Veteran

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Surprisingly good voice acting in general for the main characters…
2. Voice Acting: …but also for the NPCs. The US soldiers sound like kids, the SAS sound like seasoned vets, there’s variance in tone and direction depending on outfit, etc.
3. Architecture: We bounce around quite a bit but work is always done to make places feel like actual towns, bases, and cities
4. Intro: Crew Expendable. Immediately establishes what kind of game this is
5. Intro: The car ride. I can’t even begin to summarize the level of detail in this level, and the visual storytelling going on everywhere…
6. Intro: …easily earning two positives for what is essentially a barely-interactive cutscene
7. Storytelling Mechanics: Briefings. Lots of info is given very quickly and often powerfully in the briefings, and the satellite radar approach helps to sell both the detachment and the modern feel
8. MSQ: Proper escalation and foreshadowing in Blackout, with Kamarov and Nikolai
9. MSQ: Death From Above. This is probably the second best mission in the game narratively. The detachment, the deliberate lack of music, the total dehumanization of the targets, the dull tones of the crew, the cold professionalism, all seen through the eyes of the person on the radar telling someone else to push a button that kills people…
10. MSQ: …easily earning…
11. MSQ: …three positives
12. Moment: You know the one. Don’t front. This moment… it’s perfectly built up and paid off, it’s literally the fulcrum of the series, and… it hit a lot harder than I thought it would…
13. Moment: …earning…
14. Moment: …three positives
15. MSQ: Shock and Awe
16. Cutscene: Shock and Awe
17. Banter: Love the banter between the squad mates
18. Outro: The Outro does a great job of raising the stakes without getting ridiculous, and feels incredibly tense…
19. Outro: …but the finale where we’ve already won, and need to just survive, and finally being rescued by Kamarov, is a great moment
20. Brickwork: Really great brickwork in this one…
21. Brickwork: …just… everywhere really
22. Theme: Modern war… sucks

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: A weirdly large amount of ‘just go with it’ slides under the spectacle throughout

Gameplay Positives:

1. Intro: Crew Expendable. Good pacing, good structure, good tutorial
2. Tutorialization: The obstacle course. Gets across an idea of what to do and how to play, but also encourages the player via score and distinct scoreboard to repeat it just for fun
3. HUD: Minimalist (and reactionary) without being obtuse, very helpful on the fly
4. MSQ: Blackout, and the gradual encirclement and finally push through the village
5. MSQ: Charlie Don’t Surf, and the charge into enemy held territory
6. MSQ: Hunted. Night-time sequence that bounces between stealth and loud
7. MSQ: Death From Above… a good turret mission, go figure. This is a bit better on the narrative axis than the gameplay one but it’s still fun to play
8. MSQ: Shock and Awe… tense, short, and well paced between holdouts, turret sections, and pushing through heavily held territory…
9. MSQ: …solid double stage
10. MSQ: All Ghillied Up. I’m sorry, this probably the single best mission in the game. The stealth segments, the crawl through the field, the containers and multiple routes to progression, the fact that you CAN recover from a screw up if you’re good, it’s phenomenal…
11. MSQ: …a solid…
12. MSQ: …triple
13. MSQ: One Shot One Kill. A sniper shot (have fun with redoing it over and over by the way) followed by an intense escape sequence…
14. Terrain: …and I have to give special praise to the hold the line mission because this is just fantastic. You’re given a lot of places to work with, designated vectors the enemy will come through, plenty of ammo and traps, and time to set it up to your heart’s content. How this goes is entirely up to you…
15. MSQ: …and easily worthy of its own positive
16. Viscerality: Guns look, sound, and feel fantastic…
17. Viscerality: …earning two positives
18. Kit: Not the best, but still a decent spread between turrets and guns
19. Pacing: This isn’t exactly the first game that’s short to have good pacing, but what really impersses me most is how the game manages good pacing throughout. Unlike some other FPSs I could mention (including later Modern Warfare games, cough) they know when to be quiet, when to be tense, when to be dreadful, and when to be frenetic, and the flow goes through wonerfully. To wit, a positive for the prologue
20. Pacing: The US invasion of Madeupistan
21. Pacing: The SAS evacuation of Nikolai
22. Pacing: And of course All Ghillied Up and onwards
23. MSQ: Sins of the Father. Tense, intense, and I love the chase
24. Level Design: American missions (loud, hardware, reinforcements)
25. Level Design: SAS missions (quiet, behind lines, outnumbered)
26. Level Design: Final missions (somehow combining the previous two)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Raspberry Jam: Yep
2. Sound Design: Very bad audio balancing on the cutscenes
3. Difficulty: Boring difficulty
4. Encounter Rate: Monster closets
5. Visual Distinction: While deliberate, it’s very hard to tell enemies, friendlies, and civvies at a glance
6. Bug: Consistent crash on The Bog
7. Outro: The Outro… is honestly kind of the worst aspects of the game combined. Terrible visibility, inconsistent checkpoints, lots of enemies, etc.
8. Graphics: Entirely too much visual noise and irritation and jarring camerawork

Story Positives:

1. Visual Storytelling: The initial, expansive base under Shepard
2. Brickwork: S.S.D.D. has an astonishing level of detail going on, establishing tone and scene
3. Architecture: Similar to the first game some real good effort is put into this, in fact it’s arguably better. The only major difference is you really only spend time in an area that qualifies for one segment of the game. Still, the suburbia and commercial district and of course DC area all work
4. Plot: The core plot of the game is surprisingly tightly knit
5. Foreshadowing: This allows the game to have plenty of foreshadowing
6. Internal Continuity: And the internal continuity similarly remains tight throughout
7. External Continuity: The game also is made much better by how it follows through, both literally and thematically, from Modern Warfare 1
8. MSQ: No Russian speaks for itself. It’s everything it needs to be, and for that…
9. MSQ: …it gets two positives
10. NPC Set Dressing: Excellent usage of NPCs in the cityscape areas to flesh out the story
11. Brickwork: Brazil is just… gorgeous
12. Doodads: Brazil also has insanely good doodad design
13. Doodads: No Russian (the airport) similarly nails the Doodad design
14. Storytelling Mechanics: Pre mission satellite briefings are awesome as always
15. Moment: The voice acting, presentation, and immediate professionalism of the ACS glitch… followed by the invasion
16. Visual Storytelling: Wolverines mission tells a lot just by looking around as the russian troops airdrop into suburbia
17. Voice Acting: The main characters are excellent of course…
18. Voice Acting: …but the supporting cast nails it across the board
19. Pacing: Each Act is very, very well paced. Proper lows, highs, tensions, breathers, and stressors…
20. Pacing: …earning each act…
21. Pacing: …a pacing positive
22. Cutscene: Of Their Own Accord’s intro is one of the more chilling moments in gaming for me. It’s just the emergency broadcast… no fancy, flashy logo or graphics, no epic music, no voice over. It’s chilling…
23. Atmosphere: …and part of what makes this land so hard is all the other briefings (even the last one, which has its own variance) has the music and the style and the special effects and this is just… the emergency broadcast. It’s fantastoc
24. MSQ: The intro to Of Their Own Accord, by itself, deserves its own positive. The walk through the bunker, the background chatter…
25. Visual Storytelling: …and the walk out into Washington DC, and the trench warfare
26. Babylon 5 Effect: The story really looks different the second time around
27. Brickwork: Contingency continues the brickwork excellence
28. Moment: The astronaut watching the nuke go off is very, very well executed
29. Sound Design: General. Awesome sound design
30. Sound Design: Second Sun gets its own sound positive for the proper use of no music, as well as the muted eeriness of it all
31. MSQ: Second Sun of course is amazing, what can I say
32. Tone: Hammer down is in effect, I repeat, hammer down is in effect
33. Moment: The finale of Whiskey Hotel. The chilling normalcy with which the rangers speak of revenge upon Moscow
34. Moment: Do not trust Shepard. I repeat; Do not trust Shepard
35. Characters: Good main cast
36. Characters: Good supporting cast
37. Moment: Just Like Old Times intro and speech by Price. It’s exactly as powerful and to the point as it needs to be. No grand gesture, no great victory, no ‘beat the bad guy and win’… we’re here for just one thing
38. Banter: As usual, great banter throughout
39. Brickwork: Suburbia has the usual excellent brickwork
40. Brickwork: Whiskey Hotel, ditto
41. Consequence Storytelling: A lot of actions are followed through very smoothly and naturally
42. Outro: The entire outro is fantastic, up to and including…
43. Outro: …the final knife fight, and the dead men in the desert
44. Themes: Revenge, what is it good for, absolutely nothing

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: Hollywood nonsense…
2. Writing: …more hollywood nonsense

Gameplay Positives:

1. Kit: Good gun variety
2. Controls: Plays very smoothly compared to its predecessor
3. MSQ: No Russian… the optional nature of the earlier mission is nice, but what’s really good is the charge through the airport against entrenched defenders
4. Options: The ability to bypass No Russian (twice)
5. Enemy AI: Very good AI in general
6. Friendly AI: For both friends and foes
7. MSQ: Wolverines… you start off fighting through suburbia, have to hit the gas station, then the burger town, and the whole time there’s no feel of arduousness or backtracking. Enemy placement and design varies, as do the tools you have at your disposal…
8. MSQ: …earning it two positives
9. MSQ: Takedown. Despite the frustrations, it’s still a great showcasing of the new AI and dynamic nature of the firefights
10. MSQ: Hornet’s Nest. Ditto from before, but without the irritation this time, plus some excellent variety and pacing…
11. MSQ: …earning two positives
12. Viscerality: All the same viscerality of the last game, but now with even more…
13. Viscerality: …earning two positives
14. Pacing: The gameplay in general is very well paced across the board
15. Pacing: Act I continues pacing both within and across missions
16. Pacing: Early invasion missions are just… awesome
17. MSQ: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday is a very fun joint infiltration and assault mission, varying up both
18. MSQ: Of Their Own Accord is honestly one of the better mid game missions…
19. Pacing: …getting its own pacing positive
20. Pacing: End game…
21. Pacing: …times two
22. MSQ: Whiskey Hotel. Hammer down is in effect
23. MSQ: Second Sun. Just… Second Sun. Somehow these missions continue to one up each other…
24. MSQ: …making it the best mission to date…
25. MSQ: …and our first solid triple
26. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Very well placed, and reasonably spread
27. MSQ: Loose Ends continues the trend of excellent missions. It’s brutal, in all the right ways, gives you a ton of kit, and tons of options for how to deal with the assault…
28. MSQ: …earning two positives
29. MSQ: Endgame. The final assault, chase, the whole thing is just great
30. Music: Excellent music
31. Yoshi Drums: And excellent Yoshi Drums
32. Replayability: While this exact version (the remaster) lacks the Spec Ops missions, the main campaign continues to be very replayable
33. HUD: Same good minimalist HUD design from the last game
34. Sound Design: Fantastic sound design, between barks and directions giving you a lot to decide what to do very quickly
35. Song: Betrayal
36. Difficulty Curve: Smooth and fun

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Railroading: The ease with which the action setpieces can go badly, completely screwing the entire section, is just irritating
2. MSQ: Takedown (geometry and dead ends)
3. Raspberry Jam: Not as bad as the original believe it or not, but still there
4. Visual Distinction: Same ‘hard to see’ deliberate issue from the first game

Story Positives:

1. Cutscene: The original cutscenes were incredible for the time, but the resurrected versions are even better. The sheer fidelity on display is insane and needs to be mentioned as its own point. This is some crazy good stuff…
2. Cutscene: …and across the whole game…
3. Cutscene: …deserves its own triple
4. Cutscene: So the opening cutscene is even better than the original while still retaining the same motif and theme. Marius, our viewpoint character (arguably the main character)’s perspective and the sheer horror he’s been dealing with. Also a great, very personal showcasing of exactly how messed up the events of Diablo 1 really were. And everyone there dies simply for the sin of being present
5. Voice Acting: This is when Blizzard had really started getting good with voice acting…
6. Voice Acting: …and it shows
7. Background Lore: Random dialogues with the villagers at multiple steps throughout
8. Atmosphere and Tone: Yep, it’s appropriately horrifying
9. Humor: The Cow Level. Moo moo moo. Moo
10. Characters: Generally memorable, amusing characters
11. Architecture: There’s actually several ‘towns’ (obviously, I suppose, one per Act) but there’s a decent amount of work put into making each town feel reasonably large for what it is. Special shout outs to Lut Gholein and Harrogath
12. Spritework: Absolutely excellent, varied spritework for the classes…
13. Spritework: …for a full…
14. Spritework: …three positives
15. Spritework: Enemies. My goodness, enemies. I could gush for days about the enemy sprites…
16. Spritework: …for another bundle…
17. Spritework: …of positives
18. External Continuity: The story is a direct sequel to D1, and does a good job of continuing not just its threads, but using it for the betterment of the overall work
19. Music Direction: Each song is not just great by itself, but wonderfully designed to accentuate the different locales across Sanctuary
20. Brickwork: Okay so here’s the deal. Diablo 2 R’s brickwork is crazy good, some of the best brickwork I have ever seen. (Sidebar: I went back to audit this up a bit to make it more up to code with the modern review detail and even as of this moment this game still has one of the highest Brickwork and Doodads scores we’ve ever given). We have some of the original visuals (which are already good) but the new stuff is bonkers good. Rather than try to type of specifics in each act and subzone, I’m just going to jot down rough positives based on overall quality. So… Act 1 green fields are great looking of course…
21. Brickwork: …a strong double
22. Brickwork: Act 1 green fields original
23. Brickwork: Rogue Encampment…
24. Brickwork: …for a double
25. Brickwork: Rogue Encampment Original
26. Doodads: Alongside this is some excellent doodad design. I mean of course there’s good doodads, Blizzard literally invented the term. (Or popularized it? I’m not usre). Either way, the Rogue Encampment
27. Doodads: Rogue Encampment Original
28. Visual Storytelling: The Rogue Encampment and the ‘temporary’ nature of it on a major throughroad
29. Visual Storytelling: Rogue Encampment Original
30. Doodads: Act 1 in general. Rocks, bushes, houses, fences, broken tools, roads, torture devices, usual stuff
31. Brickwork: Act 1’s caves aren’t much, but I am quite fond of the Monastary itself. Starts off fine in the exterior, gets worse as we descend into the Jail, and at the very bottom we start to see Hell forming an outpost
32. Character: Act 1’s supporting cast. Akara is fairly basic, but we get the wonderful Cain and his just-serious-enough hamminess. Also the delightful Gheed, the adorable Charsi, and the reliable Warriv (whom we’ll see again later)
33. MSQ: Act 1’s entire throughline is interesting. Under normal circumstances it’d be pretty high tier (indeed, Act 1 of D2’s plot is already higher scale than all of D1) but it’s kept grounded by our interactions with the individuals struck by their flight from the fortress, and of course culminates in having to retake ‘our’ own home base now corrupted by Andariel
34. Cutscene: Act 2’s cutscene does a wonderful job of conveying how awful the Aranoch Desert is, and of course establishing the Wanderer’s overall goal and what awaits us in Act 2.
35. Brickwork: Lut Gholein…
36. Brickwork: …for a full…
37. Brickwork: …triple
38. Brickwork: Lut Gholein Original
39. Doodads: Lut Gholein…
40. Doodads: …for a double
41. Doodads: Lut Gholein Original
42. Character: Act 2’s in general, again. Though there’s more of them and they have a bit more flavor this time. Atma and her earnest pleas, Drognan as the local wiseman, Elzix as our Gheed replacement, Fara the ever-useful and supportive, Geglash suffering in the corner, Greiz who’s just trying to deal with all this, Jerhyn who is clearly in over his head, and Lysander adding a bit of levity to events…
43. Character: …solid supporting cast
44. Brickwork: Act 2 desert
45. Brickwork: Act 2 desert original
46. Brickwork: Act 2’s interiors. No I don’t mean the memorable stuff, just things like the Claw Viper Temple, or the Maggot Lair
47. Brickwork: Palace interior
48. Brickwork: Palace original
49. Brickwork: I was originally torn on if the Arcane Sanctuary deserved visual positives or not. Ultimately I decided it does ‘set the scene’ (which is what Brickwork, really, boils down to; Set design) and is certainly memorable enough to count
50. Pacing: Act 2 pacing and flow
51. Atmosphere: Act 2’s actual plot is fairly weak (the ENTIRE act is just getting plot coupons to open Baal’s seal only to find out we were too late) but where it succeeds is sheer atmosphere. What we see, everywhere, is how bad things are getting simply because the Wanderer happened through this area. All of this is just the side effects of the presence of one of the Prime Evils
52. Cutscene: Our first real action piece. They don’t show much of the fight but we do get several interesting tidbits here amidst the destruction and terror. First, Baal was able to use Tal Rasha’s own desperation and pain to give an earnest plea to Marius. Second, Baal and Diablo both are enough to overpower Tyrael. Third, we see how good intentions combined with a rather, dare I say, devilish twisting of perception (the fog of fear and pain and fatigue) can lead to tragedy
53. Brickwork: Kurast Docks…
54. Brickwork: …for a double
55. Brickwork: Kurast Docks Original
56. Doodads: Kurast Docks
57. Visual Storytelling: Kurast Docks which, as a reminder, is actually a part of the city, showcasing just how much the jungle has encroached on Kurast
58. Character: Act 3’s supporting cast. Alkor (another amusing character), Asheara (we’ll see her again!), Hratli (guide and smith), Meshif (reliable passage securer), Natalya (hm), and of course Ormus (who doubles as our local wiseman)
59. Brickwork: There’s actually several distinct biomes in Act 3. First we have the jungle itself of course, which looks exactly as overgrown and messy as it should, with rivers and vines everywhere
60. Brickwork: Then there’s the spider caves and fetish nests and while I’m at it the friggin’ sewers. The frickin’ sewers.. sigh
61. Brickwork: The city center, what’s let of it, with its interesting architecture and rain-soaked buildings and lovely fortress walls
62. Visual Storytelling: Kurast city proper, and the showcasing of what’s left of a city totally consumed by evil
63. Secondary: Act 3 probably has the most interesting side quests in the game (something Blizzard is somewhat known for). The Jade Figurine which involves a bunch of background lore, rebuilding the warding spell to keep the Docks safe, procuring Khalim’s… literal body parts (yes I know this is technically MSQ), and a book all about the Prime Evils
64. Brickwork: Hell in Act 4. It’s honestly one of the most boring looking zones in the game, but still worth a positive
65. Cutscene: So we see the end of Marius. And as is typical for the Diablo series the final fate of the protagonist is to die horribly. This continues all the themes of Marius’ story thusfar. The nightmares and memories blending. The trials and tribulations of the world weighing down on him. The skewed perceptions of reality. And the horrors of Hell upon the normal mind. In the end he crumbles, desperate and pleading, begging
66. Cutscene: Then the Act 5 cutscene plays. I admit I’m very fond of this one. There is a LOT of detail going on and a lot of implication and presentation. The size of the army, the gates closing behind the emissary, his attempt to build himself up only to slump, defeated, before he does his speech. And Baal silences him with a single word, leaving him huddling and holding his hat in horror. And Baal, who has been shown to have a streak of playing with his food (see what he did with Marius) makes sure the man knows his fate before he kills him. And the death itself is very ignoble. Just a quick splat, and he’s gone. Love this…
67. Cutscene: …a solid double
68. Brickwork: Harrogath…
69. Brickwork: …gets two
70. Doodads: Harrogath
71. Visual Storytelling: Harrogath and the siege
72. Brickwork: Act 5 in general
73. Visual Storytelling: Bloody Foothills

Story Negatives:

1. Plot: Act 2 finale. The ‘battle’ between the forces is honestly pretty badly choreographed, Diablo just has no issues whatsoever in getting there before you, there’s no sign of the fact that they got there first, and the whole thing fails at its intended purpose of having the player ‘lose’
2. Writing: Also, Tyrael just sort of… deciding Marius needs to be the one to carry the stone east is ridiculous on every level. This level -3 Human Commoner is supposed to go INTO HELL and smash a soulstone
3. Writing: Why is Marius dragged along for so much of the plot? There’s no point or benefit in it until he accidentaly’s Baal’s soulstone. Yes I get that he’s the protagonist that doesn’t answer WHY he is
4. Story Sequencing: Act 3 main plot. You really do just kind of tumble forward down the metaphorical stairs of the jungle until you’re ready to kill Mephisto
5. Writing: How the hell is Marius there in the Durance of Hatred? No, seriously, think about this for a moment. Think about all we had to go through to even OPEN THE DOOR to this place, nevermind get to it and through it
6. Plot: Act 4 and the absence of story. There is no real narrative to Act 4. After everything we’ve done we’re just killing the D Man now
7. Story Sequencing: There’s a whole lot of ‘how did we get here’ or disconnected tissue in the narrative. This never really stops
8. MSQ: So Nilathak is evil, barely explained, and insists on betraying us despite everything, for some reason, and…
9. MSQ: …it was all for nothing because what Baal was doing was ultimately barely affected by this
10. Outro: Cutscene: There’s… so much wrong with the Outro. Baal goes for the stone, corrupts it? Somehow? Also Tyrael is like okay let’s blow this sucker up. And worst of all, what’s it all for?
11. Outro: Who knows. Typical Blizzard ending
12. Brickwork: Act 5 Original. It looks… bad. Like, actively bad. Brown and orange and grey splotches
13. Internal Continuity: Whole lot of ‘because plot’ just flinging around everywhere

Gameplay Positives:

