Nintendo Switch

Yoshi’s Island – Critical Miss #37

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No Yoshi is an Island

Is it just me or is anyone sad that the idea of a “virtual console” seems to be dead and buried? It seems like the halcyon days of the 7th generation digital game markets with the likes of the Playstation Network and the Xbox Live Arcade forgotten relics. Even Nintendo–who jumped started the trend and coined the term with their online marketplace, the Virtual Console–seems to be struggle with giving gamers their past legacy titles now that studios have seen how much money is to be made by carving their titles into serfdoms and releasing them as separate packages. I found myself about this as I used the Nintendo Switch Online to play Yoshi’s Island. 

Upon booting up Yoshi’s Island, the player is greeted with a music box styled song, complete with winding sound, and a short cutscene of a stork carrying a couple babies in bindles. The stork is ambushed by Kamek on his broom. He snatches one of the babies, but the other falls to the ground, landing on the back of a Yoshi, and is revealed to be a baby Mario. The Yoshis of the island decide to help Mario reunite with his brother Luigi and the adventure starts!

The charm of the game hits the player immediately. The graphics are done in a cartoony style, with everything having thick black outlines, bright and vivid colors, and a slight crayon texture on everything–a style that Kirby’s Dream Land 3 would later adopt. All the sprites of the game are very expressive, especially the Yoshis who have a variety of frames of animations for running, jumping, throwing eggs, and everything else they do. The enemies are also lively as Shy Guys jump and dance and the giant ghost boogers hanging from the ceiling look genuinely hurt and sad when Yoshi attacks them. Adding to the whole presentation is one of the best soundtracks on the SNES. Koji Kondo expertly blends island percussion, toy instruments, and some extremely groovy bass lines to make songs that are catchy, atmospheric, triumphant, and upbeat. The completed tracking of the level select screen is one of my all time favorite video game songs and gets stuck in my head at least once a week.

Even though the full title is Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, the game is a completely different beast from Super Mario World. While Super Mario World refined Mario’s move set by giving him a few moves and powers to use in the game, Yoshi’s Island just added a bunch of gameplay features since the new playable character was a cool cartoon dinosaur. While the game is still a platformer like Super Mario World, Yoshi as a character has enough of a different move set for the game to feel completely unique.

For starters, Yoshis are either part chameleon or part frog since they can grab enemies with their long tongues and pull them back into their mouths to be spit out as projectiles or swallowed and turned into eggs. Throwing these eggs to hit distant enemies, collect coins or flowers, and hit question mark clouds to create new platforms is the biggest new gameplay mechanic to Yoshi’s Island. Making sure you are well stocked with eggs is always something to consider when running through levels since some sections may require a minimum number to use to make progress or discover a secret. Yoshi’s Island also adds a flutter jump for platforming. If you hold down the button after jumping, Yoshi does a sort of kicking motion, straining to get higher in a way that can only be described as them doing their best. While this flutter jump offers slightly more height at the end of a jump, it works best as a sort of extender to jump further or better position yourself midair. This is extremely useful because Mario must be a chonky baby since Yoshi drops like stone when falling out of a jump. It’s strange since the start of a jump and the flutter feels very floaty, but once it’s over, all momentum is lost and Yoshi just plummets. It’s something you get used to, but it did lead to falling into pits more often than it should have.

Yoshi’s Island also expands on the idea of power-ups from the Mario series. Yoshi can eat a few different watermelons throughout the game that gives them different breath powers from ice to fire to just spitting out the seeds rapid fire like a gatling gun. Besides these, Yoshi can also transform into a variety of different forms like a car, mole, submarine, or helicopter. I’m not a big fan of these sections since none of these forms control as tightly as just playing as Yoshi, especially the sub and helicopter which feel way too loose. Even baby Mario gets some play time during the adventure. Grabbing a star turns him into super baby Mario, where he is completely invincible and can over spikes and up walls. These sections are fun because they are all about going fast enough to get to the next star before the power up wears off.

The gameplay is solid, typical for a Nintendo developed platforming, and likewise there is also a huge amount of creativity on display in Yoshi’s Island. While all levels have aspects of platforming, there are still different types of levels in the game. Sometimes they’re the basic get to the end, sometimes they’re a winding maze that must be navigating, and sometimes still they’re more puzzle focused, requiring you to find keys to unlock doors. The levels’ themes are about as varied as they can be with the game being set on a sole island. The real creativity is found in the boss fights, which all differ greatly from each other and focus on different aspects of gameplay to defeat. From throwing eggs at a turtle to knock them on their back in order to attack to running around a tiny moon fighting a bird to knocking a flower pot off a ledge to exorcise the ghost inside to playing a game of break out in order to make a boss fall into lava, the bosses are a highlight of the game that consistently challenge the player in new ways. The fact that all bosses are just regular enemies that Kamek enlarged just adds so much charm to the game. Not all levels are great, but they are always interesting to play through to set what new ideas will pop up. That’s why it’s such a shame that I will never see all of them in the game.

Yoshi’s Island is a game built for completionists. Every level has three objectives in them besides just living and making it to the end: collect twenty red coins, grab the five happy flowers, and end the level with thirty star points. At the end of a level, you are scored on how much you collected and you need a score of one hundred on all eight levels in a world to unlock bonus levels. While collecting the red coins and flowers isn’t too bad, it is still tedious and bogs down the pace of the game to scouring the entire level to find them. The real annoyance comes with ending the level with thirty star points. See, these basically work as Yoshi’s life, but really they are a timer. If you get hit in a level, Mario will fly of Yoshi’s back, float around in bubble, and cry until he is caught–and I know a lot of hatred is directed at baby Mario because of the crying and, while it can be annoying, I don’t find it that terrible and see it as a good incentive not to get hit. Anyways, the star points are the amount of time you have to collect Mario before Kamek’s minions come down and spirit him away. This system seems weirdly punishing to the player, especially on levels with bosses, since it requires close to perfect play. I would make a bigger deal of it if great perfect scores in levels were required to progress through the game, but since they are only needed to unlock bonus levels, I find it fine. 

Overall, Yoshi’s Island is still a great game and a worthy sequel to Super Mario World–the objective best 2D Mario game. It is so charming and filled with creativity that I think anyone can pick it up and enjoy it. It’s a perfect example of the easy to learn, hard to master mentality since unlocking the bonus levels takes time and patience to do. But even without them, there are loads of levels to play, enemies to beat, charm to be found, and memories to be made. 

Bastion – Critical Miss #35

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“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

A Safe Place Amongst the Ruins

When I first got my PS4 in 2014, I had already been devouring gaming content on the internet and was aware of some of the big indie games. Super Meat Boy, Nuclear Throne, Fez–hell, I had already played Cave Story on my 3DS by then–all these games I was super excited to play once I got my shiny new console. Only thing is, I never finished any of them. Call it decision paralysis, but I bought so many games when I first got the console that I spent maybe an hour in each of these games before moving on to something else. Another game I bought right around the same time was Bastion, the indie darling of 2011, and first game made by now legendary developer, Supergiant Games. I liked Bastion enough from what I played of it, but nothing about it really grabbed me and pulled me in. Looking back, I’m not sure why, because Bastion is truly a special game. And, well, every proper blog is supposed to start at the beginning…

A narrator introduces the main character as he wakes up in a bed on a chuck of floor floating in the sky. The character is only ever referred to as the Kid–in a very Blood Meridian way–and the narrator speaks of the Calamity that has broken up and wiped out most of the city you live in, Caelondia. They speak of the Bastion, the place your people have agreed to meet at in times of trouble, and you head out for it. As you do, fragments of ground will suddenly fly up to create a path in front of your feet. The visuals of Bastion are immediately striking. The game uses hand-drawn art–a staple of Supergiant’s games–and it is all extremely detailed, vividly colorful, and absolutely gorgeous. The art helps make everything in the game interesting to look at, but mixed with the isometric camera, I found it hard to tell where the edges of the world was and often fell off due to it. That is a common problem with any isometric game, but the insane lushness of the art only made determining what was a safe piece of land to stand on harder. Luckily, falling off the edge of the world is only penalized with a second of wasted time as you fall back on the level and a small bit of damage being taken. Like the art, the music in the game is also great. An interesting mix of twangy folk, fuzzy and distorted rock, and trippy hip hop beats–my favorite track in the game being “Brusher Patrol.”

