Familiar 5

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Y’know, honestly, the brickwork is pretty solid for what it is. Especially given they had so few tones to work with on the original gameboy
2. Architecture: This was brought up as a contrast to a couple of future games (3DS and early Switch) where work is actually done to have multiple buildings with blocking sightlines and generally make these towns feel larger than they are. Considering how long this game took to make it makes sense that SNES RPG standards would creep in here
3. Atmosphere: The overall tone and vibe of a Pokemon game is still here, if barely
4. MSQ: Lavender Town vibes. This whole segment has a nice morose tone, especially in the tower itself where the mourners reside
5. MSQ: Y’know call me weird but I like the slow build up and take over by Team Rocket. Thanks to some clever knee-high walling by the game you don’t see everything at once, which means from the player’s perspective Team Rocket goes from a minor nuisance up at Mt. Moon and Cerulean to being more invested down in their hideout to taking over an entire town and Silph Co itself
6. Outro: For what little it is, the build up to Victory Road and the final battles are pretty sweet
7. Localization: Y’know, honestly, I’m surprised at how good the localization really is. Lot of flavor here

Story Negatives:

1. Spritework: The battle sprites are not good, at best
2. Storytelling Mechanic: Pokedex and its ridiculously inaccurate nonsense. This is a trend that will be in every pokemon game and it got started all the way back here

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Combat: The core fundamentals of the turn based combat itself were good even all the way back in Gen 1. They’re not… great, there’s some jank and some issues, but the meat is still there
2. Build: Again, the Build potential of the base loadout is still here (if truncated due to other issues). Six pokemon, four moves each, make it work…
3. Build: …still tons of options and potential builds
4. Unit Design: Electrics. 9 Pokemon across 6 Lines and some surprisingly decent design to them. I don’t want to over-praise but thanks to their generally high Speed most of these can hold their own and there’s a decent stat spread
5. Unit Design: Fighting. 8 Pokemon in 4 Lines isn’t much of a spread but there’s some decent stat spread and usefulness to them
6. Unit Design: Fire. 12 Pokemon in 7 Lines, pretty good spread, but there’s some issues here (some of which we’ll talk about down in the negatives) which drag this down a bit. The Fires also rely WAY too much on the Fire Stone to access 4 of the 12 forms. Still could be worse
7. Unit Design: Grass. 14 Pokemon in 6 Lines so a decent spread and, weirdly enough, some solid stat spread. What drags grass down is their heavy reliance on cross Poison type and some weird issues with Special and Attack
8. Unit Design: Ground. 14 Pokemon in 7 Lines (sensing some trends here) but some solid defenses and good stat spreads make for one of the more, uh, solid Types in Gen 1. Even if this also includes some stinkers
9. Unit Design: Normal. There’s some bleed over here so exactly how many Normals there are is debatable but there’s a ton one way or the other and a lot of them tend to be some of the more well designed units. Even basic units like Rattata and Pidgey can be useful, and this is true pretty much across the board. There’s a reason so many of the ultra dooms are Normals (Tauros, Persian, Snorlax… just to name a few). There’s big heavies like Clefable, fast sweepers like Fearow, and some wild units like Chansey and Ditto. Normal probably had the best overall design to it in Gen 1…
10. Unit Design: …earning out first…
11. Unit Design: …triple for a Type
12. Unit Design: Poison, believe it or not, is pretty well done. I once again will not be counting Poison types as there are so many dual types (thanks for that) but the true Poison types tend to be decent stat spreads, decent movesets, and decent evolutions
13. Unit Design: Water is probably the other really solid group of units in Gen 1. Lots of units (a whopping 32, across 14 Lines) with good varieties of stats and moveset to allow for some actual variety in Builds…
14. Unit Design: …so that’s another…
15. Unit Design: …triple
16. Kit: Electric moves in general. Good accuracy, chance of paralysis, and nice damage
17. Kit: Fighting moves in general. Varied accuracy, good spread of damage, some nice indirect stuff like Seismic Toss
18. Kit: Grass moves… in general. Lots of nice stuff here and some of the more interesting status effect moves tend to be under Grass. Plus you have plenty of absorb abilities
19. Kit: Ice moves. Solid attacks, good accuracy, plus things like Mist and Haze
20. Kit: Normal moves are actually pretty solid even in Gen 1, and there are a TON of them. Probably some of the best spread of stats and utility…
21. Kit: …for a double
22. Kit: Poison is no slouch. Basic poisoners are fine, but you also have things like Acid Armor (big defense increase), Acid (debuffer plus light attack), regular poison, and of course the horrific Toxic
23. Kit: Water moves. Solid abilities and known for having high accuracy
24. Itemization: Drops are actually pretty well spread out and useful across the game
25. Level: Rocket Hideout, of all things. The ‘go down to go up’ thing works, and planning out the spinning things is neat for what it is
26. Guidance and Flow: The game is, as most RPGs are, pretty linear, but it’s nicely guided in how it opens up. Further there are several points where you can branch a bit depending on what you want to do next
27. Replayability: By definition this game gets the second positive… and nothing else
28. Fast Travel: By definition, yes, Fly definitely qualifies

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: Okay so let’s get this out of the way; the interface in this game is awful. An old, janky, slow, irritating, badly explained gameboy interface
2. Interface: This is in addition to having to interact with the PC to store extra Pokemon, and there’s just a whole thing with those boxes (which have limited space, so enjoy switching boxes)
3. Interface: Also the EXTREMELY limited inventory size which runs into problems with how quest items and usable items also take up said inventory space
4. Inventory: I have to be clear here, this is THE worst inventory I have seen in video gaming history…
5. Inventory: …so enjoy that triple
6. Music: I’ll be nice and only give one negative for the music…
7. Music: …no I lied. When I get MULTIPLE requests to mute the stream because of how unpleasant and painful it is I think that qualifies as a negative
8. Song: Special mention to Lavender Town. Actually hurts my ears to hear it
9. Bug: So let’s get this out of the way… this game is very bugged. Yes some of those bugs you really have to go out of your way to trigger, but several you’ll run into just in a normal playthrough. Further the game has so many issues with Feedback that at times you’ll run into a bug and not even know it and thus learn the wrong thing or assume you’re doing something wrong when you’re not…
10. Bug: …so that sucks
11. Unit Design: So! Let’s talk about unit design, by which I mean pokemon design. This is always tricky since there’s a pretty big gradient in design when it comes to pokemon and it takes a lot to be objectively ‘bad’ (since so much of the point is to bring your favorites and make it work). Having said that Gen 1… absolutely has legitimately bad pokemon design. Let’s start with the Bugs. We have a grand total of 12 Bug Types in Gen 1 across 6 Lines. That’s not a great spread but then it gets even worse because almost all of these have legitimately terrible stats combined with severe weaknesses. The one thing they’re supposed to be good at (anti Psychic) they completely suck at for reasons we’ll discuss later. This is…
12. Unit Design: …not great
13. Unit Design: Then there’s the Dragons. All… 3 of them. THREE. Which are all part of the same Line. Also thanks to the issues with abilities these units… well they aren’t terrible but they are still a gimmick at best
14. Unit Design: Fire. Yes there’s some good stuff here, but the heavy reliance on the Fire Stone (again, 4 of the 12 forms require a Fire Stone) and some honestly depressingly bad stats and move spread (Flareon is a great example of this) drag the whole group down
15. Unit Design: Ghost. I mean come on. There’s 3 Ghosts in 1 Line. And they’re all partially Poison. Gengar is a beast but this is some pathetic representation at best
16. Unit Design: So I have to give special mention to several Mons that are just… really bad. Like Onix or Kakuna/Metapod or Abra. In some cases they can be made worthwhile, in most they cannot
17. Unit Design: So, so many units being part Poison is just one of many reasons why Psychic is stupid in Gen 1. Speaking of…
18. Unit Design: Psychic. Almost every Psychic pokemon in Gen 1 is just overpowered by virtue of being the imbalanced Psychic and having Psychic moves
19. Kit: Bug moves are legitimately terrible. First off there’s a whopping FOUR of them. One does absolutely no damage, one is effectively a DoT, and the other two (the only REAL attacks) are only learned by Beedrill and Jolteon in one case and JUST Beedrill in the other. This is horrendous spread, especially for the so-called Psychic counter. No wonder Jolteon was the anti Mewtwo back in the day…
20. Kit: …awful design
21. Kit: Dragon moves… or should I say move, singular… is a joke. There’s one move, it has very little mana (10 uses!) and it does a static amount of damage regardless of variables. Wow
22. Kit: Fire. These can burn, sure, but the accuracy is wild (70% on a 15 PP attack?) and they tend to not be well suited to the stats of the pokemon that can use them
23. Kit: Flying. Flying is pretty under-represented in general in Gen 1 but some of these moves are just silly. Like Sky Attack. This is a 5 PP 90% accuracy two move attack. What in the world were they thinking?
24. Kit: Ghost. I mean come on. There’s THREE Ghost moves. One just confuses, one does static damage, and Lick is awful (20 attack power means it’s basically just a Paralysis machine)
25. Kit: So this isn’t technically its fault but, as mentioned more than once before, Psychic moves are just silly in Gen 1. High damage, high accuracy, good against literally everything, and the best buffs to boot
26. Kit: Rock has TWO moves. One has a 65% accuracy. Give me a break
27. Early Game Hell: So nothing tells you this but if you choose Charmander as your starter you’ve chosen hard mode. Squirtle is normal, and Bulbasaur is easy. This would be fine, really, if the game TOLD you that
28. Info In Game: The game barely tells you ANYthing. It’s actually funny to me considering how many tutorials there are, but good luck figuring out what moves are what or how which pokemon evolve or where to catch what or any frickin’ thing…
29. Info In Game: …and that’s not even getting into the nitty gritty mechanics…
30. Info In Game: …or anything about how catching works
31. Core Mechanic: Speaking of which catching sucks. Ignoring the fact that the math is literally borked (specifically in Gen 1, they redid it in 2)…
32. Core Mechanic: …but the sheer RNG of it continues to suck
33. Traversal: HMs have never not sucked but they might suck the worst way back here in Gen 1. First is the obvious fact that they’re of variable use but are basically mandatory to keep on you all the time (except Flash) and take up valuable space…
34. QoL: …but also you CANNOT unlearn HMs in Gen 1
35. Seconds In Minutes: Also you need to enter the menu and select the Pokemon and then use the ability each time
36. Encounter Rate: It’s fine out in the grass. It’s AWFUL in the caves…
37. Encounter Rate: …really, really awful
38. Seconds In Minutes: The whole game is slow (I mean it is a Gameboy game). So many things require so much interaction cost and it just adds to the drag…
39. Seconds In Minutes: …and boy…
40. Seconds In Minutes: …does it drag
41. Raspberry Jam: This is, no question, the worst low health beedleeps I have ever heard. Ever. It’s loud, piercing, just two notes, there’s only four sound channels to begin with, and it takes sound priority. Meaning it overrides sound effects AND music…
42. Raspberry Jam: …and it’s…
43. Raspberry Jam: …terrible
44. Penalty For Failure: Losing half your money when you die sounds fine… until you realize how finite money is in this game. Yes I know there’s technically infinite money (Payday and the Elite 4) but that’s one hell of a technically. Speaking of which…
45. Itemization: …the finite money combined with how expensive the useful stuff is means I sure hope you’re thinking carefully about what you buy and when
46. Grind: Also grinding money is a pain, but it’s nothing compared to…
47. Grind: …the grind itself. So let’s check this. There’s no refighting (except for the Elite 4) which means there’s a finite amount of good experience in the game, because Trainer exp is much higher than wild pokemon exp. So you really want to be careful about which pokemon gain which experience from Trainers because otherwise you’re stuck doing the Wild grind which is just as slow and awful as it sounds…
48. Grind: …so that’s already…
49. Grind: …awful. But wait, there’s more!
50. QoL: See, the only way to level some pokemon is to do the swap method. You start with the pokemon you’re leveling then swap them to the carry pokemon (who takes a free hit for their troubles). They then only gain half the experience they otherwise would. This means that there’s finite exp or bad exp which is being chopped in half…
51. Grind: …which just makes the whole process even slower. And this is especially egregious given just how MANY pokemon the game wants you to have access to and to level. Even if you’re JUST leveling to fill out the Dex this is an insane amount of grinding…
52. Grind: …for another…
53. Grind: …triple
54. Grind: Rare pokemon also suck. I put this under grind because it boils down to running in a circle over and over in an area to get the right pokemon to show up, and I sure hope you know which pokemon spawn where because without that… well. Let’s put it this way. Some areas have spawn rates of 3% (and lower!). If you don’t walk in knowing those pokemon are there you’ll do a few battles (maybe even like 10 per area) and then walk away thinking you’ve found everything
55. Grind: And when you finally get that rare pokemon to spawn, good luck catching it! Because catch rates are entirely too low in Gen 1. In general. But then there’s the actually rare ones, the ones where you can fling wave after wave of ball and fail to catch them…
56. Grind: …which is completely unacceptable
57. Level: Surge’s gym and the puzzle of stupid which is not only NOT a puzzle (it’s just ‘try each thing until you’re right’), but also nothing communicates how it’s supposed to work, oh and also it’s friggin’ bugged
58. Level: Dark Tunnel. It’s not as bad as I remember, but it’s still a long, dull, high-encounter-rate fest designed to irritate you if you didn’t bring Flash
59. Level: Silph Co sucks. It commits three major sins; You teleport around (which prevents the player from being able to navigate properly since they are detached from geography)…
60. Level: …which then runs into the issue of the building looking entirely too samey…
61. Level: …and finally the dungeon is gigantic (largest dungeon in the game)
62. Enemy AI: Enemy actually cheats with PP! They have infinite move usage! Wow
63. Level: Sabrina and Koga’s gyms both suck for inverse reasons. Hers is too obtuse if you don’t know the trick, and his is way too easy
64. MSQ: Safari Zone. This place is kind of terrible. It’s terribly RNG heavy by design…
65. MSQ: …is literally bugged…
66. MSQ: …and the music that plays here is the friggin’ Evolution music. You know, the insanely short loop of like three notes
67. Level: The mansion (switch shenanigans which would be fine if not for the insane encounter rate)
68. Second In Minutes: One last padding negative for Exp All which just… drags the entire thing down pretty hard
69. Outro: Boss: The Elite 4. There’s several issues here but the biggest by far is how… not designed they are. It’d take a while to really go down the list and yes it’s also partially because of the lack of variety of certain pokemon types
70. Walkthroughitis: General. Plenty of situations where I sure hope you have a guide or prior knowledge lying around just to progress through the game
71. Core Mechanic: Trading in general is whatever, but locking evolutions behind trading is problematic for a lot of reasons. If you don’t have an internet connection (AND are willing to pay for said service) and/or don’t have anyone local to trade with then there’s entire evolutions you’re just locked out of forever and there’s nothing you can do about that

Story Positives:

1. MSQ: Sponsor adverts, requiring a sponsor to join the challenge, actual League personnel and organization, uniforms, and a lot of general world building as well as an approach to the Gym Challenge like it’s a seasonal sporting event which is just kind of awesome
2. World Building: Everything to do with the sports league is honestly legit in its own right
3. World Building: Bonus points for the little extra tidbits all over
4. Character: Team Yell is great, and in addition to not being evil, are just a delight every scene they’re in
5. MSQ: The story is delightfully cheesy, and there’s no real evil people. Even scenes that would normally be ‘muwa ha ha and now I reveal my evil plan’ are more like ‘muwa ha ha and now I’m not actually evil’, it’s wonderfully wholesome
6. Character: Multiple characters have actual character arcs throughout, including Hop, Bede, Sonia, and of course several Gym Leaders get good characterization too…
7. Character: …for two positives
8. Character: Everything to do with Marnie and her story arc, which is arguably the actual MSQ of the game
9. Spritework: As per usual with the 3D games, it could be better, but there’s enough of it and quality to qualify…
10. Spritework: …for a double
11. Character: Avery and Peony are simply delightful
12. Atmosphere: Cute! The game is just too cute
13. Localization: Some of the best Localization in the series to date
14. Music Direction: Good Music Direction for scenes
15. Doodads: Surprisingly good for a Pokemon game, both in the routes and in towns…
16. Doodads: …for a full…
17. Brickwork: Grassy fields, rolling hills, green countryside
18. Brickwork: Cities, of which there are several, all look very solid
19. Brickwork: Towns, of which there are (again) several
20. Brickwork: Generally high quality stuff for the snowy, rocky, and cave areas
21. Brickwork: While still grassy and the like, I do really enjoy the stylings of the Isle of Armor
22. Brickwork: The Crown Tundra area is wonderfully put together and really sells the Mystical and frozen vibe
23. NPC Set Dressing: Plenty of people just roaming around doing their things alongside their pokemon
24. Animations: Some decent mid combat camera stuff, as well as for the few cutscenes the game has

Story Negatives:

1. MSQ: The post game sequence is just kind of awful; deliberately irritating rich snobby people (who suffer no consequences for their actions), odd and badly designed dialogue, and general weirdness. Whole thing stinks
2. Outro: The entire nonsense of the end of the world plot at the last minute, by itself, completely ruins the otherwise engaging and interesting story
3. Outro: It also needs to be emphasized, further, just how STUPID this ending is. We’re in the middle of a tournament so Leon is busy, but Rose is worried about a power crisis… that won’t happen for years or CENTURIES. So he insists on kickstarting a country wide crisis RIGHT NOW because he refuses to wait ONE DAY for Leon, who agrees with him by the way that it’s an issue to be solved, to be free. This is just idiocy

Gameplay Positives:

1. HUD: The UI design in combat shows a great amount of info (including type effectiveness if you already have info on a pokemon)
2. Core Combat: There’s a good dynamic of tactics with 6 sized party and 4 moves per is, as always, great core combat…
3. Core Combat: …for a solid double
4. Music: The music is surprisingly good
5. Music: The music remains good throughout, not only did it not get old but they kept adding new awesome songs
6. Info In Game: Lots of good info in the menus and interface…
7. Info In Game: …and generally good cross referencing
8. HUD: In general, but mostly in combat
9. QoL: Being able to access pokemon anywhere is a Godsend and a gamechanger…
10. QoL: …for two positives by itself
11. QoL: Then there’s all the other little changes. Forgive me for not listing them all, but a lot of clear thought and effort has been put into smoothing over rough edges in the game design. Reduced interaction cost, better shortcutting, better access, reduced backtracking, reduced padding, reduced mandatory grind…
12. QoL: …it’s…
13. QoL: …fantastic
14. Interface: For the first time in the franchise, the interface is actually good. With search and filters and shortcuts and hotkeys…
15. Interface: …and it’s just…
16. Interface: …so smooth to play now
17. Boss: Raid fights are fun and neat in their own right, but also give good rewards, new chances for catching, neat boss phase style mechanics, and are fun with friends
18. Encounter Rate: The visible pokemon on the overworld map, which stay through combat, is awesome and allows you to avoid (most) RNG when looking for specific mons, removes the Trash Problem entirely, and allows you to hone in on specific enemies. This isn’t a perfect encounter system (that would be Arceus) but it’s one step down…
19. Encounter Rate: …for two positives
20. Core Mechanic: Some of the core ideas of the Wild Area are great, allowing you to gain local currency to by TMs and balls, lots of pokemon variety, trees, random NPCs, and raids…
21. Map: Decent and useful
22. Grind/Leveling: XP gain for catching
23. Grind/Leveling: Exp Share
24. Fast Travel: Giving the player Fly very early and Fly being able to not only access Routes but specific spots of the Wild Area…
25. Fast Travel: …for a full…
26. Fast Travel: …three positives
27. Grind/Leveling: The variable XP gain (discourage grind, encourage catch-up)
28. Itemization: XP Candies of variable amount and their usage in helping level / catching up…
29. Itemization: …for two positives
30. Itemization: General itemization distribution and usefulness
31. Core Mechanic: Thanks to the general smoothness, QoL features, and overall design of interface, it’s legitimately fun ‘catching them all’
32. MSQ: Lots and lots of general, fun exploring to do in the Isle of Armor
33. Prime Opt: The Max Raid thing is honestly a really cool and fun addition to play with friends
34. Minigame: The dual tournament thing, where you challenge your way up the ranks with a partner you select and can change, is quite fun and a cool overall gimmick
35. Cosmetic: Surprisingly good Cosmetic design throughout, and honestly the best cosmetics in the series to date…
36. Cosmetic: …and, spoilers, better than several later games too
37. Guidance and Flow: Pretty solid and smooth throughout, especially the ‘overworld’ zones
38. Overworld: Generally well designed and laid out overworld zones
39. Lives/Penalty For Failure: Pokemon point for Penalty For Failure
40. Save: Despite the single save slot, Saving itself is very quick and easy and convenient
41. Visual Continuity: Helps to navigate, especially in the wild areas
42. Visual Distinction: Especially helpful in seeing the pokemon roaming the grassy areas
43. Viscerality: As per usual for the modern Pokemon games, the moves could look and feel better, but they’re still good
44. Build: As usual, Pokemon games have tons of Build potential. Lots and lots of Moves to pick from…
45. Build: …for a huge variety of setups, strats, and coverage…
46. Build: …and a triple
47. Build: The Types themselves and related strengths, weaknesses, and immunities…
48. Build: …for another…
49. Build: …triple
50. Build: The actual Pokemon variety itself…
51. Build: …which is going to happen…
52. Build: …when you have hundreds of units to pick from
53. Build: TMs, which can really vary things up by going outside of what a Pokemon would normally have access to…
54. Build: …so that’s another…
55. Build: …triple
56. Build: Abilities which can totally change your build, team, and playstyle…
57. Build: …so that’s another…
58. Build: …triple
59. Build: And finally Held Items which, like Abilities, can have a substantial impact…
60. Build: …for a final…
61. Build: …triple
62. Itemization: Reusable TMs
63. Minigame: Camping and cooking
64. Replayability: As per usual for the series, lots of general replayability as well as options for varied replays…
65. Replayability: …for two positives
66. Unit Design: The Starters are… fine. There’s nothing wrong with them, there’s just better…
67. Unit Design: …so we’ll call that merely a double positive for all three lines
68. Unit Design: Orbeetle, Vikavolt, and Greedent are some solid lines
69. Unit Design: Corviknight is way better than it has any right to be. And two of its pokemon include some of the only pure Flying types.. ever! Also Unfezant and Thievul say hello
70. Unit Design: Obstagoon (and Zigzagoon) are just superior early normal types. And Wooloo is better than Dubwool, don’t at me. Anyways, some other solid repeat stuff, like Shiftry and Ludicolo and Liepard
71. Unit Design: Drednaw is legit. Boltund has no right to be that good. Cinccino is way better than its cuteness would indicate
72. Unit Design: Golurk and Bewear are both fantastic heavies, alongside some old standbies like Kingler and Abomasnow
73. Unit Design: Pangoro really grew on me. Great type combo (Fighting and Dark). Also Klinklang is here too I guess
74. Unit Design: Eldegoss is another weird Grass type (you wouldn’t expect a grass tank but here we are). There’s some other middle ranged pokemon I’m going to gloss over here too
75. Unit Design: Noivern is legit, I don’t even care. The Galar Meowth is fantastic, making it pure steel was a great idea
76. Unit Design: Alcremie is way better a support mon than you’d think, and can pair well with Ferrothorn or Gourgeist
77. Unit Design: Okay as much as I mock the Apple Dragons line is well designed. And is offset by the much better pure ghost type Cursola which holy hell
78. Unit Design: A bunch of other good repeat showings here with a few small variances (like Weezing’s new regional form, for example)
79. Unit Design: Aegislash is weirdly good for what it is. And the Galar Rapidash is an inspired Psychic Fairy that works way too well
80. Unit Design: Poltageist and Trevenant are great lines
81. Unit Design: Real talk, the legendaries are a bit of a let down in Shield. The pseudo legendaries are not. Dragapult is a fantastic Ghost Dragon which can hit like an absolute truck if set up right
82. Kit: Hokay. Let’s get this out of the way; there are just so many good moves at this point in time that it’s unlikely any given Type will get LESS than double. There’s too much that’s too good and too well designed. So I’ll make it a point to just mention any that jump out at me as ‘better than doubleterritory. We’ll start with Bug
83. Kit: Dark is pretty legit too
84. Kit: Dragon continues a solid swing
85. Kit: Electric is back up to…
86. Kit: …being a double
87. Kit: Fairy…
88. Kit: …is a double
89. Kit: Hokay here’s our first double I think. There’s so much variety, and some great risk/reward stuff in Fighting…
90. Kit: …that we’ll give it a double
91. Kit: Fire is going to be another of those. Fire really benefited from that Special/Physical split lemme tell you…
92. Kit: …so…
93. Kit: …there’s a triple
94. Kit: Flying…
95. Kit: …is another double
96. Kit: Ghost…
97. Kit: …enjoys a double
98. Kit: Grass is another of those triple ones. I mean come on…
99. Kit: …there’s just too much here…
100. Kit: …to not give a triple
101. Kit: Ground…
102. Kit: …is another double
103. Kit: For how good it is offensively you’d think Ice would have more but no
104. Kit: Okay this is stupid. There are too many Normal moves, my God. Okay so we have buffs, debuffs, attacks, specials, physicals, trades, uniques…
105. Kit: …an absolutely insane amount of great moves…
106. Kit: …for a triple
107. Kit: Poison is a pretty solid moveset
108. Kit: Psychic has entirely too many mean, fun buffs and debuffs these days
109. Kit: Rock is kind of like Ice when I think about it. Good type but not much there really
110. Kit: Water…
111. Kit: …is another double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Save: Only one save slot
2. Unskippable Cutscenes: As per usual
3. Core Mechanic: RNG of catch mechanics
4. Walkthroughitis: As per usual for the series
5. Grind/Leveling: Literally cannot catch pokemon of certain ranges until you have an appropriate Gym Badge as opposed to any of the other alternate solutions they could do (including the one that’s existed since Gen 1)
6. Graphics: …to continue from Gameplay Positive 9, the Wild Area is a very clear beta. The textures are either substandard or bad, there’s no good doodad design, it’s laggy and drops frames, and it has issues both showing and connecting with others (even when friended)
7. Padding: Dynamaxing really is just too much of a slog. The same song plays each time, animations can’t be turned off and take too long, they have HP barriers, and…
8. Padding: …the game actively encourages you to do dynamax battles, often (especially in the DLC) making it worse
9. Grind/Leveling: Inability to turn off XP Share
10. Bug: Consistent netcode consistency issues with the multiplayer features
11. Pacing: Some serious Pacing issues in several sections of the game
12. Info In Game: As per usual for the series, mostly about how certain mechanics and features work

Story Positives:

1. Atmosphere: There’s not much story here. But what there is is atmosphere. Dark, gloomy, and offputting
2. Music Direction: Helped by the very ambient music
3. Visual Storytelling: The water is bad. No, seriously. There’s a lot of GAME issues with the usage of water in Episode 4, but it’s used brilliantly to convey the horror of the moment. Narrow strips of water you fall through, seemingly safe water that’s actually acid, and underwater torture rooms with only one escape through slow moving doors while drowning… it’s good stuff

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: I sure hope you like dull browns everywhere. I’ll be honest I was fully expecting a triple here but the enhanced edition made these a lot less blurry and messy so it’s merely a single

Gameplay Positives:

1. Options: Generally solid options. A few are missing, but there’s still some proper depth here
2. Save: Quick, easy, multiple slots…
3. Save: …and a great save system regardless
4. Save: Quicksaves exist and are quick and easy to use
5. Difficulty Options: Actually changes manual placement of enemies (numbers, locations, and types)
6. Difficulty: Ending splash screen indicates time, secrets gotten (a specific number too), and kills… great for replay and optional objective type stuff
7. Itemization: With a noteworthy exception I’ll mention in the negatives the itemization is good stuff. Good placement of healing items and ammo, as well as rewarding secrets and bonus power ups…
8. Itemization: …easy double
9. Controls: Generally solid and smooth
10. Sound Design: Damned good sound design. Distinct sounds for attacks, enemies roaming, enemies aggroing, enemies taking damage, plus each enemy has their own sounds so you can navigate based solely on audio for combat…
11. Sound Design: …fantastic stuff…
12. Sound Design: …easy triple
13. Kit: Simple yet solid. Basic shotgun never gets old (sniper rifle, basically), super shotty for melee range, nailgun gets obsoleted the moment you get the super nail gun but both are fantastic rapid fire AND very narrow stream so great for accuracy. The grenade launcher is amazing, the rocket launcher is mean, and the lightning gun is hilarious…
14. Kit: …a double
15. Viscerality: Solid across both audio and visual impact
16. NG+: Level select (though it defaults your weapons which can seriously suck)
17. Visual Distinction: Y’know honestly it’s better than I was expecting. I don’t know how much of that is the 2021 version but it’s still pretty clear what’s what and what to interact with where. There’s even little details, like how the color red is infrequent but used to catch the eye (including on things like grenades)
18. Enemy Design: Good enemy design in general. Most enemies aren’t too spongey relatively speaking, and have their own styles of attacks (several have both ranged and melee too)
19. Enemy Variety: Good variety as well. The strats you use for one type of enemy generally don’t apply for others
20. Guidance: The same Doom style of Guidance; using drops and enemy corpses to navigate
21. Intro: Lobby. It’s so simple but so well laid out. Clear indicators for what difficulties are (visually and in text), and a (nearly) perfectly safe arena in which to figure out controls and navigation
22. Intro: Level: E1M1, The Slipgate Complex. I don’t want to over-praise because of how simple it is but Quake’s E1M1 is damned solid. Smooth, great flow, great individual design. First enemy? Behind a door, with room to navigate. Second? A couple of enemies now, but they’re past a bridge giving you a chokepoint. Third? Behind another door with tons of room to maneuver AND an exploding barrel. I’m not going to list everything but there’s tons of micro optimizations in the level…
23. Intro: Level: …and that by itself deserves the double
24. Intro: Tutorialization: E1M1 also is a fantastic way to convey how to play a video game, plus how Quake operates. Jumping, enemies, loot, secrets, switches, doors, all are conveyed naturally in level design
25. Level: E1M2, Castle of the Damned, is even better than E1M1. We start off with more introductions to concepts (enemies facing away from you, non hostile), as well as some fantastic guidance and looping. Hallway with traps? Clear indicators. Sideways ramp with enemies? Easy to hit the switch for bonus armor. Walking in opens the doors for enemies? The ammo in said room opens the bridge. Getting the key from across the bridge? Opens the shortcut right back to the door you need to use it on. Also the very obvious and multiple indicator on what a key is is great…
26. Level: Encounter: …but wait there’s more! Because we then see three ‘traps’ in quick succession, but each one is smartly laid out to not piss off the player or be a Gotcha! but instead gives the player room to deal with the traps as they’re sprung, even if they don’t see them coming…
27. Level: …great, great stuff
28. Tutorialization: I should also mention the game keeps tutorializing new concepts (types of traps, switches, secrets, enemies, items, guns) and is doing a great job of it
29. Level: E1M3, The Necropolis, continues the trend of awesome. I almost feel silly going into it all but to cover it in brief… We have looping stage design, an extremely well designed initial encounter to tutorialize both zombies and the grenade launcher, great introduction arena for the new flying enemies and a perfect weapon for them (with ammo nearby), great placement of the nearby key…
30. Level: Terrain: …great terrain design centered around constantly giving the player tools to work with and to encourage usage of their new grenade launcher…
31. Level: …and some smart, fun mini puzzles with subsequent rewards and progression
32. Level: E1M4, The Grisly Grotto, isn’t quite as good as the absolute bonkers good levels we’ve had so far but it’s still yet another solid episode. They’ve started getting a bit meaner with encounter design, but we haven’t dipped past fair yet. Melee centric enemies in tight corridors, more of that wonderful looping design, our first showcasing of underwater physics, and a nice puzzle enemy combo right at the end…
33. Level: …easy double
34. Level: E1M5, Gloom Keep, our first encounter with ogres who have terrain advantage over you as well as a nice big room of doom to deal with some fiends for flavor. But then we get introduced to vertical traps and my personal favorite, a great big…
35. Level: Encounter: …introduction to Shamblers. This is way better designed than it looks. Shamblers are meeean, and have a powerful hitscan ability so having the little towers to hide behind is great. This room is also just littered with pickups which is good, because you are going to need them
36. Level: E1M6, The Door To Chthon, our first American McGee level. Lots of focus on enemies, damaging environment, and slipgates. He manages to continue having good looping design by making branches from the main hub area which terminate in slipgates heading back to the hub…
37. Level: …solid stuff
38. Level: E2M1, The Installation, is honestly a damned solid level. We have some fantastic escalation (new enemy types! New traps!) as well as tight, intelligent design to the layout (I love how you can both see and fight enemies before you’re stuck in close quarters with them)…
39. Level: Guidance: …and honestly some really solid flow and guidance to what you can do where, and what to interact with when. The whole level…
40. Level: Flow: …has wonderful flow to it
41. Level: E2M2, the Ogre Citadel, lives up to its friggin’ name. This place is absolutely littered with enemies, most notably ogres, as well as their oh so fun compatriots…
42. Level: Encounter: …and let me tell you, Romero is really smart about their placement and density. This is fantastic stuff honestly…
43. Level: Terrain: …especially given how smart it is about keeping the terrain relevant in every encounter
44. Level: E1M8, Ziggurat Vertigo, our first secret level! Nothing too fancy here (also a good showcasing of how the level select is a bit borked) buuut still, nice usage of switches, verticality, and low gravity
45. Level: E2M3, The Crypt of Decay, starts to get a bit mazey but does some fun stuff with its new enemy types (Death Knights and Rotfish) as well as some optional side paths to choose your progression, lots of pickups, and a nice big surprise Shambler! Also great usage of…
46. Level: Terrain: …traps and enemy placement
47. Level: E2M5, The Wizard’s Manse. Clever usage of terrain as always (I love the underwater sequence… it’s just there to freak you out but it only actively does a little bit of damage in the end), and the way they…
48. Level: Tutorialization: …indicate how to deal with the buttons, lightning gun, and platforming is all legit
49. Level: E2M6 is actually pretty friggin’ solid. There’s some fantastic usage of specifics like… lemme zoom in on just one sequence…
50. Level: …there’s this moment where you’re in an elevator that goes up and down between three floors. The elevator is very small so any shot in is likely to hit you. Floors 2 and 3 both have a ‘fence’ in the way (that switches later open) and ogres on the other side. If you’re too close to them you’re likely to get chainsaw’d, but if you zoom to the other side you’re likely to get hit by the other ogre on the opposite side on the other floor. This is in addition to…
51. Level: Flow: …the fantastic flow of the level. The first floor, second floor, and third floor all dovetail into each other so despite technically backtracking constantly it never feels like it because as you progress the terrain is constantly changing. This is Romero design to a T; lots and lots of triggers, enemy spawns, and smart item placement to keep the player constantly traversing the same area in a constantly evolving layout…
52. Level: Encounter: …oh and bonus points, the final elevator fight (which has a trap in it too!)
53. Level: E3M1, Termination Center. Romero’s last level for Quake 1 is a banger to go out on. His usual fantastic looping level design, with areas morphing and/or spawning as you go, as well as his usual punish/reward method for hurting players but then rewarding them for succeeding…
54. Level: …great stuff
55. Level: E3M5, The Wind Tunnels, is back to fantasticness. Wonderful looping flow as you go through the air tunnels, excellent usage of backtracking where the routes change each time you hit one of the air vent hubs, and legitimately fair trap and enemy placement and design to encourage the player to think about their encounters…
56. Level: …a solid double, but I have to mention one other thing that gets its own bonus…
57. Level: Guidance: …item placement. I know I give this positive in general but I have to mention this. There’s a central hub area where there are three air tunnels, each leading to different parts of the level. The first one that opens is obvious, it’s the only one that’s open, but the second one you might not be sure which one to enter. And by the third one it’s been a minute (it’s a pretty large stage) AND you don’t want to go back through old parts again if you don’t mean to. The solution? Just put an item pickup in each air tunnel which is visible from the hub area. It’s incredibly simple and absolutely brilliant. It’s a fantastic example of item pickups as guidance
58. Level: E4M1, The Sewage System. This is another solid take on the Wind Tunnels concept, with multiple double backs to keep going through further unlocks in the tunnels
59. Replayability: I was tempted to remove this BUT the completion progress thing and the general fun (of the early levels) earns the first positive
60. Level: Guidance: E2M7, The Underneath. Let me start with the part of it I love the most, the player guidance. At every step the stage does things, often little things, to incline the player towards noticing things and then rewarding them for it. One of the first things we see is the gold key and the gold door, in the same room, but the key is up on the ledge. Right after this is a crusher with some armor past it. Further in there’s a wonderful sequence…
61. Level: …where there’s some fighting over an acid pit and some enemies, but also down IN the pit there’s a visible switch. Shooting it does nothing, so the player is inclined to jump down to hit it manually. The closest place to do so gives a clear visual indicator of a nearby alcove. So you jump down, hit it, rush for the alcove in which you find a suit that protects you from acid. Well okay, now you’re safe so you’re inclined to investigate the slime pit and, hey, completely invisible from before there’s a hidden area to a secret. All of this is a great highlighting of how simply using the terrain itself and the natural placement of what and where you can guide the player towards actions…
62. Level: …easy triple stage
63. Info In Game: Demo reel. Conveys concepts, and some nice showcasing of levels, weapons, and enemies

