Before I begin, I do want to point out that Pangburn and poyfuh also discuss most of the mechanical problems that I go over in this review. Man... this was rough. Maybe it's partly my fault because I felt the need to rush through it for the final stint of L2AGO, but I didn't think it would be this bad. A quick note here: I played through the first level of the original Ratchet & Clank many years ago but never progressed past that for some reason (I think I just forgot to go back to it), and so the first Ratchet & Clank game I ever cleared was Rift Apart. My experience is definitely colored from 100%ing the newest game in the series first, so keep that in mind.

The original Ratchet & Clank in my mind suffers from two glaring problems. The first is that combat, to put it bluntly, does not work. One of the main draws of Ratchet & Clank is that you have a bunch of cool weaponized gadgets to work with to systematically eliminate hordes of different enemies, and combat comprises of both hack and slash (using the wrench) and 3D platform based aiming/shooting. There's no way to block damage; you have to dodge attacks by strafing or jumping out of the way. But you don't get strafing to begin with (and strafing's implementation is not amazing either, I'll get to that in a bit), so as a result, most of combat involves turning to face enemies to shoot with auto aim, then turning around to dodge attacks, and then turning back around to shoot again. You can't just jump in place to dodge attacks either because most enemies will fire enough shots (or there will be enough enemies near you) to where lasting/lingering hitboxes will end up damaging you anyways. It's for this reason that abusing jump + wrench slam isn't 100% foolproof either. There are often just too many enemies, and targeting them while trying to dodge attacks is a nightmare. Also, trying to hack and slash all your enemies with the wrench alone becomes unreliable as soon as enemies start taking more than one hit to kill; you'll get swarmed within seconds and will probably take damage. So, you've got your pick between auto-aim on the run ranged combat, unreliable long lasting end-lag hack and slash combat, or cheesing combat altogether by playing the game like some kind of first person shooter and outranging enemies to begin with and taking them out with first person scope blaster/missile launcher/remote rockets. The latter option is your most reliable combat option unfortunately (and you can't do this too up close, otherwise the enemies get privy and will interrupt you while you're in first person scope; remember that it gets quite unwieldy having to switch back and forth between the perspectives and dodging/positioning vs aiming, so bypassing this by sniping enemies is the safest way to go), and this turns combat into somewhat of a tedious exercise. This is further exacerbated when you start fighting commandos in the final few chapters that will somehow figure out your location no matter how far away you were when you shot them down with remote rockets, so you have to spend two cycles dodging bullets from them before resuming your attack. And finally, you may end up doing this more often anyways for aerial opponents because auto-aim doesn't always lock onto them while you're on the ground. Perhaps I may sound a little anachronistic saying this, but compare this to Rift Apart, where the game instantly locks you into a 3rd person over the shoulder shooter perspective as soon as you press the trigger, so you can easily strafe and aim adjust at the same time. It's just a much cleaner solution; you'll eventually get strafing by double tapping the right trigger and holding down L2 or R2 (but at the cost of constantly hovering) but with no lock strafing, and that definitely did not click with me unlike the newer games.

The other big issue with the original Ratchet & Clank is the pacing. The checkpoints are by far the biggest culprit here; it's often quite hard to tell where the checkpoints are located and how far you'll be sent back if you die. Sometimes I lost 5 minutes of progress when I died, and sometimes I lost 20 minutes or more. Keep in mind that the enemies will respawn if you die, but your ammo (and your money, if you spent any via PDA/vending boxes before dying) will not. This, as well as the general lack of respawning boxes unless you fly off the planet, means that you'll often be at a deficit of funds to even purchase all the guns, much less buy more ammo for certain enemies, and money grinding itself becomes even more of a slog. I also felt that there was a certain lock & key element to the enemies and some of the weapons that's somewhat emphasized; for example, the floating mine enemies on Gaspar have to be taken out with the Walloper (you could try and kill them with the Bomb Glove or Pyrociter, but aiming at them up close is pretty hard), and the Walloper I feel is not worth one of your eight slots otherwise when the wrench handles more or less the same function outside of that one enemy. Similarly, most flying enemies are best taken out with the missile launcher/remote rockets, and the giant blimps that spawn commandos could only be taken out with remote rockets from my experience. So there's this awkward glut of enemies that I felt had to be taken out with specific weapons, and this resulted in a lot of my weapons feeling kind of redundant while I constantly ran out of ammo for the weapons I needed. I'd like to say that you'll get what you need from the ammo crates to make up for the reliance upon certain weapons, but the number of times I got Pyrociter or Repeater ammo when I really needed more missiles has led me to believe otherwise.

