Wednesday, February 7, 2024

New Review: Super Mario Bros Wonder delivers a creative, unpredictable, extremely weird and very fun 2D platformer



I never thought I’d see the day when a 2D Mario game would win me over to this extent, but Super Mario Bros Wonder is not only a fun, immersive, inventive, and at times awe-inspiring adventure through the brand new Flower Kingdom, but it even tops Super Mario Odyssey as the best Mario platformer this gen.

The Switch has seen a creatively-rejuvenated Nintendo release one incredible game after another, and their latest take on 2D Mario, their first since New Super Mario Bros U in 2012, proves to be one of the best 2D platformers of the year, if not in recent memory.

Nearly every decision made in the development of Super Mario Bros Wonder was the right one; the plot doesn’t feature Peach getting kidnapped yet again but instead tells a story in which she gets to be a part of saving Flower Kingdom with all the others. Freed from the constraints of having to take place in Mushroom Kingdom, and freed from the philosophy that 2D Mario has to play it safe and closely mimic games from 30 years ago, Wonder from the start feels fresh, invigorated, and genuinely unpredictable and delightful from level to level.

Flower Kingdom is an expansive one, with something like 15 hours of playtime awaiting. Each “World” you visit features plenty of levels to complete, along with a boss or two. The world map, a hybrid between 2D and 3D, has sections where you can free roam in 3D from one level to the next, which opens up all sorts of possibilities not only in terms of finding hidden secrets and levels, but in giving off a true sense of scale, atmosphere, and immersion completely missing from the previous several 2D Mario installments.

The levels themselves are creative, varied, well-paced, and just the right length. The powers are fun to use and frequently entertaining. The best new feature by far though is the Wonder Flower, which transforms each level into a psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland-like trip, in which your goal is to find each level’s hidden Wonder Seed. These sections are totally chaotic and crazy, unlike anything I’ve seen in a Mario game, and many offer a good amount of challenge to the proceedings.

Super Mario Bros Wonder offers a pretty decent amount of difficulty, with it only rarely devolving into frustration. The game maintains the Lives system, something which other modern games of this type have been doing away with, but it’s a good choice here and one that I still prefer over the various alternatives to it. The levels provide just the right amount of challenge, while still being designed to be beatable with only a limited number of lives, creating the difficulty balance that (so far) really only the Lives system delivers.

The visuals are gorgeous throughout, with the worlds appearing sharp, distinctive, and very smooth. Nintendo often has a strong command of their hardware’s strengths and limitations, and Super Mario Bros Wonder is a great showcase for that. Character animations and facial expressions are also a major improvement from any previous 2D Mario outing.

The only areas where things fall a little short are in terms of World number and the bosses; the boss battles are pretty underwhelming; though they’re generally fun, and none are frustrating to the level seen from those in Sonic Superstars, for example, I do wish that a little more was done with them. They lack the creativity seen in other aspects of the game and often feel like an afterthought.

Super Mario Bros Wonder also only features 6 main Worlds (plus an additional World-ish for the Final Boss segment of the game) for a total of 7. Though there’s still a ton of content here, along with plenty of post-game content, it’s similar to Nintendo’s shorter games during the Wii U era, which often also only had 6 Worlds, as opposed to the typical 8. My guess is that the developers just didn’t have the time, as the Switch, now having been on the market for almost 7 years, is nearing the end of its lifespan, and Super Mario Bros Wonder likely had to release in 2023.

That said, though an 8th World would have been nice, ultimately what’s here is more than enough to warrant a purchase. Super Mario Bros Wonder was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2023, a game I didn’t expect to love nearly as much as I did given my lifelong preference for 3D Mario, and the very standard, uninspired feel that 2D Mario’s had for well over a decade. But Wonder breaks through, delivering a creative, unpredictable, extremely weird and very fun 2D platformer, one with a sense of freedom and innovation that I felt even Super Mario Odyssey held back on. The Nintendo Switch continues to be a source of some of Nintendo’s best 1st party efforts in a very long time, and Super Mario Bros Wonder is no exception.


4/5

Thursday, September 28, 2023

New Review: Despite a genuine and noteworthy attempt at quality storytelling, Final Fantasy 16 also suffers from uninspired, repetitive gameplay.

 



Final Fantasy, a series that played a key role in defining the “modern RPG” multiple times since its creation, has struggled, like many long-running franchises, to find its footing in the modern era. With each new installment, it’s evident that Square-Enix is desperate to once again re-invent the RPG franchise into something that will truly define what a Final Fantasy game should be.

Setting aside the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, it’s been nearly 7 years since the last numbered entry, Final Fantasy 15, came out, itself an intended spinoff that had been branched out into a numbered entry in its similarly excruciatingly long development process. We’re many, many years now from when this series was at its most creative and most influential; with a growing number of years separating main installments, and with these new games generally being solid, if somewhat forgettable, adventures, it’s been hard not to feel like the last several entries have struggled, with varying degrees, to capture the same magic.

Final Fantasy 16, in the end, doesn’t quite get there, despite its best efforts, and while numerous aspects of the game show major promise for the series going forward, others have me scratching my head as to what exactly Square-Enix is attempting to achieve with its long-running, iconic RPG series.

In terms of narrative and direction, Final Fantasy 16 gets off to a very promising start. Producer Naoki Yoshida, himself having saved Final Fantasy 14 from complete disaster, expressed his disappointment with the fully open world Final Fantasy 15’s storytelling, and wanted to assure fans that 16 would once again tell a truly memorable, compelling tale.

His efforts to bring storytelling back into the forefront are noticeable from the moment the game starts. The dialogue’s extremely well-written, the voice acting as close to perfect as anything I’ve heard from a Japanese translation; cutscenes put the characters and their interactions with each other and their personalities front-and-center, and a few hours into the game, I remember expressing that I hadn’t felt this way with a Final Fantasy game in well over a decade. Main character Clive is incredibly well-developed and likable, able to demonstrate not only ruthlessness (this is the first M-rated Final Fantasy game and without a doubt earns it) but also a sense of humor and unwavering determination that makes him genuinely compelling. Even during Final Fantasy 16’s often extremely bland gameplay quests, Clive’s dialogue and his interactions with others manage to provide enjoyment. His past relationship with his younger brother, Joshua, is in many ways the heart of the story, and both characters come across so well. 

Others come and go throughout; unlike many Japanese RPGs, Final Fantasy 16’s combat system is purely action-driven and is focused so much on controlling Clive that his companions in combat are swapped in and out all the time and often barely register. Still, considering this, the other party members do as good a job as they possibly can in leaving an impression given their somewhat reduced role in the game. Special mention definitely goes out to Final Fantasy 16’s version of Cid, easily one of the best and most entertaining Cid characters that this series has seen, and that’s quite a legacy to live up to. Jill makes for a strong female lead as well, and Torgal’s a great example of how games can always benefit from introducing a main character who happens to be a dog. 

