Unfamiliar 4

Story Positives:

1. Tone: Cheese. Wonderful, ridiculous cheese. I love it
2. Cutscene: Opener. Ridiculous but well edited and directed, and gets across the aforementioned tone very well
3. Storytelling Mechanic: Files. These unlock as you go and offer some neat…
4. Background Lore: …background lore to proceedings
5. Cutscenes: General, but I do honestly like the direction and usage of cameras and the little picture-in-picture thing
6. Voice Acting: I was torn on this but honestly they do enough good stuff to qualify (especially Eiding)

Story Negatives:

1. Character: Imani Gray. This woman is aggravating, abrasive, and irritating for almost all of her screen time
2. Character: Imani Gray, post mortem. Even after she dies the first thing they do is tell you how awful this is and how much you should care, THEN spend an entire mission on it. Her death is ALSO the motivator for going after Mara on top of everything else
3. Plot: This is kind of an aggregate but the plot is not good enough, but not bad enough, but also overly skippable, leading to it being a negative rather than an absence
4. Outro: Weirdly disjointed, bad editing, completely dissatisfying (even in the final mission… this sure doesn’t feel like we’re racing the clock to stop a nuclear launch)…
5. Outro: …and all of that is on top of the fact that you’re locked into a bad ending in solo mode

Gameplay Positives:

1. Kit: Pretty solid actually. Good variety of guns which have different accuracies, stats, fire rates, the usual…
2. Kit: …on top of some neat side kit like the grenades, taser, stun, etc.
3. Power Progression Curve: So this is a bad thing too, but as you progress through the game the curve of equipment really starts to arc, letting you do all kinds of fun interesting stuff (especially if you go back to redo missions, which the game encourages)
4. All Roads Lead To Rome: Infrequent, but general
5. Difficulty Mutators: Optional objectives in general
6. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Lots. In fact with very few exceptions these are well laid out and relatively quick to load, plus you’re invincible for a few moments while reloading (which is basically mandatory)…
7. Mid Mission Checkpoints: …easily earning…
8. Mid Mission Checkpoints: …a triple
9. Music: Over the top, bombastic, and awesome
10. Co-Op: This is sort of a pity positive because it’s such a bizarre situation. So this game has full campaign co-op (woo) but also is only available online (boo). So obviously the original PS2 version of the game barely gets credit for that (you CAN do so IF you have a PS2, with the game, with the modem, and know where to connect to). Emulators can bypass all of this of course but that’s sort of the point isn’t it? There’s no couch or local co-op it’s this or nothing. So we’ll call it one and move on
11. Level: The first stage (Quarantine Zone) is a great tutorial for what kind of game this is. While I don’t want to over-praise this is still solid and fun and gets across how you can have multiple methods to accomplish objectives
12. Level: The second stage (Warehouse District) has some really cool optional objectives which continue the trend of solid level design
13. Level: The third stage (‘Carthage’ Mall) is the most open ended of the stages so far, and honestly impressed me the most out of everything so far. Lots of options which can be done in multiple ways with very tight, dense design and cool tools to do so with…
14. Level: …easy double
15. Terrain: Also special praise for the terrain design of stage 3
16. Terrain: I have some pretty serious issues with it, but stage 4 (Krivorozhstal Mill) honestly has some really solid terrain design
17. Level: 7 (Taherir Palace) actually has a solid opening segment of having to figure out how to knock out all the guards on a timer while not being detected. It still has all the usual stealth issues the whole game has but this is at least designed interestingly enough to work
18. Level: 8 (International University). Stealth still sucks but isn’t mandatory this time, and there are multiple paths of progression in case you screw something up
19. Level: 9 (Lorelei Salvage Rig). So we have a central elevator to help with navigation which you unlock by using the ladders on either side to go up or down, actually good stealth design (they have to reach an alert to activate stealth), nice spread of objectives (with a couple of exceptions), and some fun encounter design…
20. Level: …for an easy double
21. Terrain: Also bonus points for the layout and design of the level
22. Level: 10 (Murakawa Tower) A bit of an aggregate, but the objectives (most of which are optional) and freeform flow is nice
23. Terrain: 10 also has some legitimately solid terrain and routing design
24. Level: 12 (Niculescu Funds Tower). Granular difficulty and stealth, ability to change routing based on which objectives you do when, good avoidance of permanent fail states, fun laser puzzles, and well designed guard patrols…
25. Level: …honestly just a solid…
26. Level: …triple
27. Level: 13 (Chechen Terrorist Base). There’s enough interesting stuff here to qualify. Not a lot of routing, but nice placement of enemies (and for once not just enemy spam) and some decent terrain layout
28. Replayability: The game is generally replayable, issues aside…
29. Replayability: …but the whole thing actively encourages mastery and redoing missions to get progression, side objectives, and race the clock

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Tutorialization: The training level is… not great. Not everything is even tutorialized, and the training course itself is very weirdly laid out (no real flow to it)
2. Controls: I’ve played worse but wow this takes some serious getting used to. Select being swap weapon alone has gotten me killed multiple times
3. Map: It varies from level to level but when it’s bad it’s… pretty bad
4. Early Game Hell: So this is a weird one. Most games you start off with limited kit, but in this case it’s not just gear but methods of playing the game, and it makes early missions way more frustrating than they really should be…
5. Grind: …coupled with the grind required to unlock things
6. Co-Op: So this game is VERY designed around co-op. And if you’re not tech savvy or comfortable enough with online play (or don’t have anyone to play with, or no one’s doing random matches) it sucks to be you. Ignoring the fact that the game is better with co-op in several features, the fact is there is co-op specific content you’re just locked out from
7. Encounter Rate: Ninja Gaiden problem. This is an aggregate for every stage (any individual stage that does particularly badly will get its own negatives) but good lord the enemy respawn in this game is awful. I say without hyperbole that I think this one issue is the single worst thing about the game
8. Music: Cuts in and out wildly and sometimes seemingly at random
9. Lighting: Darkness issues. I ended up just turning the brightness setting up on the game to accomodate
10. Encounter Rate: Level 1. This is one of the few levels where the Ninja Gaiden Respawning is really irritating
11. Level: 4 (Krivorozhstal Mill). A rare case of bad checkpoints (or should I say checkpoint, singular) with 7 independent and awful escort quests (which do everything wrong; escorts are slow and with no defense, enemies prioritize attacking them unless you use a programming bug, and of course they can die in seconds)…
12. Level: …bad labeling (and good luck navigating that map)…
13. Level: …and at the end there’s a timed objective with no warning that mandates knowing where to go in very little time
14. Level: 5 (Belaya Vezha). So first we have a Limited Kit Section which does nothing to mitigate this other than giving everyone tons of AK47s (which might actually be the worst gun in the entire game)…
15. Encounter Rate: …the Ninja Gaiden problem, arguably the worst so far in the game…
16. Terrain: …terrain designed around bottlenecking you into areas with enemies who are almost uniquely placed as a middle finger to the player…
17. Level: …and then there’s just everything about the final villa segment
18. Core Combat: Meleeing. I legitimately don’t know how to properly vocalize how much meleeing sucks in this game
19. Level: Bonus 1 (St. Cetteo Square). So first we have all the hallmarks of bad stealth (binary fail state, no clear indicator of visibility, no kit to avoid)…
20. Level: …which, I really have to stress, sucks very badly…
21. Mid Mission Checkpoint: …but there’s also no checkpoint. And I need to stress this part because, while the mission is short, there’s at least two awful, awful points in this stage…
22. Gotcha: …where the game more or less mandates trial-and-error or already having a walkthrough to know what to do. One is where you have to hide in a cubby hole to pass a guy (only on one side, the other side won’t work), and the other is having to go up the correct side of a building with VERY little indicator of which side is correct
23. Level: 6 (Yemen Arms Bazaar). Oh my goodness, screw this stupid stage. So you start off with a frustrating stealth segment… it’s ‘optional’ but failing it basically means death because it sets the whole base into active alert ‘kill you on sight’ mode and you don’t have your kit. So yes it’s another Limited Kit section combined with a terrible Stealth section…
24. Encounter Rate: …and of COURSE this stage has Ninja Gaiden respawns, why wouldn’t it
25. Level: 7 (Taherir Palace) is then very… VERY boring after the initial stealth section. Just several minutes of a prolonged pseudo sniper escort mission
26. Bug: Several, but Level 8 earns particular notice because of two weird bugs that prevented us from getting the code and staying in stealth, which made the whole mission much much worse
27. Audio Spam: The alarms. They’re loud, obnoxious, and literally drove some of my viewers away
28. Encounter Rate: Level 10. As usual the respawning enemies just make certain floors of this area obnoxious (special mention to the helipad)
29. Boss: Level 10 minigun boy. Okay so this fight is supposed to be a puzzle fight, and I can see where they’re going with it, but let’s examine this nonsense. First, he’s got a minigun which will kill you in milliseconds (I believe it’s literally 1 or 2 shots, from full armor and health). This is on top of him having laser perfect accuracy at range. Then there’s his AI, which just slowly roams away from you trying to keep himself always at the opposite of the arena he’s in, aka as far away from you as possible. This then coincides with the terrain design of said room, where there’s only a few ways to even reach the level he’s at and all of which he covers with his insane gun and accuracy. Finally, just fighting him at ranged barely works thanks to the fact that the only way to spot him is to be spotted by him, leading to death by gun and accuracy again. This fight sucks
30. Overly Skippable: Some dialogues, audio, etc. are too easy to skip over, not hear in the noise, or literally don’t play
31. Level: Backtracking: 11 (Irawaddy Basin). So you need to plant these explosives, 5 of them. You can carry 2 at a time. You do the math. Oh and later you just carry a person back across the entire region, have fun
32. Level: Encounter Rate: 11 also loves its respawning enemies, especially as you’re slowly roaming back with the corpse
33. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Bonus 2 (Saydahmat’s Village). This is worse than usual because this is a long, unclear mission with no friggin’ checkpoints and it contains several mandatory wait points. Speaking of which…
34. Level: …wait sections and unclear objectives
35. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Bonus 3 (Ivankov’s Home). I mean yeah. Get detected, go back to Go, do not collect 200 dollars
36. Level: Also yet another escort mission (two, actually!)
37. Level: Bonus 4 (Niculescu’s Village Estate). Screw everything about this stage. First we have bizarre and honestly bad objective markers (hope you thought to loot that ONE random guard who has the required item to proceed!)…
38. Gotcha: …on top of several gotcha! traps throughout the stage (enemies literally spawn right ahead of you in a narrow corridor whether you’re in stealth or not)
39. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Also no checkpoints, as usual
40. Terrain: Also the entire stage is, functionally, a narrow corridor. There’s no design to the level here
41. Itemization: Finally there’s nothing to help mitigate any of this. No smart item placement or refills of armor just one armor and health bar, screw you
42. Difficulty: Locking the good ending behind co-op mode is a dick move

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Ridiculous and bad and I love it
2. Intro: Cheesy, silly, ridiculous. This would probably be more positives if it were the original intro but here we are
3. Lighting: This is honestly pretty well designed, and adds to the…
4. Atmosphere: …atmosphere, which is better than I thought it’d be, highlighted even better…
5. Sound Design: …with the wonderful creaks and groans and thunder and wind and bugs and everything
6. Background Lore: Mostly in the form of the doomed journals, but there’s some really solid ones in this, including one of my favorites…
7. Moment: …Itchy Tasty
8. Music Direction: No weird trumpet basement in this version. Instead the music also adds to… you guessed it… the atmosphere
9. Brickwork: Okay so I have to be honest, I do NOT like the excess brown and grey. But what I do like is everything else. The detailing, the clean and crisp surface on top of a broken wreck on top of a horrible pit of horror and death…
10. Brickwork: …easy double

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: Also kind of bad, honestly, ridiculousness aside. In fact I think the original would score better
2. Voice Acting: Ridiculous and bad, which is still bad
3. Cutscene Incompetence: A lot, constantly, by basically everybody except for Barry and Wesker. Honestly I think they were going for abstract horror at the events but the execution is severely lacking. While we’re on the topic…
4. Character: …Jill is… awful. She’s James-lite and that’s not even a joke. Her reactions to every scene are off, her emoting isn’t, and she’s a damsel in distress in almost every single cutscene
5. Plot: Barry. I’m willing to give a lot of leeway to a game this silly but the Barry moments are universally badly handled. It’s extremely obvious he’s the traitor from moment 1, Jill forgives him constantly and repeatedly, and then nothing comes of it
6. Cutscene: The big reveal with Wesker and Barry is… not good. All the issues the rest of the game has collide here and it just isn’t as ridiculous as it needs to be to bypass this
7. Outro: Even the best ending is just… a complete nothingburger. You escape, fly into the sunset, the end

Gameplay Positives:

1. Map: This is a weirdly good map. Clear and distinct, both in where you’ve been and haven’t, which doors have which status (locked, unlocked, passed-through), clear indicators of how it connects to itself, and just generally helps navigation…
2. Map: …double positive worthy
3. Visual Distinction: Sometimes (not always) the game does a good job of making it clear what you can interact with and now, where paths forward are, etc.
4. Core Mechanic: Inventory. Limited inventory, more specifically, which also interacts well with almost every other aspect of gameplay. Almost everything is a consumable, and everything has a use in either gaining access to something, avoiding a zombie, defeating a zombie, or even fully removing a zombie from the equation (no respawns). This is even better in later games…
5. Core Mechanic: …but even here in the first (remaster of a remake) it’s still good
6. Enemy Design: Zombies can be low speed, slightly faster, and upon dying will eventually come back as Crimsons who are much faster and meaner. This dovetails nicely with the methods to permanently remove zombies mentioned earlier (random amount of ammo to kill twice, lucky headshots, or burning)
7. QoL: It’s such a minor thing but I do like how once you’re done with an item it tells you and gives you the option to drop it. Plus there’s a few other features here and there in the 2015 version
8. Itemization: Good placement of items throughout. Good spread too (nice pacing between floods and droughts of items), and a good specificity of which items show up where (blue herbs before or after poison segments, several defense items after an unusually dense concentration of zombies, lots of ammo up front but then none for a while, etc.)…
9. Itemization: …easy double
10. Sound: Good sound design, even on the gameplay axis. Sounds can indicate puzzles, items, and help identify enemies off camera
11. Level: The initial loop of the mansion (basically up to and including the Sword Key) is probably the single best part of the entire game. This is a great combination of tutorialization, good but simple puzzles, enemy placement (not too easy or harsh), and All Roads Lead To Rome…
12. Level: …easy double
13. Level: The second loop (up to and including the Armor Key) is more or less just as good as the previous one. Great escalations, getting more advanced with where you can access when, the looping design really starting to come in…
14. Level: …easy double
15. Level: The later segments tend to fall off a bit (more linear, less interesting enemy placement, simpler puzzles like the ‘replace with item’ stuff) but there’s still good stuff leading to the outdoors segment
16. Replayability: Especially since Chris is basically designed for a second playthrough, but obviously a game with this many metroidy elements gets the second Replay positive
17. Optional Mode: One Dangerous Zombie (don’t shoot him or it’s game over), Real Survivor (boxes aren’t linked, aiming disabled) and Invisible Enemy (lawl)
18. Viscerality: Sound, specifically. Most notably the Magnum, Shotgun, and Grenade Launcher
19. Overworld: It varies, but the mansion area has some pretty solid connective tissue and routing design

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: For every time the game does visual distinction well it also does it poorly. There are large swaths of the game where, without help or guidance (even WITH the camera shoving my face the right direction) I could not see what I was supposed to see
2. Controls: The tank controls are fine. The non-tank controls… can be fine. But they interact badly with some segments of camera, leading to some frustrations (especially in timed areas or areas with enemies)
3. Saves: Limited saves. I get why it’s a thing and I do not care. This should be a toggle or an optional hard mode
4. Seconds In Minute: Doors. This one speaks for itself really. We modded this out pretty early…
5. Seconds In Minutes: …and it’s pretty bad
6. Inventory: Not being able to drop items, having to enter and exit menu constantly, no proper swapping, no proper stacking, also can’t combine items without having an empty space. Also anytime you load a save you need to go dump your ribbon (or very carefully set up your ribbons so you have multiple ‘stacks’ of one)
7. Backtracking: I was chewing on this one for a bit. The game handles this pretty well early on honestly, but the further into the game you get and the longer the backtracks get without proper shortcutting or pathing to compensate. Further, later backtracks don’t vary up said backtracking enough to make it a positive so it ends up being just… walking back and forth. This also stumbles into some of the later puzzle design issues too. All of this means a lot… and I mean a LOT… of walking back and forth, leading to huge swaths of boredom and padding the whole experience out…
8. Backtracking: …for an easy…
9. Backtracking: …triple
10. Guidance: Periodic, but there’s a few sections where it’s super not clear what can be interacted with, or how to use what with what
11. Level: So the quality of the levels slowly dips throughout the game, but by the time we hit the caves it finally reaches what I’d call actual negatives. The camera flips get worse, the timing gets more irritating, the puzzles become disinteresting
12. Outro: The Tyrant fight is… fine… but that’s the problem really. It’s barely a fight as the big final battle against the big culmination of all the zombie research and it’s a big slow dude with three moves

Story Positives:

1. Animations: As per the standard started in RE2R, the animations and motion capture are absolutely amazing…
2. Animations: …an easy…
3. Animations: …triple
4. Spritework: As with RE2R, really solid designs on the main cast…
5. Spritework: …and the various enemies throughout
6. Brickwork: The Village area, of course. It’s… honestly a bit brown for my tastes, but it’s still good
7. Doodads: By contrast the doodads are bonkers good. While it’s all gross (really… REALLY really gross) it’s still very well done…
8. Doodads: …and earns…
9. Doodads: …a triple
10. Intro: MSQ: The initial town segment is a great Intro, just like it was in the original. Starts off creepy, gets loud, gets louder, and then it just… stops
11. Brickwork: The forest. The very, very brown forest
12. Sound Design: The forest has some great stuff going on. Birds, bugs, wind, branches, occasionally an animal
13. Cutscene: Leon and Lui’s escape was weirdly well choreographed, something I don’t get to praise as often as I’d like. Great scene
14. MSQ: Holding the line at the house was exactly as intense and awesome as it needed to be
15. Brickwork: The castle looks really solid, much better than the forest. The (literal) brickwork, the variety in the lower quality areas versus the places clearly designed for the wealthy well to dos, etc…
16. Brickwork: …easy double
17. Doodads: The doodading of the castle is, once again, absolutely amazing. Treasures, torture implements, furniture, foodstuffs, portraits, and some absolutely amazing placement thereof to highlight each individual room…
18. Doodads: …once again…
19. Doodads: …for a triple
20. Princess Peach Segment: Ashley’s solo segment is basically perfect. It’s absolutely terrifying, in lighting, sound, and enemy usage
21. Banter: General. Leon and Ashley as well as Leon and Luis have some good banter
22. Cutscene: Luis’ final scene. It manages to have some honest to goodness impact
23. Brickwork: The island. Military fortress, long since abandoned
24. Doodads: The island, again. This place really is a craphole
25. Voice Acting: Ashley is damned good in this game. Like, there is a lot of nuance and character for her that comes directly from her acting. Her hesitance, her just-barely-holding-on, her slowly becoming more comfortable around Leon, her slowly becoming more self confident, all while freaking out about the (let’s be honest) absolutely insane situation she’s in…
26. Voice Acting: …bravo to the actress, top notch stuff
27. Voice Acting: General acting positive for everyone else. There’s some… interesting choices here (Krauser) but they still put in decent performances
28. Character: Leon. Just enough there to still snark now and again, but ultimately still dealing with the trauma of 2
29. Character: Luis. Dude embodies the concept of trying to make up for what he’s done (he’s even very honest about it from word go), and manages to be enjoyable the entire time
30. Character: Ashley. Covered part of this up in Voice Acting but she is a vastly improved character here; the young woman who’s in extraordinarily over her head and is just barely holding on

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Acting: Ada. She sounds wrong AND bad, which is wild to think about. The voice coming out of that woman does not match her appearance or tone at all, even if I wasn’t already familiar with Ada as a character…
2. Voice Direction: …and almost every line she says is said just plain wrong
3. Pacing: There are some weird lurches in the story, which is made worse because the narrative reaches a fairly natural end point…
4. Padding: …and then keeps going. For a while
5. Camera: Too many hyper edits, too many jump cuts. Actively hurts several otherwise good scenes
6. Voice Acting: DLC, for real what is going on with Ada. I wasn’t going to double down on this but there’s a whole new DLC of her talking (a lot) and not improving over her original performance

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: Some basic but decent stuff, as per the series standard
2. Inventory: Arguably one of the first codifiers of the inventory tetris system. Individual items getting variable sizes relative to their value, and being able to move and rotate to adjust and deal with the ever-shrinking inventory problems. Now, I do think there’s some itemization related issues that diminishes this, but the inventory system itself is still solid…
3. Inventory: …and still deserves its double
4. Itemization: So… this is weird. RE4 (original and this one) both kind of bypass the usual approach to itemization in this franchise by instead focusing on loot being spawned off enemies and crates, which then ‘rolls’ what drops when you loot it. And thanks to the dynamic loot system this kind of bypasses the entire gameplay mechanic of inventory juggling and resource management. Thing is… I DO still think the itemization itself is still solid. Multiple times I went out of my way to be wasteful to see if I could manage to progress, and I could… barely. And I think that’s exactly where that should be. I was punished for it, but not to the point of frustration or having to rewind to a previous save. At least… that’s how it started off. There’s still good enough itemization up through the castle to qualify for a single positive
5. HUD: Good placement, color distinction, indicators of how much one would heal, what portion of durability you’ve used, etc.
6. Info In Game: Quite a bit, actually. Exactly what damage, rate, upgrades, damage, heals, etc. all do
7. Map: So there’s still some decent map design here and it still deserves mention for having good indicators for treasure, items, and secondary quest objectives
8. Viscerality: Audio. It’s… honestly not quite as good as it was in some previous games, but it’s still solid
9. Core Mechanic: Knife parry. I know, weird, but it does add a lot to the combat and makes it far more fun than I thought it would
10. Kit: Guns, once upgraded, have enough usefulness and variety in their use alongside the usual array of items and the like that it qualifies for a solitary positive
11. Sound Design: Generally good indicators of enemies and interactables via sound design. Several times I caught myself realizing that a dude mutated, or a mob had spawned solely because I could hear them
12. Enemy Design: Very good enemy design honestly. While there’s several enemies I just go ‘gaah not this jackass’ it’s still really well designed top to bottom…
13. Enemy Design: …easy double
14. Enemy Variety: Good variety too. Enemies you can attack their weapons, their heads, their legs, weak to specific types of ammo or weapons, different attack patterns…
15. Enemy Variety: …great stuff
16. Music: Generally good music. I mostly enjoy the more bombastic, actiony songs admittedly, but what’s there is still good
17. Guidance: There were exactly two points in the game I felt the need to either roam or look it up. Now, for a mostly linear game that makes sense, but the game still does a decent amount to help nudge you in the right direction. And no I don’t mean the yellow crap
18. Options: Really solid options across the board. Lots of things which add malleability to things that might otherwise be problematic
19. Intro: Level: Initial. The first sequence in the town is, as of writing this, the best level in the game. There are a lot of smart items, crates, windows, paths, enemy placement, escalation of enemies, and it’s all about surviving long enough or killing enough to progress. It’s incredibly open ended, dynamic, and designed well enough to support multiple playstyles…
20. Intro: Level: …with the ability to swap said style on the fly if needed or wanted to…
21. Intro: Terrain: …and some of the best arena design I’ve seen in the franchise to-date
22. Encounter: Similar, some really solid encounter design from the farm to the fishery. Good pacing, quantity, and spread of enemies
23. Pacing: The cadence of the early game is excellent. Big combat sequences followed by exploration and recovery followed by another combat sequence
24. Secondary: Tasks for special upgrade currency. These little side quests are fleshed out from the original and give you bonus items which can be used however you want in whatever you’re lacking
25. Minigame: The Shooting Gallery is… weirdly fun with some good design going for it. Static patterns but spawns are based on your speed, and bonus rounds for getting so far, plus optional side things you can do to improve your score. And of course the whole thing is rewarding with the charms system
26. Boss: Del Lagos. It’s not much but having to dodge while attacking with the angled shots, rewarding the player for actually thinking about where they were shooting, was fun
27. Overworld: Village and lake exploration segment. This is weirdly open-ended. Once you get the boat you can roam around and hit almost any area you’ve already hit to-date to explore, finish side quests, and loot, and the usage of the boat itself as the shortcut was inspired
28. Boss: Gigantos. Another well designed boss fight. Big dude, hard to dodge attacks but very telegraphed, and with two nice big obvious weak points. Also rewards you if you freed the dog with distracting him, which conveniently exposes his back. Also some smart item placement in the arena
29. Encounter: Hold the line at the house. This is another excellent sequence for a lot of reasons. The intensity of it is nice of course, but it’s also very gradient based on what exactly you do and when you do it. You start off with a single plank, so you can pick one of three ingress points to cover. Once covered that point is done, no more enemies from there, so pick your safe spot. Then as you fight through them you eventually get a second (and finally a third) to close off the rest, advancing the encounter. But as you’re narrowing the chokepoint the enemies spawn faster and start turning into ganados more frequently. And all the while…
30. Encounter: …Luis is right there helping you out. He can set up combos, finish combos, give you ammo, and just plain distract
31. Encounter: Dual chainsaw ladies. You don’t quite have to kill them both (though you are rewarded for doing so), good spawning of support enemies around them, and good at hemming you in while rewarding you for retreating. Nice arena design too
32. Terrain: Consider this an aggregate positive for arena design throughout almost all the village and forest areas. Almost all of them have the hallmarks of solid arena design; multiple routes, decent spread of pickups, few dead ends, and useful chokepoints
33. Pacing: The Castle’s early sequence continues the solid pacing from the earlier segment
34. Encounter: The blind dude. Dangling chains (which give away your position), a big obvious weak point on his back (plenty of ways to take advantage of it), he’s parryable, and he has vuln phase
35. Encounter: The troll and his rocks. This was actually a really solid encounter, unlike the earlier catapult segment, despite being basically the same concept. There’s flipping doors (Zelda style) which controls where you can go and how you can get there, some of which open into safe areas or recovery items. Meanwhile there’s plenty of cover for avoidance, good lines of sight on the enemy archers, good enemy spawn placement and variety, and the whole thing forms a semi-circle around the troll. It’s great
36. Encounter: This is a bit of an aggregate but the encounters continue being interesting in the Castle. The circle of knights which Ashley helps with, the intense segment with the red dude and his stun, etc.
37. Boss: Verdugo. This is a fully optional boss (which is good because holy crap is it a resource hog), but they do reward clever thinking, careful usage of the nitrogen, and good parrying
38. Encounter: Minecart sequence. This is just simple silly fun, I have little to add to that
39. Boss: Krauser 1. This is a weird one; It heavily encourages you to parry, rewards you for doing so, but doesn’t actively prevent you from using anything else, and in fact if you’re clever you can parry then shoot
40. Encounter: Hold the line with the wrecking ball. So we have multiple ingress points to allow for maneuvering, good escalation of enemies, it doesn’t last very long (and can apparently be sped up with grenades), the point you’re protecting has decent health giving you some leeway, and the wrecking ball itself can be used as part of the encounter
41. Hyperbeam Moment: Mike. Seriously, this was an inspired Hyperbeam Moment; There’s an attack gunship nearby that attacks enemies dragged out into the open, encouraging you to maneuver and manipulate them into it. This is a great way to vary things up while still making you (the player) feel badass for accomplishing the turbo death
42. Replayability:
43. NG+: Really good, standard new game plus. You keep spinels, money, case, charms, gear, plus an early access to the merchant…
44. NG+: …for a solid…
45. NG+: …triple
46. Minigame: Mercenaries mode. This is short, sweet, and fun and that’d be enough for a single (no real points for enemy, encounter, or level design because it recycles all of those) however…
47. Minigame: …the new characters
48. QoL: General, but consistent throughout
49. Boss: DLC, Ada’s Gigantos fight is actually pretty well designed. The enemy itself is basically the same but the introduction of the grappling across the houses adds some nice maneuvering and encourage you to stay mobile and roofside
50. Level: DLC, general. There’s several good examples of level design periodically across her DLC. It’s an aggregate but it’s still there
51. Level: DLC, Island 1 is actually a really good encounter and sequence. There’s turrets, alternate routes, smart enemy spawns, and it’s not too harsh about failure, allowing for recovery
52. Boss: DLC, Saddler. Nice range of attacks, good ‘counter’ with the move that shoots your bullets back at you, good weak points
53. Pacing: DLC, general. As someone on chat said it feels like a shorter ‘greatest hits’ of RE4R proper

Gameplay Negatives:

1. MTX: Usual garbage, but hang on it’s even worse…
2. MTX: …because there’s also a bunch of cheat microtransactions too!
3. Map: Guidance, or lack thereof. This map is… honestly legitimately bad at times, with either unclear or actually absent indicators and guidance
4. Inventory: Inability to bank most things. This is such a weird choice, why can we only bank guns and a couple of other things?
5. Kit: Guns in particular are… not very good when they’re not upgraded, expensive as hell to upgrade, and what you use has a direct impact on…
6. Itemization: …what items drop. Getting ammo is frustrating, getting resources to make ammo is worse (Small Resources are a huge bottleneck), and it leads to being constantly behind on everything…
7. Padding: …all while the enemies have a lot of the same ‘issues’ as in previous games. In previous games these added to the overall vibe and core gameplay loop, but here it just aggravates the constant resource starvation…
8. Power Progression Curve: …which is made worse by the fact that the one mechanic the game has built into it to help you bypass missing resources (the vendor) doesn’t really sell the things you need most (ammo)
9. Controls: There’s some… weird nonsense in how the game attaches certain conditions to certain bindings. For example, parrying is one button, evasion is another button, but evasion is attached to crouching (and only works in very specific conditions)
10. Encounter: Castle catapults. This segment does everything wrong that the later encounter (with the rock troll) does right. Big open spaces with no proper avoidance from multiple catapults that bombard you constantly, very few resources or routes to deal with it, irritating shots to remove the catapults prior to getting the cannon, and the whole thing is one encounter. Which is fine except it’s LONG so it can mean redoing huge chunks of gameplay if you screw up (which it’s easy to be blindsided)
11. Encounter: Two blind guys, and a huge amount of respawning enemies. This is just an irritant
12. Boss: Salazar. An instant kill attack, moves a bunch, but what really drags him down is he will NOT shut up and the fight is long and it’s hard, so enjoy that repeat audio spam. Also dude has entirely too much health for what he is. Took me an hour and 6 minutes just to drag him down…
13. Boss: …screw this fight
14. Padding: These are aggregate negatives. There’s just… a lot of padding in the entire game. Areas too long, animations too long, enemies spawning too frequently or too many of them, the whole thing could be edited down to trim the fat across the board and it’d be a better experience for it…
15. Padding: …so enjoy that double
16. Core Combat: Staggering. Almost every single action you take makes you stumble. Almost every single thing the enemies do to you makes you stumble. And you do not have iframes while stumbling. So you either lose tons of time to this across the whole game, or you get stunlocked to death. This is a constant issue across the entire game…
17. Core Combat: …and deserves a double negative
18. Core Combat: DLC, Staggering. Yes, again, it’s the worst part of the game what do you want from me

Story Positives:

1. Tone: Cheese. Delicious, delicious cheese
2. Cutscene: Zombie bikers with chains woooo
3. Cutscene: Sheva and Chris VOW to be with each other ot the end, they’re partners dammit! They just met yesterday and it’s PERSONAL now for him but by golly she’s with him TO THE END
4. Cutscene: Matrix Wesker is just fantastic and cool, and I love how over the top the fight is, but Chris screaming JIIILL really sealed it
5. Brickwork: This might be one of the most pity visual positives I’ve ever given, but clearly at least SOME design was put into the visuals of each region. I’m just… supremely unimpressed by them. Everything blurs so hard, there’s no real color distinction, even the doodads feel too copy pasted
6. Cutscene: The Jill reveal cutscene is so ridiculously over the top, and Wesker is just hamming it up the entire time
7. Cutscene: Jill being rescued, the big swelling music, ‘Chris you’re the ONLY ONE WHO CAN STOP HIM’, it’s great
8. Animation: Sheva. Yes I know it’s weird singling her out but she does a really solid job
9. Voice Acting: Sheva, again. What can I say, this woman can act
10. Voice Acting: Wesker. DC Douglas at his finest, serving premiere swiss ham
11. Character: Wesker, again. This is basically the reason he’s as memorable as he is, especially in the role of a villain. He’s just the right blends of totally in control, completely stuck in the past, and out of his goddamned mind
12. Cutscene: Wesker’s fight with the duo (the sunglasses one) is unironically the best scene in the entire game. It’s silly, ridiculous, fun, over the top, but also actually really well choreographed and blocked
13. Cutscene: Wesker AGAIN with the nonsense in the plane, leading some very great fight sequences
14. Humor: Failed QTEs in general. They vary in quality but some can be really friggin’ funny
15. Outro: The entire final encounter with Wesker is, unironically, fantastic. His ranting like a cheap comic book villain, the lava battle, the Star Wars music, great stuff

Story Negatives:

1. Camera: Hope you like shakey cam, because it is a nonstop problem. I actually got into the habit of not looking at the game during cutscenes to spare me the nausea…
2. Camera: …so enjoy…
3. Camera: …that triple
4. Intro: Dry exposition and bad narration
5. Dialogue: Absolutely terrible exposition in general. It’s harder to point to a scene which is well written
6. Storyboarding: There’s some pretty bad issues with this periodically, in a game where silly fun is sort of the point
7. Localization: Japanenglish in all its glory. Too much repetition and too many scenes with nothing happening
8. Outro: That ending though, oof