The final boss is emblematic of everything that I think has gone horribly wrong with the game. Essentially, you fight this giant flying robot that is launching missiles and mines at you; your best weapon here is the Devastator (the missile launcher), which you can mostly get away with by occasionally looking at the flying robot and shooting before having to jump/run away to dodge. You won't have enough time to stop and aim with most of your other weapons. Because there are multiple phases here, I had to stop inbetween phases to buy more weapons using the PDA, which is an optional collectible found before the boss fight that also charges extra as a "surcharge" for convenience. (If you haven't found the PDA by then, you're basically locked into the final boss and won't be able to gather additional ammo for the Destructor... oof.) Now, because the developers must have noticed that there was a pretty big possibility that you would run out of money by/during the final phase (which I absolutely did), there's another form of dealing damage by using the Suck Cannon to inhale the mines/drones that are sent your way and shoot them towards the damage spongy boss. But this actually further complicates things, because you not only have to find openings to switch your weapons from the hotbar if you don't want to go into the menu every time (Rift Apart slows down time as you switch weapons from the hotbar, but not here), you also have to deal with the presence of mines and drones acting as targets for auto aim. So if you were trying to bypass this altogether and just invest in rockets to shoot down the boss (because hit and run combat with the suck cannon is not incredible without aiming), today's your unlucky day because the game can't distinguish between the giant floating boss robot and the numerous mines/drones that are spawned and will often divert rockets to hit those instead of the boss! All of this by the way, is creating tons of objects on screen, so my game lagged constantly until the final boss decided it was time to wipe out all the extraneous enemies with his own attack, since I didn't have time to focus and pick off every single minion. And if you die, you get spawned back to right before the final phase of the boss, but without any money or extra ammo to use! Needless to say, this was the worst final boss that I had fought in a hot minute, and I had to further lower my score just for this boss alone.

I sincerely do not mean to be needlessly disparaging towards this childhood classic for many; most of the elements for a great game are here! The visuals and soundtrack still hold up, there's some pretty witty dialogue between all the characters with a simple yet solid evolution of Ratchet & Clank's relationship, the movement isn't great at first but with the stretch jump, becomes much more satisfying, and for once, the minigames/side modes are all pretty fun! (Except for the turret section... seriously, why does every 3D platformer feel the need to have some kind of rail shooter/turret section?) But this is nevertheless one of the most disappointing experiences I have had with a 3D platformer recently, especially when compared to future entries in the series. Ratchet & Clank felt like it was constantly demanding perfection from me, prioritizing health as a key resource when enemies were abound and crowd control aiming was nigh upon difficult, and dying felt like a punishment due to both how much progress I lost and how much money and ammo I could not easily regain. I can't in good faith recommend this to most 3D platformer enthusiasts who are looking for a polished and well rounded game due to how time-consuming and strenuous combat felt; hopefully Going Commando proves my misgivings of the early franchise outings wrong, as I've heard it fixes many of the flaws found here.

where to start? kingdom hearts has always kind of fascinated me as this absolutely insane idea to blend disney cinema with final fantasy characters and storytelling, an utterly bizarre clashing of styles that doesn't really work in the traditional sense, but in the kind of hot-topic mallgoth edgy snow white way that was very prevalent in the early 2000s. it's clearly chasing more of a teen demographic rather than a child demographic, with it's slightly more complex systems and labyrinthine narrative, but there's never really a point where it can transcend the strangeness of having goofy in the same frame as cloud, or donald saying stuff like "the keyblade" in that bizarre raspy voice.