Though the characters are compelling and entertaining enough on their nature alone, it has to be said that Final Fantasy 16 does stumble a bit in its other storytelling aspects. The main scenario feels hazy and hard to understand from the beginning, and doesn’t really manage to ever make itself clear. It feels similar in this sense to Final Fantasy 13, which similarly threw you into the action and setting, hoping you could pick up on what was happening without much explanation. Until I completed 16 and read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I never felt that I had much of an understanding of what the Mothercrystals were, what purpose they served, why the world was the way it was, and why the main characters were doing what they were doing or treated how they were treated. It doesn’t help that the plot, in what often feels like an attempt to extend playtime, sends Clive on meaningless, truly boring sidequest-like main quests that lead nowhere satisfying and break the flow of the narrative often at key moments.

Had Final Fantasy 16’s scenario and its presentation of it met the excellent caliber of its characters and their incredible dynamics, it’s possible that the game could have found a way to compete with the true classics in the series in terms of narrative: instead, it falls short. At times, 16 feels like a page-turner, with me not wanting to put the controller down in order to see what was next, which is something I haven’t felt from a Final Fantasy story in a long time. While it’s unfortunate to say that it doesn’t quite follow through, the genuine attempt to refocus on storytelling is a huge step in the right direction for this series, and one that I hope it continues to attempt going forward.

The gameplay, on the other hand, ultimately comes across as yet another failed experiment, though it too isn’t without its charms. It has to be said first and foremost that while Final Fantasy 16’s combat system is indeed more along the lines of Action Games like God of War, the game itself is still very much an RPG, and still offers far more exploration, freedom, and sidequests than the extremely linear Final Fantasy 13, which was actually turn-based. So it’s important to understand that there’s varying degrees to all these things.

In terms of looking at straight up combat, the system is simple and fun on a basic level, and quite frankly I liked it much better than the attempt at an action system featured in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. You have basic attacks and more powerful attacks to Clive himself, much of which is done by mashing the Square button and Dodging, though the more powerful attacks can be triggered by holding it. Much of your combat variation however comes down to Eikons, 16’s version of Summons, which you break out with a button press, and whose moves you use after they’ve spent several seconds charging up. You unlock more Eikons as you go, and while you can only equip 3 at a time, you can reset the Ability Points you’ve spent on one if, later in the game, you want to use those to upgrade a new Eikon you’ve acquired and like better. I personally just stuck with the initial three I acquired, and Final Fantasy 16 isn’t even remotely challenging enough to require you to seriously consider your strategy, or to consider switching these up for any reason, but the option’s there. 

There’s not much in the way of health recovery; some Eikon moves recover health after being used, and Torgal can be instructed to revive an almost useless amount of Clive’s health as well, but for the most part, Final Fantasy 16 relies on Potions and High Potions. You carry a handful of each, and after dying in battle, the game gives you more. Bosses contain Checkpoints within the boss fights, so at some point I realized that it was best to go all out with using my limited selection of Potions/High Potions, knowing that if I manage to reach the checkpoint, I could die, continue on from there, and have them replenished.

It becomes pretty clear early on that Final Fantasy 16 is simply afraid to challenge the player. It’s something that I’m conflicted about, being someone who doesn’t like Action games very much, and as someone who rarely finishes them, it’s likely that had Final Fantasy 16 been a difficult game, I’d similarly never have reached the end of it. So it’s in that way that I’m happy that the game is the way it is, but I wish something was done to lessen the mind-numbing repetition of mashing the Square button, dodging, and Using Summon Powers, which, once established, continues for basically the game’s entirety. You can make some strategic use of the Stagger Gauge, but really only a couple battles towards the end required me to do anything to break even slightly from how I was fighting, or to modify my strategy in any way. Playing Final Fantasy 16 becomes, as a result, a mind-numbing exercise in repetition. 

The game’s quests don’t help much either; sidequests all follow the same blueprint of accepting a quest from someone, going to exactly where the radar tells you to go, fighting some enemies, and then Fast Traveling back. It’s bland, but something at least expected, but this design carries into the main quests as well, after a point, and in the second half you spend far less time discovering new locations and seeing new things as you do wandering back and forth from one mindless series of enemy encounters to another.

Some of Final Fantasy 16’s environments are jaw-droppingly beautiful (such as the desert and its explorable town) but the majority are, by design, dark, grey, dreary, rainy, and just not all that visually interesting. Many of the environments are large, and certain ones link to each other where they can be traversed between on foot, allowing for exploration and backtracking. But unfortunately, Final Fantasy 16 makes use of a mandated Fast Travel system, which majorly distracts from the feeling of this being a unified world and takes away a lot of the sense of exploration and adventure. 

Your characters have a hideout, which serves as a home base of sorts. Once you leave the hideout, you find yourself on a fast travel map, where you have to select the next location you want to go to. There’s no way to walk from the hideout to any other location, and no way to walk between locations that aren’t grouped together, without warping back to the Fast Travel map and selecting it from there. I’ve never been a fan of fast traveling in video games, and though I understand that at times it’s useful, I find that in games that mandate its use, it always detracts from the proceedings. At one point, the main characters supposedly embark on a “long journey” to get to a distant desert; it takes 2 seconds to select it on the Fast Travel Map, then it cuts to them walking through the desert. They spot a town and say that they need to stop there to rest, as if they’ve been journeying for days. None of this translates to the player, who was just with the characters back at their hideout 2 seconds ago.

To Final Fantasy 16’s credit, I certainly felt like I was more a part of the world than I did in the towns in Final Fantasy 15, which were big but felt dead and un-related to the narrative, and certainly more so than in Final Fantasy 13, which removed the towns and explorable areas almost entirely. Still, many times upon arriving at a beautiful, personality-filled town, I wish the game would slow down a little bit and allow the characters to spend more time there. Often, it only takes talking to one specific character before it’s time to immediately venture off to the next location, though thankfully a bunch of sidequests all then open in the town for you, should you choose to hang around. Just don’t expect any of them to be particularly exciting. Many of the game’s big cities remain off limits, visible only in cutscenes, but without a question Final Fantasy 16 has explorable towns with NPC interaction and sidequests, and it has areas with nice amounts of exploration. So for those worried that FF16 has gone full-on action game, rest assured that this applies mostly just to the combat system, not the rest of the gameplay.

Visuals are incredible, as is to be expected from this series. The visual effects in relation to the Eikons are stunning, with some of the best lighting effects I’ve ever seen attached to some pretty spectacular cutscenes and even playable sections as well. The setting, while unique to the Final Fantasy series, doesn’t otherwise feel especially original, with its dark, dreary medieval vibes not my particular cup of tea, but it does look nice for the most part. Characters look great and animate well, and the framerate proved not to be an issue for me at all throughout. The true beauty to behold is the almost complete lack of any load times to speak of, something that feels almost unheard of, especially after the previous generation of gaming, but it’s an incredibly nice touch. The only thing I found myself slightly missing is this series’ famous use of elaborate CG cutscenes, which Final Fantasy 16 seems to have done entirely away with. The in-engine cutscenes of course look amazing, but some CG cutscenes too could have added additional weight to a few of the big moments, and could have provided the story with a little more punch. 

