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Archive: Problems of the Kingdom

What's this? A new entry in the Archive series?? After 10,000 years?! Why yes, indeed! Better yet, you get two of them! In one day, no less! Anyway, so the other entry I released was called "Problems of the Wild", and it was an old essay I wrote in the years after the release of 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now that I'm releasing that today, I figured I should also release an older essay on it's sequel game, 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The problem is, though, that I never quite wrote one. Or more accurately, I never wrote just one. Over the course of 2023, I wrote many a post between Twitter and Reddit where I went into immense detail about my opinions on the game, but they've never been reposted elsewhere. I have described my thoughts on here on my "Revisited" thread, but these words specifically have been left to rot in the depths of my old accounts. So, I've decided to explore my old profiles so that I can ascend these ancient opinions back to the surface. Also, a lot of this will also consist of me discussing BotW as well, as I often discussed the two games together. Now the following journey may feel very long, extremely bloated, scattershot, being too reminiscent of BotW, and even ultimately underwhelming, but hey: That's just a simulation of the Tears of the Kingdom experience.

This was written years ago. The following may or may not reflect my current opinions. I simply wanted to post these archived thoughts on this blog. To that end, it has been left unedited.

(Posted on Twitter - May 9th, 2023)

Playing a game

I recorded this clip days ago. I've lied to all of you.

(For context, TotK released May 12th. I played the game early.)

I'd post more clips but I'm having trouble with my ftp software. I already had this one on my phone. Anyhow, yeah I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom. I've nearly finished it. I just gotta find and assassinate Ganondorf.

Overall, it's an improvement over BotW. It actually fixed a few issues. For one, it's actually a bit linear now. It's still open but you have to beat everything to continue (basically Megaman). For two, the game has real side quests now. For three, the open world isn't totally empty anymore. It's filled with caves and such which are fun to see. There's also the Sky and the Depths which add a lot more content. Finally, there's actually a plot this time around. Botws story was dogshit so this is a huge improvement.

(after finishing the game, my story opinions...changed to say the least)

However it's still ultimately a glorified rom hack, so the game feels less like a sequel and more like an overpriced updated rerelease. It doesn't help that the game still shares many of BotWs core problems. Durability is still an obnoxious issue. The weapon fusing makes it a little bit better, but not much. Weapon fusing is less like enhancing a weapon and more like recycling a weapon into a different one. Either way you'll still have to deal with your supplies breaking.

Both Stamina and Korok Seeds return and they are entirely unchanged. If you disliked them in the first game, they're still here. Korok Seeds don't even have new puzzles. They're the same tired puzzles from the first game. Dungeons have not been improved much. It's still "Go to the 5 terminals we marked on your map for you". We do have something vaguely reminiscent of dungeon items though, so that's good.

Bosses have been improved. We have real Zelda bosses now, not just refighting Ganon several times. The voice acting and cutscene animation is still horribly stiff and awkward. I really wish they just had a simple text box like the old days.

The graphics are a bit better, but the performance is way worse. The game runs like shit. I've noticed the biggest drops happen whenever water is onscreen. Whatever effect they want the Switch to process for that water the Switch is clearly not powerful enough to run. It's possible the performance can be improved in patches, but Switch games have a bad track record of that not happening so we'll see.

(it was improved a large amount by patches, but still struggles hard)

I like the new runes. The Ultrahand (Link's upgraded Magnesis) allows for a lot of creativity and all four runes can interact with each other a lot more compared to BotW. Leads to more interesting puzzles. Also the Zonai relics make for fun puzzles as well.

Although overall it's quite a mixed bag, much like the first game (fancy that), but overall it's decent. It's equal parts a satisfying step up and equal parts a frustrating lack of improvement. It's better overall though.

Timeline placement wise, I'm really not sure. This game seems to confirm a totally rebooted canon. If I had to make a guess at this stage, I'd say that BotW takes place in a new split after Skyward Sword. SS seems to be the only other canon game. In fact if I were to be wildly speculative, I'd say that this is a retconned Fallen Timeline. So the timeline would go:

Skyward Sword

Breath of the Wild

Tears of the Kingdom

A Link to the Past

And so on so forth. TotK explictly states that this game is the first time Ganondorf has ever fought a version of Link and that this is Ganondorf's first appearance. However that can't be true because that was Ocarina of Time's role. OoT was explictly made to elaborate on Ganon's backstory from a Link to the Past. The adult timeline was supposed to be classic games. But then Wind Waker retconned the plot, so now the classic games had no solid timeline placement. And so we got the weirdness that was Fallen. TotK also serves the role of being an origin story for Ganon, and it even has mentions of an "Imprisoning War". It seems to me that this is supposed to be telling us that Botw and TotK were truly at the start of a reworked Fallen timeline all along.

Also, TotK is one of the jankiest games I've ever played. It is extremely fucking easy to break TotK. I had to actively try not to cheese every puzzle. Like the fact the game was so stupid and janky and easy to break was like the main reason I was enjoying it. The game's mechanics are pure stupid bullshit and it's fun to play around.

(Posted on Twitter - May 11th, 2023)

I beat Tears of the Kingdom. The ending was very underwhelming. Also there's no post game. When you win, you go back to your last save. Super duper lame omg. That kinda sums up TotK. It's BotW again but with some improvements. They made a lot of core fixes, but it still fails to live up to what I want from a Zelda game. It's a step up, but not by enough. Maybe BotW3 will finally reach the quality I want idk.

I'll rip the bandage off here: the dungeons still suck. If you want good dungeons, don't play this game. The lead up to dungeons can actually be pretty fun, but the dungeons themselves still suck about as much as the first game. The bosses are real Zelda bosses now. Dungeon items are here in spirit. You unlock a new move in the build up to a dungeon, have to use it mid dungeon for puzzles, and unlock it permanently for beating the dungeon. Way better system than BotW.

"Here in spirit" Lol Get it? Spirit? Oh wait the game still isn't out so people can't appreciate my joke...

Well anyway the overworld is better. It's bigger and it has more to see. The emphasis on the paraglider and sky makes traversal less tedious.

The game felt more difficult to me personally. I was still dying regularly even by the end of the game, which didn't happen to me in BotW1. Final phase of the final boss is still mindlessly easy like the first game. I didn't take any damage at all. It's basically a victory lap.

The dungeon item stand-ins are way better than the guardian powers from botw1. Guardian powers were like 2 passive buffs (healing and shield), one fighting move (thunder snap), and 1 traversal move (air jump). TotK has 5 major unlockables that give you active moves.

TotK has a

Wind burst

Water shield (that works like the Megaman 2 Leaf Shield)

Rolling projectile exploding thing? (Kinda hard to explain without spoilers)

Extra powerful thunder arrows (in this game, traditional elemental arrows don't exist)

a final thing I won't spoil

Guardian powers made you wait like 20 minutes in real time for them to recharge in BotW1. That was horrible game design. In TotK, these moves can be activated at any time. The only limit is a stamina esc recharge. You can use them very frequently. Wait times have also been removed from Runes. Link's new hand moves don't have any kind of timer like the moves in BotW. Makes the game feel faster overall.

The weird grab and stick things together move is bizzare and super janky but it's pretty fun to fuck with. The fuse weapons thing is kinda cute but it also just becomes boring routine whenever you find a weapon. Weapon fusing does not "fix" durability. It's a little better but not much. Durability is still a major issue.

The game has a way bigger emphasis on materials, but there's no good sorting options in your menu. Have fun sifting through a menu with hundreds of items trying to find the one thing with a specific effect you want.

The game has many real Zelda side quests, and not just the boring (get me x item) ones that BotW1 had. However the game overall has less content. Consider it a tradeoff. Despite mainly only doing story missions, I reached 35% completion.

The performance is awful and my Switch's battery drains super quick when playing it. Hopefully patches will improve these things.

Overall the game just feels like a version of BotW with a lot more polish in the story and gameplay departments. It's a better version of an existing game. It's so similar to BotW1 that I can only discuss it by comparing the two games. It feels far more like a rerelease than a sequel. For $70, that's pretty damn overpriced. It feels more like "Breath of the Wild: Miles Morales" than BotW2.

(Posted on Twitter - May 12th, 2023)

Ok so the zelda game is out now. Time to talk about the plot.

Spoilers yada yada

The weird "Zelda is a dragon" twist was bizarre. It would've worked way better if her "death" scene didn't feel extremely awkward due to the awful acting and animation. The magic involved in the game's plot was convoluted and poorly explained (so I guess that's one Zelda tradition they kept).

I did enjoy the mystery angle they kinda went with, even though the game's nonlinear memories just completely ruin it. You can't tell a mystery story when the cutscenes are unlocked in a random order. It's obvious they only did this because botw1 did it without any consideration for if that structure fit this game's plot. To it's credit, botws plot was (for better or worse) designed with nonlinearity in mind.

Also the final confrontation with Ganondorf was underwhelming. He talked a little bit, fought us, then ate his thingy and became a mindless dragon. Pretty lame way to end. "I must sacrifice everything to become powerful enough to defeat you!" he says seconds after he was just gloating about how weak you are. He then takes a cyanide pill (sorry secret stone) and becomes an infinitely easier boss fight. Bro sacrificed everything and got nothing. And you kill him and the game just kinda ends. Like Zelda shows up and talks a little bit but that's it. Roll credits. Basically the same issue with the ending in BotW. It's super sudden. The post credits scene didn't add much either. Like you can't get me to feel emotion over Mineru. I barely even know her. I can't help but feel like they're trying to set up a third BotW game which is why the ending felt so inconclusive. Makes me long for the days of every Zelda plot being it's own standalone thing.

That said, I didn't hate this game's plot. Unlike BotW, this one actually has some redeeming factors. I really enjoyed the sages, plus every region was actually fairly creative with the problems they were facing.

Although part of the reason I like this story ia because it's literally just the plot of Ocarina of Time. Like to an exact T. "Awaken the five sages to stop Ganondorf, the male king of the Gerudo who once swore a false loyalty to the king of hyrule. Also, Zelda is missing." Like I often accuse BotW's plot of ripping off half of OoT, and this game is basically ripping off the other half of OoT.

It's like Zelda's version of FF7R. It's OoT except it's way longer, split between multiple games, and generally questionably written. Except I actually like FF7R. FF7R was a game that was too creative, which is a lot more fun than a game that's too safe. Botw1/2 just feel way too safe with the story. Like, "Oh we'll change the Zelda gameplay to the point it's nearly unrecognizable, but we won't risk the plot." I originally praised TotKs plot for at least feeling like a new Zelda plot, but after finishing the game and really thinking about it I realize that's not really the case.

Also timeline wise, I'd say occam's razor. I believe it's a reboot that takes place in it's own timeline.

In conclusion, the plots better than botw but it's still worse than the game it's knocking off. Also there's no queer people as far as I can tell so it's an objectively bad game. I don't make the rules.

(In all seriousness I think TotK is decent overall. It's a step up over BotW, but still not a step high enough for my tastes.)

(Posted on Twitter - June 7th, 2023)

So I did some basic math when it comes to the shrines in TotK and holy shit this game has so much filler in it.

Like damn no wonder I felt like it was a damn treat when I walked into a normal shrine. Like oh my god, did Nintendo just run out of ideas for shrines halfway through? It doesn't help that many of the 81 real shrines also tend to be very short and underwhelming.

Botw itself had like 47 filler shrines (blessings and test of strength) giving it a total of 71 actual shrines. These games are so insanely padded out. It's wild. At least from my memory, BotW's shrine quests had a lot more to them. In TotK it's just "bring that crystal here".

It doesn't help that in my personal opinion, I don't think the Divine Beasts/Temples in these games are true Zelda dungeons. They're too short and basic. If I'm being generous, between all divine beasts and temples, there's like 3 dungeons between them.

(Posted on Twitter - July 28th, 2023)

It blows my mind how much people like TotK. The overworld was completely reused, the sky was barren (the tutorial island was the vast majority of the sky land) and the depths was a literal black void with no content.

The depths were legit this:

It was cool to see caves, but eventually I realized how repetitive those were too. Just enter, shoot the frog thing, and leave basically. They were also super annoying at times because a bunch of shrines were stuck in them so I had to run around randomly to find the entrance. TotK felt like such a confused game, even moreso than BotW. BotW is a game that sacrificed everything for the sake of open exploration, and to it's credit it did so well. TotK wants the same appeal of BotW but like, there's nothing to explore anymore! I've seen this already!

Playing TotK felt less like playing through a sequel and more like combing through a remake while trying to find all the differences. It's such a bizarre experience. I guess it's just trying to be a silly sandbox game, but like, WHY IS THIS A ZELDA GAME AT THIS POINT!

(Posted on Reddit - October 30, 2023)

Title: The biggest problem with modern Zelda (in my opinion)

(warning: this is long and has a few swears)

There's a lot of problems with the modern games (BotW, TotK). The story is bad (yes, botw too). The dungeons are poor, and the shrines are no replacement. The difficulty is all over the place, feeling incredibly unbalanced for the entire game. Your items don't feel rewarding, as most of them break or barely get use. Even the open world itself, outside of major locations, tends to blend together in my memory. However, all of these problems are actually one singular problem. Or rather, all stem from one singular design decision: The insistence to make the entire game "nonlinear".

What modern Zelda needs is linearity, for many, many reasons. Trying to make everything in a game nonlinear just kills so much of the appeal of a video game. It's one thing to play a dungeon or two in a different order. Being able to skip straight to the final boss, on the other hand, is going comedically far. At this point, the game might as well open with a dialogue box asking "Link, would you like to skip to the end cutscene?" Let it be known, I'm not saying that every game should be a hallway SS style. But like how SS went too far with linearity, BotW went way too far in the opposite direction. To the point to where the obsession with nonlinearity goes so far in these modern games that it actively undercuts the rest of the experience. Let me break down those issues I stated in the opening:

The story is bad (yes, botw too).

It's no secret that the writing in these modern games aren't exactly the best. Now, Zelda has never really been a bastion of quality storytelling, but it's undeniable that a large appeal to these game for a lot of people is the narrative. I'd actually argue that as the series went on, it got progressively better at writing a compelling story. Skyward Sword is definitely the best written game in that regard. Say what you want about Fi's babying, but I'm sure everyone felt sad when she went away at the end . It's completely reasonable to expect a good story from BotW and TotK. But what we got was... not so much.

BotW is definitely the better written of the two, but that just makes it the second worst written 3D Zelda. The biggest problem is immediately obvious: nothing interesting is happening in the present. Virtually everything that's remotely compelling was exposition dumped to us, or shown briefly in a flashback cutscene. The game expects me to care about the champions, despite the fact they're already dead and even then I don't really get to see them much (it also doesn't help that their personalities are bland). Yeah, it's kinda cool to see snippets of the world before, but only because the world of now is so uninteresting. As for the Zelda memories, well the character arc she has doesn't work because I'm not experiencing it in order. A large reason for why SS's narrative worked was because of its linearity.

The whole game feels like you're playing cleanup work after the events of a story that you weren't there to witness. It feels like what would happen if we begun Ocarina of Time immediately after Adult Link woke up in the present, except if most of the action happened in the past. It really makes you wonder why they didn't just, make the time skip happen a third of the way in? That fixes everything. If the past was happening in the present, and we actually got to walk around pre-destroyed Hyrule and experience everyone fail in real time, that would make the BotW half work so much better. Is that literally just a copy of Ocarina of Time? Yes! But a copy of Ocarina of Time is better than a half copy of Ocarina of Time.

However, they couldn't do something like that, because that would mean making the opening sections linear. Now I would argue that making the opening few hours linear would make the rest of the game feel even more open and freeing, but hey what do I know. Instead, the game is focused on getting you into the nonlinear world asap, so the important info is just dumped to you and the rest of the cutscenes are just acquired randomly. You could at least fix Zelda's arc by making her cutscenes unlock in a linear order... but wait no... that's a shred of linearity. My bad. Better not do that.

Why is the present boring? Well simple! Because the game is written so that if you skip anything, you won't miss much. The entire plot in the present is designed to be skippable, and the ending barely changes if you do. That's why the present wasn't interesting. It wasn't allowed to be interesting, because Nintendo didn't want any player left behind in the narrative, even if said player wasn't even playing most of the game. In other words, the plot is bad because it wasn't allowed to be good.

Then TotK comes along and said "What if we butchered OoT even more?". Truly innovative. TotK is even more blatantly a copy of OoT, even down to Ganondorf faking loyalty to the king and Zelda's whereabouts being a plot twist that she secretly transformed into someone/thing that you see throughout the game . It's Ocarina of Time, except half the cutscenes are different characters repeating the same script because you're obviously a stupid dumb baby who didn't remember it the four other times. Not to mention that the entire plot revolves around "Secret stones" (wonderfully creative name there) and characters being "draconified" (turned into dragons) when the eat them. This is the stupidest shit I've ever heard, yet the game plays them dead straight. The plot is so melodramatic. Even BotW had a few fun light hearted moments, and that was a game about a post-apocalypse. And all of this is just scratching the surface of the game's poor narrative. Why is BotW never referenced? Why does this game spoil it's own mysteries? Who came up with the name "Secret Stones"? Do they know how inappropriate that sounds?

As for why the plot sucks? You guessed it! By reusing all of BotW's story structure (alongside the game's own bizzare writing choices). This game tries to tell it's own narrative within the confines of BotW's structure, and in the process it mangles itself into pieces like it got caught in machinery. Why are the cutscenes so repetitive? Because they don't know which one you reached first. Why does the game spoil itself? Because god forbid you have watch the cutscenes in a specified order. Not to mention the biggest question everyone had: Where are the BotW connections? Well, Nintendo didn't want this sequel to have a sequel narrative, because god forbid you play the games themselves in a certain order. It's the same principle applied in a larger scale.

Worth nothing that a poor story also means that the dungeons, what the plot is designed to build to, lose a lot of their emotional weight, which on that note...

The dungeons are poor, and the shrines are no replacement.

I don't think I have to explain how the dungeons aren't very good. The dungeons obviously suck due to their nonlinearity, both on small and large scales. On the small scale, the dungeons themselves are consist of "Go to the 5 points in any order" then "beat boss". Because those five points are in any order, they don't build off of each other. They're just 5 different things on a checklist. The same problem applies on a large scale. Because the dungeons themselves are in any order, they can't build off of each other. They can't get gradually harder. They can't combine puzzles and items from previous dungeons because this could be your first dungeon. The shrines are no different.

Hell not only can the dungeons not grow with you, but the game itself can't grow with you. This all leads me naturally into...

The difficulty is all over the place, feeling incredibly unbalanced for the entire game.

Because you can do anything in any order and Nintendo wants no players left behind, that means that the entire game has an incredibly static difficulty. Enemies don't get smarter. Different enemies never get introduced. Puzzles don't get harder. The timing never becomes more tricky. Once you get good at the game in the first ten minutes, you'll stay as good for the entire runtime.

The game is pretty hard at first. Enemies kill you in one shot and falling is basically an instant death. Your items are bad and you don't have many. However as you play the game and get more items, you completely zoom past the difficulty of these early enemies. Because the game never grows with your growth, that means that the longer you play the easier the game gets. These games literally have a REVERSE difficulty curve. The game begins at it's hardest and gets gradually easier from there. I mean there's a reason why Eventide is so infamous. It's the hardest part of the late game because it reverts you back to the difficulty of the beginning. It really just shows how much easier the game gets as you go on.

Really, the only attempt these games make to grow at all is the blood moon, which makes killed enemies change into their "harder" variants. However, the only difference they make is how much of a bullet sponge they are. That's not challenge. That's tedium, and a waste of resources. Speaking of:

Your items don't feel rewarding, as most of them break or barely get use.

Because the game insists on being nonlinear, it also insists on making your items feel worthless. All of your items must feel disposable, because not all players will get your items. That's bad enough for the random miscellaneous items you get, but it's even worse for the major rewards that you had to actively work for. After all, why reward your work when not all players will do that work?

For example, one of the main issues with the Sage Abilities in TotK is that after you unlock them you never need them again. They only exist to give a slight advantage if you feel like it. (Frankly, the only one I even consistently remembered to use was Tulin and that was just to get around a bit faster). The obvious solution to this problem is to just put more puzzles and locations designed for these guys around the world, alongside puzzles made for them in shrines and dungeons. While we're at it, they should've make the abilities more powerful and unique so that you can't just forget about them and like use a fruit or a bomb instead. What if those red walls that only the goron guy can smash were all over the game? What if switches only Tulin can turn appear around the world? Etc etc. It's not some crazy idea to... checks notes... give your items a function.

Not only does this seriously hurt the items, but it also seriously hurts the exploration itself.

Even the open world itself, outside of major locations, tends to blend together in my memory.

This is the biggest problem with the game's nonlinearity. Even if you can forgive everything else for the sake of "well this was all to make the exploration good", their obsession with nonlinearity actively makes the exploration worse.

Remember that solution to the Sage Ability issue I just mentioned? Well, TotK is absolutely revolted by such a solution, as that would mean requiring to players to, god forbid, do something. The game hates the concept of coming back later to do something, despite the fact that that is the EXACT WAY to get people to remember their world. When I'm playing A Link to the Past, and I notice a heart container just barely out of reach, I'll remember this location. Then when I get what I need from playing the game, I'll go "I can get that heart piece now!". This is a core concept to games about exploration. Metriodvanias, for instance, are entirely built around this concept.

However BotW and TotK, despite having the so-called "best Zelda exploration", NEVER makes you remember the fucking world you're in. You know, the appeal of exploration. Not to mention that, while it's cool I can mark my map, that just means that I can mark every shrine from a distance without actually having to remember that was there. That just turns the shrines into a checklist for me to get to eventually. Really they should've made it so that you can only mark something if you're near it. We can already make custom way points. Limiting me to only marking 6 things from a distance at once would force me to remember what I found (although it's not like you ever find anything other than shrines/koroks though). But hey, these are the same games who think you can't count to five on your own while in the dungeons. I guess trust in their player's intelligence was pretty low while developing these.

What hurts the most about all of these issues I mentioned is that it doesn't really take that much to improve most of them. A third open world Zelda game could absolutely use all the concepts I suggested to improve the game without going fully linear like Skyward Sword. Have the story be told in a linear way. Have maybe 8 dungeons, with 2-4 unlocking at once and once you beat them, 5-7 unlock. Then 8 unlocks. Boom, nonlinearity while still allowing the game to build on itself. Have harder areas with new harder enemies unlock as you unlock dungeons, or hell allow you to go anywhere but have harder areas kick your ass if you dare enter them early. Make your core items you get as major rewards have the same importance and value as classic Zelda, and require us to come back to earlier locations with those items to show that we remember the map's design. All of these are things that would easily improve the open world Zelda games. Not just making them better games, but making them feel more like Zelda games. By killing the linearity, you're killing the Zelda.

(in my opinion)

Edit: I just want to quickly add that I've been reading every comment. I agree with a lot that's being said, and a lot of people are bringing up great points that I didn't mention in this post. I haven't been replying to everyone because it's just so much.

---------------

Speaking of comments, the above post had a few, and I replied to some. As a bonus, I'll include my replies as well.

For context, I was replying to a now deleted user.

Deleted User:

I am older than most of you. One of the first video games I ever played was the first Legend of Zelda. It had no story. It was completely open world. Exploration for the sake of exploration. And it was great. So “true zelda” my ass.

I like skyward sword and I like TOTK. Two different styles of games. [...] I don’t think the answer is to get rid of open world. The answer is to brainstorm more about how to make the whole open world important.

My Reply:

"the first Legend of Zelda. It had no story."

TLoZ had a story. A relatively simple story by modern standards, but it has a story. Enough of one that it was able to lay the groundworks of an entire franchise. Not much is told in game, but they did their best in the opening crawl. The story is primarily told in the manual, which was especially important for TLoZ. While most NES games don't really need the manual, Zelda was explicitly designed to make the player be forced to use the included paperwork. The manual is just as much a part of TLoZ as what's on the cartridge itself.

"It was completely open world."

This feels revisionist. "Open world" is a marketing term more than anything, and one that was not popular until the 2000s. It's hardly a genre. It used to just mean "game without loading screens" back when that was impressive. Now it just means "a game with one or more relatively large maps that are filled with things". Technically speaking, any of the Zelda games would qualify as an open world if made nowadays, arguably even Skyward Sword. As for the original TLoZ specifically, the overworld was exactly that: an overworld. It was an elaborate hub area for the game's main content: the dungeons. If you don't believe me, then just look at the game itself. Every dungeon is labeled "Level 1-9".

If by "open world", you mean "a game with a large map that's completely nonlinear" ala BotW then I hate to break it to you, but TLoZ doesn't qualify as that either. TLoZ was semi-linear. You could do some dungeons in different orders, but dungeons often require items from other dungeons, either to reach them or to complete them. They are numbered in a linear order for a reason. Fully traversing even just the overworld requires you to get items from dungeons. Additionally, the final dungeon requires you to beat every other dungeon before it.

What's sad about BotW is that if BotW was actually structured the same way as TLoZ, like people love to claim it does, then it would feel like a very different game. Dare I say, but a much better game.

"Exploration for the sake of exploration."

That's just false. TLoZ was not "exploration for the sake of exploration". You had a goal, and a very specific one at that. Find every dungeon, collect the crucial item within them, and slay the boss to recover a piece of the Triforce of Wisdom. Exploration may be one of the main appeals of gameplay, but it's not exploration just for the pure sake of it.

"And it was great."

Well, for it's time I suppose. A lot of its game design was pretty representative of its era, and not exactly in a flattering way. The game suffers from its obtuseness, and diligently flipping through papers or drawing your own maps with real life pencils and pens is asking too much of an ordinary player. I think we're in dire need of a modernized version of this formula. BotW promised that, but it fell a long way short in my eyes.

"So 'true zelda' my ass."

I never said in my most that BotW/TotK aren't "true zelda". I asked for changes that I believe will make them play more like what we think of when we imagine Zelda gameplay. In fact, many of my suggestions would make it play more like the first game specifically.

"I don’t think the answer is to get rid of open world."

Well, I never asked for that. I think an "open world" approach could work, but they need to bring back and expand on the semi-linearity of the original game. You can make a Zelda game that's both linear and free at the same time. I know this, because the original Zelda did this.

---------------

Now for a new comment thread with a new user, this one still around:

u/Lady_of_the_Seraphim:

There is an incredibly easy fix to a lot of these problems and it rests in one of the fundamentals of game design, switches and counters. I'm not talking "game design" in an artistic sense, I'm literally talking about a base function in coding a video game.

A switch is a binary check the code makes. The code constantly checks the switch and executes a different code if the switch is flipped or unflipped. An event in game will flip said switch. Say, "cleared 60 shrines" is the trigger for the switch. Once this is done the game makes changes according to the flipped switch.

Counters are the same thing except instead of just On and Off, the code checks the number of the counter and executes different codes depending on the number the counter is at.

In this case, BotW should have had a counter for how many Divine Beasts were completed. Counter = 0, all beasts are on basic mode. Then for 1, 2, and 3 completed beasts the code recognizes the number and executes a different layout for each beast. Effectively, this would mean they'd have to make four versions of the beasts and accompanying cutscenes that change based on what order you do them in, but again, that's a very common function in video game design. It would allow the difficulty to evolve with the player if the map adapted with how much you'd progressed. The enemy units could also be keyed off this counter with their AI becoming more complex the more beasts are defeated.

My Reply:

That's a smart way to solve the difficulty issue! However, I feel like even with that implemented a lot of things would be left unaddressed. Plus, it'd amplify the workload in a way where I feel like the manpower would be better spent elsewhere. Rather than making 4 versions of every dungeon for instance, I'd think it'd be better to simply have more dungeons and require some of them to be beaten before accessing later ones.

But still, good point! I'll keep that in mind.

u/Lady_of_the_Seraphim:

I'm coming at this from the perspective of making their ultimate nonlinearity approach work. Personally I'd just rather have more linear progression.

If they absolutely needed to do this "nothing is linear" approach, the map needs to evolve based on what's been completed. This would also make the game exceptionally replayable as you could do different orders in different play throughs to see the different difficulty versions of each Dungeon. Most definitely it'd be a lot more manpower but the unfortunate reality is that if you want to make a completely nonlinear game that still has satisfying progression, the only way to accomplish it is by creating multiple versions of all major events with the full knowledge the player cannot experience all of them in one play through.

As another bonus, this user also replied to my response:

u/EMI_Black_Ace:

"it'd amplify the workload"

Not by all that much, actually. This is already the approach taken by some games, such as Uncharted: Lost Legacy -- there's a segment where you complete 3 objectives in any order, and the objective includes solving a rotation/alignment puzzle. Each of the puzzles uses the same picture per objective, and the puzzle itself (minus the picture) is the same per objective number, i.e. the first one you do will be simple, the second one more complex, and the third even more complex. Beyond this, the same "effective" cutscene plays after completing each objective, but the setting in which the cutscene takes place is wherever you completed that objective -- i.e. there are three cutscenes with unique progression of story/dialogue/etc that can take place at any of the three objective locations.

