unlocks…hints on how to beat the final boss). You need to sever the cord from the Titan in order to deal damage and prevent it from regening health, but in order to reach the cord you need to use the dodge button to retarget onto the cord and sever it, which is never really explained properly. In order to go into phase 2 you need to cyloop the center of Supreme’s body when it gets knocked down (not really hinted at what you need to do there either). There’s an attack that drains almost all of your rings if you get hit by too many energy spheres (also not explained well). And on top of all of this there’s still so many more instances of unpolished jank that I haven’t even covered with my brief explanation of this boss fight.

…this is now my favorite final boss out in the entire Sonic franchise.

Yeah bet you didn’t see that coming huh? Despite the moments of irritation and jankiness, I loved the HECK out of this final fight. The anime spectacle is off the charts once again (seriously how do they make Super Sonic so COOL bro he’s literally that guy), the perfect parry actually makes deflecting its attacks engaging because this time the attacks are designed AROUND the frame 4 parry, there’s a decent amount of challenge fighting it, the atmosphere is immaculate and the transformed Supreme is genuinely pretty creepy (especially the way it swats you away, then afterwards you see this massive 4 legged creature towering over the trees scuttling towards you, pretty unnerving for a Sonic game. You even get kinda but not really blood just like in Unleashed!), once I figured it out I had a lot of fun, and the ending afterwards finally concluded Frontiers with a nice little bow on top. I also adore the music during this fight, both the orchestral rendition (though it doesn’t really sound like real orchestra, the beginning of that track gives me straight goosebumps every time I hear it) and the godly Kellin Quinn rendition of I’m Here (though I do wish there was more screaming). Maybe I’m a sucker for spectacle considering how terrible pretty much every Sonic final boss prior to this was (though the Ikaruga shootemup was pretty good), but I don’t care. It’s gonna take quite a lot to top this.

The update as a whole wasn’t perfect, by a LONG shot lmao. The pop in still isn’t fixed (in fact it’s now noticeable in Cyberspace), there are some quirks I had with the minibosses, playable characters and the final boss, and the update as a whole was still rushed to an extent (the characters don’t even move their mouths anymore during the character interaction side stories), but I still had a blast with what I played. I know I also keep mentioning the music, but I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is Tomoya Ohtani’s best work and it’s not even close. From the new character themes, to the boss music, to the open zone themes, to some of the cyberspace soundtrack (there are a lot of composers that work on those to be fair, along with a bunch of other tracks not listed here), there’s so much variety and it’s all incredible. Sonic’s Second Wind theme in particular speaks volumes to not only how immensely talented of a composer he is, but also just to how much he GETS Sonic on a thematic level. Bless you Tomoya Ohtani, and I hope you continue to improve and deliver incredible music for years to come. Now that it’s almost certain they’re innovating and improving on this open zone concept, I can finally say something I haven’t said in years:

I’m excited to see what the next 3D Sonic game will turn out to be.

