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sage-nebula · 3 years

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Game Review — Neo: The World Ends With You

In 2008 I played a JRPG unlike any other I had played before, or have played since. It was a self-contained story and for the most part I was okay for it to stay that way, though I was always curious what more could be done in the world, and hated how Square-Enix kept teasing us with the promise of a sequel that it seemed would never come. But now, 13 years later, that sequel has finally arrived.

Overall Score: 9/10

My personal feelings on the story and characters aside, overall Neo: The World Ends With You lives up to its predecessor in terms of gameplay, writing, music, and presentation. Unlike other sequels which fall woefully short of their predecessors, Neo does a fantastic job of staying true to the spirit of the original so that older fans can enjoy it just as much as new fans do. For more detailed thoughts, head under the cut (and onto my blog for formatting purposes).

The Pros:

The writing, for the most part, is excellent. Again, I have more personal takes on the story and character beats that I’ll delve into on a different post, but in terms of how the dialogue and flavor text are written throughout the game, Neo has shown that the writing staff hasn’t forgotten what makes The World Ends With You spectacular despite it being 13 years. The humor is on point, the character of the fictionalized version of Shibuya that was created is on point. Even just playing the demo I could tell that the charm was still there despite this being written over a decade later and I couldn’t be happier with that fact.

The music is, of course, phenomenal. There are remixes of tracks from the original game that are great, because I’ll never say no to a version of “Transformation” or “The One Star” or “Someday”. But there are also original tracks that are just absolutely beyond fantastic, such as “Kill the Itch” or “Last Call” or “Bird in the Hand”. One of the things that sets The World Ends With You apart from other JRPGs is its music, and how it’s composed to be music comparable with what you could hear on a radio versus being very identifiable as video game music, and Neo delivered on that front yet again with both the remixes and the original tracks.

The gameplay is another area in which Neo shines. It would be impossible to replicate the battle system of the original game, something Square-Enix showed time and time again with their numerous ports and remasters of it. The original game was meant to be played on the Nintendo DS, and specifically the Nintendo DS, in that it was created with the dual screens in mind. As a result, the two partner system just didn’t work on the numerous ports and re-releases, and it wouldn’t be able to work in Neo either due to the fact that none of the platforms it’s releasing on have dual screens. As a result, Neo’s battle system is very different, but also very, very good. The battles are still real time, and you still control all of the characters at once (I don’t think there’s a way to let the AI take over like with the partner in the original game, but I could be wrong on that), but this time they’re all in the same plane of existence and you juggle up to six of them at a time. Instead of passing a light puck to power up a sync fusion, you’re instead bouncing combos in order to work up a Groove, which in turn lets you Beat Drop in what is essentially a version of the sync fusions, albeit not nearly as specific to the characters as the sync fusions were. There were times while playing that having to balance so many characters at once got a bit much, especially when trying out new pins with different reboot times, but overall the battle experience is incredibly smooth and is a perfect rendition of what TWEWY battling should be like on a single screen. Battles aside, there are numerous other areas in which the gameplay shined as well. Starting in Week 2 you gain the ability to move around the map more quickly in a way which integrates the BGM as well (which is important given how much thematic importance is given to music in these games), and in Week 3 you get an even faster method of travel via telewarping around the map. Pins are back, and with a story explanation given for why the characters can use any pins they please, you get different pins to use and elemental affinities to consider when picking out your decks. A new Social Network feature not only gives you additional information on various characters, but also grants you new abilities and can help you keep track of who is who, as well as who has a relation to whom. Little features like this definitely add to the experience of the game and make playing it feel fun, which is always of paramount importance when it comes to video games.

There is a ton of content, which again, is pretty important when you consider that this is a $60 game. Like the original game, there are three weeks of seven days apiece for the main story. In a way, this can make it seem like the game goes by too fast (especially if you binge play it like I did), but also like the original game, there is plenty of post-game content to do as well. For one, we once again get a light-hearted parody bonus chapter in the form of “Another Day”. For another, there are Secret Reports unlocked by completing special missions in each chapter that provide extra background information, as well as an unlockable secret ending as well. So although the main story can go by fast (especially if, again, you just can’t put it down), there is still plenty to do once the main campaign is completed and that’s always the mark of a brilliant game as well.

Speaking of, the game really is difficult to put down. Five hours passed by in a blink for me while I was playing, not only because the gameplay was fun, but because I just had to know what was going to happen next. There were times when I figured I would just start the next day and then put it down, but the next day began with something crazy happening and I had to follow up on it. For a heavily story-based game, this is yet another necessary strength and the developers pulled it off fabulously.

For the most part, the characters were all fantastic as well, newcomers and returning vets alike. The original game shined in how unique it made its characters, and Neo does this as well. The returning cast is (again for the most part) IC but with notable growth in their personalities and demeanors, and the new cast is equally as lovable (or detestable for those that are meant to be detested). Again, since this is a story-based game, having strong characters is a necessary requirement and Neo pulls that off just as splendidly as the original did, with few exceptions.

The game is also beautiful to look at, much like (at risk of sounding like a broken record) the original. The comic book art style has always been incredibly unique and charming, and they integrated the 3D graphics seamlessly with the art style to create a truly beautiful marvel to look at while playing. The character design is also worthy of a chef’s kiss, especially when wise decisions were made behind the scenes to swap the designs of certain characters (namely, Ayano and Kanon originally had each other’s appearance, before a smart decision was made to swap how they looked). All in all, this is a game you never get tired of looking at.

The Neutrals:

Despite there being a wide variety of pins to use (especially since any character can use any pin), there actually isn’t that much of a variety in terms of what the pins actually do. This is partially due to hardware restrictions; in the original game they could have sound based pins because the DS had a microphone, and the touch screen also allowed for different types of inputs as well. But current consoles don’t offer as much in terms of gameplay ingenuity, and as a result you get a lot of pins that are basically just clones of each other, which is a little bit disappointing when you compare it to the original (especially since I haven’t discovered many iconic sets yet, a la Darklit Planets or Brainy Cat etc).

While there are a ton of characters in this game, there is much, much less emphasis put on the citizens of Shibuya who aren’t involved in the Game, which in turn makes it feel like there are less memorable side characters than the last game. For the most part, the citizens of Shibuya are basically relegated to just being possessed by Noise, and that’s it. Whereas we saw their lives carry out over three weeks in the last game (such as Makoto’s evolution in both his social and professional life), here we don’t really get to see that, which is a bit disappointing as well.

The battle gameplay, while very fun and smooth, does feel a little less deep at times than it did in the original game. While in the original you had to learn to balance Neku’s pins with his partner’s psychs, here you’re basically button mashing in a rhythm in order to get the gauge up, which can get a bit tiring if you do a bunch of battles in a row. The fact that the Beat Drops aren’t unique to the characters like the Fusions were is another thing that, while not a huge detriment, still feels a little less special than the Fusions did in the original game.

Neo is a lot more plot-focused than the original, which was more character-driven. Don’t get me wrong, the original definitely had a plot as well, and Neo does care about its characters. But while the deeper aspects of the plot were discovered post-game through the Secret Reports in the original, here the plot intricacies are front and center. And while the first game spent way more time developing its characters and focusing on their inner struggles, here the character issues are mostly pushed to late game in order to focus on the plot. It’s not bad, but it is noticeably different.

You still don’t get to actually see the characters in the clothes you dress them in. While this makes sense (it would be way too much to program in), it’s still a bit of a letdown.

The fashion brands don’t really feature into the plot or world at all, with the exception of Gatto Nero because of who created it. Again, it’s not a huge deal, but I enjoyed how you could see which brands were most popular in different areas of Shibuya in the original, and how you sometimes had to boost the popularity of the brands via doing battle with those pins or clothes equipped in the original in order to clear missions. It made the brands you were wearing actually matter, versus just being fun flavor text.

The Cons:

The time travel mechanic, Replay, is probably the biggest con this game has to offer. While it does have consequences that I won’t spoil here in the very final act of the game, for the most part it completely negated the stakes for the vast majority of the game, because you knew that even if something terrible happened, Rindo would be able to go back in time and fix it. I was never worried about what the characters would encounter as a result of this, except for in a few instances where something bad happened after Rindo had already used his power for the day. This is a noticeable downgrade from the original game, where there were no Do Overs and Neku and the others had to live with whatever consequences the Game had in store for them, which made everything feel that much more dire. In addition to lowering the stakes, though, Replay also loses points for the fact that having to do the same events with slight changes over and over felt like padding. In particular, in the endgame there is a segment you have to go through about six different times, and it felt maddening. While I do feel like Replay was a homage to the Zero Escape games in that it works remarkably similar to Sigma and Phi’s SHIFTing ability (and Fret even calls the Game “the escape room from hell” which again calls to Zero Escape), for some reason it felt far more like a chore here than it did there, possibly because you couldn’t Jump at will here like you can in Virtue’s Last Reward.

I’m personally not wild about the adult/teen romances that were implied in the game, even though thankfully neither of them seemed reciprocated. Namely, Kanon viewed Fret as a kid given that she’s an adult and he’s a teenager, and Shoka never really thought about her relationship with Ayano that deeply even though Ayano seemed pretty in love with Shoka. But even though these relationships weren’t reciprocated, the fact that they were present at all is still something that I’m really just not wild about, and made me feel a bit uncomfortable while playing. (And yes, I know that Ayano and Shoka are said to be sisters in “Another Day”, but the subtext surrounding Ayano’s feelings in specific in the main story is so blatant it’s essentially overt text. I don’t want to get into it here since that delves more into spoiler territory, but I really just was not wild about it at all, especially since that’s the most blatant lesbian rep this series has given us thus far, which is disappointing to me, a lesbian.)

I don’t want to dive too much into this here because of spoilers, but: Neku. From his English voice acting to his writing, he was disrespected up and down in this game. Truly a massive disappointment in every sense of the word, and so he deserves a Con point all to himself.

There is a noticeable lack of minigames in Neo, as well as a lack of variety in the wall missions. We only had one instance of Reaper Review (that I encountered at least). There was no Reaper Creeper, nor was there Tin Pin Slammer, though both were mentioned. As someone who loved Tin Pin Slammer, I was so sad to see it not present at all in this game, and there wasn’t even a suitable replacement for it that we could play on the side, either. As mentioned above, the battles can get a bit boring after a while, so the fact that there weren’t minigames to help break them up truly feels like a detriment to what is otherwise a very fun game to play.

Fret’s Remind ability was a chore every time I had to use it. You had to hold the joysticks at certain positions and if you couldn’t solve it fast enough, you had to reposition them all over again. Maybe it’s just the Switch version that was having the issue, I don’t know, but I found it incredibly finicky and hard to control, which made me dislike every time I had to do it despite loving the little drawings that Fret conjured up when he used his ability.

In cases where Noise could interrupt your entire party at once, I found that I was unable to use pins a second or two before the interruption came. This was most notable with the elephant noise (fuck those elephants, me and all my homies hate those elephants, there were TOO MANY ELEPHANTS in this game) and the final final boss. Again, this could be a bug exclusive to the Switch version, I’m not sure, but it was annoying as heck regardless.

All in all, whatever complaints I may have, this game is extraordinarily fun and a wonderful sequel to an even more wonderful game. I’m incredibly happy with it and I’m glad that it lived up to expectations, particularly considering how long it took to arrive. Now we just need to wait 13 years for a third game. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m ready.

#neo: the world ends with you #neo twewy #neo the world ends with you #2021 game reviews #minor spoilers contained within though I tried to keep it as spoiler-free as possible

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joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh · 3 years

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My Top 5 Games of 2020

We gamer? We gamer!

5. Super Mario 3D All-Stars

So I gotta reveal that I only played like 5 games this year lol, so a glorified emulator menu for 2 of the greatest Mario games ever and also one of the worst ever in Sunshine has to qualify for this list, even if all these games are 10+ years old on their own. But yeah 3D All-Stars exists. It’s a pretty lame anniversary title, and oh boy that limited release is a cringe business practice. But hey Mario 64 is absolutely amazing even to this day, Galaxy is one of my favourite games ever, and it’s nice being able to play these games on Switch in solid quality with that portability too. This release also allowed me to play Sunshine for the first time, and even though it turns out the game was a frustrating pile of shit, I at least appreciate the experience. This collection itself is a poor effort on Nintendo’s part but I was still happy to play it and whatnot.

4. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

This game was like, the game of 2020 for a lot of people, and for me, it was my first Animal Crossing game (sans playing Pocket Camp for maybe 10 minutes) as well as my first game in this like, life-sim genre, so I wasn’t entirely sure how it’d go. Fortunately I had a good time with it. When you have objectives, they’re really satisfying to work towards, and the music and visuals and tons of the villagers are super charming and relaxing. And more than anything, that multiplayer is fun as fuck. Even being in a smaller Discord server for the game I was constantly meeting new people and doing all sorts of trades and charity and meetups and that was just really charming. But even just staying up late with a friend or two and vibing on their islands until 5 in the morning, without any real goal, that was great too. Thing is, I did eventually get bored of the game, after around 140 hours more specifically. I stopped caring about new content, stopped really helping people in that Discord server, and even when I did play the game a bit again to see the August fireworks with my friends, we’d only look at our fireworks and then go play something else. I had a really fun experience with this game, but yeah it got boring eventually. Still poggers though.

3. Streets of Rage 4

The moment I learned of this game’s existence, I popped the fuck off. Grew up loving the first 3 games, and getting a retro revival sequel? That’s hype. Now there’s every chance it could have been shit, but the team working on this game so clearly understood the appeal of those first 3 games and was able to more than sufficiently capture and actually improve on them. Streets of Rage 4 is the best beat ‘em up I’ve ever played, every character is so fuckin distinct and the combat is so damn satisfying and the soundtrack goes so fucking hard and the visuals are beautiful. It’s also really fuckin god tier at being a nostalgia fest while also introducing plenty of new content that fits right at home with the series. Fuckin’ great time all around. Playing through this game in one sitting with my little brother was among my favourite gaming experiences this year, and then even past that it was just a great game to get the fingers moving and just feel like I’m doing something. Loved it.

2. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

3D All-Stars is maybe pushing it with 3 games that are 10+ years old each, but I think a rerelease of a 10 year old Wii game with enhanced visuals, a couple of gameplay changes and an entirely new epilogue story is fair game, yeah? So Xenoblade is a game I’ve wanted to play for a good while since like, I loved Xenoblade X, and wow this pretty Definitive release sure is a great excuse to give the game a shot. And I really enjoyed it! This is certainly a game elevated by its world above all else – the environments are so fucking beautiful and creative and really fun to explore and the worldbuilding is top tier as fuck, helped by the characters in this world having so much fucking charm. I have a couple of issues with the story, particularly certain members of our main party being kinda poorly utilised, but the main narrative feels so fucking grand and easy to get invested in and it’s such an emotional ride, just felt super great to beat. I’m also a big fan of the gameplay even if it is a little simple – it feels satisfying pulling off big chain attacks or making those on the fly decisions thanks to visions, and I really love that growing the bonds between your party members is rewarded with new skills and increased chain link chances and stuff in gameplay, plus the pretty consistently well written heart-to-hearts for more narrative weight. Also the soundtrack is insane. Also I think I’m confident in saying this is the best voice acting I’ve heard in a game, Adam Howden as Shulk especially cannot be put into words. Game’s just a damn great time, and the various occasional frustrations I had all felt drowned out by just how masterful so many of the larger elements are. Strong recommend.

1. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Spoilers btw. But nah as good as Xenoblade was, game of the year for me is this. Gameplay just too fun, like the gameplay in this alone is more enjoyable to me than the story and gameplay and music and voice acting and environment design of Xenoblade combined. The degree to which just, having far more depth-y movesets on every character than was the case for Hyrule Warriors, giving everyone their own character specific gimmicks on top of a typical Warriors moveset, and then the addition of runes and elemental rods that allow you to change the pace of battles even further, it’s so fucking satisfying literally all the time. You have so many options at all times and having BotW game knowledge is rewarded through certain context sensitive interactions as well, and then the runes are also very different between characters which further makes it enjoyable to just experiment and see who’s good for you. Also obviously Age of Calamity didn’t introduce this mechanic but I’ve only played Hyrule Warriors on Wii U so the ability to select 4 playable characters in one stage and like command them to go to certain places and switch between them on the fly, that’s such a fucking amazing convenience that makes gameplay a lot less tedious and more engaging, plus reduces the time you need to spend in a stage so levels never drag.

And then I also really love how progression is handled in this game. Having objectives be presented as little dots on BotW’s world map certainly seems overwhelming - but because half of those are these little item-checks that only really get grindy postgame, and then the other half are generally fairly small gameplay challenges, you end up checking off your list really quickly. It’s a really fun and addictive progression system. Plus it makes powering up your characters a lot less demanding than it is in Hyrule Warriors – no longer do you need to grind for hours on end to get material upon material for these lengthy badge trees for like 30 different characters, instead you just clear that list of things to do and your far more manageable 14 characters – plus an optional 4 – will get stronger in a far more manageable and balanced way. And again all those characters feel so different from one another compared to some of the more homogenous movesets of Hyrule Warriors, so you really end up wanting to make all of them super strong. And like the only character that really sucks to play in all situations is fuckin Yunobo, but everything about him is shit anyway so that’s not really surprising.

Mentioning the modern day champions or whatever their title would be is a good segue to talk about the story. Which for me, was the most disappointing thing about the game. Obviously we’re set 100 years before Breath of the Wild, and so you already know that this is going to end in failure for everyone involved. But inevitable failure doesn’t mean this narrative can’t be gripping – tell us more about the Hyrule of this time and the people inhabiting it, and more importantly, let me really get to know the Champions. I want to feel for their deaths. I want to care about these really well designed characters that have no actual depth to them. But nah, the game just doesn’t deliver on that. Everything just feels like the BotW flashbacks if they were longer, but they don’t actually have more meaningful content in them, we don’t really get to know anything or anyone any better than we already did. And that’s super disappointing.

All of this is before the game goes full fanservice and splits the timeline by bringing said modern champions back to the past to save the champions and together they can all defeat Calamity Ganon. I am actually okay with this. Playing towards your ultimate demise is maybe a bit dark and unsatisfying for some, and this is a spinoff of a series that already experiments with time travel nonsense in about every game, so really, go wild. I’m not at all bothered by this very fanservice “actually everyone got saved by their successors” angle or whatever. What is unfortunate is how little is actually done with it. The modern champions’ interactions with the past champions start and end at their introductions, and very little depth or growth is displayed on anyone’s part. Sidon shows up, says he’s happy he could save Mipha, and Mipha says she’s proud of him. That’s it. That’s all we get. And then the ending acts like Zelda’s made all these wonderful friends and she’s giving them a beautiful farewell but she literally doesn’t even talk to them ever. They just show up, turn the tide, and that’s what lets them beat Calamity Ganon. It just feels very undercooked. Also this entire time there’s been a little Guardian following the party and he’s basically the excuse to have the time travel shit go on, and while I’m okay with that stuff I wasn’t even remotely endeared to the thing until he became playable and was a really fun to play lol. But before that he does nothing for me. Not bad, just underwhelming. The entire story is just underwhelming.

The other biggest problem with the game is how often the framerate absolutely fucking tanks – especially in some of the more visually overwhelming stages but even in calmer places the game will still frequently chug along. I’m not a huge stickler for this type of thing in most cases, and even here it didn’t even really take me out of the experience just because I’m as tolerant of this as I am, but it was still pretty distracting and I’d obviously prefer if the game ran a little better.

But those aside, that core gameplay is so bombastically fun and that progression loop so fucking satisfying that I absolutely loved this game to bits anyway. So much so that I even managed to 100% complete it, in around 60 hours to boot. I think in the near 200 hours I put into Hyrule Warriors on Wii U I probably would’ve been less than 10% through that game’s content? Yeah I’m certainly fucking glad that Age of Calamity is so streamlined. Pog game all in all, it’s in the number 1 for a spot.

And that’s gaming, baby!

#mario #animal crossing #streets of rage #xenoblade #zelda #21.12.20

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defiantdreemurrs · 3 years

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Pokemon: Gold and Silver - Review

In 2000, Nintendo released the long anticipated sequels to its smash hits, Pokemon Red and Blue. Boasting an entirely new region to explore, a whole new set of over a hundred Pokemon to catch alongside the previous 151, and almost an entire second game unlocked after beating the main game, Pokemon Gold and Silver were an almost immediate success. These games are often mentioned as being “the best in the series” by fans across the globe and represented Game Freak’s most ambitious project to date. After years of only having vague memories of the games from childhood, we decided to finally make an attempt at completing Silver version, after which we plan to play through as much of the main series as possible. We’ve always felt the Game Boy and Game Boy Color era of Pokemon games paled in comparison to some of the later games like Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire and we figured after a disappointing playthrough of Blue a couple years ago, Silver would just be more of the same, but this time in color. We were shortly proven very wrong.

Pokemon Gold and Silver take us into the world of Johto. Johto is a neighbor region to Kanto from the Gen 1 games, a place we’ve heard described as “Kanto’s Backyard”. The region is based on a real region of Japan just like how Kanto was, this time the Kansai region. Where Kanto is centered around a metropolitan area in the form of Tokyo, Kansai is a much more ancient and rural area home to smaller cities such as Osaka and Kyoto. As a result, Johto feels much older than Kanto. Kanto felt like a collection of small yet relatively modern (as of the mid 90s) towns and cities surrounding Saffron and Celadon cities, whereas Johto’s even smaller towns feel much older and rich with history.

Take Ecruteak for example. Ecruteak is home to an ancient pair of towers said to be home to Legendary Pokemon. From these towers designs in the game, to the general atmosphere of Ecruteak, to the fact that a total of four Legendary Pokemon can actually be initially found within these two towers (though three of them roam around after your first meeting), even the limited display of the Game Boy Color gets across that this city has thousands of years of history surrounding it. Playing the game we felt like we were traversing around this rural, ancient region in the heart of Japan soaking in all of its beauty rather than just wandering around a world like our own. For a game series that aimed to transplant the mechanics of Dragon Quest into a more modern world, Johto brings a nice sense of that less modern, almost fantastical element back to the setting.

Not only does it feel like a beautiful region to traverse, it’s also a very relaxing region to traverse. Sure, there’s a lot of deep grass, and later on there are a lot of trainers around that can slow you down, but for the most part those slowdowns just result in having more time to appreciate the world of Gold and Silver. It wasn’t difficult to imagine wandering through the woods in place of the player character, a team of Pokemon at our side, exploring and battling, stumbling across ancient landmarks and historical buildings. All of this on a Game Boy Color game, mind you. Such a simple display and limited hardware and Game Freak still managed to hit it out of the park with such an immersive game. We easily spent hours just wandering around from town to town, not wanting to put the game down because of how sucked into it we were.

There’s a lot more than just Johto to progress through, though. Victory Road and the Indigo Plateau are back, because the game needed somewhere to put the Elite Four and the Pokemon League Champion, and since Johto and Kanto are practically next door to each other it made the most sense to just have the player travel back to Kanto after completing all eight gyms rather than design an entirely new area that’s just next door. The more eagle-eyed of players who attempt to fly away from the Indigo Plateau for training or other reasons might notice that they can’t do so, because when they pull up the Fly map, it shows they’re in Kanto as opposed to Johto. This is kind of an excellent teaser for the game’s post-game content: the entire region of Kanto.

Shortly after his passing, an anecdote about Satoru Iwata’s work on Gold and Silver went around in Nintendo fan circles. He was credited with developing a method of compression that allowed the developers at Game Freak to get both Johto and Kanto’s assets small enough to fit on a single cartridge, allowing the player the opportunity to, after completing the Pokemon League challenge, revisit the home of the previous games’ player character and see what’s changed since the player was last in Kanto. Given that Gold and Silver take place three years after Red and Blue, you can imagine a lot has changed. Cinnabar Island’s volcano has erupted, forcing the inhabitants to flee elsewhere and destroying Blaine’s gym, leaving him with nothing but a cave in the Seafoam Islands, that has become the new Cinnabar Gym. Lavender Town’s giant Tower has been turned into a new Radio Tower for Kanto, with the Pokemon graves within being moved to a new mausoleum building just south of it. A speedy bullet train has been built in Saffron City, allowing quick passage back to Johto. The player’s old rival Blue has become the new Gym Leader of Viridian City.

But while all of this provides an interesting and content-rich post-game for the player to explore and sink even more time into, we feel it comes at the cost of making the game’s main region suffer somewhat. In order to fit an entire second game into the back of the main game, the main game had to be smaller as a result. It’s nice to traverse two entire regions in one game but it’s not quite as nice when the game’s main region ends up being much faster to progress through as a result. While we did spend our time wandering around and didn’t focus too much on speed (though we were playing a little quickly since we do have a lot of games to get through), the end of the game hit us a lot sooner than we expected. In just a few short hours of playing we made it all the way up to the third gym, and the very next day blazed through four more.

What makes this relatively fast pace even more annoying is that the levels themselves are paced really weirdly. We didn’t fight every single trainer we came across, but we did fight a good amount of them and made sure to fight every trainer in every gym, and we still had to grind somewhat when we came across the Elite Four. The game’s gyms are balanced to where you end up roughly in the mid 30s after completing all eight of them, with Clair’s team in the Blackthorn Gym having a single level 40 leading a team of mid 30s. The pacing then jumps wildly out of control as the Elite Four range from low 40s to low 50s, and then again even more so at the end of the post-game, where after facing mostly 30s, 40s, and even some 50s, you face a challenging team composed of mid 70s and even a level 80. I’m assuming the game intends you to grind out your team in the Victory Road in order to reach a more appropriate level for the Elite Four, but this was somewhat difficult since it’s full of rock- and ground-types, one of which we had on our team.. In the end we just repeatedly challenged the Elite Four and didn’t bother to heal as a way to grind some more levels out more easily as well as to form strategies against them, which I would argue is actually a great way to go about it if your team is well equipped for the fights otherwise.

This is, of course, assuming you even have the team you want in the first place. After picking our starter and catching a few other Pokemon to get us through the first gym, we started thinking about the Elite Four and the eventual challenge at the end of Kanto, and decided to plan out a team instead of our usual method of just using what we catch. We had a solid team put together of Pokemon that we liked first and foremost but would also be able to tackle these challenges more easily thanks to type matchups. Getting a few hours into the game though and doing more research on where to find them, we realized a lot of the team we were building would take far too long to put together, with half of them not even being available until arriving in Kanto (despite being brand new Johto Pokemon!). Almost none of the new Dark-types are available in Johto, the only one being Umbreon, and the only Fire-types available that aren’t your starter are Magmar and Entei (and Ho-oh for those playing Gold). Since we had no interest in waiting that long for the Pokemon we actually wanted and because we wanted our full, final team embedded forever in the Hall of Fame after beating the Elite Four, we ended up having to use two Legendary Pokemon, in the form of Lugia and Entei.

Personally, we don’t feel like including Legendaries on your team makes a whole lot of sense anyways, and we usually try to restrict to no more than one because realistically who expects an 11 year old child to have even just one? But the game restricting so many of the newly introduced Johto Pokemon to the post-game and even keeping the ones it does allow you to catch in Johto itself restricted to a smaller handful of types meant we had to break our own rule if we wanted to take advantage of certain type matchups. Considering how many Pokemon throughout the game are weak to Fire-types, we had to pick Entei just to capitalize on that because otherwise we were pretty heavily limiting ourself and making the game harder.

Personal issues with the availability of certain Pokemon aside, these games present a rich experience through an immersive world, an experience that is a bit marred by its own ambition. Ambition is something we can respect though. It took a lot of effort to fit Kanto into the game and we imagine a lot of players were thrilled to go back to the land they spent so many hours exploring and playing through in Red and Blue (though, being born too late to play those games, we didn’t have that experience). Even if we didn’t have that experience in Kanto already, it’s still really impressive and almost as fun to sink time into. It’s like a whole entire second game that you unlock after beating the main game, with an even more difficult final challenge. We respect the developers at Game Freak a lot for attempting this, and in the end we’re really looking forward to returning to Johto later on in Pokemon Crystal as well as the remakes, HeartGold and SoulSilver.

#pokemon #pokemon gold and silver #pokemon silver #pokemon gold #pokemon gen ii #gen 2 #spectral system #spectral #spectral pokemon reviews

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thej13579 · 4 years

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Paper Mario Sticker Star: Really That Bad?

This will be the first in a series that I have made called Really That Bad? It's where I judge a negatively reviewed product to see if it's really as bad as people say it is.

If you have your own suggestions for Really That Bad? or you just want to give out your own opinions on either this critique or the game itself, comment down below.

Paper Mario is a series that I really liked growing up. From its humble roots as a spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG to its generally considered superior sequel in The Thousand Year Door to even its weird diversion into platforming with Super Paper Mario, I considered these three games to be some of the best Mario games ever made.

But starting with the game that I’m discussing today, the Paper Mario subseries has gone in a different direction that has not been received all that well. Considering that Paper Mario: The Origami King just came out recently, I have been wondering if Paper Mario: Sticker Star deserves all the hate it gets, or is there something worthwhile in the direction that the subseries is undergoing. Let’s find out if I think Paper Mario: Sticker Star is Really That Bad.

Story and Characters

Let’s start with the story. A basic rundown is that Bowser has disrupted the beloved Sticker Fest by causing the Sticker Comet to explode. Now Royal Stickers and pieces of the comet have been flung far and wide, and it's up to Mario and his ally Kersti to set things right by recovering them. That’s basically the entire story. A basic Mario story with nothing aside from the paper theme making it stand out.

Sadly, the characters don’t come out much better. Nearly all of them are basically bland and generic with very little in terms of personality or character design making them stand out from each other. (The Toads in of themselves have become a meme because they’re all the same exact character model) Even Kersti, an ally that follows you on your entire journey, stays static from beginning to end. Characters like Mizzter Blizzard, who actually does have a fairly sympathetic reason for what he does with him wanting to live longer and not melt, are very few and far between.

Overall, the story and characters lack any real charm from the other games and it comes across as a generic Mario story at the end of the day. While the first Paper Mario game had this exact same plot with the stars instead of the stickers, there were several things making that game stand out with its unique and memorable cast of characters and you also get to play as Peach every now and then to help Mario on his quest which was always rather nice. Not a particularly great start to this analysis.

Graphics

The graphics definitely are one of the highlights of the game. It’s fairly bright and colorful and the Nintendo 3DS takes good advantage of the fact that the world is paper. Some may dislike the extra emphasis on paper compared to the previous three games but I think it does add a little charm to the game that is sorely needed.