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Boss: Chthon is kind of a dull boss to begin with (he just stands in one place being a turret with knockback shots) but the fact that very little conveys that he’s invincible until you use the terrain isn’t great
2. Level: E3M2, The Vaults of Zin. This is starting to show the Sunshine Syndrome a bit. This is merely a ‘not good’ level, but all of the itemization problems (there’s a serious ammo drought in this stage) are going to be a recurring issue, and right at the end there’s a bad example of peeking combined with a troll trap into an awful encounter with a Shambler in a tiny enclosed space with no ammo and one tiny pillar to hide behind
3. Level: E3M4, Satan’s Dark Delight, is continuing just… weird aspects of design. Only giving the player rocket ammo for a large swath of gameplay before shoving them into two consecutive gotcha traps with short range enemies who ambush you, and some absolute bullcrap with bad arena design and spawning enemies right in front of you WHILE slamming down the door behind you…
4. Level: …I’m giving it a double
5. Level: E3M7, The Haunted Halls… sucks. The whole stage has the usual deprivation problem which is, as usual, pretty bad. It also absolutely loves peekabooing you with enemies you couldn’t possibly know were there until you’re in their faces (seriously I did a few tests, they actually don’t activate until you’re on them or bypass the route, which means no audio cues for detection)…
6. Level: Encounter: …but I have to give special mention for this one encounter. It’s a tight L corner which leads down a long open ended area with a Vore at the end who will absolutely aggro and start homing rocket your ass, as well as activating a nearby Ogre who (again) will come in and start launching grenades. This is while the ONLY safe spot is in the very corner thanks to trap placement
7. Level: E3M6, Chambers of Torment… is not very good. The extreme resource drought is getting worse, there’s absolutely awful enemy spawns, the encounter design is at the point of mandating memorization or getting all the secrets, and…
8. Level: …the absolute bullcrap of that last bridge. As you cross there’s two Vores down below who are already aggro’d to you, and as you walk across the bridge two Fiends spawn in front of AND behind you who immediately lunge at you
9. Itemization: Rockets and enemy drops. So hear me out. There are exactly three enemy drops in the entire game. Shotgun shells from the guards, energy for the lightning rod off the higher tier guards, and rockets off the ogres. The two guards only really show up in a few levels. The one enemy that shows up CONSTANTLY? Ogres. And that means the player’s only reliable, constant ammo source is ROCKETS. This is problematic for a lot of reasons (splash damage says hello)
10. Level: E4M2, the Tower of Despair, is such a dick level. The teleport traps and spots are very specifically designed to be disorienting, almost guarantee you take damage, and drop you in front of enemies with strong melee attacks. Then there’s the maze nature of it which… let me just explain this really simply. A good, well designed maze gives you an idea of the destination, the goal, then sends you in. There’s ways to play with it but that’s the barebones. Then there’s these friggin’ levels. These are just ‘enter a maze, have fun!’ and they tend to get more frustrating purely because of the lack of idea where you’re going or what to do. Oh and…
11. Level: Gotcha: …it’s also not fun to use teleporters in mazes because they, by definition, remove the visual continuity element so it’s harder for players to orient themselves
12. Level: E4M3, The Elder God Shrine. Y’know, this really isn’t a terrible dungeon crawl level if you think about it. There’s even some cleverness to it. Which is absolutely smothered in a ton of bullcrap. As with his other levels, Petersen absolutely loves to teleport monsters onto your face, or have walls that have zero indicators as doors or switches. And all of this mandates backtracking. But here’s the thing…
13. Level: …almost every level earlier in the game has been really good about the backtracking. When you go back through an area it’s different. New stuff, terrain changes, stuff like that. It unfolds. With these stages, with this stage, you’re just… backtracking. Go back through the same area again. And again
14. Lighting: Almost every level from Episode 3 onwards has a lighting issue. It’s not that they’re ‘dark’, it’s that they’re hard to see. There’s weird placement of lights and it doesn’t… work. It just makes it hard to parse what’s going on
15. Level: E4M4, the Palace of Hate, is… awful. Confusing, samey areas, extremely darkly lit lighting issues (see above), the severe lack of itemization, the massive enemy spam, the friggin’ eternal Shambler…
16. Level: …not great. But what pushes it to three negatives…
17. Bug: …is a bug. There’s this one bridge you have to cross to progress. It NEVER activated. We tried everything we could think of, including youtubing it and checking walkthroughs. Nothing. It just didn’t activate
18. Level: E4M5, Hell’s Atrium, is yet another example of Petersen’s wonderful Doom 2 design qualities. Samey areas, big empty layouts with nothing to them, terrible item placement…
19. Level: Encounter: …and actively bad enemy placement and spawning
20. Level: E4M6, the Pain Maze. Let’s start with the general lack of guidance just… everywhere…
21. Level: Encounter: …then there’s the absolutely psychotic enemy spam which just drowns you in enemies, on top of…
22. Level: Encounter: …those enemies being the dickwad Spawns. Just friggin’ dozens of them…
23. Level: …by the way the level is an absolute dick more than once. Like as in actually trolling. I’ll name two examples. First you go through a one way door (nothing indicates this) into a room where there’s an overlook seeing a bunch of Spawn. The first instinct is to start setting up shots and being strategic at about which point the level SHOVES you down into them because screw you. Second is you enter a room with two Fiends, two Vores, and if you kill one of the Fiends, three Spawns show up! This is just dickishness. Like a bad GM who thinks it’s funny
24. Outro: Level: E4M7, Azure Agony, is honestly a pretty bad outro level in general. It STARTS by being chased by a Shambler, and then you get swarmed by Spawns and Vores. Like…
25. Outro: Level: Encounter: …way, way too many…
26. Outro: Level: Encounter: …friggin’ Vores
27. NG+: Level select defaults your weapons which can make some levels functionally unplayable
28. Level: E4M8, the Nameless City. This is honestly just another bog standard Petersen level. Big empty hallways and rooms with nothing in them except a ton of enemies. Bad lighting to get you caught by asshole traps. And encounter design is just big empty rooms with no terrain and no pickups, just enemies…
29. Level: Encounter: …enjoy that double negative

Story Positives:

1. Cutscene: Honestly the opening cutscene (which I think is exclusive to the remaster) is pretty legit. Does a good job of setting up Operation Overlord, the luck involved in our survival, as well as a good showcasing of what we’re up against
2. Visual Storytelling: Quite a few examples actually. Tons of visual flair that helps explain what’s going on and what’s happened
3. Brickwork: General. They manage to have a lot of design to things despite its relative simplicity (and reliance on the color grey)…
4. Brickwork: …for a double
5. Animation: Enemy deaths and reactions. Sometimes they even do something (randomly) after dying
6. Cutscene: Missions Briefings. I do love me a solid mission briefing, and these are simple but good overall
7. Brickwork: Lots of moving parts to help convey the scenes as we go through. The military outpost, the factory, the mine, all look like what they’re supposed to and the moving parts specifically go a long way towards helping with that
8. MSQ: The factory. My God. So this is barely a stage gameplay wise, but serves as a great setpiece storywise. Here we see what they do with the captured prisoners, most of which are our fellow marines. We watch them get melted, crushed, pulped, and ground up to be dumped into a stew which is then treated and processed. And all the while we hear them laughing and screaming, as this is the eventual fate of the prisoners from the earlier stage…
9. MSQ: …this is horrific
10. Visual Storytelling: Everything about the Testing and Research area. Speaks for itself really
11. Spritework: General, but good stuff. There’s a style to them, and little details (like the flesh stretched across metal) that help

Story Negatives:

1. Sound: There’s a total absence of sound which is honestly worse. Even the No Music segments might’ve worked if there was some kind of ambient soundscape… the thrum of machinery or the hum of a factory but no, there’s literally nothing
2. Outro: Not just a nothingburger, it’s oddly disjointed compared to everything else
3. Plot: After taking out the Big Gun the plot dies completely. There’s almost no direction on what to do next, and we just sort of stumble into the palace and then onto an asteroid base for no adequately explained reason where the leader of the entire group is just hanging out

Gameplay Positives:

1. NG+: Level select (and this time it selects weapons)
2. Saves: Pretty much the same general system as in Quake 1…
3. Saves: …quick, intuitive, easy to use…
4. Saves: …and with solid quick saves
5. Difficulty Options: Not only does it change placements, similar to Quake 1…
6. Difficulty Options: …but AI behavior as well
7. Options: Solid options throughout
8. Music: So I do like the music for what it is, despite some issues we’ll talk about later
9. Itemization: Generally good spread of items and drops throughout…
10. Itemization: …and solid drops off enemies
11. Controls: Smooth and playable as always
12. Sound Design: Honestly I’ve heard better… there’s a few very tiny issues with activation sounds that pull it down from Quake 1’s quality. Still good though
13. Kit: Love the guns. Shotgun for spread or close fire, grenade launcher for corners and arcs, rocket launcher for anything non mobile, chain gun for deleting something fast but at great cost, plasma rifle for heavy or shielded targets…
14. Kit: …solid stuff
15. Viscerality: Good sound (better than Quake 1’s for reference)…
16. Viscerality: …so that’s a solid double…
17. Viscerality: …and generally good impact
18. Enemy Design: Great enemy design in this one. Each enemy has their own gimmicks and design quirks in how they attack, the speed of their shots, and their maneuvering and speeds…
19. Enemy Design: …solid stuff
20. Enemy Variety: Good variety too. Not the best, but you still want to approach each time of enemy a little bit differently
21. Terrain: Infrequent, but there is usage of terrain, most notably in the interior corridor segments
22. Core Mechanic: The arrow in general is a weirdly good progress indicator. It bugs out periodically, but it not only tells you where you’re going but will draw a line live there. As in if you jump off a ledge it will adjust to accommodate that
23. Intro: Tutorialization: Unit 1 does a lot to tutorialize quickly and efficiently. Breakable glass, how enemies work, secrets, underwater sections, buttons, keys, moving objects, adjustable terrain… it’s all here
24. Intro: Level: Unit 1 is… generally fine. Decent flow, decent build up and escalation, and we get a few guns basically immediately
25. Level: Unit 2, aggregate. Unit 2 is a perfect example of Quake 2 in one succinct area. You’ll notice I’m giving one positive for the ENTIRE Unit, which is functionally three-ish stages. And that’s my point. There’s nothing overtly wrong with it, but unlike the incredibly tight, dense, and clever design of Quake 1 this is… fine. And that’s Quake 2’s level design in a nutshell. Nothing super good or bad, just generically enjoyable
26. Level: Unit 8 actually has some solid stuff. Some enjoyable platforming and a motif of hitting buttons to add more platforms as you progress, and then a tight corridor segment with big bulky enemies which takes advantage of grenades and power ups
27. Replayability: Generally replayable

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Music: Or lack thereof. There’s just this issue where, once you finish a stage’s objective, the music stops dead on the spot. This can happen WELL before you’re done with said stage
2. Music: Also the music itself, while good, is… kind of one note. And it plays for a long time. I have trouble even telling some of the songs apart considering how similar they are
3. Level: Backtracking: Unit 3. You have to access a switch, which means turning off a laser grid, which means accessing another switch, which requires a key. So you’re given an option of which way to go and one of these directions is actively wrong. And even IF you go the right way what you’ll end up going back through the same areas (with no change!) a minimum of twice
4. Gotcha: Entirely too much of it. It’s one of those little niggling problems throughout the whole game
5. Guidance: So the arrow is good. What is NOT good is why it’s necessary. There are more than a few levels where the open ended nature of the level lends itself towards being unsure where to go ‘next’. This can lead to backtracking and frustrations…
6. Level: …for functionally a double negative
7. Level: Unit 9. I get what they’re going for; It’s a classic backtrack through the same areas as you unlock things concept. Thing is there’s no flow to it at all, if you fall at the wrong time you have to redo an ENTIRE sequence to get back where you fell, and on top of all of this it’s hard to navigate thanks to a lack of visual indicators as well as unclear interactables…
8. Level: …easily the worst stage in the game

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: So, a lot of the brickwork is still pretty basic BUT…
2. Brickwork: …the new graphics do a good job of really fleshing out certain areas. The swamp palace, the towns, the new areas
3. Spritework: Same good stuff (especially with those new cosmetics)
4. NPC Set Dressing: Better than the original, especially with the additional NPCs saying something worth a damn and the improved text speed

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. QoL: Several new quality of life features added to make the whole experience a bit more modern
2. Minigame: Randomizer mode, which… honestly deserves its own thing but let’s just say it has a ton of options, and those options are wonderfully granular, so let’s just smother a full…
3. Minigame: …three…
4. Minigame: …positives over this
5. Controls: Pretty solid controls, as is pretty standard for a good NES platformer
6. Guidance: NPC chatter. This is much better in this version since you can speed up their text so it’s not irritating to talk to people in town
7. Music: So we have the usual Zelda 2 bangers…
8. Music: …but then…
9. Music: …a bunch of great remixes as well
10. Core Combat: There’s some issues but the core combat is still pretty fun once it gets going. And this is, as usual, helped out by…
11. Kit: …the kit. Upstab and downstab as well as crouching and aiming your block…
12. Kit: …along with a variety of useful spells like Jump, Protect, Heal
13. Kit: The new kit really adds to the game. The fairy to prevent deaths from pits, the map to find hidden items, everything to do with Cucco mode which completely changes how you play the game
14. Guidance: The new map feature is nice of course, but there’s also way better design in just layouts (like little side areas in the overworld, or discolored tiles)
15. Enemy Design: Most of the enemies are pretty well designed, as they all have their own weaknesses you can take advantage of, and I like how most of the actual progression is around learning how to deal with them with your new kit rather than just hitting harder
16. Enemy Variety: This is helped by the variety involved. Heavies like the knights, flingers like the boomerang jackasses, slow movers, slimes, bouncers, those friggin’ heads, et cetera
17. Visual Continuity: For basically the same reasons as the original the dungeons are pretty easy to navigate thanks to the distinct terrain design
18. Visual Distinction: While the graphics still aren’t great (though they’re better than the original) they’re still very distinct, even more so with the new lighting stuff
19. Mid Mission Checkpointing: It’s even better than it was in the original. If you die you return to the cell you just entered with full health and mana…
20. Mid Mission Checkpointing: …but also now if you game over you go back to your last map interaction (the beginning of a town or dungeon, for example)
21. Power Progression Curve: Way smoother than the original. You basically never stop getting stronger, which means you start off a bit weaker but you eventually get to the point where you’re substantially stronger
22. Encounter Design: Smart in general. Good placement of enemies alongside other enemies and terrain to match their attack arcs
23. Intro: For the same reason as the original, the Intro works pretty solidly. You’re encouraged to roam but can’t go too far (the lack of Candle and Jump restrict your access to the southern areas). And you’re pretty quickly encouraged to find the core loop of the game; Explore a region, do the palace, finish the region
24. Level: Palace 1 (Parapa) is better than it was in the original, and it was already one of the better Palaces. The addition of extra dark rooms to guide the player, the extra optional hard area for the heart piece, good stuff. I should also mention here that Palaces really benefit from the removal of enemy respawns, as not only does it help navigation but it encourages exploration. Oh this is as good of a time as any to mention…
25. Map: …there’s a map in this version of the game! It’s pretty functional too, very Super Metroid, giving ideas of where to go (shows connecting areas and the like)
26. Boss: The first few bosses aren’t super fancy, but they did touch them up a little bit and they were always an aggregate positive
27. Difficulty Curve: The whole game has such a smoother difficulty curve. Imagine the difficulty curve of the first few dungeons in the original game and spread that across the whole game and you’ve got it
28. NG+: Still a great new game plus mode, carrying everything but items and unlocks (like lives)…
29. NG+: …so that’s still excellent
30. Postgame: So I didn’t have time to beat the entire game again to manually check, but there is new content in NG+
31. Level: Palace 3 (Island) is another nice revamp dungeon. Starts off fairly simple yet solid, good usage of terrain to add to encounters, and then it gets fun when you have to do a whole jumping puzzle over a gold slime to get the raft (and a heart piece), and some brutal but fun uses of enemy placement (see the previous Encounter Design positive)
32. Level: General in the first continent. This isn’t for the Palaces actually, it’s for all the other places. These were always fairly vanilla in the original but there’s some new, fun, and well designed stuff here (I’m especially fond of how they made the candle essentially mandatory to hit certain areas just by increasing the complexity of the jumps involved)
33. Level: Nabooru Well to get the Fire spell. This is an entire side dungeon that might as well be a Palace in and of itself! But I love how, again, clever they get with jumping mechanics and enemy placement
34. Level: Several new added challenges, like the tower to get the fairy, and the added bridge sequences. I know it sounds like I’m repeating myself (probably because I am) but it’s nice to see these new platforming challenges. You can tell people who were familiar with the game, the jump arc, and how you can interact with terrain and enemies sat down and thought about how to get creative with things
35. Level: Palace 4 (Maze). This is the best Palace so far, bar none. The looping is good, there’s a good flow to when you get what, the added platforming challenges here and there help, the new enemy placement, and of course that mean gauntlet leading up to the boss…
36. Level: …for a double. Speaking of which…
37. Boss: …I actually really like this boss. This is especially impressive since Carock was always the joke boss of the original, but with the change to the terrain (disappearing blocks) and his pattern he’s suddenly actually engaging since it’s all about quickly reacting to his reflections while managing your positioning
38. Level: Palace 5 (Ocean). Another smart, fun remix with some mean jumping puzzles, way better enemy spread, and lots of rewarding side areas
39. Level: Palace 6 (Hidden) is probably the best overall dungeon in the game. Tons of new depth and complexity added (yes, even the slime puzzle), lovely new terrain obstacles, fun minibosses…
40. Level: …just solid top to bottom
41. Replayability: Honestly, yeah. It only qualifies for the first, but it’s still there
42. Itemization: Mana and exp drops have been increased, which helps more than you’d think with keeping the player casting and progressing
43. Terrain: Great usage of terrain throughout, especially to reward exploration

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Core Combat: Dagger range. This is just as bad as it always was and good lord it takes some getting used to and drags down the combat
2. Penalty For Failure: WAY better than in the original. Dying still resets you in the cell, fully dying goes back to the nearest area which is much less bad, and you retain SOME of your experience now instead of losing EVERYthing (you still lose a full 75% of your experience, which can be a hell of a bite later on)
3. Enemy Design: Medusa heads are still bullcrap
4. Grind: Bonus xp problem is the same as the original
5. Enemy AI: Input reading jackasses still exist, and they still suck
6. Gotcha: Enemies do like to lunge out of nowhere and just grab you
7. Outro: Level: Grand Palace and saminess plus loop
8. Outro: Boss: The Gooma refight in the Grand Palace is stupid. He has an insane amount of health, hits like an absolute truck THROUGH all protections, and has a huge hurtbox and very small hitbox

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: Same nice spritework (especially on bosses and Samus) as the original
2. Music: Same atmospheric and moody music as the original

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Guidance: Some of the same generally solid guidance the original had, but made even better with the…
2. Minimap: …minimap which gives some honestly great indicators of where paths are and how to find things…
3. Map: …also helped by a decent and scrollable map
4. Kit: The Ice Beam was always good, but the inclusion of the Wave Beam with it…
5. Kit: …is unironically a game changer, letting Samus really navigate and fight better (especially with the screw attack and high jump)
6. Itemization: Much improved over the original. More frequent drops and better drop rate of items in general
7. QoL: Death warping (with full health!) is a nice feature. Being able to do it anywhere is better. Which dovetails into…
8. Save: …instant and free saves from anywhere
9. Level: Aggregate level design, same as the original, but there’s one new thing. See…
10. Intro: …the Intro is nice now. The immediate guidance on where to go and what to do, the lack of horrible punishment mechanics, ease of restarting, and decent early navigation
11. NG+: Lovely new game plus feature (keep everything except for E-Tanks and Missiles)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Raspberry Jam: Still not great
2. Info In Game: Still no real indicators of what items are or how they work
3. Level: Brinstar continues to have the same general issues as before (samey and repetitive areas) but it’s not nearly as bad as before, especially with the inclusion of the map (look, it’s a good map, what do you want from me)
4. Level: Norfair still has the same issues (samey, repetitive) buuut again that map really helps smooth over where to go and what to do
5. Level: Kraid’s Lair is… look all of these levels are the same, they’re samey and repetitive but better cuz of the map
6. Backtracking: Still a fair bit, especially if you don’t know where you’re going
7. Trash: Factory Worker Syndrome is still present. Lots and lots of trash that is mean, knocks you around into lava, and has too much damned health. This is mitigated a bit by the new increased damage and missile counts
8. Walkthroughitis: The entire game still has a bit of walkthroughitis in figuring out what to do when
9. Level: Ridley’s Lair still has enemy spam but what really makes it suck is it still has the trap pit into the Basement From Hell, which is still exactly as awful as it always was
10. Bugs: Still a fair few. Have fun trying to bomb in lava or jump out of water or glitching into the floor or a bunch of others
11. Boss: Kraid and Ridley are still fairly basic, boring bosses
12. Overworld: Samey corridors, dull columns, too many enemies. The usual really
13. Outro: Boss: Mother Brain is still total nonsense. Lava pits combined with random jump height out of them combined with tons of damage from all directions combined with a narrow attack vector combined with the trap of safety equals a frustration fest. The only reason this isn’t more is that the doors (and zebites) stay gone when defeated

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: It’s… VERY rough. But if you look at the whole game there’s still enough to kind of see the zones and areas and set the stage. Caves, towns, volcanos, etc.

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: Several areas just look… awful (looking at you, Earth Cave). And in some cases barely convey anything about where you are
2. Outro: Plot: So there’s not much plot to speak of but what there is falls off a cliff at the last minute by not understanding their own rules and conceits, which is made worse…
3. Outro: …by the actual ending which (again) contradicts itself AND makes everything you just did completely invalidated. There’s also the somewhat debatable and eyebrow raising implication that this is just another step in the loop and it’ll all happen again but let’s just ignore that

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: I mean it’s the FFI music. I’ve heard better (from the same composer, even!) but there’s still some decent tunes here
2. Kit: Fighter. This is probably the most basic a class can be while still being well designed. It’s only real features are its health pool and its ability to equip basically everything, which makes it extremely reliant on thoroughly looting as well as pouring an insane amount of gold into keeping up to date. This is interesting because while it’s powerful and useful all throughout the game, it falls off almost immediately if you get a second Fighter (because you just will not be able to keep up with the gear), and in some cases it can’t deal with certain situations (more or less mandating having other classes). Still fits basically any party composition
3. Kit: Monk (eventually) becomes a solid class… sort of. Monk has a weird quirk where it’s almost useless early on (because of how the game calculates Monk damage vs. Absorb) but thanks to its crit chance and lack of reliance on gear the Monk is a great companion character to the others. In fact in many ways it’s similar to a typical mage; Keep with it and it’ll end up carrying
4. Kit: Mages in general. Honestly this is more a positive for spells than Mages (which are straight up bugged), because there’s some shockingly good spell design for an NES game. Exit, Warp, status effects, buffs (some of which even work!)
5. Itemization: Drops are really solid in this one. To be clear I mean chests in dungeons. Good spread of items for most classes, good source of gold if not
6. Overworld: I’ve said for years this is a solid overworld design, honestly one of the standards of what an overworld should be, and it’s still true. What you can access and when slowly opens up (very Metroid style), and there’s thought put into what you can see from where and how the sightlines of mountains and forests ‘nudge’ you in directions to help you find stuff. Consider this…
7. Overworld: …an easy double
8. Guidance: The aforementioned accessibility thing is nice but there’s a lot of good hints from NPCs in the game telling you what you can do and when
9. Enemy Variety: Honestly not too shabby for what it is. Lots of different enemy types which have different moves and weaknesses and have to be bypasses in different ways
10. Difficulty Curve: Smooth until it isn’t at which point it becomes smooth again. (It’s weird)
11. Visual Continuity: Not the best, but navigation based on visuals even in dungeons tends to work well
12. Visual Distinction: With a few exceptions you can tell immediately what you can interact with and where you are
13. Intro: Okay so… there’s arguably two intros for FFI so let’s talk about the original intro first. You start off in the field but RIGHT in front of a town with a castle. If you enter the castle it quickly conveys that the town and the castle are different entities. The town has the basics, but also some solid equipment and spells for whatever your setup is. The nearby castle, by contrast, serves more of a story purpose by telling you what you’re doing and why. There’s only ONE place to go, and the surrounding area is very low level stuff to get used to combat. At the end of the peninsula is an obvious ruins looking building with a straight shot to a basic stat boss. None of this is fantastic but what it is is a good intro. This is how you play an RPG, and this is also a vertical slice of the entire gameplay loop. Town, story, overworld, dungeon, boss
14. Level: I know, but hear me out. I actually think Mt. Gurgu or Golg or… whatever they call it this version is a solid dungeon. The usage of the damaging tiles isn’t just there to dick you around but can serve as deterrent (go the long way to avoid the damage), guidance (there’s treasure over here but you need to take damage to get it), and even smooths out the length of the dungeon (no random encounters on damage tiles). So the implementation of the damage tiles works pretty solidly
15. Level: Color me surprised, I think the Sea Shrine is actually decently designed too. The ‘up then down’ thing isn’t as bad as it sounds (certainly not like Earth Cave’s ‘just do the dungeon one and a half times’ problem) and the routes through are pretty intuitive. The enemies within aren’t utter bullcrap, there’s good items with few dead ends to reward exploring, and the boss isn’t a total dick
16. Boss: Aggregate. I was torn on this for a while but there’s actually a fair number of bosses in the game that have actual design to them. Strong weakpoints, absorbs and/or health which make them beefier or weaker, and generally good ability selection. There are exceptions of course but I’d say the whole game deserves the point

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: It’s not like the interface is super fun to utilize as is. I’ve seen worse (recently, even) but man, NES RPG menus are not a great time. Just doing basic things like shopping or equipping or moving items around is more of a pain than it should be…
2. Seconds In Minutes: …and adds up precious seconds as you have to do it constantly (well, depending on your party makeup)
3. Interface: To return to the interface for a second, there’s some weird lack of feedback issues the game has. Sometimes it’s hard to tell you’ve actually done a thing because the game doesn’t convey it to you. An easy early example of this is selling or buying stuff from a shop. If you sell something from your inventory it… keeps your inventory screen up, WITH the item you just sold still visible, because it snapshotted your inventory BEFORE you sold. You have to try to sell again and load that character’s inventory again to see the update
4. Inventory: While I’m here. This is not a great inventory system. Each party member has 4 weapon and 4 armor slots, and that’s where those items go when getting treasure. This is pretty restrictive even just for usage but gets even worse when you consider how much gear a dungeon can have. If you know what you’re doing you can manage it but if you don’t it’s not difficult to end up having to do multiple trips into a dungeon to garner everything. All of this sucks…
5. Interface: …for a bonus negative
6. Music: Repetition is an absolutely huge issue. Town songs get old, vendor songs get worse
7. Intro: Early Game Hell: FFI was never exactly an easy game in early game (especially if you make a mistake, which can get punishing fast). Some combos of classes don’t work super well with each other (which is fine really) but some of the early game balancing isn’t very well designed around some of the early kit (if you didn’t bring a white mage you’re basically doing a challenge run). This is on top of the fact that some of the new optional stuff is mean (as in, more than it should be). This is dovetailed by…
8. Save: …saving can only be done at town or with tents, which means saving costs gold. This is worse than your typical ‘limited to save point’ affair, this is just hostile, especially since…
9. Intro: Itemization: …FFI can have some economy issues. There’s something I don’t talk about often where you want to design the enemies around a town to drop about enough money to cover an inn visit, so if the player isn’t doing well or is in over their heads or has started to backslide they can recover. An average Imp pack gives about 6 gold. A stay at the inn costs 30, and reviving costs 40
10. Grind: The Marsh Cave is the first major grind spot in the game. I sure hope you’ve got plenty of exp and the gold to buy literally dozens of heals and antidotes (and gear!) to hit this monster of a dungeon
11. Encounter Rate: Overworld encounter rate is entirely too high. This is in general, but is made even worse because you still get encounters on the stupid ship, which you spend a fairly large amount of game time using…
12. Encounter Rate: …so that sucks
13. Encounter Rate: Good lord I hate the dungeon encounter rate. It’s SO high it challenges BoF2’s nonsense
14. Grind: This is as good of a time as ever to mention that the grind is actually worse than it sounds. We spent quite some time at the peninsula of power (y’know, a BUG, so it wasn’t designed to be a grind spot) buuut even the peninsula of power gives relatively little experience by the time you hit about level 10. I’m just emphasizing this because even the super advanced bugged grind spot is still fairly slow and grindy
15. Backtracking: Mystic Key woes. So you get the Mystic Key and can go get tons of loot of varying usefulness. Yay! Now go redo the Marsh Cave, and go back across basically the entire game to this point to hit each of the areas to get all of this
16. Level: Y’know I haven’t even properly talked about the Marsh Cave itself yet! The dungeon itself is just a really huge slog so it’s not that bad dungeon wise, but what makes it suck…
17. Level: Encounter: …is the enemies. Tons upon tons of enemies here Marsh Cave suck. There’s worse (in this very game no less!) but I still hope you enjoy regular paralysis and constantly being poisoned by enemies just a bit out of your damage range
18. Level: Backtracking: The Earth Cave. There’s… no good reason for this but you do about half the dungeon, then leave (keep in mind you do not have access to the Exit spell at this point in time even if you go out of order), and then have to go do the entire dungeon again
19. Grind: Then there’s another grind wall post-Earth Cave. Whether you go for the volcano, Mt. Ordeals, or the Ice Cave next you need to sit and get some gold, gear, and/or exp to progress
20. Level: Encounter Rate: So then there’s the encounter rate in the Ice Cave. It sucks, as it always does, but to be honest I’d probably just ding it as an aggregate and move on…
21. Level: Enemy Design: …if not for the enemies in the Ice Cave. There are enemies in here that can proc death and petrify, enemies with a straight up death spell, and all of this is in a dungeon which is pretty far from town (which, as a reminder, is your only source of resurrection… no fast travel either). This is made worse because…
22. Level: …while it’s not super long, it IS relatively easy to get stuck in a loop thanks to one mis-step
23. Level: Boss: Eye is close to being an interesting boss. He has low health and low absorb (162 and 30 respectively) meaning he can be brought down pretty quickly. Thing is he has a low chance to white damage and a high chance to rotate through his spells, which include THREE different types of instant kill, then various debuffs. The only strat here is to keep whomever alive long enough to basically one shot him
24. Itemization: Economy. The high end stuff (mostly spells, but also gear) is STUPID expensive in this game, and more or less mandates planning out your gold usage well in advance (especially if you have mages)
25. Music: So this game has that issue endemic to older games where the music restarts every time it plays. This always irritates me, in general, but in a game like this with an encounter rate this high and how often you go up or down in dungeons (or in and out of overworlds) it’s even worse. There are times when you can’t even reasonably hear a song’s entire loop because it’s restarting so frequently…
26. Music: …so I’m giving this a double instead of the usual single
27. Level: Castle Ordeals. So! It’s a teleport dungeon with multiple go-back teleports and boring memorization (as in there’s no indication of what the right way is, just muddling your way through). Other than that it’s fine
28. Kit: So… we have a Problem in FFI. It’s a Death Problem. See, the main problem here is there is no viable way to resurrect a dead party member outside of going to town or having a White Mage with the appropriate spell (which you do not get until about halfway through the game). This already sucks…
29. Backtracking: …but then consider just how bad that can get in later dungeons. Hell even as early as the Earth Cave or Mt. Gurgu it can be horribly punishing having to traipse all the way out of a dungeon just to resurrect someone. Keep in mind…
30. Power Progression Curve: …they gain no experience while dead. Oh and let’s not forget another salient issue…
31. Difficulty Curve: …who exactly dies can be incredibly random (thanks to death procs and enemy targeting randomness). Meaning you could lose someone where it’s like ehh… or you could lose the lynchpin of your entire team. This gets even worse when you realize…
32. Enemy Design: …which character is doing how much of the heavy lifting can vary from dungeon to dungeon thanks to enemy design variance. Meaning you can, through no fault of your own, be completely screwed in a given dungeon because you lost the wrong person to pure RNG. Yes I know Exit exists… if you brought a mage who can cast it AND are at the point where you went and bought it AND have the spell slots left to cast it. All of this…
33. Padding: …just drags the game out. There are times where it’s honestly less arduous to just reset the game and go back to my save right outside of a dungeon than try to crawl in OR out (remember, several dungeons don’t have a shortcut out, meaning having to go further in and then back out without a given party member). It’s also worth noting that in addition to padding…
34. Penalty For Failure: …this can lead to a death spiral, as you have less and less capacity to deal with things and your action economy goes to hell. And of course…
35. Penalty For Failure: …more chances to just have someone die randomly. But hang on, right at the end I have to mention something. See, everything I just typed up applies to the Renaissance version we ran, but is WORSE in the original due to lack of mitigations (it’s still bad in Renaissance but it’s no where near as bad). Thus each of these is worse in the original, so enjoy…
36. Padding: …the original…
37. Enemy Design: …negatives…
38. Backtracking: …magnified
39. Seconds In Minutes: Also out of combat healing, did I mention this? This is partially interface design and partially itemization but both collide to make healing out of combat suck. You have to open the menu, hit item, select the item, the cursor always defaults to your first party member, move to who you want to heal, heal, rinse and repeat. These healing items…
40. Kit: …only heal for 30 a pop. You outpace that inside of 10 levels, so get used to doing this a lot. Oh also…
41. QoL: …you can use a healing item on someone who’s at full health, wasting it. This is doubly weird since the game doesn’t let you use status cures if they don’t have a status so clearly the tech existed to prevent waste, but here we are
42. Walkthroughitis: It could be worse, and NPCs do give you ideas of what to do, buuut good luck figuring out things like where the Waterfall cave is, where the caravan is, and how the heck to make the trek to Lufein
43. Outro: Level: So everything about the final dungeon sucks. Let’s start with the obvious; Huge swaths of windy terrain who’s only purpose is designed to force you to wind in and out of the same areas over and over, probably get lost…
44. Outro: Encounter Rate: …and stumble into tons of…
45. Outro: Encounter: …brutal, insane enemies in a dungeon…
46. Outro: Level: …that has no possible recovery. No I mean that, NO recovery. In addition to making it BORING it also means no save spots, no recovery pools…
47. Outro: Itemization: …and no items! There’s actually a couple (mostly completely useless gold) but this could have at least been mitigated by having some kinds of restore items (higher level restore items DO exist after all) but no. Nothing. Oh also…
48. Outro: Itemization: …THE best weapon in the entire game drops one floor before the last boss. What is the friggin’ point of this?
49. Outro: Boss: By the way the final bevy of bosses suck. These are absolutely insanely set up, with way beefier stats and the like, but honestly that’s just par for the course. No the real issue is their spell list, which I can explain simplest by using Lich as the example; He has a 75% chance to cast instead of attack, and the first spell in his list is freaking Nuke
50. Outro: Boss: Chaos sucks too. Hits like a truck, has an insane spell list, but my personal favorite is that if he goes through his whole rotation he will heal himself. To full. Please think about this situation because imagine you’re barely holding on but you’re slowly attritioning him down and then he just… resets his health to full. What a crap fight
51. Bug: Crit is completely incorrectly calculated on weapons. It’s actually linear; the further into the game, the higher crit rate. This is NOT deliberate, and makes several swaths of the game far harder than they really were intended to be, while also trivializing the end game. Also contributes to early game hell
52. Bug: Equipment not working correctly. So, there’s weapons that do bonus damage to certain enemies, armor that protects against certain status effects, and basically none of it works properly. This is actually a few bugs colliding with each other but the result is the same; Gear is borked
53. Bug: Int. This is arguably the worst bug in the game. INT (WIS, actually) isn’t calculated. At all. This means every spell in the game is completely locked in at their base values and will never get better. This not only makes magic fall behind in general…
54. Kit: …but it also means that WHM and BLM trail behind the other classes hard. If not for the utility spells they’d barely be worth the time and effort
55. Bug: Running not working correctly. This has a knock-on effect we’ll talk about in a sec, but the big issue here is that Running is supposed to be based on Luck and Level but kind of… isn’t. Instead it’s based on the Luck of the person running and the status of the person two slots below them. This can be exploited, sure, but it also means you can just straight up be incapable of running in some circumstances and if you don’t know about the bug you won’t know that
56. Kit: Thief. Thief is… just terrible. It’s objectively the worst class in the game. The only reason I’m not going to give it even more negatives is because most of the problem here is a lack of design, and I’ve seen worse in games that have actively bad design. The Thief has bad stat growth, worse gear setup, NO abilities whatsoever until Ninja at which point they get CRAP spells, and that’s… it. There’s no design here. Thanks to the Run ability they’re supposed to have not working and a total lack of ability to steal…
57. Kit: …Thieves just aren’t
58. Kit: Monk. Yeah I know I gave them a positive too but the problem with Monks boils down to basically needing either a walkthrough or just prior experience to understand how they work and why they’re worthwhile. Otherwise you might assume you need to gear them up which is going to hamper their ability and make them just a worse Fighter
59. Kit: Red Mage. Yeah this… is not great. A weaker Fighter with worse spell selection than either mages is not great to start with. The only reason this isn’t a triple is because there IS utility you can get with some of the lower level buffs and debuffs, but otherwise…
60. Kit: …this is just a waste of a slot
61. Seconds In Minutes: Buying items one at a time is exactly as awful as it sounds, except no that’s a lie it’s even worse. Here’s the deal; First, buying items one at a time is just arduous in and of itself…
62. Seconds In Minutes: …but then consider that you have to do this regularly because of just how many of these stupid things you’ll be chugging through constantly (remember there’s no better potions to speak of, and you’re going to want around 99 of these for most major dungeons)…
63. Seconds In Minutes: …and you realize that you’ll be doing this ‘mash A to buy 99 items’ thing many times
64. Core Combat: Targeting with no roll over. So, once upon a time I’d call this the worst part about this game. I was so innocent back then. So naive. No this is merely ONE of the worst features of the game. So for those not aware the way this works is when you set a target for your spells and attacks, if anything happens to that target (like, say, dying) then the other people… attack the spot. The now empty spot. And nothing happens. Wasted action (and remember, the Action Economy in FFI is already pretty bad) and possibly a wasted spell slot (and those are rare as hell as is)…
65. Core Combat: …this is awful
66. Info In Game: A near total lack of proper info on what items do, what equipment (doesn’t) do, or how spells work or what they do. Hope you got a walkthrough, or just a lot of trial and error…
67. Info In Game: …because lord knows the game ain’t tellin’ you jack