1. Alternate Leveling: Talents as a core system (effectively invented by DII)
2. Alternate Leveling: Talent synergies (and how they help you to not waste points in your build)
3. Level: Arcane Sanctuary (probably the best level in the game, neat gimmick and rewarding without being too frustrating)
4. Builds: While somewhat limited by connected systems, there’s plenty of good Build gameplay here
5. Co-Op: Co-op exists
6. Co-Op: Campaign co-op
7. Core Mechanic: Shrine system and its various benefits (including Wells)
8. Encounter Design: While exceptions exist, there are plenty of good examples of good encounter design
9. Enemy Design: The good enemies are pretty legit
10. Enemy Variety: Surprisingly good enemy variety
11. Enemy Variety: Second positive for enemy variety
12. Hub: Lut Gholein
13. Hub: Pandemonium Fortress
14. Hub: Rogue Encampment
15. HUD: Informative, helpful, good at-a-glance
16. Interface: Mouseover & Tooltips
17. Intro: The first bits (starting next to an NPC who gets you started, beelining Akara, road leading to the first dungeon, and shown how to both ‘sweep’ an area and forced into a unique encounter) all work really well to get you into the type of game this is even if you’ve never played D1 or similar games
18. Itemization: Charms and the trade off they offer (inventory space for stat bonuses)
19. Kit: Amazons. Javelins, bows, buffs, and nukes…
20. Kit: …for a double
21. Kit: Assassins. Shadow abilities, traps, or monking it up…
22. Kit: …for a solid double
23. Kit: Barbarians. Passives, AOE fun, and of course HUP…
24. Kit: …for a double
25. Kit: Druid. Druid is… a bit weak compared to the other classes honestly. There’s shapeshifting, elemental spells, and summons, but each of them is ultimately just a bit of a weaker variant of other classes
26. Kit: Necromancer is one of the best classes in the game. Buffs, debuffs, lots of good synergies, great and useful summons with good variety, and of course some of the best nuke spells in the game…
27. Kit: …for a solid…
28. Kit: …triple
29. Kit: Paladins. Seemingly simple, but the auras and buffs can really change playstyle, and synergize very well in co-op…
30. Kit: …for a double
31. Kit: Sorceress. While weaker in higher difficulties, the three branches all play pretty substantially differently (frost for debuff, lightning for randomness, fire for straight damage and dots) and each one has a good variety of types of spells to keep things interesting…
32. Kit: …for a solid…
33. Kit: …triple
34. QoL: Several small but neat QoL changes in the remaster
35. Music: Tristram’s music continues to be awesome… oh and other good songs too
36. Options: From the remaster, lots of good new options
37. Party AI: Surprisingly good on the henches
38. Traversal: The waypoint system is good enough to qualify as a positive I’d say. Good distribution and good design to what points go where and how
39. Trash: It is quite enjoyable smashing through the roaming hoards, especially at higher levels
40. Viscerality: Amazon, of course. Jabbing, angelic power, lightning
41. Viscerality: Druid. I have issues with it but it LOOKS cool
42. Viscerality: Necromancer, mostly on the spirit and poison spells
43. Viscerality: Paladin, almost entirely audio based but still good
44. Viscerality: Sorceress looks and sounds good, between plumes of fire, hydras, whirls of ice, massive lightning bolts…
45. Viscerality: …easy double
46. Minimap: Even better than in the first game…
47. Minimap: …and now with options on placement and visibility
48. Replayability: Generally good replayability up to Act 2
49. Replayability: Lots of gameplay mechanics which encourage replay
50. Song: Return To Tristram. This is a damned good song and deserves notice for it

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Alternate Leveling: Runewords can only be used on grays and whites
2. Audio Spam: Yeah, it’s not as bad as in D1, but it’s definitely there
3. Boss: Diablo. Hits like a truck, slows you, obliterates minions, and way, way too much health…
4. Boss: …for two negatives
5. Boss: Duriel is the worst boss in the game, and honestly one of the worst in gaming. He hits like a truck, has a charge / moves fast, slows you, and all of that’s already irritating but then you fight him in a VERY small area which you cannot simply walk back out of. This is on top of having no warning the boss is coming, and the fact that he turbo nukes minions, which combined with his other facets makes him very unforgiving to certain specs. But all of this is compounded by Duriel’s greatest sin; he’s boring. There’s nothing to him really. Earning him…
6. Boss: …a full…
7. Boss: …three negatives
8. Builds: While the builds are many and varied and awesome, it IS possible to build yourself into a corner especially if you don’t know what you’re doing or how committed it is
9. Co-Op: Quest syncing, hassles in grouping, etc.
10. Difficulty Curve: Hoo boy. The game likes to just sort of lurch forwards in difficulty periodically, and then back, and then forwards…
11. Dungeon: Maggot Hole. It’s tiny, cramped, easy to get stuck in, and almost totally invalidates several builds, but it’s even worse if you’re playing with friends cuz you’ll get stuck around and on each other
12. Encounter: The Venom Lord boss pack in Act 4 can go directly to hell, as all the inferno-type mobs can
13. Enemy Design: Act 3 irritations, especially the inferno-type mobs
14. Enemy Design: Act 4 in its entirety
15. Enemy Design: Irritating enemies across the whole game
16. Graphics: Framerate and related issues with original graphics mode
17. Grind: End game grind for experience
18. Grind: End game grind… for items
19. Grind: And of course, the terrible drop rate in general
20. Hub: Kurast Docks. It’s honestly legitimately badly laid out from a gameplay perspective
21. Info In Game: General (how specific abilities work, how specific items operate, etc.)
22. Info In Game: Horadric Cube recipes, good luck figuring any of those out without a guide or the internet
23. Info In Game: Rune word recipes, ditto
24. Interface: Inventory limitations. The inventory space is honestly far too small, and that’s before you consider the inventory tax of tomes, keys, and occasionally quest items
25. Itemization: Ammo. Honestly, enough said, but even ignoring the ‘ammo problem’ they don’t do anything interesting with ammo etiher to offset it
26. Itemization: Junk. There’s way, way too much junk and unlike some other games, there’s nothing you can really do with the junk except accidentally pick it up
27. Itemization: Runewords. They’re neat, but they’re very unforgiving, they’re RNG on top of RNG, and good luck figuring it out without a wiki
28. Itemization: The drop rates and spread of drops is just way, way too low, especially for how much junk enemies drop
29. Kit: Druid. While every class suffers this problem to some extent, Druid is the worst in how it doesn’t even really become its own class until level 24ish and that’s just way too long to be as plain as it is
30. Launch: DRM check in system requiring you to log in periodically to keep playing the game you own
31. Level: Act 3 sewers. Boring, samey, over-large, and the way forward is rather random
32. Levels: Jails. Plain, dull, frustrating, and hard to see
33. Levels: Monastery … everything wrong with Jails again
34. Lighting: Man it’s hard to see in general
35. Outro: The final dungeon is okay, the final gauntlet is whatever, but Baal is yet another of those awful DII style boss fights
36. Overworld: Act 3. It’s one nice big, long corridor that actually still manages to fail because there’s branching paths, some of which are mandatory (and some of which just waste your time)
37. Overworld: Act 4’s overworld is either plain vanilla empty or, worse, frustrating platforms to navigate
38. Padding: Act 3 jungle. This is partially due to the pseudo maze nature of the minimap but there’s entirely too much roaming for how little content there is
39. Padding: Act 4 is weirdly padded for how short it is
40. Prime Opt: Act 3 quests have no real rhyme or reason to them, and are actively hostile towards the player figuring them out unlike, say, Act 1 and 2’s
41. Prime Opt: Rescuing the barbarians in Act 5 quest by itself is just so damned frustrating
42. QoL: Talent system lack of commit/undo/idiot proofing
43. Respec: It’s there, but it’s VERY limited. One per difficulty and, worse, nothing actually indicates it’s there or that it’s limited
44. Traversal: The waypoints are heavily inconsistent. Some are fairly static, some are designed to be ‘in the path’ or useful, some can be wherever, and huge swaths of time can pass between them
45. Traversal Mechanics: Stamina. I honestly want to give it more negatives, but I can’t in good conscience, but I still hate it and how it doesn’t really do anything other than make you occasionally move slower
46. Visual Continuity: Act 3. Good luck figuring out where you are, where you’ve been, and where you need to go
47. Visual Distinction: Act 3 Original. The visuals are REALLY bad here, to the point where it’s a barely-varied palette and paths and terrain are legitimately difficult to see
48. Replayability: Act 3 and onwards actively discourages replayability
49. Penalty For Failure: Dying can REALLY suck in the wrong circumstances

Story Positives:

1. Cutscene: The opening cinematic. Let’s get this out of the way; Blizzard does good cutscenes. They have since Warcraft ONE. So of course the fidelity is through the roof…
2. Cutscene: …but this also does a good job of setting us up for where we’re at and what we’re doing. Deckard is convinced things are about to go down again, he has a niece named Leah who’s not with him on this, and then a friggin’ meteor hits
3. Cutscene: Class opening cinematics. I love the style of these, and while all of them follow the same patterns, they get across a ton of tone between the main characters
4. Architecture: Diablo 3 really does some great work with architecture. While most of the town areas themselves do good stuff here (especially Caldeum) there’s a lot of work done to make these cities feel like they’re not just exclusive to the hub, and the lovely backdrop really adds to making these places feel substantially larger and more immersive than they actually are. Again, Caldeum, but also Bastion’s Keep, and also the towns around Tristram, AND all of Westmarch…
5. Architecture: …so that’s a very strong double
6. Brickwork: Tristram. Beautiful, stubborn, stalwart Tristram
7. Doodads: Tristram, as with most cities, nails it
8. Visual Storytelling: Early Tristram. The pattern of the blood, the corpses, the burning piles of bodies
9. Brickwork: Act 1 fields and plains. Just some gorgeous stuff here, and great usage of the painting layers…
10. Brickwork: …for two positives
11. Doodads: Act 1 fields and plains have lovely, lovely touches…
12. Doodads: …easy double territory
13. Background Lore: Tristram. The stalwart defenders managing to hold their own despite being swarmed with the dead
14. Brickwork: The Cathedral of Tristram. Just the right mix of peaceful sanctuary and disturbed tomb, and some absolutely great color distinction that keeps it from being dull greys, all accented by good color usage in the lighting and the crater from the meteor…
15. Brickwork: …earning two positives
16. Doodads: The Cathedral and its bowls and books and scrolls and tables…
17. Doodads: …solid double
18. Background Lore: Everything about the madness of Leoric and how awful that period of time was
19. Visual Continuity: Act 1. The path from New Tristram to Tristram, the Cathedral, the side area later that shows parts of the Cathedral, the trek up the mountain that shows the previous zones in the distance
20. Brickwork: Leoric’s Manor. While small, a lot is put into a little to distinguish it (I’m especially fond of the placement of wealth and pride)
21. Doodads: Leoric’s Manor and all the horrible details
22. Doodads: And of course the Halls of Agony. I shall refrain from mentioning the SPECIFICS of what’s here but I think you can guess
23. Visual Storytelling: Leoric’s Manor. So much is told so quickly. If you never played Diablo 1, fear not, the whole game’s story is right here
24. Characters: Act 1 supporting cast. Captain Rumford, the guards at the gates, the guards speculating on how to help more, the husband and wife duo, etc….
25. Characters: …solid double
26. Intro: While the plot stumbles a lot, the Intro is actually quite legit at establishing tone, theme, and stakes
27. Cutscene: Technical excellence and storyboarding of the Act 1 end cutscene. You’ll notice I’m only praising it from a technical perspective, and that’s because it’s not that great. There’s SO many questions it brings up and honestly they’re never answered. Nevermind the obvious fact that Leah goes immediately from ‘I don’t believe at all’ to ‘I am a true believer’ in the space of this one cutscene. I get it, but it’s jarring as hell
28. Characters: Act 2 has a really great supporting cast. The cast out noblewoman and her guard, the people in the tavern, the mercenaries, the merchants, the peasants… there’s so many good characters here…
29. Characters: …that they deserve two positives
30. Character: Special mention; There’s a woman, Kala, who has no quests and no direct connections to anything you can talk to in camp. She starts off in a rather wealthy garb and serves as a surprisingly humanizing look into the nobility of Caldeum. She shares some of her poetry, admits she was terrified for her life (there’s one line which KIND of implies she was willing to die in the camp via letting someone murder her for her clothes and jewels, but no one does), and eventually decides to sell her courtier regalia to take to the road. Little touches like this are why I say Diablo 3 has a good story
31. Brickwork: Caldeum, despite only really being one screen (plus the lead up to the Belial fight) deserves its own mention for being absolutely gorgeous. Looks exactly like what a prosperous desert city should
32. Doodads: Caldeum as usual deserves its own positive
33. NPC Set Dressing: Caldeum really feels like a living, breathing city
34. Brickwork: Act 2 deserts. Little less usage of the paintings, but more usage of little touches and details…
35. Brickwork: …for two positives
36. Doodads: Act 2 really ups the doodad usage…
37. Doodads: …especially with the homes and roads and rocks and cliffs and crags and worksites and, uh, the horrible torture implements. Hey it’s a cult, you gotta horribly torture people
38. Brickwork: Act 2 Oasis deserves its own mention; the excellent doodads of the desert and the paintings of Act 1
39. Doodads: Then there’s Act 2’s Oasis which goes hard on Doodading. Ferns, ponds, trees, houses, hills…
40. Doodads: …easy…
41. Doodads: …triple area
42. Background Lore: Caldeum and the recent issues plaguing the city, getting the player up to speed on Belial’s activities along with some flavor lore
43. Secondary: Caldeum side stories
44. Visual Storytelling: Everything to do with Zoltun Kulle’s lair. We really get some insight into what kind of mad mage he really was
45. Cutscene: Again, excellent storyboarding and technical excellence in the Act 2 cinematic. And… y’know, problems
46. Brickwork: Bastion’s Keep. Lovely, brutal fortress barely holding its own against the cold and the swarms
47. Doodads: Bastion’s Keep has so many wonderful little doodads, I love it…
48. Doodads: …this is…
49. Doodads: …an easy triple
50. Characters: Act 3 pulls the same trick Act 2 did with a great supporting cast. It’s a lot of soldiers, but also the children, the wife, the mayor…
51. Characters: …all great stuff
52. MSQ: Defending Bastion’s Keep. This is probably the only main plot quest that’s narratively interesting, but interesting it is
53. Visual Storytelling: Bastion’s Keep. Much of what’s going on is told entirely through the visuals, especially the battle itself
54. Secondary: Bastion’s Keep side stories
55. Cutscene: Yep, the Act 3 cinematic is still high quality
56. Cutscene: …and still has several neat little nuances and details to it
57. Brickwork: Act 4 is just gorgeous. The foreground has so much going for it I struggle to describe it../
58. Brickwork: …but then there’s the background, the fighting in the distance, the spires, the clouds
59. Background Lore: Act 4. Tons of little details helping to flesh out the war between Heaven and Hell
60. Characters: Act 4 continues the Act 3 character moments and deserves its own mention. Each character also updates their dialogue at every single step of Act 4, which has its own implications in…
61. Moments: The lost hope segment of Act 4. To be clear, at one point in Act 4 the avatar of hope (Auriel) is captured and held by the forces of Diablo. During this period of time everyone back in camp acts like there is no hope which… I mean yes but like there’s no CONCEPT of hope. Considering the implications already laid out by Tyrael’s removal as an archangel at the beginning of the story and it does some interesting world building
62. World Building: Act 4 does so much to develop the setting in so many ways…
63. World Building: …easily deserving a double positive
64. Visual Continuity: Act 4. As we progress through the act we get closer and closer to that big spire in the background, and we see how the battle is progressing in real time all around us
65. Cutscene: The Act 4 finale cinematic is a bit empty but still good
66. Cutscene: Act 5 intro is just … really, really good. Wonderful visuals, excellent voice acting, fantastic presentation. For once I can just straight up gush about a cutscene rather than just praising it on a technical level, because…
67. Visual Storytelling: …it does so much right. First the way Malthael is empowering himself (absorbing the mortal guards), confusion at Tyrael, but refusal to hurt him once he tastes his essence (after all, Tyrael has no demonic essence in him, mortal or not)…
68. Storyboarding: …GREAT showcasing of his relative power level, Tyrael’s being on top of things enough to defend the one surviving Horadrim and sending him off to find us…
69. Voice Acting: …and I LOVE the voice acting. Tyrael, the guards, the friggin’ Black Soulstone, and Malthael himself
70. Visual Storytelling: Intro to Reapers, and Westmarch in general
71. Brickwork: Early Westmarch. The dark, gothic city overwhelmed by death
72. Brickwork: Westmarch proper. The city is crazy good looking, even in the midst of the apocalypse…
73. Brickwork: …for two positives
74. Doodads: Westmarch proper and the cityscape therein…
75. Doodads: …words fail me. This is one of the most city looking cities in gaming…
76. Doodads: …and the doodads are a big reason why
77. NPC Set Dressing: And the people still left in the streets (or rebelling against the king, hah!) add to this
78. Brickwork: The blood swamps of Act 5. These are exactly as awful and murky and swampy as they should be
79. Brickwork: Pandemonium. The dark and deathly halls
80. Characters: Act 5. Good lord, Act 5. This is beyond my ability to summarize properly as they really add to the entire Act. The people considering robbing us, the deserter who saved a civilian, I absolutely love these characters…
81. Characters: …and they easily earn…
82. Characters: …three positives
83. Character: Kormac and Eirena deserve their own mention. Their dynamic is adorable, and the way Lyndon dovetails into their conversations is even better
84. Moment: The various past characters moments for each class in Pandemonium
85. Prime Opt: Kormac’s quest chain is great. It really fleshes out him as a character, the Templars as a people, adds great nuance, and complets satisfyingly…
86. Prime Opt: …for two positives
87. Prime Opt: Lyndon’s quest chain is just as good as Kormac’s. While typical, the dynamic between him, his brother, and the woman in between them as well as their chemistry and the conclusion…
88. Prime Opt: …all great stuff
89. Prime Opt: Shen’s quest. Never figured the jeweler would have such a cool story arc, but here we are
90. Secondary: Side stories in streets of Westmarch
91. Secondary: Side stories in Westmarch town
92. Secondary: There are many in Westmarch and they are awesome
93. Brickwork: Greed’s realm deserves its own notice for being scarily detailed and visually excellent
94. Character: Covetous Shen is an astonishingly good character for what he is, kept just the right blend of serious and silly, and making me very much want to finish his quest chain by the end
95. Character: Zoltun Kulle. He’s a bit basic, but he has such style and panache that I’m willing to overlook all of that
96. Character: Haedrig Eamon. A great, extremely simple look at the events of the game from the perspective of the everyman
97. Character: Kormac, the one true Templar. Manages layers underneath his seemingly one note character, and his arc (while expected) is satisfying
98. Character: Lyndon. While the thief with a heart of gold is an oldie, it’s still a goodie, and I’m still rather fond of him
99. Character: Maghda. Probably the best villain in the game (which is admittedly sad), and far more engaging despite her mustache twirling than the rest
100. Characters: I’m only going to give this as an aggregate, but I love how each player character has their own personality, vibe, and tone. The Witch Doctor is kind and gentle, the Barbarian is wise and helpful, the Wizard is considerate but prideful, the Crusader is zealous but tempered, et cetera. Thus the PCs…
101. Characters: …deserve a full…
102. Characters: …three positives
103. Humor: Whimsydale. What can I say. I think the blood is what really makes it work, morbidly enough
104. Secondary: Vidian and the Sanctum of Blood side arc
105. Storytelling Mechanics: Quest log and re-listen and sort options…
106. Storytelling Mechanics: …very well done
107. Voice Acting: Covetous Shen. Of course James Hong would nail it, but he really does manage to sound silly and serious so perfectly
108. Voice Acting: Followers. Between Troy Baker as Lyndon, Sumalee Montano as Eirena, and Dominic Keating as Kormac, you have a fantastic cast that really nails it so well and elevates the characters so well…
109. Voice Acting: …easily earning two positives
110. Voice Acting: Main PCs. The variety of voice actors really adds to this one, to the point where I can’t possibly credit them all appropriately, and they each add to the aforementioned character of each, so instead we’re going to just give each one their own positive. So first off that’s Barbarian Male
111. Voice Acting: Barbarian Female
112. Voice Acting: Demon Hunter Male
113. Voice Acting: Demon Hunter Female
114. Voice Acting: Monk Male
115. Voice Acting: Monk Female
116. Voice Acting: Witch Doctor Male
117. Voice Acting: Witch Doctor Female
118. Voice Acting: Wizard Male
119. Voice Acting: Wizard Female
120. Voice Acting: Crusader Male
121. Voice Acting: Crusader Female
122. Voice Acting: Necromancer Male
123. Voice Acting: Necromancer Female
124. Voice Acting: Secondary NPCs in general. This is of course a Blizzard game, so of course the voice acting is top notch…
125. Voice Acting: …earning a full…
126. Voice Acting: …three positives
127. Voice Acting: Special mention to Westmarch NPCs
128. Voice Acting: Zoltun Kulle deserves special mention. Steve Blum is great in general but he absolutely nails it as Kulle
129. External Continuity: Proper usage of the setting, for arguably the only time
130. Lighting: Generally good usage of lighting throughout
131. Sound Design: Generally good sound design
132. Spritework: Wizard
133. Spritework: Barbarian
134. Spritework: Demon Hunter
135. Spritework: Necromancer
136. Spritework: Crusader
137. Spritework: Monk
138. Spritework: Witch Doctor
139. Spritework: The main supporting cast
140. Spritework: NPCs in Caldeum, lots of them and good variety
141. Spritework: NPCs in Bastion’s Keep
142. Spritework: NPCs in Westmarch
143. Spritework: Enemies in Act 1, from undead to beasts…
144. Spritework: …for two positives
145. Spritework: Enemies in Caldeum, from cultists to insects to magical monsters…
146. Spritework: …for two positives
147. Spritework: Demons in Act 3 and 4
148. Spritework: Enemies in Westmarch, almost entirely the reaper types
149. Banter: Some surprisingly good banter throughout the whole game, mostly between NPCs but still…
150. Banter: …there’s also the occasional bits between the PC and the Followers

Story Negatives:

1. Gameplay / Story Segregation: Everything. I know Blizzard in general is bad at this but wow, there is such a wild disconnect here
2. World Building: Myriam can literally see the future. This pretty violently contradicts how Fate worked earlier and honestly is just done to wink at the player periodically
3. Writing: So Cain survives for a week in the cathedral, but never escapes, but also is fine… sssure
4. Cutscene Incompetence: Cain’s death. I’m sorry, this should be a big moment, and the incompetence hurts it. Just let the dude retire guys
5. Moment: Cain’s death, again. This was not an impressive scene, even technically
6. Writing: Cain’s death. Look I’m sorry to keep hammering this in but this scene is BAD. Okay so it’s bad because we’re incapable of helping, it’s bad because it’s not well done (a bad cutscene by Blizzard, yeesh), but it’s also bad because it serves no REAL purpose in the narrative. I’ve talked about this extensively before but if you want to have a big shocking moment you need to do three things; Build up to it properly (even if it’s only visible in hindsight), nail it, and then have it mean something. Cain LITERALLY still has lines of dialogue in the rest of the game as he narrates the logs and lore tidbits. And we’re following HIS notes and studies as we go. What exactly changed with his death, that we have motivation now? I’m pretty sure we had plenty of reason to stop a demonic murder death cult and the literal manifestations of evil. And aside from a couple of times it’s never even mentioned again. I honestly wonder if this was tacked on later in production to be exactly what I first said; To be a big shocking moment
7. Plot: So the Stranger has amnesia
8. Plot: And the only reason they do that is to have their stupid reveal
9. Plot: Underthought with Tyrael and the undead plague. Okay so if you’ll remember I actually gave a positive up in Act 4 when Auriel is captured by Terror and so people lose hope. Cool. So here the idea is with Tyrael gone… the… unjustly slain dead rise up?? Okay… I can KIND of get it but this would be a GLOBAL phenomenon if anything and surely there’s other ways ‘lack of justice’ would be expressed. Further more there’s a non zero chance this would have pretty serious long term ramifications but it never comes up again. And that’s why this is underthought; This COULD have been an interesting setting and plot point, but it’s actually just an excuse to fight zombies
10. Moment: It was secretly Tyrael all along! Dun dun dunnn
11. Foreshadowing: Tyrael and the lack thereof
12. Writing: Also all of that secrecy and twist and build up and amnesia was just for the fact that… surprise… the demon lords are here. We, it’s worth noting, already knew this in Maghda’s much better done build up
13. Writing: So, Tyrael does all this stuff to… hang around in town and periodically give quests. What a complete waste of Tyrael
14. Writing: Leah’s plot-driven powers. This pops up periodically and yes it’s because she’s Diablo’s child (spoilers) but like… it’s some of the most overtly ‘because plot’ stuff I’ve seen in a while. This is right up there with Counselor Troi sensing a disturbance in the Force so the plot could commence
15. Character: Leah’s continued insistence on disbelief is bonkers on several levels but then it’s all just there to lead up to her suddenly hitting a switch and being cool with everything, which is worse
16. Cinematic: The Act 2 cinematic is neat and all but completely unnecessary, and only really functions to give the heroes their next destination
17. Pacing: Act 2 Kulle section. Drags and rushed at the same time
18. Pacing: Everyone’s instantly on board with every weird plot thread
19. Plot: Act 3 problems. I shouldn’t have to type up more details here, it’s THE most commonly repeated complaint about the entire game. Azmodan is an idiot and then there’s the whole thing with Adria
20. Story Sequencing: Act 3 problems. Seriously stuff just bounces around in Act 3
21. Moment: So they kill off Leah, do it badly, and do it for no reason. This is such a weird mis-step that I know several people personally who didn’t take it as ‘she’s dead’ but rather ‘we have to rescue her soul’ and… no she’s dead. Sure
22. Foreshadowing: Adria… it’s actually even worse because they both do and do not foreshadow this, and nobody picks up on it in universe
23. Cutscene Incompetence: Adria is, of course, super powerful and effortlessly accomplishes everything
24. World Building: Also Diablo is now the Prime Evil despite many reasons why that both shouldn’t work and the fact that it’s about to be made to be not a big thing because despite being ALL SEVEN Evils combined he’s just slightly stronger than Imperius and weaker than us
25. Writing: Also Diablo has been behind everything for 3 games now despite no build up, logic, reason, or even satisfaction therein. Seriously Diablo’s big character trait is that he ISN’T the big manipulative thinker. That’s Mephisto (y’know, the villain of the FOURTH game… uh, spoilers)
26. Outro: And it trips at the finishing line, as Malthael decides to free the seven Evils… so they can come back in the future. Yay… it’s okay I’m sure Diablo 4 will be super awesome and not so bad I’ll veto it from ever covering it

Gameplay Positives:

1. Cosmetics: Quite a few. While not the best feature of the game, there’s a lot you can do to customize your appearance
2. Viscerality: So there’s a concept I usually call Catharsis in games where you can smash vases and boxes and the like. And quite a few games have this (Dark Souls says hello) and it tends to be satisfying and fun, but I’ve never seen a game do it better than Diablo 3. It’s not just tons of fun to do, it can be part of a build too! So this one…
3. Viscerality: …gets the full…
4. Viscerality: …triple
5. Alternate Leveling: Kanai’s Cube. There’s so many passive and cool abilities you can add to it and design around it
6. Alternate Leveling: Legendary gems leveling and the cool additional features
7. Alternate Leveling: Paragon Levels and the benefit of continuing to level past 70
8. QoL: AOE Looting, and your pet grabbing gold
9. Inventory: The inventory management in this game is honestly really good. It auto places based on space, it’s limited but not too limited, and it takes literal seconds to sort, salvage, and get right back into it. So while I’ve seen better, this still qualifies…
10. Inventory: …for a full…
11. Inventory: …three positives
12. Trash: The trash design is excellent. Very Dynasty Warriors, in that you are intended to absolutely bulldoze through mass swarms of enemies with their own attacks and strategies, and of course some of them even help tutorialize…
13. Trash: …earning a solid…
14. Trash: …triple positive
15. Builds: Abilities. So many abilities per class and the six slots you get to work with…
16. Builds: …for a full…
17. Builds: …three positives
18. Builds: Followers and co-op. Both change the dynamic and both can definitely affect your build
19. Builds: Kanai’s Cube. All the passives and options from Legendaries
20. Builds: Legendaries in general. Those unique suffixes can completely change how you play a class…
21. Builds: …for a full…
22. Builds: …three positives
23. Builds: Legendary gems. These too can sufficiently impact your playstyle and can be tailored to how you want to progress your build…
24. Builds: …for two positives
25. Builds: Rerolling. The ability to respec pretty much on the spot is great, and really encourages the player to experiment…
26. Builds: …which also allows you to tweak your build as you go
27. Builds: Runes. Abilities are already great as is, but the way Runes can totally change how they function is fantastic…
28. Builds: …for a full…
29. Builds: …three positives
30. Builds: Set items and, more importantly, set bonuses. These can have the most singular impact on your build, but cannot be over-stated how many options they bring…
31. Builds: …for a full…
32. Builds: …three positives
33. Builds: Talents. You only get a few but they are complete game changers…
34. Builds: …for a full…
35. Builds: …three positives
36. Combat: Charges is, as it always is, a great idea when it comes to combat
37. Combat: Potions. The cooldown, percentage based potion is already great, but the additional potion abilities add to it even more…
38. Combat: …for two positives
39. Controls: B Move. The ability to move without interacting is invaluable
40. Co-Op: Campaign co-op, which allows for multiple dialogues, interactions, and full sharing on quests and progress…
41. Co-Op: …for a full…
42. Co-Op: …three positives
43. Co-Op: Ease of co op sharing loot, even when across a huge swath of distance (often times even in different zones)…
44. Co-Op: …for a full…
45. Co-Op: …three positives
46. Co-Op: Ease of party interaction which is smooth and fun and very QoL heavy in a lot of ways I will not detail here…
47. Co-Op: …for a full…
48. Co-Op: …three positives
49. Co-Op: Personal loot, which means no competition necessary for loot (and they’re also shareable) and also allows for other mechanics to get involved
50. Co-Op: Full co-op sharing of experience, lots of abilities which synergize with each other, and general gameplay built around co-oping…
51. Co-Op: …for a full…
52. Co-Op: …three positives
53. Core Mechanic: Gems and related designs
54. Cosmetics: Banners. Great way to distinguish them in the town and for teleporting
55. Cosmetics: Dyeing. Lots of colors and the usual dyeing fun
56. Cosmetics: Pets, Wings, Pennants. Mostly from seasonal things but they’re cool
57. Cosmetics: Swapping freely and on the fly…
58. Cosmetics: …for two positives
59. Cosmetics: Unlocks. Unlock across account and shareable with party members…
60. Cosmetics: …for two positives
61. Difficulty Options: Obviously it can change at will, which is great, and alters damage and health… but also spawns, numbers, loot drops, and suffixes…
62. Difficulty Options: …for a full…
63. Difficulty Options: …three positives
64. Graphics: Foreground culling. It’s a nice feature to help with visibility while still keeping things like cities or trees or canyons
65. Core Mechanics: Followers: Not the best, but with some abilities, decent AI, and the full gearing, they’re a good aspect of the game
66. Info In Game: Kanai’s Cube tells you exactly how to use it and what you get out of it
67. Info In Game: Lots and lots of info on all the actual stats you can have in your game…
68. Info In Game: Significant information available on inventory screen
69. Info In Game: …leading to two positives
70. Interface: Chat colorization options
71. Interface: Indicator when you have new dialogue to listen to. Honestly this is such a great feature it deserves its own recognition for how much padding and aggravation it removes from the game. No running around the ship or town, constantly talking to everyone JUST in case they have something new to say, just… it’s there, over their heads, and the text itself is indicated as to what’s new and old. This is so great by itself…
72. Interface: …that it deserves…
73. Interface: …three positives
74. Interface: Information in skill mouseover
75. Interface: Kanai’s Cube in general
76. Interface: Mouse-over is great, rapid fire, and gives a ton of information at a glance, to the point where I can spend literally less than a second or several minutes poring over those tooltips depending…
77. Interface: …earning a full…
78. Interface: …three positives
79. Interface: Bonus points for how it has a toggle to show even more detailed information, including ranges on stat rolls on gear, which is so useful in general but especially for rerolling
80. Interface: Profiles and ability to look up everything
81. Itemization: Cursed chests. Complete a challenge task to get bonus loot
82. Itemization: Targeted loot. Inclined towards loot you’ll like and use, but not always
83. Itemization: Treasure Goblin and their varieties. Each gives their own type of thing, and in huge quantities
84. Kit: Barbarian kit. This is hard to even properly enumerate, especially given that this might be some of the best class design in… all of gaming. So we’re going to divide this into a few categories of positives per class; Basic (which mostly means at max level), while leveling (so how good is it initially), and synergistically (so how well it works with both itself and other classes). So! Barbarians at endgame involve a lot of ‘destroying everything in your path effortlessly’ stuff, with lots of options for chippershredding or super nuking…
85. Kit: …for a full…
86. Kit: …triple
87. Kit: Barbarian Leveling is some fantastic stuff. Even at level 5, nevermind 50, Barbarian is an absolute ball and gets great options and skills very early on…
88. Kit: …earning…
89. Kit: …a triple
90. Kit: Barbarian Synergies are damned good, both with itself and with other classes. Seriously, a Barb on the team equals awesome…
91. Kit: …for a double
92. Kit: Crusader. Charges, swings, nukes, buff hits, debuff hits, and tons of mobility…
93. Kit: …for a solid…
94. Kit: …triple
95. Kit: Crusader Leveling feels strange at first, but does a lot right. Doesn’t hit quite as hard as other classes, but almost always does something in addition to just doing damage. This escalates nonstop throughout the leveling curve, as more and more amazing options get tacked on…
96. Kit: …for another…
97. Kit: …triple
98. Kit: Crusader Synergies are just as good as Barbarian, especially with those wonderful debuffs…
99. Kit: …for another double
100. Kit: Demonhunter. So, Demonhunter lags a bit behind most of the other classes. It has a few issues while leveling, and some of its abilities just don’t work as well as they look like they should. It’s still a great class, but by D3 standards it’s merely okay…
101. Kit: …enjoying a mere…
102. Kit: …triple
103. Kit: Monk is also in a weird place. It’s not super great while leveling and has a few issues, but it’s still a fantastic class with some fascinating staggering attacks and combos, as well as a lot of mobility…
104. Kit: …for a solid…
105. Kit: …triple
106. Kit: Monk Synergies. This can get frenetic, but it definitely works
107. Kit: Necromancer. So, Necro is kind of bonkers good. Huge variety of skills, very tight design behind them, and great usage of the new resource type (enemy corpses)…
108. Kit: …for a solid…
109. Kit: …triple
110. Kit: Necromancer Leveling might be one of the best leveling experiences in the game. You have tons of options and at every stage of things gain even more new amazing options for how to play. Long ranged, short ranged, corpse focused, spreading AOE, nukes, it’s all here…
111. Kit: …easy…
112. Kit: …triple
113. Kit: Witch Doctor is a fascinating class. You can be a full on summoner, but you can also be different types of summoners (big super strong, lots of weak, or even burn your own minions to do damage), but also a nuker, or a DOTer, and any combination thereof…
114. Kit: …for a solid…
115. Kit: …triple
116. Kit: Witch Doctor Leveling, as you might imagine, is just as friggin’ good. You constantly get new tools to either go hybrid or full focus on a specific playstyle and it never stops being good…
117. Kit: …earning a solid…
118. Kit: …triple
119. Kit: Wizard is a personal favorite class, but regardless of that it is just bonkers good. Surprisingly tanky if you build towards it, or maybe being very evasion focused, also lots of damaging spells that fundamentally change how they operate depending on runes…
120. Kit: …for a solid…
121. Kit: …triple
122. Kit: Wizard Leveling, as you might imagine, is just as good. AOEs, indirect spells, chain nukes, it’s got it all…
123. Kit: …for another…
124. Kit: …triple
125. Levels: General dungeon design. There’s not much to the level design from a gameplay perspective, but it is still generally good
126. Levels: Most of the Heaven levels are the best constructed ones in the game, keeping the randomized puzzle pieces thing going without being too patterned or too random
127. Lighting: The whole game in general, but special note to the Cathedral
128. Log: Chat and lore logs
129. Map: Lots and lots of good info…
130. Map: …worthy of two positives
131. Minigame: Challenge Rifts are a great, fun, timed way to play with a unique build designed for you, up to and including gear…
132. Minigame: …earning a full…
133. Minigame: …three positives
134. Minigame: Leaderboards in general, mostly for Rifts and the like, accounting for party size even
135. Minimap: Visual distinction and color usage and visible abilities…
136. Minimap: …for two positives
137. Music: Generally good music. Honestly not as good as the second game’s, but still enjoyable for what it is
138. NG+: Unlocks as you go, meaning you don’t even have to beat the entire game to unlock it, nor an entire sequence…
139. NG+: …for a full…
140. NG+: …three positives
141. NG+: Keeps everything as you go back…
142. NG+: …for a full…
143. NG+: …three positives
144. NG+: Granuliarity in where you can go…
145. NG+: …allowing you to go to individual quests…
146. NG+: …which is bonkers
147. Difficulty Options: Ability to lower difficulty on the fly…
148. Difficulty Options: …for two positives
149. Options: Not the best, but some decent accessibility options
150. QoL: Ability presets are just a great idea
151. QoL: Ease of morphing gems, gear, and other swapping related stuff
152. QoL: Rebirth mode in general
153. Respec: Great respec
154. Respec: …which is worth…
155. Respec: …three positives
156. Respec: Can do it on the fly near instantly with good interface design…
157. Respec: …which is worth…
158. Respec: …three positives
159. QoL: Return to entrance runes
160. Viscerality: Barbarian. Big, weighty, brutal…
161. Viscerality: …for a full…
162. Viscerality: …three positives
163. Viscerality: Crusader. The light purges and cleanses everything around it…
164. Viscerality: …for two positives
165. Viscerality: Demonhunter. Missiles flying, turrets, and traps…
166. Viscerality: …for a solid double
167. Viscerality: Monk. Speed, agility, and punching awesome…
168. Viscerality: …another double
169. Viscerality: Necromancer. The damned, the bones, and the brutality of it…
170. Viscerality: …yet another double
171. Viscerality: Witch Doctor. Hope you like swarms and swarms of screaming creatures…
172. Viscerality: …because we have got that in spades
173. Viscerality: Wizard is right up there with Barbarian. Fire, ice, arcane, and combinations thereof…
174. Viscerality: …for a full…
175. Viscerality: …three positives
176. Visual Distinction: Overall, really, across the whole game…
177. Visual Distinction: …for a full…
178. Visual Distinction: …three positives
179. Traversal: Waypoint system. Find as you go, travel from anywhere, travel instantly from town, travel instantly from one to another, the whole system is easily the best waypoint system in gaming…
180. Traversal: …earning it…
181. Traversal: …three positives
182. Encounter Design: Generally good combinations of enemy types
183. Enemy Variety: Lots and lots and lots of enemy variety…
184. Enemy Variety: …earning…
185. Enemy Variety: …three positives to gameplay
186. Penalty For Failure: Release (timer), release at checkpoint, release in town, rez’d by friend
187. Sound Design: Good sound design for loot, enemies, attacks, leveling, etc…
188. Sound Design: …leading to two positives
189. Replayability: Just… the best replayability. New classes, builds, modes, story zooming, story removal, challenge rifts, seasonal stuff…
190. Replayability: …earning it…
191. Replayability: …the coveted triple Replayability
192. HUD: Enemy health bars are well designed, informative, and toggleable, in addition to just… all the general info on the screen…
193. HUD: …for a full…
194. HUD: …three positives
195. Hub: Act 1. Reasonably well laid out, most of the major interactions right nearby, portal spot front and center
196. Pacing: Act 1, and just Act 1, actually has really solid pacing throughout
197. Boss: The Butcher. I love the additional mechanics and concepts they add to the boss
198. Hub: Act 2. Still decently laid out, couple irritations in having to move around to access stuff but still good
199. Boss: Zoltun Kulle. The dual boss fun and the wonderful spells he throws at you
200. Boss: Belial. Love the mechanics, the spectacle, the camera zoom, the fun factor…
201. Boss: …for two positives
202. Hub: Act 3, much improved from the previous acts. The portal is completely centralized, and everything orbits around the portal area, which itself also contains the bank and identify spot…
203. Hub: …for two positives
204. MSQ: The siege strike setpiece is surprisingly neat and unique for being something so simple
205. Boss: Diablo isn’t the best, but he’s still a fun fight
206. Boss: General. There’s several and they’re all fun to some extent
207. Boss: Greed. Again, a relatively simple but fun fight
208. Hub: Act 5 just has a fantastic hub. Central portal, significant stuff nearby but not too crowded so no accidental misclicks, and an inner circle for immediacy and an outer circle for more questy stuff. Great hub…
209. Hub: …for a full…
210. Hub: …three positives
211. MSQ: Westmarch cityscape is one of the better sequences in the game, with great pacing, enemy placement, encounter design
212. Outro: The final dungeon is actually pretty legit for what it is
213. Outro: Final boss. Honestly a very fun fight, with multiple phases and general fun and spectacle…
214. Outro: …for two positives
215. Boss: The Dual Bosses in general. These are great and really gel well together
216. Endgame: Bounties
217. Endgame: Bounties and late game viability
218. Endgame: GRifts. Greater Rifts are honestly great side fun things to do, progressing to improve gems, gear, and currency…
219. Endgame: …for two positives
220. Secondary: Optional dungeon layout, design, and worthwhileness
221. Secondary: Optional objectives on quests for bonuses
222. Endgame: Seasonal stuff and variety and general fun
223. Endgame: Seasonal stuff is just… a great idea really…
224. Endgame: …earning three positives

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Launch/DRM: Always online. There is absolutely no reason for this, it gets in the way of the game, and it’s completely unacceptable…
2. Launch/DRM: …for a full…
3. Launch/DRM: …three negatives
4. Launch: Auction House. No, not the RMAH, the regular one… which screwed with literally everything
5. Launch: RMAH. The Real Money Auction House was responsible for so, so many problems with this game that we’re still stuck with them to this very day…
6. Launch: …for a full…
7. Launch: …three positives
8. Launch: Itemization drop rates. This is a byproduct of the RMAH, but itemization was absolutely awful at launch, to the point where you were essentially forced to use the auction house to get any kind of actual gear. This was awful…
9. Launch: …and deserves two negatives
10. Launch: Difficulty. The launch difficulty was really bad, badly designed, badly playtested, and it made upping the diff awkward and awful. I literally quit the game before finishing my first Inferno playthrough and as such…
11. Launch: …for a double negative
12. Boss: General health sponginess in several bosses
13. Co-Op: 4 player party size
14. Gameplay / Story Segregation: Pretty much everything
15. Info In Game: There is still some stuff that is just not in the game and requires a wiki
16. Music: Massive over-use of the one theme in Reaper of Souls
17. Padding: Act 2 plot coupon juggling
18. Padding: Act 3 dungeon stretching
19. Padding: Act 3’s latter half honestly just… draaags, just like some of the worst D2 dungeon stretches
20. QoL: Accidental dialogue skipping
21. Padding: Randomization in lore drops
22. Endgame: FOMO in Seasonal design
23. Audio Spam: Yeah there’s a fair bit
24. Difficulty Curve: The rather jarring jump at 61 isn’t fun

Story Positives:

1. Banter: All the inter-party banter is good stuff, easily earning…
2. Banter: …a full…
3. Banter: …three positives
4. Banter: Morrigan and Allistair’s banter gets special praise
5. Atmosphere: Genuine gratitude for doing the right thing. This is something only a few games really nail, but few nail it better than Dragon Age Origins where often-times your reward for helping someone is just a few lines of dialogue saying thank you, but we get this sort of thing persistently and it’s sufficiently well acted that the whole way through I find myself feeling like I’ve really helped these people…
6. Atmosphere: …earning it…
7. Atmosphere: …three positives
8. Babylon 5 Effect: Loghain, the Darkspawn, the Grey Wardens. There’s a lot of this game that is completely different the second time through
9. Storytelling Mechanic: Codex, as per usual
10. Voice Direction: Extra nuances and details in every performance in the game…
11. Voice Direction: …earning it…
12. Voice Direction: …three positives
13. Cutscene: Good establishment of what we need to know very quickly and efficiently (Darkspawn, Grey Wardens, and it’s been a while since the last incursion) all to some great voice acting
14. Characters: Duncan gets some good stuff, seemingly generic good but honestly no he’s quite pragmatic and concerned with the Blight over all other things, a properly done ‘Renegade’ character
15. Voice Acting: Duncan, in general but also for his narration
16. Voice Acting: Dalish Origin characters. Enjoy this positive, it’s the only one I give the entire Dalish Origin
17. Voice Acting: Mage characters
18. World Building: Mage Origin. We learn a ton about the Fade, Magic, and demons here… as well as the Chantry and their militant arm
19. Brickwork: Castles and Keeps. Some of the only decent looking visuals in the game
20. MSQ: Human Noble Origin. It’s very cliche’d and very typical and very predictable… but none of that matters because it’s done quite well. It is dark, tragic, immediately gives us motive, helps establish a lot about Fereldan and several of our principle villains, and is a good insight into the politics of the country…
21. MSQ: …earning two positives
22. Voice Acting: Human Noble characters
23. MSQ: City Elf Origin, for all its flaws, nails both railroading and motive very well, and gives insight into culture, people, and politics. I’m weirded out how well written this is considering…
24. MSQ: …but it’s one of the better origins overall
25. Voice Acting: City Elf Origin characters
26. Characters: The Dwarf Origins and Orzammar in particular are peppered with memorable and fun side characters
27. Consequence Storytelling: Dwarf Noble Origin follows through on itself quite well in how events proceed
28. MSQ: Dwarf Commoner Origin is another very good origin, with tight characters, intrigue, compelling plot, and multiple gradients with the same general outcome…
29. MSQ: …earning it two positives
30. Voice Acting: Dwarf Commoner characters
31. World Building: Dwarf Commoner Origins
32. MSQ: Dwarf Noble Origin fires on every piston, between multiple paths and lots of ways to portray your character and plot and everything, all culminating in just being out-classed and struggling through anyways…
33. MSQ: …earning it…
34. MSQ: …three positives
35. Voice Acting: Dwarf Noble characters
36. World Building: Dwarf Noble Origin shares double duty with Dwarf Commoner in how it insights into Orzammar and Dwarven society
37. Architecture: Good time to mention that Orzammar is the best designed city in the game, story wise. Of the many locales, this is the one that really feels like a deep, sprawling city carved into a mountain
38. Writing: Some very good exposition in Dwarf Commoner and Noble Origins
39. Brickwork: Ostagar. Appropriate considering it’s one of the first areas we see, and you get bits of forest, camp, tower, and of course the battlefield
40. Voice Acting: Ostagar characters
41. Characters: Alistair. Alistair is just awesome, interesting, engaging, well acted, well presented, and one of my favorite characters in this game…
42. Characters: …earning him…
43. Character: …a full triple positive
44. Voice Acting: Alistair is one of the better, more nuanced acting jobs in the game…
45. Voice Acting: …earning two positives
46. Writing: Alistair’s is, similarly, very cute. He’s adorkable, has no idea what he’s doing, and is totally heads over heels in love, and you can take it a lot of directions…
47. Writing: …earning it two positives
48. Cutscene: The Ostagar cutscenes, logical issues aside, are still good stuff
49. Characters: Jowy & Daveth. They’re only the beginnings of characters, but there’s a lot implied here, and they’re interesting despite… y’know…
50. Moment: The Joining. This scene helps establish the stakes, really nails Jowy and Daveth’s characters, and helps put a bit of focus onto Duncan’s character
51. Characters: Flemeth has relatively little screen time but they do a lot with it, and she is well positioned both for the plot and for Morrigan’s arc. Speaking of…
52. Characters: Morrigan is the best character in the game. Layers to her make her a fully fleshed out, three dimensional character, and her arc can go quite a few different ways depending…
53. Characters: …earning a full…
54. Character: …three positives
55. Voice Acting: Morrigan is the best actor in the game. She manages so many tiny, nuanced details in every line, but also more overt pieces, and some fun and ‘bad acting’ sequences…
56. Voice Acting: …earning…
57. Voice Acting: …three positives
58. Writing: Morrigan’s romance is well thought out, sweet, and does great things for her character…
59. Writing: …in addition to being one of the best romances in gaming…
60. Writing: …earning it three positives
61. Voice Acting: Flemeth, and the return of Janeway
62. Plot: Why we have to do it, why the army can’t do it, why we’re recruiting. This is a GREAT hook. See…
63. Plot: …the Darkspawn are an existential threat: No matter what type of character you play (within reason), all can profit from dealing with the Darkspawn. Also normally this would already be dealt with, but Loghain refusing to allow Orlesiens in Fereldan means we didn’t have the forces we were expecting to chop off the Blight early. And with the loss of not only the Grey Wardens but all functional knowledge of the greater secrets of how all of this works, we’re struggling to make do. Finally Blights normally take years (or longer…) to be dealt with. So most of the world isn’t really aware of what’s happening yet, and by the time they are we’re already on top of things. This is a great setup…
64. Plot: …for a solid triple
65. Plot: We’re not here to save the world, we’re here to save Fereldan… but better than that, we’re not here to save Fereldan from the Blight, not really, we’re here to save Fereldan from Fereldan…
66. Plot: …and that’s…
67. Plot: …amazing
68. Characters: Loghain… lost to paranoia and madness, utterly incapable of managing or uniting the country. You’re probably wondering why he’s only a single positive. Two big reasons. First, it’s very obvious that most of the brilliance of his character is an accident. Second, his voice actor carries him HARD. Still a great villain
69. Voice Acting: Loghain because, I mean obviously. Simon Templeman is fantastic
70. Theme: Stagnation. Traditionalism is everywhere and the effects and impacts it has on everyone. I love this theme, I love the different ways it’s expressed, and I love how it’s not even a completely linear thing. Some traditions are valuable and should be respected, for practical OR cultural reasons. But adhering to them mindlessly? That’s almost universally a bad thing, and leads to so many horrible things in the game…
71. Theme: …for a solid…
72. Theme: …triple. As an aside I love how Loghain himself is part of this theme. I don’t blame him per say but he just CANNOT move beyond his past. And so he essentially kickstarts the entire plot
73. Cutscene: The Bannorn and Loghain’s first confrontation. It’s a great example of the aforementioned Babylon 5 Effect. At first glance it’s just Loghain trying to establish himself as a tyrant… but in reality land he’s just trying to get focused on the threat (the Blight and the Orlesians) and, like a charisma-less general with the tact of a brick, he just demands it. When they don’t bend he gets angry and insists they can’t shirk their duty, which… he actually means! He really does think this is just that simple. Great sequence…
74. Cutscene: …easy double
75. Characters: Leliana. The convert who still enjoys the thrill of her old job, who seeks significance in her life
76. Voice Acting: Leliana
77. Writing: Leliana’s romance isn’t on the same level as the others, but it’s still good and it still deserves a positive
78. Characters: Shale, also known as HK-47 Two, is mostly amusing, but she is quite amusing
79. Voice Acting: Shale manages a great dry wit tone
80. Moment: Shale’s introduction and that poor chicken
81. Characters: Zevran, the man who seeks death because of how unhappy he is, who nonetheless does all he can when given the opportunity, is awesome (made even better by his romance)…
82. Characters: …earning him two positives. Further positives will have to sit in his romance arc because his character arc rather abruptly stops if you don’t romance him
83. Writing: Zevran’s romance is honestly weirdly great for the type of character he portrays, an it easily earns itself…
84. Writing: …two positives
85. Voice Acting: Zevran and his own nuance
86. Moment: Character introductions in general. There’s several and they’re all pretty well executed
87. Voice Acting: Sten is wonderfully blunt and has some great moments
88. MSQ: Redcliffe in general (the dead, the keep, the demon). This entire arc is pretty long, pretty well done, and pretty fleshed out. There’s great side quests here, great mystery and build up, and when we finally find out what’s going on it not only makes perfect sense but also feels satisfying. And of course we have options of how this goes…
89. MSQ: …one of the better overall segments…
90. MSQ: …and an easy triple
91. Voice Acting: Redcliffe characters
92. Characters: Wynne, the motherly sort who remains buried under guilt and fear
93. Voice Acting: Wynne speaks a bit specifically but she does a good job with it
94. MSQ: The Fade, its lore, and its insight into characters. There’s a whole segment where you see your party members and some of them are tempted (and we see what, exactly, tempts them) and of course some of them… aren’t tempted at all. Great tidbits
95. Brickwork: Orzammar is one of the more interesting areas visually. You really get the idea of the underground city carved out directly from the mountain rock
96. Doodads: Orzammar, one of the only places in the game with decent Doodad design
97. MSQ: Orzammar initial quests and indications of Harromont vs. Bhelen. The politicking, the arguments, the slander…
98. Moment: …and I’m particularly fond of the fact that they outright kill someone just for speaking ill of one of the candidates. Out in broad daylight no less. And people wonder why I call these Drow
99. Dialogue: Dwarven dialogue in general is probably some of the tightest dialogue in the game. I love it the smooth terminology usage and cultural inferences…
100. Dialogue: …easy double
101. Characters: Oghren, the veteran warrior who lost his wife, house, and status, and delved into drink instead to escape, but still retains his keen insight into things and willingness to help his people. I was tempted to ding him due to stuff that happens later (looking at you Awakening) but no…
102. Character: …he really is that good of a character just in Origins. What really fleshes him out is there IS a character underneath the crude humor and booze
103. Voice Acting: Oghren because, shockingly, Steve Blum is a good actor
104. Secondary: Orzammar has some of the better side quests in the game. Most side quests in DAO aren’t… super great. But helping the dwarf who wants to be a mage, or finding the lost son… good stuff
105. Characters: Branka is, by herself, shockingly evil and in a well thought out, well written, horrifying way. She might legitimately be one of the best villains in the game by sheer virtue of her massive lack of care…
106. Character: …call this another double
107. MSQ: The very idea of what Branka did to reach the Anvil is so many levels of horrible all on its own
108. MSQ: Orzammar conclusion. Everything about the finale of dealing with Branka and Caridin and the finale with the crown…
109. MSQ: …very satisfying, and can go several ways (as most of these do)
110. Humor: The poet tree
111. MSQ: I was originally not going to give… ANY positives for the forest sequence. But I do like the ways it can go, I do like the twists, and I do like the always awesome…
112. Voice Acting: …Tim Russ. Okay this is also a positive for all the other characters in this arc but let’s be honest, Russ kind of nails it
113. World Building: Urns of Andraste and our first real look into the Chantry, no really style
114. Characters: Denerim NPCs and general supporting cast. Particularly fond of the noble jackasses
115. Humor: The Pearl’s special encounters
116. MSQ: The Rescue is, weirdly enough, really really well done. There’s a lot of possible permutations, they’re all good, and they’re all awesome…
117. MSQ: …earning it…
118. MSQ: …three positives
119. Exposition: Lack of knowledge about Darkspawn and Grey Wardens, by total coincidence
120. MSQ: Some of Morrigan’s ritual paths not only work but fit, are well acted and written, and work in character
121. Moment: The charge into Denerim…
122. Moment: …and Alistair’s speech. Everything about these scenes is a banger, and fulfills something very very few games do, even amongst CRPGs. Every single person you see here, the reasons they’re here to fight, the resources you have access to in the upcoming battle, that’s all because of you. YOU did that. You made this happen, because those are the groups YOU sided with, convinced, and banded together. You built that army…
123. Moment: …and I love everything about this sequence
124. Integration: The choices you’ve made determines who’s there for the final battle, both in story and in gameplay
125. Moment: The final round up of your characters and their arcs before the final battle. This is another of those ‘up to the player’ kind of things. This can be long, short, satisfying, horrifying, and everything in between…
126. Moment: …another…
127. Moment: …triple
128. Outro: The final charge up to the Archdemon is satisfying, visceral, and terrifying
129. Outro: The final playable epilogue is an awesome way to interact with everyone one last time, but also showcase your choices regarding the characters to date…
130. Outro: …earning two positives
131. Outro: The final ending slides. This is probably the best Bioware ending ever made. Go figure
132. Voice Acting: General, for all the good voice acting I missed, for there is so much
133. Humor: Consider this an aggregate for all the moments I didn’t specifically call out. Bribing the guy with cookies, Zevran and the hermit’s home, basically everything between Shale and Sten, Shale and Wynne…
134. Humor: …lots of examples…
135. Humor: …for a solid triple
136. World Building: Leliana’s Song, exposition and build up, and a lot of moving pieces in the background
137. World Building: Soldier’s Peak and some insight into the history of the world
138. Atmosphere: Golems of Amgarrak. For all its issues, it manages the tone quite well
139. Atmosphere: The general tone of massacring your way through Denerim during the Darkspawn Chronicles is actually quite fun
140. Atmosphere: Being a noble lord and related keep management. It’s not super great and I don’t want to over praise buuut it’s still worth noting the vibe of actually BEING a leader and making decisions which have consequences feels great
141. Characters: Anders, Nathaniel, and Sigrun don’t have much time to move and breathe but they’re still good and I’m still with it
142. Characters: The Architect and the Mother are both fascinating and bring up concepts that question the whole setting (that will never be followed through on but moving on)
143. Doodads: Awakening in general steps up the Doodad game noticeably
144. Humor: Yyyep, Awakening got me several times. Anders helped
145. Secondary: The conspiracy plot in Awakening is one of the better individual arcs in the game (also Awakening in general)
146. Voice Acting: Awakening Main characters all have good voice acting
147. Voice Acting: Awakening side characters also have good voice acting (notably the Mother and Architect)
148. Consequence Storytelling: If (if!) you are in a romance with Morrigan, Witch Hunt is honestly a great pay off for the whole affair

Story Negatives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Limited party size problem… I’ve been thinking about this but this is just awful, for the Fade, for banter, for reactions to quests…
2. Storytelling Mechanic: …earning it two negatives
3. Storytelling Mechanic: This dovetails nicely into the other problem with the limited party size; gated content via Approval. You are (heavily) encouraged in both gameplay and story to seek Approval, at the cost of playing the way you want and choosing the way you want
4. Brickwork: General. Whole game just doesn’t look… good
5. Architecture: Most of the towns don’t… do a good job of conveying the size they’re supposed to be. Lothering comes to mind immediately, or the ONE hut near the Mage’s Tower, but Denerim is really the winner here. Supposedly a colossally sprawling city is split up into very small, bite sized areas and there’s not enough work done to make them feel like anything other than tiny little nodes on a map
6. Writing: Very awkward exposition in Dwarf Commoner and Noble Origin
7. MSQ: The entire city elf origin’s middle section is… unnecessary at best and tonally dissonant at worse, but worst of all its all just for its own sake. It’s shock for shock and leaning too hard into The Edge and instead it detracts from the work
8. Moment: The unnecessary squick and edge of male city elf origin. What is otherwise one of the best Origins just delves into needless shock value to be edgy
9. Consequence Storytelling: Lack of payoff across the board, especially for the Origins…
10. Consequence Storytelling: …earning two negatives
11. Writing: Ostagar has several issues across the board, especially with the total nonsense of the battle
12. Writing: So… the Joinings. Lots of people can just join and it’s not treated like a big deal and everybody survives and it just sort of… cheapens the entire affair
13. Writing: We’ve seen this before, but several of the good bits of character developement for a few characters (notably Zevran) are locked behind romance
14. Brickwork: The Deep Roads especially. Hope you like endless grey and brown caves
15. World Building: So… why do the Darkspawn have gear and torches and catapults?
16. Story Sequencing: Ssssooo Redcliff is just… sitting there, on pause, and the longer you wait the less sense it makes (there’s other issues with the ‘choose your own order’ thing too)
17. Writing: The Underthought of the Super Poison. This poison is SO super ridiculously powerful that NO ONE can undo it, even once we have the weight and resources of the mages and the local bann, and potentially the resources and assets of any other number of things depending on what order we do this in. And this COULD actually be a talking point, or a plot point, or even a character point! But it isn’t. It’s an excuse to go get the stupid grail. Speaking of which…
18. Plot: So… the Grail quest is one of the most ‘because plot’ things in the entire game. The noble lord is super poisoned, cool, so let’s spread to the winds chasing a rumor of a relic which might exist because it’ll totally cure him. Bonus points, the relic is real and does cure him. Sure. I really have to emphasize how STUPID this is because there is NOTHING indicating this should work, it’s the longest of long shots, and it all goes so smoothly and easily you just wonder why no one else has ever managed this before. I get that ‘go find the macguffin’ is a common quest in basically every story ever but you need to work it a bit to make it, y’know, WORK. Not just this nonsense…
19. Plot: …consider this…
20. Plot: …a triple negative
21. MSQ: So… the Landsmeet. The game really wants us to pick Loghain or Alistair and that’s fine in and of itself (even if I’m not super into it) buuut the way it’s handled is too forced and too Fake Drama. The whole thing stinks of not having enough time to massage the sequence properly
22. MSQ: On the flip side, Morrigan’s ritual doesn’t work for several of its permutations and, worse, is a bit too… well frankly badly written as a base concept. It reads as a bad porno script rather than what they were probably going for. It’s a shame because if it goes well it’s great but there’s a lot of other ‘You MUST have sex with this beautiful woman’ vibes
23. Moment: Anora’s speech is hilarious, but man it’s just so… so bad
24. Writing: Leliana’s Song has a … lot of issues
25. Moment: The horror movie sting at the end of Golem of Amgarrak
26. External Continuity: The near total lack of continuity between Origins and Awakening is not great. I get why they did it and I super do not care
27. Character: Oghren… in Awakening… is an abrasive, irritating, unpleasant character with nothing that redeems him
28. External Continuity: Special bonus points for how Oghren is a completely different character
29. Moment: Mhairi’s death is… extraordinarily badly done. She just kind of drinks, falls over, dies, and the scene moves on less than a second later as if she never existed
30. Writing: Also, and this is a weird negative but… Mhairi dying was not a really good decision I think. She’s too interesting to be tossed away for what is essentially just tradition
31. Outro: Awakening in general just sort of falls flat in the Outro. After everything it just devolves into a big brawl with a bunch of Darkspawn and you fight your way to the Mother aaand yer done
32. Outro: (Awakening) Also good lord what a nothingburger ending
33. Consequence Storytelling: If you are not one of two very tiny slivers of character, you have… no reason to do Witch Hunt, and the game provides even less
34. Outro: (Witch Hunt) We cannot stand against the vague, foreboding foreshadowing… dun dun duuun

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Variance between top down and action modes
2. Builds: While mostly an aspect of the abilities, there’s still gear and party make-up, meaning there’s a decent variety of possible builds in the game…
3. Builds: …earning two positives
4. Core Combat: Pausing and being able to give orders in combat is a nice feature by itself
5. Core Combat: Sustained system. This is great, gradient system that allows the player to reserve a portion of their casting for permanent buffs, which can be toggled and controlled at will, at however much you want, or you can reserve your resources for casting… it’s all up to you…
6. Core Combat: …earning two positives
7. Core Mechanic: The Approval system and its unlocks for abilities and quests
8. Saves: Good general saves…
9. Saves: …and quicksaves and quickloads
10. Saves: Good general autosaves…
11. Saves: …and multiple autosave slots
12. Core Mechanic: The gambit system is awesome, and honestly probably the best implementation of Gambits in gaming that I’ve seen. You have tons and tons of options to customize how the party does what and when…
13. Core Mechanic: …earning a full…
14. Core Mechanic: …three positives
15. Core Mechanic: And a bonus positive for the Presets, both baked in and custom
16. Enemy Design: Decent design throughout
17. Enemy Variety: Decent variety throughout
18. HUD: Color distinction in text and buffs
19. Song: Leliana’s Song. No not the DLC the… nevermind
20. Itemization: Gold, equipment, drops. The in game economy is fascinating cuz you can actually completely skip it if you want, but there are a few VERY nice items which are VERY expensive and you basically can’t afford all of. So if you want those super belts, the great weapons, or that dragon armor, you want to save up
21. Kit: Archer builds for rogues
22. Kit: Melee in general, for rogues and warriors both
23. Kit: Two hander gets its own point for being surprisingly legit
24. Kit: Sword and Board is, unironically, one of the best setups in the game, with good buffs, stances, and abilities, and more viable builds…
25. Kit: …earning two positives
26. Kit: Similarly, Mage is pretty legit for pretty much the same reasons…
27. Kit: …in fact one of the, uh, ‘worst’ parts about Mage is they’re just TOO good. Mages are incredibly well designed and honestly I don’t recommend playing anything else on your main…
28. Kit: …so, y’know, triple
29. Mods: Depth of mods
30. Mods: Ease of mod implementation
31. Mods: The devs did eventually release a dev toolkit (though good luck finding and implementing it)
32. Intro: Our first Intros, the Origins, vary in quality but overall most of them follow the same beats. This is the Choices gameplay, this is the combat, this is the interface, a micro dungeon, and usually a miniboss
33. Encounter: So I don’t want to over-praise, but the entire game has excellent encounter design. The whole game is bespoke in encounter design and while not all encounters are created equally, a lot are damned good. Outsie of individual amazing encounters I’m mostly going to be highlighting areas and their general encounter design. So, naturally, this is for the Origins. Every single one of these put some real thought into who, where, and what. It’s mostly ‘people’ you fight in each of these, but not entirely. And they make sure to challenge without pressuring, and ease you into larger and larger melees as the Origins progress…
34. Encounter: …very solid stuff
35. All Roads Lead To Rome: The whole game oozes this. This might be some of the most ARLTR gameplay I’ve seen in a CRPG. No, seriously. So we’re going to give points on a per-area basis. First we’ll start off with Lothering, which among its many other positive traits leaves a lot of options in the player’s hands
36. Choices: So this is a good chance to explain what Choices Gameplay really means. This isn’t Branching Gameplay, that’s a whole other thing (and VERY few games do that). Choices is about having… Choices in text which change some of how individual quests go (do we talk this person down, or kill them horribly, or do a skill check?) as well as informs some of the choices of the player. This often performs only one real function; allowing the player to roleplay. But this is CRITICAL in a game like this, where your character is a voiceless blank slate. You NEED good Choices to be whoever ‘you’ are. And I don’t mean ‘I’m evil muwa ha ha’ or ‘I rescue kittens for fun’. That’s ‘fine’ but what you really want is nuance. There needs to be room for self contradiction, for gradient perspectives, for having quirks and personality. Dragon Age Origins is one of the best games in the business for this. So, like the ARLTR above, we’ll be scoring this on a per region basis, starting with the Origins themselves. Each Origin has a lot of permutations of what kind of (insert Origin here) that YOU are personally. To just highlight a basic example, a Dalish Elf can literally be ‘kill humans on sight’ if you choose to be. Or you can be teasing. Or disgusted, but not enough to murder. Or legitimately trying to reach out to people. And all of these choices are from a single branch on the quest. These…
37. Choices: …are very well done
38. Intro: Lothering is a really good Intro. It gets across character moments, sidequests, multiple paths to victory, and is nearly completely optional…
39. Intro: …earning two positives
40. Choices: This is a good time to mention that the Lothering Choices are also pretty damned good. Almost all of these are pure flavor, which (again) is a good thing
41. All Roads Lead To Rome: Redcliffe. Plenty of possible routes, options, and choices here to determine how this entire segment goes (also baking the Urn quest into this). This can make this quest super long and stretch across three areas, or finish it in just one, and in fact is probably the best ARLTR in the game of the major hubs…
42. All Roads Lead To Rome: …for a solid double
43. Choices: Redcliffe, of course. I won’t be going super in detail into each of these, just know that as per before there’s plenty of Choice Gameplay in this section…
44. Choices: …a solid double
45. Encounter: Defending Redcliffe. This encounter is wonderfully mean (I also like to make it a challenge of losing no one during it, which is MUCH MEANER)
46. Encounter: The Drake setup in the Ruined Temple. There are several bundles of Drakes and they’re pretty well designed
47. Boss: I should also mention the High Dragon itself, arguably the hardest boss in the game but definitely the funnest
48. Level: Trials of Andraste, probably one of the better dungeons in the whole game. Actual puzzles, actual level design. It’s not much but it’s there
49. All Roads Lead To Rome: Mage Tower. So there’s not quite as much ARLTR for this as some of the other places, but there’s still something. It also leads neatly into…
50. MSQ: The Fade. No I’m serious, where are you going?! Look, hear me out. The entire dungeon is designed such that every given area you can’t finish the first time you go there because each area gives you a form which you can use in another area, which gets you ANOTHER form. They also give you permanent stat ups for doing side optional stuff. This makes for a well designed level with cool kit and great (optional) rewards for engaging in the whole system. I say without hyperbole that this is the best ‘level’ in the game…
51. MSQ: …and grant it…
52. MSQ: …a triple
53. All Roads Lead To Rome: Orzammar. Plenty of options for how you deal with this section, at least until you hit the Deep Roads
54. Choices: Orzammar also has some great Choice Gameplay and, similar to the entire Redcliffe section…
55. Choices: …is a solid double
56. Boss: The Broodmother. This is the other ‘hardest boss’ in the game. Adds, tentacles, stuns, tons of damage, and limited space to work with
57. All Roads Lead To Rome: Brecilian Forest, as per usual. Do you like werewolves or elves? Or both? Or neither!
58. Choices: Brecilian Forest doesn’t have as good of Choice Gameplay as the rest of the areas, but it’s still here
59. Choices: Denerim in general
60. Encounter: Ser Cauthrian. This is probably one of my favorite fights in the game. What’s funny is Cauthrian herself is certainly mean (she hits like a TRUCK with that two hander) but what really makes this fight so insane is the line of friggin’ archers she has backing her up. This fight will spiral out of control almost immediately if you don’t get right on top of it. It’s also a perfect example of a Supposed To Lose Fight; brutal, but defeatable, and it acknowledges it if you win…
61. Encounter: …great fight
62. MSQ: The Rescue is just a great mission. Depending on who you bring and how you do it the quest can go a lot of different ways, and there’s a gradient here too; it’s not ‘fight’ or ‘don’t fight’. Plus you can rescue yourself! Earning it…
63. MSQ: …two positives
64. Choices: Landsmeet, again
65. All Roads Lead To Rome: Landsmeet. There’s a lot of ways this can go and a lot of stuff you can do leading up to it to affect that
66. Choices: DLCs (Soldier’s Peak, Shale)
67. Choices: Keep mechanics in Awakening. As mentioned up in Story, it’s cool actually making choices and acting like a noble lord
68. MSQ: The multi party combat during the Outro. I love how they handle the giant party size…
69. Outro: …but what I love even more is the entire mechanic of the ‘summons’. The choices you made means you get a summon bar that can pull out varying people and/or troops who then help you with the encounters on your current map. This is not only a cool feature, it gives a wonderful tangible effect for all the stuff you’ve been doing for the last 50 hours
70. Pacing: Out of combat regen seems like a minor thing but it keeps the pacing good, which is important in such a long game with so much combat
71. Prime Opt: Keep upgrade quests and related arcs
72. QoL: Bank, respec, unlock tomes, and a few other tidbits added in Awakening
73. Choices: Romance gameplay choices. There are several, and all of them are at least good
74. Viscerality: Between the meaty melee and the fun magic, plus the impact of such abilities, the game has decent viscerality…
75. Viscerality: …earning two positives
76. Integration: The choices you’ve made determines who’s there for the final battle, both in story and in gameplay
77. Level: Kal’Hirol is surprisingly decent, a good step up from Origins dungeon design
78. Core Mechanic: The Darkspawn Chronicles recruit and upgrade mechanic is actually pretty fun
79. Level: General dungeon design in Awakening
80. Replayability: First, the game has plenty of alternate options and playstyles but…
81. Replayability: …then there’s the very nature of the game and how it encourages replay given the very nature of the Choice gameplay