Finished my second completed playthrough of Chris’s scenario, and honestly after being so harsh on it for the past two years I think I understand it a lot more now.
It’s fair to say that most people usually enjoy Jill’s scenario far better than Chris’s, and for valid reasons too. This includes me too, actually, as it’s just a more comfortable experience to easily blast through while also starring BARRY BURTON, who couldn’t love that. She gets the bazooka, which decimates most enemies, she has a lockpick, getting the best ending is far easier, she has an easier time getting the shotgun, everything is just wildly convenient for her, and it is fun! The low difficulty of her scenario makes it more revisitable while also shorter, and I’ve played through it about 5 times now, including a run where I used no ink ribbons while finishing the game in less than 3 hours, which was a rewarding experience. But it is suspiciously too easy.
Entering Chris mode with this same mindset is like being hit with a reality check, he has it rough here. Smaller inventory, no bazooka, no lockpick, no Barry bailing you out to get the shotgun early, none of that. On paper, literally the only advantage Chris has is that he has far more health than Jill, which can be shrugged off by most players, but in my opinion it actually serves a key purpose during the early game. Since ammo for the handgun is rather sparse, and you’ll want to save most of your shells for the mid-to-late game, taking advantage of Chris’s larger health pool is actually very handy for essentially damage boosting areas with zombies that you are never gonna revisit, and believe me, Chris (at least on the standard difficulty) is REALLY tanky, and I was surprised during this revisit at how handy his durability was for this function. It also makes purely knifing some early area rooms in favor of wasting the handgun a valid strategy, because Chris can take quite a beating if your knifing is sloppy. I don’t ever see this brought up but I find it quite unique and rewarding in this context.
Chris overall I think has a better overall emphasis on the core inventory management and survival aspects of the game. Because of what little Chris can hold at a time, there were several trips I took with literally nothing on me just so I could pick everything up in an upcoming area. It was tense and in some cases could look extremely unsafe and stupid, but I find this technique very rewarding and suspenseful because I was making a major risk in favor of gaining more reward by not needing to backtrack, rather than keeping a weapon, it’s ammo, and 1-2 healing items on me because it feels more comfortable. The uncomfortability here heightens the tensity of the situation, which I would say is important in a horror game.
Despite all this praise I do have to knock the third “chapter” of the game for being extremely tedious and frustrating, that being the second mansion visit where all the hunters are occupying the area. As Jill, it's a breather because this is a perfect spot to unload all of your grenade and acid rounds on the hunters, but Chris has no such luxury, and it becomes unbearable as a result. The infamous stunlocking and instant kill attacks that these battletoads offer make for a spot that, last year, made me drop my entire Chris run. You WILL be punished here if you wasted a lot of your shells before this section (I circumvented this by beating Plant 42 with only the handgun). Now, you do get the magnum in this part of the game, which is a one hit kill on every normal enemy type in the game, but since ammo for it is rather sparse, and you most definitely want to save it for the final boss(es), it’s best to get rid of like 2-3 hunters using it in this entire section and either trying to outrun or use the shotgun on the rest. And also last to mention is the inconvenience of trying to find Rebecca when re-entering the mansion before the invisible timer goes out, which if you play poorly will result in a guaranteed bad ending and Rebecca most certainly… without a head on her shoulders to confront you.
That aside, I found this scenario to be a tightly designed and overall rewarding experience. It can be frustrating, and it will kick your ass if you play poorly. But managing to get through it gives me immense satisfaction, and I certainly plan on trying to perfect my runs in the future, because Chris’s scenario is an interesting facet of how good Resident Evil 1’s design truly is. It’s Resi 1 at it’s most tense, because of having lesser resources while also dealing with a more punishing difficulty curve. I’ve already got most of what I’ve wanted in challenging myself playing as Jill, so I find this to be the best next step. Definitely give this mode a try if you found Jill’s scenario too easy and need something to quench that thirst of needing a nore challenging experience.

it's like a look into the alternate timeline where zero was the true main character of megaman x, and a pretty damn convincing one at that.
really impressed with this hack and how it handles the more powerful zero, adjusting the game to give him a proper challenge while still showing the absolute powerhouse in damage he is compared to x, in addition to going out of their way to rewrite dialogue to suit zero as the main character with some fun little call-forwarding to future games.
my only real complaints are in that a boss or two felt a little too hard to me in this rom hack (namely launch octopus and armored armadillo) and i find the double-maverick refights a bit questionable, but nothing that really detracts much from the hack's quality.
it's a really cool hack with a lot of love clearly poured into it, and i liked it! massive props to CF, the creator for seeing it through.

masterful step up from the very first game in the series giving the gameplay a lot of nuance and interesting directions

while I do think this game still suffers from it being a classicvania and therefore hard as shit and therefore its pretty useless to play this game without savestates I do believe this is such a fun fucking experience even compared to the standard of the franchise as a whole

the skeleton of the game is heavily reliant on the already awesome debut the winning formula is there trevor feels like a fucking rock to move the whip is whipping the sub weapons are sub weaponing the enemies are eneming and everything feels as classic as possible

I'm not as much as a classicvania connoisseur to tell you whats actually different in the gameflow and how the entire game feels BUT I can say that the new additions of stuff like side characters with different play styles to use and branching paths add a lot to the whole experience and throughout this is definitely a tighter experience than the somehow rudimentary ancestor

this is also the game which the netflix series adapts and while I didnt watch the series yet I can say that the grand introduction of castlevanias best character to ever exist count draculas ikemen blondie tall twunk dhampir son alucard could be regarded as the second coming of christ if you ask me without this game symphony of the night would never exist so show some respect ungrateful ass

so all in all while it still doesn't have the refinement of later classicvanias in the series it's probably the greatest installment in the original NES trilogy and its pretty insane how much of an improvement this is over its predecessor and while at this point the series is moving forward im glad the original design of "let's put flying heads and fireballs over a crumbling bridge and at the end let's put a skeleton with a whip" type of levels is still there because while I don't really condone them literally bloating a 30 mins experience to like 2 hours because I have to use savestates every second thats kind of the charm of these games they're clunky in a good natured way if you want

castlevania is a weird series to get into and as a diehard fans for all these years it's still a pretty strange trip to get back to the classicvania hellfire and skill issue of yours truly but they're always gonna be bomb nonetheless

alucard I'm free on saturday and I bought kinky leather harnesses on vinted

also the soundtrack is cum inducing