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: Professional mode is honestly a really well designed, solid difficulty option with bespoke changes custom tailored to make it more rewarding and risky
2. Minimap: Not too bad for what it is. Toggleable too
3. Co-Op: Exists at all
4. Co-Op: Campaign co-op
5. Co-Op: Local and online co-op
6. Co-Op: And a bonus for how encounters, levels, and bosses are designed around the co-op
7. Party AI: So this is just bizarre but periodically Sheva is legit. She knows how to be cautious with her ammunition, how to prioritize hitting, and how to help you out
8. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Decently good checkpointing, with a few hiccups along the way
9. Kit: While there’s some pretty bad redundancies there’s some solid
10. Itemization: I’ve been chewing on this one. I think for the same basic reason as back in RE4, plus with some decent manual placement (especially of new guns), I think this deserves a nod
11. Level: Several aspects of the swamp villages have a bizarrely good amount of design to them. Multiple paths, ways to block off ingress routes, traps to avoid or utilize, etc.
12. Boss: U-8 is probably the only boss in the game I think was pretty solid. He spawns a ton of adds, but they drop stuff when killed to help keep the fight going. He has a big weakness to grenades, but also vuln spots to put him weak in general. Not too shabby all in all
13. NG+: Some pretty solid new game plus, but that’s mostly a side bonus on top of the real NG+ feature…
14. NG+: …the chapter select design. Being able to bounce chapters at will, and select which difficulty you do in each, while retaining progress? That’s…
15. NG+: …an easy double
16. Cheats: Built in and toggleable infinite ammo guns
17. Replayability: As is usual for the RE series, generally replayable
18. Pacing: Honestly pretty good. Explore / puzzle segments followed by combat sections

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Difficulty Options: Everything else is just plain old lazy difficulty
2. Controls: It’s hard to put into words how weird this game controls. It’s very janky, and you feel like you’re constantly fighting the camera and your own movement…
3. Controls: …for a double
4. Difficulty Curve: Wonks its way up and down the entire game
5. Co-Op: Co-op collision. We’ve actually given this negative before (thanks, New Mario Wii!) and it’s just as much of an issue here. Oh speaking of which
6. Encounter: So I put this under ‘encounter’ because that’s the real issue here. See, enemies have collision too… of course they do, this is a Resident Evil game they always have. But the problem is instead of one or two zombies in a corridor you have to out-maneuver or defeat, you have five or TEN in the same narrow corridor. This also leads to some weird ‘log jam’ situations where you can be body blocked, or enemies just stand around in a cluster unable to move. This naturally dovetails with…
7. Level: …tight corridors everywhere. Even in the more open, outdoors maps
8. Core Combat: Can’t move while reloading or preparing to knife. Also you can’t do… anything, really, while moving
9. Core Combat: Knifing has an incredibly short range. Like, entirely too short for what it’s going for
10. Intro: Flow: There’s several issues with how this entire sequence doesn’t really do quite a bit well. Need to run to the left? Here’s a corridor right in front of you with visible exits in front of you (that lead to dead ends). Rush forward into the arena area? Here’s a giant mob blocking the way who will one shot you. Someone did not think about this
11. Intro: Tutorialization: Figure it out! What do you mean we can have game design that helps?! Screw you, go read a side page four hours into the game
12. Intro: Encounter: Everything about the initial enemy swarms (yes, plural). Ignoring Mr. One Shots I just mentioned which is already frustrating, this is just way, way too many enemies for what’s going on here. This might have worked if…
13. Intro: Level: …the level design did something to give you something.
14. Sound Design: Something happened BWAURROOO (hope you like scare chords)
15. Boss: Chainsaw guy and the neverending health pool
16. Party AI: Popokarimu fight. Yes I put this under ‘party AI’ and not ‘boss’ because the boss itself is fine, really… but if you don’t have another player good friggin’ luck getting Sheva to actually do what’s necessary to actually fight the stupid boss
17. Encounter: The turret section followed by a turret boss. And the turret boss is entirely too tight on timing
18. Level: The hold the line segment in the oil refinery. This is how you do a hold the line badly; You have a narrow and linear pathway and no tools whatsoever to deal with it other than your own kit. And the enemies include the ‘entirely too much health’ chainsaw baddies
19. Level: The light puzzle in the buried ruins. Oh the puzzle’s fine, if a bit of Red Light Green Light, but it’s once again lots of narrow corridors with no routing and plenty of dead ends alongside forcing a party split and several high health enemies
20. Encounter: Hope you enjoy spinning around a room with repeating textures while trying to precision aim! But seriously it’s the dizziness that’s the issue here
21. Boss: Every boss in the game is built around co-op and a gimmick designed to enforce co-op. And that kind of… sucks if you don’t have a real human player to play with

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Cutscene: A nice opener and a good indicator of what we’re in for; Hilarity
2. Humor: Speaking of, the game made me laugh pretty consistently
3. Voice Acting: Solid voice acting across the board. Bringing in James Arnold Taylor didn’t hurt anything either
4. Animation: Weirdly good animation for what they were going for
5. Brickwork: Mostly a general one. There’s good if infrequent brickwork periodically throughout the whole game…
6. Brickwork: …earning a solid…
7. Brickwork: …triple
8. Cutscene: So, several of these commercials are just hilarious in and of their own right. So let’s start by giving one to the Arena
9. Cutscene: The Bikers
10. Cutscene: The Protopet
11. Background Lore: The Bestiary has several fun, silly little tidbits for the enemies you encounter
12. Cutscene: The prison
13. Brickwork: Planet Smolg, Distribution Facility. There’s a lot of great details here; the distant facilities, the swirling storm, the giant cargo ships, the cargo platforms
14. Atmosphere: Pretty much the same generally amusing tone as the first game (better, really)
15. Character: Weirdly, yes. In general sure but the thing that pulls this up is the Thugs 4 Life boss, who is bizarrely legit throughout
16. Spritework: Same generally good spritework as the first game

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: There’s… really no proper hook or setup here, and it kicks off a plot that…
2. Plot: …basically doesn’t exist. It has the same basic problem as the first game but honestly a bit worse in…
3. Story Sequencing: …how it just bounces around from setpiece to setpiece. In some cases it’s incredibly blatant, where you’ll go through a level to find someone who literally says ‘here watch this’ and then peaces out…
4. Story Sequencing: …earning a second negative
5. NPC Set Dressing: Same general issue as the first game. Areas feel absolutely devoid
6. Outro: Foreshadowing: Everything to do with the big reveal about Qwark is handled incredibly badly
7. Outro: Then there’s everything to do with the cutscenes leading up to the final battle, which is very cheap looking
8. Outro: Then there’s the fact that we’re fighting the stupid Protopet (and mooks) as the final boss
9. Outro: Then there’s the dumb humor in the actual ending
10. Outro: Then there’s the nonsense with things just sort of stopping, in a weird moment too (right after Ratchet promises to fix Clank’s girlfriend)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Map: Pretty much the same map as in 1, and still pretty decent. Shows you where you’ve been, where quests are, and is reasonably easy to parse
2. Kit: Blaster, Mininuke, Blitz Cannon, and Seeker Missiles. We have your basic assault rifle, a grenade launcher, a light spam, and a homing delayed missile. This is already good stuff…
3. Kit: …then we add the turret glove, which is fantastic and allows for not only fire and forget but also you can swap weapons and shoot with other guns while the turrets are active…
4. Kit: …then there’s the Lavagun (NOT the Meteor Gun) which uses actual water physics to be an absolute treat to use…
5. Kit: …then the Bouncer and Rocket Tube, which serve as great AOE cluster fire and long range sniper explosions respectively
6. Kit: There’s a lot of other guns which are also ported over from 1
7. Kit: And of course then there’s a host of other fun, if middling, guns to choose from
8. Traversal: Pretty solid traversal overall, between the boots, the leaps, the lunges, etc.
9. Viscerality: Audio. Great sound design for a lot of the guns
10. Viscerality: Video. Fantastic explosions, lasers, guns, everything…
11. Viscerality: …for a double
12. Music: Some damned good music throughout…
13. Music: …easy double
14. Enemy Variety: Pretty varied enemy design throughout as well. Smalls, heavies, shooters, melees, etc.
15. Difficulty: Apparently there’s a dynamic difficulty in the game which changes health drops, enemy quality, and damage
16. QoL: Smart ammo drops return, and a few other little things
17. Minigame: The Arena. Fun optional objectives that are beyond just ‘kill enemies’ with good rewards, combined with some good terrain design to help you with the fights
18. Level: General shortcutting design. Most areas automatically bake in shortcuts once you finish a given loop
19. Level: Maktar Resort, satellite jammer. The Resort is fine, but what really earns this is the satellite. Having to do some light platforming is whatever but the way they present this on the curved moon, as well as the ‘map’ of just zooming out so you can see the whole stage, works pretty well
20. Level: Planet Notak, Canal City. This is honestly probably the best overall level in the game so far, with the rising and falling water you have to freeze at the right time, melting some paths while freezing for others, and some honestly good shortcutting
21. Level: Planet Siberius. Fun for what it is, with some solid encounter design and a fun set piece
22. Minigame: Planet Joba and the second Arena. Same basic idea as the first, but with a much cooler arena, and some new enemies
23. Level: Planet Todano and the factory tour. More accurately some neat little puzzles with the tractor platforms
24. Princess Peach Segment: The Clank segments are a great way to keep variety in the pacing and give the player some neat mechanics (in the form of the bots) to play with
25. NG+: Usual
26. NG+: Money multiplier rewarding not getting hit, and all new upgrades to bump your guns up even more
27. Replayability: Generally replayable

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Continuing in the Intro just straight up does not work
2. HUD: Health and experience color usage and decisions. So your health bar is light blue, against a darker blue, and has no indicators for being low other than just not having the health there. This is on top of the experience bar being a nice bright and obvious red bar that’s filling which immediately draws the eye at a glance. This is ALSO on top of the fact that the AMMO flashes red when it’s low. This is… baffling, and dovetails into…
3. Interface: …a general lack of feedback. Multiple times I have issues telling if I’ve successfully fired a gun or not, if an enemy has hit me, or if I’ve done damage to them due to a weird lack of feedback
4. MSQ: Mandatory fighter sequence. Let’s talk problems. First, the enemies are too numerous and too ‘swoopy’ for what they are. They’re also relative instead of absolute which… defeats the entire point of a fighter segment (might as well be just a Star Fox sequence instead at that point). Third, it takes entirely too long and Fourth, it’s boring
5. Controls: Single inversion in first person, the same exact issue from the last game
6. QoL: Tools still take up a quick select wheel slot, just like in 1. This is still an issue because of how it interrupts flow and how they’re functionally just keys, and could just be passives
7. Secondary: Crystal farming in the desert. It’s optional, it’s lucrative, but damn is it boring
8. Kit: Downgrades. So here’s the deal; Some of the upgraded weapons are just straight worse (two as of typing, the shotgun and the lavagun). That already sucks but it gets worse when you realize that there’s NO avoiding this, there’s no opt-out. So the only way to keep the old version of the weapon is to not use it
9. Kit: Some of the weapons very noticeably fall behind in damage output, to the point where there’s no real reason to even use them anymore. This is part of a greater issue…
10. Difficulty Curve: …the difficulty curve. There’s a lot more focus on combat in this game and to compensate there’s several observable increases in enemy health and damage output…
11. Difficulty Curve: …which just sort of makes the whole thing slog
12. Level: The Glider segments. There’s worse out there, but screw these
13. Boss: Giant Clank, too much health
14. Boss: And the helicopters which do way too much damage
15. Level: Silver City on Boldan. This is a weird, frustrating, long swath of enemies that hit very hard, give very few bolts, and goes too long without checkpoints
16. Boss: Big slime beast thing. Too much health, too little variety, too janky of platforming
17. Boss: Megapede. Moves so fast only a few weapons even do anything, constant pressure from AOE homing grenades, and if you don’t destroy his parts he takes no damage…
18. Boss: …frustration slog
19. Level: Planet Snivelak, Thug HQ. This place is enemy spam central
20. Boss: Giganto-Mech. This boss has way… way too much health. This is a fight that literally took me 15 minutes to do it, and that was after I figured out what I was doing…
21. Boss: …so this alone deserves a double
22. Boss: Controls: Then there’s the turret problem. The controls on the turret are absolutely awful. It feels like the actual turret itself is rusted; It jerks instead of moves smoothly
23. Boss: Also the boss loves to mash you with bullet spam preventing you from being able to have dedicated vuln segments
24. Penalty For Failure: Healing, and lack thereof. For how hard things hit and how often enemies are, heals are awful. One heal healing for less than the damage you take from a single enemy attack doesn’t math well
25. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Planet Smolg, Distribution Facility. Do an entire lengthy jumping sequence without dying or start all over. Also do an entire enemy swarm segment without dying or start all over
26. Level: Planet Damosel, Allgon City, the rail section. Too long, no checkpoints, unclear feedback, and entirely too punishing
27. Level: Planet Damosel, Allgon City, kill alls. Enemies who hit entirely too hard, some of whom can self spawn, lots and lots of them, with no terrain or otherwise to mitigate or utilize, all while having tons of health
28. Enemy Design: Yetis. Everything about these assholes is awful. They spawn quickly (in fact they have collision before they’ve even spawned), they have an enormous swiping lunging attack, they spawn in huge groups, they have entirely too much health, and they like to body block. These guys…
29. Enemy Design: …absolutely suck
30. Enemy Design: The ice dragons are awful. Their attack homes in really well, their damage is crazy, they have tons of health, they spawn weirdly, and they’re inside instant death water
31. Secondary: Winter crystal farming is actually worse than the desert grind, but that’s for its own reasons listed above
32. Secondary: Raritanium grinds in the desert and the friggin’ snowfield with the friggin’ yetis
33. NG+: Just a bit too grindy on getting the new upgraded guns
34. Core Combat: Same lack of iframes and stunlocking issue as the first game
35. Outro: The last level is just another massive enemy spam from hell without much in the way of terrain or gimmick to help
36. Outro: Boss: I’ve seen worse but this is… not a good fight. First, he has two basic attacks (roll, and spawn adds) and… that’s basically it. That’s the whole fight. Yes I know he can actually eat the ammo and use that against you but you can tell it wasn’t QA’d because it’s shockingly easy to dodge (and breaks lockon while he’s doing it), and the whole time you’re dealing with minor irritants as more and more adds spawn…
37. Outro: Boss: …so enjoy that double negative

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Desert maps. I mean you’ll see a lot of them so they’d better be good, but they’re solid for what they are
2. Brickwork: The map. They really made this one gorgeous, especially with the little details here and there (I especially like that sky)…
3. Brickwork: …easy double
4. Spritework: Units, of course. Nothing super fancy but still good stuff
5. Sound: Of course the sound design is good. It’s hard to find a Total War game that doesn’t nail this
6. Voice Acting: Honestly some really solid performances here

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Alternate Advancement: The, uh, ‘tech’ tree and its related systems. The buffs they give are all linear stat buffs but the system itself is smooth, costs nothing but time, and has good interface design
2. Difficulty Options: Good difficulty options
3. Difficulty Options: Gradient difficulty options
4. Difficulty Options: Toggleable on the fly difficulty options
5. Starting Options: Campaign starting options are honestly bonkers in their depth. I can’t possibly do them a service, this is literally the most options I’ve seen in one of these games…
6. Starting Options: …so that’s a triple…
7. Starting Options: …just for the campaign options
8. Starting Options: Then there’s the Battle options
9. Starting Options: Then there’s the AI setup options
10. Starting Options: Then there’s everything else
11. Interface: Toggles, searches, and filters abound. I don’t want to over-praise (there’s still a few issues with finding info at a glance) but it’s still good
12. HUD: Ditto, really. The at-a-glance HUD is good, but could be better
13. Minigame: Skirmish mode and its various options. Honestly I’ve seen better, but it’s still solid for random maps
14. Music: Solid stuff here as well. Love the pseudo rock egyptian beat
15. Replayability: Generally replayable
16. Replayability: Plenty of options and design around continued replayability
17. Save: Good quicksave and quickload
18. Save: Good autosave…
19. Save: …with multiple slots
20. Info In Game: Encyclopedia. There’s a few weird bits of jank in how its navigated and its search feature, but it’s still there and still has a ton of info
21. Core Mechanics: Deities, Legacy, Commands. There’s some issues with these I’ll mention later, but for the most part there’s some solid ideas present. Being able to mix and max deities, determine a legacy path, and have side-custom commands adds some nice variety
22. Unit Design: I’ve seen better (from this studio, even!) but what’s here is still good. It all boils down to a few archetypes, but there’s good design to those archetypes…
23. Unit Design: …for a solid double
24. Kit: The factions aren’t nearly as wildly diverse as I’ve seen before in previous Total War games, but there’s still some good faction design and variety here. Complete with horde factions, builders, and archetype focuses
25. Viscerality: Audio viscerality is, of course, legit. In fact it’s one of the better aspects of viscerality…
26. Viscerality: …earning a solid double
27. Strategic Layer: Outposts. Of all the things this game does wrong on the Strategic Layer, I really like the Outpost system. There’s a lot of things you can build with them, they give regional and/or provincial benefits, and you can ‘use’ them with armies to gain variant benefits
28. Minimap: Generally good with generally good options

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Camera: The usual Total War camera problems. What’s really funny is there’s two other camera modes but despite this they don’t actually fix any of the core issues with said camera
2. Controls: Same issues as usual. Inability to have units across multiple control groups
3. Controls: Issues with in combat hotkeys
4. Controls: And general jank controlling your units
5. Core Mechanic: Diplomacy is, as usual, virtually non existent. It’s frustrating especially since multiple factions have ‘good diplomacy’ as their hat
6. Late Game: Usual issue every large strategy game has
7. Mid Game: By the time you’ve done your first honest to goodness siege as your chosen faction… you’ve already seen basically the entire game
8. Enemy AI: Cheats. As usual. This is especially egregious as they can just harass you with rebuilt armies which are quickly replenished entirely too quickly
9. Terrain: As usual, a general lack of terrain design
10. Bug: Diplomacy tab ‘make it work’ not… working. This is apparently a confirmed bug and it happened to us semi frequently
11. HUD: At-a-glance on unit cards. It just takes too much time to properly parse what’s going on there. This is also true in some other specific menus
12. Strategic Layer: Okay so, let’s talk about the End Turn Problem. Every Total War game has this to some extent or another, but in previous games (including both we’ve previously covered, Warhammer 3 and Troy) effort was put into trying to bandage over these issues which is… absent in this game. This leads to a bunch of issues which collide with each other (which is what we call a capital p Problem). So. First step; the Strategic Layer itself is either too abstracted or not abstract enough. Let’s cover both. First, it’s too abstracted. There is just not enough to actually do in between turns that does not involve combat. Waiting on units to recruit, waiting on buildings to finish, and that’s sort of… it. There’s depth to the strategic layer, but all of that boils down to a bunch of stats, not additional gameplay
13. Strategic Layer: Second, it’s not abstract enough. There’s too much time that is effectively wasted watching numbers tick down or people move on the map instead of just getting on with it. If provinces just straight up gave ‘resources’ and you used those to gain benefits or units, then it’d be fine (example: Dark Crusade over in Dawn of War 1). Instead there’s too much going on without adding anything to the gameplay. Worse…
14. Strategic Layer: …both of these problems run into the weird issue with how it barely feels rewarding to expand and conquer. In a game where painting the map is a primary mechanic there should probably be some tangible benefit, but thanks to how all the mechanics run into each other it feels more like a hassle to expand, not a blessing. This is in part due to…
15. Core Mechanic: …the fact that you can recruit units in the strategic layer. No, hear me out a sec. Recruitment…
16. Padding: …takes time, as well as resources…
17. Core Mechanic: …which takes buildings and lands…
18. Padding: …which takes turns…
19. Seconds In Minutes: …which take forever due to…
20. Bug: …the End Turn bug. Now I know I just ran through a lot there so here’s a paragraph to explain more. The idea here is that you want more (and different) units. Units take time to recruit, and you’re hard capped on how many you can recruit per turn. This means turns spent sitting around waiting for recruitment. It also means resources in places to both recruit and upkeep units. Those resources primarily come from buildings (there are other sources for, say, Horde factions). Buildings take time (meaning more waiting around) and… yes, resources, meaning they also take even more waiting. So wait to make to wait to make to wait to recruit. And all of this massively pads out the strategic layer entire (hence the Problem) with a whole lot of ‘not gameplay’. None of what I just described is, really, gameplay. Instead it feels more like a chore you have to slog through to get to what you actually want to do. And the bug? Well, there’s either a lack of CPU optimization or just an honest bug in the game which makes turn ends take entirely too long. Even by turn 10 we were waiting 46 seconds per turn, which is honestly insane. Especially considering most actions (like, say, replenishing an army) takes multiple turns
21. Core Mechanic: The Egyptian Court. I feel bad punching down on this one because it’s actually a really good and cool mechanic… that’s absolutely RUINED by one simple thing. The Regard you build is per Person, not per Position. So to explain how stupid this is, you have to understand that people in the Egyptian Court only get one action per turn, and that people can and often do change positions VERY rapidly in court. These two facts totally destroy it. You have to burn an entire turn just to generate Regard, and then another turn to spend it. But you also generally don’t get enough Regard with a single action to do anything, which means multiple turns spent getting Regard. And if the Person leaves the Position? All of that is nuked. Even on Ramesses, who has the special ability of doing a whopping two Court actions per turn, you still run into this problem. They just rotate too fast for it to be meaningful

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Say what you will about the character and the dialogue, but Colt’s voice actor is actually really good. He manages the right mix of normal, psychotic, and slightly insane…
2. Voice Acting: …easy double
3. Voice Acting: Everyone. I’m sorry, the cast is pretty legit, despite how much I hate them all…
4. Voice Acting: …so that’s another double
5. Visual Storytelling: Zones get worse as time goes on
6. Internal Continuity: I almost groan at giving this positive but in the interests of fairness, they DO do a good job of keeping everything internally coherent and consistent
7. Character: 2-Bit is… weirdly wholesome

Story Negatives:

1. Doodads: This is a double whammy. This is also a negative down in Visual Distinction, but even from the story axis there’s often too little thought put into what doodads should be where. This pulls it back from being ‘doodad design’ and pushes it into ‘doodad clutter’
2. Dialogue: The dialogue in this game is… bad. At best. It’s that particular brand of awkward teenager mixed with trying too hard to be funny, dripping in bathos so it’s hard to take anything seriously, and there’s whole sections of back and forth where you just find yourself thinking ‘what was just said?’ because it’s that lacking in basic sentence structure and vocabulary. So uh…
3. Dialogue: …enjoy…
4. Dialogue: …that negative
5. Plot: So. The entire game hinges on the idea that most people don’t remember their transitions through the loops. There are ways to make this work, honestly, but no effort is actually put into doing so aside from a casual handwave. This explains… absolutely nothing, and ignores the possible holes therein (How does no one else ever figure out how to do whatever ‘meditation’ Julianne is doing? How is it that you can remember, then relapse, then remember? Why is 2-Bit immune totally, despite still having a functionally biological brain?)
6. Characters: The characters are really cringe-inducingly awful. On purpose, yes, but still it’s… legitimately unpleasant to behold them
7. Visual Continuity: Or lack thereof. Despite having a strong landmark visible at all times there’s just no connective tissue between zones, it makes you feel like you’re just warping around randomly
8. Brickwork: I actively dislike the visuals of the backgrounds in this game. They’re incredibly generic, to the point where they don’t convey anything narratively… y’know, brickwork
9. Outro: The original ending of just staying in the loop is nonsense on so many levels. It’s treated as wholesome and isn’t, it flies in the face of the entire game, and it’s completely unearned…
10. Outro: …earning a solid double
11. Outro: The… ‘good’ ending is better, it really is, but it’s still pretty bad. So the world is a nightmarish hellscape, everything’s awful, but it’s okay cuz we can leave? And everyone’s… fine?

Gameplay Positives:

1. Options: Generally good options, with… a couple of hiccups I’ll mention later
2. Kit: The weapon choices are… fine. The pseudo random guns are fine, the (small) variety of guns are fine
3. All Roads Lead To Rome: Not.. as much as there should be for this type of game. Everything is aggressively linear, and most of the options are pretty scripted. So consider this an aggregate for the entire game
4. Guidance: When it’s working right, the in game indicators and pre-mission indicators of what you can do in each mission at what time are nice
5. Music: I’ve only really heard a couple of songs as of writing this but the non combat one is good ambience and the combat one is decent
6. Viscerality: Visual viscerality is definitely there, I’ll give it that…
7. Viscerality: …as well as some legitimately good impact…
8. Viscerality: …for a second Impact positive
9. Minigame: Photo Mode is pretty solid for what it is
10. Level: The Complex is solid for what it is. Mostly it’s the power plant, but there’s a lot going on down there (and I sure hope you memorized it because you’ll be back a lot…) I do appreciate the NPCs tutorializing as well as the multiple redundancies on several quest items and routes
11. Level: Updaam. There’s a lot going on here (in fact probably one of the overall better designed areas). The residential section, the interiors, the entirety of Charlie’s stupid game, and the concert area

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Several issues which there is no fix for (the camera issue alone was a constant hassle)
2. Bug: Optimization issues. The game really should not run this badly
3. Seconds In Minutes: Load times. This is… really bad. I thought about putting this under ‘bug’ because it seems to be inconsistent from computer to computer, but 30s per load screen in a game like this all about going back and forth to missions areas constantly? That’s…
4. Seconds In Minutes: …a lot…
5. Seconds In Minutes: …of padding
6. Sound: Usual audio balancing design problems
7. Interface: Feedback problems. There are multiple instances where what happened is not super clear and there’s actively inaccurate feedback
8. Interface: Also the game literally forces you to online mode (aka PvP mode) WITHOUT TELLING YOU. As of writing this I haven’t narrowed down exactly what’s doing this, but this is a great time to talk about the PvP in general. See, this game was originally designed all around the PvP element and it causes issues across the entire game
9. Interface: Really quick, it KEPT shoving us into online mode periodically (without telling me, of course) so…
10. Interface: …let’s just increase these negatives
11. Saves: First and foremost, no mid mission saves, which sucks for a lot of obvious reasons (loosing loop progress if anything interrupts you at all, which can include internet issues, hardware issues, or real life issues)
12. Inventory: Then there’s your inventory… or the near total LACK thereof. You have your two hands, each of which can equip a few things, and that’s… it. This is already very limiting in and of itself, but then consider…
13. Itemization: …that loot drops everywhere and constantly. Being forced to essentially just pick three guns means throwing away existing guns to try out new things (in the interests of fairness, if you ‘save’ an item with Residuum it stays next loop even if you toss it). Then consider…
14. Info In Game: …the guns only really tell you what they do when you mouseover them upon looting, or in between missions, because there IS no inventory to speak of to tell you what does what if you forgot (and you will, given how many guns are shotgunned at you constantly)
15. Core Mechanic: Then you have to consider mulching. Mulching equipment to make more Residuum is a major mechanic and method by which to ensure you keep some of your progress across loops. And you do not get to bring back most guns at the end of a mission due to the limited inventory size
16. Intro: Tutorialization: Okay so this is one of the worst Intros I’ve seen in a very, very long time. I’m going to have to break this down piece by piece. First, this is some of the worst tutorializing I’ve seen outside of a mobile game. To be clear; First, they’re mandatory. Second, you can’t fast forward through them. Third, they shove info into your face in giant text rather than any kind of contextual tutorialization. Fourth, you cannot do ANYthing that is not the very specific thing they want you to do…
17. Intro: Tutorialization: …and honestly it’s that last one that pisses me off the most personally…
18. Intro: Tutorialization: …but it’s bad in general
19. Intro: Padding: Second, it’s entirely too long. You spend literal hours slow moding your way through ‘intro’ versions of several stages before you’re allowed to actually do anything, which brings me to…
20. Intro: Power Progression Curve: …it takes way, way too long to slowly roll out the mechanics and options and gameplay features to the player, culminating in gaining access to Residuum to carry things across loops. There’s no real reason any of this has to take longer than 10 minutes, tops, not 4 hours. Speaking of which…
21. Intro: Level: It’s possible to lose quest items meaning mandated loop restart
22. Intro: Difficulty Curve: Also there is NO good reason for this entire sequence to be as easy to die as it is. In normal play I have no real issue with death (actually I do but that’s separate), but what the issue really is here is this is the part of the game where you’re most punished for dying because NOTHING carries forward at this point. ANY sufficient screw up (the three deaths) means starting over. This also bleeds over into…
23. Intro: Early Game: …Early Game Hell. I get wanting to slowly unlock kit, but you start off with WAY too little viable kit and it makes the first few sections not only more punishing, but more sloggy. And, I’m sorry for repeating myself…
24. Intro: Penalty For Failure: …but dying in the tutorial SUCKS because none of the carry-forward mechanics exist yet
25. Itemization: Amount of healing restoration given…
26. Difficulty: …how much damage you take from everything
27. Visual Distinction: On items AND instant death issues
28. Options: Also not letting the player change certain options at certain times and without feedback
29. Core Combat: Animation locking during kills which does not prevent damage
30. Seconds In Minutes: Looting Residuum is entirely too slow for how central of a thing it is. No I don’t mean from your corpse, I mean from items in the world
31. Backtracking: I really, really hope you love backtracking, because they sure do. Let’s track this on a case by case basis, so first I will ding the ‘get the three codes’ quest. There ARE ways to be more efficient about this and speed it up… if you know what you’re doing, AND if nothing goes wrong. Anything screws up? Time wasted…
32. Backtracking: …go do it again
33. Guidance: The quest log is very helpful… except when it isn’t. Or is actively misleading
34. Encounter: Defending the three antennae against repeatedly respawning mooks
35. Enemy Design: Or lack thereof. There are, in total, three types of enemies. Dude with gun, dude with alarm, and dude with bombs. That’s it. And there are…
36. Trash: …SO many of them. They can also kill you in seconds and like to swarm if you’re spotted. This is straight up Factory Worker Syndrome and it…
37. Trash: …makes too much of the game take too damned long (more on this later)
38. Encounter Rate: Spawn triggers also up the number of enemies, which runs contradictory to a game where static spawns are part of level design AND can be used to the player’s advantage (by avoiding or killing)
39. Encounter: Fia’s reactor and…
40. Trash: …enemy spam are the worst individual fight in the game. Screw this entire segment. There are WAY too many enemies here and failure means an entire loop reset with no option to carry forward
41. QoL: By the way the constant irritation of how long it takes to do anything is the opposite of QoL. And goes against the very format of the game (resetting, redoing, practicing, learning)
42. Kit: Powers are too limiting and not interesting enough
43. Kit: Guns are too limiting and not interesting enough. Also…
44. Prime Opt: …uniques have entire quest chains to them, resulting in a random result for the gun which means, you guessed it, late game grind
45. Late Game: Late game exemplifies all the issues with the rest of the game but magnified. You have to do many steps in a row, in the right way, at the right time. Any screw up means starting over. And while that makes sense and is fine it’s made worse because of the, the, the biggest problem of the whole game…
46. Seconds In Minutes: …EVERYTHING takes too damned long. Loading takes too long, walking across the island takes too long, killing takes too long, looting takes too long…
47. Seconds In Minutes: …the whole game…
48. Seconds In Minutes: …is padded to hell and back. I’ve actually put a lot of thought into this and I think the reason it’s such a huge issue HERE is down to three big reasons. First is the obvious (enemy spam), second is the lack of saves (no quick load if you’re spotted, instead redo the ENTIRE loop, which is a lot of menuing and loading), and third is of course… loading. The load issue we mentioned earlier. The whole game is at least twice the length it needs to be. This is on top of a lot of this not even being content (just… running from point A to point B a lot of the time) and the mandatory scripting to progress…
49. Padding: …for…
50. Padding: …another…
51. Padding: …triple
52. Replayability: The game is so aggressively linear (and frankly against its own core premise, the rogue-progression looping) that it actively resists replay
53. Enemy Variety: Or lack thereof. Seriously, the enemy design is already bad, but it’s the same…
54. Enemy Variety: …damned…
55. Enemy Variety: …three enemy types which are BARELY different from each other the ENTIRE game. Even the BOSSES are barely different. Speaking of which…
56. Boss: …the bosses! Or lack thereof! Each boss is literally a typical basic mook with more stats and a slab. This even extends into Julianne…
57. Boss: …so, yeah, that sucks
58. Level: Karl’s Bay. Irritating terrain, frustrating enemy clustering, one-way doors with no bypassing, terrain damage, irritating flow…
59. Level: …the whole place is just a pain
60. Level: The Complex. There’s some good stuff here, honestly (I mentioned that up in positives), but depending on the time it can also be just a hassle. Enemy sight lines just break the flow of navigation, far too many enemies in enclosed spaces, and that damned death water everywhere
61. Level: Fristad Rock is the worst zone in the game, bar none. Everything the other zones do wrong this one does worse. I hated navigating here, and the game forces you to come here often and for many quests, many of which suck…
62. Level: …screw…
63. Level: …this place

