It's solid! The concept of having a game that combines sidescrolling action and simulation godgame playstyles actually works really well to give the impression that you are restoring a ravaged wild land to become a fully lived continent. My only gripe about the game really is that both gameplay styles are quite basic in the grand scheme of things. The action scenes are pretty short, simple, and easy (though maybe that's for the better given how big the hitboxes for everything is), and the god game sections don't have very many options as to how you can build your society. You only have the options to perform miracles to do things that primarily involve terraforming or the option to expand the civilization towards a place. Given the fact there are also spawners to capture and enemies to shoot, the sim sections really feel more like an RTS than a citybuilder. Sure, at the time of this games release there were already more fleshed out sidescrollers and simulation games on the SNES, but only here will you get something that lets you do both and that's cool. I'm really surprised that nobody has made a spiritual followup to this game that adds more depth to both gamemodes because this game serves as a really good groundwork for the (literal) worldbuilding possibilities that this particular genre mashup can create. Maybe someone has already made something like that already and I just don't know about it though. Regardless, it's definitely a solid entry in the SNES library and worth giving a shot!


i was not expecting the 20th century fox jingle in the credits though, sasuga yuzo koshiro

I really don't know what to say other than the fact that this game is crazy dude

It's like a first person puzzle game typically about putting blocks on buttons a la portal, but you can't jump as instead you can control gravity by walking on walls and ceilings. The puzzles themselves are alright, not braindeadly easy but also not frustratingly hard. There's no real plot to speak of, the real meat and potatoes of this game come from its absolutely stunning art style. Each setpiece loops indefinitely in all directions and it leads to some extremely trippy and cool places to look at and explore. There's almost a sort of entrancing, meditative vibe with how everything looks and sounds, I found myself slowing down to just admire the visuals quite a lot. Definitely give this a try if you like other first person puzzle games like portal or superliminal or what have you.

Certainly a way to end the first character pass, alright. I already felt completely satisfied with the smash roster after Banjo dropped, and Terry was a very well-timed personal bonus I never even considered, but yea ending it with another modern fire emblem marketing character is certainly something. Apparently Three Houses is good so I'd assume this is a better choice than Corrin was to push Fates, but again I have no idea. It was the only time in the entire history of smash DLC where after seeing the character announced, I didn't care enough to even learn how they play and just clicked off the Sakurai stream.

As for the characters themselves, I think I've played as them maybe like 5 times in total? I think they have a bow and a big smashy down B attack or something. They might be good. Or they might not. At least it's not another fire emblem character with a counter (unless they actually do have a counter, I don't remember).

I'm sure in 2047 when I actually finish playing all the fire emblem games enough to get to three houses I'm gonna look back on my thoughts on this character and cringe or something but as for now Beyleth (Bayleth? byeleth? how do you even spell it?) really is probably the character in smash that elicits the most absolutely nothing from me. No joy, no anger, no excitement, no frustration, nothing. They might as well not even be in the game. But I'm sure they make some people happy, so their inclusion is fine by me.


what was their stage again?

The year is 2019.

I'm in my second year of college as a whole, and my first year of a non-community college. I'm living entirely by myself in an extremely overpriced "apartment" in San Francisco that's basically someone's side office next to their garage they decided to rent out in order to make an easy buck. Despite being in a giant city, joining school clubs, and talking with classmates, I haven't been able to create any substantial relationships with anyone. Any social space that I would be interested in like game stores or arcades aren't easily around as the only real used game store is a record store about a 30 minute walk away that happens to sell games, and almost every arcade is a barcade that doesn't allow 19-year-old me to enter, even if past (and still present!) me has zero interest in drinking and just wants to play games and MAYBE talk to someone. Looking back on it now, it was a really lonely period of time in my life. Obviously one year later some shit's really gonna hit the fan and change everything for everyone, but nobody knew that just yet.