The music, sadly, is entirely forgettable; as I type this, I can remember only the 2nd “hideout theme” and almost nothing else, which is such a bummer after the incredible soundtracks that this series used to be known for. Throughout the game it’s generally pleasant, but nothing that I’d ever really have much of an urge to listen to again.

It's with a heavy heart that I regard Final Fantasy 16 as such a mixed bag, but there it is. It takes some incredibly promising steps for the series towards having a compelling narrative with memorable, truly human-like characters, and though it ultimately falls short on that promise because of a vague story, it comes closer than any Final Fantasy in recent memory. The combat system is fast and fun, but ultimately repetitive and almost mindless, a description that can also be applied to many of the missions you do in the game, both those that progress the story and the side missions. It took me a good while into this 40+ hour adventure for the repetition to truly set in, and for the first half of the game I was fully onboard for the ride. Sadly, as Final Fantasy 16 goes on, and on, and on, I grew more and more tired of it. 

I’m genuinely confused as to what Square-Enix is attempting to do with this series; any fan of Action Games is going to find the combat to be shallow and incredibly easy, while RPG fans will likely mostly be wishing for a return to battle systems that aren’t so reliant on constantly hammering the Square button. It’s a direction that ultimately won’t please anyone, and at some point I think the various developers and producers are going to have to take a look and figure out exactly what is it that they’re trying to accomplish with this action-driven approach, of which this is now the 3rd iteration, and decide whether it’s even within their capabilities to achieve it.

Final Fantasy 16 though, isn’t a total bust; it has its fair share of fun, and a great cast of characters along with an (at times) very compelling narrative. The battle system and gameplay mechanics are fun before you begin to get tired of them about halfway through, and the visuals are a feast for the eyes. Probably worth a shot for Final Fantasy fans with their expectations set in line, but for everyone else (and I had to say this with Final Fantasy 15 too) I’m just not sure that there’s ultimately enough substance here to carry you across the finish line. 

 

3/5

Saturday, December 10, 2022

New Review: Better than I ever expected it to be, Sonic Frontiers is a fun, addictive, and fully-realized Open Zone Sonic concept that easily approaches greatness

 



Even after over thirty years in existence, Sonic can still manage to surprise. Taking bold cues from modern open world games and incorporating them firmly with boost-style 3D Sonic gameplay, Sonic Frontiers is a game that, despite numerous cut corners and odd storytelling, is a real crowd-pleaser of an action-adventure game. After the almost shockingly underwhelming Sonic Forces, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that Sonic Team is, thankfully, still capable of developing not just a competent entry in the long-running series, but a nearly great one.

The game begins with Sonic and his friends becoming separated, with the blue mascot finding himself alone on a deserted island, and it’s easy at first to spot Frontiers’ obvious Breath of the Wild influences, from the somber piano music to the atmospheric flourishes that hit you almost from minute one. While I feel it would have been better and helped Frontiers feel more original to have had a graphics style and art direction more in the style of the Sonic Universe than the Legend of Zelda, the game still finds a way to differentiate itself in a pretty major way from other open world titles, and a couple hours in, I was fully able to understand what Sonic Team was attempting with their “open zone” concept, and it’s one that, for the most part, completely won me over.

There’s something so addictive about the flow of gameplay with your arrival on each of Sonic Frontiers’ five islands, four of which are fully-realized massive open world playgrounds. (One of them is a bit of a cop out, but is at least pretty fun as far as cop outs go.)  A mission marker guides you to where the game suggests you go next to progress the story, but you can explore the islands and accomplish your goals however you see fit. Similarly to the likes of Breath of the Wild and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, there’s a lot of inherent fun in the idea of completing an objective to fill in a portion of your map, allowing you to see what each area has to offer and exploring it. In the case of Sonic Frontiers, you complete bite-sized puzzles, most of which are simple but fun exercises, and the feeling of satisfaction upon then seeing your visible map expand is hard to put into words but it’s one thing that makes this formula so compelling. Frontiers goes a step further by then changing the world itself, adding a series of roller coaster-like grind rails to the areas that you Reveal, making traversing the island as you fill in your map even faster.

The controls feel great and very fluid, and while Frontiers still uses the boost mechanics that have become fairly tiresome in other recent modern Sonic entries, somehow the open zone setting suits them very well, and getting around, solving puzzles, zipping across the islands on speed boosts and grind rails, along with fighting the various enemies, all feels, for the most part, nearly perfect.  Though the traditional Sonic “levels” exist in the form of the Cyber Space segments (more on those a little later) they’re a fairly small portion of what Sonic Frontiers has to offer, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t miss them as much as I thought I would. In a sense, the world you explore feels almost like a giant Level, and though you follow the same formula upon arriving on almost every island, the feeling of progression, from defeating mini-bosses, to completing the Cyber Space levels, to filling in your map, to leveling up your character, to talking to your friends to progress the story, it all flows very well and feels not only addictive but truly fun.

Cyber Space levels are the closest Sonic Frontiers comes to featuring your typical end-to-end Sonic stages, and though many of them are fairly short, and they all use the same (re-used) visual templates, their platforming is surprisingly fun and very well-paced, with your goal not only to just reach the end of the stage but to complete various objectives, none of which feel like a chore and the short length of the stages works very well in this sense. The music, too, during many of these stages, is almost unspeakably awesome.

Upon collecting all the chaos emeralds, you fight a massive boss encounter before clearing the island and getting to move to the next one. These bosses are huge and are generally fairly fun to play, though there are some frustrations associated with them that I wish had been addressed. You fight each boss as Super Sonic, which means you have a time limit, as the amount of rings you have depletes second-by-second. It’s important therefore to go into each boss battle with a full collection of rings, and dying on a boss and having to retry it doesn’t save this progress, forcing you to collect the rings (and then having to journey back to the boss encounter) all over again. The bosses also include something that I really wish video games would abandon by now, which is the Sudden Death QTE. Yes, failing those dumb QTEs will cause you to lose the boss fight and have to start it all over again, which is as frustrating as it sounds.

As far as puzzles are concerned, most of those featured are quick and fun, though there’s a very difficult puzzle towards the end of the first island that needs to be completed before you can fight the boss, and it’s such a tedious puzzle that I could easily see many, especially younger fans, quitting the game right there and never going back to it, which would be a real shame because it’s the only such puzzle in the whole thing and it happens so early in the story.