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Cutscene: For what it’s worth, the intro anime cinematic is quite good. We’re told a lot in very little time and with very little idea of what any of it means, but with one noteworthy exception none of it is a cheat. Instead we get a lot of characterization for the Eldridge’s captain, the scope of the threat, and the pettiness of the main villain all in a neat package. And then a little ‘huh??’ with the final shot…
2. Intro: Cutscene: …easy double
3. Brickwork: Lahan is easily one of the better looking places in the game. Going full 3D was bold and, honestly, a little foolish of the devs given the limitations of the time and team, but it does look legit here…
4. Doodads: …as well as in the doodads
5. Spritework: The main cast have some really solid sprites. They’re not as good as a few other games of this era (Breath of Fire 3, Chrono Cross) but the animations really help…
6. Spritework: …for a solid…
7. Spritework: …triple
8. Animation: And, yeah, the animations are very well done for pretty much the entire main cast…
9. Animation: …again, for that double
10. Moment: Fei painting. This one scene encapsulates so much of his character in one scene. Even with everything that’s been and gone, Fei would really be happy just living in that nothing little village and painting
11. Moment: Repetition aside, having Fei narrate while Elly shows (via flashback) her side of events is actually good storytelling
12. Brickwork: Dazil. Lovely usage of the desert-dwelling vibes
13. NPC Set Dressing: General. Lots of people roaming around; soldiers, merchants, treasure seekers
14. World Building: An entire industry around excavating mechas. This is a fascinating concept on the face of it
15. Background Lore: Religion, legends, and myths. Effort is put into using myths as part of in universe storytelling and from these disparate threads you can almost weave together the truth
16. Tone: The Yggdrasil itself is such a cool ship. No more notes, it’s just cool
17. Background Lore: Aveh politics is a cool background element to most of Act 1, further set in front of the backdrop of the war with Kislev
18. Animation: Background elements. This is something I so rarely see in games in general but there’s little details that flesh out scenes going on in the backgrounds of a lot of scenes
19. Brickwork: Bledavik and the palace on the mountain
20. Brickwork: The cathedral of Nisan and its weirdly metallic construction
21. Theme: The One Winged Angels and people being incomplete apart
22. MSQ: Initial zoomed in focus on Shakhan
23. MSQ: Shift in focus and escalation
24. Cutscene: Good military jargon and well written combat between Ramsus and Sigmund
25. Moment: Nice evacuation and last minute craziness from Sigmund
26. Moment: Great escalation with throwing the ship at Crazyboy (and then him throwing it back)
27. MSQ: The Goliath capture to the lost at sea to the Thames is a weirdly wholesome, humorous segment and feels like a nice breather after the attempted genocide just prior
28. Moment: Also special mention to Fei and Elly getting a nice moment while stranded on the waves
29. Moment: Miang verbally owning Dominia and taking charge of Ramsus and Elly effortlessly
30. Visual Storytelling: Babel Tower. The clear, rusted remains of a piece of the Eldridge, where random encounters are the attack drones
31. MSQ: This is a bunch of disparate little connecting pieces but I like reaching Shevat (finally) and finding the one thing Solaris fears is actually… just a bunch of refugees from various battles we’ve been seeing throughout the game, who have even less of an idea what’s going on than we do
32. Moment: Maria and what’s left of Nikolai. Both of them
33. Brickwork: Solaris. Pristine, clean, and artificial as hell
34. MSQ: Also the entire vibe of Solaris. I know this is sci fi nazi germany but WOW they really hammer in how awful this place is. Special bonus points to a tiny little side detail…
35. Visual Storytelling: …all the normal citizenry are dumb, white, and blonde
36. MSQ: The Ministry ranting blindly about their purpose, Citan reaching out to Id, Krelian giving entirely too much away in his discussions with Elly, and Ramsus continuing to bemoan his tiny dick. It took 40 hours of gameplay but we finally started the plot, and to be fair this is a decent hook
37. Visual Storytelling: The near total absence of personnel in Solaris… everywhere. Similar to the earlier Shevat incident (where we find out the super advanced Shevat are mostly refugees and rescues), we find out most of Solaris are actually converts and slaves, and even those are slowly running out. The whole place is empty, and it’s properly horrifying, especially for how it leads into…
38. Moment: …the revelation of how they sustain their food and medicine supplies
39. Moment: The entire friggin’ castle of Kislev turning into a colossal mech is already cool…
40. Cutscene: …but the immediately following battle against the Solaris super weapon is just kind of awesome. Up to and including using the friggin’ Yggrassil as a friggin’ gun
41. Cutscene: So this may sound odd but I rather like the ‘posed screenshot backdrop’ thing they do in Disc 2. Some obvious thought was put into the creation thereof and it’s a nice, clear indicative of what’s happening alongside the narration
42. MSQ: The revelation that the removal of the limiter lead to the mutations of more Wels to be turned into goop for Deus is just the right amounts of ‘completely screwed up’
43. Moment: Elly (Sophia?)’s genuine entreaty to the mutants
44. Character: Citan. The manipulator who happens to have benevolent intentions
45. Character: Bart. The actual protagonist in every real way for a huge portion of the game, with all the silliness and himbo energy that implies
46. Character: Pirate supporting cast. Seriously, the whole crew of the Yggdrassil is legit
47. Character: Nortune supporting cast. Lot of flavor in Prison Block D (and special mention to the townsfolk)
48. Character: Thames supporting cast. The true MEN… OF… THE SEA
49. Character: General supporting cast. Lots of fun, flavorful NPCs speckled throughout
50. Character: Miang. The manipulative twat who is constantly belittling and controlling everyone around her for its own ends
51. Character: Ramsus. I call him ‘little dick’ because it’s his whole motivation but honestly it’s surprisingly engaging of a character trait. Dude really is just constantly suffering from Imposter Syndrome and cannot get over the fact that Fei keeps defeating him
52. Babylon 5 Effect: For the sake of obviousness I will only mention things here, but there is a LOT of Babylon 5 Effect throughout this game. The opening cinematic, Citan throughout, Id’s presentation, Grahf’s connection to us, the significance of Fei and Elly, the misunderstandings of ‘god’, all of it…
53. Babylon 5 Effect: …is some of the best of this type of foreshadowing…
54. Babylon 5 Effect: …I’ve seen in gaming
55. Theme: Humans are social creatures, and we all need each other
56. MSQ: I admit I find Ramsus fascinating, but what I find funnier about him is how he’s so wrapped around Miang (and Krellian’s) fingers and how they maneuver him against Cain who is against the Ministry and it’s just a wonderfully political tangle
57. Cutscene: Krelian finally killing off the Ministry copies one by one, calmly and politely informing them of how pointless they are, and the wonderful visuals of the orbs and screens blipping away one by one
58. Writing: I have to give a bonus positive to the dramatic irony. The Ministry Bots were so convinced of their own superiority and significance, constantly touting how they are above everyone else, but are ultimately deleted ingloriously by someone who doesn’t even have any special powers or magic. Just a man with a brain. Unlike them
59. Plot: The true nature of what Deus is and how it formed the entire history of the world is legitimately compelling…
60. Plot: …an easy double
61. Internal Continuity: The game does a lot to keep track of itself in the latter ends of Disc 2
62. MSQ: The entire swath of the reveal about Miang, the role Krelian may or may not play, and the nature of the reincarnation
63. MSQ: Finally, finally, having Fei’s character arc. It’s incredibly truncated and shoved into like 10 minutes of cutscenes, but damned if it isn’t some good stuff. The absolute horror of what Miang did to Fei, the reality of Fei’s three pieces, the culmination of the reveals about Lacan, Miang, and Fei…
64. MSQ: …some very…
65. MSQ: …powerful stuff
66. Cutscene: Some legitimately excellent cutscene construction (arguably for the first time) as Fei, Id, and the Coward hash out their issues
67. Brickwork: The Lighthouse, and related cutscenes. It’s honestly shocking how detailed and well designed this all is for a single barely sidequest
68. Cutscene: It’s little, but I do like the Emeralda moment and the insight it gives into how things were before the end 4000 years ago
69. Character: Krelian is truly one of the most horrifying people in the game. The only one who even comes close to him is Miang and, let’s be honest, she’s just Deus. This monster has been so focused on leaving and taking all of humanity with him that he does not care about anything else, and so does some truly awful things

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: Lack of hook. The opening is bland, at best, and worst doesn’t do anything to lead into the game proper. The first Act in its entirety is really Bart’s story as well as the focus on freeing Aveh from Shakhan
2. Intro: Writing: As You Know exposition. Seriously there’s a lot of this in the Intro
3. Intro: Pacing: Cutscene into massive text dump into bad writing
4. Intro: And honestly the Intro doesn’t do anything… good. It’s just the bog standard doomed hometown where the hero is banished and that’s it
5. Moment: Repetition of conveyance to Elly about what literally just happened
6. Empty Text: The Forest segment, and the initial foray into the Desert, both have long stretches of empty text
7. Story Sequencing: It’s minor but the way we bumble into the actual first act plot is tenuous at best (I’m particularly fond of the part where Fei chases Gears into the desert on foot)
8. Empty Text: Bart’s base, Bledavik, and Nisan. I have a feeling this is going to be a recurring trend
9. Localization: While I fully understand the issues that Honeywood was having, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a rough localization. Patches of inconsistent word usage, weird repetition, odd sentencing, over-use of ellipses and exclamation marks, the usual for the era
10. Brickwork: Nortune. This entire place looks… awful. Boring, samey blobs of grey and brown
11. Cutscene: Wiseman’s exposition dump is already a smorgasborg of badly translated boring text but the fact is the scene itself has nothing going on at all. It’s literally a static camera angle and unmoving people talking to each other, textbook case of bad scene construction
12. Cutscene: An entire swath of nonsense and obviously incomplete story beats as we deal with Rico, the Kaiser, and Noturne
13. Localization: By this point in the game the localization has taken a noticeable dip downwards in quality. While sometimes the general gist is still possible, in some cases I literally cannot tell what they’re saying
14. Story Sequencing: There’s a LOT of ‘uhh’ in the stretch between Nortune and Thames
15. Moment: Child prostitution… and played for laughs. No, game
16. Architecture: Probably as a result of all the other issues with the development of this game the towns feel… bad. Like the giant sand city only looks large because of the map view, the actual playable areas are miniscule and leave you feeling like you’ve stepped onto a stage play
17. Empty Text: Hours and hours of nothing followed by entirely too much plot crammed into one sequence…
18. Writing: …with lots (and I mean LOTS) of repeat dialogue
19. MSQ: The Thames attack is… weird. It feels like a huge swath of something just isn’t here. We see Kerellian (for the first time!) who absolutely bodies the salvager fleet in one shot, then drops a bunch of kaiju and leaves. By the time we get there… they’re fine. No Wels, no problems, nothing. We’re just told to go to the next plot area
20. Cutscene Incompetence: I’ve been biting my tongue on this for a while but GOOD lord do we just stand there and let bad stuff happen a lot
21. Tone: So… the whole game is weirdly, uncomfortably misogynistic. No I don’t mean the people IN the game, I mean the game itself
22. Pacing: Okay so… I’ve been pretty tolerant of this until now but we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room. There’s an old saying, ‘If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter’. It speaks to how long it takes to really polish good fiction (of any medium, really) because being very careful with things like tempo and pacing and padding and all that jazz takes, more than anything else, time. Time the devs of this game didn’t… really have because their manager was an idiot and the team was way over-ambitious. The result is that the game is crazy lopsided sequence of events where you can spend, literally, nine hours of gameplay and accomplish two sentences worth of plot, but also follow that up with about 30 minutes of just a cavalcade of big reveals. This pacing is…
23. Pacing: …honestly…
24. Pacing: …some of the worst I’ve seen in recent memory
25. Padding: It isn’t helped by how much of the story is just spinnings its wheels…
26. Padding: …over…
27. Padding: …and over
28. Segregation: So after Drive is a huge plot point (we even get a whole scene with Elly using Drive) early in the game, now we just get… Drives that permanently raise our stats. No detriment, not even commented on, it’s just… there
29. Localization: Yes I know, but the game keeps surprising me with how much worse the localization keeps getting. By the time we hit Solaris we’ve reached the point where entire swaths of text are actual nonsense and do not make sense. It’s still periodic at least
30. Cutscene: Everything about Fei, Elly, and her parents’ confrontation is… really bad. Sudden, forced, and abandoned all in the space of about a minute
31. Music Direction: There’s just entirely too many times when music either doesn’t play or is played inappropriately (or endlessly)
32. MSQ: Why is the game suddenly whitewashing the Elements? These people are fully in favor of mass genocide and racial purity and they’re aware of it, but they all simp for Ramsus and his tiny dick
33. Fake Drama: Kicking Elly off the party sucks for other reasons but it also makes ZERO sense in universe. Both his motivations and his strategy to accomplish it are questionable at best
34. Plot: So why did it take Deus ten god damned millennia to do its big evil plan? There MAY be an explanation out of universe (I have not seen one I find satisfactory) but in game there is no proper answer to this question
35. Pacing: You like having a metric ton of plot dumped on your head in the space of seconds?! Have we got your back!
36. Character: Grahf. I know the game explains it, I know that it makes sense, I just kind of don’t care. Grahf feels completely unnecessary to the narrative, especially since most of the relevant points to him (the Contact, Lacan, Sophia, the disaster of 500 years ago) all don’t require him to exist
37. Outro: Krelian not only gets whitewashed at the end, but let’s be honest, gets exactly what he always wanted. One of these points is irritating, both is aggravating…
38. Outro: …for a double
39. Outro: The ending is also bizarrely happy given… y’know, the world being completely doomed
40. Outro: It’s also a total nothingburger. It just kind of stops

Gameplay Positives:

1. Tutorialization: The tutorial house is not bad for what it is. Plenty of info on how (most of) the mechanics work
2. Core Combat: So the basic attacks become invalidated almost immediately, but then serve as a way to generate AP (for combos) and to fulfill Deathblows. Thing is these roll into each other rather smoothly. Which attacks you use to build up AP is a whole decision (especially since you won’t really be doing substantial damage while generating AP) and it’s easy to screw up, offering a layer of risk. Further, the Deathblows themselves reward the player for comboing (lower case) attacks in the right ways and add some (for lack of a better way to put it) gameplay to your typical Fight input
3. Core Combat: Combos are another nice little side tidbit. Stagger up tons of damage in one giant push to avoid defenses, counter attacks, and other aspects of enemy design, which thankfully…
4. Enemy Design: …there are plenty of examples that take advantage thereof
5. Kit: General but extant. Buffs, debuffs, AOEs, a few decent items
6. Viscerality: Decent viscerality overall, particularly on the visual side of things. I’m rather fond of the Deathblows and how cool they look
7. Enemy Variety: While there are a few issues with the enemy design, one cannot deny the variety of how the enemies are handled and attack you is nicely done
8. Level: Forest (and mountainside). Simple but well designed tutorialization and platforming, with appropriately ease-in enemy design to service as the tutorial dungeon
9. Level: The tournament, how long you take giving Bart more time and removing more guards
10. Minigame: I can’t believe I’m saying this but I do actually like the minigame Battler fights. They’re a good variation of the normal combat, they’re (frankly) more fun than actual gear combat, and while it’s janky as hell and with a nausea-inducing camera it’s still fun for what it is
11. Minigame: The card minigame on the Thames is weirdly good for what it is
12. Level: The Ethos Transport. It’s not much but I liked what was there; Some interactions, actually decent exploration, and straightforward
13. Pacing: I cannot friggin’ believe this but Disc 2’s pacing is suddenly good. Cutscene, boss, cutscene, dungeon, boss. It’s a good loop, it’s just a shame it doesn’t show up until 45 hours in
14. Boss: Hammer. I know, shocking, but I like the idea of this fight. He starts off weak, but then he gets stronger as he takes damage, and then just stops at some point and starts flashing red while the party says ‘we should run’. You should, of course, but if you don’t and kill him in time you can get a very nice piece of gear from him on the way out
15. Music: Make of this what you will. Too few unique songs, too much repetition, and some questionable decisions, but there’s still enough good music to qualify

Gameplay Negatives:

1. HUD: Buffs, debuffs, etc. Also honestly, and this is just personally speaking, the HUD is… jarringly amateurish looking
2. Unskippable Cutscenes: Some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Between the text scrolling speed, irritants with bypassing said text (no way to speed up, and it almost always defaults to ‘no’ or ‘repeat’), and the sheer…
3. Unskippable Cutscenes: …quantity…
4. Unskippable Cutscenes: …of cutscenes, this gets pretty egregious
5. Unskippable Cutscenes: Also the game loves to put tons of cutscenes right before a boss fight
6. Encounter Rate: It’s inconsistent but in a game THIS long and with as much time you spend in dungeons…
7. Encounter Rate: …it’s still pretty damned high
8. Info In Game: It’s fine sometimes, it’s not a lot of the times, and it’s very unclear all the time
9. Options: Total lack thereof. I usually don’t give this kind of negative but this is jarring from this company, genre, and era
10. Level: The Stalactite Cave is not a particularly good dungeon. Mandatory backtracking, samey textures, irritating enemies designed to waste fuel, high encounter rate, and ultimately the dungeon is just a miniscule jumping puzzle and a corridor…
11. Level: …not super great
12. Boss: Also the boss of the cave is basically a ‘you figured out how to upgrade your mech, right?’ check, which means it’s either boring or nearly impossible
13. Difficulty Curve: There are several difficulty cliffs throughout. This negative is for the one you hit in the Desert and the one in the Sewers
14. Interface: Many, many small issues that just make the whole interface weirdly awkward and hard to read
15. Walkthroughitis: Bart’s base and the second hanger. I’m sorry this entire sequence is entirely too vague and it’s VERY easy to miss the ‘correct’ route. This actually ties into a related issue…
16. Guidance: …general signposting issues. There’s a whole lot of ‘oh THAT’S what I was supposed to interact with?’ going on regularly. This is made even worse…
17. Camera: …by the camera. Having a rotating camera is neat and all but the way it works is entirely too disorienting, and more or less mandates you constantly swiveling around to figure out what’s nearby. It also REALLY does not like vertical areas, of which there are several…
18. Visual Navigation: …making it legitimately frustrating just to navigate normal areas, not even dungeons just towns and the like…
19. Minimap: …most of which would be smoothed out substantially with some kind of minimap, but there is none. The compass is there and helps, but only barely
20. Power Progression Curve: Gear parts are more or less mandatory (it’s the only way to improve the output of your gear) and they are very expensive, leading to a situation where a huge chunk of your gold goes right into your gear while your (much more interesting) ground combat is more on skills, deathblows, and stats
21. Core Combat: This is a good time to mention that the mech combat is… not good. In fact I’m just going to say that it’s boring. You have far fewer options than on ground, and as a result almost every fight boils down to ‘attack, do the same combo, repeat’. The only real choice is if you burn extra fuel on Boost or not
22. Encounter Rate: It varies, but in almost every dungeon it is entirely too high
23. Music: Short loops for long areas. This is a pretty common Mitsuda problem and it gets pretty bad here (some places you spend close to an hour listening to a song that has a 40 second loop)
24. Boss: Ramsus 1 and 2. I get what they were going for but the result is just boring if you do it right, and horribly penalizing if you don’t
25. Camera: By the way the camera (just… everywhere, really) is honestly nausea inducing
26. Level: Enemy Design: So, the sewers. The God damned sewers. Let’s start by mentioning that there’s a lot of different enemy types down here and they ALL suck. Poisoners, confusers, things immune to most attack types, things immune to ONE attack type, things you can’t attack in melee, and everything has entirely too much health…
27. Level: Enemy Design: …fun place
28. Level: Encounter Rate: Special mention for the encounter rate in here. I know I already mentioned this but it becomes a part of bad level design because those encounters can take just a bit too long and lead to ‘where was I going’ syndrome, especially…
29. Level: …given how incredibly samey the sewers are. Honestly the only reason this is merely two negatives is because they give you that (barely functional) map. First dungeon in the game they give you a map for, I think that says everything. But good luck figuring out where you need to go or what you need to do in which order while also taking damage from environmental things you can’t see unless the camera is at the right angle because screw you…
30. Level: …all in a dull looking and dull sounding slogfest
31. Boss: And then there’s Redrum. Good lord Redrum. Okay where do I begin. First, he’s at the end of a long, horrible dungeon (which doesn’t help because it’s your only option for grinding if you’re under-leveled). Second, he is entirely over-tuned, hitting VERY hard (in my case he could two shot anybody with a basic attack). One of his attacks is an AOE that also heals himself. He can double cast Confusion and Poison. He has a bajillion health. And on top of it all when he gets low on health he can straight up unavoidably kill someone and heal for whatever their max health is. I honestly want to give this fight more than three negatives for how badly tuned, placed, and designed it is but a lot of that is because this fight (literally) made me quit the game and never look back 27 years ago. Instead I will merely acquiesce to acknowledging, in my own boring manner…
32. Boss: …that this fight…
33. Boss: …sucks
34. Grind: Deathblow rate of leveling is way, way too slow
35. Walkthroughitis: Navigation through Nortune, and also Thames
36. Boss: Okay even though I managed it second try, the Ramsus underwater fight still sucks. He has too much health, is healed periodically, hits like an absolute truck three times in a row, and can attack WHILE he’s in his counterattack stance. Screw this fight
37. Walkthroughitis: Basic navigation… again. In the Ethos HQ especially
38. Pacing: This is more or less the exact same negative as on the story axis. There are… HUGE sweeping swaths of no gameplay followed by very little combat sections, usually a padded boss fight, and then back to endless cutscenes…
39. Pacing: …this is pretty bad in terms of variety…
40. Padding: …and in how much…
41. Padding: …it pads out…
42. Padding: …the runtime
43. Level: Babel Tower. Jumping puzzles plus random encounters plus redoing a whole segment of the level if you fail plus the… rope swing time waster…
44. Level: …enough said, though I do have to add something else…
45. Core Mechanic: …platforming is just… not good in this game. It’s clearly not designed around it, is janky in how well it controls, loves to ‘slide’ depending on exactly where you land, and it just… sucks. Platforming ITSELF is not the issue (to the contrary, I think a true platforming thing could work here) but it just does not here
46. Level: Shevat tunnels. This is another maze of samey corridors with irritating enemies and, unlike Kislev’s sewers, it’s even harder to tell what’s going on here…
47. Level: …so enjoy that double
48. Walkthroughitis: The binary processing code puzzle is astonishingly bullcrap. No real guidance, no input on how to interact with it, no feedback to speak of, and the info the game does give you is hilariously misleading
49. Level: Krelian’s lab. Samey corridors and labyrinth design on top of way, way too many side branches to explore, most of which are not worth it, and the usual ‘easy to get turned around’ issues…
50. Level: …make this place turbo suck
51. Level: Solaris finale. This is the final part of the lab and it’s even worse because in addition to being a maze the game cheats you by periodically forcing you to go through doors which unload parts of the visible area, and each of these micro areas you can see look near identical. Just to make it even more confusing and irritating
52. Boss: Vendetta. Boss gets an opening strike (hitting you for a quarter of your health), also is super fast so you have a hard time out speeding him, but if you Boost you’ll run into issues with his counter mechanic, which in addition to the usual irritations also doesn’t properly animate when it’s up or down due to how he reverts his stance after attacking you. OR it’s just badly designed and he can just attack you while countering, one of the two
53. Encounter: The sudoku puzzle is a bit much and not explained at all, so if you don’t know sudoku, sucks to be you
54. Encounter: The rock pillar puzzle is actually a neat idea but the way the flags are set is fundamentally wrong. The fact that you HAVE to talk to the spots in the right order means if you hit the right spots out of order you get no feedback, discouraging the player from thinking they’re doing the right thing even though they are
55. Encounter: The Water Puzzle is so bad, RighteousHam blocked it from their memory. I’m not joking. Okay so there’s four interactables, something with a 3 written on it, a step that fills water, a step that removes water, and a button with 7 notches. That’s it. Solve the puzzle. This is already absolutely HORRIBLE signposting (what’s the state? What’s the goal? What does anything do?)…
56. Encounter: …but also there’s very little feedback about what anything is doing other than the two switches in the middle and the water going up and down (which actually isn’t even about this water). Hold on I’m not done yet…
57. Encounter: …because it actively deceives you in what the goal is. There’s a clear and obvious door at the bottom that emptying the water should access, but reducing the water to HALF of that is the actual goal
58. Graphics: Flashing lights and other headache inducing effects…
59. Graphics: …commonly, even
60. Walkthroughitis: What’s that, you didn’t know Elly PERMANENTLY leaves the party after the Hammer fight? Sucks to be you! Hope you didn’t leave amazing gear on her or on her Gear
61. Boss: Amphysvena. This isn’t technically a terrible fight in itself, but it’s made worse because you have to fight it then the next fight with no possible pause or recovery period. And even THAT is fine except for what this fight does; It drains your health to 1 (which mandates using lots of fuel to recover), then it hits hard which encourages you to burn even more fuel burning him down quickly, especially since if you take too long he’ll do his 1 health attack again. And all of this leaves you with low health and lower fuel for…
62. Boss: Opiomorph. This is actually kind of a clever fight in itself and comes close to being a positive. Everytime she’s attacked she raises her defense and magic attack. Every few rounds she does an AOE magic spell. Everytime she does an AOE magic spell she resets her defense and magic attack. The problems here are several. First, this is incredibly punishing if you do anything wrong at all (for example she just hastes herself if one of your gears dies, and at the end of the fight it turns into a straight dps race which you might not have the fuel to deal with if you don’t know it’s coming). Second, the defense up part. What this means in practical application is that you attack with someone you’re raising their attack value of… once… and then sit there and charge for a full round. Taking one action per about three rounds on average. And heaven help you if you didn’t bring the gear to back all of this up because if you can’t hang with the magic damage she’s doing, or brought the wrong heals, sucks to be you. Finally and worst of all is the fight right before it, a fight (I remind you) designed entirely to drain your health and fuel. All of this…
63. Boss: …makes for…
64. Boss: …an absolutely miserable, boring fight
65. Itemization: Why are there no items for the Gears? Especially HEALING items, or items that regenerate fuel. This is… a weird choice at best
66. Outro: The final dungeon is… pathetic, at best. Long, mazey corridors which are just time wastey, nothing interesting visually or audio-wise. This is… unfinished at best
67. Outro: Grind: The final boss rush is a series of gear battles. Gear battles which only have one method to improve your power on, which is the equipment. Equipment… requires money. And money means grind. It’s even worse than that because that final grind will get you stats which (except for Chu) so any grind that doesn’t get money is pointless. Oh and good luck knowing where the super optional vendor is (Joe) to even buy any of this…
68. Outro: Grind: …I spent three goddamned hours…
69. Outro: Grind: …grinding this nonsense

Story Positives:

1. External Continuity: Considering it’s a direct friggin’ sequel I’d hope so. Though honestly not as much as I’d like. While there’s some good minor bits of flavor and continuance, honestly if you never play the first game you’re not really missing anything in the second
2. Storytelling Mechanic: Portrait expressions are back and are still good
3. Background Lore: Books and papers, just like in the last game
4. Brickwork: Rolent, just like the last game
5. Doodads: Rolent, just like the last game (deja vu)
6. Brickwork: Bose!
7. Doodads: Bose, again
8. Brickwork: Grancel again
9. Humor: Chest messages, which are (let’s be honest) WAY better this time. Even with the repeat messages this is still…
10. Humor: …an easy double
11. Dialogue: So if you know about this game you know that it had an absolutely insane, multi-year project to be localized, including many tribulations, lots of crunch, and two companies working on it simultaneously. Given all that you’d think the dialogue and localization would suck but uh… actually no, this is really solid stuff…
12. Dialogue: …with good intonation, sentence structure, word choice…
13. Localization: …and a lot of little things that are well handled to ‘convert’ it into something more appropriate for english…
14. Localization: …up to and including using improper grammar (deliberately) and partial sentences to convey tone
15. Intro: Estelle’s freak out is very well handled, and the initial hook is actually quite solid (rescue Joshua from the fantasy illuminati)
16. Storytelling Mechanic: Weissman’s ability to blur out his face and name in the interface. It’s a wonderful way to convey what he does to people
17. Moment: Theresa and Estelle (and the kiddos) is a delightful and wholesome moment
18. Branching: Agate and Schera choice which doesn’t change much plot wise but massively changes a huge amount of flavor text
19. Internal Continuity: I mean. Yeah. The extent to which the game keeps track of itself is exceptionally well done…
20. Internal Continuity: …to the point that you’re legitimately rewarded for keeping track of all the little details…
21. Internal Continuity: …as well as character arcs, history, and plot elements
22. Consequence Storytelling: I want to give a bonus positive for bothering with keeping track of things like geography and time, something a shockingly small number of stories (across ANY medium) keep track of
23. MSQ: The Ruan segment is legit by itself. It’s a local story that’s directly connected to the main plot
24. Tone: Background stories. So far each chapter has had little tidbits of recurring stories for the NPCs. And while yes the first game did this too, the second game does it much better
25. Banter: Generally improved banter for the main party as well…
26. Banter: …with some solid character points here
27. MSQ: Grancel and the big political plot of the treaty signing framed as backdrop for the much more personal story of Renne
28. MSQ: Renne’s story is… interesting. There’s enough ambiguity here that her exact role in the plot is debatable, and even after her reveal there’s still some layers going on here
29. Writing: I’ll give you this, Amalthea’s plan is portrayed exactly as stupid as it is. And it goes exactly how it should go
30. Story Sequencing: Airship bridges. Each chapter is bridged by an airship sequence where we can chat with people, get up to date on what’s up, and talk with our party. This is almost entirely character stuff, though we hear tidbits about things like the treaty signing or the aforementioned NPC stories
31. Cutscene: Estelle’s dream sequence. The transition was brilliant, the drifts of awareness…
32. Cutscene: …and the last conversation with Lena
33. Moment: The escalation of getting a dragon involved is reasonably well done
34. Cutscene: I do like Agate and Loewe’s confrontation by the dragon. It’s a good character moment for Agate and Loewe both, and Tita’s entrance is appropriately sweet and badass
35. MSQ: The entire dragon arc is actually a pretty good escalation. It’s a shame it happens SO far into TWO games but it’s still a good ‘end of act 1’ kind of event, with the threat being emphasized, more information and details about the dragons and before, and of course more character stuff for Loewe, Morgan, Agate, and Ragnard
36. Secondary: Lila and Maybelle
37. MSQ: Infiltration of the first Ouroboros base. The tone is appropriately creepy, the slow push through the mind controlled bracers, the messed up sequence with the Joshua dolls
38. Moment: As usual Weissman is well written. The way he talks around Estelle is very on point; He’s constantly hitting her emotionally, being both polite and apologetic without actually changing what he’s saying or doing. Example; “I apologize for avoiding your questions,” immediately thereafter he ignores her question and asks her one instead. He just cannot stop himself from being a sadistic dickhead
39. Cutscene: The final revelation of the Hamel Incident is a damned good moment. It also makes a lot of pieces fall together…
40. World Building: …in the history of the setting. Considering the 100 Days War is such a critical element of the Sky games’ plot and how often it comes up (personally as well as plot-wise) the construction of this moment needed to pop. And it does. It even explains why the treaty was so swift and thorough; Erebonia would’ve been absolutely terrified of internal strife AND external reprisal if the truth got out. They gave away every concession at the treaty table in exchange for but one; Silence. And this ties in…
41. External Continuity: …to a lot of earlier points in both games, notably Loewe’s taunt of Queen Alicia
42. Pacing: Chapter 6 is bizarre. For the first time in the franchise the entire chapter is VERY well paced, as…
43. MSQ: …we learn a tremendously greater amount about the society, the characters, the Hamel incident’s personal connections…
44. Cutscene: …all culminating in Estelle finally, FINALLY confronting Joshua. Let’s ignore the first game for just a second because just this game has spent its ENTIRE runtime building up to this confrontation, and holy hell…
45. Cutscene: …it does not disappoint. From the dialogue popping, to the subversions in expectations, to the smartness of how it’s structured, to the emotional impact…
46. Pacing: …even the scenes themselves are very well paced. Think about it; When they first unite she’s in trouble so there’s no time to have a moment. Immediately thereafter is their big escape, so they’re coordinating and working well, but still no resolution. When they finally get a second Joshua tries to pull the same trick (but for real this time) on her and she (rightly) throws it RIGHT back into his face. And all of this culminates…
47. Moment: …in Estelle holding Joshua, and him being brought to tears (for the first time in YEARS)
48. Brickwork: The spatial interiors of the towers are a lovely combination of the final dungeon from the first game and an extra-planar location
49. Theme: Actual showcasing of the synergy between the army and the Bracers. It’s one thing to say ‘we should work together’. It’s an even better thing to actually show why this works out so well
50. Story Sequencing: Chapter 7 and the Enforcers. Honestly this should’ve been much earlier in the story (counting both games) but it’s still good for what it is here, and using each of the towers to develop the Enforcers individually as well as their connections to the party
51. MSQ: Chapter 7 entire and escalation is very well done, culminating in…
52. Cutscene: …the reveal (finally) of the Aureole
53. MSQ: The Janis Academy and Gilbert. Friggin’ Gilbert, of all things. Nice callback too
54. Moment: Sieg swooping in and Gilbert’s… INCREDIBLY pathetic special attack
55. Character: Estelle. Another character who drifted from being a negative into a positive because she’s… actually a character now. Still the same at her core, but far better implemented
56. Character: Ruan supporting cast, notably some actual character growth for the local toughs
57. Character: Zeiss supporting cast are awesome as usual
58. Character: Kloe and struggling with the responsibilities of her presumed station
59. Character: Rolent supporting cast… are even better than the other towns because there’s so much additional story here, AND we go back through here three separate times. And each time there’s additional bits of little lore and micro arcs for the childhood friends and associates of Estelle (and later Joshua)…
60. Character: …so that’s an easy double
61. Character: Agate. He finally grew into a character in the second game (probably helped by so much of his arc being tied to the reveals around Hamel)
62. Character: Tita. Adorable, innocent, brilliant, and badass
63. Character: Morgan, Schwarz, and the military in general. These dudes are weirdly consistent in how legit they are
64. Character: Loewe. Color me surprised, but they managed to make a pseudo rival archetype actually work. Honestly I think part of why Loewe works so well is specifically because he isn’t really a rival (or even an enemy) but instead is primarily focused on his own things, and so self controlled as to functionally be an opponent to the actual villain
65. Character: Speaking of; Weissmann. Ragnard really said it best; “Thy eyes betray thy purpose. In those windows I see a soul twisted and bent… incapable of joy unyoked from bringing suffering and agony to thy fellow man.” And that really is Weissmann’s entire character in one well written line. Everything he does, top to bottom, long term and short, is ultimately all about just hurting people in the cruelest ways possible
66. Character: The Capuans manage to upgrade from Team Rocket to being great supports, both in character and for the team
67. Character: Analace (and the other bracers) are great support. Simple but solid, as I like to say
68. MSQ: A few issues along the way but I do like the Grancel attack sequence. The Enforcers are whatever, but Richard coming out of nowhere was a good moment, and the entire vibe was decent
69. MSQ: There’s a major plot point that’s been building across both games. The Blood And Iron Chancellor (Osborne) makes a move by sending troops and tanks which are conveniently fine in the EMP zone to ‘help’ by also taking care of their interests as a thinly veiled precursor to quiet occupation of Liberl. Olivert and Cassius long since predicted this and had a backup plan in place to allow the bastard Prince and the venerated General to broker a truce which required the army to back down… for now. This whole sequence is well built up and well paid off…
70. MSQ: …for an easy…
71. MSQ: …triple
72. Prime Opt: Optional Enforcer scenes (sure hope you brought the right characters!) are pretty good
73. MSQ: Joshua and Loewe’s confrontation and…
74. Theme: …a decent theme of connective threads between people
75. Outro: Moment: Weissmann taking back Joshua, followed by us getting back up
76. Outro: Moment: The reverse uno card of Joshua’s stigma. The fact that they tied it in to his sadism just makes it that much more satisfying
77. Outro: Moment: Weissmann’s very, very thorough death
78. Outro: Moment: Joshua and Estelle’s final moments were perfect. No, seriously, this was functionally perfect. They’re stuck on a pillar they know is going down, and in the moment they’re just calm. They hold each other, kiss, and as it plummets they fall in one another’s arms
79. Character: Joshua and Estelle’s dynamic and relationship is way, way better done in this game than the last one. I honestly think at least part of it is their walking away from the ‘we’re siblings’ thing they wouldn’t shut up about in the first game, but even regardless of that it’s a good dynamic
80. Storyboarding: Several fight scenes are honestly quite well done given the severe limitations placed upon them by the sprites