My main problem with the art direction essentially boils down to the locations; mainly, how generic they are. The designers fall back on various Mario locations that have been done to death by the time this game came out: Grasslands, deserts, jungles and finally Bowser’s castle. You take out the paper style, there will be nothing distinguishing it from most Mario platformers in the franchise and that’s a shame because the game actually looks pretty good on the Nintendo 3DS.

On a side note, I don’t really care that much for the 3D function of the Nintendo 3DS so I’m not taking that into account when evaluating the graphics.

Overall, the graphics, while good at taking advantage of the paper theme, suffered from a lack of originality when it comes to its locations (a flaw that later Paper Mario games did fix). It’s good but not great.

Sound

I’ll admit that the soundtrack is actually pretty good. It does have plenty of great tracks and the jazz motif throughout most of them really make it memorable in my eyes. Special mention goes to the main battle theme, Boo Night Fever, the Gooper Blooper battle themes, and the final boss themes.

I honestly don’t have much to say in this section. I just find this a very good soundtrack and I bet even most of the people who hate Sticker Star will agree with me on this.

Gameplay

Now, here’s the main part that many people have been criticizing this game for; the gameplay.

Let’s start with some positives. I liked the exploration aspect. I liked roaming around the areas, looking for stickers, solving puzzles. It really does feel like I’m accomplishing something whenever I found a secret passage that leads me to a different goal than when I was going down the beaten path.

There’s also the paperize power where you can reveal areas where you can place stickers down to enable certain events whether it is simply placing a sticker to make a ? box appear or a Thing that can really affect the environment, allowing you to progress further into the level..

That leads to the Things that you find by looking around the levels and I kind of like how they can affect the environment such as using the Faucet to fill up a dry oasis in the desert world and I especially like the animations that are played when you use them in battle. My personal favorites are the Goat, the Turkey and the Water Gun with how fun and bizarre they are. Sadly, they are not perfect for a major reason that I’ll get to in a bit.

Then we get to the battle system and here’s where most of my criticisms on the game design start to pour in. For the most part, it seems fairly similar to the RPG battle system from the first two games. You and your enemy take turns attacking each other and you have to get their health points down to zero to win the battle. Sounds exactly like the first two games... but that’s where the stickers come in.

Stickers come in a fair amount of variety with various forms of jumps, hammer attacks, and items. The main problem with them comes in the fact that all of them are consumables, even just the regular jump and hammer attacks. If you ran out of them, your only options are to either wait to die, or run away. Granted, you usually find enough stickers around the area just by looking around so it never really became a problem for me during my playthroughs. But the fact that it’s possible is not good game design.

The idea of your basic actions being entirely reliant on consumables would have been bad enough on its own, but then there’s the fact that, unlike nearly every other RPG ever, you get no experience from fighting enemies. What do you get from enemies? Coins and stickers. Two things that you can easily find on your own throughout the levels and you get plenty of the former the first time you actually complete a level. Not a very good incentive to battle if I say so myself. You are basically better off just avoiding enemies and saving your stickers for scripted encounters and boss fights.

And here’s where we get to what I consider the worst part of the game, the boss fights. The main issue can be boiled down to the fact that they are puzzle bosses with too much emphasis on the puzzle part. They are so powerful with their high health points ranging up to the hundreds and attack points they are all but guaranteed to wipe the floor with unless you have the proper Thing (and without a walkthrough, you probably don’t). If you do have the proper Thing, the boss quickly becomes a joke, hence the puzzle boss with too much emphasis on the puzzle. This is the flaw that I was referring to earlier when it comes to the Things. You have very little knowledge of what Thing you need for the fight until you’re already fighting the boss. Without a walkthrough, the only way to know is to die and possibly get a hint on what Thing you actually need.

To best describe what I’m talking about, let’s go with the very first boss, Megasparkle Goomba. To beat this boss, you have to fight the boss like normal until the sixteen Goombas that the boss is made out of reveal themselves and start to flip. From there you need one of two Things: Scissors or a Fan. Seems simple on paper (pun not intended). However, the main problem is that there is no indication that you need either of those Things to beat the boss.

It’s far from the only example of this design issue at work and not the worst, the final boss takes that spot, but it’s a perfect example of how the Things work when it comes to bosses and how poorly designed the bosses in this game are. This is not helped by how the game actively discourages trial and error considering that, one; you only have a limited amount of space for stickers and Things take a huge chunk of space in your inventory. Two, they go away once they are used so you have to either buy them which costs quite a bit of coins, or you have to go to the place where you originally found them which can be long and tedious depending on the level.

Overall, the exploration aspect of the game is kind of fun with plenty of clever puzzles and platforming. But the battling system ranges from pointless at best to downright cryptic and poorly designed at worst. The gameplay is an extremely mixed bag ranging from pretty good to pretty bad.

Is It Really THAT Bad?

So, after all that, is Paper Mario: Sticker Star really that bad? Yeah… sort of.

I will admit that all the parts the game gets flack for do genuinely deserve all the criticism it gets and then some. The lack of emphasis on story and characters, the uncreative environments, and especially the battle system with its stupid reliance on consumable items to do anything in battle and lack of any good incentive to actually fight enemies along with the awful bosses. Aside from the art style, which I do like, the game lacks the charm that the first two Paper Mario games, and even Super Paper Mario, had. The fact that the very first Paper Mario did this exact same plot but did it better with more creative characters, environments and better game design just makes Sticker Star look that much worse by comparison.

But, I can’t find myself to really hate this game and that’s for several reasons. First, when I’m not battling any enemies and I’m just travelling the world, overcoming obstacles and solving puzzles, Sticker Star can actually be pretty fun. There may be some issues with that, mainly when Things are involved, but I’m still having a good time just exploring the levels, uncovering whatever secrets they may have.

There’s also the graphics and music which are still top notch with the extra emphasis on paper in the former and the excellent jazz motif throughout most of the tracks in the latter. The game overall, looks and sounds nice and it’s definitely a point in Sticker Star’s favor.

Overall, I wouldn’t call Paper Mario: Sticker Star a good game as it has too many flaws and inadequacies to push the overall product beyond okay. The game was rejected by most Paper Mario fans for fairly good reasons with its lower emphasis on writing and a poor battle system that gives the player very little reason to battle. But I think that the game does have some potential as an action-adventure sort of game. If the people at Nintendo are really that insistent on this direction for future games then I think that these are some of the things they should take into account if they really want to go in this direction. Perhaps The Origami King could take those criticisms into account?

#paper mario #sticker star #paper mario sticker star #review #opinion #criticism #really that bad?

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audiogrizzly · 4 years

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Top 5 Games of 2019

It was a little tricky to construct a top 5 for this year, though there have been a couple of surprises. I wasn’t expecting the year to be a bit crap as we are no w on the cusp once more of a new generation. But 2012 wasn’t all that bad of a year (PS4 and Xbox One would release in 2013) and at the moment, everyone is doing alright. PS4 has sold through over 100 million systems, Nintendo are definitely on an “on” generation with Switch, Xbox has been able to get back into peoples good books with things like Game Pass (on both Console and PC, their PC side they seem to really be turning around), there’s even interesting things happening in the mobile space with Apple Arcade.

This won’t be the last year where my top 5 games are full of current gen titles, I am expecting the new systems to drop in around November, last time it was hard to find a top 5 specific to PS4 (as I listed each platform separately back then). It IS however, another list of mostly AAA tier games. If you want to know what smaller more “interesting” games I have been playing, check out my honourable mentions at the end.

Also, follow me on Melee. It’s this new image blogging service from Imgur which you can download now on the IOS App Store (its just on iPhone at the moment) and it has seemingly been built to help people share gaming related clips and images off of places like Twitter and Instagram (and err, here on Tumblr). I posted a couple of daft clips of me failing in Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 and it didn’t take long for them to amass a few likes and comments.

That sounded like a sponsored advert but ain’t nobody paying me for this. Let’s get into my top 5

5. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

I was about to select Gears 5 to be my number 5 until I saw sense and cast my memory back to when I started playing Jedi (all the way back in November. I was impressed by its intense action, impressive visuals and great characters. I especially enjoyed the 4 armed pilot who always complains. I did feel that towards the end I got sick of managing large groups of enemies so I dropped the difficulty to get through it, but I still haven’t achieved 100% of activities on all planets so I can still go back to it one day.

4. Borderlands 3

We all knew this was coming but not even I had any idea that we would have been actually playing it in 2019 way back at the start of the year. For me, I look at the game. I don’t care about weird magicians or their insane sounding legal woes, all I’m interested in is the work of a team who deserved better for their last title, but am still glad returned to what they do best, looting and shooting. I enjoyed rejoining these characters I have followed over the last 10 years, all the referenced to older games, cameos from characters from Tales From the Borderlands and The Pre Sequel and was sad to see some people go. I still have about a year of extra content to go through and I really appreciate the efforts they have made to make the game last longer than just one playthrough through in the Proving Grounds, Circle of Slaughter and Mayhem modes. Though I have always tended to stick to Borderlands games and create builds for each and every vault hunter, so I will be doing that.

3. Mortal Kombat 11

It’s been a while since I last put a fighting game into my end of year round up. And I HAVE fallen off MK11 a little bit, but this entry reminded me of how impressive it is for Nether Realms to pack their fighting games with some many things to do and keep people playing outside of just going into matchmaking and fighting others. The Vault this year is basically another little adventure full of exploration and puzzle solving and the Towers of Time give you plenty of challenge and direction of many months to come. You also have to give the developer credit for never backing down on the brutality of the game, they must have all got their heads together after DC Universe vs. and vowed never again to make watered down versions of Fatalities. It is a game that keeps getting better and better.

2. Call of Duty Modern Warfare

I was debating whether or not to include this years CoD. I always get the same type of enjoyment out of it each year, people complain that it never changes but I’m glad it sticks to a formula. Of course they are not identikit games, there are new maps, new modes, new ways of building your loadout and new touches, like how in this year you can snap to edges to stay in cover while you shoot, there’s the new special equipment system where you can drop ammo or reduce your footstep noise. Having doors you can either peek through or smash open adds another level of strategy, there have been times where I have been able to escape being under fire by closing a door, re-positioning and then wasting whoever just wanders in.

The campaign this year, good to see it back, but whatever, the co-op mode is Spec Ops again, like it was back in MW2 and 3 but on a much larger scale, I have yet to complete one of these btw. But as always, it’s the multiplayer that does it for me and Modern Warfare deserves credit for being what must be the first AAA game to feature cross platform play, not just launch with it. I know that games like Fortnite are popular, but I don’t see that as a AAA title, it doesn’t have the full package, it’s just a mode and it started off small. Call of Duty is expected to be big each year, has a lot riding on it and allowing for cross play is a big step. I especially appreciate being able to play with a keyboard and mouse on PS4 and being able to matchmake only with people playing with controllers on PC, in fact, I have never really given the game much of a shot on PC before as I know people just fall of it, there has often been low player numbers reported on the PC versions of CoD and it looks like it won’t have that problem this time round due to cross play.

Modern Warfare still has to contend with Destiny 2 and Overwatch for my time as my main multiplayer game but it’s still as fun as ever.

1. Control

Put this down as my main “surprise” game of 2019. A game which was not on my watch list, though I was aware of it as you can’t ignore a game from the makers of Max Payne (I did skip Alan Wake and didn’t care much for Quantum break though). Bought it at the last minute before its release, downloaded it and was wowed by the sinister nature of the environment you run around in. This weird fictitious US government agency which looks into paranormal activity which you seem to have become in charge of because you picked up a mysterious weapon from the deceased Director while searching for your brother. What then follows is about 12 hours of wacky powers and odd video clips as you unearth what has been going on in this strange ever morphing building.

I especially loved how the game never holds your hand too much, the map of each floor is vague enough that you also have to rely on in-game signposting to move around, as well as a bit of memory work. There is also great humour involved too in some of the PSA posters on a lot of the walls, the antics of the caretaker and the videos you find of Dr. Darling throughout the game.

I did have a few weird technical issues with the game throughout playing, but still found it to be visually pleasing, there was this weird hitch that used to appear after coming out of the pause screen that always threw me, it would be followed by a few moments of low performance before getting back into the smooth action. But this didn’t stop me from having a great time with Control. Perhaps the game that will be the most prominent in my head when I think of 2019.

So there you have it, control is my best game of 2019. But let’s look at the other new games I played throughout the year in my honourable mentions:

Gears 5

The Outer Worlds

Days Gone

Apex Legends

Far Cry New Dawn

Trover Saves the Universe

Concrete Genie

Devil May Cry 5

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

And also a special mention to these old games that were rereleased/remastered/repackaged etc in 2019:

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition Remastered

Halo Reach

And now, a look at the games I have on my watchlist for 2020:

Cyberpunk 2077

Last of Us Part 2

Ghost of Tsushima

Halo: Infinite

Watch Dogs Legion

Phantasy Star Online 2

Gods & Monsters

Doom Eternal

Overwatch 2

Diablo IV

Minecraft dungeons

Marvel's Avengers

Carrion

Streets of Rage 4

Will they all even come out? Let’s find out, happy new year!

#mortal kombat #modern warfare #control #star wars #melee #borderlands

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

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‘But They’re Covered In Nipples’: The Story Of Destroy All Humans - Quill’s Scribbles

Another E3 has come and gone. There was some good announcements. Square Enix unveiled their Avengers game, Keanu Reeves came on stage to give us the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft are making another Watch Dogs set in London, and... um... what else happened?

Oh yeah!

DESTROY ALL HUMANS IS BACK!!!!!!

Yes, the cult classic Destroy All Humans is returning next year, developed by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games. This was quite possibly the nicest surprise I’ve ever had. When the teaser trailer came up on my YouTube recommendations, I practically screamed the house down. It’s a level of excitement I felt when 20th Century Fox announced they were finally making a Deadpool movie.

Yeah. That excited.

Destroy All Humans was my favourite video game series growing up. I played the first two games non-stop on my PS2 and I even bought a Nintendo Wii and PS3 just so I could play Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon (yeah, we’ll get to them). Unfortunately, while the series was reasonably successful, it never quite broke through into the mainstream, and it ended up having a very short lifespan, making it one of the most underrated franchises of all time.

So, to mark the return of Crypto and Pox, I thought I’d take a retrospective look at the series as a whole. Analysing each game in the franchise and talking about what made them so good, whilst also looking at how it faded into obscurity and how THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games can hopefully avoid this fate with their remake.

Radioactive, Exploding, Zombie Cows

The first Destroy All Humans was developed by THQ and Pandemic Studios (the latter probably most famous for making the original Star Wars Battlefront games. You know? The good ones that weren’t overloaded with loot boxes and microtransactions) and was released in 2005 on the PS2 and Xbox. You play as a Furon warrior called Cryptosporidium 137, or Crypto for short, who is tasked with harvesting the brains of humans in order to extract pure Furon DNA from them. His leader Orthopox 13, or Pox, explains that the Furons are at risk of cloning themselves into extinction as they are unable to reproduce naturally due to a lack of genitalia and the DNA in their cloning banks are starting to degrade. Fortunately the Furons visited prehistoric Earth on their way back from destroying the Martians and took the opportunity to ‘let off some steam’ with the natives. As a result, humans possess a strand of Furon DNA that can hopefully restore the Furons’ reproductive organs. Unfortunately a secret government organisation called Majestic (a sort of cross between Project Blue Book and the Men in Black) have caught wind of the Furon invasion due to Crypto 136 crash landing in Roswell 10 years earlier. So Crypto 137 will have to be extra cautious in his quest to take over Earth.

