Mario fans when I show them try to show them actually good games like Sonic Superstars

one of my pet peeves is when people make dismissive, empty critiques like "this game has bad level design" with no elaboration. let me hit you with some facts: i've been playing the hell out of sonic superstars and it is CONSTANTLY fun. a little messy, sure, but messy in that way like sonic adventure ie where the whole thing's overflowing with creativity and vivacity. even when it's explicitly pulling from older sonic games it finds a way to spice things up... much like the beloved sonic mania. i'm just sayin'. in the first level alone (which is not green hill, hold your applause), you're bouncing between the (gorgeous) foreground and background and blasting up walls and around loops where like, the inside of the loop is facing you. it's badass!

i'd like to recant a statement from a previous iteration of this review and say that i love sonic superstars' boss fights. i don't believe a bit of challenge or obtuseness negates fun. the fang shmup boss fight is probably the worst one, and like, even that one has some dope ass environmental stuff going on with the robot assembly and fang's little animations in the breaks between dodging his bullets. the keyword is variety. no part of this game is "samey".

now onto the real shit: this game is SO SO SO pretty. the first thing that struck me was the sick way the rings would cascade towards you if you had enough when you took damage. i could ramble for ages about how cool the levels based off of unused concept art are. and this is possibly the best the cast has ever looked in a 2d sidescrolly sonic. it's one of very few sonic games where you can play as classic amy- and she's the strongest character! her hammer jump is absolutely cracked and trivializes boss fights. a lot of people have also pointed out the return of fang, but MY favorite sonic superstars character is the New Girl trip. i want to give her a hug and a pat on the head. look at her dynamic with amy! truly the lovers of the century. it's nice to see amy doing anything other than thirsting over the blue boy for once. the other big Me Thing is, of course, the music. here lies perhaps my most egregious take: i love all of it. yup. all of jun's tracks. i live for that fake genesis snare. the boss fight theme is funny every single time. shit rocks. game rocks. i love sonic.

(if y'all are wondering why i posted this again, it got taken down cuz i broke a community rule. i have since edited the review)

edit: listen, if i @Cjer (follow them) and i had been able to play death egg as trip and amy we would have beat it in like 15 minutes. as it stands, i still enjoyed the final boss. wish i would have gotten to beat it instead of dying immediately in the winning run and watching cj crush it with one ring. during the credits sequence, cj was getting all the balloons and i was getting dragged along the back of the screen because i hadn't noticed it was interactive which i think is a good allegory for our entire playthrough.

this developer has two gimmicks:

- asset flips without any marketing or presentation, which probably don't recoup their very low production costs

- "fuck none of my games sold, have you considered the Soviet Union killed 10 billion people and NOBODY talks about it"

As a Polack, I feel like there needs to be an international movement to prevent more games from coming out of that goddamn country until there's an actual denatizifcation. You shouldn't be allowed to download Unity until you can screw in a lightbulb with less than 10 people.

My girlfriend and I have been playing this game together as our next main RPG for awhile, but we took a bit of a break before the of disc 1. We're on the couch, she's doing her own thing and I stared through Skies of Arcadia. Despite kinda just looking out of the corner of her eye, she was more compelled by what was happening in this gamecube game she never heard of prior to this night, than the game that both of us had wanted to get around to for years, but just didn't have the time.

It's not like I don't have a strong taste for boring ass JRPGs. We just got done with Grandia 3. Every time I give this game a sincere shot, it comes off as less essential than almost any alternative on the console outside of like, the well known dreck. There are elements of the game that totally work, I like the soundtrack and the graphics are technically impressive.

The vibe's just not there. I don't give a fuck about this Sol Badguy knockoff, I have played +R against too many ratchet sidewinder monkeys for that archetype to carry me through four CDs. Why are the fights so fucking slow. The transformation gimmick isn't interesting from a mechanics standpoint and they take a billion years, to the extent that the developers put in a "get the fuck on with it" button in the options. The relationship with the main love interest is unfathomable boring, has man ever been in love? Why did you make the main character's best friend a lamer Rudolph Stiener?

There are attempts at worldbuilding and like, character development you would see in a really good RPG. Not the biggest fan of the Tales of series, but I think skits are really cool. The Legend of Dragoon has these developmental scenes and the writing is so fucking boring I do not care. Outside of "this is a genre on a console that's library has a bunch of fantastic JRPGs", and "I'm Blue" being the background music in a castle, I can't think of any reason I'd suggest this game to someone or a reason for it to cross my mind of a regular basis. There was effort and talent, and it isn't horribly inept, but The Legend of Dragoon just doesn't work.