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: So the whole game is better written than the first game… but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the same general issues. The first is pacing which, as with the first game, lurches a bit…
2. Pacing: …for a double
3. Padding: And of course the padding is still there in spades, with almost every single sequence taking…
4. Padding: …longer…
5. Padding: …than it needs to, padding the run time
6. Empty Text: Ruan still has an empty text problem
7. Empty Text: Zeiss does too
8. Empty Text: Grancel does as well
9. Empty Text: You knew Rolent was on this list too
10. Writing: Overpowered enemies until they aren’t. I’m sorry but if you repeat (like five separate times) that these people are ludicrously higher tier than we are, and then we beat them without much fuss, I’m calling foul
11. Character: Olivier. I know I know but hear me out; His mask persona is annoying. And he uses it CONSTANTLY. The tiny, brief snippets of him actually being himself behind the mask are actually great, but that mask slips SO infrequently that the other 99% of the time he’s just annoying
12. Moment: Estelle spontaneously decides to have a flash of self doubt and it’s resolved literally inside of 2 minutes
13. Animation: I’ve sat on this for a bit but honestly the game’s animation is… bad. I get that it’s low budget but trying to do big action sequences with airships and dragons probably shouldn’t have been attempted given said limitations
14. Pacing: Chapter 7. Yes I know I JUST gave a positive for Chapter 7’s pacing but there’s another issue here. Chapter 7 is, in many ways, the end of the second to last Act. That’s cool, but the positioning and pacing leading TO this point is… wonky. Really, really wonky. It honestly feels like the writers were like ‘oh right we should probably actually write the story’
15. Storytelling Mechanic: Several segments but ESPECIALLY the final dungeon have entire, well done scenes you don’t see at all if you don’t bring the right people
16. Fake Drama: People need to learn to shut up in crisis situations. This is even worse when they are then ‘just a few seconds too late’… because they were yammering to each other about how much of a hurry they were in

Gameplay Positives:

1. Info In Game: In game encyclopedia is back…
2. Info In Game: …and is still very good
3. Bestiary: Still a good, well designed bestiary
4. Core Combat: Initiative based combat is back, with more options to play with it too
5. HUD: Solid, as it was in the first game, with info in the battles about enemy weaknesses and the like
6. Core Mechanic: Cooking is back and more useful than ever before (with the addition of actual combat items which are pretty useful)
7. Encounter Rate: As with the first game, avoidable enemies on the overworld allowing you to pick and choose your battles
8. Penalty For Failure: Retry difficulty is back from the first game and gives the player another chance
9. QoL: Fast Forward is still a Godsend in a game like this
10. Minimap: Same basically… identically good minimap as the first game
11. Map: Same basically good map as the first game
12. Saves: Still good, quick, easy to access saves…
13. Saves: …from anywhere
14. Saves: And still good autosaves…
15. Saves: …with multiple slots
16. QoL: 100% success rate on fleeing which continues to be a great feature
17. QoL: Memory cursor, holy crap. Also auto-A
18. Intro: Level: Surprisingly decent opening and tutorial levels with some actual level design to them (levers, switches, side paths with actual rewards to them, decent difficulty curve, good flow)
19. Boss: I actually found the Storm Bringer to be a weirdly good boss fight. He has an interruptible AOE, many adds which don’t actually do much but buff him if killed, and not too much damage or health
20. Itemization: The equipment design is a lot better this time around, with far more interesting gear and accessories
21. Itemization: Also some really solid distribution of said items…
22. Itemization: …and the economy is in FAR better shape, both in Mira…
23. Power Progression Curve: …and in experience and Sepith, which is great because…
24. Kit: …the Kit is just better. I know that a lot of it is the same, but the tweaks to Crafts plus the additions of the new spells really adds to things
25. Viscerality: Helps that stuff actually feels cool this time around too
26. Enemy Design: I’ve seen better, but there’s still some honest to goodness design to the enemies
27. Music: Much better music overall I’d say…
28. Music: …easy double
29. Leveling: Catch-up experience is, as always, helpful in a game where you can have people who are quite a few levels behind
30. Level: Hot Springs Fountainhead. To my honest shock, there’s something approaching legitimate design to the place, making this (I do believe) the first level positive to the franchise
31. Boss: The back to back of the Orguille and Amalthea. First we have a big chonker with mostly frontal AOEs and a big weakness (it’s slow), then we have her who hits hard and litters the battlefield but both her and her adds have pretty low health
32. Boss: I rather liked the Ragnard fight actually. Lots of damage, but very vulnerable, and not too much health
33. MSQ: The ouroboros base is… fine (little too much backtracking, but it’s also relatively painless and is rewarded) and the forced ambush boss at the end is pretty well designed
34. MSQ: The Janis Academy sequence entire. The stealth segment, finding all of the students to free, but my personal favorite; the Gilbert boss fight, and his absolutely pathetic attack
35. NG+: Same good New Game Plus from the first game. Several options, and you can select which things to carry forward…
36. NG+: …for the double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Difficulty Options: Lazy difficulty that cannot be adjusted on the fly
2. Controls: Same general controls and issues as the first game
3. Bug: Several. Launch issues, resolution issues, rendering issues
4. Terrain: Same lack of terrain relevance to the combat as the first game
5. Walkthroughitis: Good luck finding the sidequests! At all!
6. Walkthroughitis: Also good luck figuring out getting BP in this friggin’ game, good lord
7. Walkthroughitis: Good luck finding the hide and seek girl without a guide. Okay actually to be clear this is really, really bad. First it’s MSQ so that sucks, but second not only is it unclear where she is, but the game actually goes out of its way to DIScourage you from searching the area she actually is…
8. Walkthroughitis: …for a double
9. Graphics: I get why they did it but the fog really does hurt the eyes given how long you have to stare at it
10. Level: The Glorious is… REALLY boring. And copy pasted to hell and back. And badly itemized (seriously it gives old, out-dated gear)
11. Secondary: Zeiss. These are kind of micro aggregates but honestly almost EVERY zone has a small bundle of bullcrap side quests. They’re irritating to track down (or find to begin with), and irritating to do
12. Secondary: Grancel, again
13. Secondary: Rolent… yep
14. Secondary: Bose… sigh
15. Walkthroughitis: Several big quests in the final few chapters with ZERO hints as to where the quests are or how to activate them. The Janis Academy and Elmo Hot Springs are probably the best examples of this
16. Outro: Level: The final dungeon is… fine? It’s somewhat dull, and that’s just not good enough for a final dungeon
17. Outro: Boss: Same general problem with the final bosses. They’re… fine
18. Backtracking: The whole game bounces around on how much it requires you to backtrack, but it’s still enough of a problem to qualify
19. Camera: Same camera issues as the first game, and same relative disorientation issues
20. Seconds In Minutes: Several small but extant issues across the whole game

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Portraits are, as usual, good stuff
2. Brickwork: Re-used assets, mostly in the towny areas like Not-Grancel
3. Humor: The chest dialogues are back. And while there’s that weird Trails In The Chest thing, I actually rather like the rest of it…
4. Humor: …some great stuff here
5. Dialogue: The dialogue is… less polished than the last game, but the moment to moment dialogue is still good
6. External Continuity: So this is a weird one since it’s trying so hard to fill in holes in the rest of the story, but once again I don’t think that the usage of continuity HERE in THIS game really elevates THIS game that much. It still does so of course, but not more than one positive worthy
7. Intro: Some good, some humor, some fun, some establishment of Kevin’s everyday life and job
8. Prime Opt: Kilika and Zin’s deal. Some good world building for Calvard, some good character bits for them
9. Secondary: The Salt Pale report, and the significance to Weissmann
10. Prime Opt: Kloe’s side story. It’s… too long and too padded but there’s still some good meat in there about Kloe and especially Jill, who really gets some good screen time fleshing her out
11. Prime Opt: Olivert and Mueller mulling over their time in Liberl and being actually honest with each other about the political intrigue back home is nice
12. Cutscene: Osborne’s appearance is good, but the way he wields his words like a sword is fantastic. This might unironically be the best written scene in the game so far, as it’s very clear he’s deliberately provoking in a way to probe for cracks and ideas in both Olivert and Liberl’s court
13. Cutscene: Dammit, Osborne nails it again here with his private meeting with Olivert. As usual his dialogue is fantastic, and he overtly reveals that he knows everything Olivert is doing (and even encourages him in the doing) while simultaneously challenging him, well aware that Olivert opposes him. He also drops the bombshell that he is up to something even Olivert wasn’t aware of, and that thing is Crossbell… which implies many things. Olivert even stops responding at one point in the dialogue and just starts glaring angrily
14. Atmosphere: Creepiness of Chapter 6
15. Prime Opt: The report doors. Dry but informative, on several ‘off camera’ topics. My personal favorite is the one about Cassius’ mission in Erebonia, but they’re all good
16. MSQ: The build up across the orphanage is poetry. The music is just peaceful enough to make it very clear what’s going to happen. All of this is accented wonderfully…
17. Dialogue: …by the excellently written dialogue of Kevin. He is INCREDIBLY casual here, to the point where you can feel how monumentally detached he is forcing himself to be
18. Music Direction: Special mention to some excellent music direction across this entire sequence
19. Moment: The calm, cold way Kevin talks about his past makes it hit so much harder thanks to how under-stated it is. It’s so clear just how much this bothered him
20. Writing: Also some fantastic exposition from Kevin across this section, before I forget. All he has to mention is that his father ‘had another family’ and that conveys everything we need to know about what’s going on here. Further, they don’t need to show his mother committing suicide, just her lying in some blood and her son finding her beside the knife
21. Moment: This leads to the revelation of what happened with Rufina which, again, is very under-stated. He also offers for Ries to take revenge in just the perfect way to make it clear that’s what he really wants her to do, but of course…
22. Moment: …she doesn’t take any of that crap. Yells, rushes up, hugs, shakes, hugs more. Her reaction here is essentially perfect, and any doubt we might’ve had about how much she cares about him is turbo gone
23. Storytelling Mechanic: The chest is empty
24. Character: Kevin. The mask (much better mask than Olivier), the casual self hatred, the need for punishment, but under all that is someone who can still adapt and grow
25. Character: Ries. Honestly probably the best of the new characters, really love how multi-dimensional she is and how willing she is to call other characters on their bullcrap. Repeatedly…
26. Character: …for a double
27. Character: General character positive. It’s a good cast but ultimately most of the cast aren’t given any real time to be or do so they don’t get more than basic bonus points as an aggregate
28. Character: I do like what they did with Richard here. This is probably the closest we’ve seen to his active desire to redeem himself, all alongside his fervent belief which (this is important) has not changed
29. Outro: The final farewells of all of the team are a bit drawn out but still good stuff. Most of them feel like denouements, except for Renne’s (and a few other tidbits of hinting)…
30. Outro: …easy double territory
31. Theme: Guilt, forgiveness, and letting go

Story Negatives:

1. Character: Erika. This woman is coarse, irritating, and gets everywhere. Seriously she’s barely more than one-note and her one-note is irritating
2. MSQ: Tita’s first door is… long (44 minutes long in fact) and very, very little happens during it other than ‘Erika is awful’ and ‘Tita wants to help Renne’. And that’s kind of… it. I mean we meet Tita’s parents but and?
3. Tone: Rufina and Kevin and tone deafness. Seriously I was wanting to let it slide when she forcefully kissed a boy to shock him and/or feed him, but then she pokes fun about it in the next scene
4. Brickwork: Absence of towns. This is a weird one since I usually just give nothing when nothing is there but in this case the absence of any kind of visual storytelling or connective tissue that things like ‘a town’ or ‘an overworld’ provide hurts the narrative. This dovetails into…
5. Character: …an absence of characters. Oh not the playables, I mean the total absence of NPCs. No little side stories going through the game, no flavor, no people living their daily lives, just empty tilesets…
6. Atmosphere: …which contributes overall to how ‘mobile game’ this entire thing feels
7. Prime Opt: Josette really needs to get over Joshua (she goes way overboard in attacking Don about this)
8. Prime Opt: Also, during Josette’s door, Gilbert? Of all people? He’s already getting old and having him be a major threat here is just insulting
9. Empty Text: Tita’s 44 minute cutscene from hell
10. Empty Text: Kloe’s 91 minute cutscene sequence
11. Empty Text: Schera’s 76 minute cutscene of doom
12. Prime Opt: Schera’s story arc is already a bit ridiculous but there’s an entire flashback INSIDE the flashback which is 100% redundant (no, seriously, not only is all of this information that’s from SC, it’s also exposited in THIS game)
13. Story Sequencing: Okay so this is a new one. This is one of those capital p Problems, but I think it bleeds into both Story and Gameplay. So we’ll start with Story; First, the sequencing in this game is actively awful. There’s barely any onboarding for these massive cutscenes, and there’s actually no offboarding whatsoever. This makes these feel completely detached from everything (which makes sense, because they are) and also…
14. Pacing: …interrupts the Pacing completely. After the first day we made it a point to start doing Doors as we gained access to them, to see how well they were woven into everything else. The answer is, uh, not very well. You’ll go literally about 10 minutes of dungeoning and then a boss before getting a new character unlock which, of course, unlocks a new Door. And so it’s right back to a massive extended cutscene. And this runs into another problem too, because if these cutscenes were legit this wouldn’t be as much of an issue but…
15. Padding: …these cutscenes have pretty serious issues. There’s some actual meat here, but it is smeared so far out across such absolutely gargantuan sequences that at times it was legitimately difficult to really tell what’d even happened in a given scene. All of this…
16. Atmosphere: …makes for a generally unpleasant feeling throughout
17. Writing: Please, game, please stop jokingly shipping Tita and Agate. It is not funny. It does not get excused because it’s friends poking fun. It’s just gross… quit it
18. Prime Opt: Tita’s 2nd door (which is another 41 minutes from hell) conveys nothing we didn’t already know (Agate is protective of Tita, Tita has self doubt issues, Erika is a maniac) and dipped entirely too far into fake drama…
19. Fake Drama: …repeatedly
20. Prime Opt: Joshua and Estelle’s Door is honestly the second worst one so far. In addition to showing us stuff we had no reason to see again (redundant) it’s also…
21. Character: …actively reverting Joshua to a previous point in his already concluded character arc. Literally just repeating the early steps of his arc
22. Writing: Not knowing when to end a scene. This is an issue the whole series has to some extent but they really dialed it up with these Door sequences. A sequence will reach a natural conclusion point… and then keep going. Sometimes this happens twice. Sometimes it happens more than twice
23. Empty Text: Several examples which are being bundled together here. The most immediate example that comes to mind is Richard’s Star Door and the fact that he would NOT shut up
24. Writing: Memberberries of chapter 6. This is… VERY padded, in fact I would say Chapter 6 is the longest chapter by far, and it’s entirely because we keep having these chats with various character simulacra before fighting them
25. Prime Opt: The orphanage door. Spending almost the entire quest on an actual dream sequence doesn’t help anything, but it being SO boring and dragged out (as usual) so it actually feels even worse than it really is
26. Character: Gilbert. I might have accepted him being amusing once, maybe twice, but by his seventh appearance I was well and truly tired of the running gag
27. Moment: I’d also like to ding Gilbert just sort of… being in Gehenna and providing the need for us to be rescued
28. Tone: Renne’s backstory. Enough said…
29. Tone: …for…
30. Tone: …a triple
31. Prime Opt: Also completely repeat information, while we’re at it. Honestly the whole game has the ‘unnecessarily repeated information’ problem so consider this an aggregate

Gameplay Positives:

1. Info In Game: In game encyclopedia is back…
2. Info In Game: …and is still very good
3. Bestiary: Still a good, well designed bestiary
4. Core Combat: Initiative based combat is back, with more options to play with it too
5. HUD: Solid, as it was in the first game, with info in the battles about enemy weaknesses and the like
6. Core Mechanic: Cooking is back and more useful than ever before (with the addition of actual combat items which are pretty useful)
7. Encounter Rate: As with the first game, avoidable enemies on the overworld allowing you to pick and choose your battles
8. Penalty For Failure: Retry difficulty is back from the first game and gives the player another chance
9. QoL: Fast Forward is still a Godsend in a game like this
10. Minimap: Same basically… identically good minimap as the first game (occasionally)
11. Saves: Still good, quick, easy to access saves…
12. Saves: …from anywhere
13. Saves: And still good autosaves…
14. Saves: …with multiple slots
15. QoL: 100% success rate on fleeing which continues to be a great feature
16. QoL: Memory cursor, holy crap. Also auto-A
17. Itemization: Gear quality is still pretty good, borrowing most of the ideas from the second game
18. Itemization: Item distribution is good (which it needs to be considering how many people we need to gear up)
19. Power Progression Curve: Still pretty solid, and still pretty well supported…
20. Kit: …by a pretty legit kit. In fact being completely honest I’d say the kit is even better…
21. Kit: …than it’s ever been. I think at least part of this is the additional character Crafts, but the new Arts helps too
22. Viscerality: The new stuff also all manages to look cool and feel decent, similar to the second game
23. Enemy Design: I’ve seen better, but there’s still some honest to goodness design to the enemies
24. Music: There’s only a few songs I’d consider memorable but the thing is…
25. Music: …I’d call each of them damned good…
26. Music: …and easy triple territory
27. Leveling: Catch-up experience is, as always, helpful in a game where you can have people who are quite a few levels behind
28. NG+: Same good New Game Plus from the first game. Several options, and you can select which things to carry forward…
29. NG+: …for the double
30. Fast Travel: Really solid for what it is. The menu’s esoteric but functional, and there’s lots of travel points which are well distributed…
31. Fast Travel: …so enjoy that double
32. Boss: I actually did like Bennu. Four turrets (that are slow, so not overwhelming) in the four corners, and the boss himself starts off weak (just doing a light drain) before his second phase where he starts doing dots, and his final phase starts hitting AOEs
33. Boss: Rostrum. Weirdly another decent fight. Trash which is easy to knock over and spread out, a big boss who has high vulnerability to magic and hits like a truck in melee while being AOE, encouraging outmaneuvering and outdistancing
34. Boss: Doppel Kevin. Another add fight but probably the first actually good one in the franchise, with the adds being relatively weak but their ‘boss’ (Kevin) having all his support abilities, and the adds to use them on
35. Boss: Doppel Ries. Not quite as good as the other boss but still pretty solid. She herself is mostly just there to beat your face in, but her accompanying mirrors come color coded and reflect damage of a certain type depending on said color. And, of course, the mirrors can flip their color mid fight
36. Level: Color me shocked, the not-quite re-used dungeon for Grimsel Fortress is actually decent. The colored switches making different paths to different treasures, the optional dangerous routes for additional loot
37. Boss: Astarte continues the trend of weirdly good boss designs. Two adds which are quite weak (especially to magic) and temporarily time out anyone in melee range, and a boss that does status effects and knockbacks
38. Boss: Aggregate for chapter 6. Most of these bosses are quite vanilla compared to earlier ones, but they’re still good and competently done
39. Boss: Bonus points for Cassius who is all the right flavors of hard. No irritations, no frustrations, just him beating the tar out of you
40. Boss: The Abyss optional bosses were actually pretty cool. Nothing super fancy individually but some nice design throughout
41. Outro: Itemization: Some nice gear spread (and smart chests) across the last dungeon, helping to get everyone geared up for the finale
42. Outro: Boss: Each of the final bosses are nice, fun, varied…
43. Outro: Boss: …and while there’s a bit of a stumble, I’d say three of the four…
44. Outro: Boss: …all deserve positives

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Difficulty Options: Lazy difficulty that cannot be adjusted on the fly
2. Controls: Same general controls and issues as the first game
3. Bug: Several. Launch issues, resolution issues, rendering issues
4. Terrain: Same lack of terrain relevance to the combat as the first game
5. Camera: Same camera issues as the first game, and same relative disorientation issues
6. Seconds In Minutes: Several small but extant issues across the whole game
7. Intro: Pacing: A near total lack of gameplay in the entire Intro
8. MSQ: Tita’s first door is… just… wow. It’s literally 44 minutes of non interactive cutscenes, but worse…
9. Intro: Tutorialization: …it does an absolutely terrible job of both tutorializing and encouraging players to actually DO the Doors. I honestly admit that if not for this being my job I would’ve skipped every Door after this because of how bad this one was
10. Itemization: Economy. The Mira drops are pretty bad, similar to the first game, but it’s actually worse because…
11. Itemization: …you have more people to gear up and, worse, you want to gear multiple parties simultaneously
12. Level: Samey corridors plus teleports to disorient plus long stretches of nothing plus the map issues…
13. Level: …makes the first dungeon really suck
14. Unskippable Cutscene: Okay this one takes a little explanation. We’ve long since established precedent that if a game gives you tools to ‘skip’ cutscenes (like mashing through dialogue in a CRPG, or turbo speeding through dialogue in FFIV) then that game doesn’t actually get dinged for Unskippables. Thus each Trials game so far hasn’t gotten these negatives. But the sheer, colossally huge swaths of cutscenes in 3rd specifically with pauses few and far between qualifies. Because I’m sorry, 44 minutes of uninterrupted cutscene is just too much…
15. Unskippable Cutscene: …so we’re finally giving these negatives
16. Boss: Gilbert in his stupid G-Apache. It ticks most (though not all) of the bad boss flags; No good vuln periods, too much unavoidable damage, too much health, too hard to hit, spends too much of his time forcing you on defensive, all while in a turret section with a slowdown mechanic on your gun…
17. Boss: …so enjoy…
18. Boss: …that negative
19. Padding: Level re-use with the Balstar Channel. This is our second time (ever!) encountering this but the copy pasting of the dungeon is a bit much
20. Pacing: So, this is a follow through of the Problem mentioned up around Story Negatives 13 and on. Obviously that Problem is predominantly a story issue, but it still makes the Pacing suffer pretty badly because you go through absolutely ginormous segments of either very little gameplay or literally NO gameplay at all…
21. Pacing: …so that is worthy…
22. Pacing: …of its own issues. I should reiterate that even though you can spread out the Doors, they make up such an overwhelming quantity of the runtime that even spreading them out just makes it more obvious how much time you spend on it. Either way this dovetails into…
23. Prime Opt: …how vacuous these tend to be. There’s very technically gameplay in several of these but it’s pulling such a technically I feel weird even qualifying these as gameplay. These are NOT good quests, which is even more aggravating because some obvious effort is being put into the other aspects of the game
24. Bug: A game crash that’s consistent on the Agate boss may not always happen, but it’s there
25. Minigame: I can’t 100% prove it but I swear the blackjack game is cheating. Twice in the same match she got two face cards when I had 19 total. Good lord
26. Minigame: Also the blackjack minigame is mandatory for seeing all the doors…
27. Minigame: …and the game MOCKS you for losing, in addition to RNG, in addition to mandatory, in addition to cheating
28. Level: The Abyss is… REALLY boring. It’s actually just the exact same spiral staircase over and over and over
29. Walkthroughitis: No where near as bad as the previous two games, but it still rears its ugly head now and again

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The sea may be one of the only biomes they show but it’s actually really pretty. A shame the ice and jurassic don’t quite equal out
2. Spritework: Excellent and varied spritework across the biomes. Sea, ancient, city, and frozen…
3. Spritework: …good stuff
4. Plot: Call me weird but I legitimately like the plot for what it is. Aliens periodically harvest the earth’s oceans so you travel back in time to obtain the power to fight back against them. I’m with it
5. Outro: Honestly the Outro overall isn’t bad. Being sucked through the meat grinder, navigating the horribly alien environment of the Machine, everything about the monstrous queen, it’s pretty solid

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Camera: It’s that particularly awful camera type that most sidescrollers use where it’s directly tied to you and your facing. Which in any game which involves rapid movement means nauseating and rapid-fire bouncing around…
2. Camera: …awful stuff
3. Controls: It’s hard to put it into words if you haven’t played it but the game has this heaviness to it which is doubly frustrating due to how much precision the game demands constantly. This is honestly one of the worst controlled games I’ve ever played…
4. Controls: …earning the coveted…
5. Controls: …triple
6. Core Mechanic: Oxygen. This is the single worst mechanic in the game. Half the level negatives boil down to the fact that you have to traverse colossal swaths of space with an air timer, which forces you to speed up… in a part where you are encouraged to slow down. It’s atrocious, and the timer is FAR too small, and it diminishes what could have otherwise been a fun underwater romp…
7. Core Mechanic: …and turns it…
8. Core Mechanic: …into a nightmare
9. Interface: Lack of feedback. Yes there’s an (annoying) sound when you take damage but that’s honestly it. Being completely real the first time I died I wasn’t sure what exactly happened
10. Terrain: Too tight, too many corners and bumps to get stuck on…
11. Terrain: …and it’s…
12. Terrain: …a constant issue
13. Enemy Design: Trilobites. These are the worst enemy in the game bar none. They NEVER leash, they rubberband after you so they can keep up with you, and they sit INSIDE your hitbox… the one place you can’t fight back at
14. Encounter: Awful encounter design throughout
15. Music: Repetition. We’ll decide later if the game has good music or not but the short loops and long levels mean bleh
16. Sound Design: Loud piercing sounds that you hear constantly and can’t adjust the volume of? Check
17. Map: It’s… honestly worse than worthless. Even if you figure out how to use it (good luck with that!) it just BARELY conveys more than just the screen itself
18. Visual Distinction: Keys and doors are identical? So are messages. And… shields. And switches. And songs
19. Core Mechanic: Keys are one frickin’ use and doors respawn
20. Encounter Rate: Ninja Gaiden respawns (yes I know there’s an ability to bypass this… barely)
21. Kit: You have a dash and that’s… it until you do the optional side quests at which point you gain the ability to damage people while dashing and echoing as well as the ability to periodically, kinda, if you’re lucky, permanently despawn enemies by eating their souls (yes really). These moves suck, are janky, and are hard to use
22. Intro: This is a weird ‘lack of an intro’. I’ve seen people sit down and have no idea what to do here, and even if you know what to do it’s just a couple of empty screens
23. Secondary: Dolphin escorts in the first few levels
24. Level: Stage 3, The Undercaves. So we’ve drifted out of the tutorial areas and the first thing the game smacks us with is pseudo softlocking with the shell (if you get it in a corner you might as well drown and start over), a small and needlessly irritating to navigate maze, and as will become depressingly common a total lack of checkpoints…
25. Level: …great way to start things off
26. Level: Stage 4, The Vents. So the usual checkpoints issues which make basically every single level worse, you have to go and rescue multiple dolphins (and good luck finding them, getting them back before you drown, and honestly just getting them to follow you at all), also the ‘doors’ close behind you because screw you… and this stage introduces our first Troll Paths, where you can waste time, health, and air accomplishing absolutely nothing…
27. Level: …oh also good luck maneuvering the rocks around thanks to the wonky physics…
28. Level: …this is the fourth friggin’ stage, good lord
29. Prime Opt: Dolphin rescue quests in general can suck a dick by the way. Thanks to the mid mission checkpointing you have to rescue each dolphin in one life, finding each one is a pain, surviving with them is a pain, and arguably worst of all they’re incredibly lucrative and useful and super duper optional (and relatively easy to skip by accident)
30. Encounter: Swarms of homing pufferfish around jets and spikes. A recipe for fun
31. Level: Stage 5, The Lagoon. As of typing this I’d call this the worst stage in the game that isn’t the Machine. It’s got the nonsense maze, it introduces the starfish shoving mechanic which just magnifies the awful controls, it’s possible to get temporarily stuck in ‘no air’ zones where you have to rely on clams and/or vents to breathe, there’s timers on the starfish (oh and you are obviously also drowning), this…
32. Level: …whole stage…
33. Level: …sucks
34. Level: Prime Opt: Dolphin rescue part 2, but worse. More spread out, having to ‘solve’ the puzzles every time you go through them, and mandatory backtracking…
35. Level: Prime Opt: …fun stuff
36. Level: And THEN there’s the final part which is this lengthy stretch of hell…
37. Level: …and don’t even get me started on the octopus segment
38. Level: Encounter: Also on the tunnel down past the second section which is absolutely swarming with enemies you basically can’t see coming but you are encouraged to hurry up thanks to the distance involved and the all-encompassing breath meter
39. Level: Encounter: The final tunnel in stage 5 deserves its own mention. Screw this stupid tunnel. You have to go past the homing crabs with yet another starfish escort, then there’s a healing spot BUT no air spot, multiple homing fish, then a final tunnel of spiked rocks that fall down on you. This is such a dick area
40. Level: Stage 6 Ridge Water is… merely frustrating starfish escorts and several gotchas but otherwise is probably the best level so far
41. Level: Stage 7 Open Ocean is too long, too boring, and enemy spammed
42. Level: Stage 8 Ice Zone. It’s actually not terrible but it is absolutely glutted with enemies and it is a hell of a maze
43. Level: Stage 9 Hard Water. It’s actually really short (yay) but it is filled to the BRIM with bullcrap, including our first inclusion of the crushers. And the crushers are BULLCRAP. So let’s be clear if any, ANY, part of you clips the crusher when it crushes you die instantly and restart the entire stage. And that doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that there’s a second segment of crushers which are far more irritating to bypass…
44. Level: …and this starts to run into the camera issues…
45. Level: …and control issues
46. Gotcha: Right at the end of Stage 9 is one last spread of crushers which there’s no real way to see coming unless you’re going very slowly or already know they’re there
47. Level: Stage 10 Cold Water STARTS with a bullcrap exit the ice via a waterflow that’s turbo pushing you down. This tunnel can go directly to hell. The vent is shoving you SO hard that, and this is true, the only way I got out of it was by glitching the game out. To zoom in the camera on this one segment for a second…
48. Level: Terrain: …so, the current that’s shoving you down is obviously the worst problem, but the uniquely narrow design of the tunnel means you actively cannot go up at an angle. And you already have a hard time jumping out at all, so these problems magnify each other. I spent real life minutes trying to jump out of this stupid tunnel…
49. Level: Terrain: …screw this tunnel
50. Gotcha: The spike right after the pit is such a gotcha it’s ridiculous, especially since it shoves you RIGHT back into the tunnel of hell I just mentioned
51. Level: So the last part isn’t as bullcrap as some previous things but it’s… not great. There’s NO air source anywhere near Big Blue and you HAVE to talk to him to progress. Between the insane number of enemies in the way and how far the trip is you basically have to either get lucky, go in with full air and be super fast, or do what I did and actually perma-clear your way down slowly (because I got the ability to prevent respawning enemies)…
52. Level: …this was just awful
53. Level: Stage 11 the Island Zone is one of the better stages so far. It MERELY has bullcrap gotcha traps and lengthy no-air segments with unclear direction
54. Level: Stage 13 the Marble Sea. First we have more janky physics with a rock and chain puzzle (why do the chains damage you?) but then the entire lower segment has to be done while getting enemy spam’d AND without a single air pocket in the entire region which practically speaking means that you go down, do something, go all the way back up for air, do the rock puzzle again to go down, get the key, go to the surface AGAIN, do the rock puzzle a THIRD time to go down to the exit. And that’s if you don’t screw up…
55. Level: …also remember, no checkpoints. Screw up and start all over
56. Level: Stage 14, the Library is mostly an (interesting) lore dump but then there’s absolutely ginormous segments where there’s no air (most of the stage in fact)…
57. Level: …and then there’s the initial puzzle, which I required a guide to even figure out (did you know you can lift a block as long as it’s at rest, you’re at rest, and you move ‘behind’ it? Cuz I sure didn’t!) and takes a while AND you’re running out of air the entire time
58. Walkthroughitis: Absolutely nothing indicates what a super jump is or how to use it and it’s mandatory
59. Level: Stage 15, Deep City starts off with not just the aforementioned mandatory super jump (and NO explanation that it exists or how to do it) but also actively misleads the player by giving them an entire block puzzle to solve that leads to absolutely nothing
60. Level: Also the game HEAVILY implies you’re going the wrong way. It’s too high of a jump and unless you get it JUST right you bounce right back out
61. Level: The second half of the stage is actually worse if you can believe it. First you have to go through a gotcha gauntlet in a no air section which is already pretty awful…
62. Level: …but then you hit the final stretch. Let me be very clear here, this is AWFUL. First and most importantly there is no air for this entire stretch, so any screw up and death means either a MAD dash for the air (which is quite a ways behind you) or redoing the entire level (including that awful super jump at the beginning!)…
63. Level: …then there’s the fact that there are multiple ‘slow you down’ segments where the block you need to progress is slow to respawn or you can get ‘stuck’ and have to redo a segment…
64. Level: …then there’s the last stretch which, I remind you, you’re doing after all the previous issues AND with no air AND there’s one last block puzzle WHICH can slow you down or screw up AND there’s a dozen friggin’ enemies in the room there to ambush you
65. Level: Encounter: Level 16, City of Forever, and the first jump. This jump can go directly to hell (yes I know there’s a hidden passageway to completely skip it). You have a narrow tunnel and have to make a super jump and there’s either an invisible wall or some pushback mechanic…
66. Level: Encounter: …so this sucks
67. Level: Encounter: The second jump is even worse if you can believe it. You have less room to make it, there’s corners you ‘bump’ on losing momentum, and it’s super easy to lose progress to the former jump, and… I never actually succeeded at this jump. Between the corners, the wall, the less room, and how much it hurt…
68. Level: Encounter: …this…
69. Level: Encounter: …really sucks
70. Level: Encounter: Then there’s the third jump. Yes there’s a third jump. It’s not as bad as the second as long as you have the despawner because otherwise enemies are harassing you the entire time…
71. Level: Encounter: …so that sucks
72. Level: Encounter: Then there’s the FOURTH jump. Because of course there’s a fourth jump. It’s basically the same as the third jump but with more enemies…
73. Level: Encounter: …so that also sucks
74. Level: The rest of the stage is MERELY bad game design (having to redo puzzles, multiple dead ends, enemy spam)
75. Level: Stage 18, Pteranodon Pond. So we start off fine, really, just some enemy spam and a single heal spot… then you have to find a mostly hidden key on the way through a HUGE no health, no air segment…
76. Level: …then a maze with WAY too many enemies, hidden air, and no health…
77. Level: …then a massive no air segment which mandates rushing or sweeping with the optional despawner
78. Level: Stage 19, Origin Beach, is just unfair nonsense. A gigantic swath of enemies (including trilobites) with no air section at all for the majority of the level, meaning you’re encouraged to rush while being punished for it…
79. Level: …great stuff
80. Level: Stage 20, Trilobite Circle, has a fairly simple problem; A boss which involves health mashing, and at the VERY end of the stage is a current sending you back to the beginning of the stage if you don’t avoid it (hope you knew it was coming!)
81. Level: Stage Stage 21, Dark Water. LOTS of enemies, very little air, and having to dash through spikes make for a great time. Hope you know where the invuln is or else this stage is flat impossible…
82. Level: …and remember, each time you die you start all over again
83. Boss: The Asterite is garbage. Nothing indicates what you have to do, you can’t even enter his lair without taking tons of damage, you’re on TWO timers (air and he’ll start damaging you after a while), and even when you know what to do it’s frustrating to pull off with the tiny space available…
84. Boss: …screw…
85. Boss: …this stupid boss
86. Padding: Now go do Deep Water again, nothing changed
87. Padding: Okay so then you have to do City of Forever again. Thank GOD there’s a skip but… if you don’t know that skip is there guess what? You get to do those four awful, awful jumps… all… over… again…
88. Padding: …this…
89. Padding: …is awful
90. Outro: Gotcha: Ahh… Welcome To The Machine. One of the worst final levels in video game history. Let’s just knock this out sequentially shall we? My favorite part is that the enemies can just jump in out of nowhere and if you don’t already know where they are, where they’re spawning from, OR just keep two enemies ‘active’ (so the memory is taken up by those two) you’re screwed out of nowhere and with no ability to deal with it. This is made worse by something I’ll talk about in a minute but just this…
91. Outro: Gotcha: …is a full…
92. Outro: Gotcha: …triple
93. Outro: Enemy Design: Enemies that totally ignore the terrain, never leash, and home in on you. Do I really need to add anything to this? These are the trilobites but even worse…
94. Outro: Enemy Design: …because…
95. Outro: Difficulty: …for some reason in this section in the game (even though they give you health regen and infinite air) they also take away your i-frames. Which means the moment an enemy gets into your hitbox (which, remember, is what they’re beelining for) they kill you in microseconds…
96. Outro: Difficulty: …which is part of why the earlier Gotcha…
97. Outro: Difficulty: …and Enemy Design are so bad
98. Outro: Level: Then there’s the level itself. First let’s talk about the autoscroller itself. Autoscrollers CAN be good (we’ve proven this historically) but this is… not one of those. But I’m sorry, even if this was just a typical autoscroller it’d be a piss poor final stage
99. Outro: Level: Then there’s the juking. Good God the juking. There is NO rhyme or reason to where the camera moves or when. You have to either have it memorized, get lucky, or be very good at adapting quickly. This goes into full troll territory at times where the camera will look like it’s going one way then go another, and because you want to be predictive to have time to avoid things you go the wrong way and whoops, death…
100. Outro: Level: …this is…
101. Outro: Level: …such a troll
102. Outro: Level: Then there’s the length. So hear me out; A long final dungeon is not, by itself, a bad thing. I can think of several lengthy final dungeons (or dungeons in general) that are legit. But length can serve as a bit of a multiplier if what you’re doing doesn’t really change. So you end up having to deal with everything I just mentioned for seven solid God damned minutes and let me tell you… it feels like a lot longer. And at a certain point memorizing this is just going to get ridiculous. So the length…
103. Outro: Level: …by itself…
104. Outro: Level: …makes everything worse. But wait, there’s more!
105. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpoints: Because then there’s the lack of checkpoints. And let me tell you this right here… this is the thing that makes this whole stage suck, really. Everything in here is what i’d consider bad design but all of it is magnified by the fact that if you screw up, at any point, in any way… you have to redo the ENTIRE stage. There’s no shortcuts, there’s no checkpoints, there’s no nothing…
106. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpoints: …screw this level…
107. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpoints: …as hard as possible
108. Outro: Padding: And finally if you die on the (hard!) final boss guess what! You go ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE MACHINE. I don’t have words for this. Y’know how sometimes you sort of get desensitized to horrible stuff? This one sentence by itself explains everything wrong with this entire game and its general approach to hostile design. If you die during the final boss, something that is VERY easy to do, you have to redo THE ENTIRE SEVEN MINUTE AUTOSCROLLER…
109. Outro: Padding: …Jesus…
110. Outro: Padding: …Christ
111. Outro: Boss: Phase 1. So this actually isn’t that bad really. Buncha stuff going on but it mostly does little damage, this is mostly here to wear you down for the later phases because then…
112. Outro: Boss: …there’s Phase 2. This phase turbo sucks. The boss has an instant kill attack if you get into its mouth. Nothing saves you from this, you just die (and go back to the beginning of the Machine). By the way you have to hit the part that instantly kills you with a collision attack to damage it. Let me say that again. The only way to damage the boss is to deliberately dive into its jaw which is immediately below the mouth which will instantly kill you…
113. Outro: Boss: …I…
114. Outro: Boss: …I have no words
115. Outro: Boss: Phase 3 is actually not super bad, just nuke her head with whatever, but honestly it’s still possible to die here in this phase
116. Outro: Boss: Walkthroughitis: Good luck figuring out ANY of this by the way
117. Backtracking: Especially to refill on air in… almost every stage in the game really
118. Guidance: Or lack thereof
119. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Oh and before I forget, the whole game has no checkpoints. Just stages. So…
120. Mid Mission Checkpoint: …that…
121. Mid Mission Checkpoint: …always sucks
122. Tutorialization: There is none. Just… none