As far as the story goes, it’s pretty nonsensical and difficult to follow, eventually reverting to a strange series of flashbacks in a made-up language starring characters who you really don’t get to care much about. The moments with the Sonic characters interacting with each other at least fare a little better, and the series really has come a long way from the days of amateurish voice acting and strange dialogue that used to hamper the modern entries. Oddly though, while the acting’s mostly solid, some of the key roles were recast for unknown reasons, and even the voice actors who stayed on (such as Roger Craig Smith as Sonic) seem to have been instructed to give subdued, “more serious” performances. It all sounds a little weird and had I not known that Roger Craig Smith reprised his role, I’d have assumed that Sonic was being voiced by someone else, given how different the character now sounds. That said, the frequency of the cutscenes and the presence of the overall narrative itself is much greater than I was led to believe from the trailers, which is a good thing and keeps things interesting and well-paced, even if the story being told is, frankly, pretty bad. And the lack of a single boss fight against Eggman is also a little weird, though the character does play a big role in the storyline.

Really Sonic Frontiers’ only major stumbles (aside from the somewhat frustrating boss mechanics) are the obvious development short cuts. Whether budgetary or because Sonic Team didn’t have the time that they needed, evidence of cut corners rear their heads pretty regularly. One of the chaos emeralds you have to collect is basically given to you by each boss, while the enemy types and mini-bosses you face are limited to only a couple per island that you fight over and over again. You’ll fill in Sonic’s skill tree long before the game ends, and the Cyber Space zones aren’t given identities of their own, re-using assets from Sonic Generations and only having a couple variations (Chemical Plant, Green Hill Zone, etc.) It’s too bad because the Cyber Space zones are a lot of fun, and it’d have been cool if they were differentiated from each other by being fully-realized Levels, instead of re-using tired backdrops. Four of the islands look very similar to each other, even though they all play quite differently in terms of exploration, with only the desert really standing out from the pack on a visual level. The fourth island, as mentioned earlier, is basically filler and not at all like all the other ones in terms of things to do and exploration. Pop-in and framerate hitches are pretty rampant (on the PS4 version) and though not as big a deal as I thought they’d be, they do make the game feel a little rough around the edges. The ending, too, really disappoints, with a forgettable final boss that’s far easier than all the others, while the final cutscenes feel incredibly rushed as well. The ending does save itself in literally its final 10 seconds before the credits roll, with an emotional moment that comes across as meaningful, even if everything else feels like it’s on fast-forward.

It should be noted that playing on Hard mode unlocks an additional little “boss fight” during the final boss, but other than the game bizarrely cutting away from the fight on Normal and Easy and jumping right into the ending, I think people who would rather play Sonic Frontiers on Normal or Easy should rest assured that the Hard Mode-exclusive boss is more of a mini-game than a boss, doesn’t add much of anything to the game, and can be played after the fact by switching to Hard Mode after beating the game and trying the boss again. Still, the whole concept and execution of a “final boss” fight exclusive to one difficulty setting comes across as lazy and poorly thought out.

But gripes aside, Sonic Frontiers is a game that’s so much better than I ever thought it would be. It controls like a dream 90% of the time, the mechanics of bouncing around the environments and the Cyber Space levels feel refined and nearly perfect, and the wide array of things to do on each island and the freedom you’re give to do them, not to mention some incredibly good music and solid (if repetitive) graphical presentation, make Sonic Frontiers a near-great game. Had the Cyber Space levels been fully-realized levels and given their own identities, had the game not cut so many corners in terms of mini-bosses and visual design, and had the final boss and ending not been such a (mostly) let down, we’d be looking at a true Sonic classic. But Sonic Frontiers comes close enough and, I have to say, is such a near-great game in its own right, that it’s one I’d fully recommend to fans of the series and one that I’d even encourage non-fans who might be interested to check out. This iteration might not get the critical recognition that it deserves, but next time, if Sonic Team continues down this path, we might have something even more special.

4/5

Note; this review is based on the PS4 version.

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

New Review; Correcting the record on Grand Theft Auto V, a game I was wrong about all those years ago

 




There have been times where I’ve been completely wrong with my opinion on a video game, especially a video game that seems to be beloved by the rest of the world. In certain cases, my opinion changed upon giving the game another chance in the form of an HD Remaster, where various graphical boosts and quality of life improvements, along with maybe reduced expectations, have allowed me to love games that I previously struggled to get into.

Grand Theft Auto V on the Xbox 360 was a game that, for whatever reason, I majorly disliked upon its release in 2013, and for nearly 10 years, was the only modern Grand Theft Auto game that I’d never finished, my Xbox 360 Red Ringing as I neared the end of the game resulting in me having to watch the rest online. It was weird, as a huge fan of Rockstar Games and their iconic GTA series, that I didn’t like GTA V, and though my thoughts at the time were undoubtedly sincere, I have to admit, upon finally giving the game another shot nearly 10 years later, that I had no idea what I was talking about.

GTA V is of course a great game, one that has been beloved for nearly a decade and has remained a top-seller for nearly a decade. It still has its flaws, and though I haven’t gone back and re-read my review of the 360 version of the game before writing this one, I do remember some of what I wrote, and those flaws are still intact. But Grand Theft Auto V is an atmospheric, exciting, incredibly fun, and visually striking game that presents its city of Los Santos and its wild surroundings in a loving, very detailed way. Though it carries several of the weaknesses common in games from the 7th generation of consoles, it in many ways stands above its fellow open world adventures from that area and largely holds up incredibly well today.

Grand Theft Auto V is unique so far for the series in that it stars 3 playable characters who you can switch between on the fly. You can do this when exploring the open world, each character often having their own available missions at any given time, even if the game more or less dictates which character ultimately needs to be selected in order to progress through the main story. During the missions, which often take the form of multi-part heists, the characters can also be switched between, all of this putting a fun spin on the typical GTA proceedings. GTA V may not really rock the boat in any major way in terms of the series’ famous formula, but changes such as the multiple playable characters and the frequent heists and setups help it to stand out, while returning a lot of the craziness and wackiness that was in short supply in the far more grounded Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game begins with three characters in the middle of a heist mission, something along the lines of a tutorial, and admittedly offers a less-than-impressive first impression; the grimy interior corridors, lack of awareness as to who the characters are, and the lack of ability to save for something like the first 30 minutes of the game feel like just as much of a bad start as they did to me on the Xbox 360. Once you do get set loose into the open world though, the magic of Rockstar’s incredible visuals and art direction, along with their great talent for immersive music and atmosphere, takes immediate center stage.

You play as Michael, a retired bank robber-turned family man, along with Franklin, a young man who repossess cars in South Los Santos, and of course Trevor, a deranged and truly psychotic individual who does have a certain charm to him that was completely lost on me the first time I played through the game. Each character is given their own fairly comprehensive setup before they all eventually team up, but admittedly the narrative doesn’t treat them all equally, with Trevor and Michael having a history together that ultimately plays a big role in the game’s events, while Franklin gets, without a doubt, the short end of the stick. His character’s likable and I was generally interested in his life and his friends, but unfortunately every time I switched to him, his map always seemed almost empty, without much to really do, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that GTA V’s really Michael and Trevor’s show.