This would not be all that difficult to implement, nor would it take all that much manpower.

For instance, having modular/swappable segments of the dungeons according to what you've completed -- i.e. a staircase may be swapped for a hookshot check; if you have the telekinesis ability then there's a harder version of a weight balancing puzzle that requires some kind of post-hoc "I have to stand here before I move this thing" logic to solve while the version without telekinesis doesn't require that step.

The biggest thing, though, is modified enemy spawns.

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One more comment thread. This user wrote a long careful rebuttal to my post, but we're just going to hone in on a small portion of it:

u/Capable-Tie-4670:

I disagree with a lot here and I’ve got some time to kill so here goes, I guess:

[At this point, they went through my story, dungeons, difficulty, and item complaints. I'll summarize their points quickly. For starters, they felt that BotW had a strong story, and that the fact we only get short glimpses at the past actually makes the present more interesting, because it adds mystery to the ruins. They do concede on my point about Zelda's character arc being out of order, but they argue that Zelda's hidden diary helps fix that issue somewhat. As for TotK, they agreed that it was just "godawful". Personally, I find their take perfectly understandable, and I go back and forth on the issue myself. As for dungeons, they agree that the new ones suck, but they think they barely matter anymore since they're a fraction of the game now. Personally, I consider that an issue in-it-of-itself, but whatever. For difficulty, they argued that the reverse difficulty curve is actually a good thing, as it makes the player feel more powerful. Personally, I think that just means the game should have more difficulty options. Finally, they think it's ok if common items like weapons and materials feel disposable since they're so, well, common. I personally feel like that missed the point of my complaint entirely.]

As for the permanent big upgrades/items like sage and Champion abilities, I feel like you’re misrepresenting just how useful they are. They don’t just give you a slight advantage in the game, they give you a huge advantage. Just cause you can still do the game without them doesn’t mean that they don’t make it a whole lot easier. Also, if certain areas and puzzles were gated with the requirement of a certain Champion/sage ability, it would kill the flow of the open world. That kinda backtracking works for other Zelda’s cause the worlds are much smaller but in a world as big as BotW’s and especially TotK’s, I’d probably forget about it and never come back.

Exploration

I mean, I already answered the whole thing about backtracking so I don’t have much to add here. I will say, though, expecting players to memorize the entire map would not only not make exploration any more interesting, it would actively make it more frustrating. Memorizing major landmarks and how they’re placed in relation to each other, while not really required, is really helpful and it should be left at that. Expecting players to memorize every nook and cranny of such massive worlds would be ridiculous. Being able to mark locations to return to them later is an absolute blessing. If it wasn’t for that, people would just forget about some areas and never return. And the marking system doesn’t just turn it into a Ubisoft type checklist open world because, first off, you can only mark a limited amount at a time, secondly, you still need close enough to be within sight of said area to be able to mark it and, finally, on your way to your marker, you’ll probably run into a few other things so it’s not as simple as you mark it and go to it(ok I guess I did have a lot to add here).

Conclusion

All these suggestions you’re making aren’t “fixing” the open air format or improving upon the foundation of open world Zelda, they’re just turning it into traditional Zelda. You’re trying to make these games into something they’re not and were never meant to be. Yes, BotW and TotK are wildly different from traditional Zelda’s but that doesn’t make them inherently worse imo.

My Reply:

"Expecting players to memorize every nook and cranny of such massive worlds would be ridiculous."

Well that right there touches on another major issue with BotW and especially TotK. One that I didn't mention in my post because it was irrelevant to my point about linearity. These games are way too big. If I'm honest, It feels like Nintendo made them gargantuan for the sake of marketing and not much else. The vast majority of the world of BotW and TotK are empty space. Hell, TotK has the depths which itself is 95% empty space with the occasional interesting set piece. I don't see any value in a world being this large if the majority of this space isn't being meaningfully used.

But beyond that, I completely agree that it's completely unreasonable to expect a player to fully remember a world this large. However, what's the point of exploring a world if the world itself is unmemorable? In a game about exploration, I should feel rewarded for doing so. Not just functionally rewarded with items, but emotionally rewarded with interesting and unique things to see and do. If the world is unmemorable, then I'm being emotionally starved of reasons to explore it.

Therefore. the world should be substantially shrunken down. Even a world half the size of BotW would be more than enough space. With less overall space, the world could be more densely packed with nooks and crannies to explore. With less overall space, it's much easier to remember everywhere you've been.

"Being able to mark locations to return to them later is an absolute blessing. If it wasn’t for that, people would just forget about some areas and never return."

I agree. Marking is useful, which is why I asked to limit it, not remove it.

"you still need close enough to be within sight of said area to be able to mark it"

You don't need to be that close to add a waypoint. With how high you can get in these games, you can easily make a waypoint from halfway across the map. Then you can turn that waypoint into a permanent mark in the map screen.

When I was playing TotK, I marked every shrine I saw in the distance with a star. When I eventually got around to nabbing them all it wasn't satisfying, because I didn't accomplish anything by simply noticing the obvious glowy thing in the distance while doing other tasks. It didn't take any memory on my part. It was ultimately a bunch of collectable locations on my map screen, but with an extra step. Because this game is nonlinear, that means none of my marks meant "something to figure out later". Instead it was "something to get around to eventually". That's a checklist.

"All these suggestions you’re making aren’t “fixing” the open air format or improving upon the foundation of open world Zelda, they’re just turning it into traditional Zelda. You’re trying to make these games into something they’re not and were never meant to be. Yes, BotW and TotK are wildly different from traditional Zelda’s but that doesn’t make them inherently worse imo."

I suppose I could've elaborated more on what I would change, but I wanted to keep the the post focused on BotW and TotK's actual design, rather than my hypothetical design. But since you seem focused on them, I'll elaborate.

When I was writing those suggestions, I was actually taking inspiration from how games like Super Metroid were designed, rather than classic Zelda (although yes they do share many design principles). I feel like if you want to reimagine Zelda to have a more open and explorable world, the metroidvania genre would be a great source of ideas. Metroidvanias are exploration games with intricately crafted worlds and a strong emphasis on finding and utilizing items, all while allowing the player to be somewhat free as they explore around. I feel like that kind of design perfectly grafts on to the Zelda franchise. Hell, I'd argue that the 2D Zelda games often feel like top down metroidvanias.

How I would structure this game would be to let you explore the world relatively freely, but to reach or safely traverse some locations you'll need items from dungeons. Dungeons can be done in any order that you can reach them, but most dungeons will need items from other dungeons to reach them to begin with. For example, let's say that the Forest Temple and the Fire temple can both be reached on foot. But to reach the Water Temple, you'll need the hookshot from the forest temple and to reach the Sand Temple you'll need the gauntlets from the Fire Temple. Then to reach the Shadow Temple, you'll need to use the gauntlets, hookshot, and the Sand Temple's hover boots. etc etc etc.

The game is nonlinear, technically. You can do the various dungeons in different orders. However, you do have to do prior dungeons to unlock later dungeons. The gating is simply what items you have. The game could even allow sequence breaking. Maybe you can reach the Shadow Temple without the hover boots if you make it through a difficult section designed with the hover boots in mind, but is technically barely possible to get through without them. The shadow temple will now be harder without them, but it's possible to barely squeeze through it and walk out of it with the Shadow Temple's item early. You'll think you exploited the game, but it reality it was designed with that in mind.

As for the world itself, it'd be densely packed with heart pieces, stamina pieces, and other valuable upgrades all over the place as a reward for exploring and doing sidequests. Items like this will often be in locations that reward you for having items from other dungeons, such as a heart piece near the fire temple you can get with the hookshot, or a stamina piece near the forest temple that needs the hover boots. When you reach a location like this, you can place a mark on your map where you're currently standing. If you think you see something in the distance, you can make up to 5 waypointers at once like BotW.

The random collectables (food, animals, monster bits, etc) from BotW can return as consistent small rewards for exploration, as well as for fun experimentation while cooking. However I think the weapon system should be heavily revamped. Breakable weapons as is feels like a punishment for fighting enemies. I think Link should have a base reliable blade that can be temporarily upgraded with items and more in the same was as TotK's fusing, with only the upgrades breaking with use. That encourages you to experiment with different weapon types while never feeling totally defenseless. You could then buy or find new base weapons to experiment with. I feel like this fixes the problems that people have with the durability system.

The story would be mostly linearly told. Maybe after completing 4 dungeons, some major mid-story event happens. Do every dungeon and you can reach the final one. Story would happen mostly in the present and is told via current day cutscenes. Maybe you can bring back scattered memories as bonus lore scenes, but they aren't anything more than that. The bulk of the plot is happening now.

Ooh, and here's a bonus cool idea I had: After completing all prior dungeons, you can reach the second to last dungeon, the Sky Temple. The reward for it is the biggest game changer yet: a paraglider. Afterwards the clouds part, and you can sail from the highest point in the map. Now you can simply sail across chasms you once had to ride around on your horse. It'll feel broken, but it's your reward for getting this far.

So yeah, that's how I'd reimagine the BotW formula. I feel like that would perfectly capture the appeal of both game styles and would be loved by fans of old and new Zelda alike. Best of both worlds sorta deal.

Ultimately, none of my criticisms were really focused on "This is different from older zelda, so bad". Instead, I focused simply on BotW and TotK themself and questioned the choices they made. I'm not saying they must go back to the classic formula. I'm fine with a new open world formula. My problem is that the open world formula they chose seems pretty poorly thought out. BotW feels like it's trying so hard to be different from classic Zelda that it ends up completely ignoring the fact that classic Zelda was designed a certain way for a reason.

Classic Zelda wasn't linear because the developers were evil. They were linear because that linearity had many intelligent design choices baked into it. By throwing out all linearity, they threw out all of those intelligent choices that came with it. It's throwing out the baby with the bath water for the sake of looking different from the earlier games.

I truly do think that an open world Zelda could work brilliantly if they brought some of those design elements back. We need a happy medium between SS's over-linearity and BotW's over-nonlinearity. I'm not asking them to throw out BotW's ideas entirely and make Twilight Princess 2 (not that I'd be opposed...). What I'm asking is for them to take the ideas introduced in BotW and the ideas from classic Zelda and carefully merge them together. To give us the best of both worlds. I don't think it's that impossible to recreate the appeal of both game styles in the same title.

They could even keep things like the breakable swords and disposable item system from BotW, so long as we frequently got permanent upgrades from dungeons and notable questlines. Additionally, the reward must match the effort put into getting it. In TotK, one of the questlines rewards you with a Goddess Sword. That's cool as a reference, but the thing breaks like any other random weapon. That's just not a good reward for a lengthy side quest.

I'm not asking for "more classic Zelda". I'm asking for a better BotW.

---------------

Now for a comment I made on another random thread, unrelated to any of the above posts:

(Posted on Reddit — December 26, 2023)

The player wasn’t really restricted in any way with where they could go or what they could do.

Ha ha, yeah sure. That's a joke. BotW and TotK are incredibly restrictive. There's zero room for choose your own adventure in the game's progression. You may be able to do any area in any order, but every area is interchangeable and doing one before the other doesn't impact anything meaningfully.

You're never given any real choices in BotW/TotK. If you see a shrine nearby, your choices are:

Do the shrine now (most logical)

Do the shrine later (procrastination)

Don't do it ever (this has no benefit and will put you at an objective disadvantage)

aka "play the game, play the game later, or don't play the game"

Every "choice" you make is just "Which item on my checklist should I do first?", with the answer to that being "It just makes no difference". If I do the Gerudo before the Zora it makes zero impact on the story and hardly any impact on the gameplay, beyond having some useless Champion/Sage ability earlier. There's never any major ramifications for your choices. If BotW and TotK limited you to do things in a certain order, the gameplay and plot would hardly change. BotW/TotK advertise the feeling of freedom without actually providing it. It's completely shallow.

Even just looking at the quest lines, there's barely any room for user creativity. You aren't being made to figure out one of many solutions to a given problem. You're being told by NPCs to do the exact thing an NPC wants in the order they want. The most you can do is skip a few steps in the "go talk to X chain" if you already know what they want. That's not freedom, that's just speeding up a linear chain of events.

---------------

Finally, here's a mini-argument I had once:

(Posted on Reddit — Janurary 1st, 2024)

u/xXglitchygamesXx:

Whenever I see "they aren't true Zelda" I just want to ask, what about Mario? What's true Mario? Just looking at the design philosophy of classic 2D Mario compared to Mario 64, you'll see those games play absolutely nothing whatsoever alike, yet I don't see anyone saying "Mario 64 isn't a true Mario game!"

Other franchises like Donkey Kong made radical shifts as well, going from the original arcade games to the Country series (and beyond). Ninja Gaiden is another great example, there's three games called "Ninja Gaiden" one for Arcade, one for NES, and another for Xbox, and they all play radically different with completely different design philosophies.

My Reply:

The Mario franchise is fundamentally simple. You jump, collect powerups, and grab a goal. Super Mario 64 fits this description well. The only difference is that SM64 focuses on a handful of levels with many goals (a cartridge limitation) rather than many levels with one goal each.

Donkey Kong Country is not in any sense replacement for the DK arcade game. It's simply another game starring the DK mascot.

Even ignoring that, DKC has far more in common with DK than TotK has to, say, OoT. DK is a simple platformer with a linear goal. DKC is a comparatively more complex platformer also with a linear goal. The gameplay is fundamentally in the same genre, even if the games have many differences. OoT and TotK meanwhile play like completely different games. The former being an adventure game with lots of dungeon crawling, and the latter being an open world sandbox game.

Ninja Gaiden (Arcade) is a game that could not be ported to the NES due to technical limitation. They began to develop an NES game based on the Arcade game, they decided to forego recreating the game to run on the weaker hardware and instead decided to simply make a completely different game that was more designed with console players in mind.

As for Ninja Gaiden (2004), that's actually a great comparison to BotW and TotK because that game is a REBOOT that tried to modernize a classic series by completely changing it's genre, appealing mainly to a different crowd of people.

u/xXglitchygamesXx:

"1. The Mario franchise is fundamentally simple. You jump, collect powerups, and grab a goal"

You could just as easily simplify Zelda down to that level of simplicity if you wanted (e.g. you explore, get upgrades, defeat bosses) regardless it doesn't change the fact 64 is fundamentally a completely and totally different style of game than it's predecessors. The side scrolling games are about starting at point A and ending at point B, 64 is about exploration, and it doesn't have any specific end point for its levels, you can find many different end points for the level.

"2. Donkey Kong Country is not in any sense replacement for the DK arcade game. It's simply another game starring the DK mascot."

You could say that about the modern Zelda games as well.

"The former being an adventure game with lots of dungeon crawling, and the latter being an open world sandbox game."

I'd argue both OoT and TOTK have a lot more in common as well, and that what you listed is not exclusively what those games are about. OoT can actually be considered an open world game just with a bit more limitations (e.g. some dungeons can actually be done in different orders), but if you reject that notion, there's no denying the original Zelda is a fully open world game.

"they decided to forego recreating the game to run on the weaker hardware and instead decided to simply make a completely different game that was more designed with console players in mind. 5. As for Ninja Gaiden (2004), that's actually a great comparison to BotW and TotK because that game is a REBOOT that tried to modernize a classic series by completely changing it's genre, appealing mainly to a different crowd of people."

So, it's just a matter of if the fanbase accepts the difference of the new games? That's ultimately what this boils down to, between Mario 64, Ninja Gaiden, DKC, etc (there's a billion other examples like Kid Icarus, Resident Evil, Castlevania Pac-Man, etc etc etc) it's all just a matter of whether someone accepts the change or not

My Reply:

Clearly you missed my point about Mario. 64 was altered out of hardware necessity. A game like Crash Bandicoot (something more in line with the 2D Mario formula) would not be able to fit on a Nintendo 64 cartridge because of size limitations. Mario 64 WAS FORCED to have fewer levels. It just so happened that a change made out of necessity also happened to be a winning formula that, despite differences, captured the same fun of the 2D games quite well (as well as some unique fun of its own).

Besides, I didn't simplify Mario. What I described is literally all there is to the core gameplay. There's a reason why most Mario games have to invent some weird new gimmick to base the whole game around (e.g. water jetpacks, unusual gravity, fusing with enemies): The game would be too simple and samey otherwise.

Anyway point being, Mario isn't comparable.

"You could say that about the modern Zelda games as well."

Aonuma literally said they were not making classic style games anymore because he thinks the modern ones are objectively better. They are quite literally a replacement. If Nintendo never came up with the idea of BotW, we would still be getting classic style games.

"I'd argue both OoT and TOTK have a lot more in common as well, and that what you listed is not exclusively what those games are about. OoT can actually be considered an open world game just with a bit more limitations (e.g. some dungeons can actually be done in different orders), but if you reject that notion, there's no denying the original Zelda is a fully open world game."

I'll spare you my long ramble about what an open world game is and how the classic games differ, because ultimately this is all semantics. Regardless of labels, both Zelda 1 and OoT both play extremely differently to that of BotW and TotK, to the point to where they're barely even comparable. The similarities that remain are very surface level. There's no denying that.

"So, it's just a matter of if the fanbase accepts the difference of the new games?"

... that's not what I said. Ninja Gaiden NES was made to be a different game out of HARDWARE NECESSITY. Additionally, they realized arcade style games simply didn't translate well to home consoles to begin with, so they just made a new game from scratch. So it's not comparable.

The Ninja Gaiden reboot meanwhile was a great example to compare to BotW because that's exactly what BotW is: a reboot, at least in spirit. It's essentially the start of a brand new series that shares the same name (and some of the lore) as an existing one. OoT and BotW are part of the same franchise, but they are not in the same series. When people say "true Zelda", they're really just referring to the original TLoZ series, which these new games are simply not part of. Some fans just don't like the new reboot series and wish they had more of the original series, which is a pretty standard fan reaction to any kind of reboot.

"there's a billion other examples like Kid Icarus, Resident Evil, Castlevania Pac-Man, etc etc etc"

Kid Icarus was a relatively obscure (and generally unremarkable) game with relatively few fans. The Kid Icarus reboot was essentially a brand new game that created a fan base all by itself. Not very comparable.

The original Resident Evil trilogy does indeed have many fans who think the later more action oriented games didn't do as good of a job at being scary, primarily due to it's gameplay change. It's somewhat comparable to Zelda, however keep in mind that RE only had 3 PS1 games before the switch to action. Meanwhile Zelda had decades of games before it's sudden switch.

Castlevania switched up it's gameplay styles constantly. As early as the second game there were massive changes. It's not really comparable to Zelda, which followed a famously consistent game formula before the sudden change in BotW.

Pac-Man? Really? That's one of your examples?

Ok well, Pac-Man is a video game series that has been very consistent since its creation. It's an arcade style maze game where you eat every pellet to win while avoiding enemies. It's very simple. Much like Mario, Pac-Man sequels thus had to invent gimmicks in order to distinguish themselves. The majority of these sequels never really caught on, and the original game remained the most popular. The only sequel to receive any major notoriety was Ms. Pac-Man, which was practically just the same game as the original Pac-Man but with an extra layer of polish. None of these are comparable to Zelda.

When it comes to home consoles, the Pac-Man series mainly existed as arcade compilations/"ports". The main exception is Pac-Man Championship Edition, which was an Xbox Live Arcade game that kinda reimagined the Pac-Man gameplay to pretty good success. However much like the arcade variants, Championship Edition still lives in the shadow of the original game. Aside from CE, Pac-Man received various random spinoffs made to profit off the brand, such as Pac-Attack, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man World, and Pac 'n Roll (off the top of my head). I'd say that none of this is remotely comparable to Zelda either.

Anyway this tangent is off topic.

"it's all just a matter of whether someone accepts the change or not"

Well that's always the rub, ain't it? When something you love undergoes a massive change, depending on what that change is it can be hard to still love it afterwards. For many, the change from classic Zelda to reboot Zelda was too much to handle. The parts of the series that were changed were the parts that made them stick around. They have a right to be upset about that, just like how fans who only like BotW/TotK would have a right to be upset if Nintendo hypothetically pulls a 180° and goes back to the classic series. They would've lost what made them stick around. It's all about empathy.

-------------------------

Finally, that's the end of this. After the above argument, I had basically stopped talking about either game online. I probably could find more posts if I spent more time collecting all of this, but why would I add additional content to this? It's only a $10 upgrade.

[randomboo256]

Archive: Problems of the Wild

Yep, I'm bringing back my old "Archive" series for two more entries, and these are major ones. The prior entries in the Archive series mostly consisted of texts I wrote while in high school to then privately share amongst my friends. This one is no exception. In fact, this was my biggest and most carefully made review at-the-time. For whatever reason, I never posted it. As you may have guessed from the title, it's a lengthy criticism of 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and one that I wrote back in 2019, then revised in 2020 then again in 2021. The additions that I made in 2020-21 will be clearly labeled as "Addendums" throughout. As for why now? I figured that, since the Nintendo Switch 2 is looming on the horizon, I should finally rerelease my own legacy content with no meaningful alterations, except I'm not charging you an extra $10! What a steal!

This was written years ago. The following may or may not reflect my current opinions. I simply wanted to post these archived thoughts on this blog. To that end, it has been left unedited.

An updated retrospective on the often ignored issues in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Squadila! We are off!

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (TLOZ: BOTW) is truly an anomaly of the Zelda franchise. It, unlike its predecessors, completely changed up the formula that other Zelda games often strictly abided by, and the game wants you to know that. So far in fact, that on the game’s page on Nintendo’s online storefront, the Nintendo eShop, it reads: “Forget everything you know about The Legend of Zelda games.” So what did it do?

Breath of the Wild is the first game in the Zelda franchise in which the game had an open-world, which abides by a current gaming trend widely popularized by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Open-worlds, like other gaming trends at their time, were lauded by critics, often leading to important criticisms of the game going overlooked. 

An easy example is Bethesda, the company behind Skyrim as well as a handful of other open-world games like it. Bethesda’s games are riddled with tens of hundreds of technical flaws and glitches. Critics and fans alike overlooked these glaring flaws and gave Bethesda a pass. This led to Bethesda to not only fail to improve their craft, but to try less and less to make a good game as time went by. This led to Fallout 76: an unfinished mess of a game with more bugs than one could count and scummy microtransactions galore.

A similar case happened with BOTW. The game was lauded by critics and fans, despite having numerous flaws. Mostly because of the defining feature: “You can do anything you want, when you want.” So what are the flaws? Let’s start from the top.

I just wonder what Ganon’s up to...

The plot of BOTW is nonexistent at best. Because of the dedication of “You can do anything you want, when you want.”, the story had to take a backseat. It’s hardly there. Here’s the plot: “Go kill Ganon. He’s a bad and he's doing a bad.” Hell, even that’s a stretch. We never see him doing anything bad. Or at all. All he does is float around the castle. He certainly looks evil. But that isn’t enough. The rest of the story is just backstory (and not very interesting backstory at that). It’s all about people long dead that you can’t do anything for. It’s all just meaningless fluff to convince you that there is more plot going on than there actually is. And also, the voice acting leaves something to be desired. 

Addendum to the story

It’s a shame the plot is so lukewarm, considering the plot is generally the best part of Zelda games. They also try to make emotional moments between Link and Zelda, but they fail because you never see Zelda in person until the end, and when you do it’s underwhelming to say the least. Even if you ignore that and just focus on what is given, the plot makes no sense. Let’s go over some of the plot holes off the top of my head.

After 100 years, why hasn’t society rebuilt itself? 

Why are the majority of towns still in ruin? The world acts like the disaster happened last sunday. 100 years is a long time. Look at the real world. Not even a century has passed since WWII and the world is completely different. I get that there are monsters, but if the monsters were that much of a problem, why is anyone still alive? 

Why is Zelda still young? Everyone else has aged. Why didn’t she age? Oh because she wouldn’t look like waifu bait anymore. I see.

How has Zelda been able to hold Ganon back for so long? 

What is she even doing anyway? They never explained it. 

Why is it that right when Link is starting to wake up she “can’t hold him back much longer”? 

In fact, why does she lose her grip right when Link walks into the final boss room? You could beeline straight to Ganon at the start or spend 500+ hours climbing mountains and either way she loses her grip when you walk in. Maybe she got excited seeing him and lost grip…? But they don’t say that in the game nor does it come off that way.

Why did it take 100 years to revive Link? It isn’t like he died and they resurrected him with magic. He was alive. Why didn’t they just heal him? This is a game where eating apples can revive you from the brink of death. 

If Zelda is holding Ganon back, why is Ganon seen flying around the castle? 

Why does Ganon have control over everything if Zelda is “holding him back” whatever that means? 

What exactly is Zelda preventing Ganon from doing? Preventing his physical pig form from leaving? 

What’s the point of holding Ganon back anyway? He won already, has he not?

What does Ganon want?

 In fact, what is he even like? 

In fact, why is he like this shadow-y thing in the first place? This isn’t established in the series, and it certainly isn’t explained in Botw. Maybe it’s for the sequel.

How would I change the plot? Well here is what I would change it to. I think that the game’s plot would have been a lot better if Ganondorf was completely free and did rule the world. Make it so it was only a couple years passed. Zelda is free, but she’s in hiding, alongside Impa. Once Link is free, the dead king tells Link to go to them. They tell Link to go free the Divine Beasts. When Zelda realizes that Link forgot about her, there could be an emotional moment where Zelda gets upset and leaves the room. After you complete the memory quest, you can return to Impa and Zelda and talk to them. Zelda will be happy, and she will mention that she forgot to give you the Champion’s Tunic, which now serves as a reward for completing the quest.

Throughout the game, we would actually get to see Ganondorf in cutscenes and we can hear about the things he did from the npcs. Link could slowly free places like Kakariko from his rule. Once everything is done, Link defeats Ganon and we get a nice wrap up to a romance plot with Zelda. Why not? They clearly wanted to do that in game and got cold feet.

It didn’t take me very long to come up with a lot of improvements to this plotline, and I think that one of my biggest problems with the plot. 

You must die!

BOTW is praised for its combat. “It’s the best in the series!” - BOTW fans. I’m here to argue that it’s style over substance. It’s crazy and flashy, but that’s it. Aside from some elemental mechanics, minor stealth, and counter attacks, it’s the same thing as the other games.

But there is one mechanic that makes it much worse than other Zelda games: weapon durability. In BOTW, shields, bows, and everything from mops to the Master Sword, can break after enough use. Bows rarely break, and I never really used my shield a lot because it doesn’t even block most attacks (another major problem with combat in this game). 

The big one is weapons. The problem with this is they often break between 1 to 6 uses of that weapon. Because of this, an enemy encounter inherently takes a toll on you. You need your weapons for more important things. Therefore, it makes it a much smarter idea to just avoid combat altogether. 

Which soils the idea of the “The combat is the best in the series!”. Even if it was, you wouldn’t want to actively engage with it for a number of reasons. Because not only does it waste weapons, but it wastes food, which is used to restore health. Because in BOTW, even the smallest of enemies pack a major punch. Expect one-hit KOs. Many, many one-hit KOs. 

Even when you’re powered up enough to handle those hits, they still pack a wallop. You will have to restore that health via consuming food. But you again need that food for more important things. But to add insult to injury, when you do kill those enemies, you get something like a weapon or food that’s worse than the ones you wasted, or a pitiful handful of rupees.

Addendum to the combat

Upon further inspection, I would like to add onto my thoughts on the combat. 

While there is a large variety of ways to fight, most are incredibly ineffective or more tedious than the simple solution, which I’ll explain in a second. But first, the weapons. 

The weapon types are very unbalanced. Big weapons take too long to use and are so hard to aim that they’re practically useless, or at the very least quite inferior. Most enemies are fast, so fighting slow is a bad idea. 

Swords are better. They swing fast enough and do good damage, but because of their short reach you have to get right up in your foes face, and considering most enemies fight exclusively melee, you often get hit. Swords pale in comparison to past Zelda games. You’re limited to basic horizontal swings that stick you in place. It makes sword fighting feel very stiff. Even OoT had more complex sword mechanics.

The best is easily spears. They may deal the least with each hit, but they hit very fast. More importantly, spears are so long that in many cases, it can hurt enemies without getting close enough for them to hit back quick enough. Many battles devolve to walking around in circles jabbing the enemies. But once you get lighting weapons, fights become a joke. The lightning spear is the best weapon in the game. One jab shocks the enemy in place (dropping their weapon). In the time they take to unstun, the spear will recharge. Jab them as soon as they unstun and wait for the spear to recharge, etc.  The cycle continues until they die.