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: As with before, generally excellent brickwork. Good animation, good visual indicators, good color usage
2. Spritework: Great spritework. Enemies, bosses…
3. Spritework: …and Kirby himself, who is even better animated than before if you can believe it
4. Animation: And yes, the animations are all excellent. Which reminds me of…
5. Cutscene: …the pre-level cutscenes. The epic duel which results in the logo getting impaled, dreaming of sweets and then an enemy who wakes us up, getting knocked off a ledge and barely crawling back up only to be exploded, losing all our balloons because we lost one balloon (aww…), climbing the mountain for our tomato only to lose it (nooo), falling into the ocean and getting chased by a shark, singing the rainbow away, and of course dragging Dedede to the Fountain of Dreams. These are well done, delightful…
6. Cutscene: …and worthy of a double positive
7. Visual Continuity: Butter Building by itself is pretty self contiguous, as we slowly climb further and further up the tower, and the slow climb up the staircase to the Fountain of Dreams works the same way
8. Brickwork: World 4. The airships, the sky, the detailing here is just silly
9. Brickwork: World 7 (and technically 8), the entire Fountain of Dreams area. Appropriately dreamy and spacey without being too hard to tell what you’re looking at and retaining the tone
10. Atmosphere: Cute. Of COURSE it’s cute
11. Plot: Believe it or not I rather like the overall plot thread. Dedede is up to his old tricks, people have stopped dreaming, actually no he was just trying to protect us from something much worse. This leads to some interesting implications (which actually are carried forward in future games, with the Dark Matters) as well as connecting Dedede to Kirby henceforth. Nice little ending to tie it off too

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Info In Game: The game has an honest to goodness demo reel at the start. It might unironically be one of the better ones I’ve seen, rivaling Super Metroid
2. Controls: Game controls solidly and smoothly as usual, with smart usage of which buttons do what
3. HUD: I adore the little cards that indicate what power up you currently have (and if you pause you get a little tid bit as well!)
4. Music: Continuing the distinction of fun, well done Kirby style music
5. Visual Distinction: Usual excellent color usage and outlining
6. Itemization: So this is a bit of a weird one but I really like how the game gives you lots of options for getting power ups throughout
7. Kit: Speaking of those power ups. These are pretty solid for a first outing. While there’s some redundancies here (fire and fireball are different, as well as a few other similar things) there’s still a good variety of useful, great, less useful, utility, and overpowered stuff to play around with (the UFO is ridiculous, the Needle is silly, etc)…
8. Kit: …easy double
9. Intro: Tutorialization: As usual the first stage does some really good stuff in tutorializing the basic game concepts, as well as the new ones (the copy moves)
10. Intro: Level: World 1 (Vegetable Valley) in its entirety. We have some very simple platforming here, but a lot of tutorialization of the copy moves (see above) as well as some nice easing into the concepts of the game. While spread out across four stages, the whole world really functions as a single stage, and each flows smoothly from the previous
11. Level: World 2 (Ice Cream Island) starts to up the enemy density and platforming. Still introducing new abilities and portions of stages dedicated to playing around with them, but we’re starting to see more of the ‘multiple solutions to this room’ level design
12. Level: World 3 (Butter Building) is a personal favorite of mine. The verticality, the playing with abilities, the introduction of side objectives and switches…
13. Level: …starting to really get some good stages here
14. Level: World 4 (Grape Garden) finally gets to the point where I’m going to give individual stage positives. And the first one that really earns it is 4-3. This is a creative, fun stage with lots of moving parts, good usage of wind, rewarding side areas, and is just generally fun
15. Level: By the way the rest of World 4 is also great stuff. Really getting good with item placement, enemy positioning, power up positioning, and general terrain use…
16. Level: …for a solid double
17. Level: World 5 (Yogurt Yard) is another very good world across the board. Creative vertical levels, neat usage of terrain, and all the other insane and fun stuff they were coming up with. You could really tell they were just throwing ideas out left and right…
18. Level: …easy…
19. Level: …triple
20. Level: World 6 (Orange Ocean). We start to see a lot more playing with platforms and pits, as well as rewarding the player for holding onto power ups across rooms to access bonus things further on. This is also when we start seeing the ship levels which continue the verticality thing, and a ton of usage of the slanted slopes (which also benefits some of the new abilities). They also like to start putting mini puzzles into the level design, which I rather appreciate…
21. Level: …easy double world
22. Level: World 7 (Rainbow Resort). Levels are finally getting legitimately mean, playing with wrapping, boss rushing, and really just playing around with fun concepts like an entire level of diagonals, or littering a stage with sleep power ups to tempt you, or doing a lot of one-screen challenges, or having portions of rooms that shove you in different directions. Plus the nostalgia levels are here…
23. Level: …some solid stuff
24. Enemy Design: General, as usual
25. Outro: King Dedede and Nightmare. The added moves to Dedede make him a far more interesting fight, and Nightmare is a bit iffy but still a nice spectacle
26. Mid Mission Checkpoints: As per usual, some solid checkpointing (usually per door)
27. Minigames: I really like these minigames. They’re fun, short, and rewarding
28. Replayability: General but solid. I mean, it’s short and it’s fun, I’d replay it
29. QoL: Ability to quit out from a stage after having beaten it, retaining progress (and, critically, items)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Penalty For Failure: You lose your copy ability the moment you take damage. There’s a reason this isn’t true in future games
2. Encounter Rate: Ninja Gaiden respawns

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: Kirby! Good lord there are so, so many sprites for Kirby and his multitudinous abilities, and they’re all good…
2. Spritework: …and they all deserve…
3. Spritework: …a triple
4. Animation: Did I mention the crazy good animation…
5. Animation: …just for Kirby, nevermind everything else?
6. Spritework: Enemies are brilliantly colored and stylized as well
7. Spritework: As is… the food! Yes you heard me. I think it adds honest flavor to the game having the tons of different food types that act as health ups (I counted, there’s FORTY THREE different food types in this game if we don’t count the invincibility lollipops)
8. Cutscene: Spring Breeze returns the same basic cutscenes as all the way back in Dream Land 1. They’re still cute too
9. Atmosphere: Will we someday find a Kirby game that isn’t adorable? Maybe… I hope not though
10. Brickwork: Okay so I honestly think the brickwork in this game… isn’t that great. The forced usage of the 3D rendered stills honestly hinders it (fun fact, Sakurai actually agrees with me on this) so the game gets what I’d consider a barebones Brickwork positive aggregate for the entire game…
11. Brickwork: …so enjoy this double, for what it’s worth
12. Dialogue: I unironically enjoy the dialogue of the entire Metaknight sequence. The crew freaking out as Kirby just kind of destroys everything is great
13. Visual Continuity: I also love how we progress through the Halberd as we slowly dismantle it
14. Brickwork: Okay so the one and ONLY place that actually has individually solid brickwork is the Halberd. In fact…
15. Doodads: …I’d even go so far as to say it has good doodad usage! (the bombs, the fighter craft, the Wheelie engine, the fire extinguisher…)
16. Background Lore: General, but I also like how they introduce a few interesting concepts here. This establishes Meta Knight, Nova, and a few other tiny tidbits

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Co-Op: Solid co-op (with hot swap in and out)…
2. Co-Op: …and full campaign co-op
3. Music: Y’know, this is sort of funny, because the music in this game is still really good. But it’s… just inferior to the SNES version. There’s individual songs that are demonstrably weaker thanks to the DS’s different soundfont and (as Talia so accurately put it) it just sounds too MIDI. It’s still exceptional music though…
4. Music: …and so still gets the double
5. Info In Game: Pause screen info. You can see all of the movesets on it which… is good cuz there’s a lot, hah
6. Tutorialization: A lot. Plenty of the new stuff is well tutorialized throughout the course of the game
7. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Usual quality checkpointing throughout the game
8. Itemization: So there’s the usual solid spread of items and healing thingers throughout…
9. Itemization: …but, weirdly, there’s also very good placement of enemies relative to puzzles throughout too
10. Minigame: The new DS minigames are, collectively, fine for what they are. It’s all touchpad stuff of course
11. Core Mechanic: So while Dream Land 2 had companions first, this game has a full on second player who just helps you out (and can be played by another player, of course). This is really well thought out. First you can make them at will out of any power up you have. They can also have a power up thrown at them (or have them fall into one) to change them into that new powerup, also at will. They also start with full health, meaning if you ‘remake’ one it gets healed to full. They can also share healing with you and vice versa (great for co-op mode), and finally they can ignore terrain to summon to you so they don’t get stuck. They’re not perfect…
12. Core Mechanic: …but they’re a great feature
13. Party AI: Also the AI is, about half the time, really solid. They know when to attack puzzles, enemies, bosses, weak points, etc. and will go full berserker if allowed to
14. Controls: This is the very first Kirby game I’d say controls really well. The previous games were fine, this one’s above fine. Smaller windows of delay on cooldown after actions, tighter responsiveness on jumping and eating, little refinements like that make it control noticeably better…
15. Controls: …earning that second positive. Which is good because…
16. Core Combat: …the core combat of this game is really solid. No, really, hear me out. There’s an honest to goodness combo / fighting system in this game, changing up what you do based on input, and almost every enemy in the game and several bosses are designed around this…
17. Core Combat: …so that’s a solid double
18. Difficulty Curve: It’s a good thing too because the difficulty curve, while smooth, absolutely ramps up. This is probably the hardest of the Kirby games I’ve played in this block (that’d be from Dream Land 1 to this, for those reading this in the future… by the way, hi from the past!) and I mean that as a good thing
19. Enemy Design: Usual solid array, but there’s two things that elevate it this time around
20. Enemy AI: First, the enemy AI is solid. They have a wider variety of moves and know how to use them better
21. Enemy Variety: Second, there’s a better spread of enemies this time around. This is due almost entirely to…
22. Kit: …the expanded kit. Let’s be clear, there are a LOT of new abilities here, but the important part is almost every ability now has multiple ways to use it. How long you hold the button down, whether you’re going forwards or backwards, being near an enemy, all of this can change it up. Y’know, like a fighter game. So! Let’s bundle these up a bit. First we have some of the more ‘basic’ abilities, which are still good but somewhat simple. These include the Bomb (you can change the arc of its attack but otherwise it’s just a bomb), Cutter (has a melee combo attack and a nice dash attack), and Stone (it’s still stone, but it controls better than before)
23. Kit: Beam and Parasol are both what I like to call ‘surprisingly good’. Beam has the same basic whip attack, but also a dash cone attack, a nice anti ground air attack, and an incredibly powerful charged shot. Parasol can stunlock enemies, has a great charge attack, and can just cancel anything above you
24. Kit: Fighter is… really good. It’s straight up Ryu from Street Fighter. Multi punch, long punch, short kick, long dash kick, wave attack, short aerial kick, a giant uppercut… it’s mean
25. Kit: Hammer is a personal favorite (it hits like a truck, has great coverage, an insanely useful dash attack with tons of iframes, a massive upwards attack) and Ice (almost everything you do is a short range AOE, whether it’s a whirling attack in the air, a dashing aura, a cone in front of you, and of course freezing enemies to use as ammo)
26. Kit: Jet and Wing are fun ones. Jet is the simple but universally useful of the two (chargeable dash attack, the ability to perfectly hover while damaging whatever’s below you) and Wing is the most mobile kit in the game (great flying ability, multi strike small cone attacks, great dash, and a ground pound)
27. Kit: Mirror is a fun one. It has a cone attack, the ability to attack in multiple directions while dashing AND without interrupting the dash, and an incredibly powerful defense upgrade. The Ninja is a weird one, with a long range spammable attack, a basic dash, the ability to cling to the wall, and a fling
28. Kit: Plasma is… weird. It’s actually very simple, but incredibly powerful. As you move around you gain charge. There are five charge levels and your attack varies based on said charge level. The thing is that you can gain charge innately just by moving around, and the strongest attack is insanely hard hitting. But… it also means you’re encouraged to kind of kill your hand constantly rotating to generate charge. Alongside this is the Wheelie, which is another simple but solid. You can charge, and that’s sort of it, but the weirdest tech in it is if you turn around you actually increase your speed
29. Kit: Suplex. This is probably the single best moveset in the entire game. You grab the enemy (I mean, yeah) and then you have EIGHT different throws you can do depending on input. Suplex is pretty high skill ceiling to really get the benefit out of it, but if you learn it you will absolutely destroy everything and have fun doing it
30. Kit: Sword is only a little more complex than it used to be (additional combo moves and a nice dash attack) but it’s still incredibly useful (still has great reach and coverage). And Fire has some really nice maneuverability considering almost all its moves also make you invincible while you’re doing damage
31. Kit: Yo Yo is unironically my favorite kit in this game. No, seriously. So it has a few basic attacks, but you can also aim up or down to change your angle. The fling is nice, the spin is great, the spiral is amazing. But what really makes this work so well is it has fantastic range without sacrificing damage, incredible coverage thanks to its three basic attacks, and it can hit through walls, meaning it has super high utility
32. Intro: Level: Spring Breeze in its entirety is still a good intro to the game as a whole, and serves as an extended tutorial. It’s bite-sized, easy, fun, and still has the same density of the originals…
33. Intro: Level: …for a solid double
34. Level: Gourmet Race. There’s not much here but there’s a weirdly large amount of thought put into the level layouts and item placements, and the scripting for Dedede is pretty legit
35. Level: The Great Cave Offensive! So most of this place is about getting the treasures of course, but we still have some levels here. First, Sub-Tree. Okay so a LOT of the level design in this game is going to sound the same in notes. It’s just all good, you know? So I will try to make this sound remotely interesting but I will fail at that. Sub-Tree is a great example of this. Individual screens have multiple puzzles and obstacles to them, great enemy placement, great encouragement of exploration, and dense as hell
36. Level: Crystal is even better than Sub-Tree. The treasures here were really fun to find, there’s tons of working with moving water and switches that change the terrain, and the usual fantastic density…
37. Level: …solid double
38. Boss: Computer Virus is just such a fun fight. It’s obviously mostly a joke, but it’s impressive how much effort they put into the details here. Tracking the damage you do, you take, and the power ups popping in periodically are all good stuff
39. Level: Garden. No, I didn’t miss the Old Tower, look down in the negatives. Anyways, Garden is a great final exam for the entire segment. Treasures are mean but fun to get, enemies are far more brutal in placement, but there’s still tons of recovery and good checkpointing, and it’s just the right length…
40. Level: …solid double
41. Level: Dyna-1, Peanut Plains. This is… uh, another… Intro/Tutorial style level (I think we’re up to three now), but does a good job at it. Introduces damaging terrain, multiple routes, hidden areas, and copy abilities
42. Level: Dyna-2, Mallow Castle, is already starting to really play around with some level design concepts. Switches that unlock power ups but then later add traps, good sight-lines and guidance indicators, and just challenging enough while still easing the player into the mode
43. Level: Dyna-3, Cocoa Cave, continues to be fun but fair and starts to escalate in terms of enemy placement and usage of terrain traps (spikes, lava) as obstacles while still having tons of recovery and bonus options
44. Level: Dyna-4, Candy Mountain, is just a fantastic section of water, cannons, and very dense platforming
45. Boss: Dynablade herself, of course. Nice range of attacks and very good vuln periods
46. Level: Metaknight-1, the islands. So all the Metaknight stages are insanely short, like just a minute or two long. You’d think that wouldn’t deserve positives, and you’d be wrong, because there is SO much going on in such a small period of time. This is so dense I’m having trouble explaining it. Slopes, ladders, cave segments, recovery areas… it’s literally four screens long (five if you count the recovery room) but it’s good stuff
47. Boss: Dual tree. This is one of the very few boss remixes I think deserves its own positive. The addition of the second tree and the new attacks really helps make this fun
48. Level: Metaknight-2, the mountainside. We climb up a tree first (great side areas), rush through some floors, enjoy a nice climb up the mountain, have a tightly packed bombable walls segment, and bam, we’re there
49. Level: Metaknight-3, the Halberd surface and port wing. The first section is straight up gauntlet, tons of enemies. Then some quick elevator and outdoors shenanigans before we fight the cannon
50. Level: Metaknight-4, the Halberd core and starboard wing. Much more extensive outside section this time, but still enough time for a tight interior rush through the elevator segment
51. Level: Metaknight-5, the finale. Underside of the ship and then the tightly crammed duct segment, and all of this is followed up by the intense escape sequence
52. Core Mechanic: Milkyway Wishes has a mechanic so great I’m shocked other Kirby games haven’t used it. So you can explore levels to go find optional unlock nodes. These permanently unlock that power up for you, you can just pop it whenever, it’s yours, congrats. Yes this also means infinite helpers, if you want it. This type of actual power progression is great and really encourages the player to go sweep the levels (by the way there’s also an indicator on the map showing how many you’ve unlocked)
53. Level: Milkyway-1, Floria. The seasons gimmick is neat, the way you think around the environment is fun, and it’s a creative little level
54. Level: Milkyway-2, Aquarius. Again a bit short, with a lot of gimmicks, but a lot of cool dynamics with air and water segments
55. Level: Milkyway-3, Skyhigh. Tight, fun optional challenges, lots of density to enemies, lots of terrain usage
56. Level: Milkyway-4, Hotbeat. A bit mean (lots of traps to bar your path, though it’s pretty consistent) and a very tight and dense sequence of corridor platforming (where even the ceilings are lava)
57. Level: Milkyway-5, Cavius. Multiple paths forward, more tight platforming, and plenty of rewarding exploration
58. Level: Milkyway-7, Halfmoon. Another short, simple, and fun cart segment with some interesting terrain design (especially around hiding extra paths) and the return of the Computer Virus
59. Boss: Marx. Fun, fast, lots of variety in his attacks
60. Minigame: Revenge of the King is a fun hard mode version of Spring Breeze. It’s the same stages but with much harder enemy placement, and a harder Dedede at the end
61. Minigame: The Arena and…
62. Minigame: …the True Arena. Both of these are surprisingly well designed boss rushes. First you get a set amount of healing, ever, for the entire run, which means you can decide for yourself when you use what. Second, there’s a nice indicator previewing what the next boss will be. Third, you get to swap weapons as you go semi randomly. You also always end on Marx (or Marx’s Soul). It’s fun stuff
63. Minigame: Meta Knightmare Ultra. So this is just the game again but you play as Metaknight. Why a positive? They do a few small things to make it more fun, like the speed of transitions, the timer tracking how fast you’ve done it all, and…
64. Kit: …Metaknight’s new kit. He’s kind of a combo of Wing and Sword, but he also gains ‘spells’ that he can cast at will which buff him, heal him, or let him destroy things… and you gain mana from killing things. So there’s this wonderful dynamic of being fast (timer) and killing everything (mana)
65. Boss: Galacta Knight. I wasn’t sure I was going to review this boss even existing but honestly, sure, here we are. Galacta is one of the better designed fights in the game. Tons of attacks, lots of coverage, big vuln periods, properly mean without being bullcrap (small example; the gigantic seemingly unavoidable tornado doesn’t cover the entire screen, and you can get behind it if you’re quick)…
66. Boss: …great superboss. But not as good as…
67. Boss: Marx Soul. This is actually the second Soul enemy in the series, but the codifier for what the concept would be going forwards. Marx Soul comes out swinging, with a huge variety of attacks (which continue the trend of ‘rough but fair’) and tons of vuln periods, but also punishing to greedy players…
68. Boss: …another solid double fight
69. Pacing: The micro nature of the game’s individual modes really helps the pacing as you hop between styles of play. The only real exceptions are Spring Breeze and Dyna Blade
70. Replayability: I mean, yeah. It’s short and it’s fun
71. Viscerality: Visuals! Attacks look friggin’ awesome to use, and there’s so many of them…
72. Viscerality: …that it’s a double solid
73. Viscerality: Audio! They really make good use of that deep bass for a lot of the attacks, everything sounds great
74. Viscerality: Impact! When you fling an enemy into a wall, or smash them into the ground, or just obliterate them in one shot, it feels great
75. Visual Distinction: Almost a gimme a this point, but still good despite the 3D backgrounds

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Encounter Rate: Ninja Gaiden respawn problem
2. Level: Old Tower bullcrap. This is an aggregate but there’s at least two treasures in the Old Tower which can go directly to hell. Both require you to bring a specific power up (or TWO power ups) from outside an area into an area, and that’s a lot more frustrating than it sounds. And any failure means redoing the entire sequence again
3. Level: Garden bullcrap. Same basic problem as above, just later in the Garden. At least the Garden has some good level design too
4. Level: Milkyway-8, Nova. This should be fun. It is not. You have SO little health and everything hits like a truck, especially collision damage, and the controls are finicky enough that slamming into a wall will likely happen. There’s also no real checkpointing, to make this even more irritating
5. Party AI: So, the OTHER half of the time the Party AI is… pretty bad. It’ll grab onto you at inopportune moments (we actually died to this on camera), attack the wrong things, destroy power ups or enemies when you don’t want it to, and the AI has absolutely NO idea how to deal with damaging terrain (lava or spikes) and will very quickly kill itself on them

Story Positives:

1. Visual Continuity: Stages in general, but also the constant presence of the Tower (final dungeon) in the background
2. NPC Set Dressing: Weirdly well done in town
3. Brickwork: Pridemoore Keep and the Lichyards. Golden ramparts and a lovely haunted graveyard
4. Brickwork: Villages. I feel weird trying to describe this since it’s probably the most bog standard ‘medieval village’ I’ve ever seen but it’s really well done
5. Brickwork: Explodatorium, the wonderfully green and violet alchemist laboratory, and the Iron Whale with its shifting underwater sands and sunken ruins
6. Brickwork: Lost City and the molten ruins (what’s with all these ruins?)
7. Brickwork: Clockwork Tower. Honestly this might be the most literally descriptive name for a zone ever. It’s a clockwork tower
8. Brickwork: Stranded Ship and the frozen wastes and, you guessed it, ruins
9. Brickwork: Flying Machine and tons of flying propellers and steam punk
10. Brickwork: Tower of Fate which looks exactly as horrifying as it should be
11. Outro: I absolutely love the simple but effective symmetry; the reveal of Shield Knight, her joining you in the final battle, and the simple but enjoyable ending
12. Spritework: So, hey, spritework. This was one of the earlier of the so called retro sprite games, but they still went all out, and the spritework only gets better as we go. So let’s start off with some boss positives…
13. Spritework: …for…
14. Spritework: …a triple. Do note this is across all the games so there’s going to be a bunch of these
15. Spritework: Then we have the enemies of course…
16. Spritework: …so that’s…
17. Spritework: …a triple
18. Spritework: There’s quite a few NPCs of course, especially across all three games…
19. Spritework: …so we’ll just consider that…
20. Spritework: …another triple
21. Spritework: But then there’s the main cast. So let’s just jot down a double…
22. Spritework: …for Shovel Knight himself

Story Negatives:

1. Drama: There’s a lot of excuse fighting going on here, it’s kinda weird honestly

Gameplay Positives:

1. Enemy Variety: I mean there’s… just so many types and styles of enemies…
2. Enemy Variety: …easily earning…
3. Enemy Variety: …three positives
4. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Good placement in general
5. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Optional! Risk/reward with breaking for gold, or keeping for safety
6. Penalty For Failure: Drop a chunk of your money on death, can go get it back… but if you die again, it’s gone
7. Enemy Design: As with the variety, there’s a lot of good enemy design…
8. Enemy Design: …especially across all four games…
9. Enemy Design: …earning three positives
10. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Shovel. So let’s talk about what these are. These are little challenges which are just there for the… uh, challenge of it. They’re unique, fun, and interesting, and vary wildly based on the character you’re playing as. The initial bundle, Shovel’s, are probably the best of the bunch…
11. Minigame: …and so get the double
12. Controls: Could be better, but still precise and tight. I should mention this is just for Shovel Knight himself, we’ll cover the others later
13. Co-Op: Limited, but it’s there
14. Guidance: Usage of terrain to indicate where to explore and why
15. Music: I mean you knew this was going to be here…
16. Music: …cuz there’s just so many bangers…
17. Music: …and they’re generally awesome. As mentioned later in Levels these are the same basic songs across a huge portion of each game so these three cover basically everything, with a few noteworthy exceptions
18. Kit: So let’s look at Shovel Knight’s kit first, of course. We start off with some basic stuff like the Flare Wand which is whatever, and the Throwing Anchor which is our classic Castlevania style axe. Also the War Horn which is a big AOE around you, and the Chaos Sphere which is a nice bouncing thing…
19. Kit: …but where it really comes into its own is the more utility items. The Dust Knuckles are pretty limited in use, but you can do a lot with the Mobile Gear and the Propeller Dagger, and of course the Phase Locket is fantastic (in how it lets you not only avoid damage for a bit, but ‘freezes’ you in place even if you’re in mid air, so it can help with traversal)
20. Intro: So before we go any further let’s elaborate on something. Each of these stages is next to identical between both Shovel and Plague, so it won’t be until Specter or King that we vary those level positives and negatives up any. Okay so, very, very strong intro. Great escalation and tutorialization of the Mario World variety (no language, no dialogue, no problems) and functioning as a bit of an increasing essay of platforming…
21. Intro: …for an easy two positives
22. Boss: Dark Knight (all). Good variety of attacks, lots of spread which allow for multiple methods of avoidance
23. Tutorialization: Each new gimmick is properly showcased
24. Tutorialization: The mini rooms to get you used to a new ability
25. Traversal: Bouncing! It’s refined from Duck Tales but it’s still awesome
26. Level: Pridemoor Keep. This is kind of an extension of the tutorial stage but it’s still good. There’s some basic but fun temporary platforms, traps, and the basics of enemy placement
27. Level: Lichyards. Already a fun stage with the bush… things you hit to use as bounce targets, the platforms that sink under weight, and of course the shadowy sections, but all of this is on top of some very smart enemy usage (the frogs on the weighted section come to mind)…
28. Level: …great level
29. Level: Iron Whale. Mean as hell, but very fun and some great new mechanics. I especially like the destructible sand sections, the slowly collapsing bubble platforms, the rising platforms (usually under a series of spikes), and the enemies-as-platforms segments (lot of platforms in here)…
30. Level: …easy double
31. Boss: Treasure Knight. Another ‘wouldn’t think he’s this fast’ type, love his grapple movement and large sweeping attacks. And of course he’s uniquely positioned to take damage from the anchor, assuming you procured it
32. Level: Lost City. As you might imagine a lot of this level places emphasis on digging (both the hard and soft rock) but what surprised me is the emphasis on BOUNCING, as there is quite a bit of usage of the green goop in general traversal and lava avoidance…
33. Level: …great level either way
34. Boss: Mole Knight. Faster than you’d think for the big guy, with some good layering in his attacks
35. Level: Explodatorium. Try to be shocked but this place has a ton of explosions and destructible terrain, as well as temporary safe spots that will (fairly quickly) gush up as jets of fire. Even the miniboss primarily throws grenades at you. Follow this up with some timing puzzles and a few fun platforming segments…
36. Level: …and we have another solid level
37. Level: Clockwork Tower. As mentioned up in Brickwork the name is right on the tin. Lots of moving pieces, with a continuing theme of having to time your progression based on aiming for safe zones as the machine moves around you, escalating later on to also include portions where you ‘push’ platforms or gears forward to make additional paths…
38. Level: …another solid double
39. Boss: Tinker Knight. Phase 1 is a joke, phase 2 is fantastic. Love the spectacle if nothing else
40. Level: Stranded Ship. This is probably the ‘worst’ stage in the game, which considering I’m still giving it a positive says something. But you have harassment enemies which are both fast and relentless on top of ice physics and lots of bottomless pits. I do like using snow to cover the instant death spikes but the physics of it is also a bit wonky
41. Level: Flying Machine. Even when I first played this game (on camera, even!) I was impressed with this game. It’s almost a Wily Level in its own right, including a lot of final exam themes. Pressure jumps, moving and temporary platforms, using projectiles as platforms, and of course the wind mechanic…
42. Level: …probably the best stage of the first two games…
43. Level: …easy double
44. Boss: Propeller Knight. Starts off pretty basic, ends up pretty fun
45. Boss: General boss design, to cover the rest
46. Level: Tower of Fate Entrance. There’s some issues with the rest of the Tower, but the initial ascent is still damned solid, and really rewards the player for using those Relics which hopefully they’ve been getting because if not, whoof
47. Outro: While there are definitely some issues, the last two fights are very well designed and very fun
48. NG+: While it enforces the difficulty increase, it’s still good to have and does keep all your stuff

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Several areas where it’s legitimately hard to see what you’re looking at in the background
2. Difficulty Curve: Very spiky, and prone to death spirals
3. Difficulty Curve: This is several mechanics combined but essentially it’s a bit too easy to fall into a death loop and have to go grind to get upgrades or access to areas
4. Terrain Design: Some jumps and areas are just complete ‘screw yous’
5. Padding: Boss refights
6. QoL: The game does not allow exiting and keeping progress, which means if you miss anything you have to not only do the ENTIRE stage over again, but also fight the boss again, which is just aggravating
7. Interface: There’s just too many clicks to swap things around, which is already problematic in any game but is just weird in a high action, high pace platformer

Story Positives:

1. Animation: A lot of this is on Plague himself, but Mona gets special mention
2. Plague: NPC Set Dressing: Several, especially when you take the second town over
3. Brickwork: Pridemoore Keep and the Lichyards. Golden ramparts and a lovely haunted graveyard
4. Brickwork: Villages. I feel weird trying to describe this since it’s probably the most bog standard ‘medieval village’ I’ve ever seen but it’s really well done
5. Brickwork: Explodatorium, the wonderfully green and violet alchemist laboratory, and the Iron Whale with its shifting underwater sands and sunken ruins
6. Brickwork: Lost City and the molten ruins (what’s with all these ruins?)
7. Brickwork: Clockwork Tower. Honestly this might be the most literally descriptive name for a zone ever. It’s a clockwork tower
8. Brickwork: Stranded Ship and the frozen wastes and, you guessed it, ruins
9. Brickwork: Flying Machine and tons of flying propellers and steam punk
10. Brickwork: Tower of Fate which looks exactly as horrifying as it should be
11. Character: Mona and support cast
12. Character: Plague Knight himself. How do you take someone who’s a total geek, absolutely crazy, and then make him adorable and shy? This is how
13. Dialogue: Noticeably improved and generally amusing dialogue in Plague Knight
14. Moment: Several in the first few stages leading up to…
15. Moment: …the finale with Mona and Plague which is honestly just so adorable
16. Outro: Honestly even better than the last one, not just for the usual reasons but for the connection with Shovel as well as the cuteness
17. Internal Continuity: The way Plague’s tale dovetails into Shovel’s is neat and adds to it
18. Atmosphere: The overall vibe and tone of the work, the flavor of it, are very much on point as the chaotic, explosive mad scientist
19. Spritework: So, hey, spritework. This was one of the earlier of the so called retro sprite games, but they still went all out, and the spritework only gets better as we go. So let’s start off with some boss positives…
20. Spritework: …for…
21. Spritework: …a triple. Do note this is across all the games so there’s going to be a bunch of these
22. Spritework: Then we have the enemies of course…
23. Spritework: …so that’s…
24. Spritework: …a triple
25. Spritework: There’s quite a few NPCs of course, especially across all three games…
26. Spritework: …so we’ll just consider that…
27. Spritework: …another triple
28. Spritework: Of course Plague Knight…
29. Spritework: …gets another double

Story Negatives:

1. Drama: There’s a lot of excuse fighting going on here, it’s kinda weird honestly
2. Fake Drama: So there’s a moment where Mona bails on Plague for stupid reasons. We call this the Third Act Breakup and it’s something so regular in fiction you can set your clock to it. It’s not ALWAYS bad… but it’s bad here. Not a fan

Gameplay Positives:

1. Enemy Variety: I mean there’s… just so many types and styles of enemies…
2. Enemy Variety: …easily earning…
3. Enemy Variety: …three positives
4. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Good placement in general
5. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Optional! Risk/reward with breaking for gold, or keeping for safety
6. Penalty For Failure: Drop a chunk of your money on death, can go get it back… but if you die again, it’s gone
7. Enemy Design: As with the variety, there’s a lot of good enemy design…
8. Enemy Design: …especially across all four games…
9. Enemy Design: …earning three positives
10. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Shovel. So let’s talk about what these are. These are little challenges which are just there for the… uh, challenge of it. They’re unique, fun, and interesting, and vary wildly based on the character you’re playing as. The initial bundle, Shovel’s, are probably the best of the bunch…
11. Minigame: …and so get the double
12. Intro: Same general stage, touched up for the new tutorialization
13. Itemization: Lower health, but regular potions which give you increased maximum health but do NOT heal you, and go away upon death… these potions also drop pretty regularly, and you can only hold so many at a time…
14. Itemization: …giving the whole potion health system two positives
15. Itemization: Once again good itemization in the gold distribution and upgrades they purchase
16. Kit: Let’s be clear, Plague Knight’s kit is bonkers good. First is the huge variety of the actual attacks and the available combinations…
17. Kit: …which not only lets you decide on your own general playstyle but can be adapted on the fly to adjust to the situation…
18. Kit: …easy triple territory
19. Kit: Then there’s Plague’s Arcana (aka his Relic equivalents) which are WAY better than Shovel’s and have a wide variety of applications in traversal, recovery, attacking, and mutating. We have a ground bomb, a huge explosion, the ability to heal off enemies, invuln within a limited space, the ability to make a platform in thin air, a vertical lunge, a super dash, giving yourself contact damage, and of course a melee attack. This is all awesome…
20. Kit: …earning Plague Knight’s Kit…
21. Kit: …three positives
22. Level: The new challenge levels are fun and, well, challenging
23. Level: The speedrunner museum challenge is honestly quite interesting and fun
24. Traversal: Plague controls so much better than Shovel, and honestly is a treat to play as by comparison…
25. Traversal: …earning a second positive
26. Level: Pridemoor Keep. This is kind of an extension of the tutorial stage but it’s still good. There’s some basic but fun temporary platforms, traps, and the basics of enemy placement
27. Level: Lichyards. Already a fun stage with the bush… things you hit to use as bounce targets, the platforms that sink under weight, and of course the shadowy sections, but all of this is on top of some very smart enemy usage (the frogs on the weighted section come to mind)…
28. Level: …great level
29. Level: Iron Whale. Mean as hell, but very fun and some great new mechanics. I especially like the destructible sand sections, the slowly collapsing bubble platforms, the rising platforms (usually under a series of spikes), and the enemies-as-platforms segments (lot of platforms in here)…
30. Level: …easy double
31. Boss: Treasure Knight. Another ‘wouldn’t think he’s this fast’ type, love his grapple movement and large sweeping attacks. And of course he’s uniquely positioned to take damage from the anchor, assuming you procured it
32. Level: Lost City. As you might imagine a lot of this level places emphasis on digging (both the hard and soft rock) but what surprised me is the emphasis on BOUNCING, as there is quite a bit of usage of the green goop in general traversal and lava avoidance…
33. Level: …great level either way
34. Boss: Mole Knight. Faster than you’d think for the big guy, with some good layering in his attacks
35. Level: Explodatorium. Try to be shocked but this place has a ton of explosions and destructible terrain, as well as temporary safe spots that will (fairly quickly) gush up as jets of fire. Even the miniboss primarily throws grenades at you. Follow this up with some timing puzzles and a few fun platforming segments…
36. Level: …and we have another solid level
37. Level: Clockwork Tower. As mentioned up in Brickwork the name is right on the tin. Lots of moving pieces, with a continuing theme of having to time your progression based on aiming for safe zones as the machine moves around you, escalating later on to also include portions where you ‘push’ platforms or gears forward to make additional paths…
38. Level: …another solid double
39. Boss: Tinker Knight. Phase 1 is a joke, phase 2 is fantastic. Love the spectacle if nothing else
40. Level: Stranded Ship. This is probably the ‘worst’ stage in the game, which considering I’m still giving it a positive says something. But you have harassment enemies which are both fast and relentless on top of ice physics and lots of bottomless pits. I do like using snow to cover the instant death spikes but the physics of it is also a bit wonky
41. Level: Flying Machine. Even when I first played this game (on camera, even!) I was impressed with this game. It’s almost a Wily Level in its own right, including a lot of final exam themes. Pressure jumps, moving and temporary platforms, using projectiles as platforms, and of course the wind mechanic…
42. Level: …probably the best stage of the first two games…
43. Level: …easy double
44. Boss: Propeller Knight. Starts off pretty basic, ends up pretty fun
45. Boss: General boss design, to cover the rest
46. Level: Tower of Fate Entrance. There’s some issues with the rest of the Tower, but the initial ascent is still damned solid, and really rewards the player for using those Relics which hopefully they’ve been getting because if not, whoof
47. Replayability: Between the variety of playstyles and general fun, Plague gets a Replayability positive
48. Viscerality: Plague is appropriately chaotic and explosive in playstyle
49. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Plague. These are still decent, but just a little worse than Shovel’s…
50. Minigame: …still double territory though

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Several areas where it’s legitimately hard to see what you’re looking at in the background
2. QoL: The stage exit problem again
3. Interface: The interface issue is so much worse as Plague Knight. The absence of presets or templates suddenly becomes awful as you have tons of enemies with tons of possible weapon configurations…
4. Interface: …leading to a second negative
5. Padding: Boss refights… again