One of the best games in IdeaFactory's catalogue.

That's to say "the original version has cards that depicted anime children in a g string, but this was removed from the international versions because western audiences might have reservations about playing loli on the bus" (remember this when people complain about this game being "censored").

It's shameful, the plot could not be more boring if it tried. The card mechanics feel both stock in a way that shouldn't be possible considering how few card games the Vita has, but convoluted in such a way that progression takes for fucking ever unless you blew cash on in game card purchases. The campaign has nothing to compel you to continue through the story. The UI doesn't even handle well! Komoney got this down on the GBA, you have a touch screen and you couldn't manage that.

The bar for IdeaFactory is somewhere in the earth's crust and yet I still can't suggest this game, even on a curve. Like, if this game was as acceptable as the GBA Dragonball Z card game, or the FMA DS card game, I'd probably give it a higher score. The only thing saving this from a rock bottom score is that there are technically worse playing card game video games. I would say, this is probably the card game the least amount of people have played against real humans.

I don't know if Shin Megami Tensei is a good game or not, but I do know it's the most based JRPG on the console. You start off as this fucking dweeb living with his mom. No combat experience, not a chosen one, he's not magical, he's just living at home until one day noted Epstein associate Stephen Hawking gives you a computer program to summon demons. The main character is Doomguy with Kaneko drip. There are like, six different end of the world scenarios that the main character copes with by perforating everything with a coherent ideology with a minigun.

Like after a certain point, it really doesn't matter how "good" your dungeons are or if you remembered to give bosses status immunity. You can shoot Yukiko Mishima in the fucking head, and then the nukes the drop. There is a skynet scare 2/3rds through the game that poses a real threat to the remainder of humanity, and so much bad shit happens in this game that most of the people who've played the game probably don't remember.

There's still historical significance to the game, SMT1 establishes what the franchise would be going forward, even moreso than MT1/2. SMT1 is just playable enough to not get in the way of the Deadly Premonition meets Book of Revelations plot they squeezed into a SFC cart. Also, the title screen cutscene still goes hard as fuck.

There's been a thematic subgenre in video games that's been coming into prominence the last couple of years. It's inspired by high octane action games like MGR and DMC and both an understanding that needlessly dark presentation is kinda cheesy, but a willingness to accept the positive elements of said presentation to a limited point. Followers of this aesthetic would wince in pain if you called them edgy. They long to be in on the joke, while still wanting to appear "cool" to their peers. These are the Sol Badguy players of the world, mechanically "proficient" at their pursuits, but still willing to look at these (mostly, there are notable exceptions) masculine protagonists and shout "that's literally me" at the screen, with the hope that others will them them in the same light. Slave Zero X is a game I'm glad I've played, because it both manages to encapsulate the appeal of this thematic current, along with how bankrupt it is in a lot of ways.

Before I rip into the game, the music's good, the sprite work is mostly really solid, I didn't have any issues understanding what was happening on the screen most of the time, and the voice acting, within the limitations of the story, was solid. This was clearly an indie title on a budget. Good on you for getting Jamieson Price, I'm eternally grateful he seems to be willing to voice whatever as long as you buy him Dennys first. Effort went into making this game look really cool.

Mechanically, this game is creatively bankrupt. The developers really liked Arcsys fighters without understanding why specific systems were put into place. In Guilty Gear, there's an ability every character has access to called psych burst. It's full at the beginning of the round, and you can use it at almost any time during the match to push the opponent away from you, even while you're being attacked. It is a solution to two major issues:

1) The lax combo rules of the game allow for unintended game states that might otherwise hurt the competitive integrity, including infinite combos.

2) Even during intended game states, Gear combos can be long and it feels bad for the other player to watch one player do ray charles shit on their stick for 30 seconds while they sit there not playing a video game. Burst gives them a change to interact with longer combos.

These aren't issues Slave Zero X should have at all. There are times where the player gets wailed on by enemies, but it feels less like the encounters are thought out and will combo you in a cohesive manner (outside of a few late game fights) and more that you're going to get chaingrabbed by a recolor of the same enemy you've been fighting since stage 2. It even behaves the same way it does in Guilty Gear, where if you use it in a neutral state and the shockwave of this burst hits an opponent, you gain full meter. There doesn't seem to be any retooling of this game mechanic to fit a sidescrolling brawler, they just slapped it in there because it's in Gear.