The short journey to the Bastion will take the player through a tutorial level where you can get a feel for the combat and the isometric view of the game, all while the narrator comments on the player’s actions and provides small details about the world around you. Once you reach the Bastion, the Kid meets the narrator himself, an old man named Rucks, and is informed that to rebuild and repower the Bastion, the Kid will have to adventure out into the world to collect cores. The game is broken up into rather short levels, all with unique visuals and gimmicks to them. Of course, there are enemies to fight through in order to get to the Core you’ve come to find. Be them wild creatures, members of the Gasfellow race, or soldiers from the enemy Ura people, the Kid must get through them all in order to get what he came for in hopes of saving his community. 

The combat in the game is serviceable–nothing amazing, but it doesn’t do anything wrong either–but the game shines with the variety of weapons and the customizability offered to the player. Weapons are divided into melee and long range weapons, all varied with how they handle, and all with different strengths and weaknesses. You can also learn special techniques that can help in battle. Some of these require certain weapons to perform, while others are agnostic, like the ability to summon a Squirt to fight alongside you or throw grenades. Weapons can be upgraded once a Forge is built in the Bastion and they can be swapped around to choose a loadout at an Arsenal in the Bastion or in a level. 

Building structures in the Bastion is what the Cores are used for in the game. There are six buildings to create and they all aid the player in levels. Passive perks can be equipped at the Distillery, items can be bought at the Lost and Found, the Memorial gives the player objectives to complete in the game for rewards, and the Shrine allows the player to pray to different gods. Doing this will give the player more exp and money in levels, but also adds a difficulty modifier to the game. Enemies may hit harder or move fast, they might leave little bombs behind that explode a second after they die, or the Kid’s movement speed might be reduced if hit. This difficulty system is really interesting due to its tactileness, how it allows the player to change up the game feel as they see fit and benefit from it. The Shrine mechanic tied with the customizability of weapons and loadouts add a ton of replayability to the game.

But, as much as I am a mechanics driven player, gameplay isn’t everything. Supergiant Games has been constantly praised for making games with not only satisfying gameplay, but engaging and emotional storytelling, and it clearly started here with Bastion. 

Along his travels, the Kid will meet a couple survivors and bring them back to the safety of the Bastion. They are from the Ura people, the same ones the Caelondians were warring with before the Calamity. The young man, Zulf, was an ambassador to Caelondia trying to bring peace between the two nations. The woman is Zia, an Ura woman who was born and raised in Caelondia. The player can learn more about them and the history of the world surrounding them by asking them about items they find while exploring levels or by fighting in Who Knows Where, a gauntlet level where the play fights through hordes of enemies as the Rucks tells the backstory of characters and the world of the game. The differences in nationality or the fact that they were at war with each other, does nothing to prevent Zulf and Zia making fast friends with the Kid and Rucks. All is well in the Bastion for a bit. That is, until the Kid finds a journal from Zia’s father out in the world and Zulf reads the true cause behind the Calamity.

Without wanting to spoil the twists and turns of the plot in the second half of Bastion, all I will say is that the Calamity has similarities to the Manhattan Project. It is a story of trying to rebuild after destruction, attempting to make sense of a world blow to bits, and accepting responsibility for things out of your control. Because the characters in the game had nothing to do with the Calamity, except maybe Rucks, but they are left shouldering the burden of what to do in response to it. Some seek revenge, some seek only the truth, and the ultimate decision of reversing the Calamity in hopes it will not happen again or accepting the world as it now is and trying to move past the atrocity is left up to the Kid, and therefore the player. 

Bastion is a strange game to talk about because there’s not one thing I can point to and say is done better than any other game I’ve played. But I still came out of it extremely positive and I would recommend it to anyone interested in video games. It’s not one thing the game does well, but everything, from gameplay, to world building (both story- and mechanic-wise), to narrative structure, to the tactileness the game offers the player, to the gorgeous art and incredible soundtrack. It’s done with equal attention and given equal importance, it’s all melded into one, and the game feels stronger for it. Bastion is a game that wants to engage the player both on a fun level and on an emotional level, and it succeeds at both. At the end of the day, that is the best thing I can ever hope to say about a game.

Top 5 Games of 2021

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2021 was a pretty meh year for games. It makes sense with the pandemic still raging and messing anything up. Even in the face of that, I managed to play more new games this year than I did in 2020. But I say this year is lacking in terms of video games because not much really gripped me as years passed. Most games I played from this year I did enjoy, but nothing really blew me away. I’m a categorizer at heart though, so every year I like to look back and sort out how I feel about the games I played. These are almost guaranteed to change as time goes on, but at this moment, these are my top five favorite games of 2021.

But first, a few honorable mentions. Like I said, I did manage to play a good chunk of games from this year, but there are a few noticeable absences. Firstly, any next gen game. I still haven’t gotten my hands on a PS5, so no game exclusive for it will appear on this list; no Renturnal, no Rachet & Clank, no Deathloop. I also haven’t found the time to play Loop Hero, although it is on my list to check out. Beside those, here are a few games I played this year that didn’t quite make the cut:

  • Psychonauts 2 – Pretty much everything I wanted it to be, having all the creativity and heart of the original, but controlling so much better. This almost made my top five, but didn’t solely on the fact that I’m only about a third of the way through it. Not nearly enough to form a full opinion on it.
  • Unsighted – A clever blend of Metroidvania and top down Zelda-style adventure games with a very interesting central mechanic of using a very limited resource to keep your NPC friends alive. However, this mechanic was not as deep as I hoped it would be and the exploration didn’t really engage me.
  • Bowser’s Fury – Released alongside the port of Super Mario 3D World, this game is a brilliant combination of 3D Mario level design and power-ups from the 2D games. It has all the polish and fun to be expected from a Mario title, but the choice to make one giant level with 100 shines in it makes the game feel spread too thin and with too many empty spaces.

But with those out of the way, let’s get to the list proper!

5) Super Auto Pets

I never got into the auto battler genre, nothing about it really piqued my interest, until Super Auto Pets. At first, it was the cute animals–just emojis ripped from the Android keyboard–but once I started playing, I discovered a deceptively simple game with a wealth of depth and strategy. All the different animal units have different effects from buffing themselves or others, providing more gold to spend in the shop, or copying other units’ abilities. Learning these effects and how they interact with others has all the fun of a deck building game, but runs are significantly shorter, making it a great pick up and play game. I don’t spend hours playing Super Auto Pets at a time, but I have been putting a few runs in here and there daily for the past few months. The reason it is at the bottom of the list is only because it is still in beta, with patches that change up the meta coming out pretty consistently, so who knows where the game will be a few months or years from now.