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Really upping the animation quality here, for Specter as well as the people in the Keep…
2. Animation: …solid double
3. Brickwork: Pridemoore Keep and the Lichyards. Golden ramparts and a lovely haunted graveyard
4. Brickwork: Villages. I feel weird trying to describe this since it’s probably the most bog standard ‘medieval village’ I’ve ever seen but it’s really well done
5. Brickwork: Explodatorium, the wonderfully green and violet alchemist laboratory, and the Iron Whale with its shifting underwater sands and sunken ruins
6. Brickwork: Lost City and the molten ruins (what’s with all these ruins?)
7. Brickwork: Clockwork Tower. Honestly this might be the most literally descriptive name for a zone ever. It’s a clockwork tower
8. Brickwork: Stranded Ship and the frozen wastes and, you guessed it, ruins
9. Brickwork: Flying Machine and tons of flying propellers and steam punk
10. Brickwork: Tower of Fate which looks exactly as horrifying as it should be
11. NPC Set Dressing: As per usual for the hub areas
12. Hub: There’s a lot of lovely touches and dialogues in the hub, but also the fact that it slowly fills out as you recruit
13. Brickwork: While I can’t give them full credit, the added touches to every stage in Spectre Knight are a welcome addition and really add to the areas. Special mention to the Lost City for really mixing it up
14. Character: Donavon is engaging right from the start, showing several additional layers to him on top of his surface level stuff
15. Moment: The second and third flashbacks really help nail the sequence of events here
16. Internal Continuity: I love how this connects with the rest of the games, especially regarding the significance of the locket and Reize… but the most understated of all is the Acolyte becoming the Troupple follower
17. Outro: Great significance for the final boss duo (the last one being primarily about navigating the terrain, not the boss)
18. Characters: Great supporting cast across the board, especially Red and Reize
19. Consequence Storytelling: Weirdly all the pieces line up pretty well here. From the initial foray into the Tower, the fall of Donovan, the tragedy of Specter Knight, Reize’s life, and the inevitable fate of the valley
20. Plot: The entire plot is really engaging. The rise of the Enchantress and the future story’s pieces falling into place
21. Atmosphere: Gloomy, despondent, and ultimately tragic
22. Spritework: So, hey, spritework. This was one of the earlier of the so called retro sprite games, but they still went all out, and the spritework only gets better as we go. So let’s start off with some boss positives…
23. Spritework: …for…
24. Spritework: …a triple. Do note this is across all the games so there’s going to be a bunch of these
25. Spritework: Then we have the enemies of course…
26. Spritework: …so that’s…
27. Spritework: …a triple
28. Spritework: There’s quite a few NPCs of course, especially across all three games…
29. Spritework: …so we’ll just consider that…
30. Spritework: …another triple
31. Spritework: But then there’s Specter Knight, which is really showcasing how much better the spritework has gotten with the later versions…
32. Spritework: …so that’s…
33. Spritework: …a triple

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Enemy Variety: I mean there’s… just so many types and styles of enemies…
2. Enemy Variety: …easily earning…
3. Enemy Variety: …three positives
4. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Good placement in general
5. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Optional! Risk/reward with breaking for gold, or keeping for safety
6. Penalty For Failure: Drop a chunk of your money on death, can go get it back… but if you die again, it’s gone
7. Enemy Design: As with the variety, there’s a lot of good enemy design…
8. Enemy Design: …especially across all four games…
9. Enemy Design: …earning three positives
10. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Shovel. So let’s talk about what these are. These are little challenges which are just there for the… uh, challenge of it. They’re unique, fun, and interesting, and vary wildly based on the character you’re playing as. The initial bundle, Shovel’s, are probably the best of the bunch…
11. Minigame: …and so get the double
12. Tutorialization: The mini stages once you buy a new curio
13. Kit: So hey, Curios. These are what we in the business refer to as ‘turbo badass’. We have a boomerang attack, a massive melee hit, a terrain-following scythe, and a bouncing attack… already good stuff…
14. Kit: …then we skootch forward with some cool utility, like the Skull (heal), Sentry (summon a skeleton to help you which you can also detonate), barrier (exactly what it sounds like), and Shadow Mirror (makes a duplicate of yourself that ignores terrain)…
15. Kit: …And of course then there’s the overpowered stuff, like the Chronos Coin (slow the entire game except yourself), Hover Plume (a bit of physics defying flight which can be really well used in combination with jumps), and my personal favorite, Judgement Rush (which just zooms you to the next target and obliterates them)
16. Guidance: Terrain design indicating where to explore and how
17. Music: So, hey, mostly new music for Specter. It’s all remixes of course, but they’re REALLY GOOD remixes, so I’d be remiss…
18. Music: …if I didn’t give…
19. Music: …another triple
20. Terrain: Just… bonkers good, throughout…
21. Terrain: …earning two positives
22. Tutorialization: The levels constantly add new mechanics and the level design so naturally informs how they work
23. Viscerality: It feels so good and so cool to play as Specter Knight
24. Replayability: Oh yeah
25. Traversal: God I love just moving around as Specter Knight. The new movement kit and slashing and verticality are so good…
26. Traversal: …easy double territory for fluidity, usage in levels, and general fun
27. Intro: Once again a great and well designed Intro, honestly even better than the last two…
28. Intro: …with a new boss battle and some very tight level design that forces the player to realize their kit very early on
29. Level: Pridemoor Keep is exactly as mean and fun as it should be, even for a first stage. Keeping the same basic enemies and themes of the original two games, but varying it up by making the platforming much tighter and forcing the player to use obstacles and enemies as progression…
30. Level: …easy double
31. Boss: King Knight’s new kit is appropriate, varied, and fun, altering the terrain and throwing way more attacks in the arena (but these also allow for more traversal options for the player)…
32. Boss: …solid double fight
33. Level: The Explodatorium just knocks it out of the park now, with wild and challenging platforming puzzles and a great density. Lovely usage of walls as a way to progress, and as with King Knight’s stage retains the same themes (explosions, timing, and destructible terrain). This is as good a time as any to mention that this is going to be a running theme for Specter Knight. While Plague Knight was just the same stages with a new character Specter Knight is full on remixes of the themes of previous stages, using the same building blocks. This is why we’re giving brand new positives here whereas Plague didn’t get any. Anyways! This is one of the better ones of this bundle…
34. Level: …giving the Explodatorium…
35. Level: …three positives
36. Boss: Plague Knight is just awesome now, lots of fun new mechanics and gimmicks including duplicating himself, far more explosive platforms (which chain of course), and several of his attacks from the previous game
37. Level: Lost City. So this one surprised me considering how… not underground and not lava soaked it is, but it works out super well. It still contains the same themes as the previous version (the bouncing green goop primarily, but also digging and lava). Either way this, combined with the incredibly creative way they use the goop bubbles and lanterns and lava fields and everything…
38. Level: …makes for a solid…
39. Level: …triple
40. Boss: Mole Knight. So he’s still super fast (how is he so fast?) but now he uses goop powers more than lava powers which makes for a nice inversion and, honestly, makes him much harder than before as this changes the vectors of his attacks based on if he’s lava or goopey…
41. Boss: …great fight
42. Level: Lichyard. While obviously this is more of a story thing I just want to comment on how cool it is to see the otherwise normal town slowly get haunted across the level. Anyways! Specter Knight in his home turf now (or what will become it at least), and the level is really going nuts with the main mechanic of slicing through / bouncing off things now. Huge portions of the level are pitch black, the ghostly platforms are great and used cleverly (since they can form unidirectional passages), and of course the fire you have to put out with attacking. Great stage…
43. Level: …an easy…
44. Level: …triple
45. Boss: Phantom Striker. So hey, we had to put SOMEone in the Lichyard. Lightning boy is as good as any, though I admit I dislike how projectile spammy he is
46. Level: The Stranded Ship. So as with before this is probably my least overall favorite level. They use the ‘you can’t climb on this’ wall a lot on this stage, and the ice physics and harassment enemies aren’t any better. That being said the grindrail sections are great, and I do like what they do with the rainbow platforms
47. Level: Iron Whale. Again with the theme remixing; Enemies at platforms, plenty of death pits and spikes, more floating platforms by said spikes, and of course the friggin’ torpedoes. The Big Bertha enemy can go to hell though (see negatives later)
48. Boss: Treasure Knight. Way more projectiles than before but still with the great reach and speed
49. Level: Clockwork Tower. Yeah this is probably the best stage in this particular playthrough. Chapter? Campaign? Anyways. You know the drill; It’s the same unthinking, cold, brutal machines churning on without you and you have to deal with that combined with moving and pushing pulleys and gears to shove your own way through, all while clockwork enemies absolutely swarm you from every direction and provide you a convenient alternate ingress method. It’s great, and I love it…
50. Level: …and it’s…
51. Level: …a solid triple
52. Boss: Tinker Knight. This was already a fun fight but hoo boy. This time around the terrain starts being less… terrainy, forcing us to stay afloat based on him and his giant (unfinished) mech, all while he’s flinging tons of projectiles at us. One of my favorite bosses of the bunch…
53. Boss: …an easy…
54. Boss: …triple
55. Level: Flying Ship. This is always one of my favorite stages so how’s it do this time? It’s insanely brutal, with lots of verticality, usage of the cannonballs as traversal, some autoscrolling, more usage of the wind mechanics, buncha precise stuff…
56. Level: …all good stuff really
57. Boss: Propeller Knight’s phase 2 is way funner now, with the little fighter airships serving as the platforms for the fight
58. Level: Tower of Fate Entrance. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there’s a ton of verticality to this level and you have to fight through tons of enemies which are designed to simultaneously interrupt your likely traversal paths while also informing them so they have nice big vuln areas. This is on top of some timing puzzles alongside switches, and some great final exam stuff by mixing and matching concepts from multiple previous levels. To phrase that differently, they’ll often do a thing where two stages get represented in a single section simultaneously. So you’re dealing with Lichyard and Iron Whale simultaneously, or Lost City, or whatever. And that’s before we get into the railgrinding section again. It’s great stuff…
59. Level: …another solid…
60. Level: …triple
61. Outro: This is a bit of an aggregate, but it still counts. Consider it for the final bundle of bosses, mostly notably the railgrind of the very last one. Not hard, but still fun
62. Song: Hitting Close To Home. This song does such a great job of conveying the intensity and emotions going into where it plays (the final stage for Specter Knight)
63. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Specter. Same general quality as Plague’s…
64. Minigame: …for a double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Several areas where it’s legitimately hard to see what you’re looking at in the background
2. QoL: The stage exit problem… agaaain…
3. Enemy: The Big Bertha wannabe enemy is honestly just a uniquely irritating frustration

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Similar to Specter, great animation quality here…
2. Animation: …solid double
3. Intro: Sets up the characters, scene, connections, and plot pretty effectively… even has some foreshadowing
4. Character: The supporting cast is weirdly well characterized and has great flavor
5. Brickwork: Joustus Hall looks pretty great
6. Brickwork: Pridemoore Keep and the Lichyards. Golden ramparts and a lovely haunted graveyard
7. Brickwork: Villages. I feel weird trying to describe this since it’s probably the most bog standard ‘medieval village’ I’ve ever seen but it’s really well done
8. Brickwork: Explodatorium, the wonderfully green and violet alchemist laboratory, and the Iron Whale with its shifting underwater sands and sunken ruins
9. Brickwork: Lost City and the molten ruins (what’s with all these ruins?)
10. Brickwork: Clockwork Tower. Honestly this might be the most literally descriptive name for a zone ever. It’s a clockwork tower
11. Brickwork: Stranded Ship and the frozen wastes and, you guessed it, ruins
12. Brickwork: Flying Machine and tons of flying propellers and steam punk
13. Brickwork: Tower of Fate which looks exactly as horrifying as it should be
14. NPC Set Dressing: Love the characters roaming the ship
15. Brickwork: Troupple Forest, one of the few new areas for the later games
16. Brickwork: There’s actually one other new biome, the Birder Bluffs. Lots of waterfalls, mountain ranges, and (strangely) old mountaintop ruins
17. Character: King Knight himself. Simple, with a weak ego and a need to prove himself. Speaking of which…
18. Character: …King Knight’s arc. He starts off trumpeting himself like he’s hot stuff while simultaneously being pathetic. And over the course of his game he slowly builds himself up to being the person he always thought he was with friends, respect, and authority… but what he thinks he wants and what he really wants do not coincide. And so…
19. Moment: …King Knight is, finally, just one step from actual character growth, before King Pridemoor just… screws it all up, and King Knight throws everything he’d earned away for something he thought he wanted. And that leads to the ending which…
20. Outro: …has the usual general quality (and I LOVE how lonely King Knight is at the end) but…
21. Outro: …a bonus positive for how it lines up so neatly with Specter Knight, and sets up for the future games
22. Spritework: So, hey, spritework. This was one of the earlier of the so called retro sprite games, but they still went all out, and the spritework only gets better as we go. So let’s start off with some boss positives…
23. Spritework: …for…
24. Spritework: …a triple. Do note this is across all the games so there’s going to be a bunch of these
25. Spritework: Then we have the enemies of course…
26. Spritework: …so that’s…
27. Spritework: …a triple
28. Spritework: There’s quite a few NPCs of course, especially across all three games…
29. Spritework: …so we’ll just consider that…
30. Spritework: …another triple
31. Spritework: And King Knight…
32. Spritework: …has…
33. Spritework: …the same

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Enemy Variety: I mean there’s… just so many types and styles of enemies…
2. Enemy Variety: …easily earning…
3. Enemy Variety: …three positives
4. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Good placement in general
5. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Optional! Risk/reward with breaking for gold, or keeping for safety
6. Penalty For Failure: Drop a chunk of your money on death, can go get it back… but if you die again, it’s gone
7. Enemy Design: As with the variety, there’s a lot of good enemy design…
8. Enemy Design: …especially across all four games…
9. Enemy Design: …earning three positives
10. Minigame: Challenge Mode, Shovel. So let’s talk about what these are. These are little challenges which are just there for the… uh, challenge of it. They’re unique, fun, and interesting, and vary wildly based on the character you’re playing as. The initial bundle, Shovel’s, are probably the best of the bunch…
11. Minigame: …and so get the double
12. Core Mechanic: Joustus. Normally I’d put this under minigame but no, this is clearly a core mechanic to King’s Knight. The minigame itself is fine. It’s well designed, fun, and has some depth to it. It has issues but I’ll cover those in the negatives
13. HUD: Joustus battle arena. Again, good HUD, lots of good at a glance
14. Interface: Joustus card filters and info. Pretty much everything you need to know about Joustus is right there in the game
15. Guidance: As per usual, very well indicated and places…
16. Guidance: …even more than before, with the multiple exits and hidden paths
17. Overworld: Actual design put into it now, multiple routes and exits, and the micro-levels idea. This is what I’d consider at the Mario 3 level (not as good as, say, Mario World’s)…
18. Overworld: …so that’s a solid double
19. Itemization: Not counting the last few tidbits, the game does a great deal right here
20. Kit: As with Specter Knight, King Knight has some really unique mobility in his Kit. He’s dull to get AROUND but he’s great to platform, if that makes any sense, which is why this is a positive and a negative
21. Kit: But then there’s his moves and Heirlooms. He has a massive AOE attack, a hammer which heals if it connects, a horizontal missile, exploding rats which you can control, a shield which lets you then do damage based on how much you take, and my personal favorite… a friggin’ slap. Okay I’m kidding, but this is all solid stuff…
22. Kit: …but then you consider the Scepter which lets you avoid water, the Bubble Frog which is basically a float, Scorching Saber which lets you destroy everything, and of course Gyro Boots which are just bypassing terrain entirely at that point…
23. Kit: …all great stuff
24. Tutorialization: As before, each new mechanic and gimmick a new area adds is properly tutorialized and showcased
25. Intro: Usual introduction and level design goodness. It’s based off the usual first stage, but quickly develops into its own thing as is necessitated by King Knight’s unique kit
26. Level: Mossy Mountain. So, the thing King Knight did that was actually quite brilliant was rather than having long levels of doom they broke down each of the biomes into much more bite sized pieces. So there’s several ‘plains levels’ instead of just the one. In other words this takes the place of the second chunk of the tutorial stage. For the record I’m fully in favor of this, and not just for the usual time reasons (after all the whole game is still just as long), but because it allows for greater density in platforming themes. For example this entire stage is all about making sure the player is fully aware of King Knight’s unique smash into spiral gimmick, and all the platforming is centered around that
27. Level: Spectral Plains. This might as well be the final exam for the first few stages. The swinging and moving lanterns serving as targetable objects you can dash into and bounce off of quickly becomes mandatory for basic progression
28. Level: Bounding Battlements. This is a good time to mention that, unlike the Specter levels which were clear remixes of existing themes, these new stages are… new stages. Oh there’s some of the same moving pieces, like similar enemies and obstacles, but there’s new expressions, new platform types, new mechanics, and of course new enemies. All of that makes for some really fun, dense stuff… like this in fact, where we start introducing the bounding platforms
29. Level: Grand Hall. One of the larger levels so far, once again playing a lot with the midair dash and what refills it (enemies, bouncing platforms), solid stuff
30. Boss: And it leads into King Pridemoor himself with his giant suit of armor. I like the summons, the fact that he defends against his biggest weak spot (which amusingly also leaves him vulnerable), nice big sweeping attacks which rewards your greater mobility. Simple but well designed
31. Level: Floating Frog Fen. So this is clever; You have floating flogs in bubbles (foreshadowing the new kit) which let you run into them for a boost, but doing so also frees the frog which you can then also jump on. The frog will also immediately go for a jump themselves, meaning they’re very likely to also be a new platform for you. Clever, tight, fun level. This level also introduces the new temporary platforms in the form of leaves, and does some very creative stuff with its alternate route
32. Level: Lunkeroth’s Lagoon. So this is fun. We’re pulling in some of the gradually moving / crushing platform concept from Mario World, combined with some of the only decent usage of the Big Bertha enemy I’ve ever seen
33. Level: Pressure Plant. So this is another new one; corks! These are temporary moving platforms which require hitting the same color of vial to shoot them out, which makes for some interesting interactions (and they, of course, tutorialize this well)
34. Level: Ratsploder Runway. I really like this stage. You can tell large swaths of it are designed to be used with some of the kit (notably the shield), lots of flaming death everywhere, and some very smart placement to help you stay in the air to totally avoid the aforementioned flaming death
35. Level: Royal Pond. I wasn’t expecting much from this but this was actually pretty creative for what they were going for. The canoe, the autoscroller segment, the cheep cheep wannabes.
36. Boss: The Troupple king returns, in style! Arcing attacks, lots of ‘using adds as projectiles’… but as is the primary theme of the entire game, enemies just make moving platforms for King Knight. This plus having control over your own safe spot (the canoe) throughout the fight makes a lot of how it goes in the player’s hands
37. Level: Torque Lift Torsion. So you remember the second half of the Clockwork Tower levels’ themes back in the previous 3 games? Yeah it was the ‘you step on it, you make it go’. Well they take that to its next logical conclusion here. While the whole stage is centered around that, now you can ram into the part you DON’T want to change the navigable terrain.
38. Level: Aerial Brigade. So hey, they REALLY like this theme of obstacles being traversal aids. In this case it’s cannonballs (and a few enemies). And… yes I see you game, ha ha, nice reference to 5-9 from Mario 3. At least here we have honest to goodness kit to deal with it instead of ‘sucks to be you’
39. Level: Shock Assembly. Some new fun pressure plate lightning zappers, so that’s always fun. They do some great stuff with this, like using roaming enemies to activate them, or later there’s enemies that follow you, or even places where the ONLY platforms are the zappers
40. Level: Ladder Factory. The name is quite accurate. The whole level is ladders but they’re floating or flying or falling and you have to navigate them the entire time. This might be one of the shortest stages in the game but it’s got a lot of density going for it
41. Level: Excavation Station. So now we have tons of breakable blocks from the side! Nah I’m kidding, the new gimmick here is… digging! I find this vaguely amusing considering our first hero had a friggin’ shovel but it took until twirly boy to finally start using that as a mechanic. Each dirt patch can be tunneled into which can change your route or find other ways forward. And secrets, of course… then there’s the final room. I love this. So you have to slam into things to make some of the harder jumps, which makes you twirl. Twirling tunnels through dirt patches. The dirt patches are over lava. Figure it out!
42. Level: Alchemical Aqueducts. Rushing waters, temporary platforms, moving platforms, enemies that fling bombs, new slime enemies with… shields? (Where did they get the shields…) Some spikes too for good measure
43. Level: Axolongl Alcove. Whole new… enemy? Platform? Mechanic? Anyways the Axolongls serve as retracting / extending platforms depending on being hit vs. being left alone and it allows for some very creative platforming
44. Level: Cyclone Sierra. Hey, new biome! First time we see one. Our first and most obvious new mechanic is the cyclones which warp you between the same color of cyclone. They do some good tutorialization of this and some great escalation of it both. Love this whole segment
45. Level: Heavyweight Heights. I don’t have much to add to this one. It’s using the same mechanics as the ship levels from the previous games (the wind in particular) and doing so competently, and is otherwise well done
46. Level: Birder’s Roost, aka our boss stage. Lots of stop / go moving platforms, birder enemies absolutely everywhere, good escalation with spikes and pits later as they continue the stop / go theme
47. Boss: King Birder. Continues the moving platform motif of his stage. Summoning adds, periodic water splashes (interrupted by the platforms), the bouncing laser, and a shrinking arena make for a fun fight
48. Level: Shrouded Spires. Our friendly silhouette mechanic is back, along with moving platforms AND spikes (fun combo). They’re actually quite smart with it, making sure you can always see at least something. Combine this with some mean enemy placement, spring platforms, and the flames you have to snuff out with his dash, and you get some interesting screens
49. Level: Lava Well. So try to be surprised but there’s a lot of lava in this stage, alongside the axolongls which are moving (and trailing fire??) but also frozen segments, flying enemies, bubble frogs… a final exam stage, in other words
50. Level: Warp Wrap Keep. This is bloody creative. So the ceiling and floor warp into each other at the start, which not only tutorializes the mechanic immediately but forces you to plan out your movements to avoid the spikes. Then they start really playing with it. This is basically a Portal level and I love it. Great usage of the warps on walls to force a ‘wrapping’ mechanic similar to Mario 2 or 3, lots of enemies to use as platforms. My favorite part is in the vertical scrolling section where you start off having platforms to stand on that wrap through the portals, then have to do the next segment WITHOUT platforms and just things to bounce on. This might be…
51. Level: …one of the only double positive stages in King Knight
52. Minigame: Challenge Mode, King. I’m only giving this one a single because… honestly while there’s some good stuff here, there’s also five that are just Joustus matches. And… eh

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Several areas where it’s legitimately hard to see what you’re looking at in the background
2. Audio Spam: A sound effect plays every single time you dash and spin and… you do a whooole lot of that…
3. Audio Spam: …a whole… whole lot of it
4. Pacing: Joustus. The game just… slows to a crawl during Joustus matches, and that’s just off for a high paced precision platformer like this. The minigame itself is fine, really, but it takes entirely too long…
5. Seconds In Minutes: …and that’s the real issue here. Every single action takes too long. Not by a lot, just enough that you’ll notice. And you WILL notice because, again, you do a LOT of Joustus in King Knight…
6. Seconds In Minutes: …for a double
7. Traversal: Or lack thereof. I get that he’s supposed to be a big bruiser clunker but good lord
8. Music: By this point the songs have gotten repetitive. They’re GREAT songs but… there’s two games of music in four games here. This is actually made worse because…
9. Music: …there are SO many stages thanks to how they spread them out. Meaning just listening to these same songs over and over and over
10. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Some issues with placement, especially in the longer and auto-scrolly stages
11. Outro: What the hell. The first final boss is whatever, the second is actively irritating (can’t be bounced on, most weapons don’t work, have to hit from the side) and…
12. Outro: …it leads into the THIRD final boss which is just awful. No health reset, instant death pit everywhere, and frustrating hand movements, incredibly easy to die thanks to nonsense or having done nothing wrong. This is such an aggravating way to end an otherwise fantastic game…
13. Outro: …so for the final final boss and the multi phase bullcrap of doom…
14. Outro: …an easy triple

Story Positives:

1. Character: Sazh. I mean, yeah, he’s the best character in the game bar none. Even at the beginning when most of the other characters are a lot rougher Sazh remains a beacon of quality and enjoyability. Little tidbits humanizing him like him struggling to keep up or gasping for breath while Lightning’s off pretending to be cool or while Vanille is struggling not to think about things. He’s the closest thing we have to a relatable character and probably the most well acted too…
2. Character: …so consider this a solid double right out of the gate
3. Storytelling Mechanic: Datalog. As per usual, putting information in a little side thing for some extra flavor lore is a neat thing
4. MSQ: Camera hopping. This is a weird one but throughout the game they do this thing where the perspective character changes, meaning there are multiple concurrent plots happening simultaneously and we see tidbits of them as we go. I really like this in general but more to the point there’s more work and effort involved in doing so, so it’s always nice to see this kind of effort
5. Intro: Characterization. Lightning is completely unfazed by everything, Sazh is barely keeping up and panting and wheezing as he’s joking around. He also clearly has no idea what’s going on
6. Intro: Moment: I do actually like our introduction to Vanille. She points the gun at Snow and says ‘bang’ in the cutest way, but the reason this moment sticks is her brief and effective narration of Snow. “First impression of Snow; All talk.” Ouch
7. Intro: Exposition once they get to the vestige, learning about the three Cs, Focuses, and motivations
8. Brickwork: Lake Bresha. For the first time the visuals of the background do a good job of conveying the scene. The crystallized lake and the remains of the facility above
9. Character: Hope and Snow dynamic. I’m honestly shocked by this but the initial dynamic between the two (it only really shows up twice but it’s good both times) is solid. Hope hates Snow and is struggling with everything while Snow is totally unaware of this and is just treating him like some random kid
10. World Building: Cocoon itself (Phoenix, day and night, resources provided by fal’Cie, propaganda, et cetera)
11. Cutscene: Lt. Amodar talking with Lightning about PSICOM, the Guardian Corps (aka cops), and him just being generally awesome and supportive while simultaneously actually conveying some good character points about Lightning (she’s a cop geek; Uptight and takes her job entirely too seriously. She APOLOGIZES for taking a day off to her boss)
12. Cutscene: The flashback where Lightning gets on the Purge train is weirdly well done. We see how awful it is (they gun down civilians) but also we hear a throwaway line in the background (“Those were warning shots, right!”) which does so much to characterize the environment, the culture, as well as seeing how Lightning and Sazh ended up like this
13. Brickwork: Gapra Whitewood. Artificial foliage developing artificial fauna. It’s a great vibe and insight into how constructed so many of these environments are
14. Moment: It’s small, but there’s a nice moment when Sazh is talking about his son and struggling to convey what happened. Vanille deduces it’s because ‘of the l’Cie’ and he’s like ‘how did you know?!’ because, y’know. And she then thinks he’s referring to himself. It’s a nice bit
15. Cutscene: Sazh and Dajh. This is a shockingly well done scene for this game (uh, no offense, but usually this game has bad execution and this is a great exception). We see the hint of Vanille and Fang, it ties directly in to multiple story arcs, we get a hint of boobslady again, and finally there’s this great moment where Sazh has a scene where we can see all of his frustration and rage without having to hear it…
16. Cutscene: …very solid scene
17. Cutscene: Lightning and Hope and Lightning admitting her faults in what she was doing to and for Hope, as well as his acknowledgement that they were both using their own methods to (badly) deal with the trauma of being branded
18. MSQ: While I have severe issues with its execution I do have to admit that the fulfillment of the Hope and Snow dynamic on Palumpolum is solid
19. MSQ: So let’s talk about Palumpolum. First, there’s been a lot of build up to this moment (the entire game to-date, really, minus some padding). This leads to us finally seeing Hope’s home and Hope’s father, Barthalomew. He, immediately upon seeing Hope, embraces him. (This makes sense; He hasn’t heard from his wife or son in days and knows about the Purge so he’s probably already freaking out). This leads to our first and arguably only breather segment in the entire game, as Snow and Lightning get a moment and Bartholomew tries to process everything that’s happened. Speaking of which…
20. Character: …Bartholomew himself is just plain legit. This guy has his son show up out of no where, is informed his wife is dead, and they’re in the company of Pulse ‘terrorists’ and he handles it extremely well, is immediately on his son’s side in all of this, and even starts adding something legit to the party that they desperately need; Someone to sit and actually think their way through the situation
21. Moment: I also want to give special praise to how he keeps reiterating to his son that no, this is his home, no matter what
22. Cutscene: This is then followed by our first real characterization for Rosch in his confrontation with Snow (and then a terrible boss fight, hah)
23. Cutscene: While they don’t do much with Boobs (no I don’t care what her name is) I do ‘like’ how much her sadism is immediately on display as she forces Sazh into Vanille
24. Cutscene: This leads to the best cutscene in the entire game. No, I know what you’re going to say, I stand by it. Sazh confronts Vanille who without hesitation offers her life to his… which he then rejects outright thinking it’s the easy way out (he’s not wrong). Uncertain of what to do and at his lowest point he summons his, uh, summon and we have an awful boss battle
25. Cutscene: This leads to an incredibly well done scene. Sazh lifts the gun to her and she, after flinching in fear, puts her arms out, embracing her death. He… can’t. He just cannot hurt her. And as she slumps, exhausted from the battle, we see his silhouette flashing on the ground by her as he raises the gun to his own head. And he’s just so tired as he says “Enough is enough” and pulls the trigger. This is…
26. Cutscene: …incredibly powerful…
27. Cutscene: …and easily the best EXECUTED scene in the game. For once the storyboarding, camera, usage of the scene, voice acting, it all pops. And if not for something that happens later it’d be the unquestionable best moment in the game
28. Moment: Sazh and Vanille’s escape is actually pretty legit. Chocolina charging the guard, Vanille just bringing out the assault rifle to gun down the robot, and Vanille’s sincere question; ‘Do I deserve to escape?’
29. Character: I’ve been chewing on this the entire game. Obviously Sazh is legit, well established and awesome. Cool. What about the rest? Well I’ve been debating it and while several of them suck REALLY BADLY in specific cutscenes I think there are a few interesting people here. Starting with… SIGH… Hope. Hope’s character arc is a bit truncated (same problem Vaan had) but the build up to it is decent and the very idea of the kid in way over his head is actually pretty awesome
30. Character: I also have to mention Fang here. She’s mostly got the cool factor going for her, but that’s character too. Voice actress helps
31. Character: And… consider this an aggregate for the rest of the principle cast. Lightning, Vanille, and Snow all have good moments sufficient to warrant an aggregate
32. Voice Acting: This is a good time to mention that the voice acting is quite good across the board. Main cast and secondary characters alike. I can’t warrant…
33. Voice Acting: …more than a double, for reasons I will cover down in the negatives
34. Brickwork: I’m actually behind a bit on Brickwork. Or so I thought! Then I double checked myself and, nope, the game is just that long and repetitive, even in its visuals. Sigh. But hey, I do like what they do with the Palamecia, and they make climbing around on its outside work really well
35. Visual Storytelling: There’s an establishing cutscene for Pulse. Oh sure the party loses their airship instantly so we can’t fly around Pulse (which sucks cuz that’d be awesome) but they do a pretty good job of conveying the more wild and dog eat dog nature of it
36. Brickwork: Pulse itself, specifically the Archylte Steppe. This is basically the HD version of the Calm Lands but they do good stuff with it. Even the crude Cocoon PNG in the background is a nice reminder
37. World Building: I’ll choose now to talk about the world and mythos. This is one of the weirdest, most alien worlds of the entire FF series (seriously) and they put a fair amount of work into a decent chunk of it. I can’t give it TOO much credit because (frankly) they don’t present it that well. But we do get the gist. The gods (the ACTUAL gods) came and built the people and the machines to serve them. And the machines HATE that. And they’ve been trying to get their creators to come back ever since, which is at the core root of everything happening in the entire game. But of course they’re trapped, they can only do what they’re programmed to do. So the Fal’Cie for all their power…
38. Theme: …are just as much slaves as anyone else is. And I think this is the one and only good usage of the ‘defying fate’ theme in the game. The fal’Cie try to find a loophole to work they way around and out of the situation, but at the end of the day they are just as enslaved as anyone else. And if I may…
39. Writing: …part of what I find so engaging about this is how there is no real villain here. Oh there’s plenty of evil people (like Boobs. Remember her? No you don’t, you remember her chest, but still) but there’s no Muwa Ha Ha I Am Behind It All. There’s no spider at the center of the web, for the web sits empty, long abandoned. And the strands struggle against one another, desperate to bring it home
40. Visual Storytelling: Oerba Village. A long broken and rusted husk filled with the damned
41. Brickwork: Okay, I’ll admit, Eden looks nice. Probably tons of man hours to make the sort of deco residential district
42. Visual Storytelling: I do like the ‘war’ as we go through Eden. Plenty of infighting and people roaming and a proper amount of damage
43. Babylon 5 Effect: A non insubstantial amount. Almost all of it is right at the beginning, but it’s there, and reframes several scenes
44. Spritework: Honestly I think previous games had better BUT it would be dismissive to say this game doesn’t have good spritework. The enemies are… fine, the NPCs barely exist, but what really sells this is the main cast who actually looks pretty distinct and not-terrible for once. Consider me impressed…
45. Spritework: …and worthy…
46. Spritework: …of a triple