The game was released four years after Grand Theft Auto III, which had completely revolutionised gaming with its open world sandbox. As a result, other companies were attempting their own open worlds and putting their own spin on them. While Destroy All Humans didn’t quite have the same scale as GTA, it made up for it with quality over quantity. The game offered six small open world areas for players to have fun in and its central premise was utterly captivating. After countless games where you had to fight alien invaders, Destroy All Humans allowed you to play as the alien invader.

Pandemic Studios completely embraced the alien invasion premise, giving the player a vast number of weapons and abilities to wreak havoc on planet Earth. You had access to weapons like the Zap O Matic, Disintegrator Ray and Anal Probe (no, really, there’s actually a gun called the Anal Probe and it’s as funny as it sounds) as well as mental abilities such as Psychokinesis, Hypnotism and the Cortex Scan, which allowed you to read the thoughts of humans and was also used to help maintain your Holoblob disguise in stealth missions. And if that isn’t cool enough, you also get your own flying saucer, which you can use to destroy buildings and landmarks. The game gave you a lot of freedom, essentially dropping you in a small destructible playground and telling you to go and enjoy yourself.

But the thing I loved most about the first game was the writing. The plot itself is actually pretty good with plenty of twists and turns as the military and Majestic become more and more desperate to stop you. And the humour, my God the humour! Honestly Destroy All Humans remains to this day one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. It’s use of satirical humour and 50s pop culture references never failed to make me chuckle. There was one moment that I’ll always remember where I scanned the mind of a police officer and it revealed that he was thinking about forming the Village People. If only he could find a cowboy, an Indian and a construction worker.

The game’s main source of comedy mostly came from poking fun at the culture and attitudes of the time period. 1950s America was of course gripped by ‘the Red Scare,’ which the game mocks frequently as we see Majestic and the US government try desperately to cover up alien activity by blaming the death and destruction on communists, to the point where it just gets more and more absurd. At the end of each mission, a newspaper headline is shown, often blaming recent events on freak weather or communist propaganda. Yes, that should explain perfectly why people’s heads are exploding and why the cows are glowing green. It’s all perfectly normal. No aliens here. What’s that? A little green man in a flying saucer is blowing up ice cream trucks? Damn you commies!

The game also pokes fun at 50s sci-fi B movies, often parodying and lampshading the tropes and gimmicks one would expect in a low budget sci-fi flick. For example, the game ends with you fighting a giant robot that houses the President’s brain. It’s fully aware of how ridiculous and stupid it all is and clearly revels in it. Killer robots, mind control, radioactive animals, mad scientists and secret government conspiracies galore. Destroy All Humans is very much a love letter to cheesy sci-fi.

But by far the biggest draw was the main characters. Crypto and Pox. They’re both such funny, wonderfully realised and likeable characters. Pox is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, who you may remember from Invader Zim, and he gives the character a maniacal glee. I honestly could listen to his rants all day. He’s the quintessential evil genius. Crypto meanwhile is voiced by J. Grant Albrecht, who gives the character a Jack Nicholson-esque voice. Unlike Pox, Crypto is crass, crude and craves destruction, which often puts him at odds with Pox, who favours more subtle styles of invasion such as mind control. The two characters often bicker and squabble, which never fails to be entertaining, and yet there is an underlying respect and fondness for each other that helps ground the relationship. It’s the perfect double act.

Destroy All Humans was a good game, but does it still hold up? Well there are a few issues. Controls can be a bit clunky at times and missions can often get repetitive. Destroy x number of farmers. Collect x amount of DNA. That kind of thing. Also, annoyingly, there’s no checkpoints, which means if you die or fail the mission, you’re automatically sent back to the Furon Mothership and you have to start the mission all over again. But the writing, humour and entertainment value more than make up for it.

Hot Monkey Love

While the first game wasn’t what you’d call a hit, it was successful enough for THQ to commission a sequel. Destroy All Humans 2 was released in 2006 on PS2 and Xbox, just one year after the first game, and this time Crypto was going international.

Set in the 1960s, ten years after the events of the first game, the KGB in Russia learn about the Furon’s takeover of America and plan a counterattack. They nuke the Furon Mothership, killing Pox, and try to assassinate Crypto 138, who is posing as the President of the United States. The assassination fails and Pox’s mind is able to survive in hologram form. The two then embark on a global adventure, seeking revenge against the KGB and uncovering a massive conspiracy that puts the entire Furon invasion at risk.

Destroy All Humans 2 is an ambitious sequel that increases its scope from the first game. No longer confined to America, we see Crypto terrorise San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Russia and even the Moon. Our arsenal of weapons are also expanded. The original weapons from the first game return as well as some all new ones such as the Disclocator, which fires a purple disc at a human or vehicle and sends them flying around the map, the Burrow Beast, which summons a Tremors-esque space worm to cause carnage, and Meteor Strike, which I think speaks for itself. We also get a few new mental abilities such as Transmogrify, which allows you to turn objects into ammo, and Free Love, which causes everyone in the general vicinity to start dancing, allowing you to make a quick getaway while they’re distracted. The saucer too has some extra features, including a cloaking device and the ability to drain vehicles of health using your Abducto Beam.

This sequel pretty much takes everything that worked from the first game whilst tweaking the things that didn’t. The GTA style Alert system got a complete overhaul. If you want to raise or lower the Alert level, all you have to do is bodysnatch a cop or a soldier and make a call using a police box (you can also make prank calls from them, which is good for a giggle). Holoblobbing has been replaced with Bodysnatching, which works so much better and it does away with the annoying Concentration meter, so you can PK cars and humans to your heart’s content. There’s also a lot more stuff to do now. There are numerous collectables such as Alien Artefacts, which unlocks the Burrow Beast weapon, and FuroTech Cells, which are your main currency that can be used to upgrade your health and weapons. Missions have greater variety than in the first game. There’s a lot more side missions, including Odd Jobs and my personal favourites the Cult of Arkvoodle missions, where Crypto brainwashes humans to worship the Furon God Arkvoodle of the Sacred Crotch.

As you can tell, the humour is still just as wacky and ridiculous as ever. Destroy All Humans 2 lampoons and ridicules the 60s mercilessly, taking aim at the Cold War and the hippie counterculture movement. It also pokes fun at 60s sci-fi films, spy films and Japanese movies like Godzilla. In fact there’s a boss fight that involves you fighting a Godzilla-esque monster and it’s honestly the best boss fight in the series. It regains health by destroying buildings, so you have to destroy them first before you can kill the monster. It’s a great premise.

Story-wise, Destroy All Humans 2 is a worthy successor, raising the stakes and expanding the lore. We’re introduced to the Blisk, the Martians that were presumed extinct by the Furons millions of years ago. It’s a brilliant conflict and ostensibly allows the developers to make commentaries on America and Russia at the time using the Furons and the Blisk respectively as stand-ins. Crypto and Pox are well written, funny and likeable as ever and we’re also introduced to an assortment of new characters, including the Russian spy Natalya and MI6 agent Ponsomby (voiced by none other than Anthony Head from Buffy). The game is engaging and rewarding, but it crucially never takes itself too seriously. For example there’s one instance in Tokyo where Crypto learns about the battle between the White and Black Ninjas and he guesses that the conflict started because of the cliche student betraying his master type origin, but it turns out that both groups of ninjas were originally Grey, but then they ran out of grey fabric and disagreed over which colour they should be instead. There’s so many great comedic moments like that and they pretty much hit bullseyes every time.

That being said, there was one aspect of the game I didn’t like and that was the crude sex jokes. Crypto 138 is the first clone to have pure Furon DNA, which means he now has genitalia. As a result, this new incarnation of Crypto is far more randy than 137 was in the first game. This mostly takes the form of Crypto constantly trying to hit on Natalya, despite her showing no sexual interest, which I personally found pretty gross. Worse still, the game ends with Crypto cloning Natalya and ‘making a few adjustments’ so she will consent to have sex with him. The word ‘creepy’ doesn’t begin to cover how I felt about this. If THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games ever decide to remake the second game, I really hope they consider rethinking that ending because... Jesus!

On the whole, Destroy All Humans 2 was a brilliant sequel. It was also sadly the last Destroy All Humans game to be developed by Pandemic Studios before they were bought by EA and eventually shut down in 2009. Unfortunately this would have a severe impact on the future of the series going forward.

Limp Willy

The next game in the series was a spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, released in early 2008 and developed by Locomotive Games. A PS2 version was also planned, but was scrapped due to budget cuts (remember this. It’ll become relevant later).

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed was... underwhelming, to say the least. Set in the 1970s, six years after the second game, Crypto and Pox have opened a fast food restaurant called Big Willy as a way of disposing of the corpses left behind during Crypto’s missions. However a rival fast food chain, run by Colonel Kluckin’, is stealing their business and socialite Patty Wurst is threatening to expose Big Willy (smirk). So it’s up to Crypto to protect Pox’s Big Willy (haha) and maintain their cover on Earth.

Now you’re probably thinking this sounds quite tame compared to the previous two games, and yeah, it is. But it’s a spinoff, so I can understand to a certain extent. However there are a few narrative discrepancies. The big one being Crypto has retired from being the President. No explanation given as to why and we have no idea what Crypto is doing instead. When we first see him, he’s watching TV. He doesn’t even know Big Willy exists until Pox brings it up. So what’s going on exactly? Are they still trying to invade Earth or have they gone native? Also, compared to the grand conspiracy stories of the previous games, Crypto protecting a fast food restaurant sounds a little beneath him.

Gameplay is virtually unchanged from the previous game. There’s some new guns such as Ball Lightning and the Zombie Gun, but nothing special. The biggest addition is Big Willy, the restaurant mascot that’s actually a Furon battle mech in disguise. It’s... fine. Not that much different from the Saucer really. We also get some new locations. Harbor City, Fairfield in Kentucky, Fantasy Atoll (a weak parody of Fantasy Island) and Vietmahl (a painfully obvious homage to Vietnam). None of these locations are particularly interesting however. There’s also a multiplayer mode, which... exists.

Honestly the game as a whole is just lacklustre. The story just isn’t as good as the first two games and the humour doesn’t have the same wit or intelligence. Most of the comedy surrounds the fact that Pox has called his restaurant Big Willy and isn’t entirely aware of the double entendre, which admittedly is funny for the first few missions, but by the time you’ve finished Harbor City and move on to Fairfield, the joke gets old real fast. There’s less of an effort to actually satirise the culture or films of the time, instead merely making 70s pop culture references without ever actually doing anything with it. It’s like the Family Guy school of comedy. Take Fantasy Atoll for instance. A pisstake of Fantasy Island, but instead of Mr. Roarke and Tatoo, we get Mr. Pork and Ratpoo. That’s the level of humour we’re talking about here.

What’s worse is that J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz don’t return as Crypto and Pox. Sean Donnellan and Darryl Kurylo voice the characters instead and it’s just not the same. It doesn’t feel like Crypto and Pox. So from the very first cutscene, we’re already off on the wrong foot.

And then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I find really questionable. The most obvious being the revelation that Colonel Kluckin’ makes his chicken wings from the corpses of the Vietmahl (Vietnam) war, which just seems in very bad taste to me. If there is a satirical point being made here, I can’t find it for the life of me. There’s also some side missions where Crypto finds out that he and Natalya have a son, which goes absolutely nowhere and doesn’t feel like something that should be in a Destroy All Humans game.

Overall, Big Willy Unleashed was a massive dud meant to tide us over until Destroy All Humans 3 came out later in the year. Honestly the one aspect of it I thought had potential was the side missions involving Crypto and Pox being assessed by a Furon Efficiency Expert called Toxoplasma Gondii. Considering what happened in the second game, including the destruction of the Furon Mothership, the return of the Blisk and the Furon operation on Earth being jeoprodised, this could have been a great premise for a sequel.

Instead what we got was...

Disco Inferno

Oh boy. Where do I begin?

Path Of The Furon was developed by THQ and Sandblast Games and released in December 2008 on the Xbox 360 in North America. The PS3 version was cancelled because Sandblast (and Locomotive Games) was closed down before development was finished due to THQ’s financial problems at the time. However the PS3 version was released in Europe and Australia, so either THQ got another studio to complete it or, more likely, they just released it in a broken, buggy state.

Fans really didn’t like this game, myself included, but before we go tearing it a new one, lets look at the few positives the game has. First off, J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz return to voice Crypto and Pox, which is great. As a result, the original chemistry is back and they help salvage the game when the writing fails to deliver. There are a few cool new weapons, like the Black Hole Gun and the Venus Human Trap, which creates a giant man eating plant. The Saucer’s weapons have been tweaked, so now they affect the environment as well as destroy buildings. So if you fire your Death Ray at the ground, for example, you can create scorch marks. PK now has its own dedicated button, which means you can pick up and throw objects whilst using your guns simultaneously. There’s also the titular ‘Path Of Enlightenment,’ which upgrades your mental abilities significantly as well as allowing you to freeze time.

That’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is... pretty much everything else.

The humour is, again, quite poor. Rather than satirising 70s culture, the game continues to make references to 70s films like The Godfather and Star Wars, but not actually doing anything with them. Just making the reference. The writing as a whole is quite substandard as the plot pretty much recycles the plots of Destroy All Humans 2 and Big Willy Unleashed, except instead of the Big Willy restaurant, it’s the Space Dust casino and instead of the Blisk, it’s Nexosporidium warriors, who are basically Furon cyborgs. Things do threaten to get a bit interesting when Crypto and Pox discover someone has been manufacturing synthetic Furon DNA, but nothing ever really comes of it. Instead the game focuses mainly on the Master.

Ah yes. The Master.

In an attempt to recapture the magic of the second game, Path Of The Furon tries to spoof kung-fu movies just like how DAH 2 spoofed spy films. Unfortunately this leads us to a slew of unfunny gags, cultural appropriation and some of the worst racial stereotyping I think I’ve ever seen. The Master is a Furon who crashed on Earth a hundred years ago and embroiled himself in Eastern culture, enhancing his PK abilities. This is what he looks like:

YYYYeah.

Oh and if that’s not awkward enough, he also speaks in an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. It’s incredibly cringeworthy and made me want to crawl out of my body and hide in the darkest corner I could possibly find. How anyone involved in this game’s development could look at this deeply racist and downright embarrassing excuse for a character and think this was okay, I don’t know.

And before anyone tries to excuse it by saying that he has been living in China for a hundred years, so he’s bound to pick a few things up, please note that Nolan North is in this game playing the Furon Emperor Meningitis, who also has an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. Now I suppose some could argue that the game is satirising how Asian people were portrayed at the time, but if that’s what the game is going for, they’ve failed miserably. See, the problem with that argument is that replicating something doesn’t count as satire. By recreating over the top racist caricatures, you’re not making fun of them. If anything you’re just reinforcing them. The first game’s satire of the Red Scare worked so much better than this because there was an actual point behind it. It comments on how paranoid the people of the 50s were at the time by using Majestic to exploit the threat of communism in order to cover up alien activity, and everyone willingly buys into it because of that sheer paranoia. Now yes, admittedly the humour in Destroy All Humans isn’t the most sophisticated in the world, but it used to be a LOT better than this. Not only do I find the racial stereotyping in this game deeply offensive, it’s also frankly beneath this franchise. And it’s not just limited to the Chinese either. The final act takes us to the Furon homeworld (which was pretty underwhelming after four games worth of buildup) and we meet another Furon called Endometriosis whose only characteristics are that he has an Italian accent and wears a beret. It’s these broad strokes and general laziness that makes this game such a disappointing experience.