Certain flaws like that do exist throughout Grand Theft Auto V, and they aren’t flaws that ruin the game in the same way that I once thought they did, but they come across as development oversights that I’m surprised this massive team didn’t catch. The driving controls and physics are all over the map, with driving greatly sped up from its sluggish handling in GTA IV, but cars still spin out with alarming frequency, and there’s no consistency whatsoever as to which types of objects you can run over and which ones will stop you completely in your tracks. It’s a true testament to the quality of the rest of the title that frustrating driving controls, despite cars playing a huge role in the proceedings, don’t hurt the overall game too much, even though they have the potential to.

Simple actions that could be done with the press of a button are instead given multi-step control prompts, leading me to constantly have to remind myself how to shoot from a vehicle, or how to check the current radio station, or how to change my weapon. It’s something that was common in the 7th console generation and GTA V definitely reminded me of it. Other little things, like character conversations while driving continuing on long after you’ve reached your destination, feel surprisingly sloppy, as it forces anyone who wants to hear the whole conversation to sit at the location and wait for it to end before exiting the car and proceeding to the mission, making me wonder why they didn’t better match the length of the conversations to the expected drive time. The game can also be frustratingly unclear as to what exactly it wants you to do, especially during any section that involves flying a plane or a helicopter, and Rockstar seems to under-estimate how difficult certain things are, such as in a particular mission where you have to land a plane, and in another where you have to drive a motorcycle on top of a train. That the game isn’t more forgiving during missions like these makes them frustrating in a way that I don’t think was intended by the development team.

The characters, though, I found to be genuinely likable this time around. Michael and his horrible family are a constant source of laughs, while Trevor, terrifying as he is, managed to win me over, at least in a sense. Franklin’s under-utilized but he serves as a decent anchor between his two crazy cohorts, and the way they all function together is compelling. The argument can certainly be made (and I’m sure it’s one I made back in 2013) that the cartoonish characters are a step down from the more realistic, human casts of GTA IV and GTA: San Andreas, but I find myself able to appreciate the entertainment value of GTA V’s characters too. Maybe as I get older, it’s becoming easier for me to appreciate things for what they are instead of wishing they could be something else, or maybe I didn’t appreciate them with an open mind back then, it’s hard to say. But I did feel a genuine affection towards these characters by the end of the game, though it has to be said that one of the three available endings is significantly better than the other two.

Where GTA V shows its age is mostly in the size of its world. The size of the map is absolutely huge, but the portions that exist outside of the city of Los Santos dwarf those of the game’s signature city by such a huge margin that it has the effect of making Los Santos feel so much smaller than intended. The game as a result takes you outside the city so frequently that it makes it feel less developed than the cities in other Grand Theft Auto titles, whether or not that’s actually the case. It’s a design choice that makes sense in what was a notoriously difficult generation for open world games, and it undoubtedly made it possible to release the game before that generation ended, but it’s the one thing that stood out the most to me as someone revisiting the game all these years later. If you have any familiarity with the city of Los Angeles it’s hard not to notice how much smaller Los Santos feels than the real thing, with the omission of the San Fernando Valley entirely, along with your ability to clearly see the Downtown skyline from the Santa Monica Pier, both standing out in a pretty major way.

Otherwise though, GTAV does a great job at capturing the set and setting of LA, or at least, the LA as it existed in 2013, when the game originally released. Though Los Santos feels quite small by today’s open world standards, it still leaves a great impression by the game’s end, as do at least two of the three main characters. It may not have the emotional weight of some of the other GTA installments, but its over-the-top craziness and top-notch atmosphere, along with many incredibly fun missions, help GTAV stand out despite its occasional frustrations and strange game design oversights.

This is obviously not a review that’s going to get much attention now in 2022, as almost everyone’s played the game by now, but it’s a review that I felt compelled to write, if for no other reason than to correct the record left by my review of the original GTAV back in 2013, a game which I was entirely wrong about. Though it’s always better when studios focus on new releases as opposed to remasters, the beauty of remasters is that they can give games second chances, and in my case, more often than not, the second chance has allowed me to appreciate a title that I just didn’t back when it originally came out.

Not a perfect game, but truly a great one.

 

4/5


Note; This review is based on the PS4 version

Monday, May 2, 2022

New Review: Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 is probably the final nail in the coffin for Grasshopper Manufacture.





Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 just might be the final nail in the coffin for me as far as any hopes that Grasshopper Manufacture will ever go on to recapture the magic that made them such an interesting studio during the era of Killer 7 and the original No More Heroes.

It hurts to say, especially as someone who was once a huge fan of Suda 51 and his crazy, stylistically violent games, but I haven’t enjoyed anything his studio’s put out since 2008.

There were glimpses here and there of fun and cooky artistry in games like Shadows of the Damned and the James Gunn-penned Lollipop Chainsaw, but to increasingly diminishing results and not nearly enough to have overcome their rough gameplay and lack of depth and polish. After trying twice but being unable to force myself through the unbearable Killer is Dead, I’d all but written off the indie studio, though I couldn’t help but give them one more shot with No More Heroes 3, which promised the return of Suda 51 to the Director’s chair, (albeit as a co-director) something he hadn’t been for the majority of Grasshopper’s output following the original No More Heroes.

On a very surface level, No More Heroes 3 feels more like a sequel to the original game than to the far more limited No More Heroes 2; returning from the 1st game is the ability to explore the world of Santa Destroy, the GTA-like hub where you travel from place to place and embark on missions and side missions. You are Travis Touchdown, the incredibly nerdy and angry main character who, as is series tradition, must move up the ranks of Assassins by challenging and killing various bosses, each complete with their own backstories, the pre-boss conversations with Sylvia also returning after their absence in the previous game. As with the original No More Heroes, you spend time in between assassination missions taking on odd jobs around town to earn the money necessary to qualify for the missions themselves. No More Heroes 3 replaces the traditional pre-boss hack and slash levels with individual combat missions scattered throughout the open world that also have to be completed to unlock the Ranked Assassin Missions, which now just takes you directly to the boss fight. It’s a choice that makes sense in the context of today’s open world games, but one that ultimately makes this third installment feel more slow-paced than the others. Still, it’s something different, and the studio bringing back many of the features that were removed from No More Heroes 2 was a reason for me to be somewhat interested in giving this a shot.

The results, unfortunately, are depressingly bad. Almost from minute one, I found myself struggling to follow the lengthy, jumpy, confusing cutscenes that open the game up. Once I finally did catch up and manage to figure out exactly what was going on, I was able to somewhat appreciate the interesting dynamics between the game’s villains, and there are a couple somewhat humorous moments throughout, though the majority of No More Heroes 3’s attempts at humor land with a thud. Sadly however, despite this being the first return of Travis Touchdown (spinoff aside) to his own proper game in over 11 years, I was hit with a wave of indifference from almost the minute the game began. The open world’s ridiculously fragmented into tiny, poorly-designed pieces that are unlocked like levels and just aren’t any fun to explore. The “alien” theme’s both generic and under-developed at the same time, while the graphics are bathed in a dark, dreary, blue tint that makes this easily the worst-looking numbered No More Heroes game yet, despite it being the first in HD. Santa Destroy in the original game had a bright, fun, cel shaded summer vibe to it, but the open world in No More Heroes 3 (where you spend the majority of your time) feels entirely devoid of life and atmosphere outside of the Perfect World section of the map, and never managed to immerse me or develop any sort of sense of place.