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Starting Options: Limitations of race are already irritating but locking you into Origins per class is worse
2. Bug: Audio bugs with ambient lines
3. Audio Balancing: Lots of minor issues throughout
4. Audio Spam: There’s not a ton but there is some and it is irritating
5. Bug: Memory Leak. This is easily the worst memory leak I’ve seen in gaming, requiring a reset (on average) of about once an hour, earning it…
6. Bug: …a full…
7. Bug: …three negatives
8. Graphics: Gross, as per usual
9. Core Mechanic: Approval only effects present party members, which can lead to irritations and issues with regards to trying to raise Approval appropriately
10. Graphics: Improper resolution scaling (especially subtitles)
11. Graphics: One of the few spider negatives in gaming. In fact as of this typing there are exactly four games in existence that’d get this negative; This, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Skyrim
12. Choices: As per usual, the Persuasion stat is neigh-unto mandatory and limits your build potential
13. Core Mechanic: Attribute and skill point tax on tactics slots (requires Cunning and Skill Points)
14. Core Combat: While I do, legitimately, enjoy the core combat there’s just SO much of it that it gets old
15. Core Combat: …made worse by virtue of trying to force something the game doesn’t, at its core, support
16. Encounter: Forced positioning after dialogues before a fight. There are SO many fights where you do a dialogue then are immediately dumped in a fight and the game shoves your characters into disadvantageous spots without even warning you
17. Inventory: I like this game (I do) but the inventory in it can go directly to hell. Limited spaces, unclear usefulness of items, lots of trash with minimal or NO real use, and large swaths of dungeoning without access to a vendor. This is only more irritating over time…
18. Inventory: …for a double
19. Itemization: The Injury system and subsequent item tax
20. Itemization: The Rogue lockpick tax
21. Music: Darkspawn’s battle theme and the repetition thereof in an expansion where we fight almost exclusively Darkspawn
22. No Music: And also there’s huge, huge swaths of No Music
23. No Music: Inconsistent music. Sometimes it plays, sometimes it doesn’t
24. Padding: Random Encounters and trash fights
25. Respec: The lack of respec in a game with so many options and possible builds hurts viability and experimentation…
26. Respec: …made worse by companions coming pre-leveled without option, limiting things even further
27. Seconds In Minutes: Unlocking and the Rogue of Requirement
28. Choices: It’s entirely too easy to stumble into a romance, and with no take-backs or other options to avoid it
29. Minigame: The Shale puzzle. Getting stuck on the terrain, taking pointless damage, and dialogue spam the whole time
30. Encounter Rate: Yeah there’s honestly just… way too many trash fights in this game. Nowhere worse though than…
31. Encounter Rate: …the Deep Roads. Good lord, the Deep Roads. This is just one long repetitive slog (followed by an amazing story beat and a great boss… go figure)
32. Level: This is mostly a feature of level design, but the Deep Roads are a slog. Samey corridors and boring visuals in an endless dungeon fest fighting wave after wave after wave of enemies…
33. Level: …earning two negatives
34. Graphics: The blurry headache-inducing nature of the Fade is a toggle, which is nice, but that toggle is very unclear in its labeling, which is not
35. MSQ: Fade (badly balanced, sucks for some classes, game isn’t built for solo combat). Yes I know I also gave it positives, that doesn’t change the fact that it also turbo sucks for the above reasons
36. Level: More problems from the Ruined Temple and DAO’s approach to dungeon design
37. Choices: So the Hardening for Alistair is already kind of vague and unnatural (unlike the Leliana one where it’s clear where it’s going) but also it has a substantial impact on how his future and the endings can go
38. Encounter Rate: The Ruined Temple of the Sacred Ashes quest just has far, far too much endless boring trash fights
39. Inventory: So if Alistair leaves the party heeee takes everything with him. Cute. (This is true for several characters by the way)
40. Encounter Rate: Similar to the Deep Roads, the Brecilian Forest just… has way, way too much trash
41. Level: Brecilian Forest, general. Very narrow, very nothing-burger, honestly feels worse designed than even the endless repetition of the Deep Roads
42. Secondary: The quest designs of the Brecilian Forest are bland, boring, and worse, in some cases best left undone
43. Padding: The final few trash fights and general fights (with infinite respawns) of the Outro
44. Outro: The final fight with the Archdemon is passable… which is honestly the problem, it’s just another fight really
45. Party: Extremely badly designed party members which you can’t respec in the DLCs
46. Encounter: Severe over-tuning of several encounters in Leliana’s Song
47. Boss: The Darkspawn Chronicles final boss fight is all the wrong things about escort quests magnified. The amount of ridiculousness on display here while defending a paper tiger is bonkers…
48. Boss: …earning the encounter two negatives
49. Difficulty: So Golems of Amgarrak can go directly to hell with its difficulty cliffs. This DLC is way, way harder than anything else in the game and nothing tells you this walking in (which is the real negative here. If it was properly labeled as ‘super optional hard mode’ it’d be fine)
50. Level: For all its positives, Kal’Hirol just drags on entirely too long
51. Boss: The Harvester fight is overtuned to hell and back but even if we ignore that, it’s just kind of boring
52. Bug: Lots of bugs in Awakening
53. Choices: Or lack thereof in Awakening. Seriously they go from great Choices Gameplay to actively badly designed Choices (misleading Choices, lack of options, lack of nuance, etc.)
54. Interface: The inventory problems get worse in Awakening
55. Walkthroughitis: It’s disturbingly easy to permanently miss content through no fault of your own in Awakening

Story Positives:

1. Atmosphere: The final Brood War Protoss mission does a great job at really getting across just how overrun by the Swarm the planet really is
2. Atmosphere & Tone: The Swarm slowly overwhelming Shakuras and Aiur simply by being uncontrolled
3. Banter: Pisseds
4. Brickwork: Brood War has generally acceptable Brickwork in the new tilesets
5. Cutscene: Starcraft vanilla Intro does a lot to establish the tone and setting very quickly and efficiently without really spoiling much
6. Cutscene: Brood War’s intro. The absolute chaos of the trenches, the smooth long shots of the Alexander, the familiarity with the characters, the final shot of the jaws closing
7. Cutscene: Terran Vanilla outro. Mengsk’s coronation speech is great. His focus first on alien forces (identifying the ‘other’), focusing on security and threats, offering not prosperity and peace but security and unity, and trying to emphasize ‘all humans should be unified’… while under him
8. Cutscene: The final detonation on Shakuras was actually pretty legit, both in appearance and in storytelling
9. Cutscene: The UED final cutscene is just awesome. Just the right blend of ridiculous 50s propaganda piece, and deliberate misinformation which informs the viewer, and general amusement
10. Cutscenes: Ground perspective on things, in general
11. Intro: Mission 1 & 2, initial vibes and tones, establishing the ‘scene’. Duke is the obstinate jackass, Raynor is friendly and affable
12. Moment: Mengsk’s speech… you know the one
13. Moment: Raynor swooping in out of no where to rescue Mengsk and
14. Moment: The very first briefing for the very first Zerg mission is near perfect. The Overmind states things as fact, establishing itself and its relationship to the Swarm. We now understand that the Swarm has intelligence behind it. And now we get to play as the ‘bad guys’
15. MSQ: So the first few missions very rapidly but very properly set up the entire premise of the Terran campaign
16. MSQ: Tassadar’s subtle storytelling with Raynor and the significance and understated exposition thereof in Protoss Vanilla 4
17. MSQ: The briefing establishing the death of Zasz is well executed and presented, but also surprisingly well written; It informs the player of a weakness in the Swarm we can later exploit, establishes the nature of the hierarchical Swarm structure, and pushes the Overmind out of play temporarily to force us to deal with the situation
18. MSQ: The briefing where the Queen of Blades introduces herself and the new Overmind plot has a few issues, but Aldaris being the voice of reason (and peacing out), the voice direction, playing on the player’s inclinations, and the reasonability of their current predicament all set the stage nicely
19. MSQ: The reverse Alien mission through the Amerigo is some great tone setter, especially followed through by the cutscene showing the other side of things
20. MSQ: The tonal usage and cutscene of UED Brood War 7. Stukov’s final speech and Dugalle’s reaction are very well acted and surprisingly well written, the events of the mission itself make sense for future events, and the humor helps contrast the tragedy of it
21. Pacing: Generally good pacing across the Vanilla campaigns
22. Plot: Barely surviving and constantly on the back foot during the entire Brood War Protoss campaign
23. Plot: Build up for first four Zerg missions
24. Plot: Protoss vanilla campaign and the perspective from the crumbling perch
25. Plot: The slow escalation across the Terran campaign as the focus drifts from the Confederacy, to the Zerg*
26. Story Sequencing: Surprisingly good Sequencing, again throughout the Vanilla campaigns
27. Storytelling Mechanic: Mid mission stills
28. Visual Storytelling: BW Protoss 1 gets special mention for doing some cool stuff to really indicate just how over-run Aiur really is
29. Voice Direction: General, but noticeable
30. World Building: Lots. The world is very naturally and fluidly built up throughout the narrative, and building honestly one of the more interesting and engaging settings I’ve seen. Between the three races…
31. World Building: …I think it deserves…
32. World Building: …three positives
33. Writing: Exposition and setup in general
34. Voice Acting: The voice acting in Starcraft 1 is honestly really damned good, even on an individual level. Thus we get positives for individuals, starting with the Adjutant
35. Voice Acting: Raynor
36. Voice Acting: Duke
37. Voice Acting: Mengsk
38. Voice Acting: Overmind
39. Voice Acting: Kerrigan
40. Voice Acting: Aldaris
41. Voice Acting: Tassadar
42. Voice Acting: Zeratul
43. Voice Acting: Stukov
44. Voice Acting: Duran
45. Voice Acting: Dugalle
46. Characters: Raynor. Jimmy boy is the closest thing to a main character for the franchise, but what really works for him is despite his cynicism, bitterness, and pain he never loses his core optimism and desire to do what’s right
47. Characters: Mengsk. He’s one of my favorite villains (of all time) for a reason. Manipulative, driven, ambitious, and a weird combination of overly proud and surprisingly humble, willing to do whatever he has to in order to win
48. Characters: Duke. This is a weird one. He starts off as the symbol of the corrupt government, transitions into competent general, and gets galvanized thanks to his loyalty to Mengsk where he becomes a legitimately dangerous force
49. Characters: Kerrigan. The elite operative turned elite minion turned conqueror
50. Characters: Overmind. This is a fun one because the Overmind only really shows up in the Zerg vanilla campaign, but it does a lot with its screen time, with memorable lines, voice acting, and motivations making it just alien enough while still being relatable
51. Characters: Tassadar. The other big ‘hero’ character, which they do some brave stuff in the original campaign and he never drifts into ‘pansy’ despite being very peace and cooperation oriented
52. Characters: Zeratul manages a good job as the widened old mentor, but like Tassadar before him never loses his edge and martial prowess
53. Doodads: There’s some doodad usage… not alot, but it’s there (mostly in the No Build missions)
54. Spritework: Terrans. Rough, ramshackle, lived in
55. Spritework: Zerg. Brutal, bloody, organic
56. Spritework: Protoss. Crystalline, ephemeral, pristine
57. Foreshadowing: Duran is actually really well foreshadowed throughout the Brood War campaign, quiet little things in the background
58. Plot: The second twist with Duran…
59. Moment: …and Duran’s big reveal of the Hybrid
60. Outro: Dugalle’s final cutscene, and final sendoff, is basically perfect. Music, audio, visuals, tone, dialogue

Story Negatives:

1. Plot: There’s some ‘because plot’ with Tassadar. Either he didn’t know about the Cerebrates weakness to tell the team (which is… weird) or he didn’t tell them (which is stupid)
2. Plot: So… okay. We return home and Tassadar and crew are like let’s save our people against the idiots of the Conclave… then surrenders to them, leading to literally the next mission being to… free him from the Conclave. This whole thing is just a weird mis-step
3. Writing: So… why exactly are we fighting the UED in the Protoss Brood War Mission 5? And why do they act like nothing happened later?
4. Fake Drama: Ohhh nooo we have to kill Aldaris, even though a 10 second phone call would fix this
5. Cutscene: Aldaris’ refusal to spit it out, Kerrigan just zooping in and murdering him in mid sentence…
6. Cutscene: …it’s… so bad. Aldaris even has a chance to say the relevant information, oh also the characters even offer a hand of friendship after having mass butchered their fellow REFUGEES who we helped save from Aiur and just… what?
7. Writing: Idiot Ball, for just… the entire Protoss campaign. So, so many times the truth is slapping the characters in the face with bright neon signs and they just ignore it
8. Atmosphere: Sadly the Brood War Protoss campaign, with one notable exception, doesn’t really sell what’s really happening on the planet during the missions
9. Integration: As with most Blizzard games, there’s a lot of gameplay and story segregation going on
10. MSQ: Okay so there’s a lot of problems colliding into each other in the second to last UED Brood War mission. First, the Captain being a silent protagonist actively detracts from the scene (we KNOW what’s going on, why don’t we say anything?) Second, Dugalle grabs the Idiot Ball so hard that people have for years head-canoned it (even though the game itself doesn’t earn this at all). Third and finally, a simple message or comm signal would (once again) fix all of this…
11. MSQ: …earning double negatives
12. Writing: Mengsk somehow, magically, doesn’t see the Queen of Blade’s betrayal coming, acts legitimately shocked, and has no backup plan for her inevitable betrayal
13. Character: Raszagal, and the lack thereof thanks to mind control
14. Consequence Storytelling: So the entire sequence of events that leads to the Queen of Blade having mind control over Raszagal has so many holes in it that the timeline makes zero sense
15. Plot: Finally, the very fact that the Queen of Blades can mind control Raszagal doesn’t work either direction it’s sliced. Either she infested her (which makes no sense in lore) or she’s mind controlling her (which is ridiculous on several levels)
16. Character: Artanis is such a nothingburger character who acts as a naive idiot who… shouldn’t be
17. Consequence Storytelling: Everything to do with the Queen of Blades is… problematic. While they work at earning some of it, they really don’t most of the time
18. Outro: Everything to do with the Queen of Blades’ generic victory is just kind of there

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Hotkeys, control groups, ‘smart’ interactions
2. Core Mechanic: Food as an additional slot mechanic
3. Core Mechanic: The ‘standard resource / rare resource’ isn’t good by itself, but it’s used to good effect as a natural bottleneck on certain techs and units
4. Core Mechanic: Upgrades and ‘tech trees’ being generally well thought out and worthwhile
5. Graphics: On-the-fly swapping of graphics with F5
6. HUD: Decent
7. Level: Antiga Prime Vanilla Terran 5. Introduces air units, dropships, and anti air, and does a small but brilliant bit of tutorialization just based on the mission and level layout; The enemy will periodically attack with Wraiths and Dropships (so you know the concept exists), the enemy main base is layered in Anti Air (discouraging the player from hitting there) but has a side area which is designed to be an easier beachhead (which also has vulture mines to prompt the player into being cautious)
8. Level: Assault Tarsonis, Vanilla Terran 7. Two well entrenched enemy bases but you start off with a full kit and a base custom built for you… buuut it also has limited space and resources, essentially mandating the player don’t sit and entrench, but push out
9. Level: Brood War Protoss 9, defending the temple. The ‘hold the line’ part of the mission is actually great, with a large amount of mixed-units assaults happening frequently from all directions
10. Level: Early Zerg levels do a good job of encouraging you to use Lings, Hydras, and Mutas respectively with level layout and design
11. Level: Save Duke Vanilla Terran 6. Zerg bases in the way to go ‘around’ to the target, or go directly through a giant wall of anti air defenses
12. Level: The Hammer Falls, Vanilla Terran 10. Brutal, brilliantly designed, and mean in all the right ways
13. Level: UED Brood War 2 is honestly one of the best missions in the game. Well laid out areas designed around the limitations of the game, rather than in contrast to it. Fun, proper micro No-Build. Well done tutorialization of the Medic. Rewarding for playing it well. Non binary difficulty. And finally, a Hyperbeam Moment right at the end to have fun with…
14. Level: …this level rocks and deserves…
15. Level: …three positives
16. Level: UED Brood War 3. Four enemy bases, each one very hyper specialized and rewarding different tactics for taking them down
17. Level: UED Brood War 7. Simple but fun No-Build mission with good layout, pick ups, and interactables
18. Level: UED Brood War 8 does do one thing right; the three varied, gimmicky bases
19. Level: Zerg Brood War 1. The whole map flows beautifully into itself, with each base rescued giving you new units to take the next base, and good thought put into which units you get vs. which units you end up having to fight…
20. Level: …for two positives
21. Level: Zerg Brood War 2, the recruitable minions, the spread and layout of hero units
22. Minigames: Skirmish mode options
23. Minimap: Surprisingly good and informative…
24. Minimap: …for two positives
25. Music: I mean come on…
26. Music: …of course the music is multiple positive worthy
27. QoL: A few
28. Save: Save at any time mid mission
29. Tutorialization: The first several missions in general do a great job of introducing strategy, controls, and interface
30. Unit Design: Protoss, Brood War, the additional units. While none of them are positive worthy by themselves, all three add some good flavor and tactics to the Protoss
31. Unit Design: Protoss, General. Fire and forget building, pylon ranged construction, and the very existence of shields
32. Unit Design: Terran, General. The ability to build essentially anywhere and lift and move your producer buildings is great, their variety and general utility of units is generally good…
33. Unit Design: …earning the Terrans two general positives
34. Unit Design: Terran, Medics. Autocasting! Good utility (dispel and blind) and that heal has great synergy with infantry (and stimpacks)
35. Unit Design: Terran Goliaths. Pathing issues aside, the Goliaths are (by themselves) well designed, with a decent and meaty ground attack, great anti air, and worthwhile cost and teching
36. Unit Design: Terran Marines. Simple yet very well designed, with two useful upgrades (range and attack speed at a cost) and the ability to bunker up
37. Unit Design: Terran Siege Tanks might be the best designed unit in vanilla Starcraft. A mid-tier tech unit which is expensive but not too much so with no anti air but the ability to be useful on the move or when fashioned as artillery, with just enough health and armor to not be worthless but still functioning as a glass cannon, and the final piece of awesome is that their attack range is greater than their spot range meaning they naturally benefit from support from other units…
38. Unit Design: …earning Siege Tanks two positives
39. Unit Design: Zerg, General. Limited base building (requiring the creep) but buildings are irrelevant except as unlocks and upgrades, meaning heavily centralized production lines which can churn out an entire squad of units at a time rather than drip-feed like the other two factions…
40. Unit Design: …earning the Zerg two general positives
41. Unit Design: Zerg Guardians. A natural offshoot of the Mutas, flying artillery which needs support to function but is devastating with it
42. Unit Design: Zerg Hydralisks. Essentially the same design as Marines but a step further in the tech tree, and a bit pricier, but with increased movement speed and a bit meatier to back it up
43. Unit Design: Zerg Mutalisks. Very much a workhorse unit, a bit pricey but not too much, a bit techy but not too much, useful in all situations but not great by themselves
44. Unit Design: Zerg Overlords. Mobile food that can spy and carry
45. Unit Design: Zerg Lurkers. Mobile turrets that aren’t too expensive and properly difficult to use but still great when used properly
46. Viscerality: While a bit of an assault on the ears, the visuals certainly get it across
47. Visual Distinction: Color usage and crispness
48. Enemy AI: The different types and styles of enemy AI are pretty decent