4) Monster Hunter Rise

As noted before on this very blog, I am a big fan of the Monster Hunter series. So I was excited when Monster Hunter Rise was announced for the Switch. It looked like a great blend of the games from the series I played on the 3DS and the newer World formula. And that is exactly what the game was. Visually, Rise looks like a slightly more polished Generations, but it has the quality of life changes that were introduced in World–weapon upgrade trees, notes on monsters’ weaknesses and drops in game, seamless environments. The combat is as deep as ever, the monsters as big, imposing, and creative as ever, and the weird goofiness of characters is as charming as ever. But with the addition of the wire bugs and Palimutes, the game is more fast-paced and kinetic than any other game in the series. It’s low on the list because I only ended up putting around 30 hours into it overall, about a 3rd of what I put into World and Generations each.

3) Resident Evil Village

What do you get when you mix together RE4 and RE7? Well, you get Resident Evil Village. The game takes the 1st person perspective, characters, and plot from RE7 and adds in the more combat focus, weapon upgrades, European village setting, and more camp tone of RE4. And it works surprisingly well. The pacing is fantastic with combat being fast and frantic, spookier moments being effective, and there being enough quiet moments between them that it doesn’t get repetitive. While I like Village more than RE7, I think the more isolated, focused setting of the Baker’s home worked much better. Village swings from gothic castle to Lovecraftian flooded village to machine zombie factory. It can feel like you are playing several, small games as opposed to one cohesive whole at times. But Village also has Lady Dimitrescu, a shining beacon of goth waifuness that brought the country together at a time where we feel more divided than ever. And I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

2) Metroid Dread

The fact this game even came out is crazy since it’s been hinted at since the DS era. The fact that Metroid Dread came out and is great is even crazier. I’ve played a good chunk of Metroid games at this point, and Dread is easily my favorite now. A lot of this has to do with the controls because Samus has never felt so good to move around with. Exploration, item hunting, and secret finding is as satisfying as ever, but this game takes the bosses fights to a whole other level. I love a game with good boss fights–ones with clear but tricky attack patterns to learn, ones with unique ways of fighting them without feeling to gimmicky, ones where you know the next hour or two in the game will be just on this boss, learning its ins and outs, until you finally beat it–and Metroid Dread has some great, tough, and sticky boss fights. The game is pretty linear when you take a broad look at it, with the developers cleverly using points of no returns and transporters to guide the player in the right direction, but it’s this mix of exploration and guidance that makes Dread the most accessible game in the Metroid series.

1) The Binding of Isaac: Repentance

I agonized a bit on whether or not I was going to put Repentance on this list since it’s only an expansion of a game. But I decided it not only belonged on the list, but also at the top spot, for a few reasons. Mainly, Repentance more than doubles the content in The Binding of Isaac–two new alternate routes, 14 new characters, and a lot of new items, trinkets, cards, enemies, etc. Repentance could easily have been a standalone game. There is also what this expansion means to Isaac as a game and me as a player. It is the final expansion, the last hurrah of my favorite game, the culmination of years of waiting and excitement, and the last time I will get to honor it in a list like this. Most importantly, though, Repentance is the only game I played this year that I want to keep playing. Once I finished Resident Evil Village and Metroid Dread, I was done, but I am still putting time into Repentance pretty much daily. Some days, it’s all I play and I play it for hours. After the shakiness with Afterbirth+, Repentance have brought The Binding of Isaac to the best place it’s been in years, possibly ever, and it is easily my favorite game of 2021.

Quake – Critical Miss #34

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Ok, Boomer Shooter

Id Software blew peoples’ minds like a shotgun under the chin with the release of Doom. While not a true 3D game, and not even the first shooter of the style they released, it was such a huge release and its effects on 1st person shooters can still be seen today. The game holds up extremely well today as I discussed in an early Critical Miss. Id would again help shape the foundations of the FPS genre in 1996 with the release of Quake. While it feels rather similar to Doom, the leap forward in technology in just three years meant that Quake could be bigger, more complicated, and, most importantly, truly 3D.

I usually start off these reviews with a short story description. Unfortunately, I cannot begin to say what the story of Quake is. Not because it’s overly complicated, but because I just didn’t pay attention to it. The story comes as text dumps in between episodes, text dumps that come with painfully slow scrolling. I tried reading the first one when it appeared, but quickly got bored and skipped it to get to the next level. I was never concerned about the lack of story because the lack of context it could provide was easily made up in atmosphere.

The sound design of the game is great. Gunshots are impactful and crunchy as they rip monsters apart. Each unearthly creature has their own growl and cry when hit. The soundtrack is ambient and layers on the atmosphere in droning waves. Composed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, it fits the game perfectly, but tends to be too atmospheric to be memorable to me. 

I played the new remaster of Quake on my Switch and the visuals cleaned up extremely well. Textures are crisp, enemy models are clear, but the simple polygons and repeating stones in the wall help retain the charm of the original game. All the levels have a heavy atmosphere, whether it be a dark castle dungeon, bright castle great hall, or a dank courtyard of a castle. Quake has a lot of castle levels in it. 

The levels themselves are a blast to play through. They are massive and sprawling, able to have pathways run above and below others creating a sense of verticality not present in Doom. This isn’t staying much nowadays, but seeing how Quake was one of the first truly 3D shooters, the fact that the levels are so well designed is incredible. They are deeply explorative, requiring the player to scour the map for keys to progress. There are secrets hidden behind puzzles and sneaky switches lead to better weapons, power-ups, and caches of ammo and health to find. Most levels have unique set pieces and obstacles in them to give them their own identity, but they tend to blur together since they all use similar brown and tan color palettes and locations–again, mainly castles. Sadly, level themes are not the only thing Quake repeats.

While exploring a level and searching for secrets, there will be hordes of enemies to fight through. And the combat in Quake is honestly great. It’s as fast and frantic as Doom, but with the invention of the z-axis, enemies on higher ground now actually have to be aimed at to hit. It’s a small thing, but it makes the game feel that bit more modern than its predecessors. All the enemies fill different roles in the game, ranging from harassing you up close with melee attacks, attacking from afar with ranged explosives and fireballs, or being completely annoying and borderline unfair like the Vores, who shoot homing, exploring balls. Luckily, you have a range of weapons, from shotguns to nail guns to grenade launchers, that work best against different enemy types. Unfortunately, weapon variety leaves a lot to be desired. First you will get a shotgun, then a double barrel shotgun; a nail gun and then a super nail; grenade launcher then a missile launcher. These similar weapons will use the same ammo type, but use that ammo at double the rate. I think the intention was for the players to use the weaker weapons on weaker enemies to converse ammo, but the stronger weapons kill them faster so you’re not actually saving anything in the long run. It’s not a big deal at all, it is just disappointing that half the weapons in the game are copies of other ones.

Like the combat, the pacing in Quake is absurdly fast. The character glides around more than walks like a hockey player barrelling down the rink, the enemies are relentless once they spot you, and the difficulty curve is near perfect. The game is great at introducing trickier puzzles, harder enemies, and better weapons as the player progresses through levels. Until the fourth episode, that is. I don’t know what happened, but the difficult spike between episode three and four is ridiculous and a little obnoxious. The levels in episode three were getting tough, but nothing insurmountable, but episode four gets stupid hard. Strong enemies being brought out before you have strong enough weapons to comfortably deal with them, more limited ammo and armor, puzzles that feel more obtuse than clever, and more of the goddamned Vores with their hellish homing bombs and Spawns that rush you down, can jump clear across a room in an instant, and explode when killed. Levels in episode three usually took about ten minutes with thorough exploration. Levels in episode four were ending at close to twenty minutes of just fighting tooth and nail to get through–and that’s not even accounting for all the time quick saving and quick loading. These levels are not completely unfun, but I found myself getting more frustrated with them than anything.