Everything, presentationally, about No More Heroes 3 feels like the wrong choice, from the constant stream of in-game credits sequences that begin and end each “chapter” to the bland, forgettable and often downbeat music that plays throughout. The homages to the 8-bit era that this series has always dabbled in are cranked up to 11 here, and serve as a complete distraction. The deliberately pixelated radar in the corner of the screen is so hard to use that I almost always had to pull up the full-size map just to have an idea of where I was going.  This map strangely displays a huge chunk of the world that you’re never actually allowed to visit, and the load times that take place through all of this feel abrupt, disruptive, and excessive. The game (which lacks an auto-save feature) once froze on me at the worst possible time, forcing me to repeat about a half hour of playtime over again. Chapters are bookended with pointless cutscenes featuring Travis and one of his friends sitting in his living room discussing Takashi Miike movies. In addition to the scenes being presented with all the visual flair of having been recorded off a security monitor, the dialogue between the two characters isn’t funny at all and doesn’t even seem to be attempting to be, and as someone unfamiliar with Miike’s movies, I of course had little idea what they were discussing. Even if I had, though, their analysis is incredibly shallow and not particularly interesting; I get the sense that I could find more in-depth analysis from high schoolers on a Miike-devoted message board. The payoff from having to sit through these puzzling cutscenes comes far too late to have been worth the effort.

That isn’t to say that everything about No More Heroes 3 is horrible; the combat system remains fun and fast, albeit veering into frustration a little too often and easily, just like it did in No More Heroes 2 and all of Grasshopper Manufacture’s games since. Still, battles are chaotic and visually striking, and the leveling up system for Travis offers a solid amount of customization. Boss encounters still don’t have the depth, personality, or the extravagance of the fights from the original game, but they’re more or less on par with its sequel in providing interesting personalities and solid gameplay variety. As with its predecessors, motion controls are integrated perfectly, in a way that isn’t even close to being excessive but one that feels so satisfying.

The quirky odd jobs, however, are tedious and lack any of the charm of either previous No More Heroes game. After trying a couple of them, I decided to focus entirely on combat challenges as a means to earn money instead. The characters you encounter around the world are strange in the usual Suda 51 way but lack a lot of the charm that existed in the original, with No More Heroes 3 often feeling like it’s trying desperately to grasp something that the studio just doesn’t seem to have in them anymore.

This is most clear in the storyline that propels the adventure forward. Every tone that it strikes just hits the wrong note; Travis seems angry and unpleasant, almost all of the likability he had in the first two games somehow nonexistent. The villains are both too menacing to be truly funny and yet too funny to be taken seriously, and the side characters (especially Shinobu) are given so little to do that I wondered why they were even included. The writing itself is oftentimes incomprehensible and never as funny as it seems to think it is. Travis yelling out the names of various fruits every 10 seconds in battle is supposed to be funny because of its randomness, but weirdness just for the sake of weirdness isn’t automatically deep or funny; it actually has to go somewhere, and No More Heroes 3’s just doesn’t. As with many modern GHM games, cutscene after cutscene ends with thoughts of “huh. That was weird,” with the studio seeming to think that weirdness alone makes them profound, or hilarious, or innovative. But as with all of their modern games, they simply come across as weird, but little else.  

It’s sad how far Grasshopper Manufacture seems to have fallen. As someone who loved the original No More Heroes and the divisive Killer 7 before it, nobody was hoping more than me that No More Heroes 3 would see a return to at least some of that former glory. Unfortunately, the aggressively confusing storyline, tonal inconsistencies, terrible visuals and presentation, a boring, soulless world along with repetitive, unexciting gameplay ends up leaving almost nothing for me to recommend about No More Heroes 3, even with a solid and usually fun combat system. I do hope that the studio can somehow manage to find its sweet spot in the HD era at some point, but I worry that they just don’t have the amount of people, the budget, or the focus to pull it off. As a former fan of Suda 51’s strange and inventive games, it’s a difficult pill to swallow, but something that just seems to be, for now, the way it is.

2/5

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

New Review; Structural problems aside, Skyward Sword HD proves to be a great way to experience an often-overlooked Zelda game

 


At long, long last, the somewhat divisive Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has been given new life in the form of an HD remaster. Arriving years after the remasters of Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess on the 3DS and Wii U, respectively, Skyward Sword HD now has its turn to be both discovered by those who missed out on its charms back on the Wii, and of course to be experienced a second time by those who have played it.

Skyward Sword has always been a somewhat controversial entry in the series, having been developed exclusively for the Wii and taking full advantage of its motion controls; specifically, its Motion Plus peripheral. This fact, along with its release towards the end of the Wii’s lifespan at a time when many had moved their attention to other consoles, meant that Skyward Sword was a game that many fans haven’t played or finished, making it ripe for a remaster.

It comes to the Switch with full 1080p visuals at 60 FPS, with various improvements to tone down the game’s somewhat aggressive hint system, speed up the dialogue boxes, and other little tweaks that go a long way towards a smoother experience. The most major addition is the button-only control scheme, which allows you to use the right analog stick to recreate the game’s motion elements. As someone who always felt that Skyward Sword was somewhat under-appreciated, I was looking forward to the game being given a second chance, and of course was looking forward to getting to re-experience it myself. I’m happy to report that Skyward Sword HD is the definitive way to enjoy the game, even if the Joy Cons have to be recalibrated in motion mode far more frequently than they should be, and even if aspects of the game’s structure are more flawed than I remember them being, something I similarly remember thinking with Wind Waker’s HD remaster a few years ago.

A surprisingly cinematic introduction sets the stage pretty quickly for what promises to be a much more story-driven Zelda game than its predecessors. The dialogue remains text-based, sadly, but the cutscenes are very well-presented and as movie-like as I think text box cutscenes have ever managed to be. Taking place in a village in the clouds called Skyloft, the citizens of this world live above an undeveloped, far more dangerous world below the clouds, one which consists of essentially 3 areas that are traveled through and are further explored numerous times as the game progresses.

The humans explore the sky world by riding on birds called Loftwings, while numerous Skyloft citizens train to be knights, who, among many other things, rescue those who fall from the sky island. Skyloft’s a town with a lot of character, and serves as a pleasant, albeit fairly under-populated, hub world of sorts, where numerous side quests can be taken on and where charming NPCs can be interacted with in typical Zelda fashion. The sky world you can explore is somewhat reminiscent of the ocean from Wind Waker, though, it has to be said, on an almost astronomically smaller scale, and with very little in the way of populated islands to visit beyond Skyloft’s boundaries. Still, there’s something cool about leaping from Skyloft, summoning your Loftwing, and (after an unfortunate but brief second or two of loading) soaring through the clouds. The little islands scattered throughout house treasure chests, which have to be activated in the world below before they can be accessed, along with a bar called The Lumpy Pumpkin and one or two other cool little gems. Still, there’s not much out there, and the vast majority of Skyward Sword’s exploration and gameplay takes place in Skyloft and on the ground.