Not to mention that most enemies are bullet sponges (as in they have an absurd amount of health) as well as the aforementioned ridiculous amounts of damage they deal. This game uses a ragdoll physics engine (specifically a modified Havok engine.  Garry's Mod also uses a modified version of Havoc. A little fun fact.), so you either get pinned to the ground as you get pummeled to death, or by the time you get up, another enemy comes at you and you have little to no time to react. So essentially, every fight is either you infinite the enemy, or the enemy infinites you. Great.

Many things were removed from combat that were in past Zeldas, specifically Twilight Princess. Here’s a list of some:

You can't swing your weapon while moving.

All forms of sword swings outside the basic swing, jump (which is clunkier now), and spin (which has never been that useful) have been removed, making Link feel more robotic.

Rolling is gone. Not a super useful move, but it was very iconic. Just another Zelda thing BotW removed for no reason.

Sword fighting on horseback has been nerfed.

Link now only attacks one side in a pathetic jab.

Link can no longer spin attack on horseback.

Link can no longer quickfire arrows, slowing down combat.

While quick spin attack is still in, it still drains stamina, which partially defeats the point of the quick spin attack as it's supposed to be a faster and free spin attack, but it requires practice to consistently pull off in a combat scenario.

While partially already covered, all the unlockable sword moves in Twilight Princess to my knowledge are missing, with the exception of the shield bash, however that has been nerfed.

The dumbing down of sword fighting to just "press button to swing" makes sword fighting feel way more repetitive, and generally less useful. Relying on unorthodox strategies is more or less required both to be effective and to have any fun with the combat system. With everything considered, it's odd people are quick to say this game has the best combat in the series. It adds less than it takes away, as well as introducing unique problems such as the weapon breaking system.

Jumping left/right to dodge attacks is WAY worse than other Zeldas. Z-targeting once would make everything revolve around the enemy you are trying to fight, so when you dodged, Link would dodge wrapping around the enemy.  But in Botw if Link tries to do that, Link just dodges to his side, no matter where the enemy is. It could be because other 3d Zelda game engines were being designed from the ground up to be 3d zelda game engines (not modified from an already existing engine), but it could just be because this game was poorly designed. 

Also, some people say that combat taking a toll is a good thing because… idk. Maybe in a better game they could actually run with that concept and do something fun with it. Make a game where combat is intentionally discouraged in that way, like a horror game, a stealth game, a survival game.... wait those genres already do that.

Sarcasm aside, Botw clearly wasn't designed with that in mind, so the game suffers from it as a result, instead of benefiting from it like it could have. I mean, what does botw have to lose if weapons didn't break and if arrows were as easily replenishable as past games? 

Nothing imo. I think that those merely serve as annoying and unnecessary systems in a game that doesn't blend well with them.

They come off as annoying rather than fun. 

Like an inconvenience rather than challenge.

They discourage you from engaging in the combat and rather just avoiding every enemy like it's the plague.

Gee… It sure is boring around here.

This is a big one, Despite the massive size of this world, there isn’t much to it. The game is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. On your grand exploration of Hyrule, you will: 

Find Korok seeds

Find the occasional shrine

Find Korok seeds

Find one-note NPCs

Find Korok seeds

Run into generic wildlife

Find Korok seeds

Find cool little structures that are otherwise meaningless

Find Korok seeds

Find a rare special shrine (i.e. Eventide, that completely dark area, mazes)

And find Korok seeds.

That is, if you find anything at all. 4/5s of the time you find nothing or you suddenly realize you’re exploring the same area again because everything looks identical. But, getting around can be fun. It normally isn’t. But it can be fun. You know, once you spend an extra $20 to play the dlc chapter to unlock the motorcycle. Horses are still as clunky as always, and they are much slower than what you can do on foot, and running around everywhere also isn’t ideal.

This game is incredibly repetitive. You found a mini-boss in the overworld?! Cool! I hope you like fighting it a lot, because you will do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, etc. Did you like the boss at the end of [Insert divine beast]? Well, you have to fight it three more times with slight changes. Oh, so you do want that motorcycle? Well, you gotta fight it 4 more times! Yep, that’s where your $20 went! Boss refights! Did you like fighting [insert any enemy]? Well, I hope you like fighting it a lot, because there are very few kinds of enemies. So you will fight it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, etc.

But it doesn’t just stop at enemies. Remember food? Well, because enemies hit so hard, you will need a lot of food. How do you get food? By making it. How do you make it? You need ingredients. How do you get ingredients? By finding them randomly or buying them. How do you get money? By finding them randomly or by selling stuff. How do you get the stuff to sell? You find it randomly. And you make each dish one by one. It’s tedious! And it isn’t fun.

All Korok seeds are all one of about 6 puzzles. All shrines feel identical, and so do the Divine Beasts. The extra dungeon at the end of the dlc also just reuses elements from the already similar feeling Divine Beasts. Hell, almost the entire map feels identical. Combat feels identical. Everything feels identical! The entire game is “Great! Now do it again.” 

It’s kind of like life in that sense. It is incredibly boring, repetitive, and if you try to do anything out of the norm, it’s a great risk that will likely lead to death or will really mess you up. But that is NOT a good thing. Let’s leave games similar to life at Animal Crossing. At least Animal Crossing is somewhat charming in its mundanity. In fact, speaking of charm...

Addendum to the exploration

Let’s ignore the world itself now, because even if the world was massive and diverse, the game still messes up its exploration, and that’s mostly because of one thing: stamina. Link has a stamina meter, which essentially just exists to heavily restrict certain moves. 

What moves? Well spin attacks, climbing, gliding, swimming, and running. Yes. Running in a massive open world game is limited. Not only that, but once the meter is fully drained, Link can’t do anything until it refills. Additionally, it stops your current climbing/swimming/gliding, making you fall and normally lose a lot of progress. 

My question is this: what do these systems add? Nothing, other than being annoying and slowing you down. Having infinite stamina wouldn't break the game. It would just make it much faster (something the game really needs) and more convenient. 

When it comes to climbing and swimming, these actions are incredibly tedious. It devolves into just holding up and waiting forever for something to happen. You can speed it up, but that consumes all of your stamina real quick. 

The only option is to sit your ass down and wait for something to happen. Even worse if you end up running out of stamina, which will normally end up with you stuck back at square one, resulting in a complete waste of time. Between stamina, the rain, and your IPad powers needing to wait to refill, it's like entire game feels like nothing but waiting for things to happen half the time.

“Great! I’ll grab my stuff!” - Zelda Series 

In BOTW, there is almost nothing Zelda related. If you remove the few easter eggs, returning species, and the Master Sword (which feels lazily slapped in) and you would never have been able to tell it was ever supposed to be a Zelda game at all. In brief, the main dungeons in BOTW (aka the divine beasts) feel so half assed compared to literally any other dungeon in any other Zelda game. They used to be these large, multilevel labyrinths full of puzzles, and while that's still kinda true now, they still pale in comparison. The puzzles feel watered down as well, especially considering the lack of true dungeon items.

This especially hurts with the lack of the series' signature charm. Even the series at its worst in the past had maintained the charm it established back when the games first started being RPGs. But BOTW just doesn’t have that charm. The game removes so many iconic things from Zelda that’s not even worth attempting to list them all. It’s faster to list what they did keep, and that’s because they didn’t keep much.

It also lacks when it comes to music. The game has little music. What is there ranges from decent to unmemorable to outright annoying. The music is often just random unconnected notes from a piano. It sounds so lazy. The Zelda franchise has a ton of memorable tunes. Not only does this game not use any of those tunes, but it adds nothing to that list. 

The only good song in the game is the song the game plays for 30 seconds at the beginning and never again until the end credits. Even then, the Smash bros version is superior, so this game adds nothing in this category.  Well, that and some of the dungeon and battle themes. Admittedly, the cutscenes have pretty good music, but most of the gameplay itself (aka the vast majority of your playtime) is very lacking. You're better off just listening to a playlist of Zelda songs from other games while playing.

Not to mention the technology. This is a Zelda game. Technology has never been a factor, aside from small doses here and there. This game spits all over all of that. I know they try to justify it in the game through story, but it just feels jarring to see sci-fi elements in a fantasy game. It’s not even hard to rewrite this game to remove the technology. Zelda is known for magical mystical adventures. This contrasts so hard with BotW, and not in a good way. At this point, they should just give Link a gun.

The game is so different that I can’t help but wonder if it was always intended to be a Zelda game. Throughout BOTW’s development, Nintendo was constantly teasing a new Zelda game. But maybe, just maybe, something just fell through; they didn’t like the ideas they had (or something of the like) and the game was scrapped and then replaced by an ambitious new IP they cooked up. That’s just a theory, though.

“Forget everything you know about The Legend of Zelda games.” If you forgot everything about yourself , and then proceeded to act entirely different, then you aren't you. You’re someone else that looks just like you. In my eyes, at least.

Imagine if Nintendo released a new Pikmin game, but called it and themed it as a Mario game, going off about how it’s the way Mario is from now on. Imagine the response that would get. But that’s what BOTW is to Zelda, but instead of being a Pikmin clone, it’s an uninspired copy of every other open-world game on the market. The game clearly took some notes from Bethesda. Probably too many.

Addendum to the lack of series elements

The most likely cause of the lack of Zelda staples is the same reason we went from the cheeriest 3D Zelda game, Wind Waker, to the darkest, Twilight Princess. It’s because anytime Nintendo is faced with criticism towards 3D Zelda, they way overcorrect in the opposite direction. That’s the main reason why the 3D Zelda games are so distinct from one another. To fully understand Breath of the Wild, you must understand what came before: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Skyward Sword (SS) was a game made for the Nintendo Wii, and it damn well wanted you to know that, in basically all aspects of its design. The obvious thing to point to is its overreliance on motion controls, which later games simplified down just to aiming, including BotW. However, that’s not the most important thing in the game that was influenced by the console. 

The Wii had a very large market of mostly casual gamers, people who didn’t normally play video games. As such, Nintendo designed the game so that not even Grandma can be left behind not knowing what to do. To achieve this, they did several things. First off all, the game, especially early on, likes to hold your hand. They added hint stones that straight up explain puzzles for you, and, more pressingly, your partner, Fi, would explain quite literally everything for you in excruciating detail. Partners normally served to offer some advice, as well as provide certain menu options. Fi cranked that up to eleventy seven, constantly interrupting gameplay to explain basic stuff you probably figured out moments before she said it. As an aside, she also had little personality of any kind, which made it even more annoying. 

It didn’t stop at hand holding, however. The game design itself was designed very differently to a typical Zelda game. The overworld was designed the same as dungeons. As such, it felt much more linear than a normal Zelda, even though Zelda was always about that linear. It’s just now the game itself makes that abundantly clear. My assumption for why they did that was that they didn’t want the casuals getting bored or something.

Now, I should state here that Skyward Sword is still a very good game, but the forced motion controls completely overshadowed the rest of the experience in the eyes of the public. Casuals were never a reliable market, especially by late in the Wii’s lifespan that Skyward Sword released in. By then, iPhones really started skyrocketing in popularity, and the Wii was an old fad. This is something Nintendo would only understand fully until the Wii U’s failure. That left Skyward Sword only to be bought by the leftover gamers, and they screamed and ran when they saw the motion controls. All of this led to Skyward Sword selling substantially worse than Twilight Princess, the previous 3d Zelda game. 

This caught Nintendo’s attention, and they decided to make their next game the polar opposite to Skyward Sword in many ways. They completely ditched partners, made the game completely open (I’d argue too open), and got rid of dungeons almost entirely. Skyward Sword was also a game that doubled down on things from prior games. BotW is a game that removes so many things from previous games, while not adding much to compensate. In that sense, many of BotW’s differences are just being different for the sake of being different. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?

My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for.

Every game can live or die based on its difficulty. I would say this one dies. Because of the “You can do anything you want, when you want.” gimmick, the entire game is the same level of difficulty. It’s a high bar at first, but a little over halfway in you surpass the bar and then the rest of the game becomes a cake-walk. So the game starts off at its hardest point and ends off at its easiest point. I have never seen difficulty this botched before.

Oh boy! I'm so hungry, I could eat an Octorok!

I’ll admit. There is some fun to be had just playing around. Just having stupid mindless fun. You know, doing stuff like biking around from point A to wherever the road takes you (if you catch my drift). Clearing random shrines as you see them. Doing and experimenting with random stuff. It reminds me of Garry's Mod (in more ways than one) in just playing around and losing yourself with that level of freedom. No real goal in mind. 

But then, I realized something. Despite the momentary joy, it left me feeling completely unfulfilled. It’s the junk food of gaming. Sure, it tastes nice, but you’re still going to be hungry after you eat it. So you just eat more and more, and before long you have diabetes grow sick of the taste and just want to eat something that will actually fill you up. At best, that's what BotW can hope to achieve. Since doing everything by the game’s actual design isn’t good, all you have left is to have your own fun.

“I won!” - BOTW

Well, despite all of these flaws, BOTW was praised beyond rationality. I clearly disagree. This game is easily one of the most flawed games in the franchise. “You’re lying. You’re only saying all this stuff to be contrarian.”  I’m saying this genuinely, as a fan of this franchise.

So I must hate it, right? Wrong. The game can be fun.  But is it the best game ever made? Hell no. It has WAY too many flaws to ever be considered anywhere NEAR that in my eye. 

But the biggest issue is that the concept of “You can do anything you want, when you want.” is flawed. A game can’t have no rules. That’s a mess. But BOTW has rules. So… you can’t “Do anything you want, when you want.” Besides, Garry’s Mod is a game with no rules. And it gets very boring after awhile, even with the memes it brings.

Good games have structure and order. BOTW doesn’t. “You can do anything you want, when you want.” is a gimmick, and not a long lasting one at that. It’s a shame what happened to Zelda. I really enjoyed a lot of the games in this series, but if this is how things will be from now on, I’m less than thrilled to say the least. Oh well. I give this game a:

4/10

-Maycie Hughes 2019 (Revised 2020-21)

-------------------------

Huh, so that was my old essay, huh? Yeah, I definitely don't agree with everything I said there. (Seriously, why did I end with a review score, and why one so stupidly low? Even with the problems I have with it, it should be at least a 7/10). Anyhow, this review definitely be very different if I rewrote it today, especially considering the sequel. A lot of this really comes off as overly aggressive ranting, which makes sense considering I wrote this in the middle of my "edgy" phase. Ugh. I'd recommend reading my post "Tears of the Kingdom Revisted" from last year, as well as my new post "Problems of the Kingdom" for a more updated and thoughtful opinion on these titles. Oh, what's that? Why wouldn't I just remake it in this post? Well, because then I'd have no choice but to charge $80 for it, and that's too much for ya.

[randomboo256]

Yuri Grab-bag 2: Beyond

*technically this isn't solely yuri but shhhhh

Whelp, it's that time again. Last time, I posted a lengthy remaster of a Bluesky thread where I detailed a long list of sapphic-focused manga and webcomics, and today is time for round two. This will be a compilation of my second thread, except this time I'm expanding beyond my original limits.

This post will contain reviews of varying length for any worthwhile comics, manga, and books that I happen to come across that feature heavy LGBT themes. Generally speaking, it will still be yuri-centric.

On that note, I'll let my past self take the wheel:

(Posted on Bluesky — February 10, 2025)

My yuri thread got too long, so I'm starting a sequel thread. If you don't know, this will be a thread where I write "bite-sized" reviews on a lot of LGBT comics/manga/whatever else that I read through. I'll be coming back to regularly update this. It's essentially a detailed recommendations list. I'll likely be focused on stories about queer women, since, y'know, I'm a bi trans gal? However, there may be some exceptions to that rule. Traditionally, I never posted about this kinda stuff, but one thing the world needs right now is more queer stories, and I feel a duty to highlight them.

Our Dreams At Dusk

If you read my yuri thread, you'd have noticed that the stories I discussed were often radically different. It went from as low stakes and ordinary as normal college kids to as high stakes and insane as world destroying threats that must be defeated with the power of love. Despite that wild disparity, I think this might be the most different story from the bunch. First of all, this story is centered on a man, Tasuku Kaname, but secondly, romance isn't the primary genre. Rather, this story is a serious drama that's interested in the LGBT community itself.

The story opens on a gay high school boy, Kaname, who's considering suicide after his classmates found out and began bullying him over his sexuality. However, he became distracted in the midst of that when he saw a person doing freestyle epic parkour. He talks to them, and he ends up ranting about his life. They then suggests him to spend time in a public lounge that they owns, as it's filled with people "like him". Sure enough, he goes, and thus we meet our wider sitcom-esc ensemble cast.

Without going into too heavy detail (as you really should read it), there's an adult lesbian, an adult trans man, an older gay man, a tweenage trans girl, and of course the owner, who's known only as "Someone". Each of them goes through their own problems.

The lesbian wants to marry her girlfriend, but her GF is too scared to come out to her parents.

The trans man has to deal with an old high school friend who's trying to be supportive, but who's acting a bit condescending and insensitive.

The old gay man is dealing with the stress of his partner being in the hospital.

The tween trans girl is still struggling with the early stages of her identity and is feeling doubts and shame over her identity.

Someone-san is asexual, aromantic, agender, and a...everything-else. They pride themselves on not having any labels, even a name. They're unique, as they don't really have a storyline. They mostly keep to themself.

Finally, Kaname has to learn to accept himself and, maybe, ask out his crush.

Personally, I found the story very refreshing after having read so many lesbian stories that don't even say the word "lesbian" once. Going from a story that tries actively to avoid LGBT issues into a story like this is whiplash in the best way. Hell, this is one of the only stories I've read that has trans people in it at all, let alone dive deep into the trans experience with a perfect understanding of it. For this aspect alone, this story is very much worth reading. They even do the unthinkable: say the word "trans"!

what a concept...

Jokes aside, the manga isn't perfect. While it does discuss many LGBT issues with empathy, it does so within a relatively short narrative, so they're kinda fighting for attention. A storyline will receive a lot of focus and development before getting sat aside for like two volumes while they develop other storylines. The most egregious offender is the trans girl. They spent most of Volume 2 setting up her character, before abruptly dropping her on an unsatisfying note. She then didn't appear in Volume 3 *at all* and finally got a rushed resolution (if you can call it that) at the end of the story in Volume 4. Beyond feeling a tad rushed, it could also come off a bit "LGBT PSA" at times. When you're trying to cram so many complex topics into just 4 volumes while also trying to develop a lot of characters, it occasionally comes off as a "A Beginner's Guide to LGBT People", which is a bit heavy handed. But hey, beggars can't be choosers. I'd much rather have this than a story that refuses to acknowledge the queerness at all. But y'know, there's a careful balance you have to strike. Doesn't help that my favorite, the trans girl, who had the most nuanced relationship to their queerness got written out for half of it. Yes, I am bitter about that.

Overall, it's still a fantastic manga that I still highly recommend. All of the characters were very good, and it did get me sobbing a few times. Despite my whining, it's one of the best ones I've talked about yet. You can probably tell considering how long I discussed it. 😓

"bite-sized" huh...

(Posted on Bluesky — February 11, 2025)

My Dearest Nemesis

A romcom webcomic about two lady office workers who've been engaged in a lifelong rivalry. The story is predictable enough, but the character writing is pretty good and I enjoyed the relative realism of the work environment. The comedy is pretty solid as well. Probably the most notable aspect is that one of the ladies, Jiang, reads pretty clearly as autistic-coded, which I think is a great aspect to this comic. It possibly wasn't intentional, but it feels like solid representation nonetheless. This comic is short, so there's no harm in reading it.

(Posted on Bluesky — February 12, 2025)

Shoujo Manga Protagonist X Rival-san

Kimura, a high school girl, has fallen in love with Mizushima, the most popular boy in school. However, Hiyama, the most popular girl in school, wants to prevent the two from getting together, as she is in love... with Kimura.

Wait, this sounds familiar....

If you read my previous thread, I talked briefly about Not-So-Shoujo Love Story, a Webtoon that, on a surface level, seems like the exact same premise. So, what sets these apart? Well, the metanarrative. If you recall, Not-So-Shoujo was all about a manga obsessed tomboy who can't tell apart fiction from reality. Rei was a girl who was convinced that people in real life behave the same as they do in generic stories, and thus viewed everyone around her as walking stereotypes. And so, the supposed "mean girl" Hannah wasn't actually mean in the slightest, and never acted like how Rei expected her to.

Protag x Rival, on the other hand, plays the Shoujo aspect far more straight. All of the main leads feel plucked straight out of a Shoujo story. Kimura is a sweet and shy girl who goes unnoticed, while Hiyama is a menacing and hot-headed trickster who will do anything to get what she wants. Of course, the twist is that instead of scheming to sabotage Kimura, she's scheming to woo her. It's a pretty fun concept, although it didn't quite get as fleshed out as I wanted.

Part of the problem is the structure. This manga was released concurrently as a webcomic and as serialized chapters. The webcomic consisted of a couple pages of build up, leading to a punchline, much like a comic strip. The joke was always the same. "Oh you thought Hiyama was being a villain, but actually she's just gay." It's repetitive, and they often don't further the plot. It's clearly just filler.

As for the actual narrative, it's... weak. It mostly just consists of the "misunderstanding" trope repeated over and over and over ad nauseam. Usually I can tolerate stories filled with tropes, but this one was honestly pushing my limits. At least use several different tropes for fuck's sake. If you're someone who can't stand the parts of Shrek 1 where he got sad after hearing Fiona's talk with Donkey, you'll want to end yourself if you read through this comic. It's that 24/7. GIRLS!!! Just talk to each other!!! Use your words!!! I promise it'll be worth it!!

Anyway, it wasn't all bad. Despite my complaints, it was still a pretty cute story with some really fun character dynamics, and of course some adorable art. I (mostly) enjoyed reading it. Although more than anything, it just makes me want to reread Not So Shoujo Love Story...

(Posted on Bluesky — February 14, 2025)

Always Human

In the 24th century, humankind had fully accepted using "mods" as a core part of daily life. Mods are a type of nanomachine that floats around in your blood that can alter your body in countless ways instantly. Mods have become an essential, near required, part of human existence. Sunati, a 21 yo girl, is one such average person who uses mods nonstop. However, her world-view begins to be challenged when she meets Austin, an 18yo girl whose body is incapable of using mods, leaving her at an innate genetic disadvantage.

Ok, backing up: Always Human is a Webtoon that, despite the cyberpunk-sounding premise, focused on normal (to them) slice-of-life moments between our two lovebirds. It's a story where our leads are written as realistically as possible, and so they all just act like ordinary people. Sunati is kind and very selfless... perhaps to a harmful extent. Her arc was simply to allow herself to be more selfish. Austin is someone who's bitterly insecure and constantly stressed, and she learns to put aside her stress and to accept herself, no matter what others may think. At the same time, she also has to learn that sometimes you can't achieve your dreams due to disability, and instead you need to look for what you can do, which is a painful, yet accurate message.

Overall, the character writing is very strong, and I don't really have any complaints. In fact, pretty much everything the comic did was executed quite well. The presentation is especially jaw-dropping, with a unique beautiful artstyle and a complete OST to accompany every single chapter.

My problems come more from what the comic DIDN'T do. Despite the premise, the 24th century is treated as a utopia throughout the whole comic, and is almost never questioned. Isn't that a waste of potential? It could've been a great source of external conflict, while providing social commentary. Austin's "disability" is mentioned constantly, and it's only ever treated as that: a tragic "disability" that she wishes she could cure. It's very strange, because based on the premise, a society like this sounds frankly horrifying. Yet, this story seems to be fully uncritically in support of this kind of transhumanism, to an almost propagandistic extent. It's kinda weird, but I don't know if it was intentional.

Despite the missed opportunities, Always Human is a great GL story. It's not very long by Webtoon standards, so it's an easy recommendation. I just wish the themes implied by the title and premise were more incorporated into the overall work.

(Posted on Bluesky — March 10, 2025)

I Want To Be A Cute Anime Girl

This one's a bit different, as it's the first one yet to have no prominent romance (at the moment). Instead, it's a *very* slow-paced slice-of-life Webtoon about a young trans girl discovering her identity. I wish I could say more, but that's about all it is. It's a pretty cute story, and it's always nice to see a trans main character. It's a story that's designed to be very lightweight and wholesome, which is cute, albeit a tad boring. It's mostly structured like a four panel comic strip, with a build up and punchline for each week.

My only real complaint is that the pacing of the comic is a bit frustrating. A single conversation will span many chapters, and I'd like if it'd just speed up a bit. Other stories I've read have achieved much more with less runtime. That said it's ultimately just a sweet little comfort Webtoon, so I can recommend it in that sense. Just don't go in expecting drama of any kind.

I actually have a personal story with this comic, as it was one of the earliest stories I found that starred a transgender woman, so it was actually pretty meaningful to me in the early stages of my transition. Honestly, it was just nice to finally see how the story developed after all this time.

(Posted on Bluesky — March 14, 2025)

The Mimosa Confessions (Vol. 1 - Vol. 3)

This is the most strikingly different entry across my two lists so far, for several reasons. Firstly, this ain't no comic. This is just a plain old book series (or, more accurately, a light novel series). Secondly, while queerness is a very major aspect, it's not the sole focus. Finally, this is the first story I've discussed whose main character is a cishet male. So how is it queer? Well...

Sakuma Kamiki was a pretty standard high-schooler who mostly just kept to himself without any real friends. That was, until one fateful day where his whole school life changed. As a starter, he managed to befriend a sweet, albeit clumsy, girl named Natsuki Hoshihara, whom he immediately developed a crush on. More importantly however, while he was out late at night, he stumbled across Ushio Tsukinoki, the most popular boy in school, crying alone in a dimly lit park. Except... Ushio was dressed like a girl. When Sakuma tried to ask questions, Ushio got overwhelmed, panicked, and ran.

After that, Ushio didn't attend school for over two weeks. Eventually, Ushio finally returned to class... in a girl's uniform. Ushio then came out as a trans woman, to immediate repercussions. She was immediately faced with severe bullying coming from the whole school, quickly turning her from the most popular boy to the most disliked girl. Chief among the backlash stood Arisa Nishizono, an aggressive "mean girl" type who had gleefully spent the majority of her time spouting vile transphobic rhetoric while simultaneously using every opportunity to torture Ushio as much as possible.

In the face of this intense backlash, the only people who decided to stand by Ushio were Sakuma and Natsuki. The three became a nervous trio, as her friends did their best to help her, although, not with relationship drama of their own. As quickly comes apparent to Sakuma, the three of them are locked in an unusual love triangle. Firstly, Sakuma has a crush on Natsuki, but is too nervous to tell. Secondly, Natsuki has a long-standing crush on Ushio, but she's unsure about what that crush means now that Ushio transitioned. Finally, Ushio has a crush on Sakuma, but she assumes Sakuma doesn't feel attracted to her, leading to deep insecurities on her part. And so, the three of them are just locked like that, with nobody able or willing to make a move, and all of them just quietly trying to bury their feelings.

I'd say more, but for now I'll leave my summary there for the sake of spoilers. As you might guess, this story touches on a lot of themes that ring close to home for me. It unapologetically touches on all aspects of transness with an empathetic, albeit brutally realistic, touch, but that's not all. It also manages to do that without making the story focus solely on being transgender. In fact, after Volume 1, we start stepping back and begin breaking down our other cast members, to incredible results. In fact, I'd say that Volume 3, the one with the least direct focus on it, was the highlight.

In Vol. 3, we spend a lot of time developing our antagonist: Arisa Nishizono, the mean girl. We get to see how that kind of hate isolates you, before she eventually breaks under the weight of her own misdeeds. Her slow spiral was incredible to behold, as we spent a huge portion of the book switched into her POV as we watched her descent into a self-loathing madness. It was masterful character work, and it ended up being my favorite highlight so far. I'd describe it more, but I've already said too much.

Overall, these first three volumes are amazing. I highly recommend giving this series a read. Of all the stories I've discussed for these threads so far, this is one of the ones I can recommend the most, which is saying a lot considering how much I loved a lot of these.

Can't wait for Vol. 4 and 5!

(Posted on Bluesky — April 13, 2025)

My Girlfriend's Not Here Today

It's a toxic yuri about cheating. Honestly I'd like to say more, but I don't really have much to say about it. It's basically a soap opera. It's an enjoyable enough read, but it's not particularly interesting. If it sounds up your alley, go for it.

(current day)

Ok, that review was pathetically short even my standards. I mostly wrote it like that because I was in a hurry. The plot of this one is pretty tangled, so I didn't even want to bother trying to explain it at the time. To make up for that past laziness, I'll do my best to rundown a basic plot recap, although I'm just going off memory here as it's been a while since I read it and I can't be bothered to reread it. I'm terrible at remembering names, so I'll just use placeholder names.