In the end though, I still thoroughly enjoyed Quake. The difficult spike at the end goes through the roof and I wish there was more weapon variety overall, but the game is still a great cathartic, fast as hell shooter that has aged incredibly well, especially with a coat of high-res paint over it. The game is also massive. If you buy the new remaster, you get the base games, the expansion packs that came out in the 90’s, the Honey level pack made by the studio that developed the new Wolfenstein games, a horde mode, and Quake 64, the original Nintendo 64 port of the game. I didn’t have time to play any of these except a little bit of Honey for this review because I underestimated how large the base game was, but I may have to go back to give this extra content a spin. I’ve discovered since starting this blog that I am a fan of Boomer Shooters, and Quake is the exemplar of the genre I’ve played so far.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Critical Miss #33

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Flying High, Falling Fast

I’ve said before that I’m a more casual fan of the Legend of Zelda series. I’ve liked every game I’ve played from the illustrious series, but they are not in my favorite games of all time. However, I do want to play through all games in the series, though, both the good and the bad. That brings us to Skyward Sword. Released for the Wii in 2011, this is one of the most divisive games under Zelda’s name. The contrarian in me went into the game wanting to love it. While there are a lot of good things in it, the game has a counter to everything there is to like. This is one of the most mixed experiences I’ve had with a game in a long time.

One of the best aspects of Skyward Sword is the art style. It is bright, colorful, but not super cartoony. It’s like a good mix of the more realistic proportions of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask and the colors and cell-shading of Wind Waker; it fits a Zelda game perfectly. The characters in the game are all bold, goofy, and memorable. Their charm instantly made me more interested and care about them, especially Zelda and Link themselves. Never before has their relationship been so fleshed out. They are best friends with some romantic feeling growing inside them. It gives Link a more personal reason for risking his life to save Zelda and gives the player strong context for the adventure. The character Grouse even has a nice character arc throughout the game, starting as a mere high school bully and turning into an honorable fellow trying to help Link however he can. The world of Skyward Sword is a pleasant and beautiful one to exist in, but it would be nice if there were more things to do in it.

A thick layer of clouds separates the two parts of Skyward Sword’s world: the surface and the sky. The surface is divided into the Faron Woods, Lanayru Desert, and Eldin Volcano. These are the areas where you will spend most of your time looking for and exploring dungeons, but in between dungeons you will have to return to the sky. To put it bluntly, the sky is too big, too empty, and traveling across it feels way too slow. Since you can see everything in the distance, travelling to a destination is a matter of pointing your bird at it and watching it sluggishly get closer. The first few times I flew in the game, it felt exhilarating until I realized how little nuisance is needed to control your Loftwing. Besides Goddess Chests that appear in the sky, there’s nothing to find in it. There are only a few memorable islands worth exploring in the sea of cloud including Skyloft, the main hub, the rest are just floating rocks that neither pique interest or act as an obstacle to avoid.

So flying above the clouds is not terribly engaging or fun, but what about below them?  Since there are only three main areas you will explore below the clouds, the world of Skyward Sword feels rather small, especially since you will revisit these areas at least three times each. Areas sometimes change, like the Faron Woods being flooded at a point, or there will be all new areas to explore for a dungeon entrance, but it doesn’t help the game world feel any less small or tedious. Often to find a dungeon, you will have to use Fi’s dowsing abilities to find things. This process gets very tiresome and repetitive after the first few times. Same with the strange stealth sections when doing a Goddess Challenge to get a new piece of equipment. There are even times the game makes you run through the entirety of a section you’ve already played in order to progress—most egregious of this would be the 3rd trip to Eldin Volcano where you lose all your items and have to sneak around enemies to get them back. Once you get through all the tedium and nonsense and actually get inside a dungeon, though, is when the level design of Skyward Sword starts to shine.

Dungeons are always a highlight of any Zelda game because they blend the gameplay loops of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat. Skyward Sword is no different since the dungeons are probably the best part of the game. Each has unique gimmicks and different visuals, despite taking place in similar areas. From using special stones to shift time in certain areas, lowering and raising a central statue, and dropping water in lava to create platforms, all the dungeons offer something new and interesting to play with. These are probably the most balanced dungeons in series too, with puzzles being tricky and clever, but never too obtuse to feel unfair. The loop of finding a new item in a dungeon, discovering ways that new tool opens new paths and lead to the boss, and using the item against that boss is as strong as ever. The bosses themselves are also a blast. Blowing sand away to reveal Moldarach, pulling the arms off of Koloktos to use its own weapons against it, and pushing Scaldera down a ramp to weaken it; every boss is interesting and fun to fight. That is, when the game is not reusing bosses, which it does a lot. Ghirahim and Demise will both have to be fought multiple times throughout the game. While Demise is always a pretty lame fight, Ghirahim has the nugget of a great fight in him, but it hindered by the games controls.

Being released on the Nintendo Wii, Skyward Sword makes heavy use of motion controls. This is why opinions on the game are so mixed amongst Zelda fans. I played the recent HD remaster on the Switch where it can be played without these motion controls. Instead of waving your arm for a sword slash, you just flick the right stick; instead of thrusting the nunchuck forward, you click in the left stick for a shield parry; and instead of aiming the bow or slingshot with the pointer, the right stick is again used. These controls work about as well as they can, but they still feel unresponsive and clunky. This is especially true when using or selecting items, where the difference between clicking the right trigger and holding it down is seemingly a matter of microseconds, causing the item selection wheel to pop up in the heat of battle when you were trying to aim your bow at an enemy. These controls have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the game, adding to the sense of tedium and clunkiness that is present throughout, but especially in combat.

Much like flying around the overworld, combat in Skyward Sword is something that starts off feeling thrilling until fatigue quickly sets in. Since you can attack in eight directions at any time, you have more freedom than in any other Zelda game. Enemies will block your attacks and this encourages you to feign to create openings to hit them. This helps every enemy encounter feel unique, challenging, and engaging since you are not just waiting for an opening and spamming the attack button. That would be great if spamming the attack button wasn’t more often than not the easiest way to break an enemy’s guard. Even Ghirahim, whose whole deal is he will grab your sword if you don’t feign attacks, goes down pretty easily if you just spam sword swings in different directions. It is a shame because I can see what the developers were trying to do, to make every fight require attention and skill and patience to beat, but it’s not fleshed out enough, the enemy AI not smart enough, and the controls not refined enough to require players to get good at it to survive. I probably died more times in Skyward Sword than any other Zelda game, but it always felt like the result of poor controls rather than any lack of skill.

Like I said at the beginning, playing through Skyward Sword is the most mixed experience I’ve had with a game in a long time. I didn’t hate the game, there is a lot of fun that can be found in it, but for everything good the game has, there is something negative that hampers it. It was ambitious to make a game that relies almost entirely on motion controls, but I can see a more enjoyable game buried here that would be alright if it had standard Zelda controls and mechanics. Even that wouldn’t have fixed everything with the game though. The world design and progression throughout the game is just tedious and slow and extremely bloated. The search for the Goddess Flames or the Triforce, could have easily been cut and the game wouldn’t have lost anything important. But I still had fun during parts of the game. Skyward Sword is still a Zelda game and still rather good as far as AAA games go, but it is the Zelda game that I have the least interest in revisiting anytime in the future. I played through it once and that’s enough for me. 