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Good animation, good detailing on the brickwork, short and to the point
2. Animation: Of course I need to mention the baller animation that looks good NOW, nevermind in 1989
3. Cutscene: Honestly the little segways showing us the princess and the hourglass along with the grim reminder of the timer are nice on the story axis (even though they suck on the gameplay one)

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Guidance: Honestly pretty solid for what’s there. At most points in time it’s pretty clear where to go and what to do
2. Intro: Actually does a pretty good job of indicating the basics of the game. The first step jiggles almost guaranteed as you land nearby, when you either fall with it or it falls behind you indicates how to traverse vertically, and you can ledge grab or just fall and it won’t kill you. Meanwhile if you head right you immediately see the objective of the level; a single guard who will kill you instantly, meaning you need some way to bypass him
3. Visual Distinction: Actually pretty solid for what it is. You can really tell what’s what even at a glance thanks to the stylized pseudo isometric block style. Plus there’s good animation to help see what’s interactable and what’s collapsible and the like
4. Level: Stage 1 is honestly one of the best stages in the game. There’s good indication, good puzzles, good rewarding optional areas, good layout. It’s a solid stage

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Core Combat: You have so much limitation in combat it’s awful. It’s basic, boring, limited, janky, and involves awful enemies that have every advantage over you. There’s luck involved too (what they decide to do in reaction to you). And there’s entirely too much of it…
2. Core Combat: …so…
3. Core Combat: …y’know
4. Controls: Input buffering in combat
5. Animation: Animation locking in combat
6. Enemy Design: Guards have more reach than you and are programmed to attack on approach. Later on they attack faster than you too so you HAVE to parry and then immediately counter
7. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Die on the very last jump? Go redo the entire stage. This is insanely bad in this game, to the point where I feel like it needs to be noted at the stage level. So consider this the negative for level 1
8. Core Mechanic: The timer and subsequent problems. So the timer is awful because it creates a soft timer in addition to the obvious hard timer. Each stage is progressively harder and several are far more time consuming than others. This means you have an average of 5 minutes per stage. You can ‘make up’ time by going fast but you can also lose it. If you fall too far behind you can reach the point where it’s mathematically impossible to actually finish the game even if you play perfectly… which you probably will not. A more lenient timer, or less trial-and-error level design (more or less mandating doing stages repeatedly to memorize them), or several other methods could mitigate this. Maybe even make it optional. But instead it looms over the entire game and sort of makes the entire game a pseudo mid mission checkpoint issue…
9. Core Mechanic: …so…
10. Core Mechanic: …screw this
11. Penalty For Failure: Total reset on death (minus time of course). So you don’t keep upgrades or progress
12. Level: Stage 2 has, I kid you not, five guards. There’s almost no platforming to speak of (except that last horrible jump) it’s just ‘fight five friggin’ guards
13. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Stage 2
14. Level: Stage 3 has a bullcrap puzzle to get a health upgrade which is even harder to get on the way back (and remember, deaths reset, so you can’t get it then die)…
15. Level: …and then the Jump Of Dumb. The Jump of Dumb is a TIMED race across two narrow platforms, two long jumps, and if you fail for any reason you might as well die because you require the last bit of platform to make the jump and it falls when you go over it
16. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Stage 3
17. Level: Stage 4 is fine, really. It just has some dead ends, some bullcrap traps, and some walkthroughitis in how to progress
18. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Stage 4
19. Level: Stage 5 is not. Ignoring the absolute troll of the shadow eating your health upgrade there are multiple segments where you have to make flat blind jumps or falls in order to progress. Oh and the guards are starting to get worse so now you HAVE to parry to attack
20. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Stage 5
21. Level: Stage 8 begins the trend of the next few stages of making you loop around the level several times which might be neat if not for incredibly precise platforming, ease of death, and my personal favorite thing in the world; no checkpoints. I really have to stress that the checkpoint issue alone makes these levels crap. If there was a per screen or per area or just a flat out save feature this game’s honestly fine but having to redo an ENTIRE stage WHILE losing time? That’s awful
22. Level: Stage 9 has multiple bullcrap jumps I’ll just gloss over for now…
23. Level: …including some really fun instant deaths and blind jumps…
24. Level: …but THE worst part is that there’s a button you have to hit early on to open the door at the very end. If you hit that button… the door will be closed by the end because SCREW you. No you have to make part of an upper panel drop on it to KEEP the button depressed
25. Level: Encounter: Stage 10 has a timer door puzzle where you have to go through a slicer, two buttons that will close the door on you, and another slicer in quick succession. Screw this one spot in particular
26. Level: Walkthroughitis: Stage 10 also MANDATES you break an invisible ceiling tile at just the right spot. Honestly even looking at a map I wasn’t sure that was possible
27. Level: Also Stage 10 just sucks in general for all the usual instant death screw you jumps
28. Level: Stage 11 actually has some neat things here and there… completely hampered by the worst guards in the game (the LAST guards I do believe), there’s blind leaps which nothing at all indicates you have to do, and there’s terrain designed to softlock you if you make any mistakes…
29. Level: …good lord
30. Level: Stage 12 pretty much mandates a map because it’s vertical in a game that doesn’t scroll or let you look up
31. Boss: Not super impressed with the shadow fight, though there is a logic to it imagine reaching it and then having to redo stage because you dared to attack an enemy
32. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Also the entire climb and the Shadow fight have no checkpoints either
33. Boss: Jaffar is literally a normal (fast attacking) guard. No variance at all
34. Replayability: The game is antagonistic towards replay, in addition to never varying (which is fine really) it also mandates doing huge swaths of the same stuff over and over
35. Enemy Variety: There’s only two enemy types in the game, and all that’s different is the attack speed

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: So this is a weird one. The actual textures and environment graphics are not good (this is primarily listed under Gameplay Negatives)… but the environment design itself is actually really good. The placements, composition, and varying architecture does a great job of conveying quite a bit. So this is going to be one of those good and bad situations. First we’ll mention the general grassy, overworldy areas, as well as places like Los Platos
2. Brickwork: Next up we have the vast olive fields and more rural Cortondo
3. Brickwork: I was also pretty impressed with the bustling port of Levincia
4. Architecture: So they don’t use as many tricks and ‘set design’ as Shield did, but instead they more traditionally SNES RPG it up and make towns feel larger than the tiny spits of land they are, and do a great job with the variety and stylings thereof…
5. Architecture: …for a solid double
6. Doodads: I’ve seen better, but I’ve seen worse too. Mostly interiors, since outdoors the bushes and the like have horrendous pop in
7. Character: Nemona. She’s such a simple character, but she’s very well executed. There’s an earnestness to her that helps
8. Character: Arven. The jackass who was abandoned by his parents and just wants to help his dog
9. Character: Team Star in general and Penny. Each of the bosses is a bit simple but distinct, and Penny herself is a nice mix of shy and brazen
10. Character: The Teachers deserve mention (mostly during their classes) for having their own little bits of flavor
11. Character: Supporting cast in general. Lots in this one
12. Spritework: Y’know, call me weird, I like the updated Pokemon models. I don’t want to over-praise but there’s some solid stuff here, and it even works when the camera’s more close up…
13. Spritework: …solid double
14. NPC Set Dressing: Wild pokemon in general. There’s tons, they like to roam in packs, and they like to watch your battles. The relative absence of people in the world is well offset by how crowded things are out and about
15. World Building: As usual, Pokemon games do some good world building. My personal favorite touches this time around are the ads, though the food is good too. Lots of merch as well. And quite a few casual references to everyday pokemon interactions…
16. World Building: …and how they build the culture of each area
17. MSQ: Titan 2. So the second Titan you do, Arven opens up about why he’s doing all this. And good lord that sort of works for me. One dude who just wants to heal his sick partner. Sold
18. MSQ: Star in general have been interesting for what they are so far. Bullied, disenfranchised, and otherwise beleaguered people who got together to do their own thing and became part of the problem, but also an oddly piercing insight into rumor culture and how bad it can get at schools (Persona 5 hit this same point, for perspective)
19. MSQ: Larry! Poor friggin’ Larry! He’s not even a joke, he’s just straight up a salaryman and acts like it! He even has a few jabs in there, like when he gives us the Facade TM he flat out says “Hopefully you’ll never have to put this on”, like… argh!
20. Brickwork: The snowy areas in general look nice. Very lush, thick snow, and great mountain peaks
21. Brickwork: Also bonus points to the snowy towns. Very cozy, surprisingly warm looking
22. MSQ: Ghost gym doesn’t have the appeal of Larry, but it is still badass and has some great vibes, good rapping, and a good general setup
23. Brickwork: Alfornada is honestly quite gorgeous. Unique music, fun mosaic bricks, lovely Gen 1 decor, the plates… love it
24. MSQ: Team Star in general. There’s some nice, simple, cheesy, fun character tidbits here as we learn more about these kids, what they went through, and how they dealt with it
25. MSQ: Team Star finale. Call me weird, I rather liked it. Especially how it resolved in such a positive manner
26. Outro: MSQ: The descent into Area Zero, visually and audibly, is a great sequence. The sparkles, the music, and of course…
27. Outro: Banter: …the banter as they’re going down
28. Outro: MSQ: AI Turo and Turo, distinctions, and the fact that the original professor was an evil, abusive idiot, which dovetails nicely into…
29. Outro: Moment: …AI Turo being more of a father than Turo ever was
30. Outro: Storytelling Mechanic: There’s a lot of little details in the finale which are legit. The glitched text, the garbled plea from AI Turo, the animations on the robot, the text on the battle and it being initiated, the fact that the Protocol was using exclusively Master Balls, lots of good stuff
31. Character: This is as good of a time as any to mention that Turo (the professor), no the real one, is… REALLY well characterized in absence. They’re also in the running for the most horrible character in the entire franchise (right up there with Ghetsis)…
32. Character: …screw it, double positive. Turo/Sada has seriously stuck with me. They’re such a perfect fit of a villain for a game like Pokemon. They’re not a diseased monster like Ghetsis, they’re not an arrogant idiot like Archie and whatshisface, they just had a dream. And then they started to see that dream come true, and the rush of that success pushed them further… and further… and further. Until all that was left was their fixation. And there’s something wonderfully appropriate about the main villain being just the same as everyone but distended to an extreme… and, I really need to reiterate this, they’re DEAD. They died before the game even started. And that’s just fantastic
33. Theme: Treasure… but it’s not so simple. I am giving this because the game goes the extra step in mentioning that focusing too much OR too little on your treasure can be a bad thing. That you need to care, but in moderation. We see this in all three major storylines, but nowhere is this hammered in as hard as during the Outro where we see exactly what this type of monomaniac fixation did to Turo… and to his victims
34. Animations: I should have mentioned this much earlier but like… the animations are weirdly good in this one in cutscenes. I was reminded because of how they showcased AI Turo but it’s been solid throughout
35. Humor: It’s infrequent, but it’s definitely there. And I have to admit, most of the humor strikes me as actually funny instead of just cringe
36. Flavor: Pokedex pictures and related tidbits. What I especially like is how many of these have their own little stories or jokes or even connect with some other pictures elsewhere in the Dex…
37. Flavor: …an easy…
38. Flavor: …triple
39. Brickwork: Kitakami in general. I’m especially fond of the flowing grass, the rice paddies, and the apple orchard
40. Cutscene: The stylized art showcasing the past of Kitakami and the Ogrepon was really well done
41. Flavor: The DLC pokedex pictures are, honestly, even better. So despite having less overall pictures…
42. Flavor: …they still get…
43. Flavor: …the triple
44. Storytelling Mechanic: Fun detail; Almost every trainer in the game uses balls relevant to their personality. It’s a nice touch
45. Localization: REALLY solid localization this time around. Details, nuance, dialect, different people talk in different ways…
46. Localization: …great stuff
47. Writing: This is as good of a time to mention that, outside of the DLCs, the base game has weirdly good writing. Just generally good practices in the construction of it. Someone somewhere did their job this time around
48. NPC Set Dressing: The people roaming about. Most can’t be directly talked to but usually have little snippets as you’re walking by
49. Visual Storytelling: Arven’s room, Penny’s room
50. Prime Opt: The post Team Star school arc is adorable, light hearted, and surprisingly real
51. Character: Director Clavell really needs to be mentioned here too in his own positive
52. Outro: The entire Mochi Panic thing was exactly the right length, exactly as cheesy, and exactly as horrifying as it needed to be…
53. Outro: …and had me grinning the entire time
54. Outro: Also a legit and satisfying ending, but with ooone laaast scene…
55. Outro: …which is just a brilliant scene. We see Turo before he made AI Turo, before he made the machine. He’s… exactly as sociopathic as he should be here, barely cares about his son, is entirely too invested in Miraidon, and does not give a crap about anything but his work. And of course we gift him the book completing the loop
56. Doodads: A general second…
57. Doodads: …and third positive
58. External Continuity: Quiet, but persistant. It’s nice to see some honest connections to other regions and characters
59. Storyboarding: Actually yeah. Quite a few clearly motion-captured scenes that do some good stuff with what’s going on, especially in the bigger narrative beats

Story Negatives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: As usual the Pokedex is nonsense. I’m probably going to give this negative to every single Pokemon game so… here we are
2. World Building: Underthought. For all the world building this game has, as per usual there’s a ton of ‘just go with it’. Animals and meat, economics, population, all kinds of little details
3. Brickwork: GRAPHICS. I normally put these types of issues under Gameplay but there are… many, many scenes that are actively injured because of the various graphics issues…
4. Brickwork: …pushing me right out of the game
5. Padding: Area Zero doldrums. Seriously, why is this as long as it is?
6. Writing: Time travel. I could go into detail on this but honestly the game doesn’t, so why bother? They have a time machine, it rips Pokemon out of time, but the actual issue isn’t with MESSING WITH TIME, it’s how these pokemon are going to be damaging to the ecosystem. Sure game
7. Fake Drama: Everything to do with forcing us to not tell the truth to Kieran. They even give us the option to, except they don’t, because both options are to continue to gaslight him
8. Writing: Also the general writing quality of the first half of the first DLC is just noticeably worse across the board
9. Plot: The entire plot point of the pointless Cassandra Truth about Ogerpon
10. MSQ: And then they rub your face in it about how you’re too GOOD of a person to EVER tell the truth to a friend of yours, of course I’d NEVER accuse you of something so horrible. Imagine having honest communication! The nerve
11. Moment: And then Kieran apologizes because the game acts like it was HIS fault all along!! We have gaslight this poor kid so hard HE apologizes! I can’t even
12. Empty Text: Weirdly yeah, the moment we hit the Underdepths
13. Outro: The entire second DLCs conclusion was bad. The descent was not interesting, people kept repeating the same lines and info over and over, and there’s no tension or energy as this stupid (cute) turtle… doesn’t really do anything it’s just sitting there terastallizing. The entire sequence is lacking. It’s lacking in character, lacking in payoff, and lacking in emotion. It comes across as a Temu version of the vanilla ending we already got. And then…
14. Outro: …there’s this dumb wah-wah ending

Gameplay Positives:

1. Interface: Let’s get this out of the way; the Interface in modern pokemon games is baller. Good shortcutting, good cross referencing, quick ease of access to basically everything everywhere, low interaction cost, low seconds in minutes…
2. Interface: …it’s…
3. Interface: …fantastic
4. Info In Game: Plenty… again, which has been a thing for a while now (since Gen 5 roughly). Whether you’ve caught a pokemon or not, advantages and disadvantages on the fly, move information, stat information, ability information, type information, it’s actually funny considering this game still gets the negative for not telling you how to evolve a bunch of pokemon but it still gets…
5. Info In Game: …a full…
6. Info In Game: …triple for the rest
7. HUD: And yes, you knew it was coming. Amazing HUD design here. Color usage, good outlines, good placement, good information, and also dynamic on what needs to be seen and when…
8. HUD: …great…
9. HUD: …HUD
10. QoL: Hooboy. There’s so many I gave up listing after a certain point in time. Most modern Pokemon games tend to have a ton of Quality of Life and this is no exception. Renaming on the fly, shortcut for balls in battle, lots of cross-referencing, shortcuts in the field…
11. QoL: …Autoheal which smartly uses healing items straight from the menu with one button press…
12. QoL: …looting being super quick and easy…
13. QoL: …box sorting anywhere, option to see party pokemon and put newly caught into party or box from the catch screen…
14. QoL: …move sorting and remembering AND forgetting from the menu, memory cursor…
15. QoL: …and plenty more little ones I’m not going to list
16. QoL: Lots of good, quality indicators of interactions with NPCs. No, seriously, there’s indicators for who you can talk to, who you can fight, who you’ve already fought, who has a quest, and who is a difficult trainer, all just with their speech bubbles
17. Controls: Game controls great too. Again, good and responsive usage and button interactions, smart menu interactions, and great shortcutting…
18. Controls: …easy double
19. Pacing: With the new different types of interactions on the MSQ the already good pacing…
20. Pacing: …gets kicked up a notch
21. Yoshi Drums: This is some next level Yoshi Drums here. Roaming, night, sneaking, riding, and fighting are all on the same track (which varies per region)…
22. Yoshi Drums: …fantastic stuff
23. Music: Loving the music overall too…
24. Music: …easy double
25. Music: Nah scratch that, triple it up
26. Interface: The Pokedex could be better but it still has good info and good filters
27. Encounter Rate: As usual, my absolute favorite system of random encounters…
28. Encounter Rate: …but somehow it’s even better than usual here. Pokemon being visible from a distance, groups of pokemon, audible indicators, most of them actually avoid attacking you BUT will approach out of curiosity, pokemon watching your battles who can then be encountered next…
29. Encounter Rate: …this is unironically the best implementation of this system I’ve ever seen…
30. Encounter Rate: …so it’s getting that bonus fourth point
31. Tutorialization: For all the issues it has (mostly being non optional) the tutorialization is actually pretty sweet. I’m especially fond of the Pokecenter tips and the classes at the school
32. Cosmetics: Honestly Sword/Shield had better, BUT there’s still some decent stuff here
33. Map: I’ve been chewing on the map. It has a couple of flaws (the biggest being it’s hard to tell the terrain at a glance, like when a seemingly blank spot on the map is actually a mountain path) but it still does a solid job with everything else. Icons for nearby pokemon, roads being easily tracked, points of interest being clear and distinct…
34. Map: …solid stuff
35. Overworld: I’ve seen better overworld design (the kind of games where multiple positives can be given for individual zones) but there’s still some solid design overall in this overworld. Good layout, flow, guidance, and usage of the terrain…
36. Overworld: …for a solid double
37. Penalty For Failure: Usual decent stuff here; Shoved back to where you were, minus your money
38. Save: Autosaves, woo
39. Save: Quick and easy to use manual saves too
40. Core Mechanic: Tera Raids are a bit better than Dynamax, which is good because Dynamax had issues. The fact that catching is guaranteed is great, the fact that people basically go ‘all at once’, and the co-op elements are nice, but the removal of how LOOONG Dynamax battles took is the best part…
41. Core Mechanic: …for a double
42. Core Combat: A simple but rather complex We Go They Go turn based system, which has a ton going on under the hood…
43. Core Combat: …and the core loop remains good
44. Alternate Leveling: Learning moves directly to pool, which also puts TMs into said pool for relearning. I’m sorry this is such a great feature and it completely removes a huge aggravating from a lot of building your team…
45. Alternate Leveling: …not the least of which you no longer need to be staring at a wiki to do so
46. Core Mechanic: Capturing isn’t as good as it was in Arceus (I mean, obviously) but it’s still pretty smooth in this one. The special balls help (even though Quick Ball reigns supreme) and the ease and speed with which you can do so helps
47. Fast Travel: Very, very good quick travel. You have access to it from the start, there’s lots of places to hop to, and you discover them as you go…
48. Fast Travel: …oh and also the travel itself is super smooth and fast…
49. Fast Travel: …easy triple
50. Flow: The game has incredible flow. Everything leads almost directly into everything else. Even if and when you run into walls there’s built in ways to bypass them, whether it’s access to moves (TM crafting and finding can fix), levels (the raids and abundance of experience candies), or literal traversal (caves and paths)…
51. Flow: …great stuff
52. Leveling: Exp Share. The fact that it’s mandatory is still a negative (removal of an option) but the way it works to begin with is still good
53. Leveling: Gaining experience for catching is one of the best decisions they ever made in this franchise. And the fact that you can focus on whatever style you want and still progress is great
54. Itemization: Exp candies continue to be an excellent idea to offer gradient experience boosts to help out. If you want to boost a high end pokemon, help one who’s fallen behind, try out a new one, or just level one for its form, being able to just point a finger and zap pooled experience into a given pokemon is a fantastic aspect of player choice…
55. Itemization: …with the side benefit of making the Tera raids (which are way less irritating than Dynamax raids)…
56. Itemization: …even more lucrative and desireable
57. Itemization: I should also mention that the game has shockingly good itemization in general. There’s static drops (of items, consumables, and pokemon) and then there’s the random stuff…
58. Itemization: …and there’s some great thought into what’s where, and the whole thing really encourages exploration, which is helped by…
59. Traversal: …the bike. Honestly I thought the absence of a true flight would bother me but it super doesn’t. The bike takes a moment to really come into its own (specifically it needs the dash ability) but from that point onwards it’s great. The climb is a natural feeling evolution, the glide works well to open up accessible areas, and the thing being mountable / dismountable with a single button press while in motion…
60. Traversal: …is all good stuff
61. Unit Design: Hokay. Per the usual rules I’m going to limit myself to new Pokemon (either in new Forms, new Evolutions, or just plain new Lines) because… y’know, fairness. So! Let’s start with our resident Fire types. Not a lot of representation here but the Charcadet Line is very well designed, Scovillain is a fascinating combo (Grass Fire), and the Paradoxes aren’t shabby either
62. Unit Design: Surprisingly good Dark types this time around. Mabosstiff’s Line, a few additional Forms or Evolutions, and of course several fun Paradox mons
63. Unit Design: There’s not a lot of Bug or Dragon representation but we do still get things like Baxcalibur, Tatsugiri, and of course Lokix
64. Unit Design: Our latest Pikachu wannabe is a nice Electric Fight combo, plus we have the solid Bellibolt and Kilowattrel Lines…
65. Unit Design: …plus the Electric Paradox pokemon are kind of silly good by themselves
66. Unit Design: Fidough is just adorable, but Dachsbun honestly has a great Ability (Well Baked). Then we have Tinkaton which is hilariously good (great combo too, Fairy Steel)
67. Unit Design: Call this an Aggregate for several combo types in Fighting (like Flamigo), Flying (like… Flamigo…), Ground (Clodsire!), etc.
68. Unit Design: Good lord, I was not expecting this many solid Ghosts this time around. We have Brambleghast which is a solid offense Grass combo, Houndstone for a mean pure Ghost, Annihilape which is a walking nuke, and of course Gimmighoul
69. Unit Design: Lots of Grass types but a lot of them are our friendly Paradox mons (go figure). Still some solid stuff here. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Toedscool’s new Line
70. Unit Design: LECHONK! (also Maushold and Dundunsparce… but mostly Le CHONK)
71. Unit Design: Some weird Poison showcasing. Mostly new Evolutions (Overqwil says hi) but I rather liked the Revavroom Line and Glimmora as well
72. Unit Design: Again not a lot of spread but some great design here. Espathra by itself is very solid, Farigiraf is a nice development, and some mean Paradox representation
73. Unit Design: Garganacl, Klawf, and our friendly Orthworm are all decent groundy types
74. Unit Design: Wugtrio is a hysterical take on the Dugtrio Line, the Palafins are amusing, the Tatsugiri are great, and of course Veluza is just kind of insane
75. Unit Design: Let’s go ahead and mention that this time around each Starter is absolutely solid. Each one has a good variety of stats, good Abilities, and an amazing signature move each. We’re going to jot down a double for each Line for being some of the better designed Starters out there. So that’s starting off with a double for Fuecoco…
76. Unit Design: …and that entire Line
77. Unit Design: Then there’s the friggin’ cat line of Sprigatito to Floragato to Meowscarada (if I gave pluses for puns…) which also rawks…
78. Unit Design: …a double
79. Unit Design: And finally Quaxly (I hate Quaxly…), Quaxwell, and Quaquaval… okay yeah these ones are mean…
80. Unit Design: …and, again, deserve the double
81. 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…
82. Kit: …for a double
83. Kit: Dark…
84. Kit: …gets a double
85. Kit: Dragon continues a solid swing
86. Kit: Electric is back up to…
87. Kit: …being a double
88. Kit: Fairy…
89. Kit: …is a double
90. Kit: Hokay here’s our first triple I think. There’s so much variety, and some great risk/reward stuff in Fighting…
91. Kit: …that we’ll give it…
92. Kit: …the triple
93. Kit: Fire is going to be another of those. Fire really benefited from that Special/Physical split lemme tell you…
94. Kit: …so…
95. Kit: …there’s a triple
96. Kit: Flying…
97. Kit: …is another double
98. Kit: Ghost…
99. Kit: …enjoys a double
100. Kit: Grass is another of those triple ones. I mean come on…
101. Kit: …there’s just too much here…
102. Kit: …to not give a triple
103. Kit: Ground…
104. Kit: …is another double
105. Kit: For how good it is offensively you’d think Ice would have more but no
106. Kit: Okay this is stupid. There are too many Normal moves, my God. Okay so we have buffs, debuffs, attacks, specials, physicals, trades, uniques…
107. Kit: …an absolutely insane amount of great moves so we’re going to split it right down the middle
108. Kit: Then we’re going to cover…
109. Kit: …the other half of the Normal moves
110. Kit: Poison is a pretty solid…
111. Kit: …double
112. Kit: Psychic has entirely too many mean, fun buffs and debuffs these days…
113. Kit: …so take a double
114. Kit: Rock is kind of like Ice when I think about it. Good type but not much there really
115. Kit: It’s weird that Steel has so relatively little but what’s there is still very SOLID (sorry)
116. Kit: Water…
117. Kit: …is another double
118. Core Mechanic: Affection buffs are, as usual, a great feature to encourage the player to actually raise their happiness and receive a tangible reward for it. Very thematically appropriate and feels great in a clutch
119. Build: As usual, Pokemon games have tons of Build potential. Lots and lots of Moves to pick from…
120. Build: …for a huge variety of setups, strats, and coverage…
121. Build: …and a triple
122. Build: The Types themselves and related strengths, weaknesses, and immunities…
123. Build: …for another…
124. Build: …triple
125. Build: The actual Pokemon variety itself…
126. Build: …which is going to happen…
127. Build: …when you have hundreds of units to pick from
128. Build: TMs, which can really vary things up by going outside of what a Pokemon would normally have access to…
129. Build: …so that’s another…
130. Build: …triple
131. Build: Abilities which can totally change your build, team, and playstyle…
132. Build: …so that’s another…
133. Build: …triple
134. Build: And finally Held Items which, like Abilities, can have a substantial impact…
135. Build: …for a final…
136. Build: …triple
137. Replayability: I mean. Yeah…
138. Replayability: …of course it gets the first two
139. Viscerality: For once, yeah. Some of the moves both look and feel legit
140. Visual Distinction: Very sharp visual distinction throughout. Great usage of color and outlines…
141. Visual Distinction: …which helps when roaming and looking for something specific
142. Intro: Again, while I had issues with it, ‘interrupting’ the Intro with a mini open world zone with tons of things to do and catch and fight was a brilliant move. There’s a reason we spent an entire 4 hours just roaming this first zone before we even hit the school
143. Boss: Klawf, the Stony Cliff Titan. Nothing too fancy here, but a solid brick wall (ha ha) and some good stats to push back against the player, plus a dual battle
144. MSQ: Cortondo Gym is a great tutorial Gym. The Olive rolling is fun (and includes battles for shortcuts), and it introduces the star of the Gym chain; Using a pokemon off type for the Gym who terastalizes into type, which later bosses will do some creative things with
145. Boss: The Iono fight of the Levincia Gym is honestly one of the best fights in the game. She has a fairly average spread of electric pokemon, but her ace and its exact Terastalizing and type combinations make for a legitimately fun challenge…
146. Boss: …easy double
147. Boss: Kofu of the Cascarrafa Gym does the same basically good thing they all do, but he still does it well
148. Boss: Bombirdier, the Open Sky Titan, is another simple but fun mega fight
149. Boss: Iron Treads, the Quaking Earth Titan, is probably my favorite of the Titan fights so far
150. Boss: Larry of the Medali Gym. A simple but solid spread of pokemon, followed by doubling down on his Staraptor and its double STAB on Normal and a big swinging Facade
151. Boss: Ryme of the Montenevera Ghost Gym. First, the double battle helps a lot, because double battles are just better in Pokemon and kind of always have been. But the spread of Ghost types here helps (Banette, Mimikyu, and Houndstone) and of course she does the same thing everything else does (throwing out an Electric/Poison who types to Ghost)
152. Boss: Ortega, the Team Star Fairy boss, is another fun fight against another decent team, but as usual the Starmobile is the kicker
153. Boss: The False Dragon Titan fight was already good, but it being the surprise Tatsugiri (and a fun fight to boot) was great
154. Boss: Eri, the Team Star Fighting champ, is one of the funner mean fights in the game. A brutal Annihilape, a mean usage of Toxicroak right off the bat, and her Starmobile having great coverage…
155. Boss: …made this whole fight awesome
156. Boss: The final Arven fight was properly mean. And it being one of each of his pokemon from across the Titan fights was even better…
157. Boss: …easy double
158. Boss: Final Clavell fight. I’m sorry, at this point I’d just be repeating myself. Good mons, good moveset, good design…
159. Boss: …good double
160. Boss: Penny fight. Even though it’s ‘just’ Eevees she does some fun stuff here
161. Boss: Rika is a solid opener to the Elite 4, Ground types with great coverage
162. Boss: Poppy surprised me, but she does some solid stuff with her Steel team
163. Boss: Larry is always awesome, but he rocks it here with his Fliers
164. Boss: Hassel is our resident Dragon trainer and he does not disappoint, with a great spread of dragons
165. Boss: Nemona is another solid Gen 5 style fight. Starts off with Lycanroc who has Stealth Rock and a bunch of high crit moves, followed by a Dundunsparce with some mean coverage, a Goodra who can hit like a truck, an Orthworm, a Pawmot, and finally her ace the Quaquaval who she’ll Terastallize. All of this makes for a varied, mean, fun fight…
166. Boss: …and an easy double
167. Outro: Boss: Turo. Good lord the Turo fight. First we have a fantastic spread of paradox pokemon which are properly leveled and kitted out…
168. Outro: Boss: …easy…
169. Outro: Boss: …triple. Not as good as the final Arceus fight, but right up there with Ghetsis
170. Outro: Boss: I was debating this but I think the victory lap with the Protocol deserves mention (especially since you CAN do it legit)
171. Song: The final boss theme. This sucker’s a banger
172. Postgame: The Gym refights are neat, and the opened up raid battles are lucrative
173. Build: Terastallizing. It’s a bit of a pain to do (and requires raiding) but the ability to change your defensive Type as well as either buff an existing STAB or add a new one is a great aspect of Build gameplay…
174. Build: …easy double
175. Tutorialization: The school classes are a bit drab and lengthy but wxhat they DO is do a pretty good job of explaining several of the more under-the-hood math behind mechanics in the game
176. Core Mechanic: Being able to breed multiple eggs simultaneously, plus how fast it is to hatch now, really helps with breeding in general
177. Boss: Keiran in the DLC. We actually just fight a slowly evolving team of his (in fact he’s most of the fights in the DLC) but it’s a solid setup
178. Boss: The Titan fights are fine, but I was especially fond of the Ogerpon one in particular. Those four forms are damned mean, and it has the stats to back it up…
179. Boss: …easy double
180. Boss: So all of the bosses in the second DLC are pretty legit. They’re all double battles (which is awesome) and they’re all VERY well typed up, with good combos, held items, support moves, and Tera support. So starting with Crispin…
181. Boss: …it’s pretty likely each of these are going to be doubles
182. Boss: Amarys is no joke either. She has amazing coverage too…
183. Boss: …another double
184. Boss: Drayton is just another fantastic fight. The usual ace dragon type, with some really fun new monds to play with…
185. Boss: …another double
186. Boss: Lacey actually gave me the most trouble of everyone, but it’s really worth noting that regardless of that her team is fantastic. Two separate support mons, party buffs, and great coverage…
187. Boss: …fantastic fight
188. Leveling: I’m sorry have I mentioned this game has catch up mechanics for its experience gain? Which reduces grind even further and helps get new mons caught up?
189. Overworld: The first DLC’s volcano thing is actually pretty well designed overall, especially considering it has to accommodate the possibility of going there very early or late
190. Unit Design: Honestly most legendaries across most games are nothing special. But color me impressed with Ogerpon and the other gimmicky ones here in Violet
191. Boss: The Epilogue’s final series of double battles were legit
192. Enemy AI: Smart, clever, knows how to use their kit…
193. Enemy AI: …great stuff