From what I recall, the plot began with Girl A being upset over her relationship with Girl B, as Girl B both doesn't spend enough time with her, instead opting to focus on school sports. She also refuses to let the two of them come out as gay publicly, as she's worried about bullying. So, Girl B pretends not to know her while they're in public, which is a taking a serious toll on Girl A, who just wants the two to come out already and ignore what others have to say. The two girls do honestly love each other and mean well, but right now Girl B is simply not meeting Girl A's needs.

Girl A, stuck with a lot of free time as she waits daily for her girlfriend to finish volleyball practice, ends up using it by venting her relationship struggles on her anonymous Twitter account. Finally, enter Girl C, who reveals that she discovered Girl A's account and knows that it's her. Girl A is mortified that anybody found out about them, so to make sure that Girl C doesn't tell anyone, she nervously accompanies her. Soon enough, Girl C tells her that what she actually wants is to be Girl A's side-bitch. Obviously, Girl A refuses, but that didn't save her from weeks of obsessive pursuing from Girl C. Meanwhile, Girl B is growing increasingly self-centered, as she's beginning to forget anniversaries while also making expensive requests that Girl A can't afford. Seeing an opportunity, Girl C offers up the cash in exchange for a date, and so, desperate for the money, Girl A accepts the devil's bargain and ends up cheating on her GF.

From there, it's one drama after another as Girl A desperately tries to cover the cheating up, while also dealing with the guilt of it as she tries to push Girl C away. Meanwhile, Girl C was secretly fanning the flames, as her entire goal was actually to force the two to break up in order to have Girl A all to herself. This all eventually climaxes with Girl B finding out about everything, and yet, she doesn't hate Girl A for it. Girl B knows that the way she's been treating her was wrong, and promises that the two of them can just start over and treat each right from the get-go. Girl A happily accepts the offer, and the two leave in each other's arms as Girl C has a meltdown over her plan failing.

I mean, that sounds like a solid story, right? So, why was I so underwhelmed by it? Well, because somehow the story didn't end there. It seems like, based on how the current arc was looking at the time of my reading of it, Girl A was starting to miss Girl C and was probably gonna start cheating again... which... ugh. If I had to guess the actual ending, it'll probably be Girl A dating Girl C, which I'm sorry but Girl C was simply not sympathetic enough to make me want to root for her. She was consistently framed as a villain, so the writer has a real task ahead of them if they want an ending like that to be satisfying. At any rate, I'm having trouble guessing what the moral of the story could be...

In any case, it's not an awful yuri, but (as you can tell) it's not one I'm likely going to reread, even for something as simple as this blog post. To reiterate my past self, if this story sounds like something you'd like, go ahead and hop right into it.

(Posted on Bluesky — May 14, 2025)

Sugar Girl Drip

This one's one of the darkest yet, and it has a lot of intense themes alongside graphic violence. Without spoiling much, the plot is about two women who've both undergone severe domestic abuse learning to heal together... while also trying to get away with murder on the side. The artstyle and writing is really strong, and I really have no complaints in those regards. Both of our main leads have so much character growth over the relatively short runtime of this story, and it all manages to feel natural. However, to explain any further, I'll have to do a plot recap.

The story frequently mentions the concept of fulfilling one's own wishes. Our main lead, Marie, is a girl who, after her abusive childhood, vowed to devote her life solely to fulling her wishes. She managed to do so, and got herself a seemingly picture perfect life as an Instagram celeb. However, despite the fact that she had everything she wanted, she still felt hollow. It wasn't until she met Aki, her coworker at a café, that the meaning of her life began to change. As for Aki, she was a meek girl who hated herself and simply did whatever who told her to. As we come to learn, that came from Aki's own childhood trauma. While Marie decided to live as selfishly as possible as a way to spite her past abuse, Aki internalized it, and truly believed that her life had no value. Aki had no wishes, no dreams, and allowed herself to get roped up into one abusive scenario after another, eventually leading to her current one.

As we find out, the owner of the cafe was an abusive freak who made dirty money by filming himself assaulting Aki, to which she put up little resistance. The owner then got tired of Aki, and tried to abuse Marie in the same way. However, in an unfiltered act of desperation, Marie promptly grabbed a baseball bat and mercilessly beat him to death. Aki witnessed the event, yet seemed unfazed, and so the two of them became reluctant accomplices in crime. Since Aki had no home, she moved in with Marie. While Aki was simply happy to have a new friend, Marie was solely concerned with making sure Aki didn't run her loose lips.

From there, we had one drama after another as they covered their tracks, and along the way the two of them grew closer together. At the start, Marie insisted that she will "fix" Aki, by trying to force Aki down the same self-serving path that she had took. To an extent, Marie's attempt at "mental reformation" in Aki was a success, as through Marie's constant efforts, Aki began to express some small wishes of her own. However, Aki never fully followed Marie's path, and instead found something more meaningful than Marie's temporary desires: Marie herself. Eventually, Marie, via some heartrending scenes of her worrying for Aki's wellbeing, realized that she felt the same way, but was now racked with guilt, and so she confessed everything, from her childhood trauma, to her selfishness, to her mistreatment of Aki, and to her newfound love. Marie says that she's afraid that she'll wind up getting Aki hurt again and wants her to leave, but Aki ignores her and gives her a kiss. From there, the two grow even closer, with Marie realizing that, when Aki is by her side, that hollow feeling in her chest is finally able to vanish.

I'll end my recap there. The story technically is still ongoing, but for my money, that's a complete and satisfying narrative.

When you lay it out like this, the moral is rather simple, right? Hiding your trauma behind meaningless desires will never heal the wound. Only by sharing your pain with others will you finally be able to save your soul. It's a story about learning to open up, and of course, it's also a story about falling in love. Through love, the two girls were able to fill the hollow void in their hearts. Despite the subject matter, it's a very sweet message at the end of the day. Overall, I highly recommend this one.

And with that, we end another installment of Yuri Grab-bag. I told you it was gonna be a series, didn't I? Jokes aside, jeez this round got a lot more intense, didn't it? Themes of queerphobia, disability, bullying, cheating, childhood domestic abuse... yeah, this was certainly a lot less lighthearted than my previous affair. I certainly didn't intend for that to be a running theme. It just kinda worked out that way...

On the bright side, we managed to step further outside the realm of pure Yuri romance. We've been seeing more stories that deal with conflicts outside the core romance, stories with less focus on romance in general, and even some that tap into transgender issues. At this point, I'm wondering if I should rename this series, but at the end of the day, the core end-goal is the same: to bring attention to queer works that I've read recently.

If you enjoyed this post, then the first thing you should do is to check out everything I recommended just now. After that, you can follow me on Bluesky so you can see these updated in real time. Alternatively, you can just sit here on my blog and wait for the next installment of Yuri Grab-bag!

I guess the moral of this thread is that, no matter how hard things get, to always search for community with others. Whether that be a community as large as spanning the globe, or as small as two people who only care about each other, we're better off together than we are alone. In times like these, I think that's something that everyone should take to heart.

unless you're cheating on your girlfriend, in which case GET FUCKED

[randomboo256]

Yuri Grab-bag

(Posted on Bluesky — November 12, 2024)

Lately, I've been reading a whole lot of yuri manga, as kinda a soothing way to cope with all the bad news this year. Y'know, it's nice to escape from the chaos through entering a nice, romantic world where queerness is embraced. If any queer girls out there are also feeling down, I'd recommend it. Here's some low-effort reviews of the yuri I've been reading lately. Think of this more as just a quick recommendations list. Try not to take it too seriously, ok?

How Do We Relationship

An emotional journey through the complicated love lives of two college-aged lesbians, and all the fun, beauty, messiness, and heartbreak that entails. It's incredible, so I highly recommend it. I'd say more, but I wouldn't want to spoil it. Notably, it's only one of the few yuri that I've read that actually stops to realistically discuss the queerness of our leads. We learn about their self-realizations, their struggles from discrimination, their fear of publicly coming out, dealing with comphet, and so much more. It's refreshing. I understand that a lot of people don't want to be reminded of upsetting stuff when reading their gay romance stories, but there's a value in depicting all aspects of queer life, good and bad. Being queer is a struggle, and pretending that struggle doesn't exist makes it feel a bit inauthentic.

The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All

A fairly lighthearted story about a woman who, as it says on the tin, unintentionally developed a crush on a female classmate that she tries to hide while they bond over their shared love of music. It's simple and cute, and it's still ongoing.

Catch These Hands

A story about a mid-20s former teen delinquent who ends up reluctantly dating her former high school rival after losing a bet. The manga shows her growth from reluctantly dating her to being genuinely in love, while she debates leaving her rebellious side behind. It had some well written and nuanced character development, while also keeping a mostly lighthearted tone throughout. It doesn't feel very romantic until the last third or so, but it's an enjoyable read all throughout. I really recommend it. Helps that it's also a completed story.

Beauty And The Beast Girl

I've only read the first volume of this one, and I've yet to get around to finishing it. From what I've read, the plot was about a monster-girl who had hidden away in fear in a forest that falls in love with a blind girl. It had a mixed tone, leaning more on being heartwarming. It was enjoyable enough. The most interesting aspect how the monster girl was suffering from a sense of guilt over having indirectly caused her lover's blindness, as well as her lover's description of how people have mistreated her due to her disability.

I Love Amy

So here's the premise: A typical yandere notices her male crush talking to another girl. Immediately jealous, she invites the girl over, intending to kill her. However, she unintentionally befriends her, and she decides to use this shy submissive girl to her advantage.

This one has a super cute artstyle and a lot of fun comedy, although despite that, it also tackles a lot of dark subject matter with a sense of careful grace. The story goes out of it's way to heavily flesh everyone out, and it comes away with a lot of really enjoyable and well-rounded characters. The story is all about how people struggle with mental illness and childhood trauma, and ultimately shows how even "broken" people deserve love and care. I think I Love Amy is incredible all around, as well as wonderful subversion of the infamous yandere character trope. It's a very easy recommendation.

(Posted on Bluesky — November 24, 2024)

Not So Shoujo Love Story

A romantic comedy webtoon about a manga-obsessed girl (Rei) who is convinced that her life can only be right if she lives out a stereotypical romance story, in which she fights back mean girl rivals in order to win her very own perfect boyfriend. When she finally meets her "evil rival" (Hannah), it quickly comes apparent to the audience that her literal black-and-white way of thinking is wrong, as the mean girl is in love.... with Rei. However, Rei doesn't seem to realize that, leading to comedy.

This one was a pretty long read. It has 120 chapters, and I can definitely say that I was not expecting the twists and turns it all took me on.

First of all, despite my description sounding pretty grounded, the comedy tends to be very absurdist and/or slapstick. It's pretty funny overall, imo. As for the romance, it's a very, VERY, slow burn. I enjoyed it, but you'll have to be very patient with it. While the romance and the character development IS a major aspect, the comedy mainly comes first. This type of thing is my exact cup of tea, but others might get fed up with all of it. The characters themselves are pretty great! They all start off kinda shallow, but as it goes on, they all get a lot of interesting depth. When the story does focus on the characters and their development, it's all very well done and tastefully handled.

Additionally, this is also another example of a GL story that ACTUALLY discusses the queerness of our leads. The story is about two girls trying to come to turns with and understand their sexualities, all while worrying about societal expectations. So, despite being the most absurd story yet in this thread, this story is far more relatable than nearly all of them. I think that's a huge upside to all of this. We need more stories like this. Overall, this webtoon is tied with How Do We Relationship as my fav GL story I've read so far.

(Posted on Bluesky — February 3, 2025)

Mage & Demon Queen

One of the longest Yuri yet in this thread. It's on Webtoons, and it cost me $20 to read through. It was more than worth it, though. This one is different, as it's not purely a romantic tale. Rather, it's a complex fantasy with romance as just one element.

It takes place in a fantasy world that operates on turn-based RPG logic, and the story is largely focused on making us rethink how we view a traditional video game storyline by placing us in the villain's perspective, with some social commentary along the way. In this world, we have the human kingdom and the demon kingdom. The humans propagandize the horrors of the demons to justify their countless acts of cruelty against them, as well as fuel their fascistic war machine. Meanwhile, the demons are just ordinary people who are struggling to get by. It's certainly a heavy setup, but it manages to ease us into the intense themes with the more lighthearted first season, in which we meet the titular mage, Malori.

Malori is a talented young human girl who's somehow fallen madly in love with the Demon Queen, despite the Queen's constant rejections. Through numerous escapades, she's tried again and again to profess her love, before eventually giving up after realizing the error of her ways. Afterwards, the two girls begin to form a natural bond as the growing political strife between the two races slowly starts to ramp up. Cue drama.

It's a pretty strong storyline, and the romance at the heart of it certainly adds a lot to the narrative. It's an effortless recommendation from me, even if that means coughing up money to trade in Webtoon tokens to read through it. It's one of the best here, but it's not quite the same genre.

The Girl Through The Viewfinder

This is a pretty short one. The story is about a shy young girl named Hajime who dreams of being a film director, but only had the courage to start once she met Kei, a classmate who, despite her cold demeanor, agrees to be a starring actress over the summer break. I quite enjoy the premise of this. It's all about the joy of creation, as we see Hajime slowly branch out of her comfort zone so that she can create the amateur film of her dreams, all while she and Kei slowly fall in love. I feel like the romance could've been developed more, but it's worth a read.

(Posted on Bluesky — February 6, 2025)

Superwomen in Love! Honey Trap & Rapid Rabbit

(You'll never guess what this one's about...)

Despite what the bad name might suggest, this Yuri is probably the least focused on romance, with it mainly being a side element. Instead, it's a five volume long superhero parody/genre deconstruction, and it's great. The overt mechanics of the world draw from tokusatsu (Power Rangers) style heroes, but the messages of the story draw from all types of heroes.

So, what's it about?

Coming from a higher dimension and born from negative human emotions, five creatures known as Antinoids are determined to wipe out the human race. Meanwhile, when a young woman named Hayata finds a fancy wristwatch, she unlocks the ability to turn into the superhero Rapid Rabbit, and after witnessing a horrible tragedy at the hands of the Antinoids she became determined to stop them. However, she was eventually defeated by one of them, a villainess called Honey Trap. But strangely, Honey Trap let Hayata go, as the villain had instantly fallen in love with the hero! As punishment for sparing the enemy, Honey Trap got fired (and attacked) by X, the Antinoid leader. Later, Hayata found Honey weak in an alley, and helped her recover. Honey Trap, enamored by the hero's kindness, decides to join her in her fight. From there, they became a super duo determined to stop the remaining four Antinoids.

That's the very basic set-up. Pretty complicated, at least compared to the rest of these. It'll just get a lot more complicated from there.

The tone of the comic is often pretty silly, but it gets more serious as it goes on. The story is all about getting deep into the philosophy of what it means to be a "good guy" vs a "bad guy", and how our relationship with love plays into that. It talks about how we act out of obligation vs out of genuine desire, and about how fighting out of a sense of justice can go both ways, as one person's sense of justice can hurt someone else. So on so forth. It's too much to get into for a mini review. It's all really interesting stuff, and in terms of themes, it's one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. It's also a fairly funny comedy with a few interesting nuanced characters, primarily the two leads as well as X, who really ends up as the star of the show here. The action is great as well. As for the yuri, it's a pretty enjoyable romance, although it's more notable for its thematic weight.

It's not perfect though. What bothered me the most was how sexualized it was. You can kinda tell that it's one of THOSE Yuri that are trying to rope in horny viewers at times, and it can get distracting. That said, a few of the other stories here had this problem as well, but it didn't ruin those and it didn't ruin this.

Really, this is a perfect companion piece to M&DQ. Where M&DQ was ripping apart the overused stories we tell video games, this was ripping apart the overused stories in superhero stories. Much like M&DQ, you'll have to enjoy the wider story elements beyond the simple romance angle to be able to really appreciate it. Give it a read!

So, that's all I got for you, for now anyway. This will likely become a new series of posts that I'll do, so stay tuned for the next installment of Yuri Grab-bag! In the meantime, why don't you start reading all the stories I just listed? What? Did I not pique your interest?

Overall, I guess the moral of this thread is just: If the world is getting you down, comfort media will always have your back.

[randomboo256]

The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018) Retrospective

This post is different than my usual posts, hence "retrospective". It's more of a detailed analysis compared to a usual review of mine. Additionally, this is an expanded version with fixes and new details.

This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are. -from the title screen

Recently, I played through a little horror game called "The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories". It's an indie published by Arc System Works and created by the studio "White Owls Inc.".

As for why I was interested in this title, that's because I heard going into it that it's one of the few video games that primarily focuses on tackling intense LGBT themes in an empathetic way. There's hardly any games like that, so I was really interested in it for that reason alone. Primarily, it's about the horrifying mental health struggles that often come with being LGBT. So, consider this a content warning as well. This game is rated M for Mature, and it doesn't hold back.

Now, the game features many plot twists along the way and it was also meant to be a mystery game, so it's best to go in blind. However, I just have to discuss the contents of the game's story, so I'll save all the story analysis until after I discuss the gameplay. That said, there will necessarily be light spoilers in the gameplay section as well. Additionally, the intensity of the game's story might be too much for some people to be able to experience, so consider this post a way to experience it for those unable to bear it until the game's actual end.

Without getting too ahead of myself, YES I do think the game handles its queer content with a lot of skill and respect. You can really tell the creators knew what they were talking about when they were making this, which is impressive considering this game was seemingly made by a cis straight man. From what I heard, he had close queer friends who he consulted with in order to make this game, and this game really goes to show that anyone can write a great queer story as long as they're willing to listen to queer people.

On that note, apparently the creator in question is a famous Japanese developer who goes by SWENY. I've never heard of him before, but apparently he's famous for a game called "Deadly Premonition", which (from what I can tell) is an artsy horror game famed for it's both incredible narrative and it's buggy so-so gameplay. I've never played Deadly Premonition personally, so I can't comment much on it, but it's worth mentioning here anyway.

With enough preamble out of the way, let's finally discuss the game itself. The Missing is a stiff, realistic 2D puzzle platformer, making it pretty similar to games like LIMBO and INSIDE. If you've never played those, I'll give a rundown anyway. Essentially, J.J. (our lead) can only move very slowly in realistic, human ways. While she can jump, it's not high and it's not far, so you'll be mainly relying on her ledge grab. Instead of raw platforming, the game is more about figuring out how to get a normal human person past all of the game's platforming areas, all done entirely by solving environmental puzzles.

In my opinion, these types of games are very fun, but you have to be in the right mood for it. These are not twitchy platformers. Your character is intentionally very sluggish, and that's the point. If this game was controlled like Mario or Mega Man, it'd be boring and easy. Overcoming J.J.'s realistic human limitations is meant to be both the primary challenge and the main appeal of the gameplay. The slow-moving gameplay isn't for everyone, but it's definitely for me, so I really enjoyed it. Not every platformer has to play the same, y'know.

However, this game has a grisly twist: self-harm. This is where the game's horror elements start coming in. After completing the opening section, J.J. gets brutally murdered, without the player being able to prevent it. Shortly after, J.J. finds herself with a sudden new super-power: regeneration. No matter how beaten J.J. gets, no matter what body parts get torn off or mutilated, as long as her head is still intact, J.J. will live. Then, with the press of a button, J.J. will instantly heal her broken bones and regrow her lost appendages. However, while she might technically survive, she is not without suffering. Every wound suffered is punctuated with J.J.'s horrifying screams, along with every brutal crack of every bone. This is not a game for someone with a weak stomach and a low tolerance for gore. You WILL see this poor woman get her body ripped to shreds again and again, and it never stops feeling any less horrible. Fortunately, the game does censor blood and her internal organs to an extent, so it's not completely graphic, but still: this game seriously earned it's M Rating. Do not go into this if you're especially squeamish.

But nonetheless, J.J. must torture herself over and over, as the majority of the game's puzzles revolve around ripping yourself apart in specific ways. You might have to rip off an arm in order to throw it as an emergency projectile, light yourself on fire in order to spread some flames, or even destroy your entire body, down to just your head as it rolls around and hops, in order to enter small spaces and execute platforming challenges. Interestingly, when J.J. is reduced to a head, she's actually at her most mobile. She's faster, and hopping as a head gives you a tight Mega Man-esc jump, rather than the game's stiff normal jump. I suspect that aspect was very much intentional when it comes to the narrative, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's a very unique gameplay concept, and overall, I thought the gameplay worked extremely well. It strikes the perfect balance between realistic gameplay and unrealistic regeneration. The self-harming gameplay is just as addicting as it is brutal. The game comes up with very creative ideas all throughout, and I don't want to just sit here and spoil all of them for you. Honestly, I wouldn't be opposed to more games that took inspiration from this, as the possibilities feel endless. It's such a fun inversion of all your natural gaming instincts. I can happily say that the gameplay alone makes this title worth the price of admission, and that's without getting to the game's real selling point: the story.

For those of you who have either: A) Already played/watched it, B) Are too squeamish to play/watch it, or C) Don't care about spoilers, go ahead and proceed. Otherwise, this review ends here for you.

SPOILER WARNING (FROM HERE ON OUT)

We open on a campfire, as two women have a fun time vaguely bonding in front of it. These two, we quickly come to learn, are named J.J. and Emily. The two are having a camping trip on a small island just off the coast of Maine. Not long after we joined, their conversation turns romantic, and the two profess their love to each other, making a promise: to always be together, no matter what.

Suddenly, the scene shifts. J.J. wakes up to find Emily missing, along with an intense thunderstorm outside. Clutching a plushie, J.J. nervously begins to search for her, calling for Emily as much as she can. The plushie, we find out later, is named F.K., and it was one of J.J.'s first childhood toys, and she's clung dear to it ever since. After exploring for a bit, she finds Emily being tormented by a horrifying, yet strangely familiar, creature. Before J.J. can do anything to help, Emily runs off, with the creature chasing after her. Shortly after, J.J. finds herself in a field of flowers and windmills, while the thunderstorm grows more and more intense. Lightning begins striking the windmills that surround her, and eventually, they strike a tree directly in front of her. J.J. tries to avoid the flames, but fails. She catches on fire, and burns to death. Her precious childhood plushie burns to ashes alongside her. Then, strangely, a man that looks like a doctor with a deer for a head shows up, muttering strange medical terms. Lightning then strikes J.J. and she weakly calls out for Emily. Somehow, her regeneration power was then awoken, and J.J. healed and stood back up. As she sobs, she remembers moments of her time with Emily, as the game enters its title sequence (as well as its second act).

From here, the story takes a back seat. From now until the third act, J.J. is simply quietly searching for Emily as she explores this increasingly fucked up island. Apart from a couple brief cutscenes here and there, the bulk of the story is told via J.J.'s cell phone. J.J.'s phone is the pause screen of the game, and among its features is J.J.'s messaging app, where she has chat logs with Emily, her mother, three of her friends, and her college teacher.

Unlike the brutal horror gameplay, the chat logs are mostly records of calm slice-of-life conversations J.J. had with her friends. They mostly consist of the characters discussing their interests, their work, things that happened lately, and their ambitions. In other words, it's all just ordinary chatting, and that serves in sharp contrast to the gameplay. Beyond the arguable dark humor of some of J.J.'s injuries, the chat logs are also the primary place where the game lightens up a bit and allows itself to add some fun humor to the mix. Personally, I think the texts are all written very realistically, and there's even a lot of care in how they were all handled, such as every character having a specific way of typing. I think the texting app is a well-executed and creative way to bring in a lot of additional characterization and important character development to an otherwise sparse and silent story.

The texting app also serves as a great motivator to continue playing the game, as the logs are all blank at first, and you slowly unlock them all as you progress. Emily and J.J.'s mother's logs are unlocked by game progression, while the other four are unlocked by collecting donuts, the game's main collectible. There's 271 donuts, all tied to additional puzzles in the level design. Most of them are independently strewn around, but others require you to find a cardboard sign of a baker, which gives multiple. If you miss some, you can replay any chapter to grab them. To get the full story, you need 100% completion. Personally, 100% was pretty fun to obtain, although admittedly I did use a guide to get about a third of them.

There is one chat option I haven't mentioned yet though. Shortly after the title sequence, J.J. got a text on her phone from... F.K. The plushie? The destroyed plushie?? F.K. tries to cheer her up, but J.J. is confused, and acts rudely to him. F.K. continues to chat throughout the second act, but J.J. continues to be mean to him, assuming that he's not the real F.K. (cause duh) while also knowing that F.K. is clearly hiding information from her.

As for the other chat logs, they're all chat logs from presumably the past few months. As you unlock them all, they slowly reach the present day. This is how we uncover the real story of the game, over the course of the second act. So, here's your final spoiler warning.

I'll structure this section by breaking down every character, and J.J.'s relationship to them. Starting with the less important characters, and getting more important from there:

Phillip - A rich boy whose dream is to become famous. He starts off by trying to create YouTube videos reviewing cars and protein supplements, and ends up quitting college to be an actor. He rarely did his own class work anyway, instead begging J.J. constantly to do it for him. Based on that description, you can somewhat tell what kind of person he acts like, that being a dudebro who's obsessed with traditional masculinity and who's fairly misogynistic, not treating his many ex-girlfriends well.

Unsurprisingly, J.J. doesn't seem to like him very much. In fact, she never even gave him her number to begin with, as he got it from Abby. Despite that, J.J. does reluctantly text him back whenever he pipes up. She shows a general disinterest to his masculine hobbies and his attempts at fame, and proudly admits to not watching his YouTube videos, even when he begs her to. She jokingly tells him to adopt a kitty to get views from cat videos, but he tells her that getting a cat for internet views would be "evil", which helped redeem him a bit in her mind. After his first audition didn't go well, he was finally humbled a bit. J.J. decides to cheer him on, giving him the advice "Be serious, bold, and genuine." In his most recent text, he tells J.J. that her advice worked and that he got a part in a low budget TV show. However, J.J. didn't respond to his news...

Abby - A typical punk rock style girl who enjoys breaking societal norms. She's in a band, has piercings, rainbow hair, parental issues, and a general "I don't give a fuck" attitude. Teachers tend to scold her for her looks, although she deserves it somewhat as she tends to put off her assignments until the last minute, and then rush it. She often gets judged for her appearance, such as assuming she's a thug, and it pisses her off a lot. She reminds me of a lot of characters like Marceline (from Adventure Time). At one point, she tells J.J. a story about a girl named Sherrie. Apparently, Sherrie is a nice girl who can get a little "touchy-feely", and the other girls began spreading rumors that she's a lesbian and began bullying her. Abby is pissed off at that, not only because the rumor is bogus, but because there's nothing wrong with being gay. Abby tried to defend Sherrie by dumping coke on her bullies, but nonetheless Sherrie became depressed and began avoiding school. Abby ended up confronting her bullies again and it broke out into a fight.

J.J. looks up to Abby, and admires her boldness. J.J. seemingly considers Abby one of her closest friends, and often goes to her for emotional advice, while keeping it vague on why exactly she needs advice. Despite that, J.J. eventually grew distant from Abby. When Abby asked what was wrong, J.J. simply said she didn't feel well. In their most recent text, J.J. says she "needs to tell her something", but when Abby didn't reply immediately, J.J. changed her mind. Abby replied a few minutes later, asking "what's up", but J.J. didn't respond...

Professor Goodman - J.J.'s teacher for her product design class. At first, his texts were purely about school, but after J.J. started asking a few personal questions, the two ended up becoming good friends. He's a kind man who enjoys nerdy media like Star Wars, and he enjoys offering general life advice to J.J.. Occasionally, he can go on long rants about the movies he likes, even though J.J. doesn't really watch movies in general. He also loves talking about his wife and his teenage daughter, although his wife doesn't understand his interests and he worries over whether his daughter will get in trouble.

J.J. views him as an older figure she can trust to have her back. On occasion, she does contact him directly for advice. At one point, she asked "Have you ever felt like you don't understand who you are anymore?" and he told her that he has, and to not worry so much about syncing up with others. At some point after, he mentioned that he heard a strange rumor about her, and she confirms that it's real. He offers her to go to the school counselor, and says he'll defend her from the other students. In his most recent text, he was inviting her to join a special dinner with his family that weekend, as he figured that she needed an excuse to relax. However, she didn't reply...

Lily - A seemingly sweet girl who loves animals and, over the course of their conversations, makes it increasingly clear she has a large crush on J.J.. She works part-time at a pizza place as she has to pay for her own tuition, and she desperately doesn't want J.J. to see her while she's working.