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Audio Balance: Music and voice acting issues. Having to periodically mute the music to hear the acting despite the music being much quieter is not great
2. Audio Spam: Unit barks are, as usual, not great
3. Audio Spam: There are multiple, frequent situations where the sound is best just straight up off in order to avoid the ear cancer…
4. Audio Spam: …for double negatives
5. Controls: Control group limitations
6. Controls: General irritations
7. Controls: “Stunned” units are forcibly removed from control groups
8. Core Mechanic: Pathfinding. There was worse pathfinding before this, but it is absolutely awful here. You have to herd your troops excessively due to the tendency to stretch out into a line, units can get permanently ‘stuck’ trying to move around each other (or in worse case scenarios, the AIR), and the larger and more steps in movement the unit has the worse it gets, effectively taking units out of usefulness simply by virtue of how much they require babying…
9. Core Mechanic: …easily earning…
10. Core Mechanic: …three negatives
11. Difficulty Curve: So the difficulty curve in the vanilla campaign bounces around a lot. And not in the good way. You can tell some missions just weren’t designed with the same level of care as others and it actively drags the whole experience down a bit
12. Difficulty Curve: The final three Protoss missions just kick the player in the teeth in a way that’s more irritating than fun
13. Info In Game: Plenty is missing, from armor types and damage variances to how exactly abilities work
14. Integration: As with most Blizzard games, there’s a lot of gameplay and story segregation going on
15. Level: Kill-All Missions in general can go to hell. They turn into long, boring slogs…
16. Level: …but the worst part is they often end a good 10 minutes after you’ve already effectively won the mission…
17. Level: …for a full triple negative
18. Level: Protoss Brood War 9’s first half is honestly really, really boring
19. Level: Protoss Brood War mission 5 is a level that should work and doesn’t, instead just kind of being… boring
20. Level: Protoss Vanilla 2 deserves special mention for the difficulty problems. It’s far, far harder than a second mission has any right to be, without the proper functionality that would make it work
21. Level: Protoss Vanilla 4’s first half is an interesting idea badly implemented, made even worse by the second half being more frustrating than it should be (its functionally an escort mission, and not a good one)…
22. Level: …for two negatives
23. Level: Protoss Vanilla 6. So the game gives you two zealots and a slow, short range caster against Infested Terrans (which can, through triggers, be spawned on your face). The entire mission really encourages save scumming, and that’s never a good design…
24. Level: …for two negatives
25. Level: UED Brood War 8 does a lot wrong however. You have an awful starting position, are almost guaranteed to lose your expansion, and there’s a whole lot of Gotcha! In the design of the stage. It’s essentially designed to be played twice
26. Level: Zerg Brood War 5 is so, so close to being a good mission… and instead turns into an incredibly boring Kill-All
27. Level: Zerg Brood War 6 is an extremely dull Kill-All
28. Padding: Due to a combination of circumstances (Kill-All missions, map size, unit control limits, food caps, visibility issues, and the AI) several missions are just… super duper padded, to the point where it’s best to just leave the TV on in the background while doing the longer missions…
29. Padding: …for two negatives
30. Penalty For Failure: If a hero unit dies, you fail the mission, sooo sucks to be you. It also de-invests the player from using them…
31. Penalty: …a problem that never really goes away and is always frustrating
32. Sound Design: Not splitting the sound input into separate channels
33. Terrain: A weirdly large number of missions really, really like to give you a crummy space to build into, not in a ‘cool and interesting’ way but in a ‘frustrating and bad pathfinding’ way…
34. Terrain: …for two negatives
35. Unit Design: All mages, in general, are not well designed in this game. They’re all too good and too bad at the same time
36. Unit Design: Dragoons. I probably don’t need to explain this, but even ignoring the obvious pathfinding and movement issues, their hitbox is just way too big (causing issues), they’re a pain to control thanks to their stuttering, and they even pause for a second before firing, all diminishing what should be a good workhorse unit into just irritating
37. Unit Design: Protoss Scouts. These could be made to work in a bunch of different ways but instead come across as just a waste in all directions. Too slow to be proper scouts, too weak to be useful in combat, too expensive for how useless they are, and require middle teching
38. Unit Design: Reavers. Very expensive, very slow, big hitbox, movement issues, pathfinding issues, but what really pushes this into negative territory is that their ‘shots’ also have pathfinding issues and can get screwy
39. Unit Design: Terran Firebats. They’re marines except worse in every way, and with the additional step of requirement and extra cost they just don’t make up for it in utility
40. Unit Design: Zerg Ultralisks. At the very end of the Zerg tech tree and hideously expensive for a lackluster unit with iffy armor and health and minimal utility thanks to no anti air and collision and attack issues
41. Unskippable Cutscenes: I cannot believe this but Brood War actually has unskippable cutscenes
42. Level: Dark Origin. Similar concept to previous No Build missions, but between the Hero unit problem (again) combined with binary difficulty (no way to recover if you screw up), finicky (control issues), and you have to spend huge swaths of time waiting (to recover energy)
43. Outro: Omega is… not a good mission. It’s not the worst, but it’s a colossal Kill-All slogfest against three vastly superior positions when your own base kinda sucks, and if you don’t get ahead of the curve quickly enough you never will
44. Enemy AI: The enemy AI is not well designed enough to be anything other than perfectly efficient at some things

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Facial / lip syncing tech
2. Spritework: Co-Op flavor of units is just top notch, so for the whole group it earns…
3. Spritework: …three…
4. Spritework: …positives
5. Spritework: Protoss. Crystalline, shimmering, glowing…
6. Spritework: …for a full…
7. Spritework: …three positives
8. Spritework: I have to give special mention for the Purifiers…
9. Spritework: …and the Tal’darim and Nerazim
10. Spritework: Terrans. Run down, beat up, slapped together, mechanized, and bulky…
11. Spritework: …for a full…
12. Spritework: …three positives
13. Spritework: Bonus for the ‘alternate’ Terran units throughout the campaigns
14. Spritework: Zerg. Organic, chitinous, muscular…
15. Spritework: …for a full…
16. Spritework: …three positives
17. Spritework: Bonus for the alternate forms of the zerg units, and the primals
18. Background Lore: News broadcasts
19. Background Lore: Stetmann’s notes about the Protoss and Zerg in WoL
20. Background Lore: Tickers on the news broadcast
21. Banter: WoL pisseds are a mixed bag, but they’re better than SC1’s for sure
22. Banter: HotS actually has quite a few good ones (kudos to Stukov)
23. Banter: Of course Legacy has good pissed sounds
24. Brickwork: Aiur
25. Brickwork: Badlands
26. Brickwork: City tileset
27. Brickwork: Enemy Within
28. Brickwork: Frozen tundra
29. Brickwork: Grassland
30. Brickwork: Hyperion interior
31. Brickwork: Korhal
32. Brickwork: Lava
33. Brickwork: Platforms
34. Brickwork: Purifiers
35. Brickwork: Scrapworld
36. Brickwork: Shakuras
37. Brickwork: Slayn
38. Brickwork: Spear of Adun
39. Brickwork: The orbital platform over Augustgrad
40. Brickwork: The Void
41. Brickwork: The Xel’Naga ship in Maw of the Void
42. Brickwork: Umojans
43. Brickwork: Zerus
44. Character: Abathur is one of the best characters in the whole game. A near perfect example of orange/blue morality, who fits in every scene he’s in…
45. Character: …for two positives
46. Character: Alarak is another great character; a smart Sith who is reasonable, intelligent, has layers, and never stops being who he is…
47. Character: …for two positives
48. Character: Dehaka is a brilliant insight into the Primal Zerg, a near total inverse of Abathur
49. Character: Horner is a great XO, functionally keeping the ship running and serving as that professional bedrock for the Raiders (and Raynor personally)
50. Character: Karax is a bit simple, but still delightful as the almost innocently competent mechanist
51. Character: Mengsk continues to be the most engaging villain in the whole franchise, a great mix of competent and petty, brutal and sophisticated
52. Character: Mengsk’s Arc throughout is near perfect, and the way he portrays it fits from the very beginning to the very end
53. Character: Raynor dips into some negative territory towards the end, but he’s still Raynor, and he’s still awesome
54. Character: Rohana is a weird one because she starts off a bit
55. Character: Stukov should irritate me but he doesn’t, he’s wonderfully pragmatic and very on point for all of his scenes, and helps sell the gravity of Narud
56. Character: Tychus might actually be the best character in the whole game. Nuanced, well presented, well acted, a real strong arc, and he’s literally good in his very first scene all the way to his very end…
57. Character: …for two positives
58. Character: Valerian really comes into his own in Heart, growing up a bit and proving to be a much better person than his father
59. Consequence Storytelling: LoTV is a good example of really pulling all the disparate elements together for the finale
60. Cutscene: Absolutely lovely intro cutscenes for Zeratul, all in engine too
61. Cutscene: Alarak’s real introduction is fantastic, a great introduction to the flat honesty and arrogance of the character, his tier, and his motives and operations
62. Cutscene: Another card to play
63. Cutscene: Artanis activating the Xel’Naga temple
64. Cutscene: Artanis and Raynor’s scenes at the end of the Korhal missions is just great…
65. Cutscene: …for two positives
66. Cutscene: Fire and fury
67. Cutscene: For all its issues the first Valerian cutscene still has some great stuff (cinematography, the one bullet, and Tychus)
68. Cutscene: For all the related issues I do love Tychus’ final scene. He clearly gives his life for Raynor and Kerrigan’s, finishing his arc
69. Cutscene: Hanson falling to infestation, Raynor taking no chances, and taking her down
70. Cutscene: HoTS’s Intro is just fantastic. The best showcasing we’ve ever had of the Swarm in their full glory, great shots and animations, amazing music, sound design, and it ends on a quiet moment with Kerrigan, great stuff…
71. Cutscene: …for a full…
72. Cutscene: …three positives
73. Cutscene: It probably should be higher than it is, but the CGI cutscene showcasing Kerrigan’s abandonment on Tarsonis is still brilliant
74. Cutscene: Kerrigan’s rebirth, and Mengsk… and the artifact
75. Cutscene: Mengsk’s final maneuver against Kerrigan, having to gloat, nearly winning despite it all, Raynor saving her, and Mengsk finally dying…
76. Cutscene: …for two positives
77. Cutscene: Post-Nova’s scene is, by contrast, absolutely hilarious (poor Tychus)
78. Cutscene: Post-Tosh’s mission cutscene does some good points to emphasize Horner’s mentality (the builder wanting to make a new future), Tosh’s (so broken that he ‘knows’ with certainty that it will never get better) and Raynor, who is slipping between the two
79. Cutscene: Some great action and character bits in the escape from Mar Sara
80. Cutscene: The entire situation with drunk Tychus, the small spiel to the crew, and the fight with Tychus
81. Cutscene: WoL Mission 1, very quickly and efficiently establishes how long it’s been since Brood War, shows Raynor’s state of mind and how close he is to suicide, rock bottom and pushed into action by his anger at Mengsk
82. Cutscene: WoL opening cinematic. Amazing animation, cinematography, presentation, music, just… great stuff…
83. Cutscene: …for two positives
84. Cutscene: Zeratul’s battle with Amon…
85. Cutscene: …is double positive worthy
86. Cutscene: Zeratul’s confrontation with the Queen of Blades, the clear distinction of the Queen vs. Kerrigan, general cool factor
87. Dialogue: Abathur’s dialogue is just perfection, clearly getting the time and attention it needed to really pop
88. Doodads: Augustgrad
89. Doodads: Brothers In Arms
90. Doodads: Cutthroat…
91. Doodads: …and Cutthroat again
92. Doodads: Dark Whispers
93. Doodads: Enemy Within
94. Doodads: Engine of Destruction
95. Doodads: Evacuation…
96. Doodads: …and another for Evacuation
97. Doodads: Fire In The Sky
98. Doodads: For Aiur
99. Doodads: Forbidden Weaponry
100. Doodads: General
101. Doodads: Great Train Robbery
102. Doodads: Haven’s Fall
103. Doodads: Liberation Day
104. Doodads: Media Blitz, and the sheer detail that goes into the cityscape, is bonkers…
105. Doodads: …for a full…
106. Doodads: …three positives
107. Doodads: Moebius Factor…
108. Doodads: …and Moebius Factor again
109. Doodads: Outbreak
110. Doodads: Piercing The Shroud…
111. Doodads: …and a second positive
112. Doodads: Protoss missions in general
113. Doodads: Sky Shield
114. Doodads: Slayn
115. Doodads: Templar’s Charge
116. Doodads: The Dig
117. Doodads: Ulnar
118. Doodads: Waking The Ancient
119. Doodads: Welcome To The Jungle
120. Humor: Donny Vermillion and the Vermillion Problem
121. Humor: News broadcasts
122. Moment: Eldion’s Purification
123. Moment: “I had a brother on Tarsonis… I had a brother there…”
124. MSQ: Absolutely love the flavor and tone of the reclamation of Aiur during For Aiur
125. MSQ: Conviction is a fantastic hyperbeam moment kind of mission, really emphasizing the sheer weight Kerrigan is bringing down on rescuing Raynor
126. MSQ: Enemy Within manages some wonderful inverted horror as you play the invading force
127. MSQ: Engine of Destruction is amusing
128. MSQ: In Utter Darkness really does a great job fulfilling the tone and vibe of being at the very end of a costly, losing war, right before the apocalypse
129. MSQ: Lab Rat manages to be amusing, but also a good insight into Kerrigan as opposed to the Queen of Blades
130. MSQ: Outbreak does such a good job with where it’s going in the narrative, the whole mission is properly tense and terrifying
131. MSQ: Outbreak has just absolutely wonderful atmosphere, horror, and general tone
132. MSQ: Piercing the Shroud
133. MSQ: Rendezvous absolutely nails the vibe and feel of having a real swarm as you roll over the enemy
134. MSQ: Sky Shield, Artanis and Raynor linking up almost immediately, the intensity of the setpiece
135. MSQ: Templar’s Charge. The initial attack, the ‘heavies’ staying behind to defend, and Karax getting his time in the spotlight
136. MSQ: Templar’s Return is a great ‘battle of Denerim’ situation; all the forces you’ve gathered united and uniquely pushing against the enemy
137. MSQ: The big reveal about the cycle, the Xel’naga, and their passing
138. MSQ: The final battles on Aiur in LoTV
139. MSQ: The Gates of Hell begins the great trend of the terrible assault into Char, the immediate dissolving of the assault converted very quickly into a decapitating strike, while being completely overwhelmed on all sides
140. MSQ: The main reveal about the Overmind’s yoke and the purpose of the Queen of Blades
141. MSQ: The Terrans making a strong, bold stand against insurmountable odds and barely managing a victory in All In works for me so well
142. MSQ: With Friends Like These is a nice, amusing breather romp
143. Outro: I’ll admit it, I really, really like that final bar scene. Interpret it how you will, but one way or another it’s a nice bow on top of the ending
144. Plot: The near-victory Amon claimed at Aiur, the logical way it was avoided, and the eventual turnaround by the heroes
145. Plot: The WoL plot as a whole
146. Secondary: Co-Op missions (mostly flavor and the like, as they all sit in their own elseworlds continuity)
147. Sound Design: Just, so much of it… footsteps, clunks of vehicles and buildings, all over the place…
148. Sound Design: …for a full…
149. Sound Design: …three positives
150. Story Sequencing: LoTV does a good job of tying the sequencing in together, for once
151. Theme: LoTV and reforging something new from the ruins of the old
152. Visual Storytelling: For Aiur
153. Visual Storytelling: Korhal in general. The gleaming central city, the husks, ruins, and craters just outside the gates
154. Visual Storytelling: WoL general
155. Voice Acting: Abathur’s voice acting is near perfect for what he is
156. Voice Acting: Alarak is, of course, fantastic, but also really manages the nuances of the role…
157. Voice Acting: …for two positives
158. Voice Acting: Amon, for all his many flaws, is a good actor
159. Voice Acting: Artanis is similarly pretty dry but sounds awesome
160. Voice Acting: Donny Vermillion really sells it. He’s already decent, but when he has actual character moments he’s great
161. Voice Acting: Gabriel Tosh’s actor (Dave Fennoy) is as awesome as he usually is
162. Voice Acting: General supporting cast (Dehaka, Zagara, Izsha)
163. Voice Acting: Horner’s actor perfectly accents his character
164. Voice Acting: Karax somehow manages to sound humble, simple, and competent
165. Voice Acting: Kerrigan’s voice actress honestly carries a lot of her lines
166. Voice Acting: Mengsk’s actor continues to completely sell the details of the character
167. Voice Acting: Raynor’s actor, of course, nails it
168. Voice Acting: Rohana does a good job of conveying the old, previous generation
169. Voice Acting: The Adjutant sounds exactly like she needs to, and serves as a good contrast to all the humans
170. Voice Acting: Tychus is already well acted but what pushes him into double territory is how he has wonderful nuance into what he’s saying. If you’re paying attention you can always tell when he’s legit, when he’s outright lying, and when he’s obfuscating …
171. Voice Acting: …for two positives
172. Voice Acting: Valerian’s actor does some great stuff, especially how his tone changes throughout his arc
173. Brickwork: Facility and cityscape in The Escape
174. Doodads: The Escape
175. Storytelling Mechanic: Loading screen artwork does a great job of setting the scene across the whole game…
176. Storytelling Mechanic: …for a full three…
177. Storytelling Mechanic: …three positives
178. Doodads: Enemy Intelligence’s interiors get special mention
179. Brickwork: Custom map tileset on Enemy Intelligence
180. Doodads: Trouble In Paradise
181. Cutscene: General Nova Mission cutscene quality (camera angles, sound design, etc.)
182. MSQ: The quiet horror of Flashpoint as you select the Zerg spawns and see the lively past
183. Doodads: Flashpoint
184. Doodads: In The Enemy’s Shadow
185. Doodads: End Game
186. World Building: Between WoL and LoTV there’s some good, solid fleshing out of the setting in this one…
187. World Building: …for two positives

Story Negatives:

1. Character: Horner being weirdly out of character in act 3 of WoL
2. Character: Kerrigan’s early arc stuff is just weird and half-hazard
3. Character: Raynor being massively out of character in act 3 of WoL
4. Character: The WoL Teldarim are just… completely devoid of any character, purpose, or reason other than to be boring acceptable targets
5. Character: Zeratrul has a near total lack of presence in WoL and it actively drags him down
6. Cutscene: Hanson’s final ‘good’ cutscene is its own level of silly, and completely ignores everything going on right now, all while implying she could totes cure the zerg virus
7. Cutscene: Raynor’s initial cutscene with Kerrigan is overly dramatic trailer fodder trash
8. Cutscene: So Zeratul shows up and he and Kerrigan fight for absolutely no reason for a while because trailer fodder
9. Cutscene: The dialogue in the drunk Tychus really needs another polishing pass
10. Cutscene: The first Valerian scene has so many issues it’ll take a minute to list them all. So first we have Valerian, who is here to work with Raynor and the artifact, showing up in Mengsk’s flagship and without hailing, which is already stupid… then Raynor and Tychus board a battlecruiser by themselves (uh huh) and kill a bunch of marines (for absolutely no reason) only for Valerian to risk being shot in the back all to preserve some kind of weird twist. The entire sequence makes absolutely no sense in character…
11. Cutscene: …for a full two negatives
12. Cutscene: Way too much slow mo in general in HoTS
13. Cutscene: We’re DONE… because our relationship… IS… OOVEEERR….
14. Cutscene: …for a full…
15. Cutscene: …three negatives
16. Dialogue: Everything Amon says is boring Empty Text nonsense
17. Dialogue: HoTS’s dialogue just feels rushed, like it needed a few more polishing passes…
18. Dialogue: …for two full positives
19. Dialogue: More trailer fodder issues
20. Fake Drama: Build up and lack of payoff to the Tosh v. Nova
21. Fake Drama: LoTV Dark Whispers (so WHY exactly are Kerrigan and Zeratul fighting here, even though they acknowledge they’re on the same side?)
22. Fake Drama: LoTV So Selendis, Artanis, and Zeratul all grab the conflict AND idiot balls right off the bat
23. Fake Drama: The constant need to spew trailer fodder lines and over-dramatize cutscenes needs to go to hell
24. Fake Drama: Yet another fake drama moment with the terrible choice between Tosh and Nova
25. Fake Drama: Zerg virus cure… sure Hanson (this is the first fake drama choice)
26. Humor: Stetmann… is just not funny in co-op mode
27. Integration: Usual Blizzard issues
28. Moment: Mengsk announcing that Raynor is executed is such a weird mis-step in the plot
29. MSQ: The dialogue and moments and impact of In Utter Darkness are a bit lessered by just not presenting it well, further hampered by Amon just kind of being Generic Villain #37
30. MSQ: Zerus (Zeratul, vagueness, and wasted potential)
31. Music Direction: They really can’t help but end so many cutscenes with musical stings and it gets irritating
32. Outro: Okay so I have to mention this, the… high tier deity level nonsense in the finale is kind of… what? Top to bottom, what?
33. Plot: So there’s this… Blizzard Vagueness throughout WoL, a common problem in Blizzard games. Where things can (and even do) make sense if you’re familiar with everything but the presentation doesn’t really sell it, and in many cases it feels more like the writers forgot their own plot points
34. Plot: So why can’t Tychus get help again? Of any kind? Even after they know he’s in trouble?
35. Plot: …for a full…
36. Plot: …three negatives
37. Plot: The Spear of Adun is honestly just one big ball of plot convenience
38. Story Sequencing: HoTS order mission problem returns just like in WoL
39. Story Sequencing: Sadly letting the player choose the order of the missions can really screw with the narrative
40. Visual Storytelling: So rebirthed Kerrigan just looks … the same, again, with a few minor details. This is not just wasted potential, it’s aggravating because it makes no sense in lore
41. Writing: Amon in general. So he has the beginnings of motivations, but comes across as undercooked. He talks constantly, but says nothing. And he magically killed his entire ultra race off camera despite being in the minority
42. Writing: Kerrigan sort of decides to beef up the Swarm… why?? In game it’s hinted, much later, that she wants to do this so the Swarm can fight the Hybrids and Amon but she starts doing this almost at the very beginning of the entire campaign
43. Writing: So Kerrigan MUST become a Xel’naga! For… some reason? Never really thought out or explained
44. Writing: So why is Artanis suddenly one of the biggest badasses in the setting? Oh right, because he was supposed to be Zeratul
45. Writing: The inconsistent usage of prophecy, mostly as a macguffin
46. Writing: The ‘because plot’ of Raynor being left behind by a tiny bridge, of all things, which kicks off everything while being so easily avoidable is just ridiculous…
47. Writing: …for two negatives
48. Writing: Third act drama and all the nonsense that usually means, especially since it’s paid off for nothing
49. Writing: Trailer fodder issues
50. Pacing: Nova missions pacing is… bonkers, and worse, designed to be done in three episodes which hurts it
51. Story Sequencing: The Nova missions kind of just… do whatever they need to in order to shove the plot forwards
52. Writing: The character assassination of having Alarak be suddenly stupid evil in Dark Skies is already irritating, but it’s even worse because it would be so easy to fix (just swap him with twitface… or hell, any other Taldarim)
53. Outro: The finale of the Nova missions absolutely sucks on the story axis. Way too rushed, nonsensical dialogue and plot beats, and clear first draft writing…
54. Outro: …for two negatives
55. Storyboarding: A little too much one-shot-ends-the-match approach and a little too much leaning on slow mo to get across what’s happening