Path Of The Furon is subpar in every way imaginable. The writing, the humour, the gameplay and even the graphics. The first two games looked so much better than this and they were on older consoles from the previous generation. It’s shocking.

It’s hard to blame Sandblast Games for this considering they were shut down before development was finished. It was THQ’s mismanagement and financial woes that killed off this franchise and indeed themselves. The company went bankrupt in 2012 and their various IPs were sold off to other studios, with Nordic Games buying the lions’ share, including Destroy All Humans, which briefly reignited hopes that we might get another game, but that seemed unlikely considering the franchise has never exactly been a mainstream success. There was even talks of doing an animated sitcom based on the games for Fox, to be written by the same guy who did King Of The Hill, but that never went anywhere.

No. It seemed like Destroy All Humans was gone for good and fans reluctantly made peace with that. It was fun while it lasted, but perhaps it was time to move on.

Oh The Furonity!

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty sure we were never going to see Destroy All Humans return. Not just because of its lack of mainstream appeal, but also because game development studios and publishers in recent years have become more and more reluctant to make single player, mid-tier games. Instead pivoting toward massive triple A releases and ‘live services’. So it came as a rather pleasant surprise when Nordic Games, now named THQ Nordic, released Darksiders III in 2018, a sequel to a series of games that were also not very mainstream but still had a significant cult following. This briefly reignited a small flicker of hope within me that maybe, just maybe, we might see our favourite Furon return.

And as you already know, I got my wish. A new Destroy All Humans game will be released next year by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games.

So what can this remake learn from the franchise’s past? Well thankfully the writing and voice acting is going to remain the same, so story, characterisation and humour won’t be an issue. They’re also incorporating elements from the sequels such as Transmogrify from Destroy All Humans 2 and giving PK its own button like in Path Of The Furon. There’s also a few new additions that I’m excited about such as the ability to dodge and strafe using the jetpack. That should make combat much more exciting and dynamic. I know a few people have a problem with the new cartoony designs of the humans and the world, but I honestly don’t mind. In fact I think it suits the tone and setting quite well. Hopefully people will eventually get used to it. The big question mark hovering over all this is whether they’re planning to remake the other games in the series. I for one would love to see a remake of the second game. As for Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon, I think it’s best to leave them firmly in the past. The big dream would be to see Crypto and Pox have further adventures together beyond the first two games. Hopefully even have enough sequels to get the characters to the present day. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings. My only word of advice for them would be to never forget what made the first two games so good and so beloved. Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon lost their way, as its writing and humour grew lazier and lazier. If we are fortunate enough to get more games, the developers will need to remember what it was about the first game that made it so special and build off of it.

This is a second chance. Not a lot of franchises get this. Don’t waste it. Here’s hoping the remake will provide the definitive Destroy All Humans experience and that it will gain the success it deserves.

#destroy all humans #pandemic studios #locomotive games #sandblast games #thq #video games #quill's scribbles

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The Weekend Warrior Feb. 14, 2020 – SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, FANTASY ISLAND, THE PHOTOGRAPH, DOWNHILL, OLYMPIC DREAMS

It’s Valentine’s Day on Friday and President’s Day on Monday, which means that this weekend is going to be absolutely nuts in terms of getting four new wide releases. Last week’s Birds of Prey did not do even remotely close to where I predicted/projected – almost half!! -- and here I thought all those raves reviews might help, but apparently not. It will still make money with its global release but it’s gonna fall short even of last year’s Shazam! and many have already started questioning whether an R-rating is the way to go with a movie semi-targeted towards younger women. (Warner Bros. has already sent out a mandate to theaters to change the title of the movie to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey. I cannot believe that it took this long for them to figure out what a terrible title they had previously!)

With the four-day weekend, it’s very likely that Paramount Pictures’ SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, will prevail, as it brings the beloved SEGA video game character to the big screen with James Marsdenand Jim Carrey, the latter starring in one of his first big-screen appearances in a while. It should be an easy victor this weekend in a market that could desperately use another strong family film.

For those unfamiliar with SEGA’s flagship video game “mascot,” Sonic has appeared in all sorts of other media including animated series and comic books, so one can say that the character is almost but not quite as well known and popular as Nintendo’s Pokemon, which has had a much wider reach in terms of both games and cartoons.

Of course, it’s impossible not to look at Sonic the Hedgehog and completely ignore the relative success of last year’s Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, which had the added benefits of a popular A-list star in Ryan Reynoldsand a summer release. That opened with $54.4 million and made $144 million domestic and $429.7 million worldwide.

On the other hand, Sonic does have Jim Carrey, who hasn’t been in an American wide release since the 2014 sequel Dumb and Dumber To, which only made about $156 million worldwide. At one point, Carrey was one of the biggest box office stars with multiple $240 million plus domestic blockbusters. Maybe the kids won’t be as invested in Carrey’s Mr. Robotnik, but many parents who grew up with Carrey’s comedies will be happy to see him in such a perfect role.

The Presidents Day weekend allows one extra day for parents with kids needing something to do with them sans school. Even so, the biggest movies on the weekend have been superhero movies, including Black Panther, Deadpool and Fifty Shades of Grey, the latter two definitely not for kids. (Daredeviland Ghost Rider also fared well on the weekend.) In fifth place for the weekend is Warner Bros’ The LEGO Movie, which made $62.5 million over the four-day weekend, but that was in its SECOND WEEKEND! So yeah, lots of money to be had for a family movie even though the biggest opener was Christopher Columbus’ Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (now on Broadway!), which opened with $38.7 million ten years ago.

I have to imagine that Sonic is more popular, and even with the tragic misstep of that first trailer last year which got such a negative reaction to Sonic’s appearance, Paramount delayed the movie and went back to the CG drawing board, there will be enough fans interested to see how he translates to the screen that $40 million over the weekend should be doable even with three other wide releases. I also don’t think reviews will be so bad, so it should be good for $100 million plus.

Mini-Review: For whatever reason, Sonic the Hedgehog is the kind of movie that lazy critics love to dump on, maybe because it’s a kids’ movie or because it’s a movie based on a video game they played as kids, or more likely, a character their kids know from popular cartoons and comic books. It doesn’t help that judgments were mostly cast when the first trailer hit last year and Sonic looked different than what people expected. Regardless, I went into the movie with very low expectations, maybe because I really had no passionate connection to the character despite being generally familiar with some of the games.

We meet Sonic as he’s being chased by robots, and we flash back to him as a kid on a planet where he’s able to zoom around freely, until he’s discovered by predators that are hunting him (it’s never explained why), so his mentor owl gives Sonic gold rings that can take him off-planet. Sonic ends up in a small town called Green Hills where he watches the townsfolk in hiding for years, including a local police officer (James Marsden) and his wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter). The former eventually discovers Sonic after he causes a major power outage that gets the attention of the government and its genius robotics scientist, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey).

Despite not having much previous connection to Sonic, it’s hard for me not to appreciate this character, because I’ve been known to zip around myself. I also enjoyed Sonic’s haste since who knows when we might see that movie based on one of my favorite comic characters, The Flash. Sonic does a good job capturing the intensity and yes, speed, of having speed powers in quite a masterful way compared to previous attempts, giving me hope that a Flash movie is possible. (Granted, they do rip-off the fun thing Quicksilver does in the recent X-movies by slowing everything around Sonic down to a halt, but it’s still amusing.)

Probably the most genius idea by Sonic’s filmmakers was to convince Jim Carrey to return to the big screen as Dr. Robotnik. He quickly reminds us how hilarious he can be when going as fully into a character as he does this one, and it’s prime Carey vs. the semi-lazy Carrey that made movies in the early ‘00s. Robotnik is a super-genius with no patience for anyone on a lower level of intellect (aka everyone), and Carrey takes that idea to the utmost extreme. (It’s hard not to compare what he’s doing in this movie to what Ewan McGregor does in Birds of Prey and see how Carey does it effortlessly whereas McGregor was clearly trying too hard.)

That’s not to take away from Marsden and Sumpter, Sonic’s other prominent human co-stars, who bring such a warmth and humanity to those characters that you rarely even think that you’re watching them interact with a fully CG-character. (Kudos to Ben Schwartz and what he brings to Sonic as his voice.)

Sure, the plot can be a bit predictable with certain parts clearly geared to kids, but there’s also slew of pop references that display some real talent in the writing of the movie so that it can be watched and enjoyed by people of all ages.

Is it possible that Sonic the Hedgehog is the first thoroughly entertaining movie of the year? Yes, indeedy. (Definitely stay through the first bunch of credits if you are a Sonic fan!)

Rating: 8/10

One of the more interesting releases of the weekend is BLUMHOUSE’S FANTASY ISLAND (Sony Pictures Releasing), which as you can guess is a PG-13 horror version of the popular ‘80s show, starring Michael Peña as Mr. Rouke, the head of a program in which people can pay lots of money to achieve their greatest wishes… with a catch! Since this is Blumhouse, you probably know that the catch involves some sort of horror/thriller premise, and if you’ve seen the trailer, you might get some idea how it works… or not. (I wish I can say more but I’m under embargo!)

The rest of the cast is decent including Maggie Q (from Mission: Impossible 3), Lucy Hale, Portia Doubleday, Michael Rooker, Ryan Hansen, Jimmy O . Yang and more, plus it’s directed by Jeff Wadlow, who last did Blumhouse’s Truth Or Dare (a very bad movie!) and then Kick Ass 2 before that. (He was supposed to direct Sony’s upcoming Bloodshot movie but he left that to do other things, like this.)

Unfortunately, Sony Pictures Releasing (another specialized imprint from the parent company?) seems to have taken a cue from Screen Gems by deciding not to screen the movie for critics until Thursday afternoon (just like with The Grudge!), plus there won’t be ANY Thursday previews for this. It’s a shame since… well, I can’t really tell you if I liked the movie or not since I’m under embargo until Friday. J

Either way, it seems like a strong enough counter to Sonic and Birds of Prey that it should be good for $15 million plus over the four days. Personally, I think it would have opened even bigger if Sony and Blumhouse had shown some balls and screened it for critics in advance, but what do I know? I’ve only written about this stuff for ALMOST TWENTY FUCKING YEARS! (Not sure I’m gonna review the movie but we’ll see.)

I know far less about Universal’s Valentine’s Day offering THE PHOTOGRAPH (Universal), which I guess is a romantic drama that’s targeting African-Americans looking for something to see on the biggest date nights of the year. In fact, we’ve seen some interesting hits on this weekend just by putting “Date” in the movie title, as was the case with Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore’s 50 First Dates ($45.1 million four-day opening) and even Date Movie ($21.8 million), which satirized romantic movies. But the real winner has to be a movie that went all out for Valentine’s Day by actually going with the title Valentine’s Day, which helped it open with $63 million over the four-day weekend ten years ago. ($23.4 million of that was on Valentine’s Day alone!)

Since I won’t see The Photograph until Weds. night, I can only talk about the little bit of marketing I’ve seen and what’s out there. Apparently, this is more in the vein of Valentine’s Day in that it’s a series of intertwined romantic stories, but it has an impressive cast of African-American actors who are on the verge of breaking out such as the great LaKeith Stanfield and amazing Kelvin Harrison Jr., as well as Rob Morgan (from “Daredevil” and Mudbound) and Courtney B. Vance. I’d be neglect if I didn’t mention any of the women involved and having Issa Raefrom the TV show “Insecure” as the primary female lead is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Stanfield isn’t the only connection to Jordan Peele, though, asLil Rel Howery from Get Outis also in this movie as is Peele’s actual wife, Chelsea Peretti!

I actually had to double check to make sure Peele wasn’t one of the film’s producers, but no, this is from Will Packer, a producer who is responsible for so many huge hits among African-Americans that one of these days I won’t underestimate his drawing power, even though all three of his 2019 movies underdelivered, including the comedy Little (co-starring Rae), although did well compared to their lower budgets.

In that sense, The Photograph could be compared to Packer’s Screen Gems comedy About Last Night, which opened with $27.8 million in just over 2,200 theaters in 2014, but that also had the power of proven box office draw Kevin Hartto bring in audiences. I certainly don’t want to be accused of underestimating Packer again, but with such a generic title and premise (and next to no marketing?), I’m just not sure the movie will deliver despite being decent counter-programming for AA audiences. With that in mind, I think the movie will probably make somewhere between $12 and 14 million.

Then there’s DOWNHILL (Searchlight Studios), the new movie from The Way, Way Back directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who also won the Oscar for cowriting Alexander Payne’s The Descendants), this one being a direct remake of Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure.

In this version, Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus play a squabbling couple who travel to the alps with their kids, but after barely escaping an avalanche – one in which he runs away leaving his family behind – they start questioning their lives. The film also stars Zach Woods (also from “Veep”), Miranda Otto and Zoe Chao, and though it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (just like the duo’s previous movie), it did not receive great reviews, as it currently sits at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I don’t think that will matter since like Carey above, Ferrell hasn’t been oversaturating the market with movies in the past couple year, maybe because his last movie, Holmes & Watson, reteaming him with John C. Reilly from Step Brothers bombed with $41 million worldwide after horrifying reviews. Fortunately, Louis-Dreyfus is far more loved thanks to her run on “Seinfeld” and her Emmy-winning run on HBO’s “Veep,” and that should help get people into theaters despite all the competition aboe and below.

Searchlight (no more Fox!!) will be releasing the movie into roughly 1,500 theaters, a moderate release to see how it fares, and the extended holiday weekend (plus the chance of it attracting older moviegoers on Valentine’s Day) should help it make $5 million plus over the extended weekend.

Mini-Review: If you’re reading this review hoping for a play-by-play of how Downhill differs from Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, then you’re bound to be disappointed, because a.) I don’t really remember it, b.) I wasn’t as big a fan of the movie as so many others, and c.) I’m going to assume that a lot of people never got around to seeing it.

In this version, it’s Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus as Peter and Billie Stanton, and there’s much more focus on their roles as parents and the responsibility that goes with that. Once again, Peter runs off when a controlled avalanche comes their way, but they don’t really talk about it so much even as it hangs over their heads.

Nat Faxon and Jim Rash once again find a manageable way of making “dramedy” out of a situation, making sure not to go for constant visual laughs or the zaniness Ferrell usually goes for. (Granted, we can totally believe him as a careless father/husband who does dumb things.) In fact, Ferrell plays his role fairly toned down, which allows Louis-Dreyfus to shine in what’s, oddly, a quite rare movie appearance. How they deal with the aftermath of the avalanche comes to a head when Pete’s work-buddy Zack (Zach Woods) arrives with a ladyfriend (Zoe Chao) allows the two to go at each other. It doesn’t get quite as intense as Marriage Story, but it’s obvious that they both have reached the point in their marriage where they need a separation.

It is kind of amusing that Miranda Otto almost steals her scenes with the two leads because she’s so funny as a hot-to-trot European guest they keep running into and who sets Billie up with a hot Italian ski trainer. There’s a few other funny characters but it mostly stays on Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus either alone or together, and that’ll be enough for most people.

Faxon and Rash find interesting ways to play with the basic premise, although Downhill is very much comedy with a lower-case “c,” and like the original movie, it should lead to some interesting conversations.