J.J. finds Lily's huge crush kinda creepy and annoying, but nonetheless she considers Lily a friend of hers, and she even invited Lily to go out to eat together, although it quickly got cancelled. However, recently J.J. checked out a library book while spending time with her, and Lily noticed something unusual on the cover. She asked J.J. if it was a "condition" she's suffering from, and J.J. dodged the question. Not long after, J.J. confronted Lily about some rumors people have been spreading about her, and Lily sheepishly admits that she's the one who spread them. Lily tells J.J. that she's worried that J.J. doesn't want to be herself and that the topic of the book is "weird". J.J. tells her to mind her own business. In her most recent text, she asks J.J. to meet up, saying that there's something she has to tell her. She begs J.J. to respond, but alas J.J. never replies...

J.J.'s Mom - An overprotective and bossy mother who works for the Food and Nutrition Service office. She has a tendency to nag and go on long-winded lectures and rambles (I could never...) and she loves to snoop into J.J.'s business, despite her daughter's continuous protests. She constantly gets on J.J. about what jobs she should take, what food she should eat, how much she should sleep, etc. All while constantly reminding her that she's an only child and that she needs to keep up the family legacy. Despite that, she doesn't seem to view her late husband all that favorably, disliking how he would rather focus on his hobbies than further his career.

Before long, we come to learn she's also a bigoted Christian, naturally to our queer lead's dismay. Fortunately, her mother doesn't know that her daughter is queer, as J.J. intentionally distanced herself from her mother, as she can't stand listening to her, often complaining about her to her best friend.

Emily - A sweet, cheerful, and incredibly supportive girl, as well as a childhood best friend of J.J.'s. She dreams of taking a trip around the world, and she wants J.J. to join her on it. The two love to imagine the places they could visit together, even if it's unlikely. She also shares J.J.'s love of sugary food, for better or worse.

Emily has been by J.J.'s side since forever, and she's the only person that J.J. trusts enough to tell her deepest secrets. J.J. worries about Emily though, as she can't really do anything on her own. When they first met, J.J. didn't like that side of her, and Emily didn't like her much either. Well regardless, they somehow managed to become best friends. Unfortunately, Emily moved away some time ago. J.J.'s birthday is coming up, so Emily is planning on visiting soon, and the two began to plan a camping trip that they can go on together...

Actually, speaking of Emily, where did she run off to? Well, long after getting initially chased by that monster, J.J. caught another glimpse at Emily as she fled from the same monster yet again. Each time, J.J. was terrified for her friend and tried to follow. However, when she finally did catch up to Emily, she found that Emily is now actively avoiding her for some reason, all while saying vague lines about whether they're in a dream, who's dream it is, etc. Eventually, J.J. gets some phone calls from Emily, which are similarly vague and weird. Emily starts talking about how, when J.J. and her were kids, Emily shared a big secret to her at a clock tower and how she was so worried that J.J. would stop being friends with her. J.J. tries to reassure Emily that the secret doesn't change anything, but Emily ignores her and tells her that she has to "break their promise", all while spouting vague things that implies that she's gonna harm herself at the clock tower.

As J.J. tries to follow Emily to the tower, J.J. gets briefly chased by the monster. Speaking of, that monster looks kind of like J.J., and is holding a knife. Well, regardless J.J. does manage to reach the clock tower. Inside, she finds Emily alongside the strange deer doctor. As J.J. desperately climbs the tower, Emily continues to spout lines about how she's going to harm herself, until the end, where Emily bizarrely starts saying that SHE'S actually J.J.. When J.J. finally reaches the roof, she sees that it's too late: Emily has hung herself, with a second noose already prepared right next to her. Next to Emily, is a suicide note... written by J.J. Macfield. Upon seeing the sight of her dead lover, J.J. doesn't hesitate to wrap the second noose around her own neck. As J.J. dies, Emily fades away...

If you haven't figured it out already, here's the big twist: Within this dream world, J.J. and Emily had switched places. In actuality, J.J. was the one who talked of suicide, all while Emily desperately tried to stop her. J.J. was the one who grew distant and ran away from Emily, and J.J. was the one who told a big secret at the clock tower. As for what that secret is?

Jackie Jameson Macfield - A closeted transgender lesbian who kept that a secret for most of her life, only telling her best friend Emily. In public, she still looks like and identifies as a man, although she sees herself as much more fem in her imagination. As for what kind of person she's like, well she generally acts rather dull, and is usually quite blunt to people, but she is a kind and selfless woman overall, which you can also tell by the fact she's a vegetarian. Despite that, J.J. is also obsessed with a brand called "Sleepy's Donuts" and she often ends up eating donuts more than actual food. She also dreams of becoming a world class baker. Despite her terrible diet, everyone around her considers her very bright, and she's very talented at her college classes. Her favorite class is one of product design, which has been a fascination of hers since she was a child, back when she would stare at old clocks. She was even complimented by her professor for her custom design of a prosthetic leg, as well as her design for a knife.

However, while spending time with a friend named Lily, Lily noticed a book in J.J.'s possession about transgender people, and so Lily spread it as a rumor around campus. By coincidence, as J.J. became increasingly bullied at college, her bigoted mother finally discovered the feminine clothes hidden in J.J.'s closet, then afterwards read J.J.'s diary. J.J.'s mother then began hounding her via text in an attempt to "fix" her, and even tried to set her up for conversion therapy. J.J. then tried to explain herself to her mother in person, but "it didn't go well". As J.J.'s life falls apart (before it really began), she eventually started to believe the horrible things people said about her and began acting erratic towards Emily, describing herself as a "freak" that Emily should pretend that she never met. All the while, Emily continuously, desperately, tries to console J.J., telling her that she's not a freak and that she is a woman, but it doesn't work. Instead, J.J. starts irrationally lashing out at Emily via text, accusing Emily of just being her friend out of pity. Emily gets mad and asks J.J. if that's how she really sees her. J.J. simply tells Emily that she "doesn't care anymore". Afterwards, she writes a suicide note. Then, while hugging her favorite childhood plushie, she took her own life, using a knife.

The entire game since then was a dream that J.J. was having as she died, with her mind subconsciously forcing her to see what it was like for J.J. to suddenly kill herself from Emily's perspective. As the dream collapses around her hanging corpse, J.J.'s body falls apart and off the clock tower. It lands in a recreation of her college, where she then partially regenerates, and begins limping forward, looking like a freak. She notices Emily and begins to follow, while her mind recreates moments from when she was bullied. Finally, she reaches the roof, where Emily is cornered and terrified. J.J. then transformed into a monster, and ended up hurting a crying and desperate Emily.

J.J. then found herself back to normal in an empty void, and she got another text from F.K. J.J. tells F.K that she remembers everything now, but it doesn't matter now—she's dead, after all. She regrets what she did to Emily, and wishes that she would've done things differently. F.K. reminds J.J. that Emily is still alive, and that J.J. needs to help her. After all, if J.J. kills herself, Emily might follow. F.K. tells her this isn't a story about death, but instead, regeneration. So, J.J. realizes that if she wants to see Emily again, she must regenerate, and the only way to do that is to conquer her literal inner demon, which can only be done by finally accepting herself. J.J. thanks her plushie, and she takes off.

So as she faces off against the monster one last time, now with a new meaning in life, she regenerates instantly upon every hit, reassuring herself that she has to continue going. Finally, once she conquers the beast (in an epic anime fashion), she finds herself waking up at the campsite yet again, but now it's finally day, and the sun is shining. She runs back to the flower field, where she sees Emily again.

We cut back to the real world, where J.J. finds herself waking up as a doctor stands over her with a defibrillator. He explains that what saved her life was none other than her plushie. It was soaked with her blood, and it helped reduce the blood loss long enough for the doctor to arrive. Emily comes running into the room, terrified, hugging Jackie. J.J explains that she had a strange dream, but it was exactly the one she needed. Roll credits.

Via post-game collectables, we find out that J.J. and Emily continued to date, that Emily began helping J.J. in her transition, that her mother seemingly overcame her transphobia, and that (based on a picture she sent Emily) J.J. managed to achieve the body she dreamt of.

THE END.

So yeah, that's my interpretation of the plot. The gameplay itself obviously ties into it, with its themes of literal self harm and all. Overall, it's a pretty damn good story about being transgender. We barely get stories like this in general, let alone in video games. The fact this was made in 2018 and largely slipped under most people's radars is completely insane to me. Hopefully this post allowed some people to learn about and better appreciate this little gem.

I will say, there is one criticism I have of the game, and that's the acting. While it has it's pros and cons, overall the acting felt pretty wooden, especially when it came to J.J.'s actress. J.J. doesn't get a lot of spoken lines, but when she does she can sound a bit... off. Like the actress doesn't really understand the character nor the story very well. Maybe it's just me, but the voice I imagine in my head when I read J.J's text is very different than the one I hear in game. It's a minor complaint, but it can be distracting.

Despite that hiccup, I'd say that this game has easily become one of my favorite games I've ever played. I only wish there were more games willing to broach topics like this, but I guess that requires talking to trans gals...

...

Originally, my retrospective ended there. I had felt like I said enough about the game, but looking back, I really hadn't. Sure, I covered mostly everything that was in the game, but I hadn't covered the most important thing:

"What does this story mean to me?"

I mean, someone doesn't just make a highly detailed and emotional retrospective like this for free without having some kind of personal investment in it, right? At least, that's what I figure.

So, I guess I should reveal my own secret then.

I'm also a transgender woman, and like J.J., I've also gone through my own boughts of suicidal depression here and there. The simple fact is that a story like hers is extremely common for our community, and largely for the same reasons I see covered in the game. Except, for a lot of us, we didn't get to regenerate.

To avoid dating this post, I'll try to avoid discussing modern politics, but unfortunately, I feel like this is one story that will always remain relevant. As the world grows increasingly cruel to queer people, there will continue to be many J.J.s in the future. People who take their own lives after they felt rejected by their family, friends, society, and themselves. The most horrifying part of The Missing is that the story it tells is a dime a dozen for people like us, which is why it's so important that this game is highlighting that fact.

I find it interesting, in a good way, that the biggest plot twist of The Missing is that J.J. is transgender. The game waited until we both fully sympathized with her and until we all unquestionably saw her as a woman before they revealed it. So then, when we cut back to reality at the very end, and we see her IRL pre-transition body along with her masculine sounding voice, it's extremely discomforting. They basically created a simulation of what dysphoria is like. I can't say I ever felt that emotion from a video game before, that's for sure.

I also think reserving it as a twist also works well in other ways. By saving it until the end, after we've read most of the texts and experienced most of her backstory, we spent the entire time imagining a woman typing all of J.J.'s texts, even though she's not out to any of her friends. Not only does that again force the player to view J.J. as a woman, but it also adds an additional layer to all of her conversations if you decide to reread them, like I did.

I mean, I never publicly came out before for the same reason. I wanted people to just view me as a woman, not a trans woman. So, making her transness a plot twist really is perfect, in my opinion.

Even the grisly gameplay premise hits home to a lot of trans people. The idea of a woman who can freely snap any of her limbs off, even destroying her entire body when it's convenient, isn't far off from a fantasy that a lot of trans people end up imagining every once in a while. The thought of "oh, if only I can just chop off the parts that make me dysphoric" is something I've admittedly thought about every now and then. As the gameplay makes apparent, J.J.'s body itself is a massive hassle to deal with sometimes, so wouldn't it be nice to just destroy that whole thing and just roll away as a head...

Obviously that kind of literal self-destructive thought is insane, but suffering from dysphoria can cause us to imagine thoughts like that sometimes. Being transgender can feel like constant painful suffering, and that's without all of the external factors. Self-hatred, usually caused by dysphoria, is a key facet of the transgender experience, for most people.

For many trans people, these scary factors are just so much that we end up with stories like J.J. People who gave up on their lives before they even began to transition, assuming that they won't be able to or that it won't be worth it. Even if The Missing had ended at the reveal of J.J.'s backstory, it already would've been one of the best queer games ever, as it would've been an incredible, yet haunting representation of the worst parts of queer life.

But it didn't end there. It didn't end at the suffering.

Because it's a story about regeneration.

OUR regeneration.

The goal of The Missing was never to just remind trans people why it hurts to be them. It was to remind trans people that, no matter how much it hurts to be them, they should never give up. They should never lose hope. No matter what injury we take, we have to get back up and keep on fighting, because there is a future worth fighting for.

I think it's also interesting that J.J. saves the day, not by somehow stopping the transphobia that drove her to suicide, but by finding a sense of peace and purpose within herself. Rather than desperately try to appeal to others, she had to learn to be proudly herself, regardless of what they might think.

In the same sense, I think all the trans people out there who are feeling especially outcast by society as of late should take a similar note. Rather than be upset about how larger society views us, we should just focus on how we view each other, because that's one thing they can't take from us.

It's true. Being transgender can be really awful sometimes. With what feels like the entire world fighting back against us, it can be really tempting to just accept what happens, and die.

But there's always a sunny day around the corner.

If you quit now, you'll never get to see it.

Pull yourself together, and carry on.

Regenerate.

[randomboo256]

Final Fantasy VII, X, X-2, and XIII "Review" Compilation

This post is (mostly) spoiler free, for once. Feel free to read ahead!

Over the past year, I've been playing the Final Fantasy series for the first time (in no particular order). Each time I finished a game, I posted a lazy Twitter/Bluesky thread where I gave my thoughts on each game. I never bothered to compile them all, until now.

Keep in mind that these are not my full thoughts on these games as I have a lot more I could say about each of them. One day, I might write a more detailed post where I discuss the story and gameplay mechanics far more, but for now it'll just be a basic overview. Enjoy!

Final Fantasy VII (From Bluesky — March 17, 2024)

I just finished Final Fantasy VII (the original) for the first time. This also marks the first time I played any classic style Final Fantasy game to completion. Hell, this is the first time I've played ANY traditional RPG to completion. So this a big moment for me. So what did I think?

I thought it was great! The game held up shockingly well nearly 30 years later. For a game this long and this complicated made for the Playstation 1, it's surprising how little it shows it's age.

Firstly, graphics. Obviously, the pre-rendered CGI was and still is beautiful. They would've blown my mind back in 1997, which is impressive because back in 1997 I was negative six years old. As for the actual game, I still think it looks pretty great (even if all the characters look like LEGO). However the graphics do have a major issue, and that is the nature of the pre-rendered backgrounds. While yes, they LOOK nice, they do not PLAY nice. 90% of the game consists of running around on top of a flat jpg while desperately and awkwardly trying to figure out the intended collision detection. For the most part, it works ok. However it still gets in the way constantly and combined with the (at times) unwieldly speed of your party leader (who runs too fast but walks too slow), it all leads into turning the exploration into a clumsy struggle. This is definitely the worst aged aspect of FF7.

As for the combat, well it's hard for be to judge it too heavily. Since this is basically my first turn based RPG (outside of Mario), I have no point of reference. I will say that it seemed extremely nuanced and interesting with the Materia system, even if I kinda struggled to fully understand it.

I do have one complaint with the combat system, and that once again is a problem with the presentation. While the battles LOOK good, it can be honestly difficult to tell at a glance what characters and enemies your cursor currently has selected, which is kinda important in a turn based RPG. Again for the most part it's fine, but sometimes when there's a group of enemies I can't really figure out which one "gloved_hand.png" is supposedly hovering over. If you struggle with depth perception, I'm sorry but you should consider skipping this game.

Plus some characters—cough cough CAIT SITH cough cough— can be so physically large that with a poor camera angle they can literally block your view of your other party members. One time, Cloud died and I was pathetically struggling to figure out where to select him so I could use Phoenix Down. You can use the help button to fix these combat issues by having it display enemy names, but then that means even more of the game's limited screen real estate is being taken up by text boxes. With help, well over half the screen is taken up by blue text boxes. There has to be a better way than this.

I have one last thing to bitch about, and that's the saving system. You're limited to saving at certain spots. For the most part it's fine (?) but the big issue comes from game overs. Game over, and you're back to the title screen. No auto save. No retry. No nothing. Better save constantly, bucko! That said, I didn't struggle too much from the game's difficulty. I only died a few times, really. Honestly, the bigger problem with the game's save system is the fact that cutscenes seem to be unskippable. Kinda takes the wind out of the game's sails when I had to rewatch a certain highly dramatic scene after slipping up during the boss right after.

All of these issues could be easily easily EASILY fixed by a remake. Like... an actual remake. Usually I bitch about Nintendo-style "we changed nothing give us $60" remakes, but this is one of the few games that would benefit from that. Just making this game with 3D environments with widescreen (with a more zoomed out camera during battles), a basic modern saving system, and the ability to skip cutscenes would solve all it's issues. The gameplay is great. It's just being held back by PS1 graphical limitations and it's pre-autosave time period.

Overall Final Fantasy VII is a great game for its era. Despite its age in few areas, it still holds up very well. If a remake with those fixes was released, it'd be pretty perfect.

Oh, what about the narrative? Well, what can I say? It's Final Fantasy VII. It's narrative speaks for itself.

(AKA, I was too lazy to actually discuss the story, since I had too much to say. Don't worry, I'll get around to doing that some day...)

Bonus - Final Fantasy VII Extended Media

Advent Children/On the Way to a Smile/The Kids Are Alright

(From Twitter — March 30, 2024)

I just watched FF7 Advent Children for the first time and... wow... That sucked. Like... real bad. I really wanted to like that film, but everything from it's treatment of the characters, it's plot, it's villains, and hell even the action to an extent. I'm really disappointed.

The character writing itself wasn't bad necessarily, but the problem is that there was so little of it. There's not enough slow, grounded scenes to help us connect to our cast (you know, kinda the whole appeal of FF7).

The plot is so bonkers and fast paced that we can't breathe. The plot itself was like... kinda hard to comprehend. Looking back, it's not that complicated. The problem is that it's told mainly through vague exposition and, more pressingly, the editing was insane. Hard cuts forward and back in time and space that even putting together a basic timeline of events requires active thought while watching it. That kind of editing can work (mainly in mystery movies), but it doesn't work at all in this movie. It's such a strange choice to tell such a relatively simple plot in such a convoluted way.

It doesn't help that the villains are extra af. They're like reject Kingdom Hearts characters, which honestly could work if they were written as a contrast to Cloud's more serious and no-nonsense personality. But they never use that to any effect, and they just feel out of place.

Even the action kinda let me down. Maybe it's just me, but I never imagined this cast of characters flying through the air like Supermen as they effortlessly shrug off fatal blows. I mean the latter is true from a gameplay sense, but you know what I mean. It kinda takes away from a character like Sephiroth if everyone can practically fly. Sephiroth being the only character to pull off insane unrealistic anime feats makes him feel more other-wordly, and makes it more impressive that this ragtag group managed to stop him. I mean obviously the action didn't feel realistic per se. However compared to Advent Children, it was way more toned down for the most part. Even the limit breaks were realistic by comparison. It was also treated with more gravity when characters were in danger in cutscenes.

I get the thought process. It's a film, so we should remove the slow moments and focus on the constant plot stuff. It's a film, so we should exaggerate the action extra hard to make it more exciting. But removing the grounded moments are literally removing the heart of the game.

....

.......

....

(From Twitter — April 12, 2024)

I finished reading On the Way to a Smile the other day, which is a book that fills in the blanks between the game and the film. The book was great, and it makes me realize just how much potential this film had... and yet it didn't deliver on it. Not sure if that makes it worse.

On the bright side, after READING A BOOK, I'm now able to understand what the film was going for with it's narrative. The illness, Geostigma, was essentially just a metaphor for depression, or more accurately the feeling you get when you've lost all hope for your life. With that information in mind, the film's plot and it's characters make WAY more sense. The film is about regaining your hope and love for the world around you, even when things feel bleak. That's a great concept for a narrative, and it makes sense as a sequel to FF7.

When Sephiroth died after FF7, most of what made him who he was disappeared into the Lifestream. Only his hatred for the world, devotion to Jenova, and obsession with Cloud remained. He's not really a character anymore. He just exists as part of the film's depression metaphor.

When you look at the film this way, it had a ton going for it. However, that doesn't change the painful fact that the film is BAD. It spent it's runtime poorly, prioritizing bad lore dumps and meaningless action over character development, and came across muddled as a result.

Honestly my current prayer is that we somehow get an expanded version of Advent Children that adds far more scenes and has much clearer character development, similar to how the Remake Project has been. I think a one season anime would be a great medium to do that in, personally.

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(From Twitter — July 24, 2024)

I finished reading FF7 - The Kids Are Alright. It's a pretty great book, and it and On the Way to a Smile serve as a prequel to Advent Children. So, I rewatched the movie. Gotta say, now that I have all the extra context, it was WAY fucking better. I actually really like it now. If you didn't like the film, read the two prequel books and rewatch it. They do a much better job explaining and exploring some of the film's concepts, as well as allowing us to spend a lot more time understanding our characters post-FFVII.

Dirge of Cerberus (From Twitter — April 12, 2024)

Recently, I completed Final Fantasy 7's unloved stepchild—Dirge of Cerberus for PS2 (on an emulator with HD and a widescreen hack). I didn't know what to expect going in. DoC has a lot of fans and haters, so what did I think?

DoC is a bizarre game from the outset. It's basically a Ratchet and Clank clone, but with RPG-like stats and item shop. The core controls are fine enough, but the manual aiming setting is pretty bad. The game is designed with semi-auto aim in mind. The combat is also fine enough. Jump around constantly to dodge attacks while mashing the shoot button. Enemies are all bullet sponges with invisible health bars. I picked Hard Mode, and on it enemies did a ton of damage so I had to really play it safe. That said, I never really died.

R&C succeeds due to it's vast and creative arsenal. This game isn't so lucky. You actually craft your own guns, but there's only three types—Handgun, Machine gun, and Rifle—and there's only three gun slots. Customization just amounts to stats, really. The biggest choices you have for weapons are "Which upgrade path?" and "Materia or no?". You can buy expensive upgrades for your guns that will boost some stats and nerf others. I prioritized damage. I can see this adding replay value (especially with the semi-New Game+ mode).

As for Materia, they use up your accessory slot and add a special shot to your gun that deals an explosion of damage and drains your magic. I generally just used my slot for other things. I ended up sticking Blizzard on one gun when they added basic enemies that require magic. Materia is fine I guess but I really don't understand why they couldn't just have their own gun slot. I would've used magic a lot more. It also defeats the point of customization if you reach a point where the game says "actually no, you have to make your gun in this exact way".

Despite being a game with a high jump and double jump, they're exclusively used for strafing and dodging attacks. There's no platforming whatsoever in this game, with aggressive invisible walls everywhere. On that note, there's also zero exploration. It's all straight and linear. Despite that, the level design was far from boring. It's frustrating if anything. It's filled to the brim with traps and ambushes to screw you over. Personally, I really enjoy that kind of trolling "fuck you" game design, but I'm sure it'll just piss off most people.

The worst part of the gameplay was the bosses. A few are fun, others are mildly annoying, and some are WAY too easy. The final handful of bosses were mindlessly easy, which is insanely weird for a game this unrelenting in it's level design. It's a very underwhelming way to end.

Overall, the gameplay's fun enough, I suppose. The gunplays decent, the customization is interesting, there's good replay value, and the level design keeps you on your toes (for better or worse). I can give this a casual recommendation. Check it out if it sounds interesting.

As for the story, it's horrible lmao. It's cool to know more about Vincent but christ was this game's writing and directing a total mess. It feels like all the worst parts of KH without any of KH's goofy charm. This has to be an example of Square Enix at its worst. The occasional Advent Children quality FMVs were nice visually, and it was cool to see the occasional cameo, but damn this plot was just bizzare and hard to follow. I also hated how they constantly had to write shitty excuses for why Vincent has to work alone. This is the last thing in the FF7 timeline and it ends on a stupid unresolved cliffhanger (lol). Do not play this game if you only care about the story. You'll only be upset. I'm glad I was able to enjoy the gameplay, or this would've been a slog.

Final Fantasy VII Remake/Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

(From Twitter — November 20, 2021)

Started Final Fantasy 7 Remake. First impressions: Gameplay wise, I think this is going to be a fun game. I wanted a fun action game and this looks like it'll deliver. Story wise, I'm mixed. Going in, I was very conflicted about this game. I knew it was like a weird semi half sequel? But the more I thought about it, I realized this game is EXACTLY what I've been wanting for months now. I've been really wanting a remake that starts as a remake, but it slowly transforms as the characters realize that it's a remake. I was thinking more in line with a comedy title, not so much a serious JRPG, but regardless I have been wanting that, so I'm honestly interested now and willing to go in with an open mind. So overall, first impressions are positive. Hopefully that continues.

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(From Twitter — November 27, 2021)

I finished Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade. What a bizarre yet very enjoyable game. I liked it quite a lot despite its many questionable aspects. I can't wait until the next part of the remake.

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(From Twitter — May 1st, 2024)

Well I finished Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and by extension my Final Fantasy 7 marathon. I had an incredible time. The marathon had it's ups and downs, but overall it was a fantastic experience.

As for Rebirth itself, I have a few thoughts.

I'll be spoiler free for now. I will start spoiling things for Rebirth later in this section, and I'll give a warning before I do.

Gameplay wise, it's great. They took the combat of Remake (which was already great) and made it faster, snappier, more aerial, and added new synergy moves with your party members. It plays even more like Kingdom Hearts now, but obvs with a few big differences. The new open world was alright. Most areas felt fun to explore, and they made 100% intel completion a fun and simple task in every region. The game just places the important stuff on your map, which has it's pros and cons admittedly. The real sore point of the open world is Gongaga. That whole place felt like a confusing maze, and the fact that you have to hunt down specific mushrooms and hope they're the ones that bounce you in the right direction doesn't help. Cosmo Canyon was also similarly a bit annoying. The game also adds a bunch of minigames that I did not like. Having to complete all of the game's shitty minigames to perfection is the main reason why I doubt I'm ever gonna 100% this game, which is sad because I'm mostly there. The minigames were a huge lowlight to Rebirth.

Story wise, it was mostly great. The story was largely the same, but much much longer and far more scenes of the main characters connecting. I love the characters and the original plot, and the vast majority of the additions/changes were great imo.

SPOILER WARNING (SKIP AHEAD NOW)

The only part I dislike is the ending. This game ends at the end of disc 1 in the original game, aka Aerith's death. In the original, it was a very dramatic and sad moment. There's a reason it's so depressingly iconic. In the remake they completely botched it and I don't get why.

The original was very simple. Aerith got stabbed, Cloud gave a heartfelt speech about how torn up he is, Sephiroth summons a simple one phase Jenova boss fight (with Aerith's theme playing over it), the party mourns, and Cloud carries her body to some water and lets her sink in.

The remake removed all of that. Cloud doesn't get his speech (hell he basically doesn't say anything now), the boss is insanely, ridiculously, COMEDICALLY long (Aerith's theme only plays for the start of it), the party barely mourns, and we completely skip her burial. Now, part of the reason for skipping pretty much the entire sequence is because the game wants some kind of bizarre multiversal ambiguity over whether Aerith is alive or not. They're likely planning on bringing her back to life, in some form, in part 3.

I think this is stupid.

Ether let Aerith live, or kill Aerith properly. Don't give me this wishy washy "Schrodinger's Flower Girl" situation. Make me cheer or make me cry. Instead, I did neither and was just left scratching my head. Totally baffled towards both WHAT happened and WHY the devs did that. A large reason for why this just doesn't work is because they tried to shove a comically massive final boss in the middle of her death sequence. I think the devs should've picked ONE Aerith option, and then ended the game at Northern Crater. It would've worked infinitely better.

I'll hold out hope that Remake part 3 will make the changes worth it, like how Rebirth made Remake's weirder changes worth it, but for now we're just stuck with a baffling creative choice and a ruined iconic moment, in my opinion. The rest of the ending, I did enjoy.

SPOILERS END HERE

Anyway overall Rebirth is a great game, and one I'll remember for a very long time. I hear it's been underperforming, which is really sad because I HAVE to play Part 3 before I die. I need to see where this story is leading to, and I hope we'll be able to get that.

Final Fantasy X (From Twitter — July 6, 2024)

Finished Final Fantasy X for the first time. I actually started playing it a couple years ago but just never got around to finishing it. It didn't fully click with me then, but it did click now. Overall, I thought it was a pretty great game.

I thought most of the main party members are great characters, and I really enjoyed the themes of the narrative. I won't spoil anything so I won't say much more.

The ending made me cry...

Gameplay wise, it's great. Being able to switch characters in and out freely mid-battle added so much strategy to the game, and the ability to (eventually) customize your character's stats outside their normal path was great. I wish you could've started customizing sooner though. I spent the last third or so of the game with Yuna converted into a black mage, and jesus christ she just destroyed everything in her path! It was really funny. She became my main damage dealer. I ended up making Tidus and Rikku stand-in healers when Yuna was busy murdering. I'm not sure how well it compares to other RPGs, since I'm still pretty new to the genre, but I loved it. The game came out in like 2001 and I'd say it aged perfectly well. I wouldn't have minded a few extra save spots here and there, but overall it was fine.