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Launch: This game originally came out on the Switch 1. And it was NOT well designed for that system. We are playing on the Switch 2, plus some patches, but it was unacceptable at launch
2. Save: Single save slot as usual
3. Graphics: More or less the same issues as Arceus. Glitchy terrain, bad culling, horrible pop in…
4. Graphics: …and easy to run into even on a normal playthrough
5. Bug: Camera filters can screw up the visuals outside of the camera feature, to the point of requiring a reset
6. QoL: Total lack of search feature in the Pokedex
7. Difficulty: Mandatory experience share is, as always, an absence of an option that should exist
8. Intro: As is the problem with basically every Pokemon game from Gen 2 (or 3) onwards, there really should be a ‘I’ve played Pokemon before please let me skip this’ option for the Intro. There’s been worse than this though
9. Info In Game: The usual negative for not telling you what evolves how or when in game. It’s actually especially bad here because not only are there some bonkers evolutions but…
10. Info In Game: …multiple of them have no mid-progress indicators, so you have to either keep track yourself or just get lucky. Because they don’t just require doing X, they require doing X THEN leveling
11. Secondary: Getting the ghost coins. Nothing really indicates you need these to begin with which already sucks, but also getting them to begin with is one hell of a grind. Further, the most reliable method (fighting the chest pokemon) not only gives you a random amount of coins (which can be VERY LITTLE by the way) but also said chests only respawn once per in game day, and even then it’s random
12. Audio Spam: I’ve heard worse but it does get old how much pokemon won’t shut up sometimes
13. Walkthroughitis: There are zero indicators on which order the various activities ‘should’ be done in. And they have static levels, not dynamic, so you can both over and under level quite easily…
14. Walkthroughitis: …sigh
15. 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
16. Seconds In Minutes: Animations and dialogue mostly
17. Seconds In Minutes: Also they removed the ability to not swap pokemon per battle which adds up over time
18. Padding: Area Zero and the removal of the mount. I’m sorry this is actively awful. We’ve spent the ENTIRE game having access to our mount and slowly improving it, and they give us this GIANT area and refuse to let us do more than walk in it. This entire sequence should’ve been half the length, or less
19. Encounter Rate: AKA the Roadkill Negative. It’s entirely too easy to get locked into endless battles as pokemon swarm you, such that you can leave battle only to immediately encounter something (often before it even renders) or while zooming around
20. Core Mechanic: Breeding involves literally putting the controller down and walking away from the computer while just waiting because it only checks to have a chance to spawn an egg every 60 seconds
21. Core Mechanic: Also there’s a CHANCE to spawn an egg every 60 seconds (unlike previous gens which had a guarantee) and there’s no bad luck protection. Even using egg power only buffs it to 15%, 21%, or 33% respectively for Egg Power 1, 2, and 3 and makes the check happen every 10 seconds
22. Minigame: Sandwiches. The wonky physics are funny, sure, but still kind of awful especially given how wonky some of the geometry is. And that’s ignoring…
23. Bug: …the disappearing picnic bug. This was SUCH a common bug I could hit it with almost 100% reliability simply by picnicking more than once in a row. And it removes your ability to do sandwiches and makes it hard to find the friggin’ egg basket
24. Grind: So there’s worse (much worse, in fact) but there is still a bit of a grind in this one for maxing out your mons and catching them all. What it really boils down to is either mulching with the autobattle feature (for mats and shinies), mashing enemies like Blisseys, or doing raids to get candies… so it’s still a bit of a grind
25. Prime Opt: The ‘go get the stakes’ quest is not great. Some are relatively easy to find, some are super not, but the actual worst part is just how long it all takes even if you have a map and know exactly where you’re going
26. Choice: Fake choices. This is pretty consistent, but it got really bad in the DLCs. You’re often given choices that don’t mean or do anything. Not even a chance to change the flavor of your character
27. Graphics: Hey you love that blinding bloom white that Nintendo loves so much? I thought we got away from it but the second DLC has got my back
28. Unskippable Cutscenes: Not as bad as it could be, but it’s there
29. Outro: Boss: Terapagos. It’s a glorified raid battle with none of the features that make those fun, and an entire phase of ‘supposed to lose’ which nothing properly conveys…
30. Outro: Boss: …on top of being a barrier change boss without properly conveying any of that to the player
31. Overworld: I’m sorry but the Terrarium is a nothingburger at best in design. Mostly big open areas with terrain morphed randomly to just look like something other than a flat disk rather than to inform gameplay

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: As per usual for the franchise, especially the sprite era, the sprites are nothing short of amazing. Shantae herself is of course the standout, with an insane number of frames and animations for herself and her various forms…
2. Spritework: …so she gets an easy double
3. Spritework: There are a wealth of NPCs who, while most of them are just standing there doing idle poses, are still exceptionally well done…
4. Spritework: …another double
5. Spritework: Enemies and bosses deserve their love too
6. Animation: Hoo boy. The animations in this game are honestly bonkers good. There are so many tiny details in how they move…
7. Animation: …great showcasing of sprite animation
8. Humor: I’m honestly shocked at how funny this game is. It’s not just jokes, but there’s plenty of those too, and thanks to the smart writing (mentioned later) this pops. And holy crap…
9. Humor: …easy…
10. Humor: …triple
11. External Continuity: Amusingly for an interquel, the game connects really well and uses the setting good, in both directions even
12. Atmosphere: Generally light hearted, silly, whimsical, and fantastical
13. Brickwork: The towns (yes, all of them) all have some solid stuff
14. Brickwork: As do the foresty areas (which is honestly most of the outside areas)
15. Brickwork: And the interiors! Especially fond of the desert pyramid dungeon
16. Dialogue: Honestly the dialogue in this game is really sharp. You don’t expect this from a silly, light hearted platformer, but it’s true. I honestly think this game has better overall dialogue than many more story focused games…
17. Dialogue: …easy double. I should also mention the dialogue for the children is really good too (sidebar; Most people don’t know how to write children, but this is good stuff)
18. Writing: This is a good of a time as any to mention the smart writing in general. Smart threading, smart connecting points, smart writing
19. Intro: Solid Intro. Good introduction, good showcasing of the premise and characters, and good fun
20. Outro: While there were some stumbles on the gameplay axis, I did enjoy the build up and pay off of the ending
21. Character: Generally solid supporting cast across the board

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Fluid and smooth as per usual for the series
2. Music: Honestly some of the earlier songs are a bit weak, but when they’re good they’re bangers
3. Kit: Dances and items. I’ve seen better (in this very series!) but it’s still good…
4. Kit: …and still fun
5. Itemization: Drops in general are decent for some upgrades, as well as keeping you supplied in potions
6. Intro: Fun, good tutorial, and a few extra fun bits
7. Level: The one and only really good ‘overworld’ area is the Orc Orchard. Nice usage and introduction of the layer gimmick, and good placement of bonuses and side dungeons. Speaking of which…
8. Level: The Crab labyrinth. Simple, short, effective. You navigate over several water areas, learn how to utilize bomb flinging, grab crab form, and head back underwater (and of course it immediately unlocks something outside)
9. Level: The first dungeon, Bramble Maze. Smart terrain usage, smart looping, very little fat in the layout, good new gimmick (bugs to make platforms) and usage of the bomb flinging from the Crab Labyrinth
10. Level: Encounter: Also some really smart usage of encounters. The inverted key room was great (they re-use it several times but it’s still solid)
11. Level: Also just generally great looping design and clever puzzles
12. Boss: MishMash. Very clever usage of the bomb mechanic (he has to light it on fire for you to then fling it into him)
13. Level: Cliff Dungeon (never figured out the name, the one with the desert motif). Clever puzzles, fun platforming, lots of traps, good usage of the dances…
14. Level: …solid stuff
15. Boss: Our good friend FlimFlam and his rotating dudes. This is fun because ‘all’ you have to do to trigger a vuln phase is hit all his adds, but if you hit the red one they go invuln for a second and charge you, BUT critically he never has an invuln phase himself, so you don’t actually HAVE to trigger the vuln phase
16. Level: Third dungeon (why aren’t these named?!) and some very clever puzzles and the addition of flight, lots of verticality, several instances of peeking, and good layered key hunting…
17. Level: …another double
18. Boss: For how simple it is I do enjoy the Hogswoggle fight. The three cakes, one progressing, one hurting (a lot, actually, the most damage the boss does) and one healing is a nice touch. No I’m not biased because of Rottytops in a leotard
19. Difficulty Curve: Pretty solid. Or should I say smooth? It’s a pretty smooth incline throughout
20. Guidance: Mostly in NPC dialogues, but there’s almost always SOME indicator of what to do and where to go next
21. Replayability: Generally replayable. Plus plenty of side stuff to collect
22. Tutorialization: Every time you get a new ability (usually a dance) the level is designed to immediately tutorialize it to you
23. Visual Distinction: Of course. Solid spritework leads to solid visuals

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Level: Naga Cliffs is… needlessly antagonistic. There’s several very easy places where you can slip and fall, and it’s fine… except thanks to how the level is designed and the total lack of shortcutting unlocks you have to redo the ENTIRE stage just to get back to where you were
2. Map: Or lack thereof! In a game about navigation and backtracking its absence makes it feel more irritating than it needs to be
3. Padding: Boss health is stupid in this game. Honestly enemy health isn’t great either but bosses have entirely too much health
4. Outro: Boss: So let’s talk this out. The first final boss is Risky Boots who has some decent attacks… which are incredibly easy to dodge. This is on top of her having way, WAY too much health, so the fight ends up just dragging on and on…
5. Outro: Boss: …and on and on and on
6. Outro: Boss: The ACTUAL last boss is so much worse. So it has very narrow vulnerability phases, during those phases it can counter attack you, some of its attacks flat out mandate transforming to avoid, it hits like hell (two and a half hearts per hit), and worst of all…
7. Outro: Boss: …it has so, so, SO much health. I spent EIGHT MINUTES dodging this asshole and hitting it and…
8. Outro: Boss: …my hand hurt by the end of this nonsense

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: I actually think the overall spritework is a bit worse than Earthbound’s, but there’s still a lot of good stuff here. Honestly I think it’s really bolstered by the animation, but we’ll discuss that later…
2. Spritework: …so for now enjoy the double
3. Brickwork: Mountains and forests. Pretty much the same general quality as Earthbound’s, so still solid
4. Brickwork: The main town itself of course. Nice, rustic, commune vibes
5. Localization: This is a weird one since we’re praising the fan translation but hey, it’s a damned amazing bit of work they did and absolutely deserving of praise…
6. Localization: …easily the same praise I gave Earthbound
7. Storyboarding: Shockingly good storyboarding. They do so much with what they have here, and so scenes can convey a great deal without a single bit of dialogue. This is up there with FFVI or CT levels…
8. Storyboarding: …getting an easy…
9. Storyboarding: …triple. And it’s helped a great deal by…
10. Animation: …the animation, which is legitimately fantastic. They do a lot with very little. Great…
11. Animation: …and really helps with the cutscenes
12. Intro: The setup, the fire, the rain, the search…
13. Intro: Moment: …and while I honestly think it stumbles, the moment where Flint loses it completely is very well executed
14. Moment: The lightning house is honestly brilliant storytelling. Lemme line this up. Early on we see Fassad is trying to sell people on the Happy Box by saying the town might get hit by lightning soon. Then, we find out this spot has been hit by lightning several times. THEN we find out Lucas has refused a Happy Box. All of that is brilliant of course and immediately conveys the plot point, but also serves as foreshadowing for future information on why the house is safe
15. MSQ: There’s an extended segment as we explore Tazmily post-capitalism. And it’s… really different. There’s some brilliant storytelling going on here. The prison-like retirement home, the roads with no real cars, the fact that people barely remember things the way they used to be…
16. Tone: …but my favorite detail is how everything is so surface-level. They have a fridge but nothing to put into it (and don’t even know what a fridge is). They have houses which are literally nothing but appliances, whereas before they had things like beds and living area. And this vibe of ‘this is what it’s supposed to look like’ without any need or even understanding of the reason why is just such a horrible tone
17. Humor: Lucas and Boney slowly, sadly walking off camera because no pets are allowed… the camera lingering sadly on the scene… before they come RIGHT back with Boney spontaneously in disguise is the best joke in the game so far
18. Moment: Fassad slipping off the tower (and the sound effect they play) are great
19. Moment: The, uh, entirety of Chapter 6 (the sunflower field) is good for what it is. No dialogue, just Lucas chasing after his mother in the sunflower fields
20. Atmosphere: Chimera Lab is a wonderfully creepy segment. What really works about it best is unlikely, say, Earthbound (which was just horrifying), this is more… banal. Every day normal stuff, while horrifically ripping animals apart and rebuilding them half hazardly
21. Visual Storytelling: This is as good of a time as any to mention the Junkpunk aesthetic of the cyborgs in general. Just crude metal bolted onto animals (and people!)
22. Moment: The very under-stated and sudden introduction of Dr. Andonuts. This is a brilliant moment, because of course the game wouldn’t over-emphasize his appearance, he’s just some doctor to them. But to US… this is our first concrete connection to Earthbound, and worse, it makes absolutely no sense at first glance (he seems unaltered, which implies very little time has passed since Earthbound, but that doesn’t track with what we’ve been told and seen across the island)
23. MSQ: Saturn Valley’s segment. They don’t do much with it sadly, but it is still adorable, as the Mr. Saturns tend to be
24. Plot: The Needles, and the nature of the race. We really zoom through these rapid fire style, but the fact that we keep trading off helps (the enemy gets a needle, we get a needle)
25. MSQ: Tanetane island. This whole sequence is fantastic. The drug trips, the fact that Boney is on guard for half of them, the distraught visuals and hallucinations, the optional stink pit which the Magpie comments on…
26. MSQ: …great stuff
27. Moment: The big reveal. Just like with Andonuts earlier this is BRILLIANTLY under-stated. There’s no big moment, there’s no dun dun dun, just… Pokey (Porky) wants to see you. Holy crap. This is a fantastic example of the audience understanding what the characters do not, and this moment serves as the jigsaw piece we’ve been missing the entire game. With this moment…
28. Internal Continuity: …suddenly everything makes sense (with a couple of exceptions, noted in the negatives)
29. Writing: Surface level. This is actually tied into the big theme which we’ll talk about in a minute but the surface level concept is every frickin’ where. I don’t mean the writers didn’t think about it, I mean in universe there’s a ton of people who have only a surface level understanding of things. Boxes which don’t display anything, streets and cars that go nowhere, a ‘harem’ room where all the women do is feed candy to their master, tons of cardboard cutouts of buildings making up a city, et cetera. This theme is everywhere because it’s not just a part of Pokey’s characterization (obviously) but even the denizens who came up with their fake ‘story’ lives didn’t really think them through. (After all, why are there two thieves on an island with nothing to steal?) And of course all of this ties into the intended main theme…
30. Theme: …the chimera. The enemies, the people, the literal logo of the game all follow the concept of crudely grafting two things together in a way that doesn’t work because surface-level thinking (as mentioned earlier)
31. Brickwork: New Pork City is so brilliant looking. The cityscape which is just close enough to accurate that it falls into uncanny valley…
32. Visual Storytelling: …and the mish mash of different objects, styles, and literal cardboard cutouts is just beautiful
33. MSQ: Beauty & Tasty restaurant. This is where a bunch of robot versions of Pokey’s mother are there, smiling horribly while offering whatever your favorite food is, all the time. Which just… says SO much about Pokey
34. MSQ: The theatre. The theatre in which we see a slideshow (implied to be a full movie) of… the main quest of Earthbound. As with so many other sequences here this continues to characterize Pokey and how he thought about Ness
35. Cutscene: The big exposition scene is actually pretty solid for what it is, though it has some problems we’ll discuss down in the negatives, but once again this fills out quite a few holes in the narrative
36. Character: Pokey (or Porky, if you prefer). It’s difficult to even properly convey what a brilliant villain Pokey is here in Mother 3. A petulant child who despite being an uncertain age never grew up one iota, never got over his upbringing, and never let go of his one ‘friend’. Almost every segment of Chapter 8 conveys another facet of his personality, which is why there’s only one specific character positive here; Because all those positives go in their own segments. But the big one here, and the theme I think the game didn’t even really intend to have, is…
37. Theme: …Maturity… or rather, LACK of maturity. Maturity doesn’t just mean being old, there’s mental maturity and emotional maturity as well. And both could be best expressed, I feel, by considering the relative depth in question. Someone liking something because it’s blue is surface level. Someone having a much more in depth reasoning behind preferring something that happens to be blue can be mature. This theme is absolutely everywhere in the work, from the backstory with humanity destroying itself, to the survivors who didn’t even try to make a proper go of a new civilization, to the Magpies and their detached attitudes, to Pokey himself and everything to do with him
38. Tone: The sand-blasted brainwashing of the recent immigrants to New Pork City. These people are SO surface level, so immature, they can only repeat one or two words. Over and over
39. MSQ: Pork Empire State Building and Pokey just screwing with us in the most pathetic and low effort ways. This is a child who thinks tripping us into some mud is the height of humor
40. Visual Storytelling: Pork Empire State Building, again. There’s lots of examples of this, but the one I want to shine a light on most specifically is the harem room. A room of scantily clad women because… that’s what you’re supposed to have as a supreme overlord king guy. Nothing indicates Pokey actually DOES anything here (or even wants to!), it’s just yet another example of that immaturity
41. MSQ: Everything to do with the Lab, but most importantly the Nice Person Spa. You get into the green goop and slooowly convert into loving Master Pokey… isn’t that nice? It makes me feel so happy
42. MSQ: And then there’s the gameshow level and how absolutely pathetic the Pokey Robot is and how hard you have to work to not just curb stomp it
43. MSQ: And then… and then there’s the museum level. Mother 1 music followed by a rendition of Pollyana, and all the memorabilia Pokey had collected from Earthbound. This is… SO sad. It’s so pathetic how much Pokey venerates Ness and the adventure he never had. This is just me, but I’ve always gotten the impression that Pokey thought that Earthbound was a great adventure he had WITH Ness, as opposed to against him
44. Visual Storytelling: Pokey finally reveals himself in all his decrepit glory. He is so entangled with vines he has to physically yank himself free of them, and he can barely move on his life support bed. And despite looking fairly similar to his younger selves he is an old, grey, almost totally immobile man
45. Cutscene: And this is just such an amazing sequence. Pokey laying into the team (also mentioning the ‘people suck’ theme mentioned down in the negatives), his motivations and perspectives, everything just laid out brilliantly…
46. Cutscene: …the child in the body of a corpse
47. Outro: Atmosphere: The creepy atmosphere of the final dungeon is wonderfully devoid of… anything, really. Unlike the alien Cave Of The Past this is just… empty. All that’s left of a dying world
48. Outro: Pokey and his finale. The child playing with explosives that finally gets what he really wanted, to be away from everyone who hates him without having to be a better person himself
49. Outro: While it drags a bit, Claus’ suicide and final confrontation with Lucas still hits
50. Dialogue: While it varies, there’s still enough quality here to warrant notice
51. Babylon 5 Effect: While it honestly fails as normal foreshadowing I gotta say, that second time through looks a whole lot different

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: The Intro… drags. It takes entirely too long and, frankly, doesn’t establish much. We don’t learn about the people, the town, the island, the main cast. The only things conveyed are ‘it’s peaceful’ (this is also stated in a literal narration box) and we incidentally find out they have no concept of money. This is further hurt by…
2. Intro: Pacing: …the pacing lurching all over the place. You’d think the forest fire is a big moment but it’s actually not and the tempo of the story actually goes DOWN during this segment, not up
3. Intro: Humor: I get that these people have issues (I do, really) but they just come across as irritating as we’re trying to save our friggin’ son
4. Tone: Everything to do with the Magpies (deliberately mis-spelled). Effeminate cross dressers who have a slur for a name and act like asshole immortals. Cute, game
5. Characters: As of Chapter 2 and the characters already detract from the narrative. Flint is a terrible father, the townsfolk are awful people to the children, Duster’s father is actively abusive towards him (and apparently caused his limp, yay!), the Magpies are racist caricatures who ALSO happen to be assholes, Hinawa’s father is that awful variety of awkward and creepy…
6. Characters: …this is just bad
7. MSQ: Fassad’s intro scene is just a few minutes of him being an unmitigated asshole to Salsa for no damned reason. Speaking of which…
8. Character: …Fassad is the worst character in the game. First of all they’re a dick, sure. But that’s… it that’s the ENTIRE character. There’s more to this later but nothing is ever done to make this any better. No charisma, no flair, no presentation, no backstory or motives, it’s just dickery all the way down
9. Padding: Showing scenes from different angles is cool. Literally repeating the same scenes beat for beat is not. And the game does this multiple times
10. Tone: Fassad and torture porn. The game spends an HOUR grinding it into our faces how awful Fassad is, and they torture Salsa in EVERY SINGLE SCENE the two share. It stops being anything and just starts being dull
11. Humor: The game has this awful tendency to have something happen which has… legitimately gross implications, and then treat it like it’s a joke
12. Padding: Chapter 1 in its entirety is probably about 10 times longer than it needs to be…
13. Padding: …and of course Chapter 2 is almost twice as long as it should be…
14. Padding: …and Chapter 3 is about twice as long as it should be
15. Humor: The entrance to the club joke lands brilliantly… and then keeps going… aand going AND going. It honestly got awkward at a certain point
16. Tone: There’s this problem the game has where a lot of weird, non sequitur things just happen. And there’s no explanation or development it’s just weird for weird sakes. Now there ARE explanations for a lot of these elements but those explanations aren’t even hinted at until Chapter friggin’ 8, aka the end
17. Cutscene Incompetence: So we’re about to pull a Needle. Literally we’re standing AT it. The enemy then flies in, slowly lands, slowly files out, slowly rolls out the red carpet (literally), and then slowly the commander walks out whos lowly draws his sword and THEN he one shots us. This is actually a double Incompetence because we stand there doing nothing for FOREVER, and the enemy basically nukes us and then moves on immediately
18. World Building: The Magpies. Who are these people? Where are they from? Why are they connected to PSI? How are they connected to PSI? Why did they bind their life-force to the needles in the Dark Dragon? Where the hell were they for the entire rest of human history? Not answered
19. World Building: Nowhere Island itself, when we are, where we are, what the rest of the world is. We could be in a distant island, or just off the coast, or on another planet, or in another dimension. This is left distressingly vague for such a relevant piece of world building
20. External Continuity: By the way. The connections to EB… aren’t great. Oh sure this is a direct sequel but there’s tons of weird, unexplained stuff all over the place, and then we get into the other problem. I know some of this comes from the mental state Itoi was in while writing but that doesn’t change that in the game, on the screen…
21. Themes: …humans are bastards. It’s basically everywhere, with precious few exceptions. Probably THE example is how all the people in town were only fine until they got ANY contact at all with the outside world and just became worse people immediately. And considering the backstory (and central villain) it just drags the entire work down, especially when considering the aforementioned connection to Earthbound
22. Character: Flint. Absent for a huge part of the game, a terrible parent in the beginning, a terrible parent to Lucas, and it takes him THREE YEARS to fail to find Claus? Good lord
23. Outro: For as much as I love Chapter 8 in general and most of the Outro, the actual ending itself is a very non ending. The world ends (in a very violent and destructive way) and then… we talk to a few people who are… fine? We don’t have any details they’re just there so who knows
24. Story Sequencing: A whole lot of stuff just… happens. For a huge portion of the game (honestly until Chapter 7 I’d say)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: I was on the fence about this for quite a while but damned if they don’t use the (awful) sound chip of the GBA to good effect
2. Core Combat: Generally decent We Go They Go turn based system, but what makes it shine is the rotating HP system which is back from Earthbound and has the same tactical considerations as before (you can ‘interrupt’ damage with heals, recover from mortal blows, etc.)
3. Kit: Duster’s kit IS interesting, for what it’s worth. It’s a shame it has so many problems attached to it (explained in the Negatives)
4. Tutorialization: While I have issues with how they don’t explain the rhythm comboing, they DO explain basically everything else reasonably well
5. Level: Frequent recovery spots in dungeons. I do like this for what it’s worth, and it’s true in both Chapters 1 and 2. This dovetails nicely into…
6. Penalty For Failure: …the fact that you lose basically nothing on death. In fact it’s a free heal and status restore! I literally death-healed several times in some of the more irritating dungeons
7. MSQ: Hooleee crap, actually good design. So there’s an entire segment in Chapter 3 where you play as Salsa, a VERY low level nothing who has low damage but good status effect abilities. Aaand the entire time you’re not only given plenty of items to use and several things to boost your experience, but also you have a guest party member (Fassad) who hits WAY harder than you carrying. I’m in shock
8. Kit: In Chapter 4 we finally start to get access to some real Kit; Namely PSI. We already had a dip into this with Kumatora but Lucas really seals the deal here. Good, useful spells, with well designed value and cost
9. Level: Thunder Tower. Optional areas, neat puzzles, good rewards
10. Level: Chimera Lab. Generally good design, with good spread of items, good optional encounters
11. Boss: Aggregate. There’s nothing super fancy here but I do overall tend to like bosses more than not. We’ll call this up to the first major Fassad fight
12. Level: Tanetane island is… weirdly well designed. So we start off being heavily encouraged to use the obviously toxic mushrooms (avoiding doing so is probably going to lead to death), which gives us a full heal and restore. Then we have non respawning enemies who aren’t super overtuned so we are encouraged to fight all of them (see the story axis), and on top of that the extremely sus ‘healing spring’ actually does heal us
13. Boss: Barrier Boss. This is actually a really solid fight overall. The enemies switch barriers of course, and have all three elemental attacks, but also react to what you do and give hints as to what they’re weak to at any given point in time
14. Boss: The Masked Man. I was torn on this but this felt like a properly difficult fight. Still has vulnerabilities to status effects, doesn’t spam AOEs, hits hard but also periodically focuses on single target, and just enough health to make it feel rough
15. Boss: Final Fassad. Mean but fair, has recovery phases which conveniently give the player the chance to recover too, and brutal in how hard they hit but also balanced around the rolling health
16. Outro: Level: As with the Cave Of The Past, the Final Cave is a nice free heals spot with enemies basically designed to level you. Which is good because…
17. Outro: Boss: …Pokey’s mean. He has a lot of variety in his attacks and is properly mean
18. Visual Distinction: Quite good, helped by the almost always awesome GBA spritework

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Unskippable Cutscenes: As usual
2. Inventory: It’s slightly better than Earthbound’s (key items have their own slot now) but otherwise it’s the same very limited, very restrictive inventory system…
3. Inventory: …which gets entirely too easy to fill up and deal with. It’s still slightly better than EBs though
4. Intro: Early Game Hell: Difficulty. Okay so you start off with just Flint. Flint is one person, which is already a problem (this is an issue in a lot of RPGs with party focused combat actually), because you’re so many steps behind on action economy that you’re always a bit underpowered for where you should be. Then consider…
5. Intro: Early Game Hell: …Flint has no kit to speak of. Worse, his kit doesn’t change, at ALL, the entire first Chapter. So there’s no change in what you can do, you’re always either attacking or using his four basic abilities. That’s it. Then consider…
6. Intro: Backtracking: …you’re going back through this stupid forest MULTIPLE times where it’s barely different (get used to that by the way)…
7. Intro: Itemization: …and barely gives you anything… twice! So there’s actually two concurrent problems here. First is the total lack of economy. There’s no money (a plot point, actually) and therefore no itemization in enemy gain. So there’s no way to stock up on healing items or, critically, Antidotes. Now there’s a dude who gives you free items but he’s limited to only two items he can give at a time and it’s friggin’ random which one he gives. So there’s no stocking up. Originally I gave a second negative here but thanks to a viewer and a walkthrough I was corrected, there is (some) gear in Chapter 1
8. Intro: Encounter: Enemy combinations designed to just screw you over
9. Intro: Boss: The Mecha-Drago hits entirely too hard for how much health it has, and it’s entirely too easy to run into its final attack unprepared. Keep in mind you CANNOT avoid taking a certain amount of damage in that final attack even if you’re prepared for it, meaning if you’re not… sucks to be you, go back to the save point
10. Tutorialization: The main combat mechanic of the game is completely unexplained (or even hinted at) for the entire first Chapter
11. Tutorialization: And when someone FINALLY talks about it they do so in not only vague terms, but actively mislead the player with their terminology
12. Enemy Design: Asshole design. Enemies that call friends and then explode (mentioned earlier), enemies that prevent you from healing, enemies that poison you while doing little else and being far from recovery
13. Backtracking: Okay so we have one of those Problems with Chapter 2. We’ll start with the obvious; you end up doing the entire dungeon twice. Cool. That’s already irritating for the same reasons it was irritating in 1, but it’s okay because surely the game will compensate us for this right? Well…
14. Kit: …the problem is Duster’s Kit. Oh don’t mistake me it’s actually pretty nice (sleep, blind, stun, lower def, lower off) but the problem here is twofold. First, these have a friggin’ miss chance. This means literally just praying for good RNG to be able to defeat some of the harder enemies or bosses here. This is compounded by…
15. Difficulty Curve: …the enemies in the castle being stupid hard. To put it into statistics, without any debuffs they will 4 or 5 shot you depending, and take upwards of 3 to 4 hits themselves to defeat (without comboing). This probably means they want us to debuff them but, again, debuffs can miss (high chance of missing, too). And this of course runs into the second problem with Duster’s Kit…
16. Walkthroughitis: …only some of these abilities work on some enemies. So you can waste an entire turn doing nothing. AND because of the aforementioned miss chance you might just assume it missed and waste even MORE turns trying to land an ability that can’t
17. Padding: This is a good of a time as any to mention that Chapter 1 is like 90% padding…
18. Padding: …and Chapter 2 is pretty bad…
19. Padding: …aaaand Chapter 3
20. Boss: Jealous Bass. My God, the Jealous Bass. Lemme line this up. This guy starts off faster than Lucas and all his attacks as long as his adds are up are horrifically damaging multi-targeting attacks from hell. Once you manage to defeat his two adds he starts off by buffing himself and then doing MORE AOE attacks (though less damaging), and it’s just a race at that point. Sure hope you grinded
21. Level: The entire highway segment and losing your car. Let’s be clear; this is BULLcrap. So you get this car to zoom around. Great! Absolutely nothing tells you that it will run out of juice, at which point it stops working and you have to walk. In a VERY large area with tons of mean enemies and the only healing / recovery spot being at one end. But it’s worse than that, see…
22. Level: …you can recharge your car. Cool! If you recharge it too much it explodes and you permanently lose it! And again NOTHING indicates this
23. QoL: No healing or save after the Fassad boss. Lemme be clear; this is a mean dungeon with a meaner boss, and then… there’s no recovery, and no save, AND you have to walk out through the mean dungeon. If you die here, sucks to be you, go do the whole thing over again. This is made even worse because you can permanently lose very valuable items (the Mementos) just because you’re that tapped at this point
24. Level: The underwater stage. What in the world is this nonsense. So there’s the lip machines which refill your oxygen (more on that in a moment) but you have VERY limited time to explore while going through an area that moves you against your will and slows you down. This is already a bit frustrating before you get to…
25. Seconds In Minutes: …the mermen who refill your oxygen. These take SEVENTEEN SECONDS of an unskippable cutscene to refill your air. In an area where you have limited air and have to do this constantly, especially if you’re exploring. This is completely unnecessary
26. Outro: Padding: The final final boss (Claus) takes too long. I know it’s a cutscene fight but it still hurts like HELL and you can still lose, but ignoring that it just takes too damned long
27. Replayability: Having to slog through six chapters of nonsense to get to the part of the game really worth playing