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: No towns. Towns serve a valuable point in a narrative, usually as a breather segment or a part for lower intensity narrative beats to happen. This game… has no towns. So…
2. Architecture: This problem has a knock on effect on the overall immersion. I’ll mention this later but it really does need to be emphasized that the absence of towns, long meandering corridors, and lack of visual elements to distinguish size or scope makes everything larger without FEELING larger, serving as a portion of one of the most common complaints the game gets…
3. Architecture: …and worthy of a second negative
4. Storytelling Mechanic: Datalog. Yes while it’s a good thing, it is also a bad one. First you have to pause the action to go read it, which is ‘normal’ but also leads to a bit of a domino effect on the other problems here. The log is completely out of character instead of in (pushing the player further out), plot critical information tends to be put into it (along with information that’s necessary or helpful to understanding what’s going on), and it tends to spoil things because they didn’t think about when log entries should unlock
5. Intro: Lack of information conveyed. From the opening cinematic all we know is that there’s bad guys, people resisting them, and l’cie are bad
6. Intro: Dialogue: NORA. They’re trying so hard to go for kids who are in over their head and the result is some very terrible, terrible dialogue. It’s so bad I wanted to double down on this negative as I was physically cringing at several of their scenes
7. Intro: Cutscene: Everything to do with the ‘let’s go together’ scene. Stumbling with the guns, Snow’s attempt at riling up the crowd which fails miserably, the whole scene lacks any real punch or oomph
8. Intro: Moment: Nora’s death is just… flat. Way too telegraphed, badly executed, and it’ll serve as the most irritating character motivation for the entire game
9. Intro: Cutscene: The first beach flashback scene. It’s not that bad, not really, but it’s weirdly acted, weirdly paced, and ultimately doesn’t do anything other than indicate that Snow is in love with Serah. And while I like this kind of character dynamic the problem here is there’s no… dynamic. They are Designated Couple without the requisite chemistry to make this work. I’ve said this before during the Lorerun but Snow unironically has more chemistry with Lightning than he does his own fiance
10. Storyboarding: The whole game. I swear no one was storyboarding half the scenes. Which would explain the over-editing actually
11. Music Direction: A fairly frequent problem throughout. There is scene after scene after scene where the choice of music just straight up does not match the scene at all…
12. Music Direction: …and it never really stops being a problem
13. Writing: Nomenclature. So there’s three very important terms in this setting; fal’Cie, l’Cie, and cie’th. Be honest with me; Just looking at those three words you can already see the problem, can’t you? It’s arguably worse when spoken out loud, because they sound like fal-sea, luh-sea, and sea-th. These words are very similar to each other and have no connection to existing vocabulary which means keeping them distinct is an extra barrier to… understanding the entire game. There’s some interesting mythos and concepts here but for over a decade people have run into this wall of these three words and how badly designed they are top to bottom. If you straight up swapped these with ‘god’, ‘angel’, and ‘zombie’ all of the sudden this barrier goes away. This is such a nonstop issue that affects so much of the game and makes an already poorly told plot more obtuse than it needs to be…
14. Writing: …and therefore…
15. Writing: …deserves a triple
16. Character: Lightning is just too good at too much. She doesn’t struggle or try or put effort into anything, she just casually cool-factors her way through things. This is a disservice to the game in general (notice this doesn’t apply to ANYone else, even after they get magically augmented) and a disservice to her (there IS a character there, buried under this nonsense). To be clear this isn’t a negative for her putting on a front, that’s different. This is for how she ACTS, how she just casually succeeds at everything, looking cool all the while (even before the aforementioned magical augment)
17. Camera: Over-editing. It’s just an issue for the pre-rendered cutscenes but these are WAY over-edited. Think the later Bourne films (which had come out just before this, which means they were still recent when they were working on these) and it’s jarring at best, and doesn’t help convey what the hell is going on at worst
18. Visual Continuity: This might be some of the worst visual continuity I have ever seen. I know people who never really were able to internalize where they were at any point in the game until they hit Pulse (and this contributes to the feel once you get there). And there’s plenty of small, screwed up ways they fail at this. For example sometimes during the pre-rendered cinematics you can see the interior curve of the hollow sphere, and sometimes you look up and see things like Phoenix, but the exterior shot we most commonly see doesn’t really convey much and the other 99% of the interior shots convey nothing at all. Areas have no connection to each other (at all, it’s worth noting) and again there’s no signs of the interior of the shell. All of it makes for a game where you almost never feel where you are at any given point in time…
19. Visual Continuity: …for another…
20. Visual Continuity: …solid triple
21. Cutscene: I’m having trouble describing it at this point but there’s just an absence of polish in scenes that makes them kind of… suck. To wit; there’s a moment where the crew tries to decide what to do and I get what they’re going for (Lightning is freaking out and badly coping, while the others are preferring to just not think about it) but instead it just comes across as crude
22. Consequence Storytelling: Fear and propaganda. Don’t mistake me, people can be stupid, but the game gets across the idea that the common populace live in CONSTANT FEAR of… something they haven’t seen in SIX CENTURIES. There’s no regular attacks, no periodic reiteration, just constant fear. Sure. This also leads into…
23. Consequence Storytelling: The very existence of the big evil military. In fact there’s SO much big evil military they have enough to have TWO factions of military (sorry, three technically). This is ridiculous at best. How do these people maintain their forces? Their training? How do they keep getting personnel? Now here’s the thing. Both points I just brought up can be explained if we try hard enough and, indeed, could actually ADD to the narrative (maybe the Sanctum has been staging false flag operations periodically. Maybe the military gets bonuses and perks to pull populace in and make them more compliant). But they DON’T, and that’s the important part. Consequence Storytelling is all about how much the consequences of actions and settings make sense and lead smoothly into each other. If there’s things that are just there, without any real explanation, that doesn’t hold up as well. And when it’s such a major part of the setting it falls apart completely. That’s why these are negatives
24. MSQ: Character arcs that go way too fast and turn on a dime
25. Cutscene: Lightning’s birthday is probably her worst scene so far. She is completely unreasonable here and even the actress doesn’t salvage how unnecessarily whiny she sounds. This is all on top of further fake drama between Snow and her and this scene’s… odd placement in the narrative (in fact it only REALLY serves one purpose, as nothing new is conveyed here; It shows where the knife Hope wants to stab Snow came from)
26. Cutscene: Lightning’s sudden revelation about being puppets and… well normal pets… of the fal’Cie is a reasonable scene and a reasonable reaction but it comes out of absolutely nowhere, doesn’t fit the tone of the sequence it’s in, and is never brought up again. This scene was probably designed to be placed at another part in the narrative and they just didn’t fix it
27. Cutscene: Hope’s mother’s death. Yes I know it’s weird to mention it down here but it’s mostly relevant for the events happening right around here. The framing of the scene for the player makes it very clear that Hope clearly sees what’s happening. And the reality is that he probably didn’t. But the presentation, as is usual for this game, is sufficiently lacking that it kind of pushes the player AGAINST Hope for half the game as he holds onto his grudge because Hope spends a decent amount of time and ALL of his initial motivation thinking Snow actively killed his mother
28. Story Sequencing: Hope finally confronts Snow… about 10 hours too late, and with very little proper build up
29. Plot: No plan. A huge, and I mean HUGE, portion of the plot is just the party either running away or doing… nothing. They even reference in character several times about how they have no plan and no idea what they’re doing. This makes sense for a bit, maybe a chapter or two, not 9/13ths of the entire game. And it’s not a good look when the overwhelming majority of the game is spent faffing about. This goes on for long and so frustratingly…
30. Plot: …that I’m giving it a double. By the way…
31. Internal Continuity: …this is out of place but later on, when we’re infiltrating the Palamecia, there’s an entire scene dedicated to pissing on the PREVIOUS scene with Bartholomew. In that scene Bartholomew, very rightly, pointed out that they had no plan and that they needed to take a moment and think. That (amazing) scene was interrupted by an action sequence (sigh) and here they are, now, talking about how they have no plan except to knock over the government. An action they themselves admitted in previous (good) scene was a TERRIBLE idea for many logical reasons. So thanks for completely ruining that
32. Cutscene: The parade and cotton candy. It’s… long, and it’s pointless fluff. Even if it’s an in universe cutscene it still wastes the player’s time on mostly nothing (and was a colossal waste of resources in the production of the game)
33. Moment: Vanille getting cut off before she could confess to Sazh is a bit much
34. Writing: Sazh wanting to kill himself is an incredibly powerful and sympathetic moment. And it is COMPLETELY ruined by the fake-out and him just shooting the wall instead. I absolutely hate this moment so damned much, and it would be SO easy to make it something amazing (two ideas posited on stream; Either his superhuman nature prevents him from dying, or his Eidolon he just got literally stops him). You don’t even have to change the dialogue for this to work. But no… instead he just doesn’t kill himself and it’s a narrative cheat. I want to give this more negatives for how much this pisses me off, but I won’t, because ultimately it’s just another fake out death
35. MSQ: So the party finally… FINALLY links back up, but now our big plan is to kill the government (we mentioned this back up in negative 29) which leads to the big twist in the plot; The human members of Sanctum who have been the villains for basically the entire game are completely sidelined and now it turns out Pope Evil is actually the main villain muwa ha ha and this has… NO build up to it and is honestly a narrative cheat. This also completely throws away whatever semblance of storytelling that has existed prior to now and effectively starts the second (and final) plot finally starts. So consider this a negative for the space flea out of nowhere…
36. Story Sequencing: …the fact that this happens WAY into the game and doesn’t earn this sudden shift in narrative focus…
37. Foreshadowing: …has no real good build up (the ONLY build up, if we’re being charitable, is the owl following us around in early game)…
38. Cutscene: …and the fact that, as usual, the scenes themselves are just kind of bad
39. Cutscene: So then we have a (bad) cutscene with over editing and constant shakey cam and barely any idea what’s going on and where we’re going…
40. Visual Continuity: …and it’s legitimately hard to tell what’s going on both during it AND after it, as we just land… somewhere… for some reason
41. Cutscene: Cutscenes ending badly. This takes a bit of explanation but the ENTIRE game does this thing where cutscenes just… terminate, abruptly and awkwardly. They usually do so in a way that makes the music transition jarringly as well. This is doubly weird because the timing on the cutscenes is static, meaning they know (to the second) how long a given cutscene is, and just did not time the music properlyi
42. Cutscene: Cid’s big cutscene. Repeated information (as in literally they repeat something and then act like it’s the first time they’ve heard it), bad voice acting,
43. Cutscene: Snow has yet another cutscene where he repeats for the umpteenbajillionth time that we’er going to fight our fate and…
44. Plot: …good GOD I am tired of constantly having micro speeches talking about how we’ll totally win and beat the bad guys and we got this and then they all just go right back to doing everything they were told to do
45. Cutscene: This leads to Fang’s Eidolon moment basically out of nowhere. She’s like nooo I hate you all and says it REALLY badly and then they try for this pseudo jokey bantering thing and then the party’s totally got her back and… I get what they were going for. I do. But this is NONSENSE. The way Fang completely turns it around inside of literal seconds doesn’t help
46. Cutscene: Seriously though everything about this cutscene sucks. I think this might legitimately be the worst cutscene so far
47. Writing: The characters go from hating each other (and actively trying to KILL each other)…
48. Banter: …to being laughy and happy and silly and bantering like they’ve been the best of friends for YEARS. I remind you it’s been DAYS in lore since all this started
49. Cutscene: AND THEN HOPE REPEATS THE SAME CUTSCENE AGAIN! This is, I swear, the THIRTEENTH time this has happened so far! Yes I counted! THE LAST TIME WAS FIVE MINUTES AGO AAAHHHH
50. Padding: Repetition! No notes!
51. Cutscene: And then Hope is assassinated. And not in the good way. Keep in mind this happens MINUTES after the previous TWO cutscenes of hope, one of which included Hope. And then out of absolutely nowhere they totally assassinate his character (in general, as well as in relation to the aforementioned cutscenes) and have him freaking out and hitting his ‘darkest hour’ and the teammates are like yeeeah we got your back in that awful saccharine way of theirs and as usual this is melodramatic, badly written, and then over in a few seconds. Good God what were they thinking with this? I don’t think this is THE worst scene in the game…
52. Cutscene: …but screw…
53. Internal Continuity: …this noise
54. Voice Direction: Speaking of which. We have a talented cast of actors. Why is their acting so bad? This is FFXIII. We’ve SOLVED this problem by now. X-2 had better acting. XII had WAY better acting. Did they fire their directors? They had plenty of time AND budget…
55. Voice Direction: …whatever
56. Writing: Fang has amnesia (for no reason) while Vanille doesn’t (okay) but the real problem is they never do anything with it
57. Cutscene: Vanille’s ‘lowest moment’ which is just… what?? I’m losing the ability to describe how poorly constructed these scenes are
58. MSQ: So we want to board Atamos to go to our destination (why? HOW?) and then a bunch of Juggernauts charge forward to block Atamos from working (why???) and then Atamos willingly carries us to our destination (where??) and you can just feel how this entire section is cut content
59. Plot: By the way the fal’Cie want to meet their various gods, right? Lindzei and Pulse. So they plot to kill everyone. So they brand Vanille and Fang to make Ragnarok, which fails. That was SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO. What have they been doing all this time?
60. Character: Barthandalus. He’s pathetic but not pathetic enough to be interesting. He’s childish but not childish enough to be engaging. He wants the party to succeed and actively hampers us at every opportunity. And every scene he’s in he just goes muwa ha ha I’m evil and that’s it
61. MSQ: The entire Pulse section is pure filler. We spend a non insubstantial amount of time on Cocoon fleeing, then we decide we need to power up so we do the Fifth Ark, then we flee down to Pulse. Our STATED reason for doing so is to find some alternate method of progression. We do not. Instead we roam the wilds, do the side quests, hit the tower, fight Barty, aaand then we go RIGHT back to Cocoon. And that is it
62. Cutscene: So then there’s the ‘worst’ cutscene in the game. Don’t mistake me, there’s worse cutscenes really, but this one has stuck with me for actual years as the perfect example of the flash over substance approach Square used around this point in history. This entire cutscene is just flash, no substance. It’s like having a spoonful of seasoning without any meat to pour it over, and I hate it…
63. Cutscene: …so…
64. Cutscene: …much
65. Padding: It’s also like five minutes of nothing
66. Cutscene: So then NORA comes back and has a dumb scene. I’m tired of explaining how bad these are presented so just… take the negative
67. Story Sequencing: This is a bonus negative for the fact that the ENTIRE game has bad sequencing
68. Outro: Okay so we end up facing Barty again and we totally win. Okay… cool. This is apparently exactly what he wanted (not properly explained) followed by him… merging? Upgrading? (not properly explained) with Orphan, leading to our final boss fight. All of this is already some bad execution…
69. Outro: …then we jump forward and despite having beaten Barty and Orphy the game acts like those fights didn’t even happen. This ALWAYS rubs me the wrong way but everything about this conveys as if those fights literally did not happen. As in if you edit the fights out the cutscenes make perfect sense. This is so that…
70. Outro: …he can force us (sorry, Fang/Vanille) to become Ragnarok to kill him. The ENTIRE time he won’t shut up and there’s just some very… VERY weird cutscene construction going on here. I feel like the best way to explain it is to say that they had multiple versions of this scene (say, three) and the notes between them got mixed so we see snippets of one then the first then the third then the first again and it’s just a jumbled mess
71. Outro: Then we all become Cieth (not properly explained) followed by torturing and healing Fang to force her to become Ragnarok. Please keep in mind she literally just became Ragnarok (for some reason? Not properly explained) but it’s okay because she broke out due to… memories of the party? Of scenes she was not present for? I honestly have no idea what’s going on at this point
72. Outro: Plot: Let’s do what the enemy wants us to do. No, seriously, everyone in the known universe has made this comment before but actually going through and paying attention we spend the ENTIRE game hammering the theme (more on that in a sec) of ‘defying our fate’ and refusing to do what the fal’Cie want us to do and then we get here and we flat out tell Orphan that ‘you want to die to kill us all, so screw you we’re going to kill you’. Did they… not think about this? I could dissect this at length but I think what I’ve been talking about this entire time is the real answer. This is multiple writers working on a very troubled production and the game has been noticeably worse ever since we hit Pulse and I think they literally just wanted to ship the damned thing. This is still a terrible plot point…
73. Outro: Plot: …for a solid…
74. Outro: Plot: …triple negative. But wait!
75. Theme: Let’s talk about the main them, which is ‘defying fate’ (it’s even written out as such IN the game). They do this by running away repeatedly, doing everything they’re told up to and including the main villain’s evil scheme, and then… win. I’ve seen worse but this is not a good execution of this theme at all
76. Outro: So then their sugar momma Etro saves them all by fixing everything forevers and everyone’s down on Pulse and happy and totally ignoring all the work the game put into portraying Pulse as a death world. I’ve seen worse endings but this fails at being happy and fulfills what is usually considered objectively bad writing…
77. Outro: Writing: …by being a deus ex machina. Not as a casual phrase, the god literally up and fixes everything

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Of course the music is good. In fact I would go so far as to say it is great. So this is a fairly easy…
2. Music: …triple…
3. Music: …positive
4. Bestiary: In combat and in menu bestiary which lists weaknesses, strengths, drops, and unique abilities…
5. Bestiary: …good stuff (a bit hampered by the bug)
6. Difficulty Options: The ability to swap difficulty on the fly (out of combat) is always appreciated
7. Difficulty Options: It’s mostly health and damage but there is enough extra stuff (healing, the Eidolon fights, and the summon mechanics)
8. QoL: When you load a save it gives you a recap of where you are in the story, which is always appreciated
9. QoL: Also you can just hit Retry at any point in time which shoves you back out of the fight a few steps away so you can rejigger your setup or try to dodge the fight
10. Saves: Quick and easy to do (at savepoints)
11. Core Combat: For what it’s worth there is one thing I rather like about the combat of FFXIII. And that is the paradigm shifting. Being able to smartly swap to the right thing at the right time is satisfying and unlike most things in the combat it actually interrupts animations and actions (though there’s an asterisk with that)
12. Core Mechanic: I should also mention that I’m rather fond of the entire system of pseudo control. It really is similar to an upgraded version of the ‘bots’ of your ‘party members’ over in Kingdom Hearts (or Secret of Mana, if you prefer). Knowing what people are going to cast when and swapping to adjust that as quickly as you can because seconds matter is, frankly, pretty fun. I really wish the rest of the game design was here to properly support this
13. QoL: Auto-battle is not too shabby, and does a good job of selecting based on your Libra knowledge of a given target
14. Party AI: Speaking of which, the party AI is weirdly good. I don’t want to over-praise because I’ve seen better (in older games, even! Guild Wars 1 Nightfall was three years before this for perspective) but it’s still GOOD and they still know how to target smartly (if you have the Libra info). Honestly the one thing that would make this even better is access to just designing the gambits yourself, but eh
15. Boss: The Shiva Twins Eidolon puzzle boss. It has a couple of issues (most notably a massive BUG… see the negatives for more on that) but the fight itself is legit. As with most gimmicky puzzle bosses there’s no real brute forcing, you have to think about what to do and how to do it
16. Boss: Hooolyyy crap we have a second boss positive. So all the Eidolon fights boil down to ‘use your primary classes’ and that’s fine… except for the fights where it’s overtuned (Brynhildr) or the fights where your primary classes involve doing the exact same stuff you’ve been doing the entire game. Bahamut bypasses this by being about enduring (Sentinel) and debuffing (Saboteur) so the fight is relatively smooth for once
17. Boss: I will also give the same general positive to Hope’s fight (Alexander). This is good because it really shoves this fight right into your face with no real warning
18. Secondary: Hunts. I know, weird pick, but some of the fights are worthwhile and a lot of the rewards are too
19. Builds: It’s… VERY threadbare. But it IS there. From Chapter 9 onwards (sigh). But for real, you can pick your team, set up their jobs, set up their paradigms, and arguably most importantly decide which weapons to upgrade to get which passive effects. There’s a few combos and it’s neat. Just bring a walkthrough and have it all planned out well in advance
20. Kit: A reasonable spread of abilities across everything. Yes, everything. It still counts (what really pushed this over the line for me was the Saboteur, Synergist, and Sentinel if you’re curious)
21. QoL: So obviously there’s the Retry button, which is great (thanks, FFMQ!) but also on fights where you go straight from a cutscene to a boss the second time around it automatically dumps you into the menu to rejigger if you need it

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Core Combat: Okay so this is terrible and will take some explanation. If the main character you are controlling dies for any reason it’s instant game over, regardless of how many other people are up or how the fight is going or if you have phoenix downs or anything. Instant game over. This is a bit obvious in how awful it is but really takes some breaking down. First, the game forces this weak point upon you more or less at a whim. You have no say in who your weak point is until very, VERY far into the game (we’re talking 20 hours in). Second, there is NOTHING to keep that character alive more than they otherwise might be. No avoidance mechanic or iframes or special stats or health or armor, they’re just the same as any other character. So while the fight COULD be recovered from and if anyone ELSE dies you’re fine, if YOU die, game over. Some games make this work (Kingdom Hearts comes to mind immediately) but those games have extra mechanics to make this work. There is no additional mechanic to assist here, whoever you’re controlling is just like any other character. And finally and most frustratingly this makes it so that it’s distressingly easy for a fight you’ve basically won to suddenly and abruptly end because, whoops, you made one mistake 10 minutes into an 11 minute fight. This… SUCKS…
2. Core Combat: …and by itself…
3. Core Combat: …is a stain upon the entire game
4. Core Combat: Over 20 hours in I think I can fairly say I don’t enjoy the stagger mechanic. Stagger mechanics in general aren’t bad (if you really break it down all it means is the player doing something to add a vuln phase to an enemy) but the problems in this game are threefold. First, stagger is the ONLY mechanic for 99% of fights in the entire game, bosses included. Second, there’s only one real way to stagger (Ravager to raise the chain, Commando or Saboteur to maintain it… that’s it, that’s the one way). Third, it’s mandatory for a huge portion of the game (from about Vile Peaks onwards you encounter a higher and higher percentage of enemies where the only viable strat is to Stagger them, otherwise you just cannot push through their health pools). All of this makes the Stagger repetitive, boring, and padded…
5. Core Combat: …for another…
6. Core Combat: …triple
7. Info In Game: Libra thoughts. It takes multiple casts to get full information and it’s single target, AND uses a turn, AND costs TP. This is needlessly taxing
8. Bug: Combat inputting has this weird problem that I’m classifying as a bug but may not be. Either way it sucks but you CANNOT input menu options as fast as you’d like, you HAVE to wait until an animation resolves before you can input. This is in a real time game, mind you
9. Bug: Depth of Field. This is clearly a bug because periodically the game just smears squares of DoF all over the screen in ways that make absolutely no sense
10. Sound: Footsteps. Clop clop clop. These are SO LOUD and so boring (it’s the SAME sound effect, no variation except on surfaces, and even then it barely varies). This is weirdly distracting…
11. Sound: …and awful
12. Seconds In Minutes: Leveling on the Crystarium. For some reason they decided to add this slow animation thing as you hold down A to progress it and I… I don’t know why this is here
13. Music: Repetition. They really over play some songs to the point of excess
14. Pacing: No towns. This is a problem for obvious narrative reasons but a lot of people forget that towns literally form one of the three dominant pillars of RPG gameplay (the others being, loosely, exploration and combat, whether expressed in dungeons or overworlds or whatever). With towns being COMPLETELY absent what we have is a whole aspect of management completely gone. No real juggling your inventory, no looking for secret chests, no checking in with NPCs for hints and quests, and arguably most importantly of all no downtime. I’m typing up thoughts on this negative as of about 23 hours into the game, in Chapter 10, and let me tell you, this REALLY hurts the pacing of the game. So much so that I feel the need…
15. Pacing: …to…
16. Pacing: …triple up on this negative
17. Difficulty Options: Most of the difficulty options are boring health and damage options
18. Intro: Padding: During the entire intro you end up fighting entirely too many enemies, going across entirely too long of dungeons, and… I mean. The Intro is over 3 hours long before you gain access to basic functionality. I don’t know what to add to that
19. Intro: Core Combat: Except I do! Hope you like mashing auto battle over and over because every single fight until you reach Lake Bresha is just mashing Auto Battle over and over. I don’t know if this is true but a common refrain is that they took the Gambit System complaints from XII to heart… and their solution was forcing you to press Auto Battle each turn instead. Wooo
20. Intro: Itemization: No item rewards worth a damn either, also only one shop which sells two things one of which we can’t afford and have no use for
21. Intro: Kit: A lot of RPGs have the problem where your options early on are too limited so combat is kind of boring, and it develops over time. In MOST RPGs this is a pretty small period of time (it is in fact a rare exception where I think this period of time is long enough to really justify a negative). But we can’t do JACK for this entire opening sequence even if we decided to. This is because…
22. Intro: Power Progression: …there’s no leveling. There is NO LEVELING in the Intro. Every single fight is a waste of time. This is related to…
23. Intro: Encounter Rate: …the fact that there are WAY too many enemies in the Intro. If there were maybe half the number, or even less, this might have worked out better (most of the Intro is cutscenes anyways) but no, each ‘gameplay’ section involves at least one additional trash pack. And it suffers from the Dragon Quest 7 problem where you ‘can’ avoid enemies but they’re faster than you, home in on you, and you’re in a narrow corridor. This dovetails into another problem…
24. Intro: Trash: …possibly as a result of how it’s designed (we don’t have access to any Kit to speak of, remember) there are exactly two types of enemies in the entire Intro. There’s enemies we have to stagger, and ones we do not. And that’s it. Three hours of mashing Auto Battle because there’s nothing worth doing anyways while fighting too many of the same fights and not being able to buy anything noteworthy
25. Intro: Boss: Anima is… the closest thing we have to enemy design so far and it’s just ‘defeat arms to attack core’. And it has way too much health besides
26. QoL: When the recap happens upon loading a save it does three things wrong. First, it scrolls way too fast. If you even glance away you’ll miss something. Second, there’s no way to scroll back up so anything you miss is just gone. And third, it has this weird stutter to the scroll making it irritating to read as it’s scrolling
27. Tutorialization: This game does tutorialization wrong twice. First it’s mostly dull and boring tutorialization which refuses to let you do anything except the one thing it wants you to do. This is… fine since it’s opt in, but…
28. Tutorialization: …the real problem here is that there’s a shockingly large number of mechanics that AREN’T tutorialized. Sometimes at all, sometimes it takes entirely too long, but either way it leaves the player unaware of entire mechanics
29. Early Game: Autobattle to your heart’s content. By the way Autobattle isn’t always super smart about what to do AND relies on already Libra’ing the enemy
30. Level: Lake Bresha. This is going to be a recurring theme but this is a fairly empty dungeon with nothing to do, barely any side paths, weak treasures (more on that later), and lots of mindless trash
31. Bug: So it’s something that’s been in the game for a bit but there’s an issue with resolution where you cannot see the help text below an enemy. This is already a problem normally but some boss fights are designed to be impossible (or next to impossible) to do without doing the gimmick. And the only way to know the gimmick is this (or a walkthrough) so this really sucks
32. Seconds In Minutes: Crystarium is basically linear. Meaning it’s just leveling. But for some reason you have to go do it manually each time, which ultimately just adds padding to the regular process of leveling
33. Level: Vile Peaks. This might be the worst area in the entire game. This is when the stagger bar for trash really becomes mandatory, and dying to a couple of missed inputs or just plain old RNG is becoming a thing. And, well, every level design so far ISN’T so we see how it’s still just a long corridor with nothing to do and no noteworthy placements or encounters. They do try the ‘robots fighting each other’ thing which approaches being neat, and have a VERY brief attempt at a Hyperbeam Moment, but both kind of flop because the former just makes the fights even longer and the latter is about 40 seconds of ‘weee’ followed by a lot of ’wooo’. And all of that is on top of its two biggest sins. First; it’s drab looking. I know that’s a weird thing to focus on but it’s a giant trash pile. And while that serves a narrative purpose it means you’re fighting fights that are much longer than usual while periodically dying and redoing them while having nothing interesting to look at…
34. Level: Padding: …in a level that is way, way too long. Even ignoring my own, ah, pacing this entire section takes HOURS…
35. Level: Padding: …of the same blegh slog
36. Boss: We interrupt this boring, sloggy area with a frustrating boss fight! As usual Odin is a gimmick fight (theoretically a good thing) but in reality land it’s overtuned to hell and back. Even the specific format of this challenge is somewhat dull; Raise your chain level while he’s beating the SNOT out of you. That’s it. Keep in mind we were actually max leveled (more on that in a bit) for this fight and had even bothered to upgrade our weapon (not that it’d help survivability) and he was absolutely destroying us in seconds if I was just a little too slow in swapping to healer paradigm. So this is already a boring fight with not much going on…
37. Boss: …and has very little margin for error…
38. Difficulty: …and serves as an insane difficulty cliff out of nowhere. I know at least one person personally who put the game down at this fight. And this is a good time to talk about…
39. Leveling: …the leveling caps. Similar to Chrono Cross there’s functional caps to how much you can level in any given area. The Crystarium grid only has so many slots and one it’s maxed, it’s maxed. Plot beats add new nodes to raise. Meaning you can actually track your level cap on a per-area basis. This… has lots of issues even at a conceptual level, because in addition to my OTHER problems with the Crystarium it means that a tool has been completely removed from the player (over-leveling) AND in many cases the game still mandates leveling. You can’t over level to help yourself out and you still have to spend the time fighting every single trash mob to level. It’s worst case scenario
40. Level: The Gapra Whitewood. It’s… the same thing every other dungeon is the game is. Too long, too little going on, loud footsteps, enemies that take too long
41. Difficulty Curve: Aster Protoflorian. The boss fight itself is pretty boring (it just has an AOE strike and a massive hit) but that’s forgivable. What is NOT is even walking into this with completely turbo maxed stats and still getting bodied by a boss with way too much health who hits like an absolute truck. Fully twice in this fight I nearly wiped due to doing an input slightly too late
42. Level: Sunleth Waterscape. You know what I’m going to say here. I will make mention of it if I stumble across a dungeon that doesn’t have these issues (although that might just be neutral territory)
43. Itemization: This is probably the biggest Problem of the game. Money is scarce. WAY too scarce. This is a huge problem because stuff is damned expensive (as I mentioned way back up in the Intro you can barely buy POTIONS in the Early Game). This already sucks…
44. Itemization: …now consider that almost all the loot in the world is worthless. Oh not all of it is, just about I’d say 98% of it. The absolutely microscopic amount of worthwhile anything you get (upgrade items, consumables, or actual gear) is also usually really good too. Which means…
45. Seconds In Minutes: …have fun looting every single chest in every single side alley to find the few that are worthwhile. (Could also consider this a Walkthroughitis negative). But wait, it gets worse…
46. Itemization: …because the gear you get is kiiind of crap, with absolutely microscopic improvements in stats and output. I’m talking 12 points difference from beginning gear at the very beginning of the game. Now there’s an asterisk to that but lemme mention really quick that consumables ALSO suck and are barely worth the money (aside from the Sols for out of combat stuff and Phoenix Downs for in combat). But yes so, gear sucks, right? Well…
47. Power Progression Curve: …let’s talk weapon leveling. So you can upgrade your weapons. EVERYTHING about this sucks. First of all, as I just mentioned, these upgrades are miniscule and don’t even have a noticeable improvement in power…
48. Guidance: …then we have to consider that there’s NO guide or help on how any of this really works. You’re told that you use items to upgrade items but not how certain items stack experience bonuses on each other and how, nor how other ‘primary exp’ items CONSUME that bonus. This also means, by the way…
49. QoL: …that you’re detrimented if you don’t dump all of your actual exp items in one bundle. I mention this under QoL because it’s the kind of feature that SHOULD be a quality of life thing. Like, imagine if you go to dump fifteen exp items on it and there’s a thing being like hey I’m only going to use thirteen of them because the rest would be wasted. Or maybe it just tells you the current level cap and you can figure it out. Or SOMEthing. But no, guess sucker. And keep in mind, and this bares repeating…
50. Grind: …these items are EXPENSIVE. The first real grind point in the ENTIRE GAME is in Chapter 9, and even there it is onerously grindy to get the gil necessary to buy the exp items to start leveling your weapons. Keep in mind there’s a whole OTHER thing about catalysts we’ll cover later. This grind negative will probably expand later but there’s one other frustration…
51. Difficulty Curve: …and that’s the fact that the game constantly shoves you into difficulty cliffs and, well, there’s something even worse later on we’ll get to later
52. Walkthroughitis: One more point. It is SO grindy and SO ‘requires a walkthrough’ to figure out how to optimize your weapons that it not only discourages you from experimenting, but there’s no real way to naturally do so in normal play. What you’re ‘supposed’ to do is figure out well in advance which ONE weapon you’re upgrading per person, then map out what to do to get that, then do that
53. MSQ: Palumporum and party composition. So this entire section you’re limited to 2 party members (STILL, sigh) and worse one of your main parties is Snow and Hope. Okay, cool. The tank and the support. Yes I know they can both do damage but they sure don’t, especially compared to the other more dedicated damagers. And heaven help you if you haven’t been leveling their damaging stats, especially when the game has conveyed that they’re a tank and support respectively. This…
54. Encounter: …along with enemy design in this section make this an absolute slog. Way too many enemies with way too much armor and health and mandatory staggering and just bleeehhh
55. Boss: Ushumgal Subjugator. This is two fights and they are both slow and boring. At this point I’m getting close to giving each boss a negative for basically being the same fight as every other fight. Seriously, just for fun I looked up the AI script for this fight and it’s hilarious. It’s ‘use the same attack 4 times in a row, then do ONE other attack, repeat’. Jesus
56. Boss: Havoc Tank. This is close to a good fight idea. It starts off with multiple parts and each one you damage breaks it off, reducing the damage you’re taking. Cool. The problem is good LUCK with that because the first portion of the fight has you taking an absolutely STUPID amount of nonstop damage from each part. Also this is one of those fights you may want to deliberately lose so you can set up your paradigms for it and if you do, hey, you’re sent back to several trash fights ago, have fun redoing those
57. Boss: Midlight Reaper. Just another boring boss fight, made worse by being stuck with two party members
58. Boss: Brynhildr. God, screw this stupid freaking fight. So he’s not nearly as interesting as most of the Eidolon fights (the big thing to do on him? Raise chain. That’s it. That’s just a normal trash fight at that point). What’s worse is he also hits very fast and VERY hard so staying up is genuinely difficult, and his timer is stupidly overtuned…
59. Boss: …screw this stupid freaking fight
60. Factory Worker Syndrome: I could have mentioned this earlier but this feels like a good place to put it. This game has REALLY BAD Factory Worker Syndrome. Fights are braindead except if you make a mistake in which case you either lose a party member, fall behind, or worse, YOU get killed. And remember you dying is a game over. This is basically every trash fight in the entire game…
61. Factory Worker Syndrome: …and…
62. Factory Worker Syndrome: …it sucks
63. Level: The Palamecia (the usual, you know how this goes by now)…
64. Trash: …and the grind. Good lord the grind. Oh hey that reminds me
65. Kit: For an absolutely insanely huge portion of this game you have two party members. This SUCKS. It limits your action economy (obviously)…
66. Padding: …makes any large pack of enemies take unnecessarily longer…
67. Build: …and prevents you from really playing with the game’s core gimmick (the paradigm system)
68. Trash: I have to give a second negative for the Palamecia’s trash. We spent an hour, an HOUR, slogging through ONE ROOM of trash encounters
69. Boss: So, Barthandalus. This is a straight stat check, no real strategy to speak of. In phase 1 all his heads start casting spells at you with their various elements. After enough time has passed they upgrade to their Ra versions of spells, then their Ga versions. Once he hits Ga you’re basically done unless you’ve done enough damage to kill them because not only are these massive damaging AOEs, they also have a knock-up animation which interrupts your actions. This means if you fall behind you’re dead. So, enjoy that straight DPS check
70. Boss: Then there’s phase two which, try to be shocked, is another stat wall. He will periodically charge up. While doing so you have to do a certain amount of damage to him. Once you do it lowers the damage he does. Otherwise he spends the entire time just hitting you a lot. That’s it. So two straight stat walls in a row…
71. Boss: Padding: …but I have to mention how insanely LONG this all took. This is an atrociously long fight (as most fights are from this point onward) and it’s VERY easy to just die at the last 10% and lose twenty minutes of your life
72. Difficulty Curve: By the way this is yet another difficulty cliff, and not the last one
73. Level: The Fifth Ark. Bonus points in that it’s also some very DULL corridors in addition to the usual bad level design
74. Trash: SCREW the fights here. SCREW these. I think we’re actually already locked in to having to cheat at this point but I’m going to keep pushing as far as I can and see how that goes. These enemies are too numerous, do too much damage, take too long to die, and aren’t rewarding enough. I want to stress that I took down Barthandalus 1, one of the hardest fights in the entire game, with only a few retries. But after repeated attempts I could not get past this one trash pack because a combination of animation locking, action economy, and a Problem I haven’t mentioned yet all just repeatedly lead to me lucking into dying. One attempt I even killed over half the trash before the other half just effortlessly bodied me. The trash here…
75. Trash: …is the worst to-date…
76. Trash: …and it may get worse later
77. Gotcha: At multiple points in the game you are forced into a new party composition (usually with new paradigms). Sometimes you can switch and adjust if you’re paying attention. Most of the time you cannot, and are just shoved right into the fight, screw you
78. Overworld: The Archylte Steppes. There’s… nothing here. There’s enemies, empty plains, and the side quests. That’s it. That’s the design
79. Level: The Mah’habara Subterra. Yeah it’s the same problem it always is. Did you know that one of the fights in this dungeon took me six and a half minutes of just bodying it to kill it? Also another boring, brown and grey cave while I’m at it
80. Boss: Anavatapta Warmech is supposed to be a hyperbeam moment where you kill the boss from the beginning of the game with Odin and wooo and it’s possible (indeed, EASY) to… fail. And if you fail it’s straight up invincible and the only option is to restart
81. Secondary: Hunts. They’re boring. They involve long, LONG stretches of walking back and forth over the same damned terrain endlessly
82. Power Progression Curve: Possible to squeeze yourself into a corner. So this is kind of unique. A lot of games have the ability to screw yourself over but there’s usually a way to fix the situation and/or you really have to work at it to make it happen. But in FFXIII there is no ‘going back’ to speak of (with one noteworthy exception for completionist’s sake). What this means is if you’re not careful, not fighting everything as you go, OR fighting everything as you go (yes really) then it’s possible at various points to reach a state where you’re just underleveled for the enemies and/or boss of a region and cannot go back to a previous area to grind back up. This is an issue the ENTIRE game mind you…
83. Power Progression Curve: …but it REALLY gets bad post Pulse. Because as soon as you leave Pulse and go back you’re locked into Eden until you pass a couple of pretty brutal bosses and if you aren’t good enough for the trash here and can’t beat the bosses… you’re stuck. I need to stress that this can happen on a NORMAL playthrough of fighting all enemies as you go. This area is just such a huge step up in mandatory difficulty (mostly through straight stat-walling) because they didn’t balance things correctly and expected you to grind face for literally dozens of hours on Pulse. And if you didn’t, sucks to be you. This is awful…
84. Power Progression Curve: …and deserves the full triple
85. Grind: This game is insanely grindy. I know RPGs in general and JRPGs in specific tend to be normalized grindfests but… no this is above and beyond. The balance issues (mentioned above), the lack of proper design of both curves (power progression and difficulty), and the stat walls you run into all over the place means have fun spending literally dozens of hours grinding. Grinding gil, equipment, and crystarium points…
86. Grind: …so…
87. Grind: …that’s a triple
88. Bug: The PC version in particular is fairly bug happy. By great fortune we didn’t run into many, but they’re pretty common, and fan patches are considered mandatory for a reason (the worst is the ‘running out of memory’ bug which just causes random crashes)
89. Enemy Variety: I hope you like fighting the same two enemies the ENTIRE game. Which is your favorite? The one you HAVE to stagger, or the one you don’t?
90. Viscerality: I could be much meaner about this. The game is just… flash and noise. Combat is just the camera constantly moving, numbers layering over each other, and rapid fire flash attacks happening constantly. It feels like someone jangling the keys. They don’t look very good, they don’t sound very good, and for that I’d merely give a single negative…
91. Viscerality: …but then there’s the impact. Or lack thereof. When your entire party rushes up and does tons of attacks, then breaks the enemy and juggles them in the air for a solid thirty seconds, and the enemy’s health just… hasn’t budged…
92. Viscerality: …that’s what bad Viscerality Impact looks like
93. Visual Distinction: Also what’s worse is you’re kind of discouraged from looking at any of it to begin with. It’s difficult to parse what the hell is going on with the camera jerks, the fact that it only shows you the status bar of whoever you’re currently attacking (so good luck seeing debuffs and buffs on enemies), as well as the numbers constantly layering over each other, and your eyes just get glued to the HUD in the corner for the entire time
94. Interface: Feedback, and lack thereof. The WHOLE game this is an issue. Stuff happens so fast and so furious it’s legitimately hard to tell what’s happening. Buffs go away in mid fight but you don’t see the enemy casting anything? Party members randomly dying? Certain attacks not landing and not understanding why? Go check a walkthrough cuz none of that is in the game proper…
95. Interface: …for a solid…
96. Interface: …triple
97. Outro: Difficulty Curve: So hey, the last dungeon is a teeth puller. Keep in mind everything I mentioned earlier and then realize how much grind is necessary to deal with this nonsense…
98. Outro: Encounter: …including enemies with Death spell shenanigans and the stupid bikes. Please keep in mind Death randomly kills you and there’s no good way to prevent it and if the main character dies you die instantly. This also contributes to…
99. Outro: Factory Worker Syndrome: …how insanely hard this trash is. I literally had a harder time with this trash than the bosses around it
100. Outro: Grind: By the way, as I mentioned earlier, all of this is hard as balls. And it’s just stats. So… go grind! For a long, LONG time
101. Outro: Boss: The first of the final bosses against Barthandalus is just another bog standard fight. Which is just not good enough for one of the final fights
102. Outro: Boss: Then there’s the first Orphan fight. Good lord this fight. Okay so he has all the usual issues which is already bad, but he also has a massive AOE attack that can absolutely murder you if you’re not ready for it, and an attack that can just decide to kill you. Did I mention there’s no dodging this? In fact there’s no doing ANYTHING because the fight removes the HUD and your controls…
103. Outro: Boss: …so, y’know, yay
104. Outro: Boss: And then there’s the final final fight against Orphan. This is a timed fight (and if you die have fun getting back to this point) and… I as of this very moment in time do not know what the ‘intended’ strategy is because what every guide will tell you is to just use Army Of One which bypasses invulnerability to stagger it, at which point you just body it. This is already bad for the timer and the invuln phase…
105. Outro: Walkthroughitis: …but I have to ding it special for NOTHING telling you about how Army of One just… bypasses all of this. And wait, it gets worse…
106. Outro: Grind: …because I sure hope you actually grinded up the necessary CP to reach this point to access Army of One to be even capable of doing this
107. Enemy Design: Every enemy is either chaff, boring, or can kill you in one hit

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: General flavor. The animations, opening, backgrounds, color palette, you get it
2. Spritework: Racers and the distance and animations on the map. There’s a surprisingly large amount of effort put into these considering each sprite needed to be made manually facing each direction at each distance