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker & Diorama Levels

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The Super Mario franchise has to have some of the most charming characters of any video game franchise. I’m not even talking about Mario, Bowser, or Peach either; characters like Boos, Wigglers, Monty Moles, and Cheep Cheeps are all beloved by me. They are all incredibly cute and show personality simply through strong character design and a few set actions. Another character I’ve grown to love is Captain Toad, but it wasn’t until recently when I played his very own game, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, that I saw how great the character and the world he inhabits could be. With a strong, clear focus of using dioramas as inspiration, Treasure Tracker displays not only some of the strongest level design in the Mario franchise, but some of it’s most charming.

Captain Toad as a character was introduced in Super Mario Galaxy as an adventure seeking little Toad that would appear in levels with his trademark mushroom-shaped spaceship. The same ship and character also appear periodically in Super Mario Odyssey, but in either game, the character doesn’t amount to more than a way to get an extra life or collectible. Captain Toad was first playable between those two games in Super Mario 3D World where you control the little adventurer through small, self-contained levels to collect Green Stars. While these levels were mostly just alright in 3D World, being short, easy, but ultimately fun mini interludes between the main levels, they set the foundation for Captain Toad’s gameplay and level design that was expanded greatly upon in his own game.

The levels in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker  were inspired by dioramas and that’s exactly what they feel like—standard Mario levels that have been struck down miniature scale. They are very small and confined, but have the colorful art style, well-thought- out design, and incredible amount of polish present in larger Mario levels. The benefit of having levels so small is that they feel meticulously created. Everything in the levels is necessary—there is absolutely no wasted space in them. Aside from the critical path to the end of the level, all side paths hold secrets ranging from Golden Mushrooms for the bonus objectives to just a few invisible coins to collect. Even though the levels are tiny, they always feel rewarding to explore since the game constantly rewards the player. The levels even tend to feel larger than they actually are thanks to clever uses of the camera and level design.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is played in the third person perspective, but the camera does not follow Captain Toad as he explores the level under his feet. Instead, moving the camera rotates it around the level itself, using the character as a sort of anchor, making sure the player can’t see too much above, below, or across the level from them until they reach that part. When a level starts, you can see most everything there is to see: the character rearing for adventure, the Power Star that acts as the end of the level, any and all level gimmicks or mechanics you will have to puzzle out—all the important information is present at a glance. But what the level hides in the spaces the camera can’t see immediately are the most interesting. Things like paths throughout the level, little caves to find entrance into, bonus diamonds or collectibles, pipes that take you to hidden parts of the level. These help a level feel like it’s unfolding around you as you guide the Toad throughout it and move the camera around to look into every nook and cranny present. What starts out looking like a simple, straightforward level soon balloons to a little puzzle box of branches to explore and secrets to discover.

There are over 50 levels in Treasure Tracker and—even though there are repeated level themes like grassy areas, desert ruins, little beach sides, and spooky haunted mansions—there are an abundance of level gimmicks and new mechanics being thrown at the player in every new level. This helps alleviate some of the repetition that comes from the game’s insistence on playing each level multiple times for 100% completion. The gimmicks usually revolve around moving parts of the level: wheels that rotating bridges, towers, or entire chunks of the ground, glowing blocks that can be shifted up, down, left, or right with a single touch, and some built-in mechanics like a level themed after a wind-up box that have each side of the level shifting up and down and a late game level that is just a cross of boxes the rotate around in a circle. These level gimmicks not only provide puzzles to solve and new ways to reach the Power Star, but often hide secrets within the moving parts. This is extremely common with the Pixel Toad Hide-and-Seek mode with the sneaky little Toad will be hiding behind a chunk of the level that must be moved first to see, but there are other secrets hidden within these folds of the levels. Often, if a diamond can be seen, but it is not immediately obvious how to get to it, there will be a hidden door somewhere behind a piece of shifting level. This again helps the levels feel bigger than they are due to every part of the level being used to encourage exploration.

The small, diorama levels adds another brilliant aspect to Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but it is the hardest aspect to explain due to its extremely subject nature. This aspect is the charm of the game. It all comes down to the art style. The highly polished and colorful style makes the game feel like a Saturday morning cartoon, especially when paired with the upbeat and catchy music. Super Mario 3D World has a similar art style, but it seems like the artists just had much more opportunity to fine-tune each and every level in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker simply due to their smaller nature. The world in the game is just a very cheerful, pleasant, and cute one to immerse yourself in. Captain Toad and Toadette themselves also help to add to the charm of their game through the determination they show in trying to reunite with each other and the excitement they display when collecting another treasured Power Star. Each level is so enjoyable to explore and cute to see, that you will soon find yourself unable to put the game down just by sheer desire to see what comes in the next level. 

It’s telling how well the diorama inspiration aids the design and overall fun of Captain Toad when you look at the levels that stray away from that focus. Some levels, like the boss fights, mine cart levels, and levels that just feel overly large, seem to ignore the diorama structure of the others and they feel much weaker for them. These larger levels feel too long to complete—especially when trying to 100% the game requires multiple playthroughs of every level. They are not poorly designed, however, just more tedious and tiresome to complete.

Basing the levels on dioramas not only provides a clear focal point and through line throughout Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but also helps limit any excess commonly found in games nowadays. With keeping levels small, confined, and focused, the developers were able to make the most out of every level’s space and mechanics. Every level in the game feels so finely tuned, so meticulously crafted, and polished to a brilliant shine that it works as an example of the benefit of limiting a project’s scope, almost like a counterpoint to the massive, bloated open-world games that have taken over AAA game. Much like a diorama or miniature, if you have a very small space to create in, you better make sure it is the most detailed creation you can make.

Dragon Quest 1 & 2 – Critical Miss #29

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The Foundation of the House of JRPG

In North America, Final Fantasy and Pokémon are the JRPG franchises. They are the most common answers you would get if you asked anyone to name a turn-based RPG. In Japan, however, there is another series that gets just as much, possibly even more, respect and recognition than those series. Dragon Quest has been a cultural touchstone in Japan ever since the series debuted in 1986. Created by Yugi Horii and with character and enemy designs done by manga legend Akira Toriyama of Dragonball fame, the first game set the groundwork for all JRPGs to follow. The first game and its sequel, released just a year later in January, 1987, both predate the Final Fantasy series and outsold that series for decades after. But I have never played more than a few hours of any Dragon Quest game before. I wanted to go all the way back, to the very beginning of the series and the JRPG genre in general, to check out both Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest 2 and see what JRPGs were like in their infancy, in those wild, swashbuckling, and more experimental days of the 1980’s.

I played the games on my Switch, which are ports of the mobile versions. While the versions I played were the same games in terms of gameplay and balance, there are a few minor changes and updates present. The most notable is the graphical overhaul. I didn’t like the mixture of pixel sizes at first, with the character and monster sprites being more detailed than the overworld art, but I found the distraction from it waned after a while. The names of items and town are the Japanese names, so anyone experienced with the American NES version might be confused by some references at first, and the menu now offers a quick save feature which is extremely helpful for reasons I’ll get into a little later.

The stories of the games are bare-bone and simple. Dragon Quest 1 sees the heir of legendary hero Erdrick tasked with saving a kidnapped princess and banishing darkness from the land. And so begins the tale of BeefyBoi as he travels across the continent of Alefgard to defeat the Dragonlord. Dragon Quest 2 is set a hundred years after the first game and follows the descendants of that game’s hero as they attempt to stop the wizard Hargon from summoning the evil demon Malroth and destroying the world. In my game, the three protagonists were named Steakums, Pork, and Tofu. They fought against the monsters and sailed across the seas to accomplish their goals. While both games have their central, looming threat that acts as the end goal of the game, neither game really has any plot to speak of—no moments of character growth or supplementally story moments to fresh out the story. Dragon Quest 2 has a few, but not enough to keep a player engaged on a story level with the game. These were both early NES RPGs, so it’s understandable, and what the games lack in story, they make up for in gameplay.