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.
2. Secondary: I rather enjoy the secondary flavor lore given to some of the new classes’ quests (notably Summoner and the summons themselves)

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: Warrior/Paladin. Old reliable. Gear focused (which, practically speaking, means expensive and requiring lots of treasure hunting in dungeons), great for melee heavy parties (Warcry buffs the party’s physical attacks for the next two rounds), and can wield shields (making them one of the tankiest). Downsides; No out of combat functionality, Cover is rarely useful in any FF. This is still a solid default unit and probably unironically one of the best classes to carry through a playthrough with
3. Kit: Thief/Ninja. Good gear spread for some decent physical damage. Mug is great for increasing that gold intake which the new classes really benefit from, making it a fantastic support, though it does hurt your DPT. The Run option actually WORKS now. Ninja gains Throw (expensive and not very useful), Sneak Attack (cannot be ambushed and higher chance of first strike, pretty useful in FFI), and Smoke Bomb (instantly run and avoid encounters for a bit), and generally remains a fantastic utility class. I really love how this class is just objectively worse in combat than many other options but the out of combat usefulness is honestly peerless. The extra gold, gear, speed, and the option to run reliably are just too useful and regardless serve as a good trade-off design…
4. Kit: …making Thief/Ninja an easy double
5. Kit: Monk/Master. The classic slow-starter, end-nuker, just like in every other FF game (looking at you, FFT). Chi is an interesting mechanic; Start each combat with 0, spend a turn building it up to your max, spend it for specials. Combo is a multi-hit which can Trample (and apparently takes advantage of hit% increases), Chakra is expensive but is an AOE heal which also removes Poison and Blind (not very useful). Later they get Chi Blast which is an expensive AOE magical nuke which does not do great damage, Counter (which lets you deny an attack with your own), Channeling (gain a free Chi for killing an enemy with white damage), and Focus Strike (boosted hit strike that auto crits). Ultimately the class itself feels like the star here, with Chi being mostly ancillary
6. Kit: Red Mage/Wizard. I’ve never been impressed with RDM in the original FFI, and it remains somewhat unimpressive here. It’s still a class that can equip actual gear and cast a few spells. And that spell selection is super limited… except they added a nice gimmick in FFR. Convert lets you swap between spell levels until you rest at town, meaning a lot more malleability in some of the mid level spells you have access to (like Fast). They also have access to very useful spells like Exit (and apparently can also revive, holy crap). But their actual level 8 spells are disinteresting at best (Revers which is super situational and Curse which is just not super useful for the level you get it at)
7. Kit: White Mage/Wizard. This is right up there with Fighter… er, I mean Warrior. Reliable, always useful, and that’s all there really is to it. Good heals (the new Cleric trait helps), Pray is a nice if unreliable filler action, and ReRaise is exactly as useful as it sounds. I will say this; While the White Mage itself is fine I will be talking more about this down in the negatives
8. Kit: Black Mage/Wizard. So you probably know what I’m going to say, since it lines up with basically all the other ‘from the base game’ classes, but Black Mage is still solid. The increase to accuracy is nice, though Bluff is functionally useless (only lasts ONE round and costs an action to use it, which just doesn’t math out except in specific circumstances). Elemental Seal is an absolutely insane way to guarantee status effects land, Priming is nice for boss cracking, and Manafont is great for casting above your weight class. Oh and hey, INT works now, so your spell damage will actually go up over time
9. Kit: Blue Mage/Wizard. So let’s get this out of the way, this class sucks to set up. Skill Lure doesn’t really work as well as you’d think (though it does affect enemy actions, so that’s something) and some of these abilities are a total pain to procure. Also you have a CHANCE to learn a blue spell, not a guarantee, so that’s another layer of randomness suck on top of it. So why is all this in the positives territory? Because the spell list of the Blue Mage is just bonkers. Starting off with an AOE fire damage spell is incredibly useful, and they keep getting AOE spells for quite a while. They taper off pretty hard towards the end (good luck getting Nuclear or Toxic) and that chance to learn is awful. Convergence is fun though (lets you do an AOE as a single target, focusing the damage)
10. Kit: Dancer/Rhythmist. This is a fascinating build/spender setup. Attacks raise success chance of Dances, anything above 100% spills over into increased accuracy or effect, and dances are free and infinite (but need those white damages to raise the chance to succeed). You start off with a solid damaging dance, but get some VERY nice buffs and debuffs as you go. This combined with medium stat spread and good run chance makes for a fantastic support damager. I unironically think the Dancer is one of the best classes in the game because they start off useful and they only ever get more so as they go. Major damage dealer? Group buffer? Healer? It’s actually good at these things too…
11. Kit: …so enjoy that double
12. Kit: Geomancer/Elementalist. This is probably another of the best classes in the game. So they start off with one charge of each spell level (yes, just 1) and gain new charges incredibly slowly. However those spells are dependant on the terrain you’re in (there’s 13 types total). They also gain the Terrain ability which randomly casts something based on your terrain type. These spells are well designed and almost always useful. They also gain the ability to boost a given element based on what bell they have equipped (or all of them with the uber bell), and can Sample a terrain to take it with them. They also have Geostorm which can just delete an enemy. It’s useful, versatile, fun, and interesting…
13. Kit: …another solid double
14. Kit: Lancer/Dragoon. This probably isn’t the absolute most DPT class in the game but it has to be close. Its attacks are big and mean (utilizing the great stats of spears) and Jump is a 2 turn Hyperbeam style attack (with 1 turn recovery so you can’t spam it) that absolutely destroys something. The best part is Jump ignores Absorb and always crits, which means enemies that are only weak to magic can still be damaged by Jump. This is on top of having access to heavy armor, which helps with survivability. But holy crap that group Jump you get later is invaluable, and Sky High is insane for just removing enemies from the board (I personally only got past several Summoner bosses with tactical use of Sky High). This makes for a high risk, high reward, incredibly damaging class…
15. Kit: …for yet another double
16. Kit: Trainer/Beastmaster. This might be the most gimmicky of the gimmick classes. Decent gear and stat spread so it’s not useless without the gimmick, but it’s mainly there to Control. Control has a bunch of things that go into its success rate, but lowering the HP of the target is the big thing. Once Controlled the mob takes the Trainer’s turn to act, does bonus damage (using the Trainer’s stats), and counts as defeated. It also gives bonus experience, meaning slightly faster leveling over time. Later on you gain Catch which is exactly what it sounds like but has some pretty janky interactions, and the ability to use buffs to buff a mob’s stats for one battle (nice for boss cracking). Overall it’s a lot of side, different stuff for a side, different class
17. Kit: Evoker/Summoner. I was really iffy on this one as it started off pretty weak. Very few uses of its summons combined with middling initial summons, but very quickly it started getting good. Some of the best utility spells in the game are here; Golem (to just throw up a damaging wall), Kirin (for a group Regen), Unicorn (a group Esuna), and of course the turbo nuke of Ramuh. And then we have things like Cait Sith (AOE confuse, which is invaluable on larger packs). But what really sells it is that the very first Summon retains relevance as a relatively cheap and hard hitting single target nuke in the form of Goblin, which can hit reasonably well, very well, or extremely well depending. And all of this is the early stuff. Later on we get even better utility spells which never stopped being useful (Fenrir was a Godsend so many times), and of course they’re one of the only classes in the game that can rez (with a level 8 summon, ouch)…
18. Kit: …still, solid stuff here
19. Kit: Time Mage/Wizard. This is probably the most utility of the mages from what I see. Only of middling use in combat, capping most of its damage output pretty early and having some decent statuses but otherwise not much going for it. What it does have is Float (which lets you bypass terrain… yes, even terrain you otherwise couldn’t, and also prevents encounters) and Tele (which warps back to the ship, airship, or town), but also later on they can place a Telepoint to warp back to. Meaning they can function as a checkpoint in longer dungeons
20. Kit: Green Mage/Wizard. So this is such a weird class to talk about. More of a tank than anything else, which has extremely situational spells (which get invalidated by end game by other means) and its big gimmick of Exuviation falls behind almost immediately, especially given how many turns it takes to do. However later on they gain the ability to set a save point per floor of a dungeon. This is… insanely useful in a game where that’s such a huge problem. I’d almost recommend taking this class for that ability alone, and just dump a bunch of magic items you use on them
21. Kit: Bard/Troubadour. Even more of a support class than Dancer, with all that implies. Songs are easy to get, useful, and can be stacked… but that’s all you’ll be doing. This involves setting the Bard up and then leaving them alone (or Hiding, which doesn’t interrupt the song) and just having a party of 3 instead. How useful this is will depend heavily on your setup, but I do like having what is functionally a pure support class
22. Kit: Dark Knight/Death Knight. This class… is almost a negative. It takes an entire side quest to catch up to other classes in stats (its stat growth is absolutely abysmal), its spell list is sad, it barely synergizes with other classes (rezzers to recover from mistakes and anything that can cast Blind), and its hit chance is in the floor. The thing that does salvage this is it’s still unique enough to serve as a challenge mode melee class which, with a lot of work, can almost be as good as a real melee
23. Kit: Spellblade/Rune Knight. We’re really getting gimmicky now. Empower your blade with a specific element which does solid damage if hitting a weakness (still some boost if not) which barely means it evens out to regular damage if you had just attacked every round instead of buffing. Bladecraft can help if you have party members who compliment it, Runic is situationally useful (absorb the next three spells, yours or theirs), and Blitz is actually really solid but requires a very late game quest to even access which limits its use. It’s still interesting at least
24. Info In Game: Really solid, especially for what is ostensibly a NES game. (Hell this has better Info In Game than FFIV on the SNES!) Good info on skills, abilities, items, equipment
25. 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
26. 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…
27. Overworld: …an easy double
28. 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
29. Bestiary: Surprisingly large amount of useful info, only requires you to kill something first. Also tells you some nitty gritty stuff like drops and procs…
30. Bestiary: …easy double
31. 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
32. Difficulty Curve: Smooth until it isn’t at which point it becomes smooth again. (It’s weird)
33. Power Progression Curve: Pretty solid, especially taking the new classes into account. Levels help of course but what really boosts you is access to all those juicy new abilities, many of which are progress unlocked rather than grind
34. Visual Continuity: Not the best, but navigation based on visuals even in dungeons tends to work well
35. Visual Distinction: With a few exceptions you can tell immediately what you can interact with and where you are
36. Intro: Okay so… there’s arguably two intros for FFI (and that applies here too), but this one does what the original did but even better. 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
37. Intro: Now, what the new version does different is add some new stuff to do. Talking to people with different classes to gain access to new options or abilities, optional fights to learn summons or blue magic spells, figuring out how the new gimmicks and mechanics work feels more like an archaic but functional version of side quests. And since each of these give class benefit they feel rewarding
38. 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
39. 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
40. 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
41. Replayability: The different classes alone deserve the second positive. Lot of build and party makeup possibilities there
42. Minigame: A weird not-quite new game plus. You start with more gold, access to Repels, advanced classes unlocked, and faster exp gain, but also harder enemies for some reason. Basically makes for an alternate way to play the game. I’d probably give this more positives if it was just a mode from the start of the game instead of mandating you beat the game to unlock it

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Wonky, weird, and jerky movement in menus. It likes to lunge multiple spaces when tapping, and sometimes just straight ignores inputs
2. 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…
3. Seconds In Minutes: …and adds up precious seconds as you have to do it constantly (well, depending on your party makeup)
4. 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
5. 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…
6. Interface: …for a bonus negative
7. Music: Repetition is an absolutely huge issue. Town songs get old, vendor songs get worse
8. 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), and this version can actually be even worse. 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 (Evokers and Blue Mages are two great examples of this). 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…
9. Intro: Difficulty Curve: …the encounters. So you can encounter things way, way meaner than imps on the starter peninsula, and that sucks exactly as much as it sounds. Earlier I mentioned how punishing it is if you make a mistake, but imagine you’re playing and you stumble into three GrWolves, or a MadPony, and have no idea that those are enemies far too high level for you at the start. And remember, it’s actually EASY to encounter these at level 1. And of course this is a classic RPG so the penalty for failure is going back to your last save. Oh and remember…
10. 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…
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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…
14. Encounter Rate: …so that sucks
15. Encounter Rate: Good lord I hate the dungeon encounter rate. It’s SO high it challenges BoF2’s nonsense
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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…
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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…
23. 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…
24. Level: …while it’s not super long, it IS relatively easy to get stuck in a loop thanks to one mis-step
25. 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
26. 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)
27. 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…
28. Music: …so I’m giving this a double instead of the usual single
29. 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
30. Kit: So… we have a Problem in FFI. It’s actually worse in the original I think because the added Kit of Renaissance mitigates it but let’s get into this. 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. This already sucks…
31. 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…
32. Power Progression Curve: …they gain no experience while dead. Oh and let’s not forget another salient issue…
33. 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…
34. 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…
35. 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…
36. 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…
37. Penalty For Failure: …more chances to just have someone die randomly. But all of this collides with one other issue…
38. Kit: …White Mages are one step away from being mandatory. ALL of these problems are completely solved by just having a White Mage in the problem. Oh there can still be issues, but just having the ease of rez (ReRaise says hello) that White Mages brings is SO over-useful it completely overshadows every other class in the game. I need to mention really quickly that all of these negatives are worse in the original which has absolutely no rez possibility whatsoever, whereas at least you have SOME ways to mitigate this IF you’re at the right level, with the right abilities, and the right classes in Renaissance
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. Kit: I really should mention that Blue Mages having only a chance to learn spells is legitimately terrible
43. 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
44. 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…
45. Outro: Encounter Rate: …and stumble into tons of…
46. Outro: Encounter: …brutal, insane enemies in a dungeon…
47. 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…
48. 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…
49. Outro: Itemization: …THE best weapon in the entire game drops one floor before the last boss. What is the friggin’ point of this?
50. 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
51. 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

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Hokay, this is kind of cheating because a lot of these assets are ripped directly from previous SNES X games but they’re still VERY well used. This game is just damned gorgeous. So let’s go down this list sequentially shall we? First we have the Intro stage, which is just gorgeous and only doesn’t earn more by virtue of being so short
2. Architecture: Honestly this is more or less the same positive for the SNES MMX games but it still counts. They still put a lot of solid work into making these feel like actual areas
3. Brickwork: The factory in the jungle, with the hanging vines, robotic trees in the background, and leaves floating around…
4. Brickwork: …make Booster Forest a visual treat
5. Brickwork: Troia Base, aka the wonderful mix of robot factory and cyberspace digitalscape
6. Brickwork: Pitch Black. The weapons warehouse and manufacturing facility
7. Tone: This is more visual storytelling than straight brickwork, and helped by the amazing song, but the general vibe of Pitch Black is also fantastic to go through. They took a stealth Megaman X mission and made it awesome
8. Brickwork: Primrose is a weird one. It’s a massive facility with gears and pipes but also scaffolding and sparkles? The whole thing feels like some kind of underground lab
9. Brickwork: Metal Valley looks great for what is just supposed to be a mining area. The sun in the distance, the sand storm constantly blowing, the cityscape a ways off, the crystalline rocks, the crude vibe of the construction, the cavernous halls in the background…
10. Brickwork: …another easy double
11. Brickwork: Central White is another of those places that shouldn’t look as good as it does. The parallax scrolling on the water, the layers of frozen ice floes in the background, the partially exposed veins of ice and snow, the frozen over base…
12. Brickwork: …fantastic stuff
13. Brickwork: I wasn’t planning to give a visual positive to Dynasty but damned if there isn’t some good work done here to make this look like a city. I’ll mostly respect what was done with the layers of the background, but lots of the foreground really does look like a sequence of streets
14. Brickwork: Inferno really just gives off that oil plant vibe. The copper and brown colors, the dim lighting, the gas periodically seeping into the areas
15. Spritework: Did I mention the spritework? X himself is fantastic of course, pretty much the standard array of amazing poses and visuals. In fact I’m only going to ding it slightly cuz his armor looks… well, bad. That’s not this game’s fault really that’s just the X8 armor being bad looking…
16. Spritework: …still very good
17. Spritework: But then there’s the bosses who are VERY well translated into 16 bits, good God…
18. Spritework: …this is just…
19. Spritework: …bonkers good
20. Brickwork: Jakob’s Ladder and the slow ascent to space, along with Gateway, the space station
21. Brickwork: Okay I’ll admit it, I like Sigma’s friggin’ marble moon base

Story Negatives:

1. Dialogue: The dialogue has never been this series’ strong point but this is honestly barely translated trash. I’m a bit embarrassed to even read it out loud. It also leads directly to…
2. Plot: …a problem I’ve seen since X5, the Excuse Fight. There’s no real, valid reason given for fighting, we’re just going to fight, because screw it. This isn’t helped at all by…
3. Character: …X. What in the world is he doing here? No I mean what is he DOING? He keeps walking up to people that he should ostensibly know aren’t infected by a virus they’re just doing things of their own free will and asks every SINGLE one of them if they’re being controlled by Sigma. It’s downright strange. I feel like his original version (where he was starting to dip into templar extremism) worked a bit better
4. Dialogue: I’m sorry, I’m really not impressed with the dialogue in this game. It’s amateur hour stuff, and made worse because…
5. Theme: …there’s the beginnings of an interesting theme here that absolutely is not followed through on (identity and free will)
6. Outro: Such as it is. This is, at best, awful
7. Writing: I don’t blame the maker of this version of the game, to be clear, X8 just… doesn’t have very good writing. Excessive repetition, characters barely having any presence even when they have screen time, events following only the loosest of connecting threads, and that’s all the extra aggregate stuff on top of the aforementioned negatives…
8. Writing: …so consider this…
9. Writing: …a triple aggregate

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: It’s the same soundtrack from the original so… yeah it’s still solid. I’d argue it’s one of the weaker X soundtracks but that doesn’t make it bad
2. Controls: There’s actually a few precision things that drag it down just a bit, but this is still a damned good controlling game…
3. Controls: …basically alongside any SNES MMX game
4. Guidance: Completion percent on stage completion to help find items. There’s also a decent amount of Peeking in the level design to help out
5. Visual Distinction: Super distinct. At no point in time did I have any issues telling what is what, where, and how and was able to navigate with the microsecond timing required to do so…
6. Visual Distinction: …so that’s a solid double
7. Kit: Sub Tanks are, as always, a great feature… but wait! They actually auto refill in between stages now. Not only does this make sense in lore but it completely nukes grinding from the game…
8. Kit: …so enjoy that double
9. Kit: This might be some of the best weapon selection in the franchise. We have great variety, great usage, and great utility. A shield that reflects just projectiles, a bomb for stationary targets…
10. Kit: …homing arrows, a semi homing rapid fire short range zap…
11. Kit: …A big nuke which also gets rid of spikes…
12. Kit: …bouncing spread fire, massive spread fire…
13. Kit: …a dash that helps with navigation and damage, and of course the super versions of all of the above…
14. Kit: …which itself…
15. Kit: …deserves a triple
16. Viscerality: Visuals. The weapons look absolutely fantastic in this one. Big, varied, and awesome…
17. Viscerality: …for a double
18. Viscerality: Audio. Everything sounds badass too
19. Viscerality: Impact. Almost every weapon you have does something big and noticeable, usually just straight up deleting enemies in your way…
20. Viscerality: …again, for a double
21. Kit: Armor and the utility thereof. Some great options here, and the mix and match is even better. Speaking of…
22. Build: As with the original you can swap between armor pieces with X and mix and match abilities
23. Intro: Level: Pretty basic level. It’s actually rather mean for an intro stage (you can tell this was not made for new players) but there’s still some generally solid design here
24. Intro: Boss: The tutorial boss is also pretty cool. Nice big shield attack you can deflect with a fully charged shot to stop his attack and do a little damage, as well as some nice vuln windows while requiring you to weave constantly
25. Level: Dynasty (Gigavolt Manowar’s stage) is actually pretty solid now. I don’t want to over-praise, and it relies a bit too much on memorization to really enjoy, but there’s still some good stretches, enemy spread, and variety
26. Boss: Gigavolt Manowar might actually be one of the best bosses in the game. He starts off with several attacks which require some careful maneuvering on your small platform, and his desperation has a nice tell, and overall I felt actually challenged fighting him
27. Level: Booster Forest (Bamboo Pandamonium’s stage) is actually a damned solid stage. We’re given a ride armor and plenty of room to learn it AND play with it, lots of enemies but in ways that basically guarantee we’ll slam through them, but then we have the aspects of the conveyor belts (which are spikes, so you can’t use them yourself) to carry the Armor throughout the stage, which if you manage you’re rewarded for. This is on top of the fact that this escalates over time, leads to even more rewards if you manage it, and lets you completely body the sub boss…
28. Level: …makes for…
29. Level: …a great stage
30. Level: Troia Base (Optic Sunflower’s stage) is another damned good stage. The gimmick is that the stage is divided into three areas, and each one has a ‘score’. As time passes your score decreases, getting hit is a big chunk of score lost, and defeating enemies raises it. So you’re encouraged to go fast, not get hit, and defeat everything. This is a fun challenge but what really makes it pop is it’s totally optional. If you want to get the rewards you get an A ranking in each thing, and you’re good. If you want the super optional fights you get S ranking in everything. And if you don’t you can just zip through. This is on top of some clever enemy placement and great moving platforms…
31. Level: …making for…
32. Level: …a great stage
33. Level: Terrain: Bonus points for the excellent usage of terrain in the level
34. Level: Primrose (Gravity Antonion’s stage) is another fun and creative level (lot of those this time around). We have instant death spikes but they’re part of the navigation now, using the gravity mechanic to great effect. The buttons that rotate (or flip) gravity are clearly tutorialized and well labeled. And the whole stage is just plain fun…
35. Level: …easy double
36. Level: Metal Valley (Earthrock Trilobyte’s stage) starts off pretty similarly to the original but like… actually good. Fleeing the gigantic invincible mech is kind of awesome, and has some features built in to make it less horrible (a degree of smart rubberbanding). Plus you can use the mech OR an ability (if you have it) to get the armor capsule. It falls a bit behind thanks to over-reliance on instant death spikes (dammit Bob) but it’s still got some solid stuff in the second half
37. Boss: Earthrock Trilobyte is another fun boss fight, this time using his ability (creating pillars and flinging them at you) to good effect. He even has a fun Desperation move (just waves upon waves of them for a bit)
38. Level: Pitch Black (Dark Mantis’ stage) is a cool approach to a stealth stage. Stealth is optional (always a plus), the usage of light is neat (follow the dude with the light… or make your own!), and some neat avoidance puzzles…
39. Level: …make for a fun stage
40. Level: Central White (Avalanche Yeti’s stage) is another great usage of the chaser bike, great enemy placement, much more open feeling than Dynasty (go figure), and with a fun miniboss and fun rewards for keeping things smooth…
41. Level: …for a solid double
42. Level: Inferno (Burn Rooster’s stage) has some really solid platforming, and I unironically love the lava wave chase sequence at the end
43. Level: Jakob’s Elevator does some really solid stuff with the placement of enemies and usage of the terrain to encourage you to think vertically
44. Mid Mission Checkpointing: Really solid checkpointing in ALMOST the entire game. It’s still good enough to warrant the double…
45. Mid Mission Checkpointing: …because the game also offers mid boss checkpoints in several areas, and well positioned ones, and saving progress too
46. Level: Gateway and the mini re-stages was actually pretty cool for what it’s worth. Little bit sized challenge modes based on the gameplay themes of the previous stages
47. Boss: For what it’s worth I really liked the method of doing the boss refights. Choosing two to fight simultaneously gives a lot of agency to the player, and these fights can be absolutely brutal or relatively synergistic depending on the combos you choose
48. Replayability: The usual for a Megaman game
49. Itemization: Enemies drop quite a few health and weapon ups. And uh, good
50. Power Progression Curve: The upgrades REALLY boost you in this one. Which is also good because it’s frickin’ needed
51. QoL: L and R weapon selecting as well as analog for a quickwheel, among a few other very minor nice details

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Difficulty Curve: The game falls prey to the same problem most fan games do; It’s designed for people already familiar with the game, cranks the diff up, but doesn’t smooth the curve out. So it’s too hard early on and too easy later. To use an example…
2. Animation: …every single boss in the game has entirely too short of an animation wind up to telegraph its attacks. In some cases it’s actually better to predict which attack is coming rather than trying to react. This is doubly bad because…
3. Difficulty: …the damage that bosses do is honestly stupid. At the beginning of the game most bosses can FOUR shot you from full health. That’s insane, and gets worse because…
4. Difficulty: …most of these attacks are either incredibly difficult to avoid or actively impossible without the right gear equipped. I should mention that these problems apply to basically all the bosses, but they all have their own individual issues we’ll cover later
5. Gotcha: A lot, actually. Some of this is clearly deliberate, some feels like a bug. Speaking of…
6. Level: Camera: So, uh, the Inferno stage has this really bizarre quirk where parts of the stage the camera lags behind X as you’re moving down. This would normally just be mildly annoying but it’s in an area where there are instant kill spikes all over the place which causes some obvious problems
7. Boss: Bamboo Pandamonium is one of the easier bosses, but even he has issues. His attacks require incredibly precise timing to avoid, and basically mandate always charging up a shot to have it ready for certain attacks, and if you make ANY mistake it’s incredibly punishing
8. Boss: Optic Sunflower is even worse if you can imagine. His first phase has a TON of attacks which have very narrow avoidance windows, and it’s worth noting he doesn’t take that much damage in general (even from his weakness), but it gets worse…
9. Boss: …because unlike some bosses, his Desperation involves him permanently switching to a phase 2 where he just blasts you every few seconds with a vertical attack that hits you and everything within a few feet of you going up the full length of the screen. If you aren’t perfectly positioned for this it can be impossible to dodge, and the boss can corner you forcing you to take damage from him or the beam
10. Boss: Gravity Antonion is similar to Optic with slightly more interesting attack patterns, but he suffers from the same problem where his second phase is just him spamming his Desperation attack
11. Level: I should probably ding the game for the general fact that it REALLY loves its instant death spikes. This is something it inherited from the original and it kinda sucks if you don’t already have the weapon to destroy them (or infinite ammo)
12. Boss: Dark Mantis is complete bullcrap. He’s incredibly fast, his attacks hit a huge swath and usually have a secondary component which isn’t obvious without memorization, and his desperation attack is insane to dodge while also being unclear where exactly ‘dodge’ is, and on top of all of that his weakness barely works against him (he’s weak to a shield attack but only has one projectile attack, he’s mostly a melee’er)…
13. Boss: …screw this fight
14. Boss: So! Avalanche Yeti is one step away from being a ‘bring the right gear’ fight. Some of his attacks are impossible to dodge without taking damage unless you have the double jump, and he has an attack that specifically denies wall climbing to avoid damage. So he denies using the wall, then has attacks you can’t jump over without double jump or the wall. Then he does MASSIVE AOE attacks that just smash huge swaths of the screen and, as usual, hit like a truck… yuck
15. Level: Inferno (Burn Rooster’s stage) has this awful problem where it’s absolutely coated in instant death spikes. This already sucks for the usual instant death reasons, but combine this with the camera issue mentioned earlier and we start to run into issues
16. Boss: Burn Rooster is insane. Like with so many other bosses he has SUCH spread and reach on his attacks with almost no wind up animation that you’re having to either out-guess or out-stat him. I do like his Desperation though (he denies access to the walls)
17. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpointing: Having to redo all three final bosses no matter what is not fun. I DO like how they give you infinite lives and health refills, don’t mistake me, but it still involves fighting the same early bosses over and over to get practice on the actually hard ones
18. Encounter Rate: Ninja Gaiden respawns are back!
19. Early Game Hell: This is strange for a Megaman game. If you’re not already good at these games you’re going to run into some pretty serious issues early on, most likely involving ‘scouting’ levels to get upgrades and power ups before even trying for any of the bosses. This problem goes away once you’ve got some experience and/or gear under your belt, but until then it’s just mean

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Portraits are honestly quite well done and, more to the point, do their usual job of conveying emotion and tone
2. Brickwork: I mean, it’s a DS 3D game. But they do some surprisingly good stuff with it honestly, and areas at least look distinct
3. Doodads: Interiors of towns are honestly well done here
4. Animation: I… cannot believe I’m typing this but the in game animations for scenes are actually pretty decent. I’ve seen better but there’s a lot of expression in movements and the like. The scenes themselves kinda suck but the animations do not
5. Moment: Dekar comes up with ridiculous names and introductions for the party… which they all take offense to, of course