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Co-Op: Of course, in fact arguably its biggest impact on Nintendo’s development philosophy
2. Co-Op: Such as it is, full campaign co-op
3. Minigame: Battle mode. There’s not much to it, but it’s still there and it’s still fun, with a handful of maps of varying size and complexity
4. Visual Distinction: Despite the graphical issues with how hard this was pushing the hardware it’s still pretty distinct
5. Intro: Level: Mario Circuit 1. Nothing fancy or flashy, but surprisingly well designed for what it is. Five corners, one convex (or concave I guess, depending on your viewpoint) line which gives the opportunity for corner cutting, but also tutorializes how bad it is to leave the track if you don’t have an item, and pretty early item box location. All in all a solid tutorial map
6. Level: Mario Circuit 2, at the end of the Mushroom Cup, is a pretty solid development of Circuit 1. More corners, a jump segment, but nothing too bullcrap and lines built to encourage the players to know when to feather and when to punch it
7. Level: Ghost Valleys, general. There are three in total and there’s some clever stuff here, such as the blocks that form the boundaries that go away as you hit them (which can remove your safety barrier if you’re hitting the same edges), lots of pits to maneuver around, and almost always at least one intended feather skip
8. Level: Mario Circuit 3 and 4. These are the further evolution of the Circuit series, with much tighter and meaner corners but still fairness in recovery zones, and both containing nice long stretches to gun it
9. Kit: General. There’s nothing super fancy here, but it is the beginnings of the items. Special mention to how you can toss some things backwards, and the semi homing Red Shell
10. Music: I chewed on this for a bit but ultimately I’d say there’s enough to qualify. It’s not bad, there’s enough variety, and a few solid tunes
11. Sound: As is pretty normal for Nintendo, solid sound design

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: The game controls… badly. It’s hard to put it into words but if you’ve played it you know immediately what I mean. Breaking only works properly half the time, collisions screw with your inputs, turning is a whole thing, almost every single Kart understeers…
2. Controls: …it’s a nonstop pain across the entire game
3. Core Mechanic: Physics and sliding and lack of design. So this game was originally F-Zero 2, right? Everyone knows that. But while they adjusted the speed and the course size down to accommodate the two player mode what they did NOT adjust is the physics. And let me tell you, it’s janky as hell. Sometimes you can work with it, but most of the time you’re just brutally penalized by sliding all over the place in a direction that you weren’t trying for while being bodied by the racers who are literal physical obstacles to you…
4. Core Mechanic: …so that’s another constant irritant in the game
5. Kit: Racers. There’s functionally 4 playable racers and they’re… not very well designed. We have the default racers who have just bad enough stats to have skipping problems, two racers who both have even worse understeer, one racer who has SUCH low acceleration that any mistake of any kind is brutally punished AND on top of that no track rewards their top speed advantage, and then the final duo who are merely… fine
6. Enemy Design: Item spamming. So enemies don’t get items like you do in this one, they just have their own abilities. They use these whenever they’re in range of you, front or back. And they use them CONSTANTLY. As in every few seconds, just an infinite supply of them
7. Enemy Design: Special mention to the Brothers who’s item is a friggin’ invincibility star. Thanks game
8. Enemy AI: Such as it is. The enemies run scripts of when to do suchandsuch and just loop those scripts. It IS possible to jam up the script but it’s somewhat rare considering they literally have programming in place to avoid this
9. Enemy AI: For example, ever see an enemy racer just perfectly dodge an item? Yours OR theirs. Or maybe they just go through an obstacle like a Monty Mole like he wasn’t there. Yeah that’s the cheating
10. Raspberry Jam: Final lap and in 5th or higher? Enjoy the nonstop beeping
11. Penalty For Failure: Lives. I don’t mind lives for this kind of game in general, but because of how the rest of the game is designed, the fact that you have no method of procuring more lives, and the fact that it can screw over co-op makes it frustrating here
12. Level: So let’s get this out of the way; a lot of the design decisions of individual maps would work in a better game. But with how this game controls and how the karts handle and how the enemy AI just avoids everything and how close they are meaning any mistake is punishing… well, a lot of choices are suddenly worse because they’re in this game. So let’s talk about things like the Bowser’s Castle levels, which are all 90 degree turns. Not a bad idea, legitimately, but as I just mentioned sucks in this game. It’s near impossible to maintain speed while pulling a 90 degree turn because of how physics work (this is true in real life even more so). Your turn arc is going to collide with the interior point or the exterior wall unless you snap those brakes. But braking every single turn isn’t exactly fun to begin with but much worse is how easy it is to screw up. And of course the enemies have no such limitation, they maintain speed just fine
13. Level: Koopa Beach 1. This is one of those innocuous looking maps that only gets bad once you think about it. A HUGE portion of the map is slow-down material (which the enemies ignore) and it’s so tiny and clustered that any mistake means the pack, which is very small, will FLY by you
14. Level: Vanilla Lake 1. It’s ice physics on a blindingly white map with breakable blocks that impede your path, what more do I need to add to this
15. Level: Bowser Castle 3 deserves special mention for just being the absolute worst of the Bowser’s Castle maps. It does three things particularly wrong. First it has four straightaways which you’re intended to gun it through, but every single one of them has something that punishes you for doing so, particularly the first corner which has this 90 degree interior ‘lip’ that will catch you and completely kill your momentum if you hit it on either side. Second it relies on the bouncing physics to get across one segment, and those are wonky at the best of times. And third it goes out of its way to interrupt the final few corners’ arcs repeatedly, ensuring you cannot pull a smooth turn across any of it
16. Level: Donut Plains 3 is a perfect example of what I was talking about. This really should be a great level, because it’s a well designed final exam level. Problem is the enemies totally skip everything and the power ups barely help, plus the usual control and skid issues
17. Level: Vanilla Lake 2. Yes it’s an even worse Vanilla Lake
18. Level: Rainbow Road. I thought about this one for a moment but I think it deserves it for a few reasons. First the visuals are honestly kind of eye cancer, especially at speed. Second said visuals literally block visibility. This is one of three tracks in the entire game where it’s hard to see things like power ups and obstacles. And third is the friggin’ thwomps, which are perfectly designed to screw with you. They’re electrified (or whatever) meaning tapping them spins you out, which almost guarantees they will then immediately smash you
19. Info In Game: There’s actually a fair bit of details and depth in the game (some of which I discussed on camera). NONE of that is in the game. Nadda

Story Positives:

1. Sound: I love the new sounds and voices for the different characters. Adds some much needed flavor
2. Tone: The general tone of the work is great. Very cheery, silly, and generally happy
3. Brickwork: Consider this an aggregate for everything. I can’t lie and say this game looks… y’know, good, but it still gets across several biomes quite well

Story Negatives:

1. Spritework: The racers themselves (and basically every 2D sprite) look… actively bad. Chunky pixelated cutouts
2. Brickwork: General. Again a bit of an aggregate because… I mean the whole game looks legitimately bad
3. Brickwork: Choco Mountain deserves special mention for looking like a giant pile of blurry mud

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: A generally excellent soundtrack and enjoyable with precious few exceptions
2. Song: Bowser’s Castle. I say without hyperbole this is one of the better takes on the many (many) Bowser’s Castle songs across the years
3. Song: Rainbow Road. This song is fantastic and, honestly, I think at least half of why people like this track
4. Song: The ending song. It’s just so happy and joyous and really encapsulates the tone of the entire game
5. Sound: Same excellent sound design as per usual. You can tell speed, nearby players, item usage, interactions with the terrain, etc. all just off sound
6. Co-Op: The usual for the series. General co-op…
7. Co-Op: …and ‘campaign’ co-op (for the grand prix)
8. Kit: So items are here and they’re noticeably better designed than before, including things like the red shells having the ‘wind up’ missile period, as well as having to decide when to fire off your triple shells…
9. Kit: …and of course a ton of new items, like the aforementioned triple shells, super mushrooms, mines, the banana line, and of course the infamous blue shell
10. Minigame: Battle mode in its entirety. It’s still there and it’s still fun, but what makes it better this time around…
11. Level: …is the level design of the multiplayer maps. Big Donut & Block Fort are both tight, fun, and enjoyable in terms of layouts and positioning
12. Level: And so are Double Deck & Skyscraper
13. Intro: Level: Luigi Raceway. Similar to Mario Circuit 1 this is a solid ‘this is what this game is about’ tutorial level. Fairly standard loop, 3D tunnel to show off that new 3Dness as well as going up and down, nice big corners but also tighter than they look, and good item placement
14. Level: Moo Moo Farm is another weirdly good tutorial map. There’s obstacles (the moles), bumps to showcase the new 3D terrain, and solid corners
15. Level: Bowser’s Castle. Yes I gave it a negative too, but there’s still a lot of good design here OTHER than the stupid thwomps. The corners are tight but thanks to the new engine they help with navigation. The spiraling is great for sliding, the giant blocks encourage picking a lane, and it’s not bullcrap with honeypots or traps like these stages were back in the SNES

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Encounter: The cars on Toad’s Turnpike. There’s a near total lack of actual design to them, meaning how much they’re in the way or an obstacle is completely random. It ALSO means it’s distressingly easy to get stuck in a stunlock with literally no way out of it until they’re all passed
2. Encounter: Tight pack design. Very much by design the pack is supposed to be tight. This is ‘fine’ but also means, as per the previous game, any penalty is horribly punished and you may not have time to recover (depends on items too)
3. Level: Choco Mountain. Fog, lip, terrain, and … that’s it because visuals is a story axis thing. But seriously, this level sucks. The fog makes it hard to plan where you’re going and just interferes with visibility. There’s a lip towards the latter end of the loop which is VERY easy to accidentally slide off (in which case you have basically lost), and the terrain has that ‘you can slide off it and totally cancel all buffs and momentum’ problem this game has in general…
4. Level: …and if it wasn’t for a later level I’d say it’s the worst map in the game
5. Padding: Frappe Snowland, Mario Raceway, Wario Stadium, Rainbow Road. All of these have something in common, and that’s a general lack of… anything. There’s nothing inherently wrong here and I hesitate to individually negative these stages, but they’re all nothing burgers. Frappe Snowland is just a standard course. Mario Raceway has solid lines but that’s it. Wario Stadium is huge and empty and long. And Rainbow Road is insanely long
6. Controls: Fishtailing. Don’t mistake me, the controls are noticeably improved over the SNES version, but there’s still this weird problem where trying to make micro turns or optimizations to change your line can lead to your back end fishtailing wildly out of control, especially if you do it multiple times in a row. And this can also lead to spin outs
7. Level: Bowser’s Castle. Sigh. THWOMPS. These thwomps are just the worst. If you hit them you bounce back and spin out. If they land on you you go through a LONG flattened animation. They’re also nearly perfectly blocking the path and are almost impossible to easily predict. This is just a pain
8. Level: Yoshi Valley. Yoshi friggin’ Valley. I get the idea for this map, in fact I like the idea. I know this because when I race this level in Mario Kart 8 I actually enjoy it. But here it’s just pain. First is how aggravatingly tight the corners are (and I don’t just mean the shortcut), while having either no railings or enemies designed to send you off the edge. Second is how the AI just perfectly zips through with no issues because screw you. And third is the worst part by far because see the actual reset plane is the BOTTOM of the valley. Even if you go flying off the edge it takes several seconds to hit the bottom and reset. And if you hit a cliff wall on the way down? The ENTIRE rolling down the mountain animation has to play before you finally reset. This is anywhere from four to EIGHT seconds of lost time just due to this one irritation…
9. Level: …screw…
10. Level: …this stupid level
11. Level: Banshee Boardwalk. Bats! The bats are awful. They spin you out, push you back, and only really effect you…
12. Level: …also there’s the REST of the level which is just a lot of pits and rail-less corners
13. Enemy AI: Welcome to rubberbanding. So they added rubberbanding and it’s not the worst in the series (Mario Kart Wii says hello) but it’s probably the second worst. They will stick to your rear like GLUE and if they get ahead they tend to just… stay there. And the item chart to help you out if you’re behind isn’t… great

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: Ships. I absolutely love the ship designs in this game. In fact these might be some of my favorite ship designs across all of fiction. This of course includes…
2. Spritework: …the…
3. Spritework: …Hiigaran ships
4. Spritework: But also includes the Vaygr ships…
5. Spritework: …so that’s another solid…
6. Spritework: …triple
7. Brickwork: Skyboxes. There’s… not that many really good skyboxes, but the few that are there are nice
8. Banter: Professionals under stress banter continues, per the franchise standard
9. Music Direction: The excellent music does a good job of conveying scene and tone
10. Intro: Cutscene: Voice acting and artwork. The presentation is legit, even if the content isn’t

Story Negatives:

1. Plot: Most plots are dull when broken down but this one takes the cake. There’s a super army coming we can’t possibly beat so go get a thing to get a thing to get the macguffin to win. We spend missions 3 to 14 just getting a thing to get a thing to get a thing…
2. Plot: …it’s stupid, it’s unengaging…
3. Plot: …and it’s repetitive
4. External Continuity: Hyperspace cores. Them even EXISTING is actually a retcon, but also it’s one of those ‘the more you think about it the less sense it makes’ things. Oh also we’re from another galaxy because Cataclysm doesn’t exist now
5. External Continuity: The entire game doesn’t fit the rest of the franchise. At all. Thematically, visually, gameplay wise, construction wise, tonally… nothing
6. World Building: Or destruction, as the case may be. The three previous Homeworld games had things that simply by existing helped build up the ‘world’. This game has so little thought put into its beats that it actually destroys them instead
7. Tone: Weird magic mysticism. Seriously I get they were going for Star Wars Temu but they dropped the ball on making it actually work
8. Voice Acting: I am unimpressed, at best, with the main cast
9. Segregation: So the Vaygr are these roaming tribal people right? That means they live in their ships and are nomadic, which means those ships need to be very multi function. They also have no centralized command structure thanks to their nature as a distended swarm. And yet they have a very rigid hierarchy with total coordination with each other and very mission specific craft because… I don’t know why. I honestly suspect that originally the fleets were swapped; that the Hiigarans had the structured mission specific craft and the Vaygr had the generalized ships
10. Consequence Storytelling: The Vaygr are just entirely too entrenched for what’s supposed to be a nomadic ultra swarm. Oh and by the way…
11. MSQ: We can’t beat the Vagyr and Makaan conventionally so we need Sajuuk. The big space war story hinges on us getting a macguffin. I don’t know how to put into words how stupid this is
12. Pacing: The story starts off racing and then lurches for about 80% of the plot while we enter the primary MSQ, which I’ll discuss in a moment
13. Intro: Emotionless and empty despite seeming relevance. Let’s cover this really quick; We’re putting together our last ditch effort to fight back against the incoming storm of Vaygr and one of their scout fleets finds us so we have to flee before we’ve even finished our tutorial yet… there’s no impact or emotion here. It’s just events happening. Honestly I know people who don’t even properly understand how doomed we are here because of how badly it’s conveyed
14. MSQ: So hey, remember that lurching? Let’s spend several missions just spinning our wheels while simultaneously acting like the Vaygr are suddenly a background threat because we wanted a ghost story dammit
15. MSQ: So then we get the ancient dreadnought and what do we do FIRST thing? IMMEDIATELY charge the enemy lines and use it… and break the damned thing, then spending TWO missions repairing it. Christ
16. MSQ: Then the Bentusi suicide themselves to defeat a few drone ships oh and to give us their core
17. Moment: I have to double down on how stupid this moment is. The LAST OF THE BENTUSI commit suicide just to give us their stupid core! Have you not heard of carrier pidgeon?! Space carrier pidgeon if you want to stay on brand. Or maybe mystical Force carrier pidgeon?! I don’t know, Christ
18. MSQ: Then Makaan goes to attack us personally. I should mention that his plan hinges on us bringing the cores to him past the gate, so him trying to destroy us here is not a great idea
19. MSQ: Then I should mention that he tries to close the gate behind him. The gate he actively wants us to go through. Don’t worry it gets worse than this later
20. Outro: MSQ: So we finally kill Makaan and in revenge he’s decided to destroy Hiigara. Naturally he’s going to do so with his ultra death motherships each of which is LITERALLY invincible except to Progenitor technology. This is so many levels of ass pull I don’t even know where to start. How does he have these ships? Why does he send them here? Why has he not been instantly winning with literally invincible planet destroyers? And WHY are they literally invincible? Either way…
21. Outro: MSQ: …this Outro…
22. Outro: MSQ: …is miserable
23. Outro: Then the actual ending hits. Turns out Sajuuk was YET ANOTHER thing to get a thing to get a thing (we’re up to like 8 of these now…) and unlocks the hyperspace gates and despite the fact that half the galaxy is a burned wreck and the other half filled with endless swarms of death ships, peace now reigns! The war’s over yaaay
24. Consequence Storytelling: There’s no real thought put into anything. Range, supply lines, forces, reinforcements, anything. The enemy just has endless waves of death they can draw from eternally and that’s as close as the game comes to even acknowledging logistics or basic reality…
25. Consequence Storytelling: …because, y’know, why would that be in a war story

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mod Ease Of Use: It’s not much, but there is a built in launcher right in the game to select and load mods
2. Music: Absolutely amazing soundtrack. This might actually be one of the best soundtracks overall in the franchise…
3. Music: …and it even has multiple songs instead of just standardized ones…
4. Music: …so that’s an easy triple
5. Interface: The interface is reasonably well designed around controlling the (fairly complex) core functionality of 3D space combat in real time
6. Tutorialization: The Tutorial missions are pretty solid. I’ve seen better, but they do a good job of conveying the basics of controls and helping with the (fairly complex) control scheme
7. Controls: It definitely takes some getting used to but the controls have tons of thought and effort put into them to make the game control smoothly…
8. Controls: …and mostly intuitively
9. HUD: Excellent HUD design. Con trails, outlines per ship type, mouseovers, tons of at-a-glance…
10. HUD: …great stuff
11. Save: Reasonably good save system
12. Sound: Solid sound design for figuring out what’s going on
13. Viscerality: Audio, almost entirely audio, but the explosions and gun sounds are still legit
14. Unit Design: Corvettes. These are… ‘fine’. The Gunship is a low tier anti fighter screen. The Minelayer is next to useless thanks to the sheer spaces involved. The Pulsar Gunship is at least worthwhile as an anti Corvette screen, and the enemy employs quite a few of those
15. Unit Design: Frigates. There’s actually three Frigates worthwhile here. First is the Flak Frigate, which is essentially the perfect fighter screen (high speed tracking, plenty of counter damage, reasonable damage against everything else). Second is the Ion Frigate which… is pretty hard nerfed from the previous games but is still a concentrated armor counter. And finally we have the Torpedo Frigate which is not really good at anything but solid against everything and so can serve as our first real catch-all ship. I’ve seen better ship designs but these at least all have a use and purpose and they only die in seconds
16. Unit Design: Destroyers. These are the real workhorse ships of the fleet. Fast and accurate big guns which can absolutely destroy anything below them, with good range and good coverage thanks to having dorsal and ventral turrets, and of course two powerful torpedo tubes. It can also take a hit, making it the first ship to really be able to hold a line
17. Unit Design: Carriers. Mobile, can build most units in the game, and come with their own modules to set up static defenses and to reinforce from wherever. They ALSO function as additional factories to speed up unit replacement which (trust me) you will be doing a lot of in this game
18. Unit Design: Battlecruisers. These are probably the best overall units in the game. Big honkers of course, good coverage on turrets and Ion Cannons, a dock to help refresh corvettes and fighters, its own module slot for boosting nearby units, and the health to hang in major battles…
19. Unit Design: …probably the only really solid unit in the game
20. Enemy Design: So enemy ships don’t get as much time to shine as they probably should but there’s a lot of solid design here too. Very mission specific profiles which usually have hard counters and are generally not as good as your variants…
21. Enemy Design: …solid stuff overall
22. Level: Mission 5 (Gehenna). There’s not too much here but I like the clearly visible dust fields, I like the tricks you can take to navigate it (stay docked, or just careful formations), and I like how it’s not binary fail state (you get a good 30 seconds to recover from being spotted)
23. Level: Mission 7 (Progenitor Foundry). Again a basic mission but I do like how you can use Movers to clear radiation before sending in real ships. And we finally get access to Destroyers this mission so that helps a lot

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Unit Design: Fighters. Scouts might as well not exist, Interceptors are invalided inside of 3 missions, and Bombers… so Bombers are exceptionally useful, but get hard countered by literally over half the enemy units in the game. And they die almost immediately to anything. So I hope you enjoy rebuilding 14 squadrons of bombers over and over again
2. Unit Design: This is technically a mechanic negative. So instead of just having capture ships now we have Marine Frigates. These can capture enemy ships, but do so slowly, are super vulnerable while doing so, no ‘stun’ mechanic like we used to have, and worst of all this doesn’t let you bypass the food cap. Even if you capture an enemy producer like a carrier you can’t build enemy ships. So… this entire mechanic might as well not exist
3. Difficulty: So Homeworld 2 has this wonderful one-two punch of dynamic difficulty. The first punch is that it adds new ships to the enemy starting composition (as in, at start of mission AND at respawns and reinforcements) based on the size of your fleet. This is exactly as frustrating as it sounds, especially since this game has finite resources to go around and ship construction takes time. So this is already…
4. Difficulty: …a…
5. Difficulty: …triple, but hang on it gets worse…
6. Difficulty Curve: …because it (sometimes) tailors the enemy ship compositions to specifically counter yours. The Vaygr (basically all you fight the whole game) are uniquely suited to this as each of their ships is very good at one thing, usually countering one of your ships. So they have more ships AND they’re specifically designed to counter you…
7. Difficulty Curve: …so this…
8. Difficulty Curve: …ALSO mega sucks. But wait, I’m not done. See…
9. Info In Game: …NOTHING tells you this. I distinctly recall the first time I played Homeworld 2, could not finish it, and could not figure out why. I was just getting absolutely pounded by gargantuan fleets from hell every single mission and at a certain point I flat could not keep up. I mention this because if the game at least told you about this mechanic existing you could work around it. It’d still SUCK but you could. Which reminds me…
10. QoL: …so the way ‘around’ this is to scrap your fleet towards the end of every mission. Notice I say ‘towards the end’ not ‘at the end’. Homeworld 2 has this AWFUL feature where on certain missions once you complete an objective it just auto roombas up all the resources on the map and shunts you to the next mission. Thing is this sucks, in general actually but especially for the purposes of this dynamic difficulty. Because there’s no time to pause, rejigger your fleet composition or replenish forces, or indeed to scrap your fleet to prepare for the next mission
11. Segregation: So the Vaygr are these roaming tribal people right? That means they live in their ships and are nomadic, which means those ships need to be very multi function. They also have no centralized command structure thanks to their nature as a distended swarm. And yet they have a very rigid hierarchy with total coordination with each other and very mission specific craft because… I don’t know why. I honestly suspect that originally the fleets were swapped; that the Hiigarans had the structured mission specific craft and the Vaygr had the generalized ships
12. Walkthroughitis: The entire game has this. Missions have certain requirements and you just cannot adapt on the fly quickly enough to keep up so… bring a walkthrough (or restart each mission a few times)…
13. Walkthroughitis: …up to and including the final mission
14. Enemy AI: Cheating AI (triggers in addition to construction and resources)
15. Intro: Level: Not a good first mission. Some extremely basic tutorialization which doesn’t do a good job of conveying anything about how to play the game followed immediately by escalating what enemies we’re fighting followed by taking control away from you and forcing you to bail. It’s too short, conveys too little, and even if it wasn’t the first mission it still sucks
16. Level: Mission 2 (Angel Moon) and pacing issues. Starts off completely swamped, then becomes incredibly boring as you wait around and do literally nothing. Even the ‘swamped’ sequence is merely fine, but the ‘wait around’ sequence is about 80% of the mission…
17. Level: …and it is supremely boring
18. Level: Mission 3 (Sarum). One method to victory, swarming early, spawn distances, and you’ll lose 10 minutes before you actually realize it. That’s a recurring trend by the way, get used to that. To talk some of those points out a bit; Most missions have an intended solution. This is fine within reasons (Starcraft 2 tends to do this too) but the thing is there’s NO indicator of what that solution is in Homeworld 2, you just have to know, have a walkthrough, or restart the mission once you do. The enemy absolutely swarms you but what’s worse is they make it SEEM like you have the option to not get swarmed but then you get swarmed anyways (this also happens later). Finally enemies spawn RIGHT on their objectives which, if you don’t know and aren’t ready for it, is just a colossal pain to deal with. And finally because you need to have the counter force in place and ready to go when it’s needed you need to start building it up 10 minutes before you actually lose the mission. This mission sucks…
19. Level: …easy…
20. Level: …triple
21. QoL: No fast forwarding. This is doubly bad considering how…
22. Padding: …long it takes to build anything. This gets even worse when you start having to build or, worse, replace capital ships. Word of advice; Get four carriers going pronto so you can have more factories for smaller ships
23. Padding: Also most missions have long swaths of nothing in them
24. Pacing: This is alongside tons of weird jerky pacing throughout. There’s no such thing as a mission that just has solid flow, it’s either too fast or too slow or some weird combination of both
25. Level: Mission 4 (Gehenna Outskirts). This is another ‘sure hope you know exactly what fleet composition to use’ setup because if you’re wrong at all you’ll fall behind the deathball immediately and, once again, lose 10 minutes before you lose. Also the MOMENT you wipe out the third inhibitor it warps you to the enemy base at which point a timer starts on taking it out. Sure hope you were ready for that! This isn’t as bad as Mission 3…
26. Level: …but it’s not great
27. Level: Mission 6 (Karos Graveyard). So, we start off with a fake timer (the first of several) and thus implied we just have to hold the line until that timer finishes. We then hold the line against the super corvettes which I sure hope you’re set up with the right way to deal with that. Especially since getting resources is a pain and your mothership warps around against your will periodically. All of this is irritating…
28. Level: …but then the final part of the mission is just straight boring. Once we’ve researched the anti Mover tech killing them is a lot less of an issue so it’s just ‘stand around waiting’
29. Level: Mission 8 (Dreadnaught Birth). This is mostly just another dull mission with a cheating invincible enemy ship and waiting around for long, long stretches of nothing
30. Difficulty Curve: This is as good of a time as any to mention that this entire game’s difficulty curve is wonky, even within a single mission. You’ll bounce between things you literally cannot defeat with your current setup to absolutely steamrolling everything…
31. Difficulty Curve: …and it almost never…
32. Difficulty Curve: …stops
33. Level: Mission 9 (Counter Attack) is an exceptionally boring hold the line mission where you just sit there for forty minutes weathering attacks before it devolves into a boring kill all…
34. Level: …so, y’know, that’s fun
35. Level: Mission 10 (Great Wastelands) is an incredibly boring mission. There’s hardly any actual mission here you just wait forever for the ship to be repaired, then swat at the Keepers for a few minutes. That’s it
36. Core Mechanic: Food cap. As with so many older RTS games the food cap is entirely too low, necessitating constantly rebuilding your forces…
37. Core Mechanic: …and wasting even more time in the doing
38. Unit Design: Shield frigates are garbage. They take up a precious food slot for frigates (you only get 21 of those total), the shield they put up lasts only seconds before running out, and worst of all its range is pathetic. If it was maybe five times larger this might be worthwhile but as is it’s just useless except for the ONE mission it’s mandatory on. Speaking of which…
39. Level: Mission 11 (Bentusi Ruins) is… actually not that bad really but the finickyness of the shield frigate combined with the enemy just being flat out immune to radiation because programming is hard does not endear me
40. Level: Mission 12 (Thaddis Sabbah) is another ‘mostly fine’ except for the fact that it’s distressingly hard to not destroy the enemy base. By the way you need to land Marine Frigates on it and enemy forces prioritize Marine Frigates. Also the enemy likes to swarm around the target meaning it’s hard to not accidentally target it as well. This is all on top of the scaling getting worse and worse at this point…
41. Level: …and you have a recipe for frustration and pain
42. Level: Mission 13 (Balcora Gate) is next to impossible normally. Thanks to the whole dynamic scaling thing the number of enemy forces attacking the gate scales based on your fleet. And your forces are probably enormous after the last mission. So enjoy losing the mission inside of two minutes despite having done nothing wrong! This is when either having VERY specific strategies and fleet compositions, or going back and scuttling your fleet, becomes the solution…
43. Level: …and it arguably makes this…
44. Level: …the worst mission in the game
45. Level: Mission 14 (Balcora). This is yet another miserable slogfest of a mission made worse by the scaling issue. Ultimately it’s actually pretty vanilla, unlike the next mission
46. Outro: Level: Mission 15 (Return to Hiigara) is the actual worst mission in the game. Let’s cover this in multiple pieces. First, you have to shoot down these missiles. They’re fast, classify as frigates, and as we’ll discuss later have other related issues. If too many missiles get through you lose. So it’s already a frustrating escort mission…
47. Outro: Level: …and this by itself…
48. Outro: Level: …would make this a miserable experience…
49. Outro: Visual Distinction: …also keep in mind just finding and tracking the missiles is weirdly hard to do, especially in all the chaos going on
50. Outro: Level: Then there’s the other aspect of the mission; Destroying the missile launchers. These are gargantuan mothership-class ships which (paradoxically) fire the missiles out their TOP and not the obvious turret looking thing down below. But wait, it gets worse! These things are FLAT immune to ALL damage except from Sajuuk. This is exactly as awful as it sounds, and automatically guarantees an absolute minimum amount of time it takes to knock out each launcher because Sajuuk’s damage output kind of sucks. And all of this is on top of having to deal with everything else going on at the same time and remember the enemy forces will beeline Sajuuk, and it sucks as a unit…
51. Outro: Level: …so that’s even more…
52. Outro: Level: …misery
53. Outro: Walkthroughitis: Also good luck figuring out how any of this works without a guide or just restarting. You NEED to have your ships in position at all three nodes ready to go when the launchers spawn
54. Outro: Boss: Oh by the way the launchers also increase the rate of firing missiles the fewer they are, in addition to all the other nonsense
55. Outro: Difficulty Curve: There’s already some bad difficulty in this game, and a wonky as hell curve, but this honestly takes the cake. I have never, in my life, sat down and burnt the time on finishing this mission without cheats because of how insanely out of nowhere this difficulty spike is…
56. Outro: Difficulty Curve: …and screw it…
57. Outro: Difficulty Curve: …and the horse it flew in on

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Voice Acting: Y’know how we give multiple negatives for capital p Problems where many issues collide with each other to cause seemingly small issues to be much worse? I think this game is a capital s Solution situation. To be clear we are ignoring the (excellent) manual in all this, just what’s in the game. So let’s start at the top. First we start off with some absolutely fantastic narration which perfectly sets the tone, vibe, and significance of these events. We can tell from his tone exactly how much of a sea change this is for an entire species
2. Intro: Writing: It is also SHOCKINGLY well written. A huge amount is conveyed in very few lines
3. Intro: Plot: So our initial plot and premise is established very quickly. We are a species who has JUST entered the space age. We have our very first ships right in front of us. And we are on a mission to find home because we have discovered we are not native to our planet
4. Intro: Cutscene: We then get a beautiful panning shot of the construction ships, the Scaffold, and of course the Mothership herself as people calmly discuss launch preparations
5. Intro: Music Direction: And a (custom!) version of Adagio For Strings plays, hopeful and uplifting (remember this point for later)
6. Intro: Visual Continuity: We then have a nice panning shot of the ship itself along with a very natural, in character way to explain all its pieces and how they work, meaning we now have an idea of the ship we’ll be piloting for the rest of the game
7. Intro: Music Direction: Then across the rest of the first mission this incredibly light, airy, hopeful music plays
8. Intro: Atmosphere: And all of this makes this first mission feel exactly like what it is; A species’ first real steps into the stars. They have moved past their squabbling and have united in peace and for 60 YEARS have built this monumental achievement. All of this is also mandatory for…
9. Intro: Pacing: …the pacing of the entire Intro. Every beat of the first three missions (which comprises the Intro) is perfectly crafted to convey everything needed
10. Intro: Brickwork: By the way, the Kharak skybox is fantastic too. We can see our desert planet home (and how barren and inhospitable it really is), and our bright and shining star right there. Remember that too
11. Moment: “We made it” is such an understated line, and hits so much harder for it. Honestly much of Homeworld’s narrative success sits upon these kinds of quiet moments. Nothing over-stated, nothing over-acted. You can tell Karen is SHOCKED at the successful hyperspace jump. It’s just a single line, and several seconds of pause, and then back to business. Perfection
12. Consequence Storytelling: Everything about the Khar-Selim. It had to make the trip the slow way, people signing up for a 10 year journey to be at the destination point, ready to check data, do final changes, and resupply
13. Visual Continuity: There’s a few of these I’ll be giving as we go but my favorite is right here. We can literally look behind us and see our sun, the star now much dimmer in the distance, literally showcasing how far we have come in this first jump
14. Cutscene: Then… the reveal of the Khar-Selim. The slow pan of the ship, before we see just how damaged it is, the entire back half blown completely off. This is incredibly powerful by itself. The entire build up to this moment has been uplifting, positive, and joyous, and now we see that our intended resupply is just gone
15. Cutscene: There’s also the horrifying implications of this. Is there other life out here? Why was it hostile? Was it sentient?
16. Moment: Then we see the Turanic Raiders, and without a single line of dialogue (they NEVER talk to us by the way) we get all of their characterization. They’re flying loosely, not in formation, in crude ships coated in warpaint, and they literally bump into each other on their way to fight us
17. Atmosphere: So now we have set the tone. We’re already new to space and we’re already taking losses. We’re starting at even more of a back foot than before, having lost untold resources and personnel, not to mention 10 years of planning, and all that was supposed to go into finalizing the Mothership. But that’s okay, we can jump back and finish all that at the Scaffold
18. Moment: And then we hit the moment the game is most well known for. Before I break this down into its various positives I want to be very clear; THIS is why this is a capital s Solution situation. Because every single data point up to here has made this moment what it is. This wouldn’t be a great moment in a vacuum. And the Gameplay Axis deserves mention too because the missions have been very carefully designed up to now too. Everything was building to this and THAT is why it stuck with so many people for so many years. In any case the first thing we see, no choice because the camera is automatically pointed at it, is the Scaffold. Which is destroyed
19. Music Direction: And then we see why the earlier Adagio For Strings was so necessary. The former was a joyous and upbeat triumph, this is a quiet lament (they’re literally two different songs, just different takes on it). This song would not hit as hard if not for the earlier version (again, needed those points to build up to this)
20. Brickwork: One more for Kharak… but it’s a bit different this time around. The ENTIRE northern half of the planet is on fire. There is no hope of survivors
21. Voice Acting: And then we hear two amazingly voiced lines. One from Karen, one from Fleet Intelligence. The voice actors absolutely nail the performance here. They are completely crushed by the reality of what they’re facing but retain professionalism despite it
22. Voice Acting: This is immediately contrasted when we see the footage from the Taiidan attack. The people in THAT don’t sound ‘professional under stress’ like the Kushan have, they sound like ROBOTS. Completely emotionless as they calmly wipe out an entire planet’s worth of life. This is something I’ll actually mention again in the negatives but it says a lot about the enemy we face
23. Foreshadowing: A very minor point which is almost assuredly deliberate; We understand the language these people speak naturally. Something to ponder
24. Visual Continuity: So the whole game will get some general Visual Continuity positives as we get closer and closer to the center of the galaxy but I wanted to give special mention to Mission 4 because it’s the very first time we are so far away we can’t even see our star anymore. And it’s a nice little touch; Our home is GONE. There is nothing left back at Kharak now. No where to go but forward
25. Plot: And that’s the final reason the Intro lands so well. We had hope, which turned to dread, which turned to tragedy. We now have no where to go, no home to return to, no point in anything except exacting revenge against the fleet that destroyed our people
26. Moment: One last thing before we move on. The calmly chilling way Intelligence says “Subject did not survive interrogation”, the quiet implication that the captain was unrepentant about obliterating our home over a 4000 year old treaty, and the calm shot of space. This is one of the most understated shots of the game…
27. Moment: …and is yet another example of how this game zigs when Homeworld 2 and 3 zagged
28. Spritework: Let’s get this out of the way. While technically the Homeworld 2 ships look prettier, there’s more OF them in Homeworld 1, and they still look amazing. Further, each one conveys the tone and flavor of each faction. So the Kushan ships, right? Big, blocky, utilitarian. They look clunked together, repurposed, and crude… perfect for the ramshackle fleet that’s barely scraping together a survival. Furthermore the colors are perfect too; dull metallic blue with only a thin orange highlight. This is great stuff…
29. Spritework: …easy double positive range
30. Spritework: Then we have the Taiidan! These are badass looking (most of my favorite HW1 ships are Taiidani) and more to the point, far more ostentatious. These look like the kind of fanciful, elaborate ship designs an ancient and rotting empire can afford, with bright yellows and reds to compliment. And I have to give special mention to the gorgeous Destroyers (both variants), but my absolute favorite? The Heavy Cruiser. The Qwaar-Jet is probably the only Taiidan ship that doesn’t look flavorful, this looks like a giant brawler here to kill you. You can just tell these are the ships they deploy when they’re not playing around. So…
31. Spritework: …enjoy…
32. Spritework: …that triple
33. Spritework: Then there’s ‘the rest’. The Turanic look ramshackle, bolted together and rusted. The Kadesh look insect-like, smooth, and almost like they’re made of polished bone. And who can forget the incredible Bentusi mothership? These ships all tell their own stories and do so very well
34. Music Direction: There’s only a handful of songs but they’re used basically perfectly. Never is there a scene, mission, or moment where the song does not accent or add to the scene…
35. Music Direction: …huge props…
36. Music Direction: …and a solid triple
37. Sound: The Soundscape is amazing too. I’ll be honest I have heard better (in THIS franchise no less) but this is still stellar…
38. Sound: …and still deserves the double
39. Animation: There’s a lot of fantastic little touches in how the ships animate that adds to their ‘character’. Speaking of
40. Character: There’s some good characters in this but this isn’t about them. No, this is about something Homeworld did very well in both this and Cataclysm; the ships WERE the characters. It’s hard to explain but if you’ve played the game you probably know what I’m talking about. When you hear the Bentusi talk there’s no person, the SHIP is the person. When Karen talks you see the Mothership. When the ambassador of the Gardeners of Kadesh talk it’s the Swarmer that you’re talking to, and so on. This is a critical element of the vibe of the game and something that Homeworld 3 completely failed at
41. Dialogue: The dialogue pops in this game, full stop. I’ve already mentioned it but it’s VERY well written and very tightly scripted to say a lot with few lines…
42. Dialogue: …very solid double
43. Voice Acting: The voice acting in general deserves a double. You’ve probably heard this referred to before as the ‘professionals under stress’ and it’s VERY well done…
44. Voice Acting: …so yeah, solid double just for the general voice acting
45. Banter: This isn’t quite ‘banter’ in the normal sense but all the various dialogues as the fight develops really adds to the ‘scene’
46. Voice Acting: Special mention to the voice acting of the central characters, most notably Karen, Intelligence, and the Bentusi
47. Character: That’s a good time to mention the character of each is interesting too. The more civilian Karen, the more militaristic Intelligence, and the vaguely mystical Bentusi
48. Visual Continuity: I’ll go ahead and start giving this for general, but there’s damned good visual continuity here. In mission 4 we can no longer see our own star. We can see the Garden of Kadesh nebula on approach, and we can see it fading as we leave. We can see the galactic core get closer, and the supernova going off light years away…
49. Visual Continuity: …and so on…
50. Visual Continuity: …all the way to the end
51. Moment: The first contact with the Bentusi is a masterclass moment. Put yourself into the mind of someone who has never played this game before. Our first contact (the Turanic) was attack on sight. Our SECOND contact (Taiidan) was genocide on sight. This is our third ‘first contact’ and it is this enormous, mobile, alien looking ship which slowly approaches entirely too closely while a tension chord holds. We send out the ambassador because at this point ‘not shooting us on sight’ puts them in the lead, and we all hold our breath… until it turns out they’re friendly. And by friendly I mean they’re traders who will trade tech for resources, but again at this point that’s a huge boon to us. This is tense…
52. Moment: …built up…
53. Moment: …and fortuitous for the future
54. Consequence Storytelling: The whole game oozes this really. Almost every tidbit logically follows how the setting has been established, and develops naturally along those lines. The Turanic are pathetic pirates who are cheap labor to the Taiidan, which is why we are a match for them. We had salvaged tech and equipment we could use in our initial construction, which is why we can swing with existing spacefaring powers. We get boosted by the Bentusi because they feel guilty for their role in things. And so on…
55. Consequence Storytelling: …it’s all good stuff but…
56. Consequence Storytelling: …one last note. The entire reason we can defeat the Taiidan assault fleet is because our orbital defenses actually did some solid damage to them (in fact it’s WHY said fleet is recovering in the Great Wastelands). A nice touch
57. MSQ: So… now what. Missions 1 to 5 are all one arc and conclude with the destruction of everyone who hurt us… but now what? We still have our vague decision to go home of course but now we know that is a much dangerous task than previously thought. Thankfully there’s this imperial broadcast we got which gives us a vague idea of the Taiidan defense outposts, so we can plot around that a bit (also thanks to our Far Jump drive). So now we enter the ‘breather’ segments of Act 2, which encompass missions 6 through 9. I do like how this entire arc has gone, and it’s well constructed to be believable how we can hold our own at all against such a vastly superior force (it’s hard for them to fight us when we can skip past so much of them so effortlessly)
58. Brickwork: Special mention to the beautiful nebula the Garden of Kadesh
59. Cutscene: The first few moments of the Garden are fantastic. We see another ship arrive; Gigantic, insect-like, covered in polished bone armor. They don’t shoot at us on sight (good sign) and we reach out peacefully. They then inform us in a very unusual and almost uncanny valley manner that we have two options; join or die. We seek to leave peacefully…
60. Cutscene: …which means death
61. Voice Acting: I really must praise the gentleman who voices the Kadeshi. He is just the right aspects of detached and religiously zealous. He almost sounds like he’s on drugs, which he might be
62. Atmosphere: The atmosphere of the entire sequence is fantastic
63. MSQ: And then we learn the Kadesh are our distant cousins. Lost to the desert of Kadesh instead of the sands of Kharak they have laid here in languish for a long time (I’ll mention this in the negatives later too) and sit in fear of ever leaving, thinking their ancient foes will come and kill them all… and for those who remember the Gaalsiens this probably sounds familiar
64. Brickwork: Everything about Supernova Station and the blazing supernova in the background that will literally burn your ships to ash is terrifying
65. MSQ: So, next act. Things are ramping up now. From mission 10 up to 12 (three missions total) we’re very surgically striking at the outskirts of the Taiidan Empire, trying to carve a path coreward in hopes of bypassing most of their primary fleets. There’s not a lot going on here narratively but this is also when we find out that there’s such a thing as not-horribly-evil Taiidan
66. Outro: The ending proper. It’s simple but, as usual, very well written with great implication and a great cutscene
67. Animation: This is a good time to mention that the greyscale sketched drawing stylized cutscenes are fantastic in general. Every briefing (plus the Intro and Outro) all do a wonderful job of conveying everything and are enjoyable regardless…
68. Animation: …so…
69. Animation: …take that triple
70. Camera: Great usage of camera too, mostly in gameplay. The slow pan of the Khar-Selim, the Supernova research station, the hyperspace inhibitor, et cetera
71. Theme: The journey, and everything that means