But first, the scenario. It’s in the midst of a ceremony where Link is about to be made a knight that Zelda is swallowed up by a mysterious force and dragged through the clouds, initiating Link’s journey below to rescue her. What’s fairly cool about the way Skyward Sword plays out is that Zelda is both brimming with personality and also bravery; far from being captured, she teams up with another character named Impa and sets off on her own journey. At risk of overselling the plot too much, it’s true that in typical Zelda fashion Link undergoes much of the journey on his own, and the game follows the standard Zelda blueprint of minimalist storytelling and object collecting, but Skyward Sword sees it being given the greatest emphasis it has ever been given in this series (even more so than in its successor, Breath of the Wild) and there are one or two scenes that are genuinely impactful emotionally, and are pulled off incredibly well and seemingly effortlessly. It’s a story definitely worthy of its journey.

As Link pursues Zelda into the land below, he finds a world essentially divided into 3 different areas, (Faron Woods, Eldin Volcano, and Lanayru Desert), areas which expand as Link learns new abilities and the story progresses. The locations serve as cool areas each with their own compelling charms and surprises (possible exception of Elden Volcano aside) but it feels like a sad limitation that you can’t travel between them on foot in-game as one full world, instead having to choose one to descend to from the sky. It’s something which bothered me much more today than it did back in 2011, making each area feel segmented from each other, lessening the feeling of full exploration. Exploring the sky world seems like it was meant to be a replacement for this, but given how barren much of it is, and given the fact that the majority of its treasures have to first be unlocked on the ground before they can be accessed in the sky, it makes Skyward Sword unquestionably feel like it’s among the most linear of the series, even though there’s still quite a bit to explore and even though at one point towards the end you’re given the ability to progress through the rest of the story somewhat non-linearly.

Skyward Sword’s gameplay contains both some of the series’ best along with some of its more tedious. The dungeons, unquestionably, are the most fun the series has seen, with excellent pacing, great use of Link’s abilities, the addition of in-dungeon save points, and some clever puzzles. The much-dreaded Water Temple here is actually a full-on blast, and arguably the most fun dungeon in the game. As someone who found its predecessor, Twilight Princess, to have had a few too many dungeons, Skyward Sword’s a Zelda game that could have used at least one or two more of them, and falls into the same trap of Wind Waker in that towards the end it recycles previous dungeons rather than having contained a much-needed additional one or two.

The bosses range from some of the series’ cooler ones to bland, swordplay-driven encounters, but thankfully the majority of them are a lot of fun. Like the rest of the game, dungeons make frequent use of the motion controls, though as Skyward Sword HD is now fully playable without them, they should hopefully serve as much less of a barrier to people’s enjoyment of the game.

The area in which motion controls have the largest impact (and where they thankfully work the best) is in combat. Enemies have to be targeted with your sword at certain angles, with swiping your Joycons at those angles triggering 1:1 motion. It’s something that worked quite well on the Wii and it works very well here too. Combat’s so satisfying with motion that while I tried switching back and forth between motion and non-motion controls, I ultimately stuck with the motion ones because they just make combat feel so much more vibrant. Playing without motion still features the same targeted slash mechanics, though this is achieved by sliding the right analog stick in the directions needed to defeat enemies. This is also something that works well, and its addition serves as a good choice for people who just can’t stand motion controls. The only major weakness to using this mode is that you lose some of the seamless camera control offered in motion mode, as button-only mode requires you to hold down the trigger before using the right analog stick to move the camera, since otherwise the right analog stick is taken up by the sword controls. It’s a slight drawback and something to consider when deciding which control scheme to use, though thankfully the control methods can be switched at any time.

The biggest issue that’s exclusive to this remaster is that the Joycons need to be recalibrated almost constantly, at least, in my experience. It was something that occasionally had to happen with the Wii Motion Plus, which required the Wii Remote to be set flat on a table and recalibrated with the TV. Though Skyward Sword HD thankfully streamlines this to simply pointing your Joycon at the center of the TV and pressing Y instantaneously, this has to be done almost all the time; whenever I wanted to use a non-combat ability that required motion for its movement, (which is most of them) the motion seemed completely off, and had to be recalibrated. It feels almost broken, and served to constantly remove me from the immersion that the developers intended. Were it not for the fact that the motion controls are more reliable (once calibrated) and that Skyward Sword HD is far more forgiving with various motion actions than the original, I’d almost argue that the motion controls worked better on the Wii because the controller didn’t have to be recalibrated so frequently. All in all, it winds up being a draw. As far as the enjoyment of using motion controls is concerned, the powerups are all fun to use, fitting the Boss Keys into their slots is always a cool little exercise, and the motion elements keep things fresh and interesting. What remains tedious with motion controls is flying your Loftwing, and it's a bummer that using an analog stick (while in Motion Control mode) wasn’t an option, as it’s really the only thing that I’d rather have used the Button Only control scheme with.

Visually, Skyward Sword HD is a beautiful game. The art style was one that I struggled with on the Wii, feeling unsure of what they were going for and thinking that things looked colorful, but incredibly blurry and washed out. In Skyward Sword HD though, what was intended with the visual style is far clearer, and the game looks gorgeous in most areas. It’s unquestionably one of the weaker art styles the series has seen, but with this remaster I’m now much more able to appreciate it and understand it, and overall I’d have to say that it works quite well for what it is. Musically is where Skyward Sword really shines; it goes with a full orchestrated soundtrack, but unlike many other MIDI series that attempt this (Tales of, Atelier, Dragon Quest) Skyward Sword pulls it off without losing the charm and vibrancy of the music this series has always been known for, and it sounds incredible. Aside from the high quality of the music, the tunes themselves are some of the best the Legend of Zelda has seen from the beginning.

Though this remaster goes a long way towards fixing several of Skyward Sword’s issues, several still remain. There’s no quest menu for sidequests, forcing you to remember who assigned them to you and what the quests were. I found myself using the Switch’s snapshot feature to note whenever I took on a sidequest, which is a semi-solution, but still feels sloppy. Finding quests to take on can also be a challenge, as many citizens of Skyloft seem to spend most of their time in their homes, which means you have to randomly enter house after house searching for NPCs who will offer you quests to take on.

It's in this sense that while there’s a solid amount of people to interact with in Skyloft (though considering its supposed existence as the home for all of humanity, it just doesn’t feel populated enough to serve that purpose) and many quests to take on, it never really feels like it, and much of the side content will likely remain hidden from many players as a result.

These issues were completely remedied in Breath of the Wild, thankfully, but even in 2011 Skyward Sword’s weaknesses in this area were readily apparent,  with the game’s lack of any sort of interface for locating and tracking side content always feeling like an obvious oversight.