Probably the most glaring issues with the game's age are the inability to skip cutscenes nor immediately retry a boss you died on. Well that, and the game's pretty shitty UI system. Even FF7 had a way better menu, so idk what happened here. It's manageable I guess, but this is the kinda shit I'd expect an "HD Remaster" to fix. From what I've heard, the remaster actually causes more problems than it solves, but regardless it's the one I own. At least the Switch version is portable?

Anyway, naturally I'll be playing FFX-2 next. I know that game's kinda controversial on the internet, but hey I'll be the judge. There's a lot of controversial things I like, for better or worse. I can't always trust consensus.

Besides, Yuna has two guns! What's not to love???

Final Fantasy X-2 (From Twitter — July 27th, 2024)

So, I finished Final Fantasy X-2. It took me a long time to finish it, but that's partially because I took a week long break in the middle of it.

So, what did I think?

Well firstly, I should start by talking about the game's unique structure. The game is divided into 5 chapters, but chapter 4 doesn't count so really it's 4 chapters. Each chapter revolves around the world map screen, on which every location is unlocked from the start. While locations labeled "hotspots" will progress the story, and every other location (and thus most of the game) will consist of optional side quest content. However they aren't as "side" as you'd think, as they all contribute to the %. A high % is required for the true ending. Additionally, if you didn't complete every side quest possible in your current chapter and move on to the next, chances are that you permanently missed the chance to complete that quest, so you must be thorough. Btw, "permanently missing your chance" is a running theme here. Overall, it's a truly bizarre structure. The closest I can compare this to is a combination of MM and TotK. It's MM in the sense that 90% of the game is optional and the fact it runs on a strict sense of time, and it's TotK in the sense of a reused overworld of it's predecessor.

Immediately I can understand why some people didn't care for this game. While FFX was an adventure, FFX-2 was all about routinely warping around the world doing busy work for others. It's a completely different vibe, and that's not helped by the story, but I'll get back to that.

I suppose I should preface the rest of this with how much of the game I actually completed. In total, I got around 70% in 1 playthrough. I skipped everything in Chapter 1 on accident then played everything after. I did most side quests, getting Chapter Complete in most locations. My save file was roughly 40 hours. I didn't get the true ending, as I wasn't fully aware of it's esoteric requirements. I had to Youtube the cutscene. Some people might consider my POV irrelevant as I didn't do everything, but I tried my best (while trying to avoid walkthroughs).

Since most of the game is optional, let's start with the side quests. Side quests mostly consist of talking to an NPC, finding and talking to another NPC and then maybe sometimes doing a minigame or sometimes fighting something or sometimes both. Yeah, it's mostly pretty mundane. Minigames are probably the defining aspect of this game. It's absolutely loaded with weird minigames, most of which being about as fleshed out as a 3 second WarioWare microgame (and about quarter as fun). Whenever a minigame starts, I always groaned.

As for the fighting, now it's getting interesting. Unlike FFX, the game uses the RTB structure that other FF games use, however with a twist. Firstly, there's timing now. Most moves take time to cast, during which it can be staggered by enemy attacks, for both you and them. I'd say it was a fun combat system, but what makes it special are dresspheres. Dresspheres are character classes that you can change on the fly mid-battle, and you can have many at your disposal. It adds infinite strategic options, and it's where the replayability is truly at.

To recap—the battle gameplay is fun, the minigames are bad, there's very little exploration, and you're mostly just running in-between boring npcs you've already met. So... the side quests aren't great from a gameplay perspective. As for the main quests, they get more interesting. They tend to have new level design as well as more engaging battles and naturally much more interesting writing. They're more what you'd expect from a game like this, which is why it's a shame there wasn't more of them. Overall the gameplay is fine. Outside of the minigames, nothing is offensively bad. It's boring at worst, usually.

It could all be saved by the writing, and fortunately I thought the writing was solid. Maybe not as good as FFX, but certainly solid. I won't spoil much, but it's a much more lighthearted game than FFX. Honestly I wouldn't even call it a sequel really, as it didn't really follow up on the plot. It's more-so just a game set a couple years later in the same world following two of the main characters. The best way I could describe the plot is that it's kinda like a playable version of Final Fantasy 7 - On the Way to a Smile. That was a book that just consisted of low stakes stories to establish where our former main characters wound up... and yeah. That's FFX-2. Personally, I love low-stakes character-driven stories, so I was mostly engaged by these three girls. However, I can definitely understand why it wouldn't appeal to some. This game really reads like a companion piece, not an actual sequel. I'm sure that was disappointing.

However, my biggest criticism of the game's plot comes back to the game's structure. FFX-2 makes it very easy to miss plot critical scenes, and the game's very ending changes drastically depending on whether you were lucky enough to see them. I hate that. It and all the other easily missable things were an attempt to foster replayability, and to go along with it they have a New Game+ mode. But this game was already replayable enough with the dressphere system. They didn't need to fuck with the plot as well, at least in my opinion.

So in conclusion, what did I think of FFX-2? Well, it was a strange mixed bag of ideas. The writing was enjoyable enough and the combat was fun, even if the actual tasks we're given are mostly boring or consisted of bad minigames. I'd say it was a good, albeit very weird game.

At the very least, it was a way better sequel than Tears of the Kingdom...

Final Fantasy XIII

(From Twitter — July 28th)

I started playing Final Fantasy XIII. I just started the 3rd chapter. So far, I think the game looks great! The combat seems pretty fun, the characters were pretty good, the graphics are gorgeous, and the world building has been pretty interesting. So far, I don't get the hate.

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(From Twitter — Sep. 10th, 2024)

I finally finished Final Fantasy XIII. Don't ask why it took over a month.

Overall, I thought it was a fantastic game, but I can definitely understand where the hate was coming from now, even if I don't really agree with most of it.

The story was pretty good, although it kinda peaked at the halfway point. By the time you hit Chapter 11, the narrative really slows down and mostly just stagnated during what was by far the longest chapter. Chapters 12 and 13 were mostly fine, but they had their problems too. The first half of the game was like, "yeah were the little guys and we're gonna take on the whole damn corrupt establishment ourselves!" But eventually it became less about that and more about complicated lore revolving around gods and stuff, and it just wasn't as interesting imo.

The first half of the game was laser focused on developing our cast of characters, and they were all pretty great. The second half was more about the game's worldbuilding. It's weirdly unbalanced. They should've spread the character beats out a bit more. Part of the problem is that once you reach Chapter 10 or so, you unlock the ability to customize your party. Ordinarily, that'd be fine, but the problem is that now the characters can't chat casually mid-gameplay bc Square didn't know who would be in your team. The obvious solution would to just have everyone be standing around together, and so anyone can still talk to anyone else at any time. That's what VII Remake and Rebirth did, but I guess the XIII team didn't think of that? Maybe they were worried about performance.

Another problem is the game's overreliance on the Datalog to explain the narrative. I don't really think this was a dealbreaker, but it did drag the pace a bit in the opening hours when I had to pause to read constantly. Although at this point, I'm pretty used to reading shit.

One weird aspect is the game's "main character". From how all the promo material presents it, you'd think it was Lightning. I mean, she's the entire front cover for crying out loud. However, she's really not? The main characters are really Vanille and Fang, at least by the end. That's not a bad thing, per se. Those two girls are great, Still, it's weirdly misleading from an outside perspective. I'd have to assume that Square just wasn't sure how to market it, so they just put the coolest character in the center of the marketing, which I guess makes sense.

As for the game's lore, it's fine? I can't really say I'm that compelled by XIII's world. I'm not sure what it is about it, but I was just never fully interested in the game's actual main plot with the fal'Cie and stuff. Like I mostly understood it, but I wasn't very compelled. It was mostly like, really grandiose shit about worshipping unfathomable deities who themselves worship even more unfathomable deities and it was kinda a lot to keep track of. If you break it down, it's not that complex, but the way it was told was a bit hard to grasp.

I know that sounded like a lot of complaints, but I still mostly enjoyed the writing, and I'm excited to see where it's heading with the sequels, although that said I'm not really sure where the plot can go? They'd have to introduce a lotta new stuff, but I guess I'll see.

As for the gameplay, girl, it's fucking weird. Good weird or bad weird, you ask? Well, it's both, kinda. Basically, the game is partially automated. Every choice, like attacking/healing/stat effects are picked for you. You can do it manually, but you'd have to go super fast. So if the game does most things for you, what do you do? Well, y'know how X-2 had that dress-sphere system where you can switch classes mid-battle? Imagine if the class switching was the whole game. No, not the multiple class mechanic. I mean the act of switching a class itself. The entire game is all about picking the right time to switch your characters from one class to another. Complicating matters is that you can't switch characters individually, only the whole party at once via 6 customizable class customization slots. This all sounds bad, but it honestly isn't. While simple, it ends up being a really addicting gameplay loop. It's all about crafting the perfect party deck which you carefully switch between at the perfect times. It works well, although I wouldn't prefer it over typical turn based combat.

Another quirk is that you can't control party members, beyond what their class is. That's not a big dealbreaker. What IS one is that if the leader dies, Game Over. Even if the rest of the party is healthy, if the leader is one-shot, you're done. This can be annoying at times. Overall the combat's fun enough, but I can totally understand why someone back then might've been upset if they thought that this weird new gameplay is where the series would be permanently heading. That said, it's still a fun combat system, even if it's not my preference.

Now as for the game's most infamous element: Level design. The game design is completely linear for most of the game. Even when it does start to open up, it's still pretty linear. Everyone knows this. However, I don't really get the complaint. A lot of FF games are linear. Linear ≠ Bad.

So, overall, what did I think of Final Fantasy XIII? Well, I started this thread with that, didn't I? Once again, I thought it was a fantastic game, but I can definitely understand where the hate was coming from now, even if I don't really agree with most of it. The plot is great in many ways, even if some aspects never fully clicked with me and even though there are some odd aspects to it. The gameplay is bizarre and unique, but still fun in it's own weird way, even if I can understand the potential fan backlash over it.

So, yeah I recommend Final Fantasy XIII. I'd say that it's definitely a focus worth seeing through to completion, not like you have a choice anyway.

You don't want to become a Cie'th, do you?

Well, that's one XIII game down. Two to go. And it only took me about *checks math* 44 days to beat...

I..

I'm gonna be here for a while, aren't I?

oh my...

And now, you'll all caught up! Good for you!!!

[randomboo256]

Adventure Time Mini-"Review"

This "review" is just a simple Twitter thread I made earlier. I like it, so I decided to repost it here, mainly so it's in a better text format.

I just finished watching Adventure Time (at least the original 10 seasons anyway). The best possible term for this show is "mixed bag". When the show is at it's best, it's an absolutely incredible must-see show. At it's worst, it's borderline unwatchable garbage.

The first few seasons (like 1 to 4-ish) were just kinda a mediocre kids show that has the occasional episode that really stands out as either really good or kinda bad. Even as a kid, I just thought it was pretty meh, but I did like the show enough to watch it on occasion.

The middle seasons (5-6) are when the show hits it's "difficult to watch era" (especially when to comes to Season 5). For some ungodly reason, those two seasons were ridiculously long. While there were still fantastic episodes and they're better than ever before, they felt fewer and further between than before. Meanwhile, there are many that are flat out horrible episodes, and even in the mid ones, our main characters are in their least likable forms. Additionally, some things...like a certain painfully unfunny lemon man... got way more screen time than they deserved. Despite my ranting though, most of the episodes were just mid. Overall, 5-6 were ok-ish, but god the show felt like it was dragging through this era. It felt like the writers were surprised with the insanely long season orders and they had to desperately stretch to fill those seasons out.

For what it's worth, most of that complaining was addressed to Season 5, and so I will say that Season 6 at the very least was a big improvement over Season 5, even if it still shared similar problems.

The final seasons (7-10) is when the season orders were dramatically reduced back to sane amounts, and the writing immediately felt improved. It helps that's also when the show became fully serialized, and that kind of writing works so much better with an "ADVENTURE" show. Those four seasons felt so laser-focused on interesting concepts and emotionally meaningful themes, all while fully embracing the interesting lore the series had been very slowly building up, and finally answering some hard hitting questions in lengthy and satisfying ways.

The late era of Adventure Time truly is an incredible show that is worth watching. The only major issue I have is that I can't recommend it on it's own. You have to watch most of 1-6 first to appreciate it, and I'm not just talking about lore relevant episodes. The show is a package deal. It's like Lucky Charms: you can't just take the out the marshmallows and eat them. Well, I mean you can, but they won't taste as good without the proper context surrounding them.

Like I said, it's a mixed bag.

However...

I like Lucky Charms, and I also like this show. It's not perfect, by any means, but there is a certain charm to it (no pun intended😉). I do recommend this show.

That said, do not eat it all in one sitting, like I did.

That much candy is bad for your health.

[randomboo256]

BotW and TotK, Revisited

So it's Tears of the Kingdom's anniversary already.

I ended up replaying the game a few months ago. I'm not sure if I've ever played a game so rife with good ideas and great potential that failed so hard to take advantage of any of it.

This will be long, please stay with me.

Before we talk about TotK, we need to talk about it's predecessor: Breath of the Wild.

I played this game when it came out, and for what it's worth I thought it was decently fun. However it lacks a lot of the design that made previous games work. Before you ask, no I'm not nostalgia blind. I played the entire Zelda series for the first time in 2016, and I played BotW just a year later. If anything, I'm just as nostalgic for old Zelda as I am for BotW itself. This is just an honest critique of the game's design.

BotW is a game that felt like a rough draft of what a modernized 3D Zelda game could be. The idea of making the world larger, more open, and more inspired by the 2D games is a brilliant one. The execution however felt less like 2D Zelda and more like every other open world game.

What BotW mainly suffered from was bloat. The world was too large and less rewarding. Your main reward for exploring a Zelda game are new items and heart pieces. When you relegate all of those to copy/paste shrines, you're removing the main incentive to actually engage with the world.

In old Zelda, you had no idea what you could find! Any random chest could have a heart piece or even a brand new item. Any sidequest could give you an awesome reward. That's what made it so much fun and so compelling to do everything you can! Old Zelda also loved to show you something you wanted, without telling you how to get it. Often you'd have to come back WAY later. It makes you remember that location, and when you can grab it it's so satisfying. Metroidvanias are like entirely built on this principle.

However, BotW's map is simply too large to be constantly engaging like this. The devs can't ensure you'll find the upgrades, important NPCs, and discoveries without just telling you. In old Zelda, the devs can naturally guide you to all of that with level design. To remedy this, BotW tries to give you items and upgrades constantly, but they do so in a way to make sure that it makes no difference if you missed them. That's how we get things like interchangeable swords that break instead a permanent sword upgrades (I'll get back to that).

It doesn't help that BotW pushed it's nonlinearity too hard. It wanted to make everything in the game accessible immediately as well as completely skippable, which ruins most sense of player progress as well as obliterating any form of a difficulty curve. BotW never has that "Oh, I can get that now!" moment. You know, I actually don't mind the weapon system in concept. I love resource management in games. The problem is that enemies are optional, and killing them is rarely ever worth the swords you broke. Other games with resource management don't allow to just effortlessly ignore every enemy. The worst part of BotW's over-nonlinearity is the dungeons. Dungeons have always been the heart of this series, even in the original game. In BotW, they were simplified down to "do these 5 points in any order" and it's just really boring and underwhelming.

On top of all of this, I haven't mentioned the stamina system, which quite literally just exists to waste your fucking time. By stripping out so much of Zelda's game design in favor of interchangeable everything, it just all adds up to a game that's very repetitive, often boring, and not as satisfying to play as the older titles. If BotW had a map half the size, it could let Nintendo actually pack it to the brim with something interesting and engaging to find in every step you take. Combine that with a return of the old item/heart piece system and a bit of linearity, and it could be great. The happy medium between old and new Zelda is basically just giving the game a more Metroidvania-esc game design logic, as I alluded to earlier. It's a simple fix, but I think it would make everyone happy.

However, TotK took a different route....

Finally, the topic of the today's post. I played Tears of the Kingdom right around launch, and again for what's worth I thought it too was decently fun. However while I could be a little forgiving of BotW for its various missteps, this game doubled down on all of BotW's worst issues.

Instead of removing bloat, TotK TRIPLED it. We have a mostly empty and boring sky and a mostly boring and empty depths. What's left is the shamelessly reused map from BotW. So now everything in the game is either something you've already seen or something you don't care about. This choice is baffling, to be frank. Of all Zelda games, BotW especially is all about exploring the map.

Like, it literally didn't have anything else!!! Why would I want to explore this map again?!!! I've seen it already!!! There wasn't that much there the first time!!!

cough cough

Getting back ahold of myself....

TotK's main excuse to explore the map is the introduction of caves (which somehow weren't in BotW). Caves certainly add a ton of life to the world design, but we still run into a problem of them too getting very stale by the end. On top of that, they removed any challenge in the physical effort of exploring the world. While the stamina system in BotW mostly sucks, it's main strength is that you can't just climb to the top of every mountain. You gotta look around and be a bit more clever. In TotK, towers alone shoot you up a million feet, so you can just glide everywhere. It's faster, I guess, but what's the point of having world map if it's smarter to just fly over it? It's like they knew that exploring again would be boring so they just let you skip over it.

Well exploration is mostly a bust, but what else changed?

Well to start out positive, I adore the weapon fusing system. I already enjoy resource management, so adding whole fusing layer on top of it is super fun. However, I still rarely have a reason to actually fight. By far the most fun part of TotK were the Proving Ground shrines. When I walk into one of these shrines, it's like the game comes to life with so much fun and energy. It's like I'm teleported to a world where the combat clicks and is insanely fun and in-depth. It's funny, because all those shrines did was limit my weapons, limit my healing, make enemies more punishing, and forced me to actually beat them.

WHY WASN'T THE WHOLE GAME DESIGNED LIKE THIS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Well we know why. By making the enemies unrelenting, the weapons and healing limited, and forcing you to fight, the game is limiting what you're capable of. Working around and with limitations are the core of what makes, not just video games, ALL games fun. However, the modern Zelda games are so allergic to the idea of limitations in general that they're sabotaging their own carefully designed combat system at pretty much all times. The only way to enjoy it is for the player to decide to place the limit themself, which is a lot to ask of us.

Outside the upgraded combat system, the main difference between BotW and TotK is a new move called Ultrahand, which strangely a reference to an old Nintendo toy. Ultrahand "functions" by letting you grab any physics object, twist it around, and then stick it to other physics objects. If you're thinking "that just sounds like the fucking Psychics Gun from Garry's Mod", then correct! The only difference is that the Physgun actually works properly. For what it's worth, it's pretty impressive technology, however that doesn't mean much when it's not actually fun to play. Moving an object around with Ultrahand feels extremely stiff and awkward. As for the glueing aspect, it's even worse. With the controls alone it's hard to make anything, but what's worse is that you can't detach one item at a time. If you glue one thing on wrong, shaking it loose will probably make it all fall apart. As you might imagine from a system where any two things can be glued in any way, it's all extremely fucking janky.

When the game's systems for Ultrahand are properly flowing and working properly, it can be pretty fun, but for every "pretty fun" Ultrahand moment, there's a thousand annoying moments.

In a way, Ultrahand is basically just an upgraded and reskinned Magnesis, a move from BotW. Magnesis also barely worked, but it wasn't used nearly as much. Ultrahand meanwhile is literally the entire game. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much every puzzle and a majority of side missions are about Ultrahand. Ultrahand is this game's gimmick. You know, like how Ocarina of Time's gimmick was time periods, Majora's Mask's was a time loop, Wind Waker's was the ocean, Twilight Princess was the wolf, Skyward Sword's was motion controls, and Breath of the Wild's was extreme nonlinearity. Tears of the Kingdom's gimmick is Ultrahand, and wow holy shit is it the worst 3D Zelda gimmick so far.

Honestly what sucks is that Ultrahand could've been a lot better. On occasion, they do have some really fun puzzles with it. However, because these modern Zelda games don't have difficulty curves, the Ultrahand puzzles won't get more challenging over time. The majority are just too easy, and I'm spending more time thinking about how awful the controls are at doing what I want.

As for the dungeons, well don't get your hopes up. They're identical to BotW, except now with Ultrahand gimmicks! Well, that's not totally true. They do have two big changes. Firstly, every dungeon has a long linear segment leading up to it. These sections are genuinely great, and they feel more like Zelda dungeons than the actual dungeons. However they are just short preludes to the lackluster main event. As for the other change, this game reintroduces companions.

Companions are classic aspect of Zelda that BotW sorely missed. They're usually small and out of the way. They exist for three important reasons: For one, player guidance. They'll occasionally chime in with hints on where to go and what to do. For two, they add worldbuilding. You can freely talk to them and sometimes you can learn some interesting details from them. For three, they give Link a voice. Link is barely a character, so having another character follow him around and speak for him in cutscenes is a great way to remedy that. Of course, they could just... let Link talk but HEY HEY let's not get too crazy.

Unfortunately TotK once again dropped the ball on this. This game has four companions that you unlock over the story, and they're not small. They're full human sized NPCs that constantly follow you around and get in your way. Now honestly, I could forgive that. I love Final Fantasy VII Remake, and those games have that issue. I don't really care that my party members get in my way in those games, because they're great characters and they're constantly chiming in with fun dialogue. However TotK somehow didn't think to do that. Your "party" never chimes in at any point. Neither in gameplay OR cutscenes. What a huge missed opportunity! They're just lifeless robots that follow you around.

You might be thinking, "I thought the whole point of Zelda companions was that they'd talk. If they don't talk in TotK, what do they do?" and that's a good question hypothetical-person-I-made-up. For one, they fight in combat with you. That sounds fun, but you can't control them at all. They're completely AI. For two, each one has a special move you can use by walking up to them and pressing A. This means they essentially act like a dungeon item. That's a huge improvement for the quality of the dungeons. But remember, they get in the way constantly. Combine that with the strange controls, and you will be constantly setting off your partners without wanting to. Did nobody playtest this???

Giving Link party members is a fucking amazing idea, but they botched the execution of this so hard that most people just turn the party members off. What a waste of an idea. I hope they revisit this concept. I'll be really sad if they don't.

So all in all, Tears of the Kingdom is a really upsetting video game to me. It didn't do the one thing I was hoping, and that was "make a version of Breath of the Wild that took more advantage of it's concept".

On top of that, it kept piling on new great ideas that they also fucked up. Like adding caves, sky islands, and depths to an open world Zelda. Yes! Great idea! However, they were really fucking boring and repetitive. They gave the game an amazing combat system, and then punished you for using it. They gave the game a complicated physics puzzle gimmick, but it was really fucking janky and overused. The added fun build ups to dungeons, but still skimped out on making the actual dungeon part. They gave Link party members, but they're boring and get in your way.

When I look at Tears of the Kingdom, all I can see is the insane amount of missed potential this game had. They could've done so much. They TRIED to do so much. But they didn't do any well at any of them! I can't help but think this all just comes down to a case of some extreme overambition. They tried to do so many things, on top of having an insanely large open world. BotW's map was way too big. TotK's map is insanely oversized. That's why my number one prayer for the next Zelda is that they SCALE THIS SHIT DOWN!!

Overall, Tears of the Kingdom isn't a bad game. When it works, it works very well. However it works so occasionally that I really wish Nintendo stops doing this new modern formula. It seems like Nintendo just doesn't know how to improve upon BotW. With TotK, they just figured "Well if we take BotW and just shove more shit into it, it'd be good right?". Well, it's not good. It's fucking mid.

As for what I want Nintendo to do instead? Well I hope that the next Zelda is just something that's radically new. You might not have expected me to say that, huh? Well honestly, I don't really care if old Zelda ever returns. If it ever did, I'd be happy for sure, but it's not like those old games are perfect either. The reason we're even in this mess is because Skyward Sword was so hated that Nintendo backpedalled so hard in the opposite direction that they fell off a cliff.

At this point, all I want is a new Zelda game that I can love again, and these modern ones just aren't it.

[randomboo256]

SEGA, we have to talk about these boss fights. Ok, look the Sonic series has always... struggled when it comes to having good fights in my opinion.

The momentum-based classic Sonic gameplay and physics have never felt very natural in a boss setting. In Classic Sonic, Sonic takes a good few seconds to build up any speed and if you jump without building up speed you'll barely move. It feels fine while platforming because the levels are designed around it. However, when fighting against a boss, Classic Sonic begins feeling pretty sluggish. It doesn't end there though. When you attack a boss in Classic Sonic, Sonic also gets bounced back in an at times unpredictable direction and speed. It's very easy to get punished for landing an attack. Not to mention the fact that Sonic the Hedgehog has an incredibly large head. And a stupidly large head = a pretty big hitbox. Additionally, it can be really unclear when it's even safe to attack some bosses. The games have no real indicator when it's safe to go for hit, so I often just keep throwing myself at them until I learn where and how they actually take damage. In total, it's just really unpleasant fighting a boss in a classic game. What makes it worse is that bosses are stapled onto acts, so if you want to replay a level you're forced to replay the boss it comes with.

Fortunately though, classic bosses usually aren't very long. Most can be beaten in under a minute, and they usually aren't too bad. They're not any fun, but they're over quickly and they aren't really hard at all. Only the final bosses of the Sonic's 1, 2, and 3K are any level of frustrating, and in 1 and 2's case that's solely from a lack of rings. I mean hell, there's a reason the Sonic series uses rings for health. It's because it's really tough to avoid taking damage all the time in these games. Between Sonic's speed while platforming and his clumsiness during bosses, Sonic needs to have a super forgiving health system.

As for the 3D games... well while there's a lot one can say about the 3D Sonic games in general about whether they're an improvement/downgrade from the classics, I will die on the hill that the 3D Sonic games have universally better boss fights. The 3D games are an inarguable improvement when it comes to the average boss fight, in my opinion.

Sonic's homing attack allows you to attack from a standstill, therefore fixing the issue with Sonic's controls. Using his homing attack without locking on also immediately gives Sonic midair speed and works as a fun dodge move.

When Sonic lands a hit on a boss in a 3D game, Sonic usually gets cinematically sent back to a safe position while the boss either acts stunned for a few seconds or gears up for the next phase. This means that landing an attack rarely punishes the player, and it also lets them relax and celebrate for a second before the fight continues.

Bosses have their own dedicated levels, and because of that they don't drag down the game's replayability, as well allowing them to be longer.

The 3D games have far more forgiving hitboxes in general.

That's not to say that the 3D games have perfect bosses though. Far from it actually.

The 3D games have famously poor cameras. While they're usually "good enough" during levels, they often crumble to pieces during boss fights. It can be damn near impossible to see anything during some 3D Sonic fights, to the extent where you wonder if the boss was even playtested at all.

The ring system just feels OP now. While classic Sonic was so clumsy during a boss that it needed it, the more precise 3D Sonic controls just make the rings redundant. I can't help but feel like a lot of these bosses would just be better if Sonic just had a normal health meter.

The issue of not knowing when it's safe it hit has gotten even worse. Mainly because most fights don't have the easy tell of "hit where you see Eggman" like a lot of the classics did.

The 3D games like being more cinematic, so so trying to attack the boss will hurt you anyway if you don't wait for their rigid patterns to conclude and for them to enter their "it's legally acceptable to attack me" state. The makes the bosses way more repetitive, and because they're longer that means death is even worse. They can also get pretty long too.

Some of the games have quick time events.

Finally, the final boss in 3D games are almost always playing as Super Sonic, which translates to "your completion of this game depends on this incredibly gimmicky boss section that's exclusively using half-baked gameplay mechanics that you have never touched in this game before this point". In other words, it's a pretty underwhelming way to end the game from a gameplay sense.

The 3D games are very diverse, so there's obviously exceptions to what I've just listed, but in general the 3D games share these strengths and issues. In general, the 3D bosses are better than the classics, but still not very good in my opinion. They're mostly just middling.

But this is all old news. Why do we have to talk about this now? Well, two days ago you released a little game called Sonic Superstars. Now, Sonic Superstars is a fun little game in general. Sure it's incredibly pitiful compared to the less expensive Super Mario Wonder, but Superstars is still a fun little game. The controls are pretty tight. Some of the chaos emerald powers are pretty neat. The level design... exists. The graphics... could've definitely been better but hey they also could've been worse...? Trip is pretty cute character design???

Yeah let's stop beating around the bush. These boss fights are awful Sega. And not just the normal Sonic boss fight where I'm "Oh well this is kinda unfun but I can tolerate it". No. The bosses in Superstars are ADVANCED UNFUN. The bosses in Superstars miraculously managed to take everything that wasn't fun about the classics and some of the worst parts of the 3D games then smashed them together into one unholy freak of nature.