Dragon Quest is considered to be the first JRPG. It took inspiration from computer RPGs like Wizardry and made a new style of the genre on consoles with turn-based combat, an overworld with towns and dungeons and random encounters, gaining experience points for battles and randomized stat points upon leveling up, and equipping new gear to get stronger. It’s all common JRPG fare, but it was not as common in the mid-80’s, especially on consoles. It is fascinating to go back to see the genre at its most stripped down and bare. And bare is the first word I would use to describe Dragon Quest.  

I mentioned that the first game in the series centers around the heir of Erdrick. Well, that is the only character you play as in the game. There are no other party members, just the lone hero battling against the forces of darkness alone. Random encounters involve just one enemy popping up to block your path and you take turns smacking each other until someone falls. You have your basic attack, flee command, and a suite of offensive and healing spells. With just one character fighting a single monster at a time, there is not much room for strategy. The most thought you will put into a battle is the best time to heal. It does make the game feel lacking, but the turn-based combat system works as well as it ever has and doesn’t get terribly tedious, although mind numbing at times. It’s still a style of gameplay used today so it doesn’t feel archaic, but there are other things in the game that take over on that job.

Dragon Quest is a slog to get through. The movement speed is sluggish, random encounter rates are higher than they need to be, there are no fast travel spells to return to towns previously visited so the majority of the game is walking back and forth across the over world. I mentioned before that the version on Switch has an option for a quick save. This can be used at any time outside of battle and it’s extremely helpful since the only other way to save the game is to speak with the King at Tantegel Castle. With the slow pace of travel, this would grind your patience to dust if the quick save was not an option. And then there is the grinding itself. Dragon Quest falls into the early JRPG trap of grinding being the only real way to improve your character enough to beat any challenge in the game. Dragon Quest especially suffers from this since the one on one battles lack any real options beside attacking or healing. The last hour or two I spent in the game was walking back and forth in the room outside the Dragonlord’s chamber, fighting enemies until I gained a few levels, and then seeing if I was strong enough to beat the boss.

Unfortunately, Dragon Quest 2 doesn’t solve the issues of the slow movement speed and high random encounter rate, but it does add more places to save, fast travel spells that make traversing the world much quicker, and overall expands and improves on the first game. The most notable change is the inclusion of multiple team members. The party you control is made up of 3 members, all of whom fill slightly different roles on the team by being able to use different spells and equip different gear. They are not quite classes like in the first Final Fantasy game (which wouldn’t be out for nearly a year still), but it adds much more variety and strategy to every battle. Enemies also attack in groups, making battles much more engaging and thoughtful then the one on one happy slaps of the first game. There’s more enemy variety overall and the over world is much bigger with more towns to explore, NPC to talk to, treasure to find, and dungeons to spelunk. At its core, Dragon Quest 2 is the same game as its predecessor, but just larger, longer, and more finely tuned. So then why did I get more burnt out playing the second game than I did playing the first?

The obvious answer is that I played the games back to back and was just feeling fatigued, but I don’t think that’s all of it. The first Dragon Quest was a fascinating game to play, to see where the JRPG genre and the tropes associated with it started—a bit like watching an old movie you’ve seen parodied a hundred times on other shows, but haven’t seen yet. Dragon Quest 2, on the other hand, is much more recognizable as most old school JRPGs that followed after it. While it was released in 1987, it feels more modern since there have been countless other games that have been based on the improvements made in it. It’s strange to say, but the closer Dragon Quest 2 got to what JRPGs feel like today, the less interesting it got. The first Dragon Quest is definitely more dated and grindier, but it still feels much more unique. I enjoyed my time with both games, they are both very charming with their jokes and art style and are both still solid JRPGs, but I found myself enjoying the first Dragon Quest more than it’s sequel. 

It is often forgotten here in North America, but the Dragon Quest series is one of the best selling JPRG series of all time. It’s not surprising though, since the beginnings of the series with Dragon Quest 1 and 2 were very solid foundations. And Dragon Quest is still a series going strong today. While the Final Fantasy series has been moving towards a real time, more action oriented combat style, Dragon Quest is still staying true to its roots. Dragon Quest 11 seems like an ultimate celebration and reminder that old school styled, turn-based JRPGs still have a place in today’s gaming atmosphere.

5 Favorite Roguelikes

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The term roguelike is an interesting one. It was originally created to describe games similar to the 1980 game Rogue, a dungeon crawler with randomly generated levels, turn-based combat, and permadeath with nothing carrying over from run to run. Now the term has expanded to include any game with randomly generated levels or encounters and permadeath. Some folks have extreme ire against the term being used in such a sweeping manner, debating online that the term should be roguelite instead. While I do have my own definitions for what both roguelike and roguelite means, they are just my personal definitions. My opinion on the debate as a whole is that it doesn’t really matter. Genre names are more limiting than anything else and language is a continually growing, evolving thing so terms often become bigger than originally intended.

But this is all to say that I love roguelike games. I love when a game in the genre succeeds at still feeling fresh after dozens, or even hundreds, of hours played. I’m fascinated by how the games all have their own sort of gameplay language they use to speak to the player. I adore getting lost in games that are so heavily mechanics driven, playing run after run, and learning a little more about the game each time. I wanted to take some time to discuss a few of my favorite games in the genre. Keep in mind, I haven’t played every roguelike. Some major games I’ve only played little to none of would be FTL, Risk of Rain, and Nuclear Throne. And honorable mentions going out to Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Into the Breach—all of which are incredible games, but feel to me to be games with roguelike elements more so than roguelike games. But with all that out of the way, let’s get into my top five favorite roguelikes.

#5) Hades

Hades released last year to instant critical and fan applause. It topped many best of the year lists and has been a commercial smash hit for developer Supergiant Games. And I found myself on the outskirts of this celebration, however. I picked up Hades the day it released on Switch and loved the gorgeous art direction, the intense and lightning quick combat, and expressiveness allotted to the player when building a run from boons offered by the Olympian Gods. However, I found myself less interested in the story and characters as most people seemed to be, preferring to just hop back into the next run. I was disappointed in the lack of gameplay benefits the relationship system brought. Neither of these are bad things really, just things I didn’t particularly care for in the game. Hades is incredible, no doubt, but it came out pretty much the same time as another roguelike in 2020—one you will be seeing later on this list—which devoured all my free time of a few months. 

#4) Streets of Rogue

Streets of Rogue is a fantastic little game with incredible depth. As a top down, 2D immersive sim, each floor tasks you with completing certain missions like neutralizing a target, stealing from a safe, or escorting an NPC to the exit of the level. How you complete these missions, though, are completely up to you. You can hack enemy turrets to fire upon their owners, use vent systems to poison a building full of hostiles, sneak around all guards, or just go in guns blazing and killing everyone in your way. What makes the game great is the options given to the player and how the game world reacts to them. Some classes immediately hate each other and will fight on sight like the members of the opposing gangs, thieves and police, gorillas and scientists. It leads to some of the most chaotic situations a roguelike can offer and some of the highest satisfaction too when everything goes just according as planned.

#3) Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon probably has the best moment-to-moment gameplay out of any game on this list. It’s face-paced, brutal, and an absolute blast to play. Shooting down enemies, dodging bullets, sliding across tables, and rolling through pots and boxes all feels incredible due to the insane amount of polish in the game. Enemies are all expressive and easy to spot, things explode into clouds of pixels that then cover the floor, and every gun has a unique reload animation. And everything in the game is a gun. The enemies are bullets, the bosses’ names are gun puns, the guns you can pick up are reference guns in movies and games, there’s even guns that shoot smaller guns which in turn shoot bullets. The difficulty is set higher than most roguelikes I would say, but it feels so good to play that you will find yourself loading up another run again and again and a gun and again.