Meter is also inspired by Guilty Gear in a very superficial way. In Gear, you gain meter through aggressive actions, and this meter is spent on a variety of actions ranging from combo extensions to critical defensive options that make the game a chore to play without. There's a lot of right ways to spend meter, but lacking it at a critical time could cost you a round, making management important. Most importantly, you can spend your meter doing cool and flashy shit that doesn't take deep mechanical understanding of the game to care about. Slave Zero X's meter is boring as sin. You mostly regain it through gibbing enemies that have already been dealt enough damage to be considered defeated (this is a major issue, because enemy variety is low and they already come off as a bit damage spongy). You spend that meter not on meter exclusive moves, but on:

- paying a slight amount of meter to backdash cancel attacks (I almost never had to do this)

- canceling the startup of weak attacks into "EX moves", which are just heavy attacks with tweaks to frame data/damage/properties (like the ability to hit an opponent off the ground with an enhanced air attack as opposed to a normal version). They're not fundamentally different attacks, nor do they change your decision making, they just allow for longer combo extensions.

- A "Devil Trigger" enhanced state that allows you use unlimited EX moves, and heals you for all damage dealt.

If I made this sound interesting, I apologize, none of it is. Meter problems go away with just a few shop upgrades (there are no new weapons or moves to buy), and enemy fodder is so omnipresent that after the first 1/4th of the game, in combination with using burst to get meter back, I spent a large chunk of this game in this enhanced state. There aren't a ton of visual differences between having this state and not having this state. You don't get exclusive moves. The healing doesn't even really matter that much, as you'll be able to either juggle 90 percent of the game with the same stale kit of moves, or have to deal with bosses with such a limited period of vulnerability that you'll get three swings off before the meter's drained. It's so fucking lame, and it pretends like what you're doing is the next coming of Bayonetta. This game pretends like it's this tough as nails, very technical brawler for people who want a break practicing sidewinder loops, but most of it can be handled by light attack - stuff - launcher - juggle until they blow up, and if not, fights take 3 min and mostly consist of learning when to parry (because of course this game has a parry) or where to fuck off until the game decides that it's your turn to play. I didn't feel like I got better after playing this game. I sure as hell didn't feel the need to enter the game's training mode, and thank god because even though they advertised it being there, it's a more barebones mode than games from over twenty years ago.

I had fun with this game still. While the game lacks the memorable set-pieces of the games it was inspired by, and very much wore out its welcome after the 3rd of it's 5 hour playtime, this wasn't an aggravating experience (outside of the dreadful platforming sections, an overwhelming majority of my deaths were to a train environmental hazard early on). But for the most part, when playing this game, I just thought "wow, Hakumen from Blazblue sure is a cool character". Hakumen has airdashes, this power fantasy arcsys inspired brawler doesn't have airdashes. Haukmen's counters are really cool, and he has a variety of them. X's parries don't lead to anything other than "cool, you can keep mashing attack, unless the enemy pressed the super armor button again. Hakumen's "I get to use all of my stuff for free" enhanced state, Mugen, is sick as hell because it allows a normally limited character to ignore the rules of the game for six seconds, and potentially one shot the opponent. X's enhanced state puts me to sleep. The fact they both happen to be robotic, eyeless, long white haired, katana wielding nerds is besides the point.

There's also a story. "Rip and tear until its done" turns into a slightly deeper emotional connection between the main protagonist and the sentient and fucked up bio-mechanical suit. There's little here with any emotional sincerity, and the setting doesn't even come off as interesting as the 25 year old game the devs took the setting from. There is some homo-eroticism between Shou (X) and Not Zero, game respect game it's about the most bold decision the Slave Zero X staff took, intentionally or not.

Is it totally fair to compare Slave Zero X's failures to its inspirations? Probably not, but the game constantly invites the comparisons and doesn't do enough original to deflect away from them. It's a game that wants you to think it's the next best thing since high-frequency katana sliced bread, but lacks any convictions of its own and comes off as a very reserved, scared project because of it. The game arrogantly sets itself up for a sequel, and I hope they throw everything in the game part of the game out, and start from the drawing board. Slave Zero X is a game that promises a combat canvas, and hands you a 4 pack of crayola crayons instead.