now why the fuck am i opening a review of terry bogard in smash with a personal loredump, you may ask? During that period of time I had saved enough money from twitch donations to buy a Neo Geo AES and a flashcart for it, and I was using most of my lonely spare time playing through the whole library. While I didn't play through EVERY game on the system, so far only playing about roughly half of it, I did make sure to give every fighting game on the system a shot because that's the Neo Geo's bread and butter. In hindsight, there is a certain ironic factor to playing tons of games intended for two people by your lonesome, and that compiled with the bullshit that is SNK bosses did probably sour some of those games more than intended (you can probably tell if you read any of my Neo Geo game reviews which were written at that time), but what I mean to say is that in this time period I had grown to basically know and appreciate everything about SNK in their Neo Geo era. SNK has always kind of been a bit of an underground game company with a reasonable legacy behind them that of all things the company wants to make known, especially as they've been fluctuating in manpower and budget since their 2000s bankruptcy. The thought of a Neo Geo character joining Smash Bros hadn't even remotely crossed my mind, so seeing SNK accidentally leaked through appearing on smash's copyright info was certainly very exciting for me! I personally wanted (honestly either) Athena to be the smash rep because she's my favorite character, but I did know it was most likely going to either be Kyo, Terry, or a Metal Slug character. Eventually the character was announced with the actual coolest trailer ever, to a reception of the general fighting game crowd going "oh hey, that's neat" while everyone else asking who this character even is. It makes sense, unless you live in certain parts of the world SNKs legacy is pretty dated and obscure by that point so it's understandable most smash players didn't know who Terry was. Leading up to the characters release, Sakurai did his usual character showcase explaining Terry's playstyle and the new content. For Terry's specific showcase though, Sakurai seemed to make more of a point in explaining the history of SNK alongside the different characters in the KoF stage, as he himself is also a Neo Geo sicko having taken inspiration from KoF for the very concept of Smash. I think his enthusiasm for the series was infectious, as after his showcase there were tons of people newly interested in the character and his series.

So let's actually talk about the character now! Terry is a fighting game character just like Ryu and Ken, and while depending on the game Terry can be considered a shoto with his kit, he still plays pretty different from how most shoto characters do. While I don't think he has the same extra set of normals like Ryu, he does still have the ability to do stronger versions of his specials by doing the motion input instead of the usual direction + B. He also has two different side specials depending on the direction he is facing, which is unique. Most importantly, when Terry has enough damage acquired, he is granted access to his super moves like Power Geyser and Buster Wolf by doing their corresponding special input. Some SNK games do have special rage/comeback mechanics where your access to supers changes depending on your health, so this is actually a really faithful way to adapt that kind of thing to smash. Maybe it's just the Neo Geo fan in me speaking, but his large variety of special moves make him a lot of fun to play as.

Smash really can be some of the best marketing a game or series can get if they have a playable rep. I don't really think that his inclusion really spiked the interest in KOF by a super substantial amount (those EVO 2024 KOF XV signup numbers, yeesh.) , but I do think that the general appeal of SNK has spread thanks to this release which I believe was entirely the point. For me though, this character basically was the culmination of all the SNK games I was playing that whole year brought to a modern spotlight I didn't even know I wanted. Obviously this isn't the sole reason why stuff like Terry getting into Street Fighter 6 and a new freakin' GAROU game are happening, but I can imagine it sure did help!


the KOF stadium is the best stage in the game but only when Athena is in the background, also 50 songs including a remix of the psycho soldier theme by yuzo koshiro that INCLUDES THE ENGLISH LYRICS??!?!?!?!??! smash bros peaked here

Definitely the most meh out of the 4 2014 Nintendo Game Seminar games imo. The art style and soundtrack are nice and give the game like a high-quality mobile game vibe (endearing), but the gameplay is a bit tricky. You know that yoshi game in Nintendo land where you have to freehand a path between different items and a door to clear levels? This is kind of like that except instead of freehand drawing from the TV to the gamepad you need to predict the path you need to take and pre-instruct your lil penguin dude to follow it. There's a mild rhythmic aspect to it, as you hear each step the penguin takes and the game wants you to approximate how far it moves for each step and plan accordingly, but also the movement instructions are done entirely with the gamepads gyro. (was using the gyro a mandatory requirement at this years seminar?) It certainly has the most content and depth as there's plenty of levels to go through with a bonus level unlocked when you can clear every previous level in a world perfectly so out of the four games you'd def get the most bang for your free buck with this one, but like ehhhhh I thought the gameplay loops for the other 3 games were a lot more interesting. maybe i just suck at this game though, you should still def give all 4 of the seminar games a try if you can.