#2) Spelunkey 2

Remember when I said that another roguelike came out around the same time as Hades? Well this is it. After not being able to really get into the first Spelunkey, I was shocked how much I loved Spelunkey 2. It feels like a remixed and perfected version of the first game with tweaks, changes, and new additions to keep things fresh for old players and exciting for new players like myself. I’ve never played another roguelike where the player’s skill matters as much as in Spelunkey 2 due to the fact that the item pool is very limited and the game is obscenely difficult, with death often coming instantly and hilariously and with you cursing Derek Yu. It can feel discouraging to get far into a run only for it to end in a second due to a poor jump or misplace bomb, but if you stick with it there are some of the most satisfying challenges to be overcome in the game. I named Spelunky 2 my game of the year for 2020, so if you are interested in a deeper look at what makes it so great, you can find that here.

#1) The Binding of Isaac

This is it, folks. The big one. The reason I bought a New 3DS and a PS4. The game that started me on the road to loving video games. My favorite game of all time. 

The original flash Isaac was one of the first modern roguelikes and helped popularize the genre. The game has been expanded many times—I personally picked it up during Rebirth and after—which has lead to sine wave of quality, but the game is so vast, with some many secrets to discover, hundreds of things to unlock, nearly unlimited synergies between items to learn, all leading to no two runs feeling the same. The game has its own language that it speaks to the player with and it expects them to learn in order to tilt luck in your favor. What started as developer Edmund McMillen wanting to make a smaller game poking fun at Catholicism blossomed into something bigger, something more personal, and one of the most popular indie games ever made. This game means so much to me, and there is so much I want to discuss about it at any given time, that I find it hard to write about because my thoughts get wiped up and spun around like a hurricane. It is my “forever game,” a game I can pick up anytime and anywhere and still enjoy it. Come Hell or high water, from the beginning of Creation until the moment of Rapture, I will always love The Binding of Isaac.

Katana Zero / Ghostrunner & Instant Kill Combat

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I recently played through two games that are strikingly similar, those being Katana Zero and Ghostrunner. With Ghostrunner releasing about a year after Katana Zero it’s hard to feel a sense of “hey, can I copy your homework” with the game since it feels like the developers made Katana Zero in 3D. Both games center around cyberpunk narrative where the main character cannot remember their past, both use a katana as the main weapon, and both focus on high speed, precision play. But by far the most important similarity is that both games focus on combat where everybody, both your characters and enemies, die in just one hit. I wanted to see how both games designed themselves around this brutal combat style and see if one outshined the other. 

In my mind, there are three major things you need in a game for this type of franic-paced, one-hit kill combat to work. They are predictable enemy AI, situational awareness in the level design, and extremely tight controls. These help alleviate some of the frustration that can be caused by the high difficulty of games with one-hit deaths. When looking at both games, it becomes clear that Katana Zero is much more successful than Ghostrunner at incorporating these design elements into the game.

Let’s start with enemy AI. Fast-paced, insta-death games, much like stealth games, require enemies to be predictable. This helps the player read them the instant they appear and react occordly. When your character moves fast and death comes even faster, it feels unfair if enemies don’t act in a way you are used to and makes the game feel too reliant on trial and error more so than the player’s skill and reflexes. Both Katana Zero and Ghostrunner have enemies with very predictable AI—if they see you, they try to kill you instantly. While the enemies in Ghostrunner appear to only be alerted by sight, the baddies in Katana Zero will react to shots fired and the crashing of bottles within a certain radius and then immediately go to investigate. This makes them more exploitable, easier to lead into traps or an unexpected fight, but also means you have to take more consideration with your movements. With the level design being all platforms separated by bottomless pits in Ghostrunner, the enemies seem practically welded in place, unable to move enough to lead into ideal positions for the player. There were times in both games too that enemies seemed to respawn in slightly different positions upon retrying a level, completely throwing off the muscle memory rhythm I had built up, but there were times in Ghostrunner where some enemies seemed to fail to spawn at all. This could be a recurring bug, some sort of adaptive difficulty mode, or the dummies just walking off into pits, but it was also baffling and frustrating.

Situational awareness comes from two major things in games like these: the level design and the boldness of the characters. I never felt lost in Katana Zero because the 2D sprites of all characters made them instantly recognizable. Players see what weapons they are holding and will learn quickly how they attack and what will alert the mooks to their presence. At that point, it’s up to the player to react quickly enough and exploit the enemies’ awareness to their advantage. Ghostrunner is more muddy visually with it being a full 3D, cyberpunk dystopia city, where all enemies are guards or robots wearing metallic armor that blend in with the gray steel environments around them. The different types of enemies can be easily discerned after a second, but in a game as fast as Ghostrunner an extra second is death. 

While Katana Zero allows players to use the right analog stick to view the layout of the entire level anytime while playing, Ghostrunner does not let the players preview a level at all. This is a problem because being able to plan out a route is important when only one hit sends you back to the beginning of a level. There’s no way to no what’s coming up in a Ghostrunner beside throwing yourself at it, leading to clearing a section only to be killed by an enemy you did not know about, trying again and again, getting a little further at a time until you’ve seen every challenge in the level, and then you still have to run through it, dodging and slashing enemies apart perfectly, to win. There is so much trial and error in the levels of Ghostrunner, which can work in high difficulty games like Dark Souls or puzzle platformers like Limbo, but in a game that is so focused on speed, it just works as a huge pace killer.

Of course, the most important thing to have in games like these are tight, responsive controls. They are another way to tamper the frustration of instant death since the player will have no one to blame but themselves. Katana Zero controls are as sharp as the blade of the titular katana and feel absolutely great. The character movement speed feels just right, the jump has just the right amount of weight yet floatiness to it, and the sword slash, while having a few frames where you are vulnerable, feels great to master. The only minor issue I have with the controls are the wall jumps. The character has the Super Meat Boy effect where you slide a little up the wall when you jump into one and this leads to leaping on and off walls to feel slightly sticky. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it meant I avoided this technique whenever possible. This slight stickiness, though, is nothing compared to downright frustrating platforming controls of Ghostrunner. 

There are very few FPS games that have done platforming well (Dying Light is probably the best use of it that I’ve seen) and Ghostrunner sadly is with the majority. The inherent problem with platforming in 1st person is the narrow view. When you can only look in one direction at a time, it’s hard to know where a platform is under your feet. You also have no peripheral vision, meaning when you are trying to run up along a wall to run across it, you have no real idea how far you are when you jump. I died countless times in Ghostrunner due to this view. The horse blinders that come with a 1st person view is not so much of an issue in games with more open levels like DOOM or Dying Light since you can quickly choose a different path if you mess up (and more importantly can absorb a few hits before you die), but Ghostrunner’s level feel rather limited. This is partly due to 70% of the areas being bottomless pits like some empty oceans, but the linear feeling is mostly because enemy placements and the stage layouts are placed in very certain locations to encourage an optimal path through them. Even in the more open levels, paths you have to take to keep moving forward and killing enemies feel like set routes. The game has the 3D Sonic problem where the world feels like it was built specifically for the character of the game and not a real, breathing world. The moments where combat is left behind for straight platforming challenges throw the clumsiness of the platforming into sharp relief and it is not flattering; it’s frustrating at best and infuriating at its worst. 