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: Cutscene: Disjointed, weird, and too in medias res
2. Intro: The Intro waffles between end of the world stakes and silly adventure tones and does not stick the landing on that contrast
3. Intro: Okay so hear me out. I know you just hit play and we’re like 5 minutes into the game but you’re the destined chosen one of destiny because a lady says so. This is just… so Korean MMO in its approach. There’s no establishment, no development. We don’t know who Maxim is or why he might be either a hero or destined or both, we’re just told he is, go save the world
4. Dialogue: Characters love to repeat what was just said to them back without adding anything or otherwise changing it. Yes I know it’s a japanese thing no I’m not going to withdraw from calling it bad writing. Or at the very least…
5. Localization: …bad localization. Or maybe we should ask the soliders about it
6. Cutscene: So the (too long) scene happens where Tia gets to establish several facts immediately. She’s a bad cook, she’s psychotically jealous of Maxim, and Maxim’s an idiot. This also is just an absolutely atrocious scene. I’m… God I’m like an hour in and I’m already struggling to describe this stuff
7. MSQ: So hey, here’s the boss, Idura, who’s… evil. That’s it his whole shtick is muwa ha ha
8. Cutscene: Hey let’s have the boss mock the heroes then have the hero’s girlfriend, who is currently held captive by said boss, laugh at it! It’s funny! Laugh dammit!
9. Character: Back in Expedition 33 we had just covered how the dynamic between characters can qualify as its own character. Well, here we are. Guy and Jessy have actually negative chemistry with each other. This is borderline toxic behavior but even regardless of that it’s just two morons bouncing off each other. And this isn’t an isolated incident either…
10. Character: …because we have the same lack of chemistry problem with Tia and Maxim. Which could be argued to be the point but what I mean is this is actively badly presented, regardless of intent
11. Integration: Physics and the violation of disbelief
12. MSQ: The entire Gruberik Bridge sequence is really dumb. Tia is being a brat for no good reason, Fake Drama abounds, we encounter the two thieves for absolutely no reason, and then we’re forced into solo fights because Maxim ‘went ahead’ (no reason the others couldn’t have gone with him) and Tia can’t fight for herself (immediately before fighting the boss solo)
13. MSQ: I just kind of hate everything about Dekar being monumentally stupid and Idura being childishly evil. There’s nothing here and it kind of sucks
14. Story Sequencing: God I… okay. So you get back to Parcelyte and it turns out that in the last like hour while you were away they not only rebuilt Parcelyte but it’s ALSO been destroyed. Again. There is no connective tissue here, you just leave and whoops town’s destroyed again…
15. MSQ: …this is several levels of nonsense by itself, but also serves as a fake drama moment for Selan, while also downplaying the tragedy of it, while also trying to be and failing at being funny…
16. Consequence Storytelling: …but then there’s the fact that nothing matters. Sorry what I mean by that is that there’s no consequence to actions, things just happen because the writer says so. Nothing logically follows events, literally or thematically
17. Character: Selan’s ‘arc’ of “I must be alone but then I must learn to trust others” lasts ONE section of the game. It’s on such fast forward that, I kid you not, it starts with us returning to Parcelyte, then we fight Gades 2, then she’s over it. That’s it
18. Consequence Storytelling: By the way TWICE, in a ROW, Selan who is lurching and on the verge of death just saunters right into a scene like she owns the place. The first time it was up a gigantic staircase with tons of people presumably watching her and the second it’s at the very top of a volcanic temple of doom!
19. Moment: So Selan confesses her undying love… for a guy she’s barely interacted with, whom she met like a day ago, and has had no hints of interest in (in EITHER direction by the way) and no chemistry with
20. Moment: Oh and he loves her too! ALSO unearned! In the exact same way!
21. Writing: The time skip isn’t… awful, but at the same time it kind of is. They really race through it here and don’t actually… do anything with the passage of time. Nothing changes in a year other than the fact that now Selan and Maxim are married and have a child, and now Tia and Dekar are hooked up
22. Tone: I’m sorry but the way we lurch from death confession to joke to marriage to day in the life fake out ending to our son was kidnapped is awful
23. Writing: Boring bog standard obvious crap in general. Just… in general
24. Character: Idura, the Fassad of Lufia 2 R. This dude is a one note ‘I’m evil’ character without the presentation, usage, or catharsis that could make that work, and he pops up entirely too often in a game where the titular Sinistrals barely have screen time
25. Cutscene: Idura’s last thing attack on Tia. This is… really dumb. He just grabs her (somehow, we don’t see how) yet we also know that she could just… leave the field. Also, as a reminder, Tia is a COMBAT party member. She could (and has) just kick his ass by herself. This leads to…
26. Cutscene: …Dekar’s pointless sacrifice. He shoves Tia out (again, they could just… leave the circle) and there’s TONS of time to do it so he could have just… walked out. But no. This also leads to…
27. Theme: …a total invalidation of Tia’s character arc on top of it all. I’m sure glad she couldn’t bring herself to cry and had moved on from Maxim only to hook up with a guy for like 3 cutscenes before he ‘dies’. Oh and reminder to self, give a negative later when Dekar inevitably comes back
28. Music Direction: There’s some… VERY weird music decisions here. This is already weird, but what makes it worse is this soundtrack is almost ENTIRELY mixes of Lufia 1 and 2 music. The only reason I say ‘almost’ is I’m not sure if there is any unique music. So the way they use the music is kind of on them, and they… massively mis-use it
29. Humor: This game really thinks it’s funny. And it really is not
30. Character: Tia is not a good character. She whines excessively and has only two character traits
31. Visual Continuity: None. Just… none. There’s no connective visuals between areas. There’s nothing connecting anything to anything else. There’s just zones you warp to that are detached from everything…
32. Visual Continuity: …and it’s jarring
33. Moment: Amon’s reveal is legitimately pathetic. And he’s competing with Gades’ pathetic intro here too. He just shows up, acts like he’s talking down to them but isn’t, acts like they’ve figured out something amazing when they haven’t, and this is a good time to mention something…
34. Writing: …see, I’ve been covering games for a long time now, and there’s this interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in some games where the writing, localization, or both gets noticeably worse the further into a game you get. This makes sense, most of this stuff is done sequentially, meaning by the time you get to the end of a game the team is more tired or burnt out or running out of time and/or money and just want to ship it. So the quality dips because they spend less time polishing. And this part of the game is noticeably worse written. Just the word choice and sentence structure has reached the point of children’s show, nevermind the fact that they’ve started hitting repetition really hard, in really easily solvable ways
35. MSQ: Also this is as good a time as any to mention that the sequence of events here makes NO sense. So the Gratze king was mind controlled by Amon (sure), no one noticed (uh huh), everyone was cool with him building tanks and skyscraper-sized missiles (and no one noticed?), and then they launch the nuke. Literal minutes later the nuke hits… their own castle, but it’s okay because they evacuated. I’m sorry, WHAT? The problem here…
36. Writing: …is this is all being done to have the childish, bloodless adventure. This happened in Parcelyte too if you remember. Gades destroyed an entire town, TWICE, and NO one died. This can work (has worked, even) but this game does absolutely nothing to earn it
37. Writing: The entire game, the ENTIRE game, is so surface level consequence-free storytelling that it’s actively frustrating to perceive. NOTHING matters for longer than it needs to and is IMMEDIATELY and perfectly resolved the second it’s passed…
38. Writing: …this is…
39. Writing: …insulting
40. Consequence Storytelling: This entire game is a god damned cartoon. Nothing matters, nothing connects to itself, nothing has any internal consistency whatsoever. Dekar DIES (yes I know he’s not dead) and literally two, TWO, scenes later Tia has not only completely forgotten that he even EXISTED but then they all JOKE about how she’s the only one who’s single! Y’know, cuz her boyfriend is DEAD (as far as they know). What in GOD’S name is going on here?!
41. Internal Continuity: …also the internal continuity is bad for the above reasons
42. MSQ: So then we find out that Lexis is polluting the water, knows it, doesn’t care, and the elf is like hey don’t do that also never trust humans, immediately followed by her apologizing and trusting us and Lexis swearing to never pollute again. I… I have no words
43. MSQ: Okay so bare with me here. Karyn goes with us to Elcid and sings and everyone’s fine. Okay that’s… fine? I guess? Let’s ignore the sound issues, that’s a gameplay issue. Everyone’s fine. THEN we go to Parcelyte, sing for two people, and everyone’s fine. EVERYone, in the entire city, is now fine. They even explain this by saying the two people who actually heard the singing went off to tell everyone ‘it’s coo brah’ and that just… works somehow
44. MSQ: Then it works again in the Bound Kingdom. This is continuing that saturday morning cartoon problem where this is just such a surface level solution to everything that does not even begin to track
45. Writing: Please please please PLEASE stop having EVERY SINGLE PERSON TELL KARYN SHE’S AMAZING EVERY SINGLE SCENE. It got old after the second iteration and by the Bound Kingdom we’ve had this happen FIVE times now. JESUS CHRIST
46. MSQ: By the way they then do this… again… in Gratze
47. Character: Then the characters openly wonder why Amon would kidnap Keryn. Gee, I don’t know guys, why would he kidnap the one person with a direct counter to his power?
48. Tone: This is a good time to mention that the whole game is trying very hard to be funny (see earlier negative) and the way it does so is by being a dick. Just straight up insulting everyone in it constantly, in ways that really should not be shrugged off the way they are because this is some horrible crap
49. Pacing: One of the most common negatives I give to pacing is when events are simultaneously rushed and take too long. And while the first portion of the game, up to Gades, wasn’t exactly good… everything after it has been AWFUL. They are speedrunning events with no real time to breathe, develop, or follow through on events while (again) everything is just taking forever for no good reason…
50. Pacing: …it’s…
51. Pacing: …bizarre
52. MSQ: So yeah uh, Daos shows up out of nowhere, the Dual Blade chooses him (sure), Albert confesses his undying love for Elaine, people ‘banter’, and now Daos is threatening the world in… the exact same manner that Gades and Amon already did. I’m getting this weird feeling of deja vu
53. Padding: So then we repeat the Amon beat, except this time everyone just kicks us out of the towns immediately
54. MSQ: By the way this is TERRIBLY written. Every single guard sounds like the exact same person and every one of them repeats the same lines to the same beats as we repeat the same scene over and over and over
55. Writing: Underthought. The entire Daos section is probably designed to make it seem like he’s spreading fear across the world, but I just don’t believe it for a second. There’s no thought put into it. The people who are immune to it are those we need to talk to for plot reasons, the people who aren’t aren’t because they’re obstacles to what we need to do. That’s it. It’s Because Plot
56. Plot: Speaking of plot. The entire plot here is we need the three power cores from the three cities to power our airship to go higher. This… makes no sense on literally any level. There’s no logistics or throughput or thought put into this, we just need the macguffins to go higher
57. Plot: Hold up! The solution LITERALLY teleports in front of us! All we have to do is go do these side dungeons to anchor Doom Island temporarily so we can then go to the towns and get their energy cores so we can get to Doom Island!
58. MSQ: The game absolutely does not earn this ‘everyone chips in’ spirit bomb thing. At all
59. Moment: Also Dekar’s back. Loreshock. No explanation either. Actually it’s worse than no explanation, sorry; The explanation is that he exploded the entire other world. Yes, seriously
60. MSQ: And then they do the most… pathetic spirit bomb imaginable. First of all they said the word ‘Maxim’ so much it lost all meaning. Second it’s just… it’s like seeing a kindergarten play’s version of this type of scene. There’s no impact, bad music direction, and the total sum of NPCs in the game is expressed right in front of us. And it’s like 20 people. Also the game insists that this is all because the children are pure
61. Moment: So Iris is actually evil! DUN DUN DUN. Okay let’s ignore the fact that this isn’t a plot twist if you’re even remotely familiar with the series for a moment (we’ll come back to that in a second). The reveal is VERY badly done even in a vacuum. She stops Daos from killing us, reveals that she’s evil, and peaces out. That’s… it. It’s just there to have the betrayal scene for no reason
62. External Continuity: But hey, this is the thing we’ve been dancing around since the very beginning. This is the fifth game in an existing franchise. Reboot or reimagining or not, this game does NOT utilize the franchise well at all. Not the concepts (energy waves), not the characters (Tia, Iris… everyone…), and not the plot beats (Erim and the Sinistrals)…
63. External Continuity: …this is…
64. External Continuity: …really, really bad. Franchise killer bad. Which is appropriate, because it did
65. Moment: Then Dekar and Tia get their tearful reunion! By which I mean she mentions she’s glad he’s alive and then they IMMEDIATELY move on to the far more important plot beat about Iris. Did we… did the writers forget that they did an entire character beat for Tia around Dekar dying?
66. Dialogue: The dialogue never gets better…
67. Dialogue: …throughout the entire game
68. Humor: This is about the mean-spirited attempts at humor the game continuously does…
69. Humor: …throughout the entire game
70. Localization: The localization never gets better. In fact it noticeably gets worse!
71. Outro: So Gades and Amon are back. Neither do anything interesting they’re just here. Waste of space
72. Outro: Erim is here to kill us noooo how could she! But we REFUSE (read: cannot) fight her! Because we know… deep down… Kingdom Erim… is Iris!! And I’m just… trying to make fun because this scene is INCREDIBLY bad. I’m struggling to even quantify it.
73. Outro: Fake Drama: …tons of fake drama, a fakeout death…
74. Outro: Writing: …insistence that Erim is Iris and their friend and would never hurt them…
75. Outro: Dialogue: …some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever seen…
76. Outro: Moment: …and then it’s all undone by Daos killing Erim (way to kill your own resurrections there buddy) and being like muwa ha ha, while Maxim is like Iris was our friend! It’s… I can’t
77. Outro: So… where do I even begin. We shout generic crap at Daos, then Maxim insists he can steer Doom Island somehow, then Daos teleports the party away except Maxim and Selan so they can die horribly, and just… the execution of this is so bad. It’s like a bad parody of the original ending…
78. Outro: …so I’m giving this last ditch sequence sacrifice bullcrap…
79. Outro: …its own triple negatives
80. Outro: THEN we get to the actual ending which is, try to be shocked, is a bad aping of the original’s. In fact there’s even a point where Tia ‘finally cries’ in Elcid despite… already being in Parcelyte? And also having already cried back when Dekar died? There’s a moment where they quote the game almost word for word just to repeat the beat
81. Outro: By the way go replay the ENTIRE game with basically NOTHING carried forward to see the actual ending
82. Empty Text: The amount of dialogue that’s straight repetition, says nothing, or is just someone’s name is insane…
83. Empty Text: …and constant

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: So even though this game is all mixes… they’re pretty damned good. I actually like most of these takes on the songs more than the originals…
2. Music: …easy double positive
3. Kit: Characters. No, hear me out, each character DOES play differently and has enough variety and design to them to be interesting
4. Kit: Items being able to heal you fully helps them retain usefulness throughout. This is also true for Miracles which are a full heal instead of the typical 30% type thing
5. Level: I honestly can’t believe it, but the Logismos Temple revisit has what is functionally an actual honest to God puzzle. There’s no jank physics or irritating not-well-coded-platforming either it’s just a solid puzzle design. I’m shocked
6. Boss: Amon. Yes, really. So he starts off with actual telegraphing (the blue spikes connected to him, and the loud ‘chink’ if you hit him early). Then he has attacks you can actually see coming and dodge appropriately. And finally he has very minimal invuln phases, and not too much health
7. Level: I… I can’t believe it. There’s another good level here. The beam puzzles for Caldia Shrine are actually pretty decent, proper brain teasers, and actually fun to do
8. Outro: Boss: Bit of a precedence setting here but the Amon fight is tooled up a bit and still a good fight so hey

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Unskippable Cutscenes: Lots. Plenty right before irritating boss fights or frustrating platforming segments…
2. Unskippable Cutscenes: …so that sucks
3. Controls: It’s a DS 3D action game. It controls… better than some I’ve played, and much worse than others
4. Camera: It’s intermittent but the camera is often antagonistic towards the player, actively hiding behind platforms or not even showing portions of the stage
5. Difficulty Curve: The game offers an option to redo a fight… with a plus five to levels. Y’know normally this would be fine (good, even!) but here’s the thing. These five levels don’t help nearly as much as you’d think that would. Further the game doesn’t have a traditional way to grind, since the only area where you can grind enemies is the Ancient Cave (if you don’t know, you do not retain experience from the Ancient Cave. It goes away when you leave). So the game is balanced around you either grinding your absolute face off by entering/leaving areas OR… dying a lot. Every time you die in a combat area you can restart with five more levels. No you heard that correctly, you just level up 5 times. Permanently. This is so ass backwards as a concept BUT it could have worked as a safety mechanic if… IF… the game was balanced properly. And it is not. Enemies hit way too hard, you do way too little damage, and while we’re at it levels barely increase your output (FIVE levels decreasing the damage you take by 10% is not a big jump in power). So this is…
6. Difficulty Curve: …a badly designed difficulty curve…
7. Power Progression Curve: …and a very badly designed…
8. Power Progression Curve: …power progression curve
9. Intro: This is… not a good Intro. Some basic fights against basic slimes which are simultaneously too easy and hit too hard, and then a non boss battle against a non boss where the goal is to literally just hit its chest exactly once… yay
10. Level: Gordovan Drawbridge. The problems with the platforming are already starting to rear their ugly heads right here in the very first dungeon. We start off with awkward camera angles that are just a bit too zoomed in to make some areas weird to navigate, followed by platforming which requires blind jumps, and all topped off with enemies that can poison you and kill you in literal seconds
11. Level: The Tanbel Abandoned Mine Southeast is… terrible. It’s the same general crappy platforming and non-puzzles as before but the ENTIRE room is a checkpoint, meaning any mistake means redoing the entire room. This is already awful but then you factor in that the enemies here can stunlock you to death before you can even move and some of the puzzles in here are either obtuse to the point of nonsense or have such jank to them that it’s easy to softlock, you have a recipe…
12. Level: Walkthroughitis: …for…
13. Level: Mid Mission Checkpoint: …a bad time
14. Level: THEN there’s the jumping sequence. Those of you familiar with Megaman 8 will know this as the Jump Jump Slide segment. I’m honestly not even sure where to begin with this nonsense. So first let’s cover the basics; It’s a dumb memorization puzzle. They deliberately zoom the camera in so you can’t see what’s coming, you can only memorize and react…
15. Level: …then there’s the fact that the very conceit is wrong. So you have to jump or duck in order to dodge everything, but each of these is a very snappy and fast action, which means you have to time it right… without being able to see it coming. There is no prepping and if you’re off even a little, you fall…
16. Level: …this already earns a tripe
17. Mid Mission Checkpoint: By the way there’s only two checkpoints in this whole sequence, which is great because every single time you go through it…
18. Audio Spam: …they say the same friggin’ barks every single time, which in addition to being repetitive are just annoying to listen to
19. Level: Someday we will get a dungeon that doesn’t have janky, irritating puzzles that are too limited in how they operate and take too long to solve. But Tanbel North is not that day
20. Boss: So hey, our first boss fight (Idura); and it sucks! So there’s a dude who starts up on higher platforms and attacks you with magic. You can damage the platforms to knock him over and have a vuln phase. Nothing wrong with anything there except for two points. First, after a bit he goes to platforms you cannot break, meaning you HAVE to use Guy to do it, meaning if Guy dies and/or you run out of Miracles, softlocked, sucks to be you…
21. Boss: …second problem is he has an attack where it puts a target where he’ll cast a spell, then a second later the spell goes off… where YOU are, not where the target is. This is actively misleading and just irritating to dodge to boot, especially considering you’re probably playing as Guy to knock the boss off his platforms
22. Level: So! Back to Soma Temple. It’s okay it’s a different dungeon. And it SUCKS. My GOD this place is just a colossal pain of janky platforming and bad camera angles…
23. Level: Guidance: …but also good friggin’ luck figuring out what’s where. At one point I had actually already solved the full puzzle but nothing indicated that I had nor where I was going, so… I ended up redoing basically the entire puzzle again because I didn’t realize I had finished successfully…
24. Level: Padding: …and by the way as I’ll mention later, this is yet another dungeon that’s easily twice as long as it should be
25. Seconds In Minutes: The 3D problem. The WHOLE game takes too long to do anything at all
26. Boss: Gades 1. Fragile speedster with a bad camera angle and tiny vuln windows. Also entirely too much health, clumsy hit box, huge hurt box, and periodic ‘invuln’ periods (he takes only 1 to 5 damage during his invuln phases)…
27. Boss: …screw…
28. Boss: …this thumb-destroying fight
29. Level: Gruberik Bridge air jank. The air mechanic is so, so janky and it’s barely visible so you just have to kind of assume it’s there. Also it’s REALLY easy to softlock and have to redo the entire bridge
30. Level: Encounter: Poison galore on the Gruberik Bridge. Seriously, why is this a thing? These enemies poison ON hit
31. Integration: Physics and the violation of disbelief
32. Boss: The mech… thing at the end of Gruberik Bridge. It has no visible animation or windup for its attacks (and you’re forced to fight as Tia, who has less maneuverability than the others, AND a longer knockdown period) and it also has a bullcrap homing attack which has perfect homing
33. Level: Why does Logismos Temple have an escort section forcing you, even if you do things perfectly, to do them twice?
34. Padding: I’m just going to start giving padding negatives for every dumb area that’s longer than it needs to be
35. Boss: The Doom Eye is an escort quest boss, which I feel already says enough, but then there’s a general lack of information going on about what the heck the fight is actually about and how close you are to death and what the boss health is and basically… anything
36. Boss: Gades 2 is… legitimately one of the worst bosses I’ve ever seen. Let’s count the ways. First he’s boring. He has very little variety to his attacks and most of them are big and obvious, which makes it more irritating that…
37. Boss: …his attacks hit like an absolute truck (doing over a THIRD of my health on my best geared character) while also having large hit windows. If not for iframes it’d be completely ridiculous since they hit such a large area. But also…
38. Boss: …he has this wonderful fakeout mechanic. So he has one attack he does where he’s vulnerable (VERY briefly), and two where he is not. If you dodge anticipating a second attack and he’s vulnerable, you do no damage. If you attack anticipating a vuln window and he attacks, you get hit. So you’re pushed to always attack and just live with it because otherwise the fight stalls. This mechanic, BY ITSELF…
39. Boss: …deserves two negatives, especially when considering everything else involved in the fight
40. Info In Game: One last complaint. Aside from him periodically shrinking the arena (which changes NOTHING about the fight by the way since his attacks have such large attacks there IS no conventional dodging, just iframing) there is no indicator you’re doing anything correctly or incorrectly aside from his invuln period on his core
41. Boss: Oh by the way when his core is vulnerable he unlocks a second attack which stunlocks you and hits you at least 3 times AND knocks you over the ledge. As a reminder three hits will kill you
42. Core Combat: So hey, the combat in this game is VERY boring. You have attacks, special attacks, and a dodge roll. That is it. The overwhelming majority of enemies don’t even have mechanics, they just attack melee or ranged and occasionally roam around. But it’s even worse because…
43. Core Combat: …you’re limited to one party member. And that sucks more than it sounds. Even in other similar styled ARPGs (that PREDATE this game by years if not decades) being able to have multiple party members on the field at once is a thing, and can inform strategy and approach. Instead you’re always solo and it always sucks
44. Kit: By the way, per what I mentioned earlier, you have VERY little you can do in combat. Just picture ANY other RPG (action or otherwise) where you have a basic attack and basic spells and that’s IT
45. Boss: I cannot believe this. I cannot freaking believe this. After the absolute nightmarefest that was the second Gades fight you fight him again. No you’re not listening to me, it’s the SAME fight (with one exception). So let’s just repeat all those negatives! First is the boredom…
46. Boss: …and then the damage…
47. Boss: …then the fakeout…
48. Boss: …which still doubly sucks…
49. Boss: …and finally the core vuln phase
50. Boss: But wait! I said there is ONE exception! In his vuln phase he now has a thing he does where he will absolutely destroy the hell out of you if you don’t do enough damage to it. Keep in mind there’s a lava pit under his vuln thing. Oh I know what you’re thinking, he drops rocks to stand on to do it… yes but he can also destroy those rocks at random! So you can RANDOMLY just lose the ability to safely stop the boss from destroying everything
51. Padding: Oh and it’s a boss refight. So screw that too
52. Pacing: You finally unlock the ability to level up stones for the grid… HALFWAY THROUGH THE GAME
53. Level: Ice Mist Mountain can suck a dick. So first we have the basic mechanic; You put heat or cold blocks into a vent to make stuff happen. Problem is that wonderful jank rears its ugly head, meaning sometimes it doesn’t take, or things get stuck, or it doesn’t trigger properly. This makes you, the player, think you did something wrong and seek another solution but spoilers; You didn’t. You already solved it, the game just wasn’t programmed well enough to acknowledge it…
54. Level: …and this just makes it completely miserable…
55. Level: Padding: …and long
56. Core Combat: Stunlocking, get yer stunlocking here!
57. Level: Padding: Gratze Factory loves to waste your time (as always) because everything just takes too damned long. Even opening the doors, nevermind bombing the tank
58. Level: Also this is yet another example of a neat idea terribly executed. This whole tank section is jank as hell
59. Boss: So! An enemy that is invincible for huge, random periods of time that requires you to hit the missiles back at it to do damage. The jank of the game means that even if you do nothing wrong the missiles may explode rather than bounce back. This is just the basics of this fight…
60. Boss: …now consider that ANY mistake means getting hit for an insane amount of damage (about a sixth of your health at a minimum) and also…
61. Boss: …it’s worth mentioning that thanks to even MORE jank it’s relatively easy to get stuck in terrain, lose vuln phases, or otherwise be unable to reach the weak spot
62. MSQ: Ancient Cave pt. 1 and the wasted time. So check this out. Earlier you have to go to the Ancient Cave and go a bit down to progress the MSQ. Okay. The thing here is the Ancient Cave is a minigame thing you do for fun to do a pseudo rogue-progression system. Y’know, a side thing. But doing this mandatorily is weird because aside from Blue gear (which, as a reminder, is random) all the gear, items, and levels you gain in here does not carry over. So you lose all that progress you made the moment you finish this section. Meaning you just grinded to do a single level
63. Level: Ancient Cave pt. 2! Because you have to do this AGAIN later
64. Boss: Idura… again. This fight is mostly fine, but putting it this far into the Ancient Cave is just a dick move
65. Music: By the way, this is the same music from Lufia 1 and 2 (mixes, but still) but the thing is… that’s fine. What is NOT fine is that these songs are virtually unchanged, meaning they have fairly short loops. And this is in a game where there’s no combat music for trash encounters. What this means is you listen to the same… damned… songs… over… and over… and over…
66. Music: …and over
67. Sound: LAAA laaa LAAAA… okay so there’s this song Karyn sings, it’s a bad riff from the main theme of Lufia 2. And it plays repeatedly. And the song is too loud. And the audio peaks. AND it’s a piercing note. It’s badly edited and legitimately unpleasant to listen to…
68. Sound: …and it plays repeatedly
69. Padding: Enjoy doing the drawbridge again. Literally the EXACT same dungeon as before by the way
70. Seconds In Minutes: The Three Towers were ultimately fine but just took too long for what they were
71. Outro: Boss: I cannot believe this. I cannot believe we have to refight the same exact Gades fight for the THIRD GODDAMNED TIME. So! One negative for boredom…
72. Outro: Boss: …one for damage…
73. Outro: Boss: …one for fakeout…
74. Outro: Boss: …which still doubly sucks…
75. Outro: Boss: …one for the core vuln phase…
76. Outro: Boss: …one for the new screw you mechanic…
77. Outro: Padding: …and one for yet another refight! Enjoy!
78. Outro: Padding: Also refighting the same damned Amon fight
79. Outro: Boss: The Erim ‘fight’ is… not good. It’s a survive fight (not an inherently bad idea) where you can barely tell where and when her attacks are with inconsistent hurtboxes
80. Outro: Boss: Daos. Good lord Daos. Okay so first off, his basic combo attack stunlocks you and does about half your health in damage. His basic attacks are hard to dodge and also stun you. He can go to the top screen (which means he cannot be attacked there) and do giant also hard to dodge attacks which hit like a truck. All of this makes this fight absolutely miserable but there’s something that makes it even worse…
81. Outro: Boss: …see, he has a gimmick where you use the special ability to freeze time and just wail on him. If done correctly this turns the fight from a pain into a complete joke (literally only takes two time freezes to kill him). Thing is…
82. Outro: Boss: …you have to freeze time at the correct, uh, time. And I don’t actually know when that is, despite having done it. And so it feels like I just randomly won
83. Bug: Plenty of times when jank just bugged out the game. Either in combat or in platforming
84. Padding: Go replay the ENTIRE game to get the secret ending!
85. Enemy Variety: So there’s enemies that fly, enemies that poison, and enemies that are big. That’s it, that’s every enemy in the game
86. Visual Distinction: It’s legitimately hard to see what’s going on. Not just because of the camera, just due to color usage
87. Walkthroughitis: Many small but irritating examples of having to look up stuff because there’s just no information on what works where or how…
88. Walkthroughitis: …for a double negative

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: Kirby by himself gets this, but everything’s pretty well designed (and animated!)
2. Brickwork: I’m more impressed than I thought I would be by the brickwork, especially the earlier stages
3. Cutscenes: Opening skits! Kirby swooped off by butterfly swarm, sneezing to knock the stars out of the sky, fishing but accidentally eating his own line nooo, tons of Kirby’s flying out of the clouds, and slamming into Dedede’s castle
4. Atmosphere: Cute. I mean come on of COURSE it’s cute, but I’m honestly impressed with how cute even this early entry is
5. Visual Continuity: Fields to castle to islands to clouds to mountain. And transition animations for each even
6. Outro: As with so many early NES style endings, this one’s silly but simple, and surprisingly well animated for what it’s going for

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Smart usage of very small number of controls to accomplish a decent amount of complexity in maneuvering
2. Visual Distinction: Smart usage of outlines and interaction markers
3. Music: Honestly I’m shocked at how good the music is even for a gameboy game. Dude knew what he was doing
4. Intro: Tutorialization: Here’s a safe screen, here’s an enemy next to another enemy, here’s a moving enemy, here’s something you have to fly over. In three screens all the basics of the game are tutorialized. The entire rest of the first stage is spent escalating upon this concept, concluding with a basic boss battle where you have to use these techniques to progress
5. Level: Stage 2, Castle Lololo. This is yet another simple yet solid stage, which manages the feat of seeming far more complex than it actually is, and even having a teleport maze which isn’t disorienting (because each door you can teleport to is visible from the other ones)
6. Level: Stage 3, Float Islands. This is probably the best stage so far. Great escalation of themes, and the introduction of spikes (which don’t instant kill you!) and good recovery after every challenge theme, all culminating in a shoot ‘em up style boss battle at the end
7. Level: Stage 4, Bubbly Clouds. Another simple but solid escalation stage, introducing enemies that can’t be eaten as well as more projectile attackers
8. Minigame: Hard mode! It’s mostly an enemy remix with double damage, but it’s actually pretty well designed for what it is. And the enemy and boss patterns are remixed as well to be even harder
9. Enemy Design: Not a ton of variety, but enough decent design that it caught my eye
10. Mid Mission Checkpointing: Frequent and well designed

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Padding: Boss refights! Get yer boss refights here! Megaman did it so it must be good

Story Positives:

1. Atmosphere: Cute. So far every Kirby game has gotten this positive and so far every one of them deserves it
2. Cutscenes: I do still like the little cutscenes that play. There’s not as much going on as, say, the first two games, but it’s still cute stuff
3. Brickwork: General brickwork across the whole game
4. Spritework: I mean of course it has solid spritework. Kirby is still well animated (I swear it’s the same as Adventure) and the enemies and bosses are good too…
5. Spritework: …for a solid double

Story Negatives:

1. Outro: Honestly even for the time I’m unimpressed. The previous two games did a better job with the same hardware limitations. This one is just like ‘you won!’, couple splash shots, then the rainbow

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Same basic good controls as the previous gameboy game
2. Kit: The kit is generally lesser than the previous game, but the addition of the animal companions and their versions of the abilities adds to it nicely. I’m also fond of how the animal companions serve as the extra HP bar
3. Mid Mission Checkpointing:
4. QoL: Quick stage exit available from the pause screen upon completing stage AND keeps all current progress (such as power ups and animals)
5. Level: World 3 (Ripple Field) is the first stage to have honest to goodness level design. Actual usage of Kine to avoid enemies, some power placement that actually informs the terrain, and clever usage of the lightning power up to light up an area showcasing hidden stuff. Though this same world also has a long corridor with nothing to do in it so… shrug. Baby steps
6. Level: World 4 (Iceberg) has started to have actual enemy placement complimenting terrain (I’m fond of the stone rolling section) and a couple of fun segments beside
7. Level: World 6 (Cloudy Park) starts to play with some actual design elements. Operational ceilings (don’t jump too high or you lose progress), ‘pushing’ sections where the challenge is the reflexes, and entire stages made of falling platforms
8. Enemy Design: I mean it’s the same basic enemies from the last two games, and they’re still solidly designed

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Intro: Level: This is… weird. The first few stages (all three in fact) are bizarrely absent in any form of real design. We have no real terrain usage, mostly flat corridors with a few random enemies smattered throughout with no thought put into their placement, and a grand total of two power ups across the entire first world. This would normally just be a wash but because this is the Intro it just isn’t good enough to not be a negative
2. Level: 4-4 can go straight to hell. So far the rainbow drops have been fun side puzzles but this is stupid. First you have to get the fish OUT of level, then carry it THROUGH an above-water section while not losing it, then either retain fire or get it at the last second (quickly, there’s a timer), THEN not lose both, THEN you can access the area with the rainbow drop. I remind you these are considered MSQ in order to beat the game. By the way it’s even worse than I thought because you have to get the fish either from randomness or out of level (meaning redoing two minibosses and half another level just to retry), and then if you make ANY mistake at all at any point from the auto scroller onwards you have to start all the way over from scratch. By the way! The final tidbit has a part where it’s mandatory to drop your fire, pick up the block, then spit it and re pick up the fire. Doing this in any way wrong means (you guessed it) starting all over again…
3. Level: …screw…
4. Level: …this nonsense
5. Level: 5-5’s rainbow drop. Yes, again. This isn’t as bad as the previous one but it does make two critical mistakes. First is the same as the previous time; You have to reach the end of a stage with the right setup (in this case Rick and Spark). There’s a bit of a gradient here like last time (Spark is available right before the autoscroller, but Rick is in another stage) but this runs into the second problem; the autoscroller segment which happens to be a part of this goes by way too fast. It’s also just littered with traps, while I’m at it…
6. Level: …for another…
7. Level: …triple
8. Gotcha: That reminds me. There’s a weirdly large number of traps in this game. To be clear; a Trap is when you’re inclined towards getting something (1 up, health, power up) but it’s designed in a way that’s highly likely to kill or injure you for doing so
9. Level: So! 6-2’s rainbow drop. This is absolutely insane. You have to bring Kine (the fish) in from out of the stage (by the way there’s very few guaranteed Kine drop spots, one of which is in another WORLD, so either go farm another world or farm RNG off one of the randoms), swim to fight a miniboss who gives you spark, then swim to another miniboss while retaining spark to defeat him to free Rick. With Rick and Spark combo you can then progress the level to the point where you can free the bird (I forget how to spell his name) and THAT gives you the power to push against the current to get the Cutter ability from a boss. If you do ALL OF THIS you then have to do the last portion completely flawlessly (any hit means a fail state). If you do ALL OF THIS… you get the rainbow drop. This… is ridiculous…
10. Level: …on so many levels…
11. Level: …that I struggle to convey it properly
12. Boss: Kracko’s probably the worst boss in the game so far. Each boss has had something going on for them but Kracko just likes to spend WAY too long not giving you any opportunities to attack him
13. Level: Padding: The World 7 (Dark Castle) stages are just repeats of each other except mirrored. And there’s not much here to begin with in terms of level design
14. Level: 7-6 is actually pretty bad. It’s simple once you figure it out but before that you get to die to randomly picking the wrong path while going through it, and by the time you can actually see which way to go it’s too late, you’re either fine or dead
15. Penalty For Failure: Similar to Adventure, you lose power ups upon taking any hit (even while on an animal friend) which causes quite a few of the issues mentioned above
16. Outro: Boss: So, Dedede. What really sucks about this fight is I honestly think it’d be a fun fight if it had about half the health. But it doesn’t, so it drags pretty hard. Worse, while he has a ‘berserk’ phase and a normal phase, there’s no real benefits to the berserk phase. Further he has such weird RNG in his attacks that when I finally did defeat him it was just pure luck, not skill…
17. Outro: Boss: …and that’s not great for what would normally be a final boss
18. Outro: Boss: Of course we do have one more boss fight after that. Knight Dark Matter is… well, again, this wouldn’t be too bad except for having way too much health…
19. Outro: Boss: …and the attack he has which you can counter shows up entirely too infrequently
20. Outro: Boss: The actual Dark Matter fight is a weird one. Unlike the previous fights its attack pattern is static (cool), but it’s also way more bullcrap to dodge everything. And it still has a bajillion health and, of course, its one vuln phase it doesn’t do very often. And this is of course the final final boss…
21. Outro: Boss: …so that sucks. There’s one last capstone to all of this…
22. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpoint: …and that’s the lack of checkpointing. Die on Dark Matter 2? Go back to Dark Matter 1. Game over on either? Fight Dedede all over again
23. Outro: Level: The entirety of World 7 is a very strange series of final levels. I already mentioned the padding but even if you ignore the padding or the bullcrap of 7-6 these levels are just… not. These remind me of World 1’s levels, and this is the Outro, and that… sucks
24. Level: I was chewing on this so long I forgot to jot it down at first! But ultimately I feel like most of the levels are just too vacuous to really… do or be anything. The overworld tissue is barely there, there’s hardly any thought put into placement or terrain usage, and a huge swath (almost all of the stages) are just a corridor. So consider this an aggregate
25. Walkthroughitis: By the way good luck figuring out ANY of the rainbow gems without a walkthrough
26. Difficulty Curve: The game is pretty chill until it isn’t then it is again. Someone on chat mentioned the game is either bullcrap or easy and nothing in between, and that’s a constant
27. Kit: I have to mention how badly the game uses its primary gimmick. The animal friends barely change how you play (the big change is the friggin’ bird), aren’t available as often as they probably should be, are too irritating to re-get later if you want them, and literally can’t join you for the final battle