but there's a charm to it all, especially in the segments that aren't just replaying a disney movie (although there is still a certain disney charm there too), where there's this earnest naivety, seeing the world through the eyes of a child and trying to break free from what you know into a wider expanse of questions and adventure, and trying to pick up the pieces of what is lost and turn it into something new. a game with so many twists and turns and yet it remains as simple as just being a story of trying to right by your friends, and forgiving those who've wronged you when they try their best to make it up to you. while not as impactful as something like final fantasy x (almost done that one too lmao) in it's coming of age narrative, there's still an ultimate sweetness here that i can't help but let carry me on to the ending, even through the variety of frustrations.

and by god are there frustrations. i'll start with some of the most obvious ones, the top of which being the horrible platforming which is relied upon far too heavily. while never really punishing the player too much for missing jumps (with the exception of hollow bastion my god), the platforming remains imprecise throughout the entire journey, and can just add to so much tedium in sections like deep jungle or monstro where the player constantly has to retry sections due to missing a single jump. there's also the ever presence of backtracking throughout the entire game, which in levels like monstro, deep jungle, or hollow bastion which also suffer from confusing layouts, can become hideously time consuming and grossly aggravating. there's also heavy difficulty spikes throughout the game, which i will say could just be me being terrible at the game, but especially in the ending section there were bosses that took me upwards of two full hours to beat. the gummi ship adds absolutely nothing to the game and just extends travel sections with mind-numbing shmup levels. the combat is fun, but lock-ons can be clunky at the best of times and i could never get the handle of healing animation times especially when facing multiple enemies that just shred your health leading to a simply overwhelming amount of times where it felt like the game simply killed me for no reason. there's a gem of something really interesting in the combat system, with it's mix of real time battling and turn-based style menus, but it never fully comes together leading to a system which turns more cumbersome than engaging when dealing with the more difficult enemies.

there's also the elephant in the room of what this project looks like in the modern day. as we've extended further into the multiverse industrial complex, i think it's really easy to look at this as a precursor to some of the most diabolical machinations of the current-day cultural machine. combining all of these marketable properties for brand synergy, hitting both the disney fan and final fantasy fan at once, throwing all of these things together to make a boatload of money. but because this is so early on in the obsession with multiverses, and because it does feel like it has a really distinct and idiosyncratic voice behind all of the madness, this never really feels like a spider-man: no way home (had to look up what that one was called) or the flash type of debacle where they're constantly pointing at things you recognize for a cheap dopamine rush. in the end, it really is that charm that pushes through it all and keeps me interested in where this all goes, no matter how utterly stupid it can all be.

The good news about trying out Solar Ash is that it clicked immediately since it was not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeves: you’ve got skating mechanics inspired by Jet Set Radio, boss fights and designs inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, and a woozy ambient soundtrack alongside gooey and ethereal aesthetics captured in deep space. It’s not hard to decipher Heart Machine’s vision for the game. The bad news about trying out Solar Ash is that being so heavily inspired by two of my favorite games meant that I was both consciously and unconsciously comparing the game in every waking moment of my playthrough, and the cracks in the armor really started to show. Right away, the most obvious issue is the lack of subtlety. The game is so in-your-face with its lore and the overarching details that it fails to leave much room for individual player interpretation. The protagonist Rei is constantly commenting upon everything she comes across, and the audio logs that she stumbles upon where her old crewmates vividly describe the world’s demise don’t leave much up to imagination either. This over-explanation is further compounded by all the jargon thrown into the mix and the exaggerated voice acting, which not only confuses me, but also feels like the authors didn’t really tackle the tone properly; instead of sounding desperate, Rei instead comes off as somewhat angsty to me. The amount of effort put into flaunting all this detail feels quite unwarranted, considering that Shadow of the Colossus was more than happy to let players just linger in their own space and judge for themselves: what happened to “show, don’t tell” guys?