What I didn’t seem to notice back then, but what feels like a significant drawback today, is Skyward Sword’s segmented world. Though each of the game’s 3 ground areas greatly expand to reveal new locations as you progress through the story, that they’re all separated from each other gives them a very disconnected feel. It doesn’t help much that the game design’s incredibly repetitive; it follows the same formula when you arrive at each area, each time, which begins with an incredibly frustrating Dowsing section, where you have to wander the environments in a Find the Object mode before you can progress the story, something that I grew to dread each time I arrived at a new location. Two of the three locations (exception being Eldin Volcano, which is pretty much exactly as it first seems) offer some very cool surprises and interesting mechanics, but the formulaic nature of Skyward Sword’s progression becomes abundantly clear early on, and it’s hard to pretend that it doesn’t exist, especially once the game stops throwing new dungeons in your direction towards the end.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword however is a game that was a blast to re-experience. 10 years later, I still feel that it’s criminally underrated among a faction of the Zelda fanbase, and hopefully this remaster, with the option of turning off the motion controls, will help it find new fans. Speaking for myself however, the motion controls are an essential part of the game’s experience, and I wound up keeping them on, even if the constant need to recalibrate the Joycons kills the immersion and winds up feeling like a step back from the Wii Motion Plus. The story here is easily the best-told in the series, with some genuinely moving moments and great characters and settings. The dungeons and music are also easily some of the series’ best to date. Skyward Sword’s repetitive and formulaic progression, the segmented nature of the world below, a tragically empty sky and a lack of a quest menu does leave a mark, as does the developers’ decision to re-use previous dungeons and bosses towards the end, something Wind Waker fans will definitely be familiar with. In fact, as with Wind Waker HD, the structural weaknesses of the game design became far more apparent to me when re-experiencing it than they were back when I’d first played it, and though it does tarnish my thoughts on the game a little bit, Skyward Sword HD is overall one I’d easily recommend, and one that, flaws aside, holds up well and was fully deserving of what turns out to be quite a solid HD remaster.

4/5

Monday, April 26, 2021

New Review: Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time doesn’t manage to live up to its predecessors; and with the possible exception of the first game, it doesn’t even come close

 



Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is a game that I realized fairly early on wasn’t going to live up to my hopes for it, and sure enough, as things progressed, what little enjoyment I had dwindled further and further. It isn’t an easy thing to report, as someone who grew up playing video games back in the days when each of the big 3 (Sony, Nintendo, Sega) were represented by a cartoony mascot with tons of personality and a gameplay style all their own.

Though Sony’s development output has shifted wildly from the days when a goofy bandicoot served as the face of the Playstation brand, many of us who gamed in the 1990s fondly remember our adventures with Crash Bandicoot. I’d been hoping for years that the series would be revived for the modern era, and the success of the recent Crash Bandicoot N’Sane Trilogy made this all but inevitable. Sure enough, a proper sequel has now been developed, and It’s About Time attempts to capture the magic that made Naughty Dog’s original Crash Bandicoot games such memorable platformers back in their day.

You can tell by my review score of course that I don’t think it does, but why I failed to find Crash Bandicoot 4 to be enjoyable on almost any level is due to something very straightforward; the removal of the Lives system. It’s a strange thing, because on paper, removing this outdated mechanic would seem like it’d get rid of a lot of frustration, but instead, it does the exact opposite. The Lives system required Naughty Dog to design their levels in a smart way; they could be difficult, and often were, but they couldn’t be so difficult that people wouldn’t be able to finish the game. Because of this, Naughty Dog managed to create levels that were quite challenging, but they weren’t relentlessly challenging; you were allowed to have fun in between the challenging sections, allowed to have minutes at a time where you weren’t dying over and over again, and instead enjoying the fun platforming mechanics and beautiful worlds.

Toys For Bob, who developed Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, is under no such obligation; you’re granted an unlimited number of lives, giving the developer the freedom to design the levels with as many hazards, enemies, and blockades to your progress as possible. They can do this because there’s no such thing as getting a Game Over, no matter how many times you die. Rather than making the game more fun, this turns It’s About Time’s levels into tedious exercises in trial and error, where dying upwards of 20 times per level in the latter portion of the game becomes commonplace. As a result, I was denied the feeling of ever being on a roll, of mastering the level, of enjoying myself, because I seemingly couldn’t walk more than a few steps at a time before being instantly killed by something offscreen, or falling through one of the many bottomless pits that overwhelm pretty much every area. The number of checkpoints isn’t horrible (albeit it could certainly be better) and the game will throw additional ones your way if it sees you dying enough times on any given part, but even without the fear of having to restart entire levels over again, having to repeat section after section after section until I had them memorized isn’t much of an alternative. It’s just frustrating.

On a lesser, though still significant note, the removal of the Lives system also takes away the fun of collecting Apples during the levels and finding secret bonus areas, because while in previous Crash games this provided much-needed additional Lives, here, the only purpose of collecting Apples is to award you with bonus skins, but these, along with Crash 4’s other rewards, are so difficult to earn on your first time through any given level that I felt like I wasted my time even trying, further damaging the formula and making the game less satisfying to play.

It’s important to note that Toys for Bob does an admirable job of capturing the Crash Bandicoot art style and vibe, though the Switch version, it has to be said, is a little on the blurry and jagged side. The cutscenes are funny and charming, even if the character of Crash himself, in my opinion anyway, feels far goofier and over the top than he was originally portrayed. Still, there’s a good sense of humor to the game all throughout, (including an incredibly funny bit during the end credits) and there are hints of a more epic scope that never quite materialize, but occasionally makes themselves apparent. The addition of other playable characters is a cool touch, and the story itself has its fun twists and turns, making good use of many of the returning characters. Some of the new powerups are fun and shake things up, while the various boss battles are actually pretty great; unlike the rest of the game, the boss fights do manage to strike the right balance between fun and frustration. There’s good stuff in here, to be sure, and Toys for Bob has their heart in the right place, but the game simply sinks under the weight of its unforgiving level design, resulting in something that looks and sounds like Crash Bandicoot, but that just doesn’t have any of the fun or any of the pacing, and unfortunately in a game like this, that’s a pretty big oversight.

Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time doesn’t manage to live up to its predecessors; and with the possible exception of the first Crash Bandicoot game, it doesn’t even come close. Though removing the Lives system was intended to alleviate frustration and take the series forward, it instead gave Toys for Bob the freedom to design tedious, pit-filled, trial-and-error levels that just aren’t any fun to play. Rather than getting to enjoy conquering the various stages, you’re forced to stumble along, bit by bit, dying endlessly along the way, until you can hobble Crash or Coco across the finish line at the end. I don’t doubt that this might very well be many people’s cup of tea, and there are worthwhile elements (such as the boss battles and the cutscenes) that I did find myself enjoying. All in all though, there’s no way I can recommend the latest Crash Bandicoot game, and after waiting for so long for it, that definitely hurts a little bit. 


2/5

Note; This review is based on the Nintendo Switch version