Gameplay Positives:

1. Builds: The Spear of Adun allocation system is wonderfully malleable and offers a lot of options and gradient…
2. Builds: …for two positives
3. Builds: WoL, between research and cash there’s a lot of Build possibility in your playthrough
4. Controls: Words do not express how brilliantly this game controls. I could not possibly list all the tiny little optimizations and features that make it control so, so smoothly…
5. Controls: …for a full…
6. Controls: …three positives
7. Co-Op: General level design…
8. Co-Op: …for two positives
9. Co-Op: Good, custom, fun co-op…
10. Co-Op: …for a full…
11. Co-Op: …three positives
12. Co-Op: Leveling and unlocks
13. Co-Op: Masteries and builds
14. Co-Op: Prestiging and unique builds
15. Difficulty Options: Achievements as optional hard-mode mutators across Wings of Liberty are a great additional way to challenge yourself and properly mix up and mutate the missions…
16. Difficulty Options: …for a full…
17. Difficulty Options: …three positives
18. Difficulty Options: Completely changes how the AI operates per difficulty option…
19. Difficulty Options: …for a full…
20. Difficulty Options: …three positives
21. Difficulty Options: Custom Mutators! The fact that you can mix and match is just so awesome…
22. Difficulty Options: …for two positives
23. Difficulty Options: Mutators, wonderful wonderful mutators, with such variety and fun…
24. Difficulty Options: …for two positives
25. Difficulty Options: Per mission map alterations per difficulty option…
26. Difficulty Options: …for a full…
27. Difficulty Options: …three positives
28. HUD: Generally good and clean HUD
29. Info In Game: General
30. Info In Game: Worker indicators
31. Level: Amon’s End is not quite as well constructed as previous missions, but is absolutely brutal (in a good way), and with the wonderfully unique built in soft enrage of the slowly destroyed terrain…
32. Level: …for two positives
33. Level: Cradle of Death (Co-Op) is one of the best co-op missions, and unique. The trucks, their use (and mandate) in taking out the statues, the slow escalation across the map, the terrain design, good stuff…
34. Level: …for two positives
35. Level: HoTS Back In The Saddle. Great hero focused No Build and some nice level design as you go
36. Level: HoTS Convictions continues the hyperbeam moment with giving us tons of units and options as we just barrel roll through the no build segment
37. Level: HoTS Death From Above is fantastic. Very, very well defended and entrenched enemy force, but tons of resources on your side, and all of this with a built in No Build mission on the side which you control simultaneously which is soft timed against an encroaching doom field…
38. Level: …for a full…
39. Level: …three positives
40. Level: HoTS Domination is another fun multiple objective romp, kind of Stratholme 2.0 where you run around gathering eggs and defending… or just wiping out the enemy base
41. Level: HoTS Enemy Within is one of the best missions in HoTS. It’s a No Build but it escalates perfectly, the camera literally zooming out as you progress, and go from infesting a unit to having multiple on your side, it’s just fantastic…
42. Level: …for a full…
43. Level: …three positives
44. Level: HoTS Fire In The Sky is a nice gradient mission with a built in kill switch and encouragement to expand quickly, but really nails it by virtue of the extra terrain design and enemy layout…
45. Level: …for two positives
46. Level: HoTS Hand of Darkness is a simple but fun timed mission pushing against the clock
47. Level: HoTS Harvest of Screams is a fun red light green light mission where it’s in your favor (for once)
48. Level: HoTS Infested is probably one of the best missions in the campaign. You have your standard lineup, but also a ‘lane’ which is pushed by spawning lowbie mobs from your side, which you have control over which spots you take when, and also benefit from creep expansion (also in your control) and also the enemy will be regularly counter attacking to try and deprive you of the spawn points pushing the lane, and all on top of just getting new caster units (the Infestors) which are brilliant and horrible…
49. Level: …for a full…
50. Level: …three positives
51. Level: HoTS Old Soldiers is a short but simple one; a fairly basic enemy base situation except that you start off with a massive early launch campaign, and the enemy regularly nukes you, on top of a great layout…
52. Level: …for two positives
53. Level: HoTS Phantoms Of The Void works for the same reasons as the last mission, but with the added benefit of Stukov on board
54. Level: HoTS Planetfall is great for the same reasons Gates Of Hell was awesome; you’re given objectives to defend which periodically spawn and are assaulted, but each one gives you new units to play with…
55. Level: …for two positives
56. Level: HoTS Rendezvous is a mediocre first half hold the line but an awesome hyperbeam moment second half
57. Level: HoTS Shoot The Messenger. While arguably better in co-op, this is still a fun mission with essentially being an inverted escort
58. Level: HoTS Supreme is a series of fun boss fights that honestly work really well in RTS format and I’m all in for it…
59. Level: …for two positives
60. Level: HoTS The Reckoning is a fantastic final mission. Tons of elite enemy forces, three avenues of reinforcements you can pull in optionally, multiple attack vectors, tons of resources, just top to bottom great…
61. Level: …for a full…
62. Level: …three positives
63. Level: HoTS Waking The Ancient is another grab resources to spot mission, with the enemy putting constant pressure on you both in your existing spots and in new ones
64. Level: HoTS With Friends Like These is a simple, fun hyperbeam mission where you just get to play around with the Hyperion for a while and it’s awesome
65. Level: Into The Void is honestly one of the best designed missions in the entire game. Three lanes to push, helpful AI allies who have an optional side objective which not only helps them out but upgrades their pushes, great constant pressure with spikes from the enemy, great unit composition… just absolutely amazing…
66. Level: …for a full…
67. Level: …three positives
68. Level: LoTV Amon’s Reach is our first Void Thrasher pressure mission, and does a generally good job with it
69. Level: LoTV Brothers In Arms is another fun take on the day/night cycle, except while it causes you issues it also screws with most of the enemy forces…
70. Level: …for two positives
71. Level: LoTV Dark Whispers is a simple but fun soft timed mission where you avoid the ‘main’ battle to
72. Level: LoTV Evil Awoken is a good No Build, with custom units and optional reinforcements as well as a fun, intense escape sequence
73. Level: LoTV For Aiur is a great No Build. Constant reinforcements, epic music, and deathballing
74. Level: LoTV Forbidden Weapon is another variant on the ‘avoid the incoming doom’ mission type, with some great layout and placement and rewards for exploring…
75. Level: …for two positives
76. Level: LoTV Ghosts in the Fog is a simple mission but with good layout and a nice anti vespene gimmick forcing the player to adapt
77. Level: LoTV Harbinger of Oblivion is another incoming doom mission, but the whole time your ally (who is doomed) is supporting and laning alongside you, while the enemy forces focus on you, giving a great dynamic and a lot of choice in the player’s hands for how to progress…
78. Level: …for two positives
79. Level: LoTV Last Stand is, ironically, not their best Hold The Line mission… but it’s a damned good one. Great escalation, objectives that get harder to achieve the longer you sit on them, and a great optional and bonus objective (by which point the enemy is absolutely pounding your base)…
80. Level: …for two positives
81. Level: LoTV Purification is another one of those missions that works precisely because of how much of it sits in the player’s hands. When and how they free the Purifiers, while defending themselves and a vulnerable spot, all while having a great terrain layout to defend from…
82. Level: …for two positives
83. Level: LoTV Rak’Shir is great. The core mission by itself is already a fun gimmick (simply being near Alarak gives him progress, but also vice versa for the enemy) but then you add in the bonus objectives and the map layout encouraging you to expand forward as you go and it rises up even more…
84. Level: …for two positives
85. Level: LoTV Salvation is yet another great Hold The Line, with allies and multiple incoming lanes and pretty much everything All In did back in Wings…
86. Level: …for a full…
87. Level: …three positives
88. Level: LoTV Spear of Adun. Each subsequent unlock escalates the enemy’s response but also grants you more launch points for your gateways (which it also serves as a tutorial for)
89. Level: LoTV Steps of the Rite is a basic but fun expansion and day/night cycle map
90. Level: LoTV Templar’s Charge is honestly just plain fun. You finally get carriers, but you’re on a map with very few mineable resources, but there are resource pockets all over the place, and the enemy mostly just harrasses you meaning it’s primarily about pushing the enemy defenses (which are strongly anti-air)… but then you add in the movable platform (which is just bonkers by itself) that adds a whole layer of utility and defense to the mission and I just love it…
91. Level: …for a full…
92. Level: …three positives
93. Level: LoTV Templar’s Return is a fantastic No Build. First phase is a bit dungeon crawlery, the second phase is very hybrid (builder and puncher), the third is a great rewarding escape sequence, and it’s all with well designed hero units…
94. Level: …for a full…
95. Level: …three positives
96. Level: LoTV Temple of Unification (and co op) isn’t the best, but it and its co-op variant combined are certainly worth a positive
97. Level: LoTV The Host is yet another great finale mission, in the same vein as The Reckoning. Start off on the back foot, but as you push in the enemy gets meaner, buuut you also gain more and more support on your side, and there are lots of resources around to support building whatever you want to…
98. Level: …for a full…
99. Level: …three positives
100. Level: LoTV The Infinite Cycle A competent, varied No Build mission with two greatly designed heroes and some good enemy compositions
101. Level: LoTV Unsealing the Past and a surprisingly competent escort mission
102. Level: Part and Parcel (Co-Op) is a bit irritating and mean, but still great fun and dynamically difficult
103. Level: The Essence of Eternity is everything good about The Dig but even better, with great loadout, the optional sides that assist but also need assistance, good defensive positions, and mean escalation…
104. Level: …for a full…
105. Level: …three positives
106. Level: WoL All In is a fantastic mission, probably the best Hold The Line mission in a long career of fantastic Hold The Lines. The malleability of which version you play, the extra resource of the artifact, the periodic double waves of attacks from all directions, the pressure from Kerrigan herself, the enormous quantity of resources you’re given, it’s just amazing…
107. Level: …for a full…
108. Level: …three positives
109. Level: WoL A Sinister Turn is a very mean, fun pressure mission where you are essentially mandated to constantly expand thanks to low resources while being chain attacked by the Hybrid as well as the enemy forces
110. Level: WoL Belly of the Beast isn’t quite as good as Shatter the Sky but it’s still a competent No Build dungeon crawler with unique heroes and abilities
111. Level: WoL Breakout, actually pretty good for what it is, but a bit overtuned and too much wait time in between waves… still good
112. Level: WoL Cutthroat is a good encourager to roam and explore and gather, with three obvious enemy weakpoints to exploit, and a good switch up for the second half
113. Level: WoL Devil’s Playground, much better minerals mission than the previous one in Brood War. Only source of minerals are down below in the danger area, clear indicators of danger areas and timing, recruitables which are well suited to exploring, lots of resources you can pick up around the map, and if you take too long Tosh will prompt you by showing you where you can mine more…
114. Level: WoL Echoes Of The Future is another fun low-resource go-expand mission designed around the new unit
115. Level: WoL Engine of Destruction is a pretty decent escort mission. You can repair the unit being escorted, they can contribute to combat pretty well, and there’s plenty of resource nodes to grab to help fund your effort
116. Level: WoL Gates of Hell is great stuff. You start off quite well entrenched and with good terrain to be even more entrenched, and the drop pods give you all the forces you really need, and they require you to push through one swarm base and then a much heavier base to reach the objective…
117. Level: …for two positives
118. Level: WoL Ghost of a Chance is a fun No Build where you guide a specialized Raynor group and the hero unit Nova simultaneously
119. Level: WoL Haven’s Fall. Great, gradient mission with lots of enemies that slowly infest nearby settlements, increasing the pressure on you, but also can be saved / destroyed, reducing said pressure…
120. Level: …for two positives
121. Level: WoL In Utter Darkness is another good Blizzard Hold The Line mission, solid layout, good waves, and good reinforcements
122. Level: WoL Maw of the Void introduces us to Battlecruisers but also the annihilation field which slowly damages anything that doesn’t have shields, along with minimal resource spots encouraging us to move forwards
123. Level: WoL Media Blitz is a decent startup, with the surprise attack, followed by a good hold the hill objective
124. Level: WoL Moebius Factor is yet another pressure mission, but with a gradual escalation and a good fortified location, nice ‘routes’ through enemy bases, and lots of pick ups to help your fighting force throughout
125. Level: WoL Outbreak is one of the better missions in the game. The initial build space, the triple vectors of attack (only two of which are open at the start), the radar booster over just the aforementioned openings, the day / night dichotomy, the extra punishing aspect of roaming at night, the extra rewards for doing so at night, and more I’m missing all equal up to three positives…
126. Level: …for a full…
127. Level: …three positives
128. Level: WoL Piercing the Shroud is one of the better No Builds in the game. You start off with a decent force, that can heal, good encounter design throughout, unique ammo pickups and heals you can grab throughout…
129. Level: WoL Safe Haven. While not quite as good as the other version of the colonists mission, is still a good pressure push mission with escalating waves and a ticking block
130. Level: WoL Shatter The Sky is better than I thought at first; it’s a playground mission. You have access to all the units and upgrades that you will get across the campaign, are given multiple enemy bases to knock over, it would suck as a mission if it was a Kill All but instead there’s a load-bearing unit you can carve to and knock out instead, and each enemy base is geared towards different types of defenses…
131. Level: …for two positives
132. Level: WoL Smash And Grab, bit of a MOBA going on up top forming a soft timer while you head east
133. Level: WoL Supernova and the escalating wall of doom is great, with suicidal protoss who will harrass you constantly, lots of pickups and new base spots periodically, no supply line so you don’t even have to worry about it (this alone would have ruined the mission), and sight on the flame line
134. Level: WoL The Dig is a mean mission with escalating incoming attacks, good spread and variety to the enemy outposts, very well entrenched but still assaultable, as well as the controllable super cannon of doom…
135. Level: …for two positives
136. Level: WoL The Evacuation, lots of custom triggers, gradient difficulty and failstate, great escalation
137. Level: WoL The Great Train Robbery, rewarding you for kills (resources), variance in train ‘difficulty’ (escorts and speed), several free Diamondbacks on the map
138. Level: WoL Welcome To The Jungle has some good gradient design and some nice layout and setup
139. Level: WoL Whispers of Doom is a fun No-Build. Zeratul is very strong but still not invincible, enemy and encounter design is very well laid out to require each encounter having its own thought and effort put into the tactics, you gain support units to help, those get additional forces periodically throughout the map, each major checkpoint heals Zeratul, and the final push is a nice reward of you being the spec ops supporting the army…
140. Level: …for two positives
141. Level: WoL Zero Hour. One of the best Hold The Line missions in Blizzard’s catalog, with good timed escalation, resource packs on the field, units to rescue (encouraging you to branch out), and increasing pressure throughout…
142. Level: …for a full…
143. Level: …three positives
144. Level: WoL …and the second half of Piercing the Shroud, which is just as well designed but much more frenetic, as it’s all about just staying ahead of the oncoming monster
145. Level: …for two positives to Devil’s Playground
146. Leveling: Kerrigan’s abilities, talents, all swappable
147. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Periodically at major points in the maps
148. Minigame: Arcade system, selection, and modes…
149. Minigame: …for a full…
150. Minigame: …three positives
151. Minigame: Custom Campaign system, selection, and modes…
152. Minigame: …for two positives
153. Minigame: Lost Vikings is a fun and neat, if lengthy, little side game
154. Minigame: PvP options, modes, tutorials, and tournaments…
155. Minigame: …for a full…
156. Minigame: …three positives
157. Minigame: Skirmish and PvP are balanced completely separately
158. Minigame: Skirmish selections have a whole lot of options and a ton of customization for how to set up a match…
159. Minigame: …for a full…
160. Minigame: …three positives
161. Minimap: Great minimap
162. Mod Depth: The amount of stuff you can do with these custom maps is
163. Mod Depth: …for a full…
164. Mod Depth: …three positives
165. Mod Tools: The game gives you the map editor and fully supports it…
166. Mod Tools: …for a full…
167. Mod Tools: …three positives
168. Mod Ease: Custom maps and modes are easy and quick to load in game…
169. Mod Ease: …for an easy…
170. Mod Ease: …triple positive
171. MSQ: Into The Void gets a bonus positive for just being an amazing mission with amazing scripting and friendly AIs
172. Music: I absolutely love the music in HoTS, what can I say…
173. Music: …for two positives
174. Music: Wings of Liberty…
175. Music: …for two positives
176. Music: Legacy of the Void
177. Options: Not the best, but still very good
178. QoL: As with the Controls thing, I could never sit down and really list the tons of tiny little QoL features all over the place…
179. QoL: …for a full…
180. QoL: …three positives
181. Respec: Protoss unit respecs
182. Respec: Zerg swappable mutations
183. Saves: Good general save system…
184. Saves: …with good quicksave and quickload
185. Saves: Also very good autosave system…
186. Saves: …with good spread and placement of autosaves both in and out of mission…
187. Saves: …and lots of autosave slots
188. Sound Design: General
189. Terrain: WoL Moebius Factor’s terrain really helps with the overall mission design
190. Terrain: WoL Outbreak deserves special mention for really nailing it in the terrain design
191. Terrain: WoL Piercing the Shroud deserves special recognition for its good terrain design and good backtracking
192. Tutorialization: Challenges and related options…
193. Tutorialization: …for two positives
194. Tutorialization: Evolution Missions are simple, short, sweet, and very fun. And, best of all, they tell you exactly how your new units will operate by literally letting you play them yourself…
195. Tutorialization: …for a full…
196. Tutorialization: …three positives
197. Tutorialization: In campaign movies
198. Tutorialization: Lab Rat does a lot to get the player in where they need to be pretty quickly and efficiently
199. Tutorialization: The first three HoTS missions are a bit slow but still decent tutorialization for what it’s like playing the Swarm
200. Tutorialization: Video shorts demonstrating upgrades
201. Unit Design: Abathur isn’t as unique as he could be, but he’s still good
202. Unit Design: Alarak has a lot of options, going tall or wide (or both), and some good new Taldarim units…
203. Unit Design: …for two positives
204. Unit Design: Banelings get their own point for how great they are, both in splitters and in hoppers
205. Unit Design: Carrier line is so close to being fantastic. Carriers are support, as they arguably always should have been, Tempests are flying artillery, and Arbiters… are there
206. Unit Design: Colossus is another excellently designed unit. Great shredding, Reavers are finally what they always should have been, and the artillery Colossi are just death…
207. Unit Design: …for two positives
208. Unit Design: Co-Op Artanis, pretty much the same idea for Protoss that the other basic Commanders get
209. Unit Design: Co-Op Kerrigan, more variances and a strong, rapid-fire hero unit
210. Unit Design: Co-Op Mode Raynor, with the variances on abilities, and of course the Top Bar
211. Unit Design: Corsair/Phoenixes are a better Scout, speed and agility and abilities to either avoid damage, nullify enemies, or just blanket ground forces
212. Unit Design: Dark Templar are much better than last time, either serving as a nice AOE shredder, survivability, or more micro options with the Hunters
213. Unit Design: Dehaka, builds! There’s so many different ways to build up Dehaka’s side
214. Unit Design: Dehaka, himself is a great hero unit, one of the better ones (if not the best)
215. Unit Design: Dehaka, Top bar and their incredible usage
216. Unit Design: Dehaka, Unit spreading, charges, and uprooted buildings
217. Unit Design: Dehaka in general is amazing, as a faction I mean
218. Unit Design: Fenix, Fenix swapping and how beautifully it works with itself
219. Unit Design: Fenix, Generally one of the best designed Commanders, extremely unique and well put together…
220. Unit Design: …for two positives
221. Unit Design: Fenix, Hero swapping and encouraging the player to diversify their units
222. Unit Design: Fenix: Omni-directional tech tree, thanks to being able to build without prerequisites
223. Unit Design: Han & Horner aren’t my thing, but they are a very well designed mix and match of subversive and direct units, which complement each other nicely…
224. Unit Design: …for a full…
225. Unit Design: …three positives
226. Unit Design: Hydralisks. They continue the trend of good medium range fun
227. Unit Design: Hydralisks also get a second positive for their upgrades being massive alterations to the base formula, essentially new units
228. Unit Design: Immortals. Inverse Siege Tanks, which can either have more damage (and an ability to hit air) or a nice long range artillery of death
229. Unit Design: Infestors are just a super fun, versatile caster unit
230. Unit Design: Karax (turrets for days, strong and expensive units… super protoss)…
231. Unit Design: …for two positives
232. Unit Design: Mengsk, elite units, and the core force pushing forward
233. Unit Design: Mengsk, Generally great design, one of the best Commanders
234. Unit Design: Mengsk, trash units and their use as a screen or swarm
235. Unit Design: Mengsk (top bar and general)
236. Unit Design: Mutalisks and both upgrades are still good stuff
237. Unit Design: Nova is one of the better designed Commanders, with a lot of her kit relying on a ton of money to compensate for both their ability and relatively small size, and some fantastic utility in her top bar…
238. Unit Design: …for a full…
239. Unit Design: …three positives
240. Unit Design: Protoss multi-track swappable upgrades
241. Unit Design: Roaches are weirdly useful despite their simple design; anti ground with either a slow or a multiplier, and all being at a good price
242. Unit Design: Stetmann isn’t as different as some of the others (mostly a basic Zerg faction) but his style is unique and his top bar is awesome
243. Unit Design: Stukov. What can I say. The way his units spawn, the way you can support them, his custom bunkers, his elite infested units, his top bar, the incredible QoL of controlling his units, the auto creep spreading, it’s all so fantastic…
244. Unit Design: …for an absolutely bonkers…
245. Unit Design: …three positives
246. Unit Design: Stukov gets a bonus positive for sheer fun and viscerality
247. Unit Design: Swann, with heavy vehicular focus, new tech trees, and differing playstyle…
248. Unit Design: …for two positives
249. Unit Design: The multi-track upgrades and general kit of the units
250. Unit Design: The Stalkers/Dragoons are another well designed unit. Stalkers with their useful micro, Dragoons which are exactly what they always should have been, and Adepts which serve as good support…
251. Unit Design: …for two positives
252. Unit Design: Tychus, Generally fantastic design
253. Unit Design: Tychus, Incredibly good Hero design…
254. Unit Design: …for a full…
255. Unit Design: …three positives
256. Unit Design: Tychus, QoL features
257. Unit Design: Tychus, Upgrades and cost
258. Unit Design: Ultralisks are honestly fantastic this time around, finally fixing their issues (range, pathfinding, cost), the only thing keeping them from multiple positives is how little time you get with them
259. Unit Design: Vorazun and the total shift towards Dark Templar and related units and abilities…
260. Unit Design: …for two positives
261. Unit Design: WoL Battlecruisers are even better than before
262. Unit Design: WoL Goliaths are finally the useful awesomes they were always meant to be; great anti air support and no asterisks making them worse
263. Unit Design: WoL Marines continue to be as well designed as they ever were; Good upgrades, good synergies, useful throughout the entire campaign
264. Unit Design: WoL Medics similarly never stop being useful as long as you keep infantry-balling
265. Unit Design: WoL Medivac is a great transport healer combo
266. Unit Design: WoL Movable Buildings continues to be useful and change how Terrans build
267. Unit Design: WoL Raven is a great caster, with lots of options and support
268. Unit Design: WoL Reactor/Tech Lab by itself really changes how you build what
269. Unit Design: WoL Reapers aren’t my cup of tea, but are very fast and mobile scouts with good skirmish and harrassment possibility
270. Unit Design: WoL Siege Tanks are still fantastic. Semi fast, artillery mode, good support, indicators on range, great upgrades reducing negatives, not super strong but also not super expensive…
271. Unit Design: …for two positives
272. Unit Design: WoL Spectre/Ghost continues its role as the support infiltrator
273. Unit Design: WoL Vikings are good hole-fillers given their adaptability and great anti air support
274. Unit Design: Zagara and her heavy emphasis on mulching units and low pop with a hero…
275. Unit Design: …for two positives
276. Unit Design: Zealots are nicely rounded out this time, with either the AOE shredding, charging and stunning, or the revive protocol (which benefits from the mechanical heal beam)
277. Unit Design: Zeratul. No supply or pylons needed, but also a great spread of units, but also no teching to speak of except in gaining artifacts, and also the entire artifact mechanic, and finally his fantastic selectable top bar…
278. Unit Design: …for a full…
279. Unit Design: …three positives
280. Unit Design: Bonus point for Zeratul
281. Unit Design: Zerglings are, for once, useful all the way through the campaign, with two great mutations
282. Viscerality: The game oozes viscerality, in all three categories…
283. Viscerality: …for a full…
284. Viscerality: …three positives
285. Level: Nova, The Escape is a very, very good No Build followed immediately followed by a fun sidescroller shoot’em up…
286. Level: …for a full…
287. Level: …three positives
288. Level: Nova, Sudden Strike is a basic, brutal, competent but fun hold the line mission
289. Level: Nova, Enemy Intelligence starts off as a basic but good hold the line with the bonus of the garrisons helping to both deal with escalation and ease the pressure… then the second half of the mission becomes a very fun stealth focused No Build…
290. Level: …for a full…
291. Level: …three positives
292. Builds: Nova equipment load out
293. Level: Nova, Trouble In Paradise is another basic but well designed ‘player controls the intensity of the mission’ gradient pressure
294. Level: Nova, Night Terrors is a good ‘player choice’ mission
295. Level: Nova, Flashpoint is bonkers good. Starts as a simple hold mission, but quickly develops as you decide which enemies you fight where, deciding your own difficulty and giving you options for how to deal with what, while also slowly escalating the attacks on you and expanding the map, all with the subway tunnel mechanic on top of it…
296. Level: …for a full…
297. Level: …three positives
298. Level: Nova, In The Enemy’s Shadow is absolutely brilliantly constructed mission. It’s a stealth / freeform game, straight out of Thief or Dishonored, that has the ability to change your loadout in the mission, and tons upon tons of options for how to progress…
299. Level: …for a full…
300. Level: …three positives
301. Terrain: Nova, In The Enemy’s Shadow has just brilliant terrain design to encourage routes
302. Encounter: Nova, In The Enemy’s Shadow also has great encounter and boss design
303. Level: Nova, Dark Skies is yet another fantastic Hold The Line, with allies, lane clearers, and access to a teleporting force, alongside the subway transportation network…
304. Level: …for a full…
305. Level: …three positives
306. Level: Nova, End Game is, once again, a fantastic mission. Enemy comes out with a few turrets on the mech which are vulnerable and able to be destroyed, in whatever order you want to, but each time she comes out she comes out with another turret active, also with the Hyperion supporting pushes periodically, while getting hit every now and again, with a lot of gradient defense spots…
307. Level: …for a full…
308. Level: …three positives
309. Core Mechanic: Food / supply dynamic, same as in Starcraft 1
310. Core Mechanic: Standard / rare resource distribution of costs
311. Core Mechanic: Pathfinding is, frankly, the best in the business. Seriously, the actual best ever, not just in general but in how units maneuver around each other…
312. Core Mechanic: …for a full…
313. Core Mechanic: …three positives
314. Enemy AI: Best in the business. It’s hard to even put into words exactly how fantastic this AI is, so instead I’ll…
315. Enemy AI: …for a full…
316. Enemy AI: …three positives
317. Replayability: Very, very replayable…
318. Replayability: …with lots of options and variances in gameplay to replay
319. Visual Distinction: With very few exceptions you can tell exactly what you’re looking at, especially in usage of colors…
320. Visual Distinction: …for a full…
321. Visual Distinction: …three positives