Both games also have one other major similarity and that is a time dilation mechanic—an invaluable power to have when one hit kills you— but again, Katana Zero feels great to use while Ghostrunner stumbles. In Katana Zero, the player can slow down time for a few seconds with the simple press of a button. This works great as a way to more precisely position yourself, deflect a bullet back at an enemy, or just give you an extra second to assess the wave of mooks coming towards you. Ghostrunner, however, uses the ability to slow down time with a few different abilities, most notably the mid-air strafe. This move can only be performed in air. You press a button to slow down time and then you can move your character left or right, but momentum makes any slight tap of a joystick slide you gliding to the side like you were covered in grease. It is so loose and slippery that I found myself being unable to rely on it since my character would slide off further then I expected constantly. 

While both the games are very similar, the gulf of success between how Katana Zero and Ghostrunner pull off designing around instant death is vast and deep and dangerous. Katana Zero feels as disciplined as the samurai that the main character emulates. It truly feels like the designers thought long and hard and reworked and tweaked every aspect of the game to ensure it worked well with the speed, difficulty, and brutal nature of the gameplay. Ghostrunner feels like an honorable attempt at best and hypocritical at best. The game demands precision from the player but shows little in the design of enemy AI or controls. If I were to recommend one of these games, it would obviously be Katana Zero. While the story feels like a pace breaker at the beginning, I slowly got absorbed into it and found myself really engaging with the narrative and characters. They were the perfect break to let my brain cool off between intense combat sections. All Ghostrunner can offer beside it’s combat is a stock standard cyberpunk narrative and some of the most frustrating platforming sections I’ve ever played.

Pokémon Snap: Critical Miss #26

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Photo by Kimberly AJ. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Pokémon

I’ve discussed my love for the Pokémon franchise before, both in my Nuzlocke post and my review of Pokémon Platinum. While I’ve been playing the main series since childhood, I’ve hardly spent any time with any spinoff game. Sure, I played a little bit of Pokémon Stadium at friends’ houses as a kid and I dabbled in Pokémon Conquest for a short time, but I’ve never played a Mystery Dungeon game, XD Gale of Darkness, or Pokken. Nintendo is about to give fans a new Pokémon Snap game, something they’ve been clammering for since the original released on the N64 in 1999. I thought now would be a great time to play the game and see what makes it one of the most beloved and well-remembered spinoff games in the Pokémon series. 

Although you can name the character at the beginning of the game, canonically his name is Todd Snap. You play as him after he has an encounter with a rare Pokémon and Prof. Oak asks him to help him with research by taking pictures of wild Pokémon. You travel across Pokémon Island where Pokémon roam wild and carefree. The island reminds me of Monster Island from the sillier of the Shōwa Era of Godzilla movies. Despite the game taking place on a single island, there are many different environments to see from scenic beaches to fiery volcanoes, dank caves to lush jungles. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

The visuals and music are always colorful, upbeat, and cheery, creating a very peaceful and pleasant experience. The graphics have aged just fine in the over twenty years since Snap’s release with the highlight being the Pokémon models themselves. Pokémon Snap was the first time players got to see Pokémon in 3D and, while the models of the creature suffer from the usual N64 blockiness, they are all charming and well animated in the game. One of the biggest appeals to Snap is just seeing Pokémon in their natural habits, enjoying their days, getting into mischief, and just living their best Pokémon lives. It’s something you just couldn’t portray effectively on the original Gameboy games and it’s an aspect of Pokémon that no other game has really tried since. The closest we’ve seen to a return of watching Pokémon roam free is the Wild Area in Sword and Shield, but the frame rate issue and constant pop-in never made that feel organic. Seeing these creatures frolic through their environments adds to the feeling of Snap being a very peaceful game. And that’s before you even account for the gameplay.

Snap is different from most other Pokémon games because you never battle any Pokémon and the only capturing of them you do is with your camera lens. It’s a very “leave only footprints” mentality—well, besides the tracks Prof. Oak apparently left all over the island for the Zero-One, the tracked vehicle you used to navigate the island. Pokémon Snap is a rail shooter similar to a House of the Dead or a Time Crisis, only with a camera instead of a gun. Pokémon will run around, hide, fly, and perform silly acts and it’s up to you to find the best time to take pictures for Prof. Oak to rate.

Oak’s rating system is a fickle thing. It’s based on the size of the Pokémon, the pose they are making, how centered they are in the frame, and sometimes if they are doing a certain action. The guidelines are simple enough for someone like me, with pretty much no skill or knowledge of visual art, to understand, but it seems a bit inconsistent. When comparing two pictures of the same Pokémon, I swear sometimes the one I honestly thought was better got the lower score. It’s not really a big problem though since the game encourages you to replay levels multiple times so there are always new chances to get better photos of Pokémon. The score in general is mostly used as a way to progress through the game.

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

Reaching a certain score on your Pokémon Report will unlock new levels to play and new items to use in those levels. There is an apple for luring Pokémon closer to you or other areas, the pester balls that stun Pokémon with noxious gas, and the Pokéflute whose medley inspires Pokémon to dance and perform actions like Picachu using Thundershock. Getting these new items are always fun because they make you look at already completed levels in new ways. Often, you will see Pokémon hiding amongst the environments, but there will be no way to get a good photo of them. If you lure them close with an apple, it becomes possible. The beach stage has a sleeping Snolax you need to wake up with the Pokéflute for the best photo and the pester balls are great for stopping quick Pokémon long enough to take a picture or draw out Pokémon from their hiding places. While levels can sometimes get dull due to being stuck to one track and the Pokémon acting the same way every time, leading to having to mesmerize the levels and the best times to capture a Pokémon’s good side, there are enough secrets to discover in Pokémon Snap to keep it engaging.

From opening up new levels to performing certain tasks to have Pokémon evolve to just finding hidden Pokémon, there are a lot of secrets to discover in Pokémon Snap. It feels a lot like Star Fox 64 in a way with both games being rail shooters and both having secret requirements to unlock new stuff in them. However, Pokémon Snap is much better at informing the player on how to unlock its secrets with clues in the environments. For example: there’s a carving on the wall of the tunnel level showing a large egg with lightning bolts and musical notes over it. So when you see that egg in the level, you know to lure the nearby Picachu over to it and play the Pokéflute. When Picachu uses Thundershock, the egg will hatch into a glittering Zapdos. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com

I purposely played through as much as Pokémon Snap without looking up any secrets and it was very satisfying discovering things on my own. However, I feel there are some things in the game that an average player would never think to do on their own. Best example of this would be discovering Gyrados. This requires in the valley level knocking a Magicarp up a slope into a Mankey, who will then yeet the fish over a nearby mountain. Later in the level, the Magicarp will fall on land in front of a waterfall and you must quickly knock it into the waterfall where it will evolve into Gryados. It is more obtuse and requires more steps than anything else in the game that it feels sort of out of place—I don’t envy anyone who had to figure this out on their own.

Pokémon Snap is a perfect playground game—a game you and your friends would swap secrets and advice about at school. It’s a breed of game that excelled in the 90’s before the internet was the omnipresent force it is today, where being stuck in a game only lasts as long as it takes to type in the problem into Google. Because of this, I wish I had played Pokémon Snap as a kid more than any other game I’ve reviewed for Critical Miss. The game is still very enjoyable playing today with its serene and chill gameplay and being able to see Pokémon roaming wild in a way we haven’t really seen since. It is a short game, able to be beaten on a first playthrough in a few hours, but that’s becoming less of a fault for me as I grow older and my amount of free time is growing smaller and smaller, like a Lapras swimming into the ocean horizon. 

Photo by Wagnike2. Found at pokemon.fandom.com