arthurhimmel
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arthurhimmel
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Pikmin
Played this game a lot as a kid but never actually managed to finish the thing, I found the amount of Pikmin that needed to die in a first-time playthrough, combined with the time limit, too stressful. Revisiting it as an adult, this game rules! While future games would make these boys like 20% less stupid in a way that feels helpful without being excessive, the basic idea here, that friction (through limitations on Pikmin, through them not being all that smart, through the somewhat janky way Olimar moves around) provides more investment and emotional connection to what's happening in the game is a very smart way. In general, the story of mainstream game development over time has been the story of developers streamlining and removing friction, to the point that a lot of modern games, especially modern strategy games, can feel a bit overly spreadsheet-y. Going back to play Pikmin is a wonderful antidote to that, still a mainstream Nintendo game so very intuitive and accessible and appealing, this isn't a Bennett Foddy game, but has enough push and pull to really feel emotionally impactful when one of your adorable stupid idiot Pikmin gets themselves killed. This is one of the last games where Miyamoto feels very directly involved as a designer instead of as an executive, and just about everything he served in that role for after this was a little too consumed by hardware gimmicks to fully shine on the level of his earlier work. In that sense, this is a bit of a last gasp of that toylike Miyamoto design ethos, very contained and replayable and expressive in the same way as Star Fox 64 or F-Zero. A delight to rediscover as an adult.
2 days ago
arthurhimmel
completed
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations
This review contains spoilers
Will admit to slightly preferring the first game's climb through the levels of power and exposing corruption (especially with Rise from the Ashes taken into consideration) to this game's insane anime soap opera gambit, but what makes the gambit particularly insane is that it all works and you feel a genuine emotional connection to at all by the end. Credit the strength of the character writing, and the localization work of it, for making you really emotionally connected to the likes of Godot and Iris and Maya after insane twist number five hundred. In many ways that blend of ludicrously trashy and salacious story content ("The evil seductress who manipulated the intellectually disabled pedophile into suicide and now stands to leave many more bodies in her wake!") with genuinely great craft and a real emotional core that works feels very noir, a nod the game makes explicit by casting the manga-style photographs in the game's fourth case in a kind of film grain. Though it's perhaps more a nod to the trashy detective novels that were adapted into noir that Shu Takumi couldn't get enough of growing up, Godot even seems to fancy himself a kind of tragic Raymond Chandler protagonist.
It helps that this game's two "filler cases" are probably two of the three best in the trilogy. The only one I can really see someone making a case for over them is Reunion and Turnabout, and I'm slightly lower on that one than consensus while being higher than consensus on Recipe for Turnabout. This is the most consistent game in the trilogy, I'm not sure if I would quite call it the best, but this has the highest lows to be sure, no circus cases here. Just a great game, and I'm glad to get to revisit it for the first time in a few years.
It helps that this game's two "filler cases" are probably two of the three best in the trilogy. The only one I can really see someone making a case for over them is Reunion and Turnabout, and I'm slightly lower on that one than consensus while being higher than consensus on Recipe for Turnabout. This is the most consistent game in the trilogy, I'm not sure if I would quite call it the best, but this has the highest lows to be sure, no circus cases here. Just a great game, and I'm glad to get to revisit it for the first time in a few years.
4 days ago