Rating: 7/10

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this… (bearing in mind that the below are all four-day projections). It’ll be interesting to see if the name change for “Birds of Prey” will make a difference, but look for NEON’s Parasite to make its first foray into the top 10 this weekend after 19 (!!!) weeks in theaters, thanks to its Best Picture win last Sunday.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog (Paramount) - $44 million N/A (up $1.5 million)* 2. Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey (Warner Bros) - $20 million -39% (down $1.5 million)* 3. Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island (Sony) - $15.8 million N/A (up $.3 million)* 4. The Photograph (Universal) - $13.5 million N/A 5. Bad Boys for Life (Sony) - $8 million -35% (up .2 million)* 6. 1917 (Universal) - $7 million -23% 7. Downhill (Searchlight) - $5.6 million N/A (up .2 million)* 8. Parasite (NEON) - $5 million +300% (up .4 million and one place) 9. Dolittle (Universal) - $4.5 million -30% (down .4 million and one place) 10. Jumanji: The Next Level (Sony) - $4.2 million -24%

*UPDATE: A few minor updates based on actual theater counts with Parasite being expanded into 2,000 theaters, the widest its been so far. I feel like most of the new movies will do well, including Downhill (which will be in 2,301 theaters vs. the 1,500 estimated earlier in the week). Anyway, it should be a fairly hearty and robust weekend at the box office.

LIMITED RELEASES

Before we get to the regular limited releases opening Friday, I want to mention two special releases for Weds. night, Trafalgar Releasing is giving a one-night screening of The Doors: Break on Thru - A Celebration of Ray Manzarek, which I haven’t seen but I’m definitely interested in as a fan of the ‘60s group (and Manzarek’s keyboard work). You can get tickets for that here. Also, Kino Lorber is giving one-night release of Emily Taguchi & Jake Lefferman’s doc After Parkland to commemorate the second anniversary of the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people and began a nationwide student movement for gun control. It’s a fairly sobering and emotional doc, as you can imagine, especially since so little has been done to prevent incidents like this even two years later.

My favorite movie of the weekend is Jeremy Teicher’s OLYMPIC DREAMS ( IFC Films), opening at the IFC Center Friday. It stars Nick Kroll (who you’ll know from “The League,” “Oh, Hello” and other things) and (actual Olympian distance runner) Alexi Pappas, who you may or may not be as familiar with. Pappas plays Penelope, an American competitor in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, who is feeling lonely and unable to connect with others until she meets Kroll’s volunteer dentist, Ezra. While at first, it wouldn’t seem like they would have anything in common, they spend a night hanging out and while some might be expecting something romantic, since this is opening on Valentine’s Day, well I won’t ruin what does or doesn’t happen, k? Either way, it’s a wonderful film co-written by Teichter, Pappas and Kroll, and if that sounds like a familiar formula, then it is indeed the one Richard Linklater used for his sequels to Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Olympic Dreams isn’t nearly as deep and philosophical (or wordy), but the two actors are so wonderful together, and they actually filmed this in the Athletes Village at the Olympics (the first film to do so) which adds some authenticity to the sweet little movie. (There will be a sneak preview Weds night at the IFC Center with Teicher, Kroll and Pappas all in attendance!)

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig returns with THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS (Vertical), a star-studded ensemble piece starring Zoe Kazan, Andrea Riseborough, Caleb Landry Jones, Jay Baruchel and Bill Nighy (who appeared in Lone’s previous film Their Finest). This is a New York City story about six strangers whose lives intersect and mingle while trying to find help, hope and love. I know it sounds like the Crash-style movie we’ve seen far too many times before, but I have faith in Ms. Scherfig and hopefully I’ll have a chance to watch it in the next day or two.

I also still haven’t gotten around to watching Kenji Tanagaki’s action-comedy ENTER THE FAT DRAGON (Go WELL USA), starring the always-amazing Donnie Yen as police officer Zhu, who is sent to Japan on a routine police escort of a suspect… who mysteriously dies, forcing Zhu to call upon a former undercover inspector to help solve the murder. I’m assuming the latter is the “Fat Dragon” and Yen didn’t gain 200 lbs. for the part.

Opening at the Quad Cinemaon Friday and in L.A. on Feb. 21 is Dimitri de Clercq’sFrench/Belgian film You Go to My Head (First Run Features) about an architect who finds a young woman lost, alone and in a fog in the Sahara after a mysterious accident, but when he takes her to the hospital, he claims to be her husband. As she gets better, he creates an elaborate life to fill in the life they shared which she can no longer remember. It also sounds perfect for Valentine’s Day, so you have plenty of options!

I didn’t have too much to say about Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (NEON), because I think I wrote about it last year, and I haven’t seen the movie since the New York Film Festival. Set in the 18thCentury, it’s about a woman painter who travels to a remote island where she’s commissioned to do a painting of a grieving widow, who she ends up falling in love with. I probably should see the movie again as it didn’t really connect with me the first time, but I can totally understand why others love it so much. (Unfortunately, the 7:10 screening on Friday night at the Angelika with a QnA moderated by my pal, Valerie Complex, is already sold out!)

The second documentary in the last year about a man named “Cunningham” (a different one this time) is Mark Bozek’s The Times of Bill Cunningham (Greenwich) about the famed photographer who died in 2016… and whom I know even less about than I did dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. Apparently, he was a New York Timesphotographer for four decades and had a long relationship with First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and this doc is even narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker! It also opens at the Angelika and City Cinemas 1, 2 & 3, and maybe L.A.?

Due to the usual conflicts and circumstances, I wasn’t able to see Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Ordinary Love (Bleecker Street) as planned, but it’s an appropriately-timed romantic drama starring Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville as a middle-aged couple who must deal with her beast cancer diagnosis. I actually am interested in seeing this, especially to see Neeson back in serious drama mode (it’s been a while), so hopefully I’ll have a chance to see this down the road.

Also opening Friday is Tanya Wexler’s Buffaloed (Magnolia), starring Zoey Deutch as Peg Dahl, a young woman living in Buffalo, the debt collection capital of America but hopes to get out of town and into an Ivy League university. When she’s accepted to her top choice but can’t afford the tuition, she gets pulled into the rope of debt collection. Also starring Judy Greer, Germaine Fowler, Noah Reid and Jai Courtney, it will open at New York’s Quad Cinema, the Loz Feliz 3 in L.A., Buffalo’s North Park Theater and more theaters.

Another SXSW 2019 movie is Richard Wong’s Come As You Are (Samuel Goldwyn), starring Gabourey Sidibe, Grant Rosenmeyer, Ravi Patel, Hayden Szeto and Janeane Garofolo. The three guys in the middle play men with disabilities who go on a road trip to a Montreal brothel to get away from their suffocating parents. Sidibe (from Precious) plays their travelling nurse who drives them across the border to help them lose their virginity. This is an English remake of the Belgian Film Hasta La Vista about the real-life adventure of Asta Philpot.

Sara Zandieh’s indie rom-com A Simple Wedding (Blue Fox Entertainment) also opens in theaters and On Demand on Valentine’s Day, this one following an Iranian-American named Nousha (Tara Grammy) whose hopes for a Persian wedding are dashed when she falls for a bisexual artist/DJ named Alex (Christopher O’Shea). She has to make sure her parents don’t realize they’re living together before marriage. The film also stars Shohreh Aghdashloo, Rita Wilson, Maz Jobrani, Peter McKenzie and James Eckhouse.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

Some cool festivals and series in New York are happening this weekend to offer competition for all the choices above.

Let’s begin with the “Winter Showcase” for one of my favorite annual film festivals, the New York Asian Film Festivalsubtitled “Love at First Bite,” since they’re including a special Valentine’s Day screening of the Korean hit Extreme Job followed by a reception including delicious Korean food. The rest of the line-up is probably more appropriate for the rep section as it will including Asian classics like Stephen Chow’s God of Cookery (1996), Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994),Tampopo (1985) on Saturday, as well as Ritesh Batra’s amazing The Lunchbox and more on Sunday.

Up at Film at Lincoln Center, there’s the annual “Neighboring Scenes,” the annual celebration of “New Latin American Cinema,” opening Friday with Joanna Reposi Garibaldi’s Lemebel, a documentary about writer/visual artist Pedro Lemebel and his controversial performances amidst Chilean upheaval. Of course, I’m most interested in the Brazilian offerings, but sadly, there just isn’t enough time in the day/week to see as many of the films in this series I’m curious about including the New York premiere of Ema from Chile’s Pablo Larrain (Neruda, Jackie). Click on the link above and check out that line-up.

Further North (in terms of global geography) but South (in terms of New York City geography) is this year’s “Canada Now” series, taking place at the IFC Center from Thursday through Sunday. It will kick off with Guest of Honor, the new film from Canada’s Atom Egoyan, starring David Thewlis and Laysla De Oliveira as father and music school teacher daughter whose lives become complicated when she’s put in prison for earlier crimes. There are seven other movies in this series, most of them getting their U.S. debuts, so that’s another alternative for what could be a busy movie-going weekend.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Lots of stuff premiering on streaming services this weekend including the British animated sequel A Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon on Netflix, as well as the rom-com sequel To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You, which will premiere on Weds and may end up being the “Netflix and chill” choice for many young people on V-Day. (I honestly never got around to seeing the first movies of either of those yet!)

Over on Hulu, they’re premiering the gender-swapped series loosely based on Nick Horny’s High Fidelity, this one starring Zoe Kravitz, the daughter of Lisa Bonet, who appeared opposite John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Hornby’s book from 2000 that was one of my favorite movies that year! Wait a second, even though Kravitz plays a character named Rob, just like Cusack, is she meant to be the daughter of Cusack and Bonet’s characters in that movie? That would be intense! (But probably not. I’m sure I’ll check it out.)

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

The Metrograph’s Valentine’s Dayweekend offerings include Casablanca (1942), Howard Hawks’ 1944 film To Have and Have Not, the 1932 film Trouble in Paradise, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and another screening of Makoto Shinkai’s animated Your Name. The “To Hong Kong with Love” series continues through the end of February, this weekend screening Yellowing (2016), which I haven’t seen.This weekend, the Welcome To Metrograph: Reduxwill offer two more screenings of Edward Yang’s 4-hour 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, while Late Nites at Metrograph will screen Nagisa Oshima’s 1978 film Empire of Passion, also which I have never seen! Rounding out the weekend’s Asian offering is the Playtime: Family Matineesoffering of Yoshifumi Kondo’s 1995 animated film Whisper of the Heart, which guess what? I haven’t seen that either! Clearly, I need to try to get to one of the four movies, right?

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC)

Tonight’s “Weird Wednesday” is the Susan Sarandon-James Spader romantic drama White Palace (1990). Oddly, the Alamo is CLOSED on Valentine’s Day.. is this true?!? On Sunday is a special “Drew Believers: Drew Barrymore Movie Marathon” with four of Barrymore’s movies in 35mm! (As of this writing, there are a few seats available near the front.) Monday’s “Fist City” is Sam Raimi’s The Quick and The Dead from 1995 and that’s quickly selling out as well. The “Terror Tuesday” is James Gunn’s hilarious Slither and then next week’s “Weird Wednesday” is the 1987 Ken Russell film Gothic.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Wednesday’s “Afternoon Classic” is the 1961 Oscar-winning musical West Side Story. Weds and Thursday night’s double feature is Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Sydney Pollack’s 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford. This week’s “Freaky Friday” offering is the classic The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, while Friday’s midnight movie is True Romanceand Saturday’s midnight is 1978’s Mean Dog Blues in 16mm! This weekend continues the “Kiddee Matinee” run with the Alfonso Cuaron-directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Monday’s matinee of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is already sold out but that night is a Robert Clouse double feature of The Pack(1977) and Darker than Amber (1970). Tuesday’s Grindhouse double feature is 1976’s Sky Riders and 1981’s Force: Five.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Thursday is a “Black Voices” double feature of Car Wash (1976) and Cooley High (1975) with guest including Bill Duke in person. John Sayles and Joe Dante will be on hand Friday night for a “John Sayles: Independent” double feature of Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981). This weekend is the “HFPA Restoration Summit” including a Saturday afternoon presentation called “Serge Bromberg Presents from the Silent Era” with the Lobster Films founder, while the one and only Jane Fonda will be on-hand Saturday evening to present a 4k restoration of the 1972 film F.T.A., which she produced with Donald Sutherland. Saturday night is a screening of The Black Vampire, the 1953 Argentine adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M, and there’s more classic cinema on Sunday as part of the series.

AERO (LA):

Thursday’s “Antiwar Cinema” matinee is Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War from 1969 with an all-star cast, while that night is a Eugene Levy/Christopher Guest double feature of A Might Windand For Your Consideration. The AERO is ALSO showing Casablancaon Valentine’s Day and then Saturday is another Levy/Guest double feature of Best in Show (2000)and Waiting for Guffman (1996) with Levy doing a discussion between films. John Sayles and Frances McDormand will appear in person for a Sunday afternoon double feature of 1996’s Lone Star and 1999’s Limbo.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

MOMI is going a bit crazy with its Valentine’s offering but it’s a good one…Jane Fonda in 1968’s Barbarella as part of its new 2001-inspired series “See It Big! Outer Space”! (If MOMI wasn’t all the way in Astoria, I’d totally go.) It will play again Sunday with Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) playing on Friday and Saturday and 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Pictureon Sunday. Sunday will also be a repeat of Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm with a discussion before the movie between Doug Trumbull and Piers Bizony. There’s also the usual DCP screening of 2001on Saturday afternoon, as part of the exhibition. On Saturday, they’ll screen Marjane Satrapi’s excellent Persepolis(2007) as part of its “World of Animation.”

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Starting Friday, the Forum will be screening a DCP restoration of Luchino Visconti’s L’Innocente (1976), starring Giancarlo Giannini. This weekend’s “Film Forum Jr.” is Guys and Dolls from 1955, starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons and Frank Sinatra. (If you read this on Wednesday, you can catch Joseph Strick’s 1963 film The Balcony, starring Shelley Winters, Peter Falk and Lee Grant, in 35mm.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad’s run of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman continues through the weekend, and there will be Valentine’s Day screenings of Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy on Thursday and Friday night. (How romantic!)

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (NYC):

The Anthology’s great “The Devil Probably: A Century of Satanic Panic” continues this weekend with screenings of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, another screening of Rosemary’s Baby, as well as screenings of Race with the Devil on Weds. and Thursday night. I missed it last week but they’ve been showing Mark Rappaport’s 1975 film Mozart in Love the past week, as well.

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

The Cage-athon continues Weds. with Neil Labute’s The Wicker Man (2006) and 2009’s Knowing on Thursday. Valentine’s Day sees screening of Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, as well as the 1987 Nicolas Cage movie Moonstruck, co-starring Cher. Spike Jonez and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2003), starring Cage, repeats on Saturday.

NITEHAWK CINEMA (NYC):

Williamsburg‘s “Uncaged” series continues Friday with last year’s Mandy at midnight and 1983’s Valley Girl on Saturday morning. Casabalanca is also playing at the Prospect Park on Thursday, and unrelated but Back to the Future will play there on Monday night. Billy Wilder’s 1954 film Sabrina, starring Bogart, Hepburn and Holden will play on Saturay morning.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Weekend Classics: Luis Buñuel is back with Belle de Jour from 1967, starring Catherine Deneuve. Waverly Midnights: Hindsight is 2020 will screen the animated Ghost in the Shell, while Late Night Favorites: Winter 2020 will also go with an Anime film, Paprika.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: Jack Lemmon is off Weds. and Thursday but will return Friday with Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1963).

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

BAM will continue to show Horace Jenkins’ 1982 film Cane River through the weekend.

Next week, the second to last week of February (man, it flew right by!) will include Fox’s The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford, and the horror sequel, Brahms: The Boy II.

#TheWeekendWarrior Movies Reviews SonicTheHedgehog FantasyIsland Downhill ThePhotograph OlympicDreams Repertory Streaming

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eggoreviews · 5 years

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Playstation All Stars 2 - Dream Roster! (PART 1)

I love Smash a lot. And I really wish that PS All Stars was a bit, you know, better. A few mechanical tweaks and the addition of some sorely missed character could turn All Stars into a genuinely awesome fighter, so here’s my dream roster for if Sony did ever attempt to clean up the slight mess they made the first time.

Note: I’ve cut a few from the first game. I’m keeping it to one character per franchise. There’s 42 altogether (because I don’t know when to stop) so here’s the first 21!

Aloy (Horizon Zero Dawn)

Here’s a fairly obvious pick, with Horizon being one of the Playstation’s most recent flagship RPGs. The star of Sony’s answer to Breath of the Wild but with added machine animals, Aloy’s tale of discovering her place in her beautiful, post-apocalyptic world is certainly a heartfelt one and it’s easy to get attached to. Plus, she has her bow, spear, traps and focus chip, so the moveset just sort of makes itself.

Astro Bot (Astro Bot: Rescue Mission)

The arguable mascot of Playstation VR, I think Astro Bot would be an unusual fighter, yet a perfect fit into an All Stars sequel. I’m sure they can think of a cool moveset from Rescue Mission and his brief cameos in the VR Playroom! I mean, if Nintendo can weaponise the Wii Fit Trainer, Sony have it easy with Astro Bot.

Big Daddy (Bioshock series)

The first character I’m carrying over from the first game, I think Big Daddy is just such a surprising character that I didn’t have the heart to cut him out. He’s a cool looking robot and I really liked Bioshock Infinite. So Daddio stays.

Cloud (Final Fantasy VII)

In an act I can only describe as ‘big oof’, Nintendo managed to swipe up Cloud to appear in a certain other fighting series, despite the fact that Cloud is most heavily associated with Playstation. And his home game is the most iconic game on the PS1. Hey, I’m not saying I don’t want him in Smash (he’s my main I love my big sword twink), but can’t they share? He’s gotta be here too, come on.

Colonel Radec (Killzone series)

Being 100% honest right now, I know basically nothing about Killzone. But what I do know is this guy has a cool helmet and probably uses a lot of guns. So he can stick around I guess. Plus, I’ve been meaning to try Killzone out for a while.

Crash Bandicoot

As the previous mascot for the PS1, Crash was one of the most glaring omissions from the first game. He’s got enough different ways of jumping around and riding motorbikes to make for a cool moveset, so if they’re doing another one, Crash really does need to be onboard.

Dante (Devil May Cry series)

Dante is heckin cool and his moveset potential is awesome and that’s kind of all there is to it, so I think he kind of needs to come back. In terms of design, it doesn’t matter too much, but it would be REALLY cool if they either went back to the original PS2 design or to his new DMC5 model. Either way, Dante would be one people would miss.

Deacon St. John (Days Gone)

The protagonist in Sony’s upcoming zombie thing Days Gone seems like he’d pretty cool in a crossover fighter, that is if they can make him unique. I doubt having him run everyone over on his bike would quite cut it, but it seems like Days Gone is gonna be pretty good, hopefully good enough to justify his place here. Bring on the bike dad.

Delsin Rowe (InFAMOUS: Second Son)

I’ve replaced Cole MacGrath with the series’ most recent protagonist, Delsin Rowe. I feel like this chaotic rebel with big ol superpowers would fit just as well as Cole, but seems a little more recognisable due to him being a little more recent.

Doom Slayer (Doom)

A lot of people have been speculating that we could be seeing Doomguy in Smash, but I think there’d be much less need for censorship if we saw him in a PS All Stars. They wouldn’t even need to tone him down at all, he can just go full out gun. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be fun.

Ellie (The Last of Us)

I mean yeah, there’s Joel, but I think Ellie would be the much cooler pick, especially now she’s all grown up in Part 2. Not the most obvious choice for an over the top crossover fighter, but The Last of Us is Playstation royalty, and by extension, Ellie. And hey, she has enough usage of cool weapons to keep her place on the roster so I would be more than down for this.

Emily Kaldwin (Dishonored series)

I think Emily is pretty much my most wanted character. I love Dishonored and I toyed around with Corvo in my head for a while, but ultimately settled on Emily because I think her powers are a bit cooler. Such an obvious fit if you think about it, with her cool shadow reach thing and all her weapons. Basically, she needs to be here.

Fat Princess

Who is Fat Princess? Does anyone actually know? Because I don’t. The pure enigma around her keeps her on the roster.

Geralt of Rivia (The Witcher series)

Monster hunter by trade. Wields two swords and a crossbow. Has access to several magic signs that allow to create magic traps or set things on fire. Plus, he’s the protagonist of one of the best RPGs of this console generation. Put him in pls.

Heihachi Mishima (Tekken series)

Another veteran I’m keeping, as I think the sequel would still need its representation from an actual fighting game. I mean, Nintendo got Street Fighter so it’s only fair Playstation get to keep Tekken. And no one’s gonna be mad, he’s from a fighting game so of course his moves would be cool.

The Hunter (Bloodborne)

It was either this guy or Solaire of Astora, so I thought I’d stick with the one that’s the PS exclusive. I imagine the Hunter as a fast-paced fighter who’s a bit jumpy, which would be a good contrast to some of the other heavier fighters. He’s got plenty going for him and he’s from a great game, so he seems an obvious choice.

Isaac Clarke (Dead Space)

Everyone’s favourite janitor who’s in way out of his depth, Isaac Clarke, is here to stay. Access to fun weapons and would probably be a nice break for him to fight Fat Princess rather than the necrofuckery he normally has to deal with. Oh, but don’t make him DLC this time.

Jak and Daxter

The poster boys of some of the best platforming on the PS2, these guys were clear picks for the first game and it’d be a little sad if you cut them from the sequel.

Joker (Persona 5)

I am BEYOND excited for my best boi to get into Smash, but it also makes a little too much sense he join in for an All Stars sequel. After all, P5 started life as and still is a PS4 exclusive, though I suppose that’s likely to change soon. Still, let him and Cloud join the fun too!

Kat and Dusty (Gravity Rush)

I have never played Gravity Rush, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty much amazing, so I thought I’d leave a spot for these two and carry them over. Plus, their designs are cool so I’m here for it.

Knack

Yeah, yeah, I know. Knack was kind of rubbish and Knack 2 was more rubbish. But how cool would Knack be in a fighting game? He could be a really technical fighter, switching between two separate movesets for his bigger and smaller forms, a bit like Pokemon Trainer in Smash. And he’s owned by Sony so he’d be easy to slot in. Sure the games weren’t great, but as a character concept, yes please.

So there’s the first half! Curious as to my other 21 picks? Drop in next week to see who they are! If you’ve got characters you’d like to see, let me know down below and we can all talk about a game that will probably never happen. Have a gr8 day.

#persona 5 #final fantasy #dishonored #the witcher #playstation #ps #list #gaming #gravity rush #horizon zero dawn #bioshock #killzone #Crash Bandicoot #devil may cry #the last of us #infamous #tekken

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blackidyll · 6 years

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I'm pretty tired.

I don't think it's really hit me that I'm actually done with my YOI reverse bang fic. Or that I've somehow written the equivalent of a novel for it. It's interesting, because I've been writing the fic in one long document, so the total word count is right there in the Word document and on AO3 now that the last chapter is up, and yet that number is like... what? 92K words, what does that mean?

It means I've written double the amount of my previous longest running fic - which is Freefall, 45K words, completed earlier this year in March. It took me over four months to write Freefall and around five months to write Myriad, so what caused the dramatic change? It's not that I became a better writer in that short amount of time, although Myriad definitely challenged me greatly as a writer.

It could be that for my Bond reverse bang fic, I chose to write about a topic and setting that required me to do a lot more research to write certain scenes accurately. I had to research for my YOI fic as well, but that was more for background details like competition timing, figure skating technicalities, etc - I could easily write entire scenes and chapters and come back to edit those smaller details later. I couldn't do that for my Bond fic, not when the setting was practically a character of its own right in the story.

It could be that I related a lot easier to Katsuki Yuuri, a high-functioning anxiety-ridden working professional, than I do to Q, a young genius cybertechnology expert who works for a government organization shrouded in mystery, even though I love both characters dearly. I channel Yuuri quite easily - Q, on the other hand, is a mystery I have to unravel before I feel like I can write him authentically.

Mainly though, the biggest difference is that I was unwell for most of the time I was writing Myriad.

I've been dealing with various health issues since late April. Normally, when I'm unwell or dealing with a lot of personal issues, I stop writing. I can't concentrate, I can't speak to the characters or hear their stories. But this time, I think I needed the distraction badly enough that I wrote continuously even when I didn't feel like it, and also because Katsuki Yuuri is a lot easier for me to relate to. If I was writing a Bond fic that required me to go off and research and plot a lot I'd have sunk that project for sure.

I ended being incredibly productive - fic writing wise - these past four months because I've been in a state of discomfort and mild to mid-range pain for a lot of it. Other than going to work because I like having a paycheck and medical insurance, I stayed a home a lot because it took too much energy to go out or do anything but sit or lie down in bed. I read a lot during this time. But writing takes me out of my head more effectively than reading does, so writing is what I did when the panic and worry became overwhelming and I needed badly to escape but couldn't do that in a physical way in the real world.

So I wrote of Yuuri's struggles and his worry and his grief over losing Vicchan, but I didn't write him in physical pain, because I'm dealing with that and wouldn't wish that on him (plus he's a figure skater and probably has a higher pain threshold than I do. I'm a wimp when it comes to pain). And when I wrote him growing closer to Victor and the two of them spending time together and being happy, well, that's because I wanted them to be happy, and it made me happy to write them being happy and soft and supportive of each other.

I'm feeling much, much better now, health-wise. I'm still struggling with paranoia over my health, where every twinge or bite of pain makes me worry like hell that the issues are coming back, and my doctor has said I can come off my meds, so I've been really grumpy and dealing with some discomfort/pain these few days as my body adjusts. But I'm feeling better, which means I have more head space to think about the past few months and it's just... I can't process it properly. I've never been unwell for this long before. I've bashed up my knee and had to go into physiotherapy for half a year, but I've never dealt with this kind of illness where I had no idea what was wrong with me or how to fix it or even how to deal with it, and going to the GP was guess-work half the time until I finally went to a specialist. At least with the knee, I knew I just needed time and to follow the steps in my physio to get better.

So, I'm pretty tired. And I have a lot of mixed feelings about Myriad. It will always be associated with one of the hardest periods of my life, but I love the story dearly. How can I not? It's distracted me and given me reasons to push through my pain. I love all the characters and writing them interacting with each other. The feedback and support from my readers has been utterly, utterly amazing - I've woken up from medical tests and laid in bed at the hospital reading comments while I waited for my results to come out (they were clean!) - and all those wonderful and kind words had nothing to do with my personal life or my health. I could just bask in our mutual love for this series and these characters and the story I happen to want to share with the world.

So even though I still can't quite process what I've done with Myriad or how I managed to write all of that - and in the eyes of my readers, write it well - I'm proud of it. It'll always be something I accomplished. Just, haha, I don't think I could do it again, not like this. I really hope I won't be in the type of situation that would allow me to write another 90K word fic in such a short period of time. Other people can do it, and they are amazing. Maybe in a few years, I could do it normally too - I've definitely started writing a lot faster now, and planning long fics is easier too. But I've done nothing but write and write these past nine months, and I need a break from that now.

I have a lot of WIPs on my list, in so many fandoms. The 00Q reverse bang starts up in October for writers, and I haven't touched the Hallowed Heart sequel in years so I want to work on that again. I promised Hetalia folks I would update Cloudy with a Chance of Fog once I was done with my fandom challenges. The World Ends With You is coming to the Nintendo Switch later this year and ahhhhhh I hope it's the resurgence of my tiny obscure fandom so I really want to write something for it! And of course, I am nowhere near done writing for YOI. But I'm not scheduling anything. I'm not planning any big projects. I'm going on vacation the next two weeks (and boy was that another thing I was worrying about, because we bought the plane tics months ago and how could I travel when I was in pain and on meds and had doctor appointments, but thankfully I feel well enough to go now) and I will try to be kind to myself.

No need to respond to this spiel - I simply wanted to wrap my head around the last few months. Just, do me a favour? Chances are, you've read a fic or seen an artwork or a fanmix or gifset or a translation or podfic or some kind of fandom work today. Drop them some love. Like, reblog, kudos, yell in the tags, leave a comment, whatever you're comfortable with. We rarely know what's going on in the creators' lives. But that little bit of love will be appreciated. It will definitely be appreciated.

♥

#just some rambling about writing and my life and health and stuff #i'll be on vacation for two weeks tomorrow onwards so i will be scarce on this blog!#the queue is still running though #take care my dears #<3 #*

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fleursetrebellion · 6 years

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Why Breath of the Wild Doesn’t Have A Companion Character

Among Legend of Zelda games there’s a rift between two types of games in the series: those with companion characters and those without. And I think there’s an interesting topic to discuss in why some have them, and why some choose not to have them. To really get to the heart of this though, it’s important to recognize what the design of Zelda was originally made to do, and how that changed over time.

In the original Legend of Zelda, the game was explicitly made to be a game about freely exploring a mysterious world and uncovering surprising things around every corner. In some sense, the original design was intended to be the purest possible form and experience of an adventure. That adventurousness goes into every part of the game’s design. You’re never guided, you make your own path. You’re never pushed, you do only what you want to. And the game never stops keeping its secrets, you must uncover them yourself. There’s never a point at which the world is no longer mysterious. They even included a feature where the second time you play through the game, it shuffles around the map so that it maintains its secrets and you can give it a second try. But a big factor here is that players were explicitly meant to choose what they want to do next, not to be told. The game directs you, but only with hints and very subtle suggestions.

In this sense, having a companion with you simply doesn’t solve any problems. The companion character could be neat at best, but even still they would be an unnecessary element which keeps you from getting to the best part of the game: discovery. At worst they might even spoil secrets that you wanted to find yourself, or push you towards things that you didn’t want to do.

When it came time for the next proper sequel, A Link to the Past, some things had changed. The game started directing players more. Some secrets were given away, though most still needed to be uncovered. But the biggest change was that parts of the game started to push you through its critical path, always nudging you towards the next dungeon. There were lots of reasons for this, I believe biggest of all was that aLttP introduced a huge increase in scale, which made it harder for players to self-direct in such a big world. But to accomplish this they introduced the first step towards a companion character.

See, the game opens with the sequence of Zelda contacting you with her telepathy, and she directs you into the castle where you save her. But after that point Zelda no longer was poised to direct you through your journey. Enter Sahasrahla. This guy was an old man, like the ones who gave you cryptic hints in the first game. Except this time he outright guides you towards dungeons and tells you where the next objective is. His function was pretty limited, so he didn’t chime in much but he did was occasionally contact you through telepathy. Pretty hands-off, but it’s already a step towards a Companion Character. So to put it simply, they introduced Sahasrahla because they needed to tell you what you can do in the world. Otherwise you might not even know that there’s a dungeon to go find.

Anyway, the next main Zelda game after aLttP was Ocarina of Time, and that’s where we got the most iconic companion character of all. The reason for introducing a companion was complicated. It was an N64 game, and every designer at Nintendo was so excited to try out 3d game mechanics. But the shift towards 3d introduced all kinds of technical issues. Spaces became harder to navigate, game worlds became more costly to create, and most of all cameras became very hard to program. Ocarina of Time famously solved this camera issue with Z-Targeting. But it wouldn’t be Nintendo if they left that as “good enough”.

Maybe you’ve noticed but Nintendo has this habit, almost an obsession, of tying up loose strings. Anything done in one part of a game’s design must connect back to all other parts of the design, including the narrative design. They couldn’t just let you Z-target, they had to tie that into the game’s narrative design as well. So they came up with one narrative-friendly solution for all of the technical problems of the 3d world all at once: Navi.

How does Navi solve camera controls? Navi is Z-targeting! How does Navi make 3d spaces easier to navigate? Navi can chime in with hints and direct you towards doors! And how does she solve the problem that 3d game worlds are costly to create? Well, if the world is smaller, Navi can stick with the player and always let them know where the next objective is, driving players along the main path so they never stray too far and discover just how little is actually in this 3d world. (At least compared to aLttP.) And it worked amazingly! Ocarina of Time quickly became the classic we all know and love. Some other neat tricks that Navi has is that she can help make story moments more interesting by speaking for Link when he has to remain silent, which lent to the new more cinematic tone of the game. She could even give a sense of larger scale to the world with bits of lore, though let’s face it they weren’t really all that great most of the time.

And then moving into Majora’s Mask we saw something... weird. Majora’s Mask was developed in a hurry, and they didn’t completely have time to rework any ideas from scratch. So when the game abandoned the cinematic style of OoT, favoring a much more classic open-exploration style of play, they still didn’t really have the time to come up with a new Navi. So, even though Majora’s Mask is much more similar to aLttP in structure than OoT, Navi stayed. Or rather, her concept stayed under a different name.

But the N64 is done. The GameCube is announced and the new tech is amazing. The best console specs in that generation, as it would turn out. That meant fewer limits on the world size, the tech for 3d cameras had time to mature, and Nintendo learned how to communicate space in 3d. So we saw the first even return-to-form for a Zelda game. Mostly it was a return to the style of aLttP, but we even saw one interesting feature return from the original Legend of Zelda. That is, in Wind Waker, the world was organized as a grid of spaces.

It was kind of a brilliant piece of design. In the first Legend of Zelda you could never see beyond the edge of the screen, each time the screen scrolled over was a new chance to surprise. But even still, they were able to make sure you could still navigate the world without getting too lost by making the world... kind of small. I mean, no doubt it was full of interesting content, but there weren’t actually that many screens in the original Zelda’s world. And that made it easier for players to recognize landmarks, remember all of the things they wanted to come back to, and remember paths through the world. And in Wind Waker they found a way to replicate that sense of exploring a limited set of spaces on a grid. Except this time the grid was a massive ocean, and each screen was the size of an entire island. You never got confused exploring the ocean because there are only a few really important islands to go to. And you never got confused exploring an island because you can see the whole thing at once!

And that isn’t the only return to form. Wind Waker favored open exploration over the linear epic storylines of OoT. It cut down on Z-targeting and allowed for more free navigation and puzzle-solving even if there were enemies around. And, back to the topic at hand, it didn’t have a companion character. At least, it sort of didn’t. The King of Red Lions acted as this sort of Sahasrahla-like character (complete with telepathy). He would direct you to certain island (annoyingly locking you into an island once at the beginning) but he could never tell you how to explore each island. He was pretty hands-off. And there were certainly more cinematic moments in the game which featured companion characters, like Makar, Medli, and Zelda at the end. But it was never anything on the scale of OoT.

With Twilight Princess there isn’t much to talk about besides the fact that, for reasons that I can’t really explain, Nintendo chose to return to Ocarina of Time’s style of play. Not that this was a bad thing, OoT and TP are both classics, but it seems strange that they would return to OoT’s style having made almost no improvements at all. The companion and the strict guided-ness of TP got slightly more overbearing than OoT, but it wasn’t so much as to ruin the experience. And the story and characters were good enough to make us be okay with it. (Seriously, who doesn’t love Midna?)

And then... Skyward Sword. There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, the game wanted to use motion controls, you can’t fault it for that. I think most of us wanted to try out a motion control Zelda, even though it kind of seemed like nobody could do the sword thing properly. And in classic Nintendo style they started tying up loose strings. The motion controls become a character. Thus Fi joins the roster!

Second, Skyward Sword was made by a new director for the series mainline games. Maybe it was that Hidemaro Fujibayashi wanted to continue following in line with the Ocarina of Time style of play, or maybe it was that Nintendo wasn’t confident letting him go Wild on his first game (hah hah). But he pushed towards this more directed structure. More directed even than Twilight Princess was.

And with these two things together, Fi came out as... Well, she was the motion controls (a feature that wasn’t well-received) and she also heavily directed the player more than any other Zelda game (also not well-received). And the result was that she become a frustrating, hand-holding, symbol of whatever feature the player personally didn’t like in the game. I mean personally I like Fi. I think she’s cute, and her final scene made me cry. And I mean, (unpopular opinion) the motion controls were kinda fun. But there’s no doubt that she’s overwhelmingly hated.

And then we come to Breath of the Wild, the truest Return To Form in the series. The design is almost exactly, point for point, the same as the design of the first Zelda game. Except this time, we’re fully leveraging the power of 3d graphics. You can see distant objectives, which helps you self-direct. The world is broken up into recognizable regions, so no worry about getting lost. And the concept that you only have to do what you want to do is turned up to 11. The only things that the game forces you to do are learn how to play, and beat the final boss. Every path you take is a path you choose.

So given all of that background... of course there’s no companion character in BotW. Why would it need one?

#Legend of Zelda #Game Design #Navi #Fi #Midna #King of Red Lions #Sahasrahla #Tatl and Tael

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recentanimenews · 2 years

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REVIEW: Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX Is A Relic In The Best Way

The best way to describe Monster Rancher as a franchise is "bygone." Its intriguing system of monster creation — one that allowed you to insert CDs into your PlayStation and conjure beasts with their metadata — aged along with its components. When CD sales dropped and were replaced by downloadable and streaming music, so did Monster Rancher's place in the grand scheme of monster collecting games. The anime — a surprisingly underrated series that crafted a full mythos out of the games' "train a critter, make it fight, repeat" mission statement — never got the wide array of follow-ups that franchises like Digimon and Pokémon did. When it ended, having been tossed haphazardly around various programming blocks like Fox Kids, there would be no sequel.

So far, any attempts at recreating the magic of "I have a copy of Ok Computer by Radiohead. Let's see what it makes!" haven't felt that notable. And I think those involved with the production of Monster Rancher 1&2 DX know that. The monster creation system provided on the Nintendo Switch is astoundingly simple: You can insert a band's name and album title (or go for a random monster) and boom, you're ready to go. It misses out on a lot of that irretrievable late '90s nostalgia — the kind of thing that causes a Twitter post with pictures of transparent electronic hardware to go viral every four seconds. But it also provides a very simple way for older fans and people that are too young to remember Monster Rancher's heyday to experience what made the games tick.

All images via KOEI TECMO AMERICA

When I say that the games revolve around creating a monster, training a monster, and making it battle over and over, it sounds like I'm reducing Monster Rancher to its most base definition. But I'm really not. Both of these games have a very singular focus, and if there is a plotline, it's not in the service of a wider theme, but instead to drive you to be able to create-train-fight even better. About 75 percent of the time you spend playing will be on the farm, slowly giving your monster chores in order to move it toward more complicated tasks and higher-ranked tournaments. As such, choosing which to play comes down to whether or not you want more monsters, more items, and some improved graphics. Monster Rancher 2 might be the best in the series, so I recommend that, but messing around with the first for a bit and then heading to the sequel is fun as well.

If you're looking for the extensive rock-paper-scissors type of combat you find in Pokémon and Digimon, you may be disappointed with Monster Rancher's approach, one that's centered around timing and improving/gaining various attacks so you can actually land moves and hit harder when you do so. "Actually" being a keyword here, because until you earn a monster's trust, early fights are often marked by your beast throwing tantrums when you ask it to perform an attack, leaving it open to be clobbered by its opponent. As such, training becomes a balancing act of ensuring that your monster likes you enough to give it their all and is well-rested, while also keeping their ego in check. Be too lenient and your beast literally won't respect you enough to listen.

Unlike its peers, Monster Rancher 1&2 don't have a real system of evolution (though you can combine monsters!,) nor is there any kind of team-based approach. You can set aside monsters and create new ones, or your monster will die, forcing you to return to the ol' Shrine. So the key to success, and really, the key to enjoying Monster Rancher, is simply to lose yourself in the process. The grind is not an uncomfortable one, especially considering each monster has little emotional outbursts of joy, angst, exhaustion, and triumph that are ceaselessly cute to look at, but if, say, your biggest problem with Pokémon is how often you're forced to walk back and forth in the grass to inch your monsters closer to the next level, perhaps look elsewhere than Monster Rancher for a retro experience.

However, as a Monster Rancher fan — I remember the anime's theme song "I was TRANSPORTED to a FARAWAY LAND, to a WORLD where MONSTERS RULE" roughly once every few days — it makes me so pleased that these re-releases happened. Monster Rancher, for many, has been a sheerly archaeological experience, a kind of time capsule that you look back on from a distance with the rose-colored goggles that can only come from hearing that, with a Reba McEntire CD, you could summon a fantastical warrior. Monster Rancher 1&2 DX are much like the ancient discs that have become the premiere iconography for the franchise — It's hard to figure out exactly how it fits in our modern age. But with these new editions, you'll get the chance to experience some of what made it special. Monsters rule, indeed.

Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Daniel Dockery

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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teaandgames · 6 years

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A Word on Paper Mario

I’ve been revisiting the Papier Mache Plumber again. See, this is a series I’ve dabbled in over the years and had mixed feelings about. The original, which I’m going to base this article off, was fantastic. The sequel, Thousand Year Door, was just as great but that’s where the series began to run aground for me. Super Paper Mario got a lot of decent press but for a number of reasons, it didn’t really click for me - despite a generally stronger storyline. As for Sticker Star, well. I’ve got a lot to say about Sticker Star.

This whole thing is going to be revolving around the first entry in the series because the biggest experience I’ve had with Paper Mario is the first one. As I said, I’ve dabbled with the others. But I’ll never forget my first. Even if it was played on an N64 emulator on a terrible old laptop I used to have. There’s a lot to like in the series, so now I’m going to pick a few bits of it apart. It’s an odd series; so much has changed over the years. Let’s start by finding some constants.

The first big one is the art style. This is ‘Paper’ Mario, changing that would be an insult to the series. Mario is 2D in a very special way. A way that means he could slide under doors just by lying down. It’s an odd choice of style to be sure but it makes the world and characters look lively. It looks like a colouring book; all filled in with bright colours. That has lasted across all of the series that I’ve played and it never stops being charming. In fact, Sticker Star, for all its many faults, pushed that even further by playing with the environment a lot more with its use of special stickers. Probably one of the few things it did right.

Perhaps one downside of this continued art style is that a lot of the sprites didn’t get updated as time went on. Paper Mario himself looks pretty much identical now to how he did in 2000. God, this series is nearly twenty years old. Existential dread aside, it would be nice to give the old cutouts a bit of a spruce up. Still, the reliance on the paper aesthetics did allow Super Paper Mario to have some fun with its gameplay, reshaping and resizing Mario at will. It gives a bit more freedom than our usual old jumpman.

Something else that should have been a constant is the humour. Paper Mario, the first one that is, had some great moments in it. It was usually fairly silly and good natured humour, and I loved it. Like hearing a group of friendly boos complimenting each other on how well they scare the nearby toads. Or, my personal favourite, encountering a murder-mystery writer named Herringway. He’s a penguin. It’s terrible and I love it a lot. Thousand Year Door kept the humour up, as did Super Paper Mario - though that was a game that wasn’t afraid to get dark. While I’ve not actually completed Super Paper Mario, apparently something happens to my main man Luigi towards the end that I’m not okay with.

Speaking of the superior plumbing brother, he’s the perfect example of great writing in Paper Mario - specifically in Thousand Year Door. While Mario goes out and completes his awesome adventures, Luigi is left in the first town you encounter. When you go back and speak to him, he regales you with a ton of embellished lies about all these adventures he’s gone on. It’s hilarious and exactly the kind of thing that’s been deliberately cut from Paper Mario games of late. There’s very little banter these days. Usually just a single side character who just makes up for Mario’s muteness.

Speaking of which, who decided to axe the side characters? Whoever did probably deserves a different kind of axe. They were one of the most charming things about the first two, being mostly simple characters that nevertheless had enough personality to add a breath of fresh air to the plumber’s adventures. Hell, it even has a strong transgender character in Thousand Year Door, Vivian. An awesome ghost who initially suffers from an inferiority complex before learning to respect herself. An odd choice to remove these side characters from Super Paper Mario onwards. Leaving us with weird fairy things? Though we do get Peach on our team, which is nice.

It also has a necessary effect on the combat system. The first two games have a turn based combat system, that has a little emphasis on timing. If you hit a button at the right moment, you’ll do more or take less damage. It spices things up a bit. I like turn based fighting of this nature a lot (it was done to perfection in the Mario and Luigi series, mind) and Thousand Year Door improved it with an audience mechanic. I will admit, the standard fights do get dull after a while but Paper Mario works tirelessly to throw the entire Mario roster at you. Every tedious fight is quickly switched up in the new area - and there’s zero grinding required. After Thousand Year Door this combat was axed too. Super Paper Mario resorted back to usual Mario rules. Jump on ‘em. Some of the magic was lost there for me. It was trying to be a normal Mario game but didn’t have the smooth controls to cope with it.

But Sticker Star is way worse. If Super Paper Mario axed the turn based combat, Sticker Star shoved some sticks up the rear end of the corpse and used it as a grotesque puppet. By which I mean, it reduced everything from basic attacks upwards to limited stickers. They then took away the experience system. As you can imagine, this reduces basic fights to simple nuisances. All you get is a few wasted stickers - and those things became precious. As a large chunk of Paper Mario games is fighting, you’ve just made about sixty percent of your game pointless. Well done.

Looking back over this, I can’t really remember why I didn’t click with Super Paper Mario. Perhaps it is the removal of companions but it felt a little fragmented to me. The actual story and characters were great but the levels felt like knock-offs of regular Mario and that isn’t what Paper Mario is supposed to be for me. The first game feels like a giant road trip across a weird and wonderful land, with recurring, funny characters and some basic gameplay to stick it all together. Yet the series seems to have lost that.

In fact, Sticker Star made such a bad impression on me that I don’t think I’ll ever get round to playing Colour Splash. I hear it has similar problems and that hurts me. For a series that, along with Mario & Luigi, prided itself on its writing and characters, to tone down that aspect feels counter-intuitive. We’ve got enough Mario games that focus on Mario himself. Let the side characters breath. Thank the Lord the Mario & Luigi games have not yet suffered the same fate. If you cut Luigi out and replace him with a sparkly fairy, Nintendo, then I’m borrowing Mario’s hammer.

#Paper Mario #Thousand Year Door #Super Paper Mario #Gaming #Video Games #Sticker Star #Article #RPG #Nintendo #Analysis #Editorial

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