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: There’s a few holes in how the Garden of Kadesh actually operates. How did they keep having things like food and water for literal centuries? How did they build new ships? They mention using anti hyperdrives to ‘hunt’ other ships but do they go beyond the nebula? This is all basically handwaved away
2. World Building: There’s some… weirdness here. For part of this plot to work the old Hiigaran exiles had to traverse the galaxy at sublight, which means an obscene amount of time crawling across the galaxy at the speed of slug. And then there needed to be ANOTHER time gap long enough for us to forget our history and origins. The problem isn’t any of that. The problem is that the galaxy has basically not changed since then. In four THOUSAND years the galaxy hasn’t budged an inch technologically, geographically, or politically? Four thousand frickin’ years. Please think about how long that is for a second
3. MSQ: Why uh… why is the Graveyard here? In fact why is ANY of this arc here? This is just a side quest WHILE we’re doing the final run towards Hiigara
4. Pacing: The entire Final Act is weirdly rushed. We don’t even find out a rebellion against the Taiidan EXISTS until the very end of Mission 12 (of 16, to be clear). And we barely get any insight into what’s going on behind the scenes (and to be clear, quite a bit is going on). We don’t even see the Council properly!

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: The music in this game is almost perfect, to a T. Every song is enjoyable to listen to and each one is a ‘theme’ for different types of situations (enemies, breather segments, tension pieces, etc.)…
2. Music: …consider this…
3. Music: …a strong triple
4. Song: Adagio for Strings (both versions) deserves special mention. “But Lore,” I hear you say, “That’s an old song, they didn’t make it!” Au contraire. This is a bespoke recording of the song done just for this game (and, again, there’s the ‘elation’ version in mission 1 which becomes the Kushan’s theme, and the mournful one more people remember in mission 3)
5. Controls: Excellent controls. With only a few niggles here and there you can swiftly and easily zip around, move the camera, select, order, hotkey, and otherwise control everything…
6. Control: …very solid double
7. Visual Distinction: There’s a few issues in later missions but thanks to the outline shapes and radar mode it’s pretty distinct
8. HUD: Excellent HUD. Lots of at-a-glance, between current composition, fleet positions, orders and formations, resources, what’s in progress and where…
9. HUD: …all great stuff
10. Interface: Generally good interface. This is definitely a positive the original would not get, for reference, since some effort was put into smoothing this out in the remaster
11. Saves: Decent saves, which can be hit and loaded at will (in mid combat even)…
12. Saves: …and decent autosaves
13. Difficulty Curve: The game is a nearly smooth incline upwards across the entire game. It knows exactly how to ramp things up, and it’s rare you’ll fight something ‘full tilt’ before you’ve had a chance to cut your teeth on it. This…
14. Difficulty Curve: …makes…
15. Difficulty Curve: …for a very smooth curve
16. Mod Support: Ease of Use, specifically. It’s not great BUT there is an option in the launcher to select mods per campaign and per game so that’s nice
17. Sound Design: Mostly the barks and info callouts but there’s some good stuff here too. If you’re idling and you hear ion beams going off you know something’s up
18. Unit Design: Interceptors and Bombers. Their time to death is absurd, but in large numbers (which are easy to field) they are a very fast response craft and can do decent damage. While Interceptors are better on unarmored and Bombers against capital ships, both can work on the other in a pinch. They will eventually fall behind but they’re still useful for a solid half of the campaign at least
19. Unit Design: Combat Corvettes and Multi-Guns. This boils down to Heavy Corvettes (if you feel like punching up) or the Multi Gunner Corvettes (for punching down). Both are useful in numbers and can pretty much replace fighters as a Strikecraft screen
20. Unit Design: Repair Corvettes and Support Frigates. This is your repair option, and keeping plenty of both can be quite helpful in keeping your bigger fleet afloat. Also dovetails nicely with the salvage mechanic we’ll talk about later
21. Unit Design: Ion Beam Frigates are our first really good unit. It’s so simple too, it’s just a basic frigate with a giant beam coming out of it. That beam, in addition to looking and sounding cool, is our first tool for piercing armor and in numbers can absolutely shred larger ships. We’ll be using these the entire game
22. Unit Design: Resource Controller and Carrier. Simple support vessels for dropping off resources (giving us some control over our income throughput) but also big, heavily armored chonkers who can also heal strike craft and, in the carrier’s case, produce frigates and smaller to quickly reinforce. A non-terrible strategy is to have the carrier right up by something you’re wanting to capture churning out Salvage Corvettes, to use one example
23. Unit Design: Destroyer, our first truly solid unit by itself. It’s got the armor to hang and the weapons to do things, and is still fast and maneuverable enough to not be a bloated boat. These are the centerpoints of most navies in this game and for a reason. Then you add the Missile Destroyer in and its incredible ability to deal with strike craft and long range artillery as well as being capable of dealing with basically anything else…
24. Unit Design: …and you have some solid stuff
25. Unit Design: Heavy Cruiser, the boat. Big, tons of armor, tons of health, very few weak points (though there are a few), gigantic turrets, and ion beams of death. This absolute monster has great coverage no matter the faction and can both give and take. It is the centerpoint of the fleet and appropriately difficult to procure and very worthwhile to do so…
26. Unit Design: …fantastic ship
27. Core Mechanic: Persistent fleets is a great concept (done better in later games). It encourages you to not blow ships you can’t afford to replace and, of course, makes salvaging even more tempting
28. Tutorialization: There is an actual tutorial mission but it’s kind of unnecessary if you have an idea of how to play. If you do NOT it’s almost mandatory for figuring out things like the camera and controls
29. Intro: Level: Tutorialization: All three Intro missions tutorialize in different ways. The first mission is all about the fundamentals; Controls, moving, attacking, formations, gathering, researching, building. The second mission is about dealing with the stressors of a real battle. The third mission is about handling things under a time budget. Each of these forms the pillars of almost every mission afterwards so it’s important to get this stuff down. Also the third mission does a good job of conveying that you can capture enemy ships, hint hint
30. Intro: Level: Mission 2, Outskirts of Kharak System. So we hop out here and we have to deal with enemy waves. The first few waves are pathetic, BUT if you haven’t built any additional fighters you’re going to have a rough time. If you fail and restart, you have learned you need to build before a fight rather than during it. If you succeed but barely, you’ve learned the same lesson. And if you’ve prepped you now know how to deal with enemy waves of attacks. Further it conveys how to deal with provoking mission progress (an important skill in Homeworld games) as well as conveys the feeling of sudden assault but holds back the enemies you’re facing so you are unlikely to get overwhelmed so early
31. Intro: Level: Mission 3, Return to Kharak is shocking good escort mission design. So we have 6 friendlies we need to save, they are being attacked by a handful of Assault Frigates, which will slowly but surely whittle them down. These ships have difficult dealing with our fighters, and will initially focus on the target but are easy to grab back to you and therefore keep the cryo trays safe. Furthermore while you may obviously WANT to save all six, it’s worth noting the only requirement is to save one of the trays, so it has a gradient as well. And as mentioned above, this is good tutorialization for capturing enemy ships
32. Level: Mission 4, Great Wastelands, fighting the Turanic. There’s a nice pause before you really have to deal with them (as the Bentusi will take their time and give you a chance to gather, but as soon as you send the Bentusi away the Turanic attack). The Array frigates attack alongside the usual (great early capture targets by the way), meaning we are now seeing the full might of the Turanic but it’s still beneath what we can field, and of course then we finally take out that carrier. This is ultimately the last tutorial for how combat works and is preparation for the next mission
33. Level: Mission 5, Great Wastelands 2, fighting the Taiidan fleet. This is the functional ‘first act boss’, and our final exam for the game. Every mission prior to this has been preparing and building for this one, and there are lots of ways to deal with it. The enemy has frigates, destroyers, and a carrier, along with plenty of screens. You can nab some VERY early nice ships here (especially those Destroyers, and the Carrier) or just punch your way through. This also establishes a trend; You always have access to a ship type via capturing before you can build your own
34. Core Mechanic: And this is a good time to talk about capturing ships. In summary, it’s great. Capturing is high risk and high reward, as you can only field 14 Salvage Corvettes at a time and you need an increasing amount based on the ship in question (2 for Frigates, 4 for Destroyers, 6 for Carriers and Heavy Cruisers), the ships in question are quite vulnerable (though decently fast), and thanks to how their AI works they’ll only send how many is needed at a time meaning if one gets blown up ONE will then move in to replace it, which might also get blown up (meaning having a ‘screen’ of other ships to draw aggro helps). And of course then the Corvettes have to drag the ship back to the mothership to be actually captured. Finally if they lose any of the Corvettes required to capture it’ll stall; They’ll keep the ship ‘stunned’ but they still need the full amount to continue capturing. On the flip side you can capture beyond your population limit, and you can capture ships WAY earlier than you can get them in many cases (sometimes 3 or even 4 missions before they’re purchasable). This is a fantastic mechanic and not only adds an extra hard mode to many missions but a great reward for pulling it off…
35. Core Mechanic: …great stuff
36. Level: Mission 6, Diamond Shoals. This is our very first true breather mission. There’s asteroids coming and they will destroy your ships (either instantly or very quickly) and they will obliterate the Mothership, so deal with them. There’s plenty of resources on the map so you can and should be recovering, but the reason this mission is interesting is twofold. First it’s another smart escort mission (keep the Mothership alive) in that it’s semi gradient and the asteroid field is not nearly as bad as it looks, which leads me to the Second point, it’s a good way to really convey to the player how to deal with 3D space. You only really need to damage the column in front of the Mothership, so planning around that and using the camera to that effect is the intended solution here. You can also just have some mobile attack craft attack all too of course
37. Level: Mission 7, Gardens of Kadesh. This is actually one of the shortest missions in the game, not counting the initial tutorial levels. So we start off with a fairly large infusion of resources which you should do everything in your power to gather en masse because you’re going to be (literally) swarmed soon. This is a fascinating challenge which doesn’t work… QUITE as well as it did back in the original thanks to the removal of fuel. This would probably be our first multi positive mission in the original. Anyways there’s still some good stuff here, since almost all of what you deal with is dozens of tiny craft which do little damage but are pretty hard to hit (also a good time to start investing into anti Strikecraft, like the Multi-Gun Corvette)
38. Level: Mission 8, Cathedral of Kadesh is a bit more interesting. First the enemy fleet has now expanded to include the legendary Multi-Beam Frigate which… I mean, capture as many as you can (there’s nine total across a normal campaign for reference, across this and the next mission) but also is a fascinating challenge in that it’s a glass cannon unit (one of the only glass cannons in the game), and you have to deal with this WHILE being swarmed. But further you have three spire ships to deal with, and you can go for whichever you want to first which will cause the other two to huddle up to group their defensive screens
39. Level: Mission 10, Supernova Station. This… is such an interesting mission. So any ship that’s out and about in the non safe zones (visually indicated by the dust fields, in both normal and radar view) will start losing health rapidly relative to its armor value. This means fighters and corvettes will MELT, which effectively forces the player to either be clever with them (a carrier can berth a bunch into safe zones) or lean on your capital fleet (possibly for the first time). Navigating the columns can be a little irritating but I do kind of like how you have to be clever to gather resources on this mission too (each resource node requires traversing non safe zones so you’ll NEED a Controller or Carrier there to help), and of course the mission itself is honestly relatively easy… unless you want to capture that big beautiful Heavy Cruiser that’s always there (and its Destroyer escorts). So, we have nice terrain design, creative unit variety encouragement, multiple possible strategies, and optional hard mode…
40. Level: …sounds legit to me
41. Level: Mission 11, Tenhauser Gate is so simple of a mission you’re probably wondering why it’s a positive. Well, three reasons. First, the enemy fleet attacking the Bentusi is RIGHT there, and it’s a big fleet… bigger than any you’ve fought the entire game so far. And you should be able to CRUSH it. This is a mission designed to make you feel just how far you’ve come from fighting Turanic fighters and having trouble with a few frigates. Second, the enemy fleet is of a nice varied composition, meaning you’re encouraged to think about what you focus on first with what. And finally, this mission is a candystore of enemy ships to be captured (another Heavy Cruiser, at least!) Oh and one last benefit; It’s a SHORT mission, probably the actual shortest mission in the game (not counting the cutscene)
42. Level: Mission 12, Galactic Core. So we’re ambushed. I’ll talk about a negative related to this mission later but the initial ambush is nice; Only your capital ships are ready to go immediately, so hopefully you’re ready to go for their initial wave. There are roaming carrier groups to be dealt with. And then finally there’s a force attacking a ‘friendly’ Destroyer, which is once again a good escort mission (it’s weird, I don’t think I ever processed before how many good escort missions are in this game). Anyways, each Carrier group is well designed, the Destroyer attack is JUST varied enough to be a threat without being irritating, and the initial assault is a good pay attention check
43. Level: Mission 14, Bridge of Sighs, is a fascinating mission. It’s probably the most perfect example of the dichotomy of this game. If you just want to get the objective it’s a well defended but fascinating defensive arrangement, with three Destroyers and a Heavy Cruiser in aggro radius of each other, one roaming Carrier, and three reinforcement points… and of course, 108 (yes you read that correctly) Ion Frigates which tend to pulse aggro each other in groups surrounding it. A fun mission, legitimately…
44. Level: …but what makes it so fascinating is it’s a short, mean mission UNLESS you want to capture ships. And if you do… well, you are spoiled for choice
45. Level: Mission 15, Chapel Perilous has a couple of issues I’ll mention later but it’s still a tight, fun damage race. Destroy the enemy escort fleet (it’s a great range of ships at this point, hitting every ship type) or distract them or tank them or disable them, and damage the rock down before it’s too late. That’s it, short but sweet
46. Viscerality: Visuals. The explosions are pretty, the shots are pretty
47. Viscerality: Audio. Some fantastic audio design here. Explosions, missiles, big meaty turrets, the iconic Ion Beams…
48. Viscerality: …great stuff
49. Viscerality: Impact. When you blast an enemy with ion beams and they just melt, or when you focus fire down a Destroyer you can feel those shots
50. Replayability: I’ve replayed this game many times, and intend to at least once more in my life. Of course it gets the first positive
51. Enemy AI: Generally good throughout
52. Options: And surprisingly decent options

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Difficulty: So Homeworld 1 Remastered is built out of the Homeworld 2 engine. Oh it’s tooled and touched up but it’s the same engine underneath. This means some features got ‘backported’… and the worst of these is the scaling difficulty. At the beginning of each mission the game looks at your fleet size and composition and then boosts the enemy forces and resources relative to how big your fleet is. This is a terrible idea in general, sucked in Homeworld 2, and is somehow WORSE here because the game is NOT designed around this. This scaling can absolutely break the game in several ways, not the least of which being that you’re actively punished for building a fleet (and salvaging past your food line). So this is already
2. Difficulty: …a…
3. Difficulty: …triple, but hang on it gets worse…
4. Difficulty Curve: …because this ties into a later issue, the possibility of softlocking. This can and DOES lead to a bit of an arms race between you and the scaling, because the solution to this is to make an EVEN BIGGER fleet. No, seriously, imagine you see two Heavy Cruisers coming at you. Your reaction is probably going to be something like ‘scramble the Salvagers!’ because you can field 14 at once so that means you can capture both if you’re careful… but now your fleet is bigger and the next enemy force will be even bigger…
5. Difficulty Curve: …and so on…
6. Difficulty Curve: …and so forth. Couple more complaints…
7. Info In Game: …See NOTHING tells you this. I only know it exists thanks to research and doing my homework. This is even worse now because a LOT of people recommend Homeworld (for good reason) and imagine playing for the first time and running into this constantly increasing enemy fleet size and naturally presuming it’s just the game getting harder as you get further into it. Oh and by the way…
8. QoL: …so the way ‘around’ this is to scrap your fleet towards the end of every mission. At the very least missions don’t end instantly like in Homeworld 2 but this is still such ass backwards design. One last problem though…
9. Level: …see, Homeworld 2 was at least designed with this mechanic in mind. It SUCKS but it was intentional. It was UNintentionally backported into Homeworld 1, and Homeworld 1 has WAY more variety in its mission design and objectives. And those objectives do not always work well when the enemy fleet is suddenly gigantic and also rich in resources…
10. Level: …so that’s…
11. Level: …the final nail in the coffin. For anyone curious there is a way around this, there are multiple mods (including the Player Patch) which give you options to remove scaling (or even make it worse!)
12. Core Mechanic: The persistent fleet thing has one huge drawback. If you win a mission via a pyrrhic victory it’s entirely possible you may no longer be able to beat the game, because you can sap your resources to the point where you can’t recover (not every mission even HAS resources to harvest) and you can lose so much that the next mission can kill you. This is already bad but what really makes it worse, ironically, is that the missions are well designed. This means that you can go for SEVERAL missions before you realize you’ve lost the game, and that always sucks
13. Bug: Dialogues not playing periodically. We only saw this twice but it was pretty irritating
14. Unit Design: Light Corvettes and Assault Frigates. These units are pathetic and outclassed almost immediately. Most RTS games have this problem; early units that are completely abandoned later in the game, but what makes Light Corvettes and Assault Frigates particularly noteworthy is they’re out-dated within a single mission in both cases. There is NEVER a need to build these
15. Unit Design: There are a large number of units which literally only exist for one mission each. Now that’d be fine (plenty of RTS’s do this kind of gimmick design) but the problem is these ships HAVE no use outside of that gimmick. Once you’ve used your gravity generator on the Junkyard Dog you might as well sell it, you will never have use for it again (to name one example)
16. Level: Mission 9, Sea of Lost Souls is one of the worst missions in the game. So there’s this ghost ship we’re investigating for ABSOLUTELY no reason (remember this is the ‘side quest’ Act of the game so… whatever). If you don’t know what you’re doing you probably just charge in, and when you do whatever you just sent is probably going to get mind controlled by the Ghost Ship and start attacking you (anything smaller than a frigate is taken over in a range around the thing). Thing is it has a STUPID amount of armor so to really do anything here you know what you need to do? That’s right; Bombers. You CAN use other ships but really, bring Bombers. This is honestly pretty boring more than anything because what the mission boils down to is; Fling Bombers at the Ghost Ship until you win. If you want to capture the enemy craft then there’s a few ways you can do that but you gain them automatically anyways if you knock out the Ghost Ship. This is the worst combination of boring and frustrating…
17. Level: …and the first time we ran into an interesting bug! We didn’t have any radar pings of where the Ghost Ship was after we disabled it, meaning I had trouble FINDING it again (turns out space is big, who knew). Not the last time we have that issue. In fact…
18. Level: Mission 12, Galactic Core has these roaming Carrier groups. They need to be destroyed to progress. Aaand they are NOT on the radar. Have fun finding them!
19. Bug: Collision bugs. There are so many weird times when ships pathfinding and collision run into each other
20. Level: Mission 13, The Karos Graveyard… sucks. It’s a giant graveyard filled with detectors to prevent you from cloaking and turrets everywhere… and naturally the frickin’ Junkyard Dog
21. Level: Encounter: The Junkyard Dog is a ship with an obscene amount of health and armor that can instantly capture your ships. It will prioritize your biggest ships first. Did I mention you get access to Heavy Cruisers this mission? That’s a fun surprise. There is a way around this (ignoring just literally flying around the map and not triggering the encounter) and the ‘intended’ solution is to use the Gravwell Generator to lock it in place before it captures a ship and pound on it for minutes on end and I hope you brought SEVERAL generators cuz one won’t cut it. That’s it that’s the strat…
22. Level: Walkthroughitis: …and NOTHING indicates the ‘intended’ solution (using the Gravwell generator) is even viable, nevermind something you can do. And even this just immobilizes the damn thing so you can pound it (so I hope you brought several)
23. Padding: Some issues in the late game missions
24. Crash: The Remaster was weirdly crash happy our entire playthrough
25. Seconds In Minutes: This is a common problem in strategy games but there are long, long stretches of just waiting for research to finish or resources to be collected or ships to be built or traveling from Point A to Point B…
26. Seconds In Minutes: …and it sucks
27. Level: Mission 15, Chapel Perilous, is overall a good mission but it’s also a perfect example of that softlock problem I’ve already mentioned. If you don’t have the fleet ready to go in this mission you are dead, it is a hard timer to beat the mission and if you cannot damage that asteroid down while dealing with the enemy fleet, that’s it
28. Outro: Level: Mission 16, Hiigara. I’ve seen worse (IN this game no less) but ultimately this is a boring mission. Hold the line against some (admittedly mean) ships then… just go attack the enemy fleet and that’s kind of it

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Loading screens do some cool stuff here. We see the temperature, remaining supplies, and where we’ve been and where we’re going
2. Brickwork: This is kind of a weird one. There’s just desert… it’s REALLY well done desert, and there’s a little bit of variety as we see plateaus and cliffs and canyons, but it’s still just an endless desert…
3. Brickwork: …so call that a double for the entire game
4. Voice Acting: For being mostly smaller named actors and a lot of television actors they kinda nail it. There’s some great actors for all the principal cast, notably Intel, the Captain, and all the Gaalsien characters…
5. Voice Acting: …so take that double
6. Voice Acting: Then there’s the ‘professionals under stress’ voice acting and I’m going to be honest this MIGHT be the best of that we’ve ever seen. It’s always been good (even in 2 and 3) but it just POPS here…
7. Voice Acting: …so consider that…
8. Voice Acting: …a solid triple, plus…
9. Banter: …the regular professional banter plus the little side conversations that happen are, without question, the best we’ve seen in the series…
10. Banter: …and so earn…
11. Banter: …a solid triple
12. Spritework: Absolutely phenomenal. It’s a shame there’s only two factions cuz these are probably the second best looking ships in the series (behind 2’s, weirdly enough). The shame of this is there’s only, really, two factions. Both look VERY sharp and both do a lot of storytelling (similar to Homeworld 1). So we’ll start with the Northern Coalition. These are big, blocky ships that look like repurposed construction vehicles. Big trawlers and treads alongside big ol’ wheels. You can tell we’re not really used to this deep in the desert but we’re managing…
13. Spritework: …and it’s awesome
14. Spritework: Then there’s the Gaalsiens who have friggin’ hoverships with nice, smooth angles that look like they’ve been polished to a sheen. Every one of these looks like they belong in the desert, and completely bypasses all the terrain difficulties…
15. Spritework: …and it’s awesome
16. External Continuity: There’s some issues here we’ll cover down in the negatives but this does still do a great job of connecting with Homeworld 1 (and, sadly, 2) and perhaps uniquely serves equally well as the first or second game in the franchise. By which I mean you can play this then 1, or 1 then this, and both directions work for different reasons
17. Intro: Epsilon Base and the sand wall, as well as the massive construction yars. Great brickwork, doodads, and a good insight into what the edge of the desert looks like (to serve as nice contrast for when we get further and further south)
18. Intro: They also do a good job of conveying the sense of scale (we see several zoomed in shots of people alongside their monstrously huge craft… which are then dwarfed by Rachel’s craft) and this helps frame the rest of the game. There’s also some good visual design in general on craft to convey how huge they are (you can see tiny, tiny windows which are the bridges for example)
19. Intro: Cutscene: The entire intro setup is nice. The world is dying, we have a long shot of success, the Gaalsiens have been attacking constantly and causing issues, and the game makes it clear this is one HELL of a hail mary
20. Character: General. Intel is the big winner here on our side, though the Captain is nice too. And I’m especially fond of the Gaalsiens. Like, all o them
21. Music Direction: The music is very well used in this game, which is good because it’s an absolute banger soundtrack…
22. Music Direction: …easy triple territory
23. Cutscene: The painted style cutscenes are neat. I’ll admit I prefer the greyscale sketches of 1 but these are still good
24. Sound: Excellent soundscape in general. The rumble of the engines, the winds, the thrum of the bigger vehicles
25. Character: Jacob S’Jet, also known as the real main character of the game. I am not joking. Dude finds out the truth about the desertification of the world, is assigned to an expedition more or less knowing it is a suicide run to buy time for the Northern Coalition, survives, endures Gaalsien capture for years, escapes having stolen the controls to the orbital super weapon, and activates the damned thing to keep the Gaalsiens away from it. All while leaving crumbs for his sister to pick up years later. This dude is heroic, a long term thinking, and perfectly keeps with the overarcing theme and tone of the entire franchise; The indomitable will of people to strive against all odds
26. Outro: I do like the actual final mission with the super carrier, and the enemy weeping for us as he begs us to seek forgiveness, believing we have doomed everyone

Story Negatives:

1. Character: The Gaalsiens are super insistent that we have to stay here because if we leave the wrath of the gods will wipe us all out. This is.. fine I guess, but it’s a bit one note and, much more importantly it directly collides with another problem which makes both worse…
2. Plot: …the dying world. See, this removes all dilemma and nuance from the situation. There’s no argument here. We enter space to survive or we slowly die here, that’s it. The Gaalsiens are just plain in the wrong. And this is honestly to the detriment of the narrative since it makes them a generic badguy race when every single time we interact with them there’s hints of actual character and depth there
3. Dialogue: The dialogue in this game is… bad. I’ve seen worse (in this series, no less!) but this is pretty bad. A lot of on-the-nose discussion of events, repeat dialogue of repeating what we already repeated, and people just rambling without saying anything…
4. Dialogue: …not great
5. Cutscene: Mission briefings in general kind of suck. They’re either Rachel failing at her character arc (I’ll get back to this in a sec) or the others just bein’ like yep, here we be, doin’ our stuff
6. Intro: The entire Intro is entirely too frenetically paced. We barely start before we’re absolutely overwhelmed with enemy troops and events. And I get that they were going for exactly that feeling but something about it just feels off and unpleasant instead. It’s hard to appreciate anything, especially since narratively this is us actually pushing back against the tide
7. Plot: So why is the Great Hyperspace Core dragging ships for LIGHT YEARS around down to Kharak? Never answered by the way
8. External Continuity: Speaking of, everything I just said. This is a pretty big retcon and it only crudely fits existing canon. But even ignoring how it doesn’t quite fit…
9. World Building: …it doesn’t really fit anything. The Kushan getting the boost from the Khar-Toba and the planet unifying in this big uplifting moment to reach out to the stars is curtailed a bit by the fact that they had CENTURIES worth of nearly pristine alien ships to use to copy and repurpose
10. Atmosphere: I was debating this as a positive originally but as we slowmode our way through it the tone of the game just kind of… falls flat. It’s going for the big war story against a superior force (just like 2.. and 3) but while it’s the best of this bundle of three it still kind of fails a bit
11. Character: Speaking of failing, Rachel. They wanted her to be a central character with a big personal story about her brother and both fall completely flat. She has no real closure, and honestly she has no real relevance to events outside of being a hero unit. Honestly her brother is a better character
12. Pacing: The entire narrative is bizarrely paced, almost assuredly because there’s huge swaths of the game that do not exist. You push through act 1 too quickly, act 2 meanders, act 3 is too short, and act 4 has a weird mandatory side quest in the middle of it we’ll talk about in a sec. The whole thing is distended, being too short and too long…
13. Pacing: …it’s…
14. Pacing: …awkward
15. MSQ: Side quest of the Sakala in act 4. So hey! The Sakala betrays us. This is technically in character in lore but that, y’know, is NOT IN THE GAME so does not count. In the game there’s almost no build up to this other than the captain giving one line in a mission talking about how much he doesn’t like them guys. But that’s merely bad, what makes this really bad? It doesn’t mean anything. They betray us right before the SECOND to last mission. So it’s a speedbump, a side quest in the middle of the last minute sprint for the finish line, and hell we already got plenty of resupplies anyways AND it didn’t even mean anything other than forcing us to kill them before we kill the Gaalsiens. That’s it. This might as well not have even been here
16. External Continuity: So right towards the end we get one last plot twist. Turns out the Taiidan had decided to deploy a Carrier to set up an orbital weapon around Kharak before being dragged down (no explanation on why it even got in orbit considering most ships can’t even get near the planet but whatever). Okay. This just messes with absolutely everything. We know who the Taiidan are (we even have their NAME and SHIP PROFILE cuz a friggin’ cruiser landed here). We know external alien powers exist AND that they wanted to kill us (or keep us trapped, we never elaborate). Also the Taiidan spent about 3900 years doing absolutely nothing but decided all of the sudden y’know let’s send one ship out cuz screw those guys. ALSO also despite doing this they then spent a CENTURY doing NOTHING when said carrier went missing. There’s ways to make this work…
17. External Continuity: …but they don’t. Worse…
18. Plot: …it’s for nothing. This changes nothing. There’s no big last minute reveal here, and barely any relevance to the plot. Honestly if the orbital laser had been a Hiigaran laser left in orbit by the original settlers it’d change nothing
19. Outro: The actual ending is flat at best, very unfinished

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: Decent for what is there. Easy and Normal are both exactly what you’d imagine, but Classic is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an old RTS difficulty; the enemy cheats with production time and resource requirements and always perfectly knows where you are
2. Sound: Generally good sound design to help you figure out what’s happening and where
3. Music: This might legitimately be the best music in the franchise, and I don’t say that lightly. I HIGHLY recommend picking up the soundtrack if you have an interest…
4. Music: …so enjoy…
5. Music: …a solid triple
6. Save: Acceptable for what it is, and a decent (though only one) Autosave
7. Unit Design: AAVs are a solid early game unit. Decently fast, with enough resources to survive more than a few seconds, good generalized damage, and reasonably cheap. They honestly replace the LAVs for most normal combat
8. Unit Design: Railguns (there are several types) are weirdly good. At first you might be tempted to think they’re not worth the effort but they’re one of those unit types where the more of them you get together the more useful they are. They die fast (about as fast as AAVs) but they have great range (especially with upgrades) and great damage, and you have to be very mindful of the terrain. Very solid early carry unit
9. Unit Design: The Carrier itself (the Kapisi) is great. We’ll talk about the shunting later but the unit itself is fantastic. Tons of health but not too much, the ability to heal, fire missiles, have turrets, and anti air. It is a very solid bulky frontline unit that can do a bit of everything but is vulnerable enough that you still need to take care of it and it rewards careful tactics…
10. Unit Design: …a very solid double. The only reason I’m not giving it a triple is because the shunting gets its own positive
11. Unit Design: Fighters in general. The fighters are great strike craft that can be used in basically any type of situation as fast response units. They’re expensive and easy to die though so you can’t lean on them too hard. The bombers are similar; They will absolutely destroy everything but are relatively slow and easy to knock over so need either support or to accept the loss
12. Unit Design: Support Cruisers are fantastic, uh, support craft. They can AOE heal, provide a spot to drop items off at, and gains a few other things like EMPs
13. Unit Design: Artillery Cruisers can do lobbing shots across an insane distance. I honestly don’t have much to add to this, they’re friggin’ artillery. Hard to use and requires support but very useful if you do
14. Unit Design: Battlecruisers. Big honkin’ ships with big honkin’ guns. These are exactly what this type of ship usually is and is exceptionally useful as a tank and damager
15. Unit Design: Assault Cruisers are no where near as tanky as Battlecruisers nor do they hit as hard, but they are more maneuverable and faster and so more useful as a hit and run craft
16. QoL: There’s an option called Default Fleet. It’s not what I’d call the best fleet composition but what it is is a way to avoid having to rewind the clock too far if you end up having too many pyrrhic victories. In short it bypasses the softlock issue of several other Homeworld games
17. HUD: Decent for what it is. Probably the worst in the series, but still decent
18. Terrain: Naturally, it’s a major feature of the game. You are detrimented for being lower, benefit from being higher, and terrain can interrupt line of sight. Terrain is a fairly major element of tactics and using it well is how you can punch pretty far above your weight
19. Core Mechanic: Veterancy is back and still pretty solid. It’s not the best (because ships have such a fast time to die that it’s honestly pretty hard to keep anything around long enough to benefit except the big ships which you don’t get until VERY late game… or you can grind infinite respawns) but it’s still great the various benefits they get. Cool things too like range of attack or speed, in addition to various damage and stat boosts
20. Core Mechanic: Power shunting. I mentioned this up above with the Carrier, you gain the ability to shunt power across the four boards. Now there’s a few caveats here, but in general this allows great flexibility in what you want your Carrier to do at any given point in time. You have to keep track of heat of course (in fact you also have to keep in mind that heat changes on a per map basis as you get further into the desert) but this is still a very cool system. You can also deliberately overheat the ship which makes it take continuous damage, so it’s a nice gradient choice on if you want to eat that damage to get the benefits
21. Core Mechanic: Artifacts (pseudo randomness and mutation). So the quality of Artifacts varies pretty wildly and which ones you get is actually random (or indeed if Artifacts drop at all, they have a chance from each ship you break) and can be generally beneficial or even playstyle altering
22. Intro: Level:
23. Level: Early missions are… fine. Consider this an aggregate for the first four missions in general. Decent scripting, routing, et cetera. Nothing too fancy
24. Level: Mission 5, Kalesh Wreck. This is the first mission that actually impressed me. You have to break the wrecks (our introduction to the mechanic), grab artifacts (introduction to that too), and then hold the line against increasingly mean enemy lines. But thanks to the breakings being the required mechanic to even progress AND the triggers for the enemy attacks you’re basically guaranteed to get resources and boosts to help deal with them, and you have the ultimate high ground with the plateau to help defend
25. Level: Mission 6 Beladin Dune Sea is a nice roaming mission with plenty of resources and isolated enemies to knock over or ignore, but the star of the show is when the Ashoka shows up and becomes a boss fight. When you first engage it it retreats to a secondary position to reinforce itself, and will retreat a second time to a third location if pressed. There’s also a timer as enemy aircraft are en route you can intercept to prevent it from gaining tactical advantage. Or you can skip all that and nuke it in the face
26. Level: Mission 7, Gaalsien Base is another interesting mission. The enemy turrets can be captured (by capturing the enemy TOWERS) and there’s some encroaching forces but they’re intermittent enough to mainly be a resource tax. The enemy will also box you in with two very different group compositions so you can pick which one you want to push through (or both)
27. Level: Mission 8, Tombs of the Ancients. Four Artifact sites, the enemy will capture them periodically, but also the enemy capturing them reveals them to you meaning you can respond quickly (with aircraft no less). Once you find the final one you have one last big push. There’s also an absolute smorgasborg of resources on this map if you take your time and splurge
28. Level: Mission 9,the Whispering Gallery, is quite possibly the best map in the game. The enemy has two full carriers, you have yours and you have the allied Sakala across a canyon. You CAN traverse the canyon but it’s a hell of a trip. The allies are under gun and need aid quickly or they will melt, but they can hold their own for a very long time before outright requiring your aid. Meanwhile you have a ton of resources on your side but also several enemies you have to push through. When you finally start pushing back the enemy carriers retreat, and now the allies start slowly escalating THEIR attacks. Meanwhile you have the option to do specific attacks to escalate the power and quantity of the attacks your allies send. Meanwhile you have a canyon in between you and the enemy so, y’know, high ground. This is also when you gain access to missile strikes (and so do the enemies). Overall a fantastic mission, very properly tense, lots going on, great scripts, useful ally, and properly smart enemy…
29. Level: …call that…
30. Level: …a solid triple
31. Viscerality: Very solid visual viscerality. Everything hits, explodes, and flings very satisfyingly. If I can relate a specific incident, at one point we knocked a fighter out of the sky and it went flying probably a solid mile as it bounced across the terrain, exploding as it went…
32. Viscerality: …yeah
33. Viscerality: The audio is also excellent
34. Viscerality: And almost every gun has decent impact. Nothing super fancy, just good
35. Level: Mission 10, Khasher Approach. This is another excellent mission. Fantastic terrain design with TONS of sharp angles and canyons you can take advantage of (and supports indirect fire, and by now we have artillery cruisers). There’s tons of resources, enemies all over, we get a HUGE influx of research and units (more on that in the negatives), and then a final rush on the airstrip…
36. Level: …very fun stuff. Sorry I don’t have much to add here it’s just that this is the definition of a well designed, solid level
37. Level: Mission 11, Khashar Plateau. So now we have to HOLD it and now we have an incredibly well defended spot with tons of resources… and we’re being attacked from every direction simultaneously by vastly superior numbers. This is a classic setup; We have SUCH a good position, and we need it. Great stuff
38. Level: Mission 12, Torin Crater. Our mandatory mirror match. Structurally this is similar to the previous mission. We have the vastly superior position (the exterior of the crater, with nothing but height advantage all the way to their carrier), and they start with a stupid powerful fleet. This is another simple but solid affair