Gameplay Negatives:

1. DRM: Always Online…
2. DRM: …for two negatives
3. MTX: In game store
4. Co-Op: Several over-tuned, binary difficulty maps in Co-Op mode
5. Audio Spam: Co-Op mode specifically
6. Co-Op: Level irritations in general
7. NG+: Per-Campaign Chapter Select
8. Bug: Resolution and letterbox bugs
9. Options: Lack of proper resolution options and scaling
10. Respec: Total lack of respec on Wings of Liberty campaign with regards to purchasing options
11. Difficulty Options: As very well as they are designed, the jump between Normal and Hard in WoL is just way too big
12. Unit Design: Diamondback
13. Integration: Usual Blizzard issues
14. Audio Spam: Mostly on mono-unit missions
15. Walkthroughitis: Good luck finding that optional mission objective on your own
16. Audio Spam: Shut UP Izsha, Christ stop over-tutorializing in literally the final mission
17. Launch: Some usual Blizzard ‘too many users’ launch issues
18. Kit: Removing the ability to choose your units, upgrades, and layout in the Epilogue…
19. Kit: …is a weird, awful irritation in the final minute

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Let’s get this out of the way; the Brickwork in this game is bonkers good. So we’re going to be giving points for the style and artwork and detail and general quality of the field zones…
2. Brickwork: …which get their own double. I’m especially fond of the flowers in the foreground
3. Brickwork: The caves. I’ve often said that the measure of truly good art design is making a cave look good because… I mean it’s a cave. What’s good about it? Dirt and rocks? But really creative people will make these look amazing…
4. Brickwork: …and Yoshi’s Island…
5. Brickwork: …comes through in spades
6. Brickwork: The castles! I love how vaguely cartooney they look too…
7. Brickwork: …while maintaining an air of semi seriousness
8. Brickwork: There’s another castle styled tileset, like in 1-8, which works great as a sewer or fortress area
9. Brickwork: By world 2 we start to see chalk drawings and other additional details, such as crystals in the caves or flowers and bushes in the fields
10. Brickwork: Yet another castle type, as shown in 3-4, this one’s more like a marble manor in the jungle. Which is appropriate
11. Brickwork: Considering the jungle itself, which looks great by the way. Great usage of trees and vines and swamp and water…
12. Brickwork: …another double
13. Brickwork: World 5 brings the snowy biome and can I just say I adore this. Seriously, this entire tileset is fantastic. The trees have just the right depth to them, the snow is light and poofy, the snowfall is great (and varies in intensity!)…
14. Brickwork: …it’s all…
15. Brickwork: …great stuff
16. Brickwork: So the sky and mountain kind of go hand in hand but they do some fun stuff with these
17. Brickwork: And of course there’s the final world. The Dark World I suppose? Or Dark Land if we’re going by Mario 3. Anyways! This is great of course, between the more barrens look (totally contrasting Yoshi’s Island’s lush areas), more barren grey buildings, and of course lava…
18. Brickwork: …another solid biome
19. Visual Continuity: Overworld map and progression in later worlds. It’s not much but I love watching us slowly navigate the island
20. Visual Storytelling: Across the island, really, but most noticeable in Worlds 4 and 5
21. Architecture: Further, everything about the fortresses, islands, and layouts of the stages does a great job of making you feel that, even though it’s heavily stylized, each of these is an actual place on the island…
22. Architecture: …really great stuff
23. Animations: Some amazing animations throughout, selling the tone and vibe…
24. Animations: …for two positives
25. Atmosphere: This is a weird one, but between the visuals and the relay mechanic (the ‘team effort’), the game has a solid atmosphere
26. Atmosphere: Also a general fun vibe positive
27. Brickwork: General visuals of weather, lighting, etc.
28. Intro: Love the storybook approach to setting up the premise
29. Spritework: Yoshi themselves are just bonkers good…
30. Spritework: …for…
31. Spritework: …three positives
32. Spritework: Enemies. So, so many extremely well designed enemies…
33. Spritework: …for a full…
34. Spritework: …three positives
35. Spritework: Aaand bosses. Creative, fun, interesting, great…
36. Spritework: …for two positives

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty: Gradient health, regenerating health, and malleability in said health
2. Difficulty: Gradient difficulty via the design of making the optional collectibles naturally increase the difficulty of levels. I feel like this needs to be properly emphasized because this is an absolutely brilliant approach to difficulty options. Because the game has a very smooth curve of difficulty depending entirely how much you’re doing and how much you care to do…
3. Difficulty: …great stuff, and one of the better implementations of this system I’ve ever seen…
4. Difficulty: …earning that triple
5. Controls: Game controls extraordinarily well…
6. Controls: …for two positives
7. Intro: Tutorial and 1-1 do the usual good setup stuff
8. Music: Lots of good music…
9. Music: …but some occasional fire songs
10. Sound Design: Absolutely amazing sound design which helps indicate basically every layer and aspect of the game…
11. Sound Design: …for a full…
12. Sound Design: …three positives
13. Enemy Variety: Absolutely great enemy variety throughout, with great designs on top of it…
14. Enemy Variety: …for a full…
15. Enemy Variety: …three positives
16. Mid-Mission Checkpointing: Some really good, well thought out checkpointing throughout…
17. Mid-Mission Checkpointing: …for two positives
18. Core Mechanic: Safety net mechanisms in lives, recover Mario mechanics, and stage layout
19. Difficulty Curve: The game has a nice, smooth, consistent curve upwards in difficulty all the way through World 6…
20. Difficulty Curve: …for two positives
21. Guidance And Flow: The usual approach, but given the design around collecting and the re-play approach they do some really good stuff with it this time around…
22. Guidance And Flow: …for two positives
23. Pacing: Lots of variety and different flow to the pacing, making the whole game just move perfectly…
24. Pacing: …for two positives
25. Terrain: Absolutely excellent terrain design across the entire game…
26. Terrain: …for a full…
27. Terrain: …three positives
28. Tutorialization: As per Mario usual, the game tutorializes pretty much all the way through the game…
29. Tutorialization: …for two positives
30. Visual Distinction: Good general distinction
31. Kit: General, but also the cards you can use mid mission
32. Kit: Yoshi’s signature ground pound and egg throwing plus the flutter hover. I should mention that the skill ceiling in this game is crazy high and while that’s awesome so much of it is so far beyond what was clearly intended by the devs that I’m not going to count it as positives
33. Level: 1-1 (Make Eggs, Throw Eggs) is, as tends to be the norm for mainline Mario games, a great tutorial level. Enemies you need to bypass with eggs and cannot find any other way around, lots of things to unlock, stuff like that
34. Level: 1-2 (Watch Out Below!) and the usage of background/foreground along with changeable terrain with the Chomps flying at you
35. Level: 1-3 (The Cave Of Chomp Rock) introduces the titular rock and how to use it to progress. It can be a platform, break things, and break enemies. And you can physics yourself all over it
36. Level: 1-4 (Burt The Bashful’s Fort) and really introducing the Castle concept as well as more fun usage of the terrain with falling sections of the wall, plenty of seesaw platforms, and lots and lots of lava
37. Level: 1-5 (Hop! Hop! Donut Lifts) is our first autoscroller, though it’s mostly about temporary platforms (some that rotate independent of you, some that you cycle forward, and some that fall if you stand on them too long)
38. Level: 1-6 (Shy-Guys On Stilts) is… well I mean most of these level names are pretty accurate. We play with layers in the floors, diggable terrain, shortcuts, and bouncing pads
39. Level: 1-7 (Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy) and the amazing terrain and control manipulation. The Fuzzies themselves are of course the star of the level, but there’s a ton of creative stuff going on here with pliable platforms, diggable terrain (again), and great enemy placement…
40. Level: …easy double
41. Level: 1-8 (Salvo the Slime’s Castle) and even more cool gimmicks and platforming. Using the slimes or water jets as platforms, lots of opportunities for ricochet shots thanks to the level layout, flippable platforms, good stuff
42. Boss: World 1 in general. Burt the Bashful is fine, nothing really wrong with him. He’s more of a final exam for ‘you’ve figured out how to throw eggs now right?’ than anything else, and does a good job as it. And Salvo the Slime is the ‘okay you can throw eggs, now can you ricochet them?’ exam
43. Level: 2-1 (Visit Koopa And Para-Koopa) is when we introduce the koopas to the mix. They’re interesting beyond nostalgia because they can’t be eaten like normal enemies, meaning you have to deal with them differently. This level also shows us Poochy for some spike shenanigans, and a deceptively hard segment where platforms slowly fall while you have to avoid them all. All in all a really solid level…
44. Level: …for another double
45. Level: 2-2 (The Baseball Boys) introduces enemies that start using your eggs against you. Which then immediately turns into you using your eggs against them against you in order to get optional stuff and bypass certain puzzles. And all of this leads to a nice segment with thief mice (they steal from you, as the name implies) and Frost Watermelon to give you a chance to give them what-for
46. Level: 2-3 (What’s Gusty Taste Like?) has tons (and I mean TONS) of these stupid Gusties all over the place. It’s an interesting obstacle because you can eat them so you have options but they are just everywhere. This then leads into an extended underground sequence with switches, terrain, and great enemy placement…
47. Level: …solid double
48. Level: 2-4 (Bigger Boo’s Fort) and some very inventive platforming and looping stage design. Seriously I love how you do the different ‘routes’ through the same room (while dodging Boos of course)
49. Level: 2-5 (Watch Out For Lakitu) and the very optional breakable terrain, extended train sequences, and of course the titular Lakitu who flings you ammunition… er I mean enemies
50. Level: 2-6 (The Cave Of The Mystery Maze) and the pseudo maze and explorable fun. It’s a relatively small level but thanks to its smart layout there’s a couple of ways through it in a couple of orders and, as with 2-4, you’ll be going back through different parts of the same room periodically
51. Level: 2-7 (Lakitu’s Wall) introduces static Lakitus. This is weird, but they compensate for their lack of mobility by their being approximately fifty billion of them. There’s ALSO Bullet Bills, falling platforms, pound pillars, and an extended and very fun racecar section…
52. Level: …a solid double
53. Level: 2-8 (The Potted Ghost’s Castle) and a lot of fun maze ghost platforming fun. Platforms on tracks over lava, platforms on temporary tracks over lava, the movable circular platforms that fly in the direction indicated which is just such a cool idea, the Shy Guys flinging bombs at you but in a way you can see coming so you have full awareness of when and where they’ll hit, the sewers mini maze with rewarding side areas, even MORE of the circle arrow block…
54. Level: …this is a great stage
55. Boss: World 2 in general. Bigger Boo isn’t much (if anything he’s a repeat of Burt The Bashful except inverted), and The Potted Ghost involves shoving him off the ledge
56. Level: 3-1 (Welcome To Monkey World!) starts using slanted terrain a bunch as well as monkeys absolutely everywhere, the non lethal swamp water, a bunch of verticality, and naturally the best weapon in the game… the Watermelon. No seriously this thing is a friggin’ machine gun and I love it
57. Level: 3-2 (Jungle Rhythm…) introduces the dancing Shy Guys with variable attack height along with having to carefully plan out jumps in advance
58. Level: 3-3 (Nep-Enut’s Domain) and just a huge variety of challenges. Small platforms, monkeys, the big guy himself, the mud slides, the entire helicopter segment, the submarine segment, careful placement of enemies along cross-sections of jump through platforms…
59. Level: …and you have a great stage
60. Level: 3-4 (Prince Froggy’s Fort) and a ton of fun, mean, spike-related problems. Underwater spikes, spikes you need to build platforms over, a pushable ferris wheel across a water segment with more SHy Guy bombers, tight corridors with crabs that get in the way, ANOTHER pushable ferris wheel across spikes…
61. Level: …great stuff
62. Boss: 3-4 (Froggy) by itself is a very inventive, fun, unique fight with a lot going on for how simple it is
63. Level: 3-5 (Jammin’ Through The Trees) is an interesting one. It’s like the earlier 3-1 but this time with way better (and harder) terrain design, requiring you to navigate carefully, destroy your way forward, and all the while bypassing or dealing with enemies everywhere
64. Level: 3-6 (The Cave Of Harry Hedgehog) has an interesting open area segment which you’re supposed to use the vehicle on, as well as navigate up and down around the area to grab everything
65. Level: 3-7 (Monkey’s Favorite Lake) is another of those non lethal water levels, this time crammed with swinging monkeys and more Shy Guys on stilts. Add in a bunch of smart platforming and enemy placement (including the fake sunflowers) and some peekaboo fish and we’re gold
66. Level: 3-8 (Naval Piranha’s Castle) is definitely a continuation of the themes introduced in the last sewer level; Angled shots. The ENTIRE stage is all about making shots under, around, and over things using the angles to manage it, and they’re super clever with it on top of the general ‘maze’ theme of most of it…
67. Level: …easy double
68. Boss: 3-8 (Piranha) is skippable, fun, and plays with the mechanics introduced in the previous stage
69. Level: 4-1 (GO! GO! MARIO!!) isn’t just nostalgia, but has some solid enemy placement and stage layout designed to be played with. The whole stage wants you to run through it full tilt and every enemy, platform, and even the Fuzzies are designed in a way to keep you zooming through it…
70. Level: …another double
71. Level: 4-2 (The Cave Of The Lakitus) is a fun, looping, dense cave filled with those turret Lakitus again, more smart backtracking, and some great encouragement to use the Koopa shells with the terrain
72. Level: 4-3 (Don’t Look Back!) is probably the official moment when the gloves come off. Almost every platform in the major segments is temporary, meaning if you make a mistake you’re probably dead. Furthermore in most parts of the level you can’t backtrack to try again. Still, the placement and arcs in question are fun and fair
73. Level: 4-4 (Marching Milde’s Fort) is one of the better levels this early on, with multiple themes and rooms and routes. You start off in a ‘hub’ style area and have to hit four nearby micro stages to get keys, which lead you back to the hub. Each micro stage has its own theme (which is visible in the preview leading to it). So we have four distinct themes in the same stage, good peeking…
74. Level: …I think this is our first solid…
75. Level: …triple stage
76. Level: 4-5 (Chomp Rock Zone) and how to properly do an escort quest. So what we’re escorting is the Rock (this is a development of the theme all the way back in World 1 where they introduced the rock) which, per my earlier statement, is helpful both for platforming and for enemy removal. The entire stage is designed around this, for a short but sweet romp
77. Level: 4-6 (Lake Shore Paradise) and lots of side areas and exploration. Seriously this might as well be an open world zone for how huge it is and how much stuff there is to do in most of its cells. I’m also very fond of the continued usage of water as more of a tool than an obstacle
78. Level: 4-7 (Ride Like The Wind) is great. Moving platforms is nothing new but these are super fast, and that also comes with super momentum. Tests your reflexes and rewards you for thinking creatively
79. Level: 4-8 (Hookbill the Koopa’s Castle) is a great vertical climb. Breakable spikes, those wonderful rotating arrow platforms, lots of smart curved terrain going up…
80. Level: …solid double
81. Boss: 4-8 (Koopa) is a relatively simple but very enjoyable, visceral fight up in the clouds
82. Level: 5-1 (BLIZZARD!!!) is when the stage design really starts to come into its own, combining themes, visuals, enemies, and difficulty. The rocks working against us, bouncey enemies that interrupt jump arcs, icy segments to help bypass stalactites, snowy hills…
83. Level: …easy double
84. Level: 5-2 (Ride The Ski Lifts) is a seeming breather level but no, this level is mean as hell, but between the snow, the lifts, and the bouncers. There are some very long, very mean jumps here and the enemies are very precisely placed to interrupt every single one of them. This stage is very well designed…
85. Level: …so we’ll call this…
86. Level: …a triple
87. Level: 5-3 (Danger – Icy Conditions Ahead) is super creative. Lots of ice (of course), some of which you can burn to melt, some of which you have to, all while dealing with bouncey penguins you can’t eat normally, culminating in a super fun skiing segment which rewards reflexes and paying attention and is just generally fun…
88. Level: …call it another…
89. Level: …triple
90. Level: 5-4 (Sluggy the Unshaven’s Fort) is another pseudo maze with lots of potential ways to deal with individual puzzles, tons of ‘make your own way’ platform breaking and generating, the squish / squeeze platforms (pretty sure those are new), an extended pseudo autoscroller (with arrows to prevent Gotcha!ing)…
91. Level: …another solid stage
92. Boss: 5-4 (Sluggy) is very unique; no damage, and a refill, but a sort of slow enrage because he WILL push you off if you take too long
93. Level: 5-5 (Goonie Rides!) continues rewarding gradient design in platforming as well as giving us tons of Goonies to play with. Obviously these are mostly enemies but some can also serve as aids. Couple this with a helicopter segment, a huge timed platform section with switches, and you have…
94. Level: …another solid stage
95. Level: 5-6 (Welcome To Cloud World) is absolutely brutal but in a very fun way, and I love the escalation and jumping arcs. We start with an autoscroller, multiple types of Shy Guys, those great boomerang birds that replace your eggs with… y’know, boomerang birds. I don’t know what they’re called don’t ask me. (Okay I paused in typing this up and looked it up, they’re called Huffin Puffins. Seriously) Combine with Lakitus, Gusties, and using enemies as a way to hit switches and you have…
96. Level: …a solid stage
97. Level: 5-7 (Shifting Platforms Ahead) is just going hog on the ‘platforms on tracks’ theme. There’s slow ones, fast ones, ones that terminate, ones that loop, all alongside those blocks that start falling as soon as you touch them. Meaning the entire stage rewards timing, speed, and reflexes…
98. Level: …great stuff
99. Level: 5-8 (Raphael the Raven’s