When I say they took "everything that wasn't fun", I mean it. I can just copy and paste the exact same problems. It's been 30 years and yet there were zero improvements. What makes Superstars so bad is when they combined all of these existing issues with the longer and more cinematic (repetitive) boss fights. So in total we have:

Controls that feel sluggish in this context.

A physics engine that will punish you even if you land the attack.

A large hitbox.

Some bosses are unclear when and how you're able to deal damage.

Some bosses that will just ignore your attacks sometimes (if they feel like it).

Bosses are stapled on the end of levels, forcing you to replay the boss every time you replay the level, or vice versa.

Bosses that are upwards of several minutes long (sometimes feeling longer than the level itself), all with no checkpoints.

Bosses that have long, tedious, and uninterruptable attack cycles that you have to repeat over and over if you die or replay the level.

A camera that sometimes won't show vital information.

And on top of everything else, they're buggy. Sometimes you or your rings clip through the ground. Sometimes bosses spawn right on top of you. Sometimes the emerald powers wig out or just refuse to work. Sometimes the performance on Switch gets so bad that you can barely even play it, let alone beat it. The only real saving grace with Superstars's bosses is that you can sometimes cheese them with emeralds.

In most Sonic games, the bosses are merely a brief low point. In Sonic Superstars, they're actively ruining the rest of the game. Because they're long, unfun, and unfair I just...

I just have no words.

[randomboo256]

Four Swords Rant

I've been playing the Four Swords games for the first time recently, and they're honestly not as good as people hype them up to be. Specifically, I'm referring to the games Four Swords Anniversary Edition and Four Swords Adventures. I was really excited to play them because they're some of the only Zelda games I never touched, so to say I was let down is an understatement. Let me go one at a time with these two, because they're surprisingly different.

Also they're pretty old and are a pain to play nowadays (hell, they were a pain to play even back then), so I imagine a lot of people haven't touched them seriously in forever, so let me recap you as well.

Warning: This post will be long. I am sorry.

Firstly, Four Swords. It's probably the most obscure official Zelda game made for one of Nintendo's main systems. Four Swords was a freebie with the GBA version of A Link to the Past, and it's remaster Four Swords Anniversary Edition was a downloadable freebie to all Nintendo DSI owners. Needless to say, but there's no reason to be too overly harsh on the game. Honestly, the main problem with Four Swords is less to do with the game and more do to Nintendo's refusal to act normal for five seconds. Four Swords Anniversary was delisted just a few months after release, and the GBA original has never been rereleased (despite the fact Nintendo charges us a $50 sub to play GBA games with online multiplayer as being its main selling point).

Anyway the game itself. It's a weird one. There's four main levels, but they're randomized. It's kinda like a roguelike game or something. The gameplay is basic, but it's fun enough for a freebie. The original GBA version was multiplayer only, but luckily the (delisted) remaster added a singleplayer which works fine enough. I wanted to play it multiplayer with a friend (and believe me I tried), but it was too much hassle. As a singleplayer game, I can see it working very well as a way to get your quick Zelda fix on the go.

"But where's the complaining?" you might be wondering. Well, I haven't gotten into the bonus levels yet. Anniversary added two extra worlds... which consist of three levels each... which themselves are batches of three levels each. So 18 levels, except unlike the base game, these aren't randomized. These were all handcrafted, and are identical on every playthrough. The first 9 levels aren't bad at all, actually. They're loving homages to ALTTP, LA, and TLOZ respectively and the level design and puzzle were pretty good imo.

Now the second batch of levels are what grind my gears. They're positioned as like the greatest challenge yet but they're more like greatest test of patience. These levels are LONG (admittedly I play slow), and they're the only time in the game where Rupees became a real annoyance to me. Basically, Rupees are your extra lives. If any Link dies, you lose 50, then 100, then like 200, etc until it caps at 500 Rupees per death. If a Link dies, they respawn on the spot. Now critically, if you can not afford the death fee it's GAME OVER. You have to go back —not to the start of the level— but to to the start of that batch of 3 levels. Just one of these levels can take me like 30 minutes because they're huge and I'm looking everywhere for all the rupees I can get. Add them all up and that's like 90 minutes of progress I can potentially lose from not having my damn tax money. Even that wouldn't be too bad if these levels didn't have some downright horrible game design in my opinion. For example, the second batch of levels are all filled with ice physics that make the game near unplayable. Yeah, it's hard I guess. But the developers didn't seem to understand that hard things should also have to be fun.

You may think this is a lot of pointless complaining considering it's about 1 bonus world in a free and delisted remaster of a relatively obscure game, and if you do think that you're completely correct. However I was so completely miserable playing it that I just had to rant to get it off my chest, ok? Despite my whining, I think Four Swords Anniversary Edition is a good game for what it is, at least from my singleplayer perspective.

Four Swords Adventures on the other hand... I am not so forgiving to. Disclaimer: I have not finished this game yet. At this point, we only have a couple worlds left. Multiplayer games like this need scheduling, and we haven't had the chance to end it yet. Firstly, Four Swords Adventures is the polar opposite of Four Swords in terms of price. While Four Swords was basically just a free giveaway, Four Swords Adventures is perhaps one of the most ridiculously expensive games to ever exist on a home console. Between the $50 price tag of the game itself, you also need four $100 GBAs, and four $10 GBA to GCN link cables. If you just want to play your Gamecube game with multiple people the couch, you had to spend over $500 (including tax) when it was new. Keep in mind, I was using the pricing of back then when it was new. Nowadays it's even worse. Just one of those GBA to GCN cables alone and used can run you like $40.

You might defend this with, "So what? The GBA Four Swords required a bunch of consoles and stuff. You didn't give it shit for it." But there's a huge difference there. It's not unreasonable for a GBA game to need more GBAs for multiplayer. In fact, for simultaneous multiplayer it simply needs to do that. There's no other way it could reasonably work. Not only that, but Four Swords—again—was a freebie to a normal Zelda game. It was more like a bonus if you had the extra hardware to play it.

Meanwhile, it's completely UNreasonable for a Gamecube game that's literally all about multiplayer to require four separate game consoles on top of the existing home console that you needed to buy. Spoiler alert, but the GBAs basically just act like Wii U Gamepads before the Wii U Gamepad, and they're about as useless. You can see your health, force gem count, and if you're in a house or underground you appear on the GBA screen. Is it neat? Kinda, but not $500 neat. This game should've just had split screen, like a normal game. The GBA stuff could've just been optional if you own the hardware already. It's completely and utterly ridiculous, and it's insane that Nintendo got away with it.

Well for a game this expensive, it must be worth it right? God I wish it was...

Firstly, the good. I really love the combat. It feels like 3D Zelda combat adapted right into the second dimension. It took me a bit to get used to, but it feels great. I can't remember if any other 2D played like this, but I like it. Secondly and despite my upcoming issues, I do think the game is decently fun most of the time.

Ok I'm out of good. Now for the bad.

Firstly, WHY IS EVERYTHING RECYCLED FROM OTHER GAMES?! Graphics, music, enemies, everything! Everything is taken from either A Link to the Past, Wind Waker, or the OG Four Swords. Even some of the characters are just lifted from Ocarina of Time like come on Nintendo! Give this game some identity! The original GBA game felt like it had more of its own identity, and it was literally a pack in! It makes me feel like I'm playing some weird mod or fangame or something. It doesn't help that some of the graphics just look bad. Some of the bosses reused from Wind Waker, for example, just have some really cheap looking sprites. Combine that with the constant mismatch of assets from random Zelda games on top of this game's tacky UI elements and it ends up looking like a Newgrounds fan game.

Secondly, the multiplayer experience is seriously flawed. There's no way around it. So, it's a co-op right? After all, the goal is to work together to finish the dungeon. Well the co-op experience is frankly lacking. All the co-op amounts to is "Push thing together" or "Grab thing together" or whatever. There's rarely any creativity in it. Most of this game could be completed with a single Link, which ends up meaning that there's rarely any feeling of actually working together to get through it. Often, one person will just end up doing everything while the others are just following them around with nothing to contribute.

As for the puzzles? What puzzles? So far, there's hardly been anything at all. That's baffling to me, because four player Zelda is literally perfect for tons of super fun puzzles, but so far it's like they aren't even in the game really. It's such a damn shame, because that was the part I was really looking forward to. Elaborate co-op puzzle solving?? Like sign me up! But alas. The game is basically just exploration and combat. The combat is fun, but the exploration? Well, I'll get back to that.

So the co-op is already wounded as is, but what kills it the fact this game feels deeply confused on what kind of multiplayer game it wants to be. On one hand, it seems like it's a co-op. On the other hand, it adds a bunch of annoying shit to try to make it competitive. I don't mean the side modes or Tingle's tower or whatever. I mean the core level to level gameplay. The fact that things like heart containers and bracelets are only given to one person is terrible because it undercuts the fact we're working together here. When I get an upgrade like that I just feel bad about it. A lot of the intended competitiveness revolves around the Rupee replacements, being Force Gems. The game really wants us to be aggressively fighting each other over these damn gems that none of us give a shit about. So much so that the game has freaking friendly fire on at all times. Not only that, but we also have hitboxes and can bump each other around and get in each other's way. This means that this a co-op game where the other players are more likely to get in the way of each other (whether they like it or not) than they are to actually work together. Even from a purely competitive perspective, what's the appeal? Being a dick to your friends just ends up costing both of you in the end, so like???

Plus like, there's practically no punishment for death at all. The only punishment as far as I can tell is ranking lower on the end level tally, which again is just an unwanted competitive element.

Finally, the exploration has problems too. It's generally fun, but there's a constant sense of being tethered too heavily to your teammates. Despite the fact that the game forces every player to have a glorified Gamepad, there's still very little freedom in walking around. Sure, another player might walk into a cave, but you're all stuck on the same overall screen. That means that if one player has to backtrack, everyone has to backtrack with them. It also means that the four players can't multitask. Unless there's a bunch to do on one screen, and there usually isn't, it just leaves someone waiting for the other players to get finished.

It doesn't help that every player only gets 1 item each. It's so lame. They totally could've added an inventory menu and had you unlock items for at least the rest of the level, rather than temporarily putting them in the hands of one Link. Any excitement I feel finding a cool item is completely ruined knowing that I'll likely be forced to toss it aside for like, a shovel or something. Plus, it's the main source of obnoxious back tracking. God, it really feels good for the whole group to backtrack multiple screens because one of us needs to grab a certain item that we need to progress. Feels great. Definitely not wasting our time.

I know I've been really negative, but I don't hate this game. When I can ignore the issues, it's pretty fun. But man this game can really get on all of our nerves at times, and not in an enjoyable way. Four Swords Adventures just reeks of missed potential. Multiplayer Zelda??! That sounds awesome! But nah this was super underwhelming. My gameplay issues combined with the insane hardware requirements just makes this a huge no go nowadays. It's frankly not worth it, in any capacity. If you have to play it, just play it on PC if you can. It's too much money for a game that feels this uncreative.

What a let down.

[randomboo256]

Psychonauts Review

Psychonauts is one of the best 3D platformers ever made. I know, bold statement right out the bat, but let me explain.

Firstly, I'm a massive fan of platformers, both 2D and 3D. It was the main genre that made me interested in video games to begin with. Over the years, I've played a lot of them. From the simple pleasure of Mario, to the fast paced and inconsistent roller-coaster of Sonic, to the smashing and bashing of Crash Bandicoot, I've seen all of the biggest stars of this genre. Psychonauts, meanwhile, is a game that easily deserves to stand among them.

In fact, I'd go so far to say that this game alone is better than most of them.

Firstly, the story and writing is fantastic. The care and effort put into it is obvious at all times. If you're somehow unaware of the plot, I won't spoil it. It's a rather simple story honestly, but the characters are what make it great. The core premise of the game revolves around a young psychic kid named Razputin who has to use his powers to enter the minds of other characters. As such, every level is themed around that character's mind. Themed around their past. Themed around their trauma. Psychonauts is not a game to shy away from dark subject matter. Many of the minds you enter in this game belong to deeply troubled individuals suffering from mental illness, and your goal is to help them work through their trauma and help them forge better lives for themselves. It's all handled with such care and attention to detail. Every collectable you find has meaning beyond its gameplay value. From figments of ideas that compliment their surroundings, to literal emotional baggage, to mental cobwebs formed by an individual neglecting part of their psyche, and to living vaults that contain the individuals brightest (and darkest) memories. Everything in this game is working to tell the story and flesh out it's characters.

However, despite it's very serious subject matter, Psychonauts is a delightfully funny game. The game is constantly hitting you with jokes, and not in an overbearing way either. Psychonauts knows exactly when to be funny and exactly when to be serious. It's not mocking it's subject matter. The humor serves to constantly lighten the mood and never allow the game to feel overly drab or moody. As for the type of humor in Psychonauts, it's usually dark humor, but portrayed in a very cartoony over-the-top way. It's pretty similar to something like Invader Zim or The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which seems appropriate considering the game's voice talent. It's very 2000s feeling, but in the best possible way. Thankfully, the writing actually aged pretty damn well in my opinion, which I unfortunately can't say for a lot of other 2000s comedy media.

But enough about story, what about the gameplay? Well, it's fantastic too. Some people call the game a collectathon which it kinda is but also kinda isn't. Every non-inventory item serves to boost your Psi-Cadet Rank. Collect enough of the right things, and you rank up. The maximum rank is 101, and that's essentially 101% completion. You only need to hit rank 30 (which is not at all hard to do) to beat the game. After you hit 30, you simply get helpful but unneeded upgrades. I got 101% which was (mostly) a pretty fun task. Most of the collectables are a blast to get, although figments can be pretty annoying. However it's still not accurate to call it a collectathon, at least not in the traditional sense. Rather, Psychonauts is a level by level platformer with combat and old-school adventure game elements. Some levels lean hard on platforming, some lean hard on combat, and some lean hard on adventure-style puzzle solving. So let's break all three down one by one.

Platforming: Razputin was born in the circus, so he's a very skilled acrobat. The game is filled with various circus-themed obstacles, alongside usual platforming obstacles. The controls are pretty smooth and it's pretty fun to just jump and fling yourself around. Raz is also a psychic, so he learns various psychic powers throughout the plot. Most of them don't have platforming use, aside from one notable exception: Levitation. Raz can summon a rolling ball and bounce high in the air then glide freely to the ground. It's kinda broken but it's super fun. There's not much more to say about platforming. It's pretty fun and it does it's job.

Combat: The combat is alright. Raz has a three hit combo as well as various psychic moves you can pull out. It's pretty easy to exploit, especially if you have a pretty high rank, but again it's fun enough to keep the gameplay interesting. Enemies were pretty repetitive but it's not a big deal. Combat isn't really a big deal.

Adventure: The game involves a lot of talking to characters, figuring out what they want you to do, and often what item you need to find so you can do what they want. The puzzles never get that complicated but it keeps the levels interesting. The game naturally also has lots and lots of exploration, especially if you want to go for 101%.

While none of these three styles are super deep on their own, the game is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It all adds together into an incredibly enjoyable gameplay loop, and when you add that with the constant deliberate storytelling, it all combines to a very complete feeling experience. The game is truly firing on all fronts, and even if it didn't hit the mark perfectly on all of them, it hit close enough that it doesn't really matter to me. Psychonauts is a cult classic for a reason, and I think everyone owes it to themselves to play it at least once. For the cheap price this game is constantly at, recommending this game is a no-brainer….

TV?

[randomboo256]

CTR: Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled (2019) Review

[This review is a continuation of my Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy review. Please read that (and by extension my whole Crash Bandicoot review saga) first.]

In 2019, Activision Blizzard released Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled, a from-the-ground-up remake of Crash’s racing title. I have mixed feelings about this remake. On one hand, I think it’s great and it’s an objective improvement over the original. On the other hand, I have big issues with it. Both game design issues and moral issues. Let’s just jump into the comparison. 

Firstly, the obvious: graphics. While I had my issues with the artstyle in N. Sane Trilogy, I don’t have them here. CTR barely has you look at your character so your attention is fully focused on the environments you’re racing through, and I think they look incredible. This game can look stunning across the board. Lots of very pretty levels. Coco Park is probably my favorite in terms of visuals. However, there’s a major issue with the graphics, and that’s the performance. As I've mentioned earlier, this game only runs 30 FPS on all consoles, even the PS4 Pro and the PS5 with no next gen update on the horizon. The resolution is decent at least, on PS5 anyway. On Nintendo Switch, the game is locked to an ugly 720p, even docked. Honestly, this is unacceptable. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe looks just as pretty as this game and it runs a crystal clear 1080p and a buttery smooth 60fps on Switch. The fact Crash can’t even manage 60 on PS5 is pathetic. What makes it worse is that Nitro Fueled never got a PC release. So that means that not only is there no official way to play the game on PC, but there’s also no official way to play the game with a decent frame rate. However, that’s not to say there’s no way to play the game at 60fps. Since this game is on Switch, it can be emulated with Yuzu, and it runs flawlessly. On Yuzu, you can upscale the game to 1440p and beyond and you can also apply a simple 60fps patch. Now you can play the game with some decent visuals. You are held back by the Switch’s inherent visual drawbacks, but it’s worth it for the frame rate. If a fan can get this game running at 60fps, then they have no excuse.

Well graphics aside, how well does the gameplay hold up? The gameplay on the whole is mostly unchanged. There are subtle downgrades though, mainly to jumps. It’s simultaneously harder to land high jumps due to awkward collisions and easier to overshoot jumps due to their new momentum physics. There are other changes too, but they’re more subtle. Of course, none of the tracks were redesigned with the new physics changes in mind, so it simply plays worse, much like the N. Sane Trilogy. However, I don’t think it’s a game ruiner here like it was in Crash 1. These changes are, like I said, subtle. They’re only really noticeable if you compare the games back to back. So while Nitro Fueled does have worse gameplay, it’s barely noticeable so it's not a deal breaker. 

Besides, unlike N. Sane Trilogy, Nitro Fueled is far more than just the same game again with prettier graphics and worse gameplay. The N. Sane Trilogy only had one original thing in the whole game, being a post launch level. Nitro Fueled is jam packed with an insane amount of new content. We have an absolutely massive roster with 56 playable characters, all of which having plenty of unique skins. We also have an insane number of kart parts. Between bodies, tires, paint jobs, and stickers the amount of unique kart combinations is limitless. We have 40 tracks, all of which having their own time trials with different time crate placements and the new ring challenge mode with various ring placements. We also have battle mode, which itself has a good handful of maps with a bunch of different battle modes. They even remade all of the content from Crash Nitro Kart and just included it with this game. Combine that with the remade Adventure mode and a ton of stuff I didn’t mention, and this game is fucking insane with how much content it has. Even if the gameplay changes were bad enough to be really noticeable, the amount of content this game has alone would justify playing it. 

This is a great remake! So how did they fuck it up?

When I was just boasting about all this game’s content like its character count and customization options, I left out one crucial detail: how to unlock that content. The vast majority of this game’s content is locked behind the Pit Stop Shop. The Pit Stop Shop is a Fortnite-style store where a small collection of random items will be available for purchase for that day only. The next day everything will refresh. This store is online only, so if you don’t have an internet connection, you can’t buy anything. That means that most of the content on the disc/cartridge can’t be accessed without an internet connection and presumably once the Pit Stop Shop servers go down, so will most of the game. It gets worse though. How do you buy these items? You buy them with Wumpa Coins. How do you get Wumpa Coins? Well, either by grinding by playing online matches to get pitifully small amounts of coinage or by, you guessed it, spending money on microtransactions. Good ol’ Activision Blizzard. We all saw this coming, right? Let’s not forget that the whole reason this company even exists in the way it does today is because Activision wanted to jump on the live service bandwagon. 

However, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this game wouldn’t have this bullshit considering that, quite literally, one month before launch the developers told us that this game wouldn’t have microtransactions at all. Then the game came out, and no microtransactions in sight. Everyone praised the game for not doing that in their reviews. Then a month after launch, after the positive reviews had gone out and after a lot of people already bought the game and got deeply invested in it, Activision announced they were adding microtransactions to the game. Not only that, but the in game shop “coincidentally” started upping the prices of everything within the shop. They made unlocking basic cosmetics a hell of a lot grindier all for the sake of pushing people into wasting their money on this crap. How utterly despicable, especially in a game aimed towards children. 

On the bright side, at least the online was good, right? Crash Team Racing is a game I’d love to have an online mode so I can play with other people. Adding an online mode to a CTR remake sounds like an incredible idea, and it is! Well, in concept at least. The online in Nitro Fueled was dead on arrival. Not even a few months after launch passed before people stopped playing. Gee, I wonder what happened to this game within a few months of launch that would turn off a lot of players. HMM. Anyway, it would take ages to find a full match, and when you did it wasn’t worth it. The most dedicated players were too advanced and the game had no matchmaking, so casual players will get destroyed and just stop playing. The characters were unbalanced. Every character was assigned an arbitrary class, and some classes were simply better than others. If you were a big Coco fan but you wanted a speed focused character, you were shit out of luck. Large portions of the roster weren’t even worth playing. The online didn’t even have servers! It was all peer to peer, which just made lag and disconnections even more of an issue. It also didn’t help the wait times either. That was all within a few months of launch. Nowadays, the game is completely dead. The only places to find a good race is in private servers with friends. Even worse is that their “live service” gave up not even a year after launch. The game was released in June 2019 and the last update was March 2020. What a joke. 

Keep in mind that these past few paragraphs were based not on my own personal experience. I wasn't there at launch and I based this review off of an offline-only Yuzu version of the game. It's possible that people were exaggerating or maybe some things are fixed now. Feel free to take some of that with a grain of salt, but honestly nothing that I've heard from others then repeated here sounded remotely far fetched to me and a lot of it was backed up by a lot of other people's personal accounts. So while it's possible some of this might not be true, I believe all of it and I would never intentionally lie to people.

In conclusion, Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled was a great remake that was ruined by unbelievable greed. I’d expect nothing less from Activision Blizzard, one of the worst companies making video games today between their anti-consumer practices, their anti-employee practices, and just their general discrimination against marginalized groups. Truly they’re just anti-everyone (except their top dogs). Look, if all you care about is the gameplay and the amount of content that’s technically on display, it’s not an awful game. It is fun and the content is still there, but I just can’t recommend this game on either a product level nor on a moral level to anyone. If you want to experience Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled, the best way to is simply emulate the game with 60fps and all the Pit Stop Shop content unlocked from the get go. That will mean that you won’t be able to play the game online, but no one was using the online anyway from what I've heard. Unless you were planning on joining an online private community for this game or were planning on playing it online with your friends, there’s no reason to play this game via the official means. I’m aware that I’m suggesting piracy, but Activision Blizzard is awful so fuck them. Piracy is fine, at least in their case. It’s always moral to pirate games that were being sold by awful corporations.

Now with all that said, I’m done talking about Crash Bandicoot for now. I could go into more detail into the era of games in-between after Naughty Dog left and before the modern day revival began, but I'm honestly tired of this orange marsupial. But still, 6 essay reviews (8 if you count the multiple parts) over the course of 5 days. That's definitely a new record to me. I haven't posted anything on Tumblr here in a while, so consider this an apology I guess.

Oh who am I kidding? No one reads these things.

Well regardless, that's all folks.

[randomboo256]

Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy (2017) Review [Part Two]

[This review is the second part of a larger Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy review. Please read Part One first]

Crash Bandicoot (N. Sane Version)

In my opinion, this version of Crash Bandicoot sucks. The trilogy gave Crash a much heavier jump and changed his hitboxes to make his jumping way less reliable. Levels that were fairly easy in the original such as Road to Nowhere became way harder when basic jumping and landing on platforms became far less consistent. Essentially, Crash has a pill shaped hitbox that’ll make him slip off platforms if you’re too close to the edge of it. This effectively made every platform in the game slightly smaller and made every jump have slightly less room for error. When combined with the heavier jumps and a game that's designed as deliberately as this one, the remaster just makes the game much less enjoyable to play in my opinion. That’s not to say the remaster has NO benefits, as it fixed the save system, made Stormy Ascent easier to access, and it made 100% easier by letting you see box totals and saving broken boxes with checkpoints, allowing you to die but still get the gem. So there are reasons to play the remaster instead, and if you own the remaster and haven’t played it yet, it’s still a decent way to play this game. However in my opinion, the pros don’t outweigh the cons. On a final note for the remaster, I’ll add that if you’re someone who played the remastered version of this game and didn’t like it, try the original. I hated the remaster when I first played it and I ended up loving the original.

Speaking of Stormy Ascent, that was a level that was cut from the original for being too hard. You could still play it with a Gameshark code however. I’ve played it. It was long and hard with some spaced out checkpoints, but it wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed the challenge. On the ORIGINAL, that is. On the remake I spent like an hour and 70 lives dying over and over, while I only died like 10 times in the original game. The remake had more checkpoints in that level too, and it was still way harder! Even Vicarious Visions knows that they made the jumping a lot harder because they acknowledged that in a blog post. Remember when this remaster came out and the Gamers™ called everyone “fake gamers” who complained about the difficulty? Remember how they were like “Oh, back in my day these games were even harder!” Well guess what? They weren’t. They were a lot easier, in fact. 

Anyway on to Crash 2.

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (N. Sane Version) 

Crash 2 has a lot of the same changes as Crash 1. It has the bad hitboxes and it has the inaccurate jumping, however this time around it’s different. You see, all three games in the trilogy are based off of Crash 3. In case you forgot, Crash 1 had a light jump, Crash 2 had a heavy jump, and Crash 3 had something in between. Crash 2’s jump was too heavy, so switching to Crash 3 was an improvement. Also, Crash 2 and 3’s jumps were both balanced around the slide jump, a high and floaty jump that basically replaces the normal jump button in a lot of places. The slide jump is basically a souped-up version of Crash 1’s normal jump, but for Crash 2 and 3. With the precise slide jump, getting around the garbage hitboxes is a ton easier. It also ends up making Crash 1 feel like the heaviest game in the trilogy, when it was originally the opposite. 

That begs the question: Why didn’t they add the slide to Crash 1? If they would’ve done that, the game would’ve been sooo much better. I understand that it would be less accurate to some extent, but how about this: Only give Coco the slide in Crash 1. In this remaster, you can choose to unlock Coco in any of the games. Like, literally choose. They give you an option. However Coco plays no differently, despite being canonically from the future (it’s not explained). Specifically Crash 3. So wouldn't it make sense for her to have moves from future games? Hell, while you’re at it: Give Coco the double jump and crash dash from the start in all three games. Coco would essentially be an easier option either for people struggling or just people who want to mix things up with moves from later Crash games in Crash 2 and 3. I think that would’ve been brilliant.

Oh anyway, yeah Crash 2 remake was ok. Overall I’d say between the better gravity and worse hitboxes it balances out to being equal with the original. They also improved the jetpack controls somewhat, but not by a lot. Anyway now for Crash 3.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped

Still refusing to just call it Crash Bandicoot: Warped. Anyway Crash 3 wasn’t half bad. Firstly, the enhanced moveset completely corrects the bad hitboxes. The hitboxes are still bad, but you won’t be able to casually notice. Also the core jumping gameplay was designed around 3 from the get go, so the platforming levels in this game are basically identical. As for the vehicle levels, well let’s go down the list.

Scuba levels: They’re the same. They still suck.

Jet Ski levels: They control a bit worse. They’re a lot less precise and feel more like a real jet ski. Honestly though, I think they’re better. The original jet ski levels were way too easy and became boring. The less precise and more realistic controls actually end up improving these levels.

Motorcycle levels: They control a lot worse, and this time that’s a bad thing. The motorcycle has awful handling and now requires you to break and come to a complete stop at times just to make certain turns. This certainly isn’t CTR I’ll say that much.

Airplane levels: These levels were a pain in the ass in the originals, but now they’re just fine. Your plane no longer snaps back to center position which makes aiming soo much easier. It’s honestly too easy now. These levels are effortless for late game stages.

Things like airplane levels are also enhanced by the new analog stick support. The original Playstation controller didn’t have dual sticks, so a lot of PS1 games didn’t have analog input, including the Crash trilogy. Or at least, THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT!! Turns out Crash 2, 3, and CTR all natively support full analog input on the original Playstation. I found this out after I beat the games already. I guess I just never tried hitting the analog button in Crash 2 or 3. I feel like such a dumbass. Oh, and if you’re wondering Crash 3 PS1’s airplane levels do play nicer on analog sticks. They still aren’t good, but you can aim a lot easier with the more precise analog inputs.