Further invited comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus make it evident to me that despite the reverence of its boss encounters, Solar Ash fails to emulate much of their appeal in any meaningful way. Nothing comes close to the volume swells present in Shadow of the Colossus, because there’s no focused build-up of anticipation when the player is too busy looking for plasma and voidrunner caches alongside traversal puzzles for destroying Anomalies, not to mention Rei’s stream of self-narration breaking up any prolonged moments of silence. More importantly, the boss fights themselves lack any stakes. Shadow of the Colossus emphasizes its sense of scale, as you carefully climb this larger-than-life creature while it desperately flails about, trying to shake you off before you snuff it out by plunging your sword into its vitals. Solar Ash on the other hand, may as well just be a casual Sunday drive through a Mario Kart course; the sigils have been replaced with temporary targets and context-sensitive grapple points, and most of the interaction boils down to holding forward on the joystick and jumping/grappling at the right time. You don’t even need to adjust the camera, because the game will automatically do that for you when you need to shift directions. Say what you want about Shadow of the Colossus’ ballistic camera during the colossi encounters, but it really lent the fights a sense of powerlessness and urgency during this desperate dance of death that Solar Ash lacks. To top this all off, consequences of failure are minimized in the latter; falling off or failing to hit a target in time just sends you back to a close checkpoint to the boss with only one hit point missing, and you can usually grapple right back on the boss to retry the phase within a minute or two. Considering that health boxes are scattered everywhere, you have to actively try to get a game over. It is kind of funny that the final boss fight doesn’t even provide you with a health bar for a potential game over: it’s a mere formality at that point.

The weird thing is, despite how streamlined the boss fights are in Solar Ash, there’s a real lack of polish from strange jank and design decisions elsewhere. Rei’s standard attack combo string consists of three attacks at a time, but the game likes throwing enemy variations at you that require four hits at a time (either a pair of smaller foes that each take two hits, or a singular medium baddy that takes four hits). The result is that you have to actively linger in the same space to completely finish off most enemies, and combat then noticeably interferes with the general flow of movement. Regarding lack of fluidity, I also have to agree with nex3’s point that it’s surprisingly easy to lose momentum altogether from strange collisions due to geometry. The strange momentum physics are reflected elsewhere too, such as when I noticed that jumping from the end of a rail resulted in significantly less momentum conserved than when Rei naturally slid off the rail instead. Finally, it’s kind of a shame that despite how much plasma is thrown at you and emphasized as the main collectible resource (to the point where one of the unlockable suits doubles your rate of plasma collection), there’s only one use for it: restoring a block of your health gauge’s max capacity after losing a cell every time you defeat a boss. In that sense, plasma feels rather superfluous, much like most of the game’s mechanics and features outside of its core traversal.

In spite of all this, I liked Solar Ash enough to complete a save file. I can’t help but feel bummed though, because I should have loved this. I had a good enough time just gliding about the surface of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and zooming about from rail to rail, but there’s so much stuff in-between that doesn’t seem to add anything pertinent to the base structure. I can’t see myself coming back to this for hardcore mode unfortunately, since it just seems like an artificially difficult no-hit playthrough with extra steps, though perhaps I’ll return someday to see if a speedrun challenge feels any better than a standard run. I find myself agreeing with quite a few others here: if practically everything minus the atmospheric visuals/soundtrack and core traversal mechanics were removed, you might actually have one of the most compact yet focused experiences of recent times. As it is now though? It’s just fine. It’ll always be I suppose.

There seems to be a prevalent expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

fantastic lil rpg filled with scrutinizing detail and whimsy. felvidek is something special, not because it's innovating or groundbreaking (it's neither of those), but because it's just so precise in its execution. you meander around the countryside, uncovering a conspiracy and fighting hussites, cultists, and monstrosities. every horror is paired by absurdity, making the encroaching apocalypse feel like one sick joke. it's a struggle to get by as two dudes with limited funds and equipment, but eventually, you become terrifying. instead of getting bodied by cloaked madmen and brigands, you start leaving limp ragdolls on the way to the tavern. even when you get the fourth party member, they're basically a meat shield since they arent a renowned knight or priest. the old english dialog, amazing outfits, and cultural taboos of the time are all so well-realized that you're further enveloped into the game's world. listen to two priests debate celibacy and sobriety, watch how coffee influences the balkans, and witness medieval confusion after stumbling upon two gay dudes. for about five hours, you'll be wanting more and more, but you can't really get anything else out of it. pavol's story ended where it needed. the burg is saved and the fires of hell are put out.

honestly would be a "perfect" game for me if there was only one gun in the entire game. that shit's too op!!! I mean, it's a gun, so it makes sense lol but having two in one party is such a freebie.