Gameplay Negatives:

1. MTX: The Expedition Guide is like the manual from Homeworld 1 but… worse. And it’s a microtransaction. What in the friggin’ world
2. Controls: The game controls… strangely. There are absence of hotkeys and options and there’s a jankiness to orders and movement. You cannot give group specific orders (or group orders at ALL actually, just targeting individuals)…
3. Controls: …and in an RTS that’s pretty bad
4. Options: Also uh… you can’t rebind. I mean yes you can go jump through hoops but there’s no native key rebinding… in a PC game from 2016. This is…
5. Options: …absolutely insane
6. Camera: By the way the camera is very Unity. You literally cannot pan and swivel at the same time, and it’s jittery and intersects with the terrain badly
7. Bug: Lots. Collision bugs, lighting bugs, pathfinding bugs
8. Unskippable Cutscenes: Weirdly inconsistent. But there’s huge and lengthy cutscenes you just cannot skip…
9. Unskippable Cutscenes: …so that kinda sucks
10. QoL: You cannot linger on a map when a mission is over, same general issue as Homeworld 2
11. Intro: Level: Mission 2, The Boneyard… is a bit too much for what is functionally the first mission
12. Level: Mission 3, Cape Wrath. We’re on mission 3 and we’re already running into the Warcraft 2 problem where resources are a bit too tight for how expensive ships are and how quickly they die
13. Enemy AI: Whack-a-Mole problem. This is mostly an issue in earlier missions but there’s this weird thing where the maps insist on spawning enemy units infinitely who all beeline your objectives, which leaves the player just running around knocking over tiny irritating enemy troops here and there
14. Encounter Rate: Speaking of which, the enemies just spawn infinitely on entirely too many maps. What in the hell
15. Economy: Early Game issues. It’s entirely too expensive to build anything and you just do not have that many resources. And remember there’s a finite amount of money in the entire game that’s never going up so any wasted resources is a permanent loss. And you WILL lose your early units
16. Itemization: Unit cost issues, speaking of which. Early cheaper units are not nearly cheap enough. 100 for an LAV is way too expensive given how crap they are and how they die in seconds to literally anything
17. Pathfinding: Not as bad as Homeworld 3 (which is hysterical since 3 is literally in space but whatever) but still bad. I’ve actually lost entire units due to a single vehicle being stuck doing wheelies, and almost game over’d because someone could not figure out how to drive in a straight line
18. Enemy Variety: None. You fight either yourself (in ONE mission) or the Gaalsiens (in the other TWELVE). It gets old
19. Seconds In Minutes: The usual for games like this, but it’s actually worse than usual because these missions are already long and the finite resource problem is so much worse…
20. Seconds In Minutes: …so we’ll call that a double
21. Unit Design: Deserts of Kharak suffers from the same issue so many RTS’s do; Early game units just fall off to the point of being useless. That’s not TURBO bad…
22. Unit Design: …but what is is how fast so many of the early units fall off in usefulness
23. Pacing: Mission 10 we suddenly get NINETEEN new researches (I counted). Nineteen! There is a lot of evidence for how unfinished this game is but this might be the single most overt piece. It’s bizarre, and punishing as hell if you haven’t been very studious about grabbing resources in every map up until now (remember resources are very finite) and trust me you want these new upgrades and units
24. Pacing: General. The whole game is distended across missions that are too long and arcs that tumble into each other
25. Outro: Level: The final stage… kinda sucks actually. It feels like a basic skirmish map and… honestly I think that’s actually what it is. You start off with a resource spot, the enemy shows up, you defeat them. That’s… it. The only neat variance is we get the ion cannon

Story Positives:

1. Intro: The opening narration is phenomenal, as it always is with Campbell Lane. It also…
2. Intro: Consequence Storytelling: …makes perfect sense. Everything about this is incredibly consistent and is a perfect follow through…
3. Intro: External Continuity: …from Homeworld 1. They made it, they got home. NOW what. So we see that there’s politicking between the Kiith (barely even mentioned back in 1 outside of the manual, since we were just ‘the kushan’), we see that the Taiidan Empire completely imploded and is now two major powers (the Remnant Imperialists and the Republic) and a whole lot of smaller factions forming something called the Bandit Kingdoms. And now we’re playing as a tiny worker Kiith which has no real prestige or power just making our way out on the outskirts of known territory. Awesome setup and such a logical follow up to the original game. If I can phrase this another way, this is not Homeworld ‘2’. This is not ‘another Homeworld but bigger’, which is what most sequels are. This is ‘Homeworld, but different’, and I love it
4. Intro: Character: Instant characterization of our principal characters. We’re sleepily going about our normal job and we hear that an Imperialist attack group has entered the Hiigaran system. Instantly and without hesitation we are already dropping everything to go assist. This is going to be a trend
5. Intro: Storyboarding: The battle in Hiigara is very well constructed and just generally cool looking but it also does a tiny little tidbit
6. Intro: Visual Storytelling: See, there’s this really cool thing where the Imperialists are all the same colors and ship types, and the Hiigaran defenders… are not. There’s almost no unified colors here. So even if you don’t know the specifics you know the defenders are from different groups. And if you’re aware, you know each of those colors accurately represents a specific other kiith
7. Intro: Tone and vibe of the attack. It feels like a giant fleet of enemy ships have attacked our home! In reality it’s kind of pathetic (we’ll see bigger fleets later in THIS game) and we can effortlessly roll over the forces we’re assigned to deal with. This is a good thing though, it makes us feel like we’re part of the defense without smacking the player in the face with a difficulty cliff
8. Intro: Cutscene: Threats and dangers of salvaging. We hear tidbits of unexploded bombs and debris and we see exactly how hard we’re working AFTER the battle to clean up everything. This is then immediately contrasted…
9. Intro: Moment: …by the military guys personally thanking the others who came to help. And not. Us. And this one moment does SO much for showcasing who we are and our position in the social and political hierarchy
10. MSQ: Mission 2 and the distress call of the destroyer, leading to…
11. Character: …us immediately ejecting their ore canister (AND detonating it) to make room for the facilities to help. Once AGAIN we’re establishing the kind of people we are (and this is ALSO foreshadowing, more on that in a bit)
12. Moment: And then we hear a second distress signal. Of COURSE we go look into it, same reason as the first time, why wouldn’t we? If we can help someone we will, if we can’t we’ll salvage
13. Cutscene: The cutscene expositing us keeping the signal is saying a lot of what’s already been shown, but it’s very well constructed besides. We need a leg up to maintain parity with the other kiith as we are barely even acknowledged and in literal danger of being absorbed by larger kiith
14. Consequence Storytelling: The reason why we keep the alien signal within the Kiith in general continues the logical and well reasoned storytelling thusfar
15. MSQ: Why was the Klee-San mined? So they could come by later to properly claim it. How do we deal with the jamming? Get close enough to do a tight beam communication (which will generally bypass jamming). And…
16. Tone: …I’m going to mention HERE that the entire game (this is several missions in now) has been building up this great political thriller plot. We’re nobodies in a barely established power that is threatened regularly by the remnants of a tyrannical regime which has vastly superior military might and is still causing issues the galaxy over. This is important because when most people talk about a twist ‘coming out of nowhere’ this isn’t what they mean. A twist that truly comes out of nowhere has NO build up at all it just happens. But here there IS build up, it’s just build up for the wrong story. Because all of this leads to…
17. Cutscene: …the initial study of the device. A very calm, clinical cutscene, with a tiny bit of a strange veiny substance spreading at the last second. . This leads to…
18. Moment: …what is probably the most well remembered scene in the game. There’s warnings going off, Command gets more and more incredulous the worse things look, and the entire time the guy down in research is SO dumbstruck he can barely talk properly. It’s only when things are so beyond salvaging that his brain kicks back in and with his final words he demands…
19. Moment: …CUT US LOOSE…
20. Moment: …and we do. Hey, remember that foreshadowing earlier? Of COURSE a mining vessel made by engineers would have an emergency jettison like this built into their ship
21. Moment: And so the lower decks flies away, screaming as they spiral into the void. And it is absolutely HORRIFYING
22. Voice Acting: Absolute praise to everyone in this scene. The stunned researcher, the increasingly shocked and irate Command…
23. Sound: …and the screams. The screams
24. Pacing: And then there’s a strange breather segment as the ship is partially crippled and still struggling to cope with what happened
25. Brickwork: Out from ‘home’ as all of this is happening. No more orange glow, no more safety net
26. Moment: And then we lose the Klee-San as we see the nature of the threat…
27. Moment: …because they can infect in space…
28. Moment: …and the crew’s final reactions (“Stay away!”) and the first bit of dialogue from the Beast. “We live” Everything about this is gold. This takes this from a horror threat to an existential crisis and now we know at least a little bit of what we’re dealing with
29. Cutscene: The engineer trying to calmly recite what the Beast actually does.. And struggling with his own terror at what he is describing. Seriously, dude sounds like he’s on the verge of just losing it
30. Plot: The nature and point of the threat. I’ve talked about this before; Making something that’s functionally magic (like the Beast) is fine as long as it’s sufficiently self consistent. And we establish the rules of the Beast very early (here, in fact) and now we know how it operates and how to move around it… with one notable exception we’ll see later
31. Atmosphere: We are not the military. I think I’ve been mentioning this indirectly a few times but it deserves its own mention for really nailing the atmosphere of the game. We are a bunch of engineers and miners. We are NOT prepared for something like this, at all. Multiple times we try to foist this problem onto someone more skilled or powerful or knowledgeable or resourceful and it never works out
32. Consequence Storytelling: Speaking of, the next thing we do is flee to the Bentusi. This makes perfect sense. We have a pre existing trade relationship with them AND they’re the ‘big guns’, the big knowledgeable people with the most powerful ships and have been around forever. Of course they can help us, how could they not?
33. Moment: Us leaping to the defense of the Bentusi. Again, we are NOTHING compared to them, but they don’t know what they’re fighting and we HAVE to help them. We’re just that damned heroic
34. MSQ: So. We ran to the Bentusi… and the Bentusi ship, rather than fight or flee or do anything else… self destructed. We ran to god for help and god killed himself. NOW what. This is such a great moment and it’s telling that the entire story up to this point is more or less a straight line in the narrative, and now we will (deliberately) fumble for a while as we try to figure out what the hell to do next. We have a damaged military carrier, ourselves, and that’s IT. So… let’s start by running
35. MSQ: Our next move? Flee through a nearby nebula. While this mission sucks (one of the worst missions in the game by far) it’s still great narratively. There is a HUGE Taiidan force right there, there’s mines everywhere, and a big honkin’ cruiser in our way, and we just need to get to the other end of this intact
36. MSQ: Outskirts of Kadiir Nebula. I honestly don’t think this hits as hard as everything else but it’s a great insight into how badly things are going as we see hundreds of thousands of colonists being preyed upon by the Beast…
37. Music Direction: …and we hear exactly how awful this is. No seriously the music is quiet, dreadful, like looking out into a yawning abyss. And the whole time we hear the screams of every single ship we fail to save
38. Integration: This is great integration. It’s almost impossible to lose this mission actually, you have to really try, but obviously you (the player) WANT to save as many of those ships as you can. So you try
39. Cutscene: Taiidan are messing with the Beast, and the Republic colonists offer us their spy in gratitude. This is a massively understated scene in how important it is. The Taiidan Republic are giving away contacts and resources to access one of their top level spies in the Imperialists because they realize how bad the situation is, WE just saved their bacon (without reward or thought for ourselves), and we’re getting stuff done
40. Cutscene: The Taiidan ‘volunteers’ to try and fail at controlling the Beast is just such a horrible visual, even before they incinerate it
41. MSQ: Act 2 and the search for a solution, otherwise known as flailing. We built up to a political thriller, shifted into existential dread, and now we just do not know what to do. After saving the colonists we capture some Imperialist ships to infiltrate one of their bases and sabotage their operations because what else are we going to do, and then we have to friggin’ flee into a debris field… and this whole time we have NO idea what we’re doing but no one else does either and at least we’re trying SOMEthing. And then we stumble onto this siege cannon… hm
42. Consequence Storytelling: And remember, by this point in the story we’re desperate, afraid, and under gun. So of COURSE we immediately grab the cannon, try to use it in hopes of turning things around, and… it fails. This is, narratively, the perfect time for a ‘turn around’ aka things starting to get better, but the failure of the cannon is the exact opposite. So now we’re on the run again (in fact if you don’t do this mission right you can literally leave ships behind… the second mission in a ROW like that)
43. Tone: All of this is retaining the tone of Act 2; We’re screwed and we’re flailing, trying to find something (ANYthing) that will work
44. Cutscene: So we warp in and the Faal-Corum freak out. This is perfectly natural and, by contrast, OUR people are perfectly calm as we discuss this eldritch horror we’re dealing with. This is all part of…
45. Character: …our arc. In a game with almost no named characters and no faces WE, the Somtaaw in general and the Kuun-Lan in specific, have been on an arc. We started off brave and willing to help but bitter and resentful of it, and being so in over our heads we ran around running for half the game. And now WE are the ones OTHERS are turning to for stability and comfort, the same way we tried to flee to the Bentusi. WE are the ones on top of this, and people have started recognizing this
46. MSQ: So now we have a plan. We’re going to go ask the Turanic for details about a region to narrow down finding the Naggarok (more on that in a sec) and this just says so much about how far we’ve come. The Turanic have never been big players but we just waltz up to their front door, try to ask reasonably, and when they don’t respond reasonably we tell them we’re going to come punch them until they give us what we want
47. Plot: So hey, the Naggarok. I love how simple and logical while absolutely terrifying this is. The ship is extra-galactic, and came here on a new experimental drive that shifted dimensions as part of its trip. And it found the Beast in that other dimension. Whether that other dimension IS the Beast, or if it just spread throughout it, or even if they just got supremely unlucky… we don’t know. All we know is this lovecraftian THING came back with them and the crew was on top of it enough to IMMEDIATELY scuttle their own ship to prevent its escape… but sadly that one tiny distress beacon got away. And hey, guess what we found at the beginning of the game? All of this lines up pretty well
48. Cutscene: So we reach out to the Turanic and they flat refuse to respond to hails… until we’ve beaten the SNOT out of them, at which point they surrender, sounding almost bored
49. Moment: The Taiidan Imperialists just… bailing after a single transmission. I love it
50. Animation: The usual quality of sketches and animations are awesome as they always are in these games (except, uh, 3… ignore 3)…
51. Animation: …so enjoy the positives
52. Voice Acting: Command is so damned good. Whoever voiced this guy deserves a raise…
53. Voice Acting: …and a double
54. Voice Acting: The Intelligence woman is also great
55. Voice Acting: We have a lot of variety of actors for the various crafts…
56. Voice Acting: …who also deserve mention
57. Banter: The usual, a bit toned down but it’s there
58. Tone: Some great flavor in the different units, for arguably the only time in the series. Each unit has its own personality and quirks in their dialogue. Personal favorite? The Mimic or the Processor
59. Character: Command. At no point does he feel or sound like he’s overbearing or egotistical despite being THE GUY in all of this. That humility carries him through most of the game
60. Character: Intel is the far more practical counterpart to Command. Many times she’ll be the one to tell us in no uncertain terms that we can’t do the right thing because we are in so hilariously over our heads
61. Sound: Soundscape. Alarms, shots, engines, mechanical sounds…
62. Sound: …usual Homeworld quality
63. Cutscene: “They’re repairing the drives!” I love how the Recon scout saying this line can barely keep herself from laughing at the sheet stupidity of it
64. Cutscene: “What are you doing?!” I love this moment. Command, who is in the middle of what is effectively a sneak attack on the Taiidan Imperialists, just… opens comms with them because he is completely flabbergasted by the insanity of what they’re doing. Surely, SURELY even these fascist dogmatic assholes can see that right? Nnnnope
65. Character: The Beast. Whatever it (they?) are, we don’t learn the specifics… and we don’t need to, because we learn plenty. It likes to spread, it wants to feed, it enjoys adding knowledge and intelligence to itself, and it’s more than capable of out-thinking and out-maneuvering its opponents. It has no morality that we could identify and barely has a concept such as ‘want’. It is wonderfully devilish
66. Cutscene: We flee to the Bentusi (for the second time) and they… are running. In fact lemme emphasize this point because it’s such a wonderfully understated point…
67. Moment: …the Bentusi are FLEEING THE ENTIRE GALAXY in the face of the Beast
68. Plot: The Bentusi are scared… because they’ve not been scared in millennia. These people have been the apex species of the galaxy for millennia that we KNOW about and this is the first time in such a length of time that they’ve fought something that can do something to them. (In fairness it IS a fate so much worse than death)
69. World Building: Flickerlives and unbound. This one exchange conveys a lot. We’ve always known the Bentusi are a bit above and beyond everyone else but now we know they are either immortal or very long lived, and that being ‘unbound’ is a whole thing to them which Karen essentially just lucked into. It is entirely possible that the only reason the Bentusi helped us in 1 (help that was critical to our survival mind you) was out of this twisted elitism. HER life mattered because she’s Unbound, see
70. External Continuity: Bentusi in general are very well used here. They’re still the same Bentusi (helpful, powerful, etc.) and we still rely on them a lot… but the way they develop them further is such a great follow up to 1
71. Cutscene: By the way the entire cutscene establishing all of this is fantastic. We almost flee before the Bentusi the moment they power up (Intel suggests this in fact) but Command overrides it. Also…
72. Voice Acting: …this is filled with some of the best voice acting in the game. The Bentusi sound hesitant, afraid, and broken. Command sounds LIVID
73. Moment: “You’re killing us!” As the Bentusi, in their terror, push through our forces, killing us effortlessly
74. Moment: “One ancient monster is as good as another!” And he’s right. In this moment the Bentusi are just another ancient unknowable power that’s destroying us
75. Moment: “We are not monsters…” The horror and regret in the Bentusi’s voice
76. Moment: And all of this culminates in the finale of this exchange, with a speech. “You’re worse than the Beast! At least the Beast doesn’t pretend to be righteous.” And the Bentusi finally admit what I’ve already said (‘we fear’)… and Command, so calmly, states the truth. Fear? We’re Somtaaw. We fought our own planet, then physics itself, then the Turanic, then the Taiidan, and now the Beast. We have ALWAYS been afraid… and in this we find solidarity with the Bentusi…
77. Moment: …what a great friggin’ moment…
78. Moment: …easily the apex of the game
79. Outro: Cutscene: The loss of the moon and the Taiidan Republic ship going down like a badass
80. Outro: Moment: “This is the Kiith Somtaaw Warship Kuun-Lan” is the best line in the game. No, I mean that. Most fiction in general has this endless desire to over-emphasize things, which deflates them and makes them not land properly. Occasionally you’ll see things understated. This is so calm and so… normal. The line is just there for anyone paying attention to pick up on it. The entire game we’ve been introducing ourselves as the ‘Kiith Somtaaw Mining Vessel Kuun-Lan’, even as recently as just a few missions ago. But then we went hunting, and now we are not messing around anymore. This line hits so hard because it is stated as simple fact; We ARE the Kiith Somtaaw Warship Kuun-Lan. This is reality…
81. Outro: Moment: …what a fantastic moment…
82. Writing: …and brilliantly written. By the way this is a good time to mention the last mission is a mirror of the first one too. We warp in to help allies in danger against a serious threat, but this time we’re the ones swinging the bat
83. Dialogue: General. The dialogue is excellent in this game, on the same level as the first game’s. No wasted words, great usage of language, excellent presentation, distinct voices per each character…
84. Dialogue: …phenomenal stuff
85. Outro: Moment: “You are what all life is to us. Food.”
86. Outro: Music Direction: By the way the Outro, the last mission? The music is different from the ENTIRE rest of the game. No dread, no fear, no doom, no horror. It’s a calm but persistent military drumbeat. And don’t that just fit perfectly
87. Outro: Simple but sweet… and a shame it’s completely ignored by future games
88. Spritework: Sadly the older graphics hurt the spritework, but these ships still look solid. The Somtaaw look like big, bulky construction vessels
89. Spritework: The Taiidan and Kushan are here of course, sparingly
90. Spritework: And special mention to the Beast ships, coated in Beast
91. Atmosphere: The ENTIRE game oozes atmosphere. Tension, dread, horror, fleeing, determination, and resolve…
92. Atmosphere: …great stuff
93. Theme: We are those who help. We are the ones for those who are in need. We are, put very simply, heroic. And this theme is an undercurrent in the entire work. The Imperialists are only interested in themselves, and make everything worse. The Republic tries to help, and serves as valuable allies. The Kushan who recognize us aid, those who don’t fall by the wayside. The Bentusi start self interested and are convinced through sacrifice to heroically aid us in our time of need (twice, actually). And finally the Beast itself which is the opposite of heroism, instead serving as a gaping maw of greed

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: I’m going to be real, a lot of the skyboxes are bad. Just plain bad. Blurry colors or random non patterns
2. Cutscene Incompetence: Mandatory stupidity with the Caal-Shto. There’s no real logic behind why we go along with this. It’d be so easy to fix too. Enjoy this, it might be the only story negative of substance this entire game gets

Gameplay Positives:

1. Save: Rough but still decent. The saves are very Doom (you can save things mid-shot)
2. Interface: Again quite rough but VERY well designed, similar to the first game
3. Controls: And while not as good as the remasters, it’s still a smooth controlling game to this day
4. HUD: A bit understated but still good. Resources, supply, current builds, current research, and of course the outlines and color usages
5. Tutorialization: A very similar tutorial to the first game, and still useful for it
6. Options: Better options than Deserts of Kharak, hah! Which… is sort of sad actually
7. QoL: Several small ones, surprisingly for such a rough game
8. Music: Almost every Homeworld game has a banger soundtrack and this is no exception. I don’t think it’s QUITE as good as 1’s or Desert’s, but it’s still fantastic…
9. Music: …and worthy of note
10. Economy: Really good for what it is. There’s always an effort to make resources available when they’re needed (and they will be needed)
11. Core Mechanic: The slow down time mechanic is helpful for players who need a few extra moments to micro and deal with everything (it also has a speed up option for the opposite… or to remove doldrums)
12. Core Mechanic: Veterancy. It was actually invented for this game and it’s a great system, encouraging you to keep units alive as long as possible, not taking a billion years to level up like in Deserts, and having a demonstrable impact on performance…
13. Core Mechanic: …so we’ll call that a double
14. Difficulty Options: Changes mission structure, AI patterns, and some usual stat stuff
15. Enemy AI: Not bad for what it is. Mostly scripted, but it’s still there, and you can still tactics around it
16. Enemy Variety: Unlike some games I could mention (Deserts!) there’s a decent variety to what we deal with in this game. Imperialist ships, Turanic ships, and Beast infected ships to name the big ones
17. Unit Design: The Destroyer is probably one of the most well rounded ships we’ve ever seen in this franchise. A relatively fast ship with ion cannons and missiles that can track even faster strikecraft, this thing is great in almost every engagement
18. Unit Design: The Dreadnoughts is that they’re almost too good. These things have missiles for small craft, turrets for big craft, ions for everything, and the only thing that drags them down a bit is their last upgrade (which they only get, optionally, in the LAST mission) actually reduces their firepower thanks to a bug (and nothing tells you this)
19. Intro: The first mission is quite smart about what it is. We start off fighting seemingly a large force but it’s designed to basically ignore us, then we go after a big honkin’ Cruiser… which is already damaged and barely paying attention to us. Both work pretty well…
20. Intro: Tutorialization: …especially as a proper tutorial to live combat and mission structure
21. Level: Mission 2, Outskirts of Hiigara System. This is mostly a continuation of the tutorial. Here we learn a few things (like we can eject parts of the ship quickly… good to know), how to salvage and repair, mimic ships, and then we have the escalation of having to salvage the distress beacon (which is more time sensitive than repairing the Bushan-Re)
22. Level: Mission 3, Coruc-Tel System. One more tutorial mission (there will actually be another one after this), this one introduces us to mines (something the enemy will use extensively in the campaign) and how to deal with them. This isn’t much but it segways neatly into Mission 4, Deep Space, Tel Sector. Mission 4 is a doozy story wise but it does some good stuff gameplay wise too. First we see exactly how modular our ship is (which we’ll be playing with for most of the campaign), plus this is our formal introduction to the fact that we shouldn’t provoke the letterbox until we’re good and ready. This a lesson in every Homeworld game at some point or another and this is probably the biggest one because your next objective is to send acolytes to escort the Clee-San. And a new player is VERY likely to just send ALL their Acolytes to escort it since, frankly, it’s easier to control that way. Whiiich means the moment the Clee-San gets in range of the detached structure… all your Acolytes are now Beast ships. This is great tutorialization for two reasons; First it showcases how the Beast infection operates and now the player knows the mechanic and how to try and cope with it. Second, it teaches the player how to rebuild from nothing. There’s no MANDATORY point in the campaign where you lose everything, but there are four distinct missions where the level design makes it highly likely that a new player is going to lose everything. So being able to recover from that quickly is a necessary skill
23. Level: Mission 5, Aiowa System. First we have a bunch of ships attacking the Bentusi which… honestly aren’t doing anything, which means you have time to rebuild and recoup from last mission. I’ll talk about that in a second but for now it gives us a moment before we attack, doing so will spawn in a few more ships including a Heavy Cruiser… which is then neutered by the damage it sustains from the Bentusi (this is our second weakened Heavy Cruiser we’ve gone after, in Mission 6 we’ll have to fight our first no-really Cruiser). Then we have to hold the line while pushing up against waves of enemies to find an enemy Carrier and force it to flee
24. Pacing: In addition to mission variety (more on that later) most missions that are intense or costly or likely to make you lose ships then have a ‘breather’ portion or mission after where you can recoup, just like we just saw with the Bentusi
25. Level: Mission 7, Outskirts of Kadiir Nebula. So now that we’re past that awful, awful mission we have… an escort mission. This mission also deserves a negative (more on that later) but it’s mostly a well designed mission. The ships you’re escorting are pretty spread out but you have fast response craft to deal with that. The more ships you lose the easier it is to lose ships (this mission can snowball pretty badly). But what really makes this work is…
26. Integration: The great integration. It’s almost impossible to lose this mission actually, you have to really try, but obviously you (the player) WANT to save as many of those ships as you can. So you try
27. Level: Mission 8, Deep Space Koreth’s Rift Sector. This is our introduction to the incredibly lucrative crystals which have to be manually mined and take multiple Workers but are super worth it. The spy, when they show up, is specifically designed to be pretty easy to lose since the real challenge is just taking out its pursuers. Then we have an interesting puzzle; We have to capture some enemy ships but they’re defended by Gravity Generators. These immobilize strikecraft, and at this point in the game we have VERY few alternatives to that (as I’ll discuss in the negatives) thus providing an interesting puzzle to solve (I prefer Ramming Frigates for this). This is all on a timer too
28. Level: Mission 9, Close Orbit, Gozan IV. This is a fun one, another ‘hard to lose’ mission… mostly. You peck at the field (literally hitting any sensor will trigger the waves) and then just sit there hanging while waves of enemies come after you. This is probably our first real ‘brawl’ mission in the entire game and is a good exam to ensure the player has figured out their preferred fleet composition and playstyle. The end of the mission then starts spawning approximately seven bajillion ships to swarm you and encourages you to bail as quickly as possible, meaning possibly another point of losing part or all of your fleet
29. Level: Mission 10, Debris Field Koreth’s Rift Sector. This is a good escalation mission; Mostly stuff we’ve already done. Deal with enemy mimics, salvage the cannon, and fight off waves of enemy troops. For the most part we’re holding our own (also this mission has a ton of resources to help with rebuilding, assuming you lost ships in the previous mission) and is our tutorial on how to fire the Siege Cannon. And when that fails we’re RIGHT next to the Beast mothership which is beelining us along with a huge fleet meaning, yes, this is another mission where you’re encouraged to bail and lose ships
30. Level: Mission 11, System AZ-23769. So hey, our sister ship is under attack. Good news this is actually a breather (no, seriously) because the attack fleet isn’t that big and the mission then pauses until you heal the Faal-Corum. Further this map (again) is glutted with resources (including THREE crystals) to, once again, give you that breather and help you recoup. This mission also gives us Carriers and their all important Support Modules which are a Godsend and represent our last food cap upgrade, meaning we’re now looking at the beginnings of our final fleet composition
31. Level: Mission 12, Turanic Outpost, Kyori Sector. This mission is, finally, our turnaround mission. We’ve been dealing with the Turanic since mission 2 and now we just walk over them. By this point in the game we have access to most of our kit (we FINALLY got Destroyers… in fact we’re only missing the Dreadnought) and the Turanic are just not ready for us. This is one step away from being a Hyperbeam Moment and is mostly here for catharsis
32. Pacing: Good time to mention gameplay pacing. Lots of good variety in missions and their design, and what you’re doing at any given point in time
33. Level: Mission 13, Location Unknown. It’s a mean trap but it comes in waves, the Faal-Corum assists about halfway through, and you’re (once again) given ample resources to recover the loss of your strikecraft and necessary repairs
34. Level: Mission 14, Galactic Rim (Gulf Sector). Get in and get out, while dealing with the proximity net. Then we have Mission 15 (Gulf Sector) where we have to deal with the Bentusi. Good luck with the Bentusi! For real there’s a lot going on here. You need to just kind of… survive, because defeating them isn’t really on the table, but you HAVE to engage them because if they flee you lose. Also it’s a damage race against that slipgate (remember the asteroid from 1? Similar vibe)
35. Level: Mission 16, Sojent-Ra System. The trap. There’s some issues here but they DO give you the Siege Cannon full tilt (finally) as well as access to plenty of Dreadnoughts to play with. Plus an absolutely insane amount of resources to bank for the final mission (which you will probably want)
36. Hyperbeam Moment: The Super Acolyte. For all the crap of the final mission, the Super Acolytes are quite fun. They’re fighters with rapid fire ion cannons, I don’t know what to add to that
37. Viscerality: Not… that great. Impact is low, visuals are low. Sounds are good though
38. Yoshi Drums: Not a lot but it’s there, especially in the Beast missions

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Render radius. I hate the render radius, it’s SO small and it gets in the way of visibility constantly. This is doubly frustrating given how far even individual battles can drift
2. Bug: Just getting the game playable is a whole thing. Also as a personal note getting the game STREAMable was an even bigger hassle, but I don’t ding games for that I just wanted to vent about it briefly
3. Unit Design: So… this is probably Cataclysm’s weakest point. There’s a pretty small roster of units overall, and a huge swath of those units are only useful for extremely niche things which are either rarely relevant or are only used for a single mission before being abandoned. So we have things like the Mimic which is… basically just there for certain missions and is otherwise a waste. This also goes for the Martyr, which is just the combined Mimic. The Ramming Frigate is also next to useless (except in two missions, and then only a little)
4. Unit Design: The Multi-Beam Frigate and the Advanced Drone Frigate FEEL like they should be useful (the former a good anti strikecraft ship, the latter a great catch-all workhorse ship) but they’re both so immediately outclassed that it’s a literal waste to build them given how limited your food cap is
5. Core Mechanic: Speaking of, real quick, the limited food cap sucks. Yes you can expand it but it’s not as big of a difference as it looks given how much insanely more food the later ships take up. This wasn’t as much of an issue in 1 because you could capture past your limit, but it feels awful here. I cannot tell you how many times I had to retire ships to make room for new ships that were flat mandatory to progress, and it just kind of hurts retiring four star ships y’know?
6. Unit Design: The Worker. No, seriously, hear me out. This one relatively slow, relatively weak ship is your healer, capturer, and resource gatherer all in one unit. And it takes up precious food cap. It also heals INCREDIBLY slowly, meaning you want lots of them all on healing at once… and you can’t spare that because they’re off gathering or capturing. It sucks
7. Power Progression Curve: So this is related to the above negatives but you spend an inordinate amount of time in this game with ACVs and Acolytes. Like, almost a dozen missions (out of 17) still relying on the ACV. Part of this is the bad roster, part is the deliberate mission design which wants you to feel underequipped and outgunned against a superior foe, but it still sucks from a gameplay perspective being suck using the same units for a huge chunk of the game…
8. Power Progression Curve: …so that’s…
9. Power Progression: …a triple
10. Level: Mission 6, Kadiir Nebula… is probably the worst mission in the game. It’s a stealth mission in a game that doesn’t support that while also being an escort mission… and lord knows Homeworld is all about escort missions but this one kinda sucks. You have to keep a mobile and fast response force on hand at all times to deal with enemy scouts otherwise you’ll be attacked by an absolutely overwhelming force, while keeping in motion to avoid said scouts, while dealing with mines, while trying to always move forwards, and it culminates in a surprise Cruiser which (if you’re not ready for it) will kill your escort before you can respond properly. This is a mission that’s better with a walkthrough…
11. Level: …because that first playthrough…
12. Level: …is gonna suck. Also the LONGEST mission in the game by a wide margin
13. Level: Mission 7, Outskirts of Kadiir Nebula, is a decent mission but it’s also a bit of walkthroughitis as nothing really tells you what’s coming or how to deal with it. If you’re prepped you can protect ALMOST every ship (in this particular playthrough I only lost one to the cheating spawning) but if you’re not… well, this can snowball really fast
14. Level: Mission 16, Sojent-Ra System and infinite instant respawns (twice!). Seriously the first enemy you face has ships that will respawn SECONDS after you kill their predecessors, including the Cruiser. This is exactly as irritating as it sounds…
15. Level: …which makes the fact that they repeat this trick right after even worse. If you know where the enemy mothership is coming in you can position early but otherwise have fun sloooowly slogging your way up a funnel of infinite ships. Yes literally infinite. And remember the cannon shot can be intercepted by any collision so even that’s not a gimme
16. Outro: Level: Slow, boring, and random. There’s an insane number of ships in this map (and some of them respawn), dealing with the Moon is just irritating (did they HAVE to put Proximity Sensors around it so you’d be encouraged to loose ships to the repulsor?), and everything takes absolutely forever. On top of that the Naggarok herself is random. It’ll roam randomly, select one ship (from ANY in the area that’s not Beast) then beeline it and eat it, then rinse and repeat. This means how long this mission takes can be extraordinarily random
17. Outro: Level: Even the Super Acolytes are ultra weak and not nearly as much of a Hyperbeam Moment as they should be
18. Encounter Rate: Too many instances of relying on infinitely respawning ships. This is the Deserts of Kharak problem all over again