Crash 3 also introduced a brand new level: Future Tense. Originally, Crash N. Sane Trilogy was a PS4 exclusive. However a year later it was released on all platforms. To celebrate that release, they added a new level to the game. Future Tense is designed to be the hardest Crash 3 level and is supposed to be that game’s version of Stormy Ascent. However, it wasn’t very hard for me. It was a bit more difficult than the average level I suppose, but not by much honestly. It was a very fun level though. Probably the best level in the N. Sane Trilogy, and that’s probably because it was actually designed with the N. Sane Trilogy in mind.

In conclusion, Crash 3 N. Sane was an improvement overall. The only real downgrade was the motorcycle levels. As for the N. Sane Trilogy in general, it was ok I guess. Other than Crash 1, the trilogy versions of these games are pretty interchangeable with the original versions to me. However, the original trilogy wasn’t the only thing that got remade...

[To be continued...]

[randomboo256]

Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy (2017) Review [Part One]

The past days I've been slowly going through the world of Crash Bandicoot as I reviewed Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2, Crash Bandicoot 3, and Crash Team Racing. All of which was based on their original Playstation releases. I highly recommend reading those reviews first for context. However, only focusing on the Playstation versions of these games isn't really being all that helpful due to a pair of releases that came out comparatively recently. But first, let's take a step back and see how we even got here.

Crash Bandicoot was a game published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and the titular character later became a mascot of sorts for the console it was on: the Playstation. The original Crash games were developed by a studio called Naughty Dog, however they eventually quit making Crash games. Despite that, the series kept going. On all platforms too.. what? Why are Crash Bandicoot games coming out on Nintendo consoles, Xbox consoles, and even PC? What’s happening? Did Sony do this? Well, no. You see, despite Naughty Dog creating the games and the characters and Sony publishing them, Universal Interactive (yes that Universal) owned the series. Ok, so a long time ago Naughty Dog made a weird fighting game called Way of the Warrior for the 3DO. Despite it's obscurity, this game is shockingly important because after finishing it, Naughty Dog displayed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in search of a publisher. After a bidding war, Universal Interactive won the rights to it. Universal liked it so much that they contracted Naughty Dog to make three more games for them. Those three games ended up being, of course, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy. Before that though, Naughty Dog needed to pick a console to develop the next game on. They thought the Playstation looked “sexy” so they started development for that. After a demonstration from Naughty Dog, Sony agreed to publish and partially fund the game. But Naughty Dog made 4 Crash games right? If they already made an extra one, they could just make more, right? Well in theory, but Naughty Dog thought that Universal was too difficult to communicate with. They had a great relationship with Sony Computer Entertainment though. They were so close in fact that only two years after CTR, Sony outright purchased Naughty Dog, firmly establishing their place as part of the Playstation family. 

After Naughty Dog quit, Sony published one more Crash Bandicoot game: Crash Bash. I haven’t really played Crash Bash personally, but from what I’ve heard it’s just a sub-par party game. After that, Universal decided to stop letting Sony publish Crash in favor of publishing the series on all platforms, with the first one being Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. People didn’t like that game, and I didn’t either. I’m not going to talk too much about this game mostly because it's already been mocked to death and also because it’d be kinda redundant. That’s because Wrath of Cortex is literally just a one to one ripoff of Crash Bandicoot 3, even down to the hub world. Except it’s like they saw my review of Crash 3 and said “Hey, what if we took every problem Crash 3 had and made them even worse?”. The platforming is worse because the camera is awful and they messed up the slide somehow. You have to like release the slide button and THEN jump, which is just awkward. Other than that the platforming is playable, but you rarely get to do it. Even more of the game is random bullshit now. Well over half of your playtime will be spent in those vehicle segments. While I didn’t care for the vehicles in Crash 3 because they distracted from the platforming, they were mostly just tolerable filler. In Wrath of Cortex, they all suck soo much ass. They all fucking suck and they're damn near unplayable. I kinda like the ball rolling, but that’s it. They also brought back Crash 2’s awful jetpack. They not only brought back Crash 3’s abysmal underwater stages, but 1. There’s even more of them. and 2. They’re even worse! You get this submarine which is so slow you can’t dodge the obstacles! Anyway, enough ranting. Wrath of Cortex sucks, but that’s no hot take. Everyone knows that, and it’s not just this game. Most Crash games after Naughty Dog left were less than stellar. Even the best one, Twinsanity, was so incredibly rushed that the final result was unpolished and had a lot of cut content. Needless to say, Crash fans weren’t happy, and after a disastrous reboot, they just wanted a simple return to the classics. 

Meanwhile, Universal was eventually merged with Vivendi, who owned a bunch of studios including Blizzard Entertainment. The combined new studio became known as "Vivendi Games". Fast forward to the late 2000s, Activision was foaming at the mouth over the idea of microtransactions and other recurring fees to the gaming consumer, and therefore were dying to get their hands on World of Warcraft, a Blizzard game. Vivendi Games was struggling at that time, so the two companies merged, forming into the public menace we now know as Activision Blizzard. But what about our favorite orange marsupial? Well he had games throughout the 2000s, but after the merger he slowly grew silent. In 2011, Activision Blizzard released a game called Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. Poor Spyro, but that’s a story for another day isn’t it? Skylanders was made by Toys for Bob alongside other companies, most notably Vicarious Visions. In 2016, the final Skylanders game was released, and it had the long awaited yet melancholic return of Crash Bandicoot. His portion of the game was developed by Vicarious Visions. Announced alongside his inclusion however was a full from the ground up remake of the entire classic Crash trilogy. Months later we got a trailer and a name: Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy.

Most people these days play this games in the N. Sane Trilogy, rather than their original Playstation releases so I feel I have to cover it. I'm not going to go super in depth with each game, because I already have done that with my reviews of the originals. Instead, I'm just going to focus on what makes the N. Sane Trilogy different.

Let’s start with the obvious: the graphics. Obviously they’re higher fidelity and they can certainly look quite nice at times, however they're far from perfect. Firstly, I simply don’t think that this realistic artstyle fits Crash Bandicoot. These characters were designed with a low poly, low resolution PS1 game with a far off camera in mind. Crash has big eyes, big eyebrows, and a big mouth so that he can be expressive in a way that still reads when looking at the game from a crappy CRT television. When you put this character in HD with realistic graphics where you can make out every hair on his little bandicock he just looks awful. He looks far better when he's very stylized, ala Crash 4. Even the rest of the graphics just look wrong to me. Something about how some of these levels look just feels off. It doesn't help that the game is also locked to 30fps on every console. For a modern day release, that's not acceptable. Especially considering that neither N. Sane Trilogy nor Nitro Fueled (which trust me I'll get back to) got PS5/Series X upgrades. Considering that even a modest computer like mine can hit 60fps on the PC port of N. Sane, there's absolutely no reason why next gen consoles couldn't also hit that same benchmark. Overall the N. Sane Trilogy only came out like 6 years ago and it already looks really dated to me. I honestly prefer the more timeless look of the originals. Well graphics aside, let’s go through each game one by one:

[Continued in Part Two]

[randomboo256]

CTR: Crash Team Racing (1999) Review

For a few days in a row now, I've been slowly reviewing the classic Playstation series Crash Bandicoot. Crash Bandicoot, for someone somehow unaware, is a game series that began on the PS1 and had 3 main series titles focusing on the titular character as he platforms (and gimmick levels) his way through to the final boss: Neo Cortex, his arch-nemesis and his creator. However, none of that is really necessary to know going into this review, although I of course still recommend reading those first for the sake of context.

While working on Crash Bandicoot 2, Naughty Dog (the original developers behind Crash Bandicoot) was quietly working on a prototype demo of a racing game with placeholder shapes as characters. They pitched the idea to Sony Computer Entertainment (the original publisher behind Crash), and thus a Crash Bandicoot racing game was born. Development went into full work after Crash 2 was finished so Crash 3 and this racing game were developed side by side. Considering the time trials and the vehicle stages in that game, perhaps the racing game put Naughty Dog in such a racing mood that it bled over into Crash 3? Who knows how it happened. Well regardless of why, at this point in his life Crash Bandicoot has now fully established himself as a glorified speedster. Truly living up to that “Sonic’s Ass Game” prototype name, eh?

However before we discuss Naughty Dog’s racing game, we need to discuss the game it’s emulating. Released in 1996, Mario Kart 64 arrived on store shelves for the Nintendo 64. The Nintendo 64 was the Playstation’s main (and let’s be real, only) console competitor. This was back in the days before Nintendo gave up on all this console war stuff and went sailing off into the great blue ocean, but that’s a story for another day. Mario Kart 64 was the sequel to Super Mario Kart, a Super Nintendo game where Mario and friends all hopped in Go-Karts and raced to the finish line all while attempting to murder each other using cartoon weaponry. Family fun for all! While Super Mario Kart did not invent the idea of a kart racing video game, it vastly popularized it and it was one of the first to integrate combat elements as well as a multiplayer focus. While “Kart Racing” may be considered its own genre by definition, the vast majority of the games within said "genre" are known generally as “Mario Kart and the Mario Kart wannabes”.

As for Mario Kart 64 specifically, it was seen as an improvement to the original in all aspects. While it is technically the sequel, a lot of people consider it the true first game in the franchise from just how much better it was by comparison. The original had small flat tracks and most tracks felt indistinguishable apart from the color palette. 64 had larger tracks with more detail and varied track design. The courses all felt unique and creative. The improvement is night and day. Not to mention multiplayer. The original had 2 player multiplayer while 64 upped it to 4, which went along with the N64’s 4 built in controller plugs. Mario Kart 64, despite being on a less popular console than its predecessor and despite being on a console with much fiercer competition, managed to outsell the original at nearly 10 million units sold. Roughly 30% of all N64 owners had Mario Kart 64 and it was seen as one of the N64’s biggest selling points over the Playstation. So how do we fix that?

Released in 1999, Sony Computer Entertainment released Naughty Dog’s final Crash Bandicoot game “CTR: Crash Team Racing”. While I can’t say for sure that this game was released as a direct response to Mario Kart 64, I mean come on. Look at it. It’s pretty damn obvious where they got their inspiration from. While it would be easy to write this game off as a worthless clone, we should give the game a fair chance regardless. Whether it’s good or bad, let's see how it compares. The basics are all here. A roster of characters from the Crash series all in Go-Karts breaking item boxes to get random cartoon weaponry they can use to attempt to murder their fellow racers. Crash that is your sister! Do NOT send that ballistic missile at her! CRASH!?

Other core mechanics, such as drifting and drift boosts, return as well, however they’re different. In Mario Kart 64 and other Mario Kart games, you can hold a drift button to slow down slightly as you turn corners. To compensate for the slowdown, you can get a boost. In early Mario Kart games, you get a boost by smacking the stick back and forth while you drift. This felt like shit and was insanely awkward to do, so from Mario Kart Wii and on they switched to simply holding down the button for long enough. Some people hated this change. I personally enjoy not having to break my analog sticks when trying to make a simple turn. As for CTR, it was changed entirely. The drifting works more or less the same, but the boosting is completely different. Now the trick is to watch for your exhaust pipe smoke to turn black then press the L1 button while drifting to get a small boost. You can boost 3 times back to back, with your final one being massive. This change is brilliant. Firstly, it’s simple and easy to do, while also still requiring timing and paying attention, unlike both of Mario Kart’s drift boosts. Secondly, in Mario Kart, especially later ones, you can often get a large drift boost that ends up sending you into a wall or off the course. Because CTR splits up the boost into 3 smaller ones, you have more control over your karts. I love it! It's the perfect system!

On the topic of controls, that was something Mario Kart 64 struggled with. The controls were awful and slippery. They felt like you were constantly on ice, even while drifting. CTR meanwhile is super tight and precise. The controls feel super accurate by comparison. In fact, while I’m just listing off changes I like, let’s just go down the list:

Unlike Mario Kart, this game has a story mode. The story isn’t much to write home about. Basically, an alien named Nitrous Oxide came to Crash’s planet and challenged it to a race. If he wins, he turns the planet into a parking lot. If someone from Crash’s planet wins, he goes away. You can play as anyone from the base roster, so whoever you choose wins the race and that’s about it. It’s a simple story, and you can tell they didn’t care too much about it because the opening cutscene only plays if you sit around on the title screen. Regardless, it’s awesome it’s here at all. It even has a large hub world! Unfortunately, you can’t switch your character mid adventure mode, which was pretty disappointing. Oh well. Mario Kart has never had any kind of adventure mode and only sold itself on the multiplayer aspect. CTR actually has a reason for someone to get hours out of the game from singleplayer alone. It’s really great and… did they give the lady bandicoot on the victory screen jiggle physics? It's kinda hard to tell and uh... moving on.

This game can feel like a platformer at times. In CTR, you get a boost from falling. The higher you jump/the longer you fall, the larger the boost when you land. This encourages you to press that jump button to get as much height as possible as much as possible. Not only that, but pressing jump while going up slopes with momentum can launch you high, which can not only give you that boost but also get extra crates and even take shortcuts. On top of all that, you have a good amount of midair control, so jumping can help you make sharp turns. Mario Kart games have a jump too, but it’s a lot less useful. It has some shortcuts here and there (mostly unintentional ones) and later games add a trick system which is somewhat similar to CTR’s falling boost, but ultimately it feels a lot less utilized.

CTR’s brake slide. In CTR, holding the brake while moving gives you a slower but more accurate drift for a few seconds. Keep holding it and you’ll turn completely around. Not only is this satisfying to use, but it allows for some clever level design. Mario Kart games, despite having a brake button, never really require you to use it unless you’re playing 200cc in Mario Kart 8.

Between the brake slide, the emphasized jumping, and the falling boosts CTR feels like it added a whole extra layer of gameplay on top of the basic Mario Kart 64 gameplay all while having a proper Adventure mode. But what about the multiplayer? CTR supports up to 4 people, but the PS1 only has 2 input slots. You have to purchase the PS1 Multitap to get 4 player multiplayer. As for the multiplayer itself, I haven’t played it. The game has a battle mode, but I don’t know what it looks like because they don’t have an option to use CPUs. They do have some tiny maps in the singleplayer that you collect crystals in because they’re too small to race. I assume those were taken from the battle mode.

Overall, Crash Team Racing, despite being a clone, was an incredible game that managed to be better than what it was copying. I had more fun playing through CTR than I’ve ever had playing through a Mario Kart game. Naughty Dog even included a little scrapbook video showing off concept art of their Crash Bandicoot games as a reward. That’s a cute way to finish their time on Crash Bandicoot off, because Naughty Dog would never develop a Crash Bandicoot game again. What a great run it was though right? 4 great games back to back. They weren’t perfect, obviously, but I quite loved my time playing through this series. But I’m not quite done yet with this series, am I?

Well, that's a story for another day I suppose. In the end, I can happily recommend CTR, at least the PS1 version anyway. This game is worth finding a copy of, whether you want it for singleplayer or multiplayer. Although of course, nowadays all of these Crash games can be emulated for free on PC with little hassle. From that perspective, all of these games are very much worth playing, despite the issues they may have. I played all of these on emulator (Duckstation specifically) so take that for what it's worth.

That's all for now.

[randomboo256]

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (1998) Review [Part Two]

[This post is the second half of a larger review. I was forced to split it due to character limits. Please read the first half before reading this one.]

The game structure is the same as Crash 2, where 5 levels of roughly the same difficulty open at once and you beat them in any order. In both of these games, I always just beat them from left to right. What’s honestly the point of this structure? You have to beat all five anyway before you move on to the next world. I suppose it can add replayability if you swap up the order each time. I don’t know the reason, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. The core gameplay is about the same as Crash 2. All the moves from that game return, but now with a twist. After every boss fight, you unlock a brand new ability. The first one is a belly flop. I'm already confused. We already have a belly flop we never use. Now we have a slightly different belly flop that we also never use. The others are more useful. Up next is a double jump. The double jump in this game is weird and took time getting used to. Basically while you can jump twice, you can only jump the second time if you haven’t started falling down after your first jump. So the second Crash starts falling after a jump, you lose the ability to double jump. It sounds awkward and it is awkward. I suppose that’s the tradeoff for being able to have a double jump in the first place. After that we got the “Death Tornado Spin” which allows you to mash the spin button to continuously spin. You can also use it in midair to glide. The gliding is a bit inconsistent at first but it wasn’t too hard to get the hang of. I like this move. Next we get a fucking gun. Dear god Crash Bandicoot has firepower. The Fruit Bazooka is slow to pull out and aim, but it also lets you completely break some challenging sections by just killing the enemies or shooting the nitros from a distance. It’s ok, but you barely get to use it. The final world only has 3 platforming levels and 1 of them is about going fast constantly, so stopping to aim isn’t helpful. Once you beat the final boss you get the Crash Dash. It’s a run button. That’s Crash’s moveset, and overall I quite like it in concept, but in execution a lot of power ups felt either awkward to get the hang of or were completely underutilized. That’s in no small part because of just how little of this game is actually spent doing normal platforming, being only about half of the game’s levels.

This game was around the start of an era. A very dark and evil era. It didn’t really start in full force until Playstation’s next console came out, but the seeds of that time were planted right around here. This was the start of the “variety era”, as I like to call it. It was a point in time where every fucking studio, especially ones working on platformers, were OBSESSED with shoving random nonsense all over their games all for the sake of “variety”. We’ll have whole levels and sections dedicated to half baked and unfun gameplay styles that completely distract from the gameplay you’re actually playing the game for. NO Mr. Sly Cooper, I don’t want to play a shitty racing game or an equally shitty turret section. I just want to rob a bank! I understand that developers likely get worried that too much of the game will play too similarly and thus it will all blend together, but this is not how you add variety to a game! Variety should all stem from the core gameplay genre. If I’m playing a platformer, give me interesting platforming challenges. Crash Bandicoot 1 did that well with those hog riding and ball rolling sections. They didn’t have to shove a fucking fishing simulator in the middle of my Sonic the Hedgehog game.

As for Crash Bandicoot 3 in particular, we have four types of vehicle stages: jet ski, scuba, motorcycle, and plane. The jet ski is ok, but it doesn’t add much. It’s pretty boring and easy. The scuba levels are like the jet ski: really boring and easy, except scuba is even more boring because it’s an awful underwater level. The motorcycle is a racing minigame, and it’s pretty challenging. They expect you to actually get pretty good at controlling that thing. For what it is it’s ok, but I dislike that they force you to get pretty good at a totally unrelated game style. The plane is a dogfight and it’s awful. The problem is that the controls are fighting you. The D-Pad both steers and aims your gun and your gunfire automatically snaps back to a directly in front of you when you aren't currently steering up or down, so you’re constantly struggling to get your bullets to go where you want. It’s not even that hard. It’s just really unfun. It is possible to use the analog sticks instead of the D-Pad, but I didn't realize that until after beating the game. The sticks make the controls a little better, but not by much. Honestly, most of these vehicle stages aren’t that bad. They can be decently fun, but I still object to them for not being what I came here for. I want platforming. This isn’t platforming. Man, I’d hate to go for 100% with this game. You’d have to break every crate in every level, including these ones. Not to mention the time trials. OH YEAH. The time trials.

Without going too deep into it, this game has time trials. Except unlike other games, these are required for the ending. I would say “the true ending”, but the normal “ending” has no actual end to the story. So the 100% ending is just the only ending. So if you want to see how the plot ends, you’re required to replay every level, including vehicle levels, at least once— without dying mind you— and have a good clear time on all of them. But just once is really unrealistic. You’ll probably end up replaying every level at least up to 3 times depending on your luck with the time trials. Not only can you not do a time trial at all on your first playthrough of a stage, you can’t even really beat most of them anyway until post game when you unlock the Crash Dash. This is padding to the most extreme degree, so no I didn’t bother doing it. It’s a shame really because doing things like breaking every box in a level can be fun, but unless you’re also willing to replay every level several times collecting that box gem will do nothing. I think this is ultimately the biggest problem this series has, and that’s that it’s all or nothing. Either you go for a minimalist run or you go for a 100% completion run. There’s no inbetween, and that really sucks. Same goes for breaking every box in a level. If you don’t break absolutely every box, you may well have broken none. There’s no leeway here. No room for human error and no room for you just not wanting to do a certain gem or the like. What they should’ve done was let you see the ending if you got half of the gems, or two thirds of the gems. The 100% reward could be like a fun joke ending, like how Crash 1’s 100% was a joke ending. That would be a great way to go about this. Anyway, let’s wrap this up.

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, despite my bitching, was a decent game. The story sucked, but I don’t really care because the platforming, when you could do it, was really fun. The vehicle levels ranged from mildly fun to bad, but I dislike their inclusion on principle. Despite that, they didn’t really ruin the game for me. The main issue wasn’t with the levels themselves, as most were ok, but with the fact that I’m not platforming. Honestly, I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a little fun at times. The controls and physics for them were surprisingly tight and satisfying, especially for the motorcycle. It definitely wasn’t perfect, but if it were fleshed out more as its own game and not just some random game style, it could’ve been a lot better. Naughty Dog certainly seems to have the potential to make a good racing game at least.

Hey wait... didn't they...

You know what, that's a story for another time.

Overall, Crash Bandicoot 3 was a game with great elements that all came together into a mismatched whole. The core platforming, while tad easy with all the powerups, is super fun. However, I rarely get to USE that platforming. I could replay the handful of levels they did give me, but why couldn't they have just given me a single complete Crash Bandicoot game? Instead, we have half of one. The other half of the game was just mildly tolerable filler. Maybe Naughty Dog did run out of ideas, like I speculated way back at the start of this. Or maybe they were really just that paranoid that the game needed more "variety". Whatever the reason for it may be, this game felt really half baked.

Despite that, I like it a bit more than Crash 2. Something I forgot to mention is that they fixed the jumping physics. In Crash 1, they were light and floaty. In Crash 2, they were heavy and in my opinion awkward. In Crash 3, they found a happy middleground. It also helped that I didn't even bother with 100% here, whereas in Crash 2 I forced myself to get 100% and it kinda spoiled the experience for me. Despite the filler, I do think Crash 3 is at least on par with Crash 2, and perhaps a little bit more. So much like 2, I think it's a decent game, but it's not worth actively seeking out. At least when it comes to the PS1 version anyway.

The platforming gameplay could be a great groundwork for later games in the series, though. However the developers will have to be someone other than Naughty Dog, as this was their last Crash Bandicoot platformer. We did have Crash platformers after this despite that. Most of them were... less that stellar. However after many years of Crash bouncing between developers and rights holders, we eventually got a game called Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. I may go more into depth about this game some other day, but for now I'll summarize.

Crash 4 is a game that manages to take the best parts of all the classic Crash games while sprucing them up with modern flair. We got the linear game structure and tight precise platforming of Crash 1 alongside the expanded and fun movesets of Crash 2 and 3. We also had great visuals and a pretty well written and beautifully animated story that feels straight out of a saturday morning cartoon. The game has seen a lot of criticism for the experience of 100% it, doubling down on issues the originals had. However, 100% only gives you a Marvel style stinger and further going for 106% gives you a fun joke ending. The game's normal ending only requires beating the main levels, just like it should be. Overall, I highly recommend Crash 4. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good.

Just make sure you pirate the game because seriously FUCK Activision Blizzard. Do not support them.

That's all for now.

[randomboo256]

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (1998) Review [Part One]

Two days ago, I made a decently long post about my thoughts on the classic Playstation game Crash Bandicoot. Yesterday, I made an even longer follow up post about my thoughts on that game's sequel: Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. I recommend reading those first. So to keep that streak going, today we're going to look at the game made to conclude the classic trilogy and this post got so long that Tumblr made me break it up into two parts. How could possibly be so much to say about an old Playstation game? Well, let's just get into things.

Once again a year after the previous game, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped released on store shelves. Well, in the UK anyway. Here in the US, it was titled simply Crash Bandicoot: Warped. I refuse to call it that because randomly dropping the number is dumb. Well whatever you call it, this game is a weird one. It’s starting to feel like Naughty Dog might be running out of ideas, because unlike the previous Crash games, this one is entirely themed around a single gimmick: time travel. Having your whole game tie around a single theme is normally done when your series has reached a certain point that you have to do it so that your new game feels distinct from all your other ones. For example, most 3D Mario games chose 1 single theme, be it summer islands, traveling across space, or exploring around the world and then have each level be different takes on that theme. That’s not a bad thing per say, but it is weird for Crash 3 to suddenly go for this approach when Crash 1 and 2 didn’t. Perhaps that’s why it’s not known as Crash 3 in some regions? Probably not. Anyway I digress, let’s just move on to the story.

This game picks up right where the true ending of the last game left off with the Cortex Vortex destroyed and falling from space. It crashes into… some kinda temple and someone or something was “freed at last”. We cut to Crash and Coco at home when Aku Aku realizes that it was the evil Uku Uku who was freed. Now I’m sure you’re wondering: "Who the heck is Aku Aku and what’s the deal with this Uku Uku guy?" Well Aku Aku is a character who was in the first and second Crash games who I’ve simply failed to mention until now, and that’s mainly because he wasn’t really a character at all. Aku Aku was just a powerup in levels. You find an Aku Aku and you get an extra hitpoint. Find three and you get invincibility. Pretty simple. Starting in Crash 3, he’s now a main character. Honestly in the first two it just felt like Aku Aku was just some weird inanimate mask that there are tons of, not one singular character. Why is he in boxes? Why can three of them stack? Well whatever the reason, in this game going forward he's now a parental figure of sorts to Crash and Coco. As for Uku Uku, we find that he was sealed away in an underground prison eons ago by his twin brother Aku Aku to protect the world from him. Meanwhile we find out that Cortex was somehow working for Uku Uku the whole time actually and Uku Uku was the real mastermind. Uku Uku is angry at Cortex for failing as Cortex begs for forgiveness as they scheme a new plan to collect the crystals. Aku Aku warps Crash and Coco to a time machine Cortex was going to use..somehow and Crash and company decide to collect all the crystals before Cortex does, except this time, they’re going to go through time and collect those crystals where they could be found throughout history and this is literally the plot of Avengers Endgame. Obviously there’s no way Endgame was inspired by this, although they did reference Ratchet and Clank in that movie… Nah moving on. Crash stops Cortex and Uku Uku by collecting everything in the game and after the pair’s defeat the time machine malfunctions and sends the two of them, plus N Tropy (the creator of the time machine), back to the prehistoric ages with them all stuck as babies. The end.

This plot sucks lmao. It’s full of retcons and moments that don’t make sense. Obviously it’s not a big deal because the storyline isn’t why you play these games, but the game is certainly still trying to tell a story. You know, if they weren’t trying to tell a story they wouldn’t have bothered to do anything, like the average Mario game. There’s a bizarre amount of lore and characters tied up in this series and I haven’t even mentioned a lot of them. It’s fucking weird. Perhaps it’s even.. insane? No? Ok. Well the point stands that if they didn’t want to tell a good plot they shouldn’t have told one. I suppose I can understand if the point was to give us an excuse to see these characters interact with one another, but none of the dialogue in this game is very entertaining. Crash is voiceless and he doesn’t really have a well defined personality, I’m not sure Coco had any speaking lines, Aku Aku is just kinda boring, and none of the villains were interesting. Well, except Cortex I suppose. He’s shown to be a lot more tired, reluctant, and pessimistic about his plan working in this game which directly contrasts with the confident and energetic Uku Uku. That was moderately interesting, but there was no real payoff to that. This whole plot just confuses me. What was Naughty Dog doing with this? Did they want a narrative or not? My best guess is that they wanted to do the Mario thing where we have a basic narrative that’s just an excuse for gameplay, while at the same time not? If you just want a gameplay excuse, what’s all this extra fluff? It makes no sense. Perhaps it’s even… insane- wait fuck I already used this joke.

But yeah, once again the plot doesn’t really matter in Crash. I just think it’s interesting to analyze. Naughty Dog is a company that later went on to be known for their groundbreaking storytelling (although whether or not their later stories truly are groundbreaking is a heated debate that I don't have time to address here). It's interesting how even as early as Crash 3 they're trying to do... something narratively. Something beyond what was necessary to include for a game of this type. In a way, it's part of a larger shifting trend moving into the Playstation 2 era where a lot of platformers started having progressively layered plots despite the fact those plots weren't particularly needed to prop up the gameplay per se. Games like Super Mario Sunshine, Sonic Adventure 2, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, and of course Naughty Dog's own Jak and Daxter. That's not to say Crash 3 was responsible for that trend (I'd argue that games like Sonic Adventure hold more of the blame) but it was an early adopter of that style. Not that there's anything wrong with having a story, as long as it's well written (which a lot of the games of this era sadly weren't).

In fact, this theme of Crash 3 being an early adopter of trends common in the Playstation 2 era is actually a bit of a running theme here, as we finally move on to what actually matters: the gameplay.

[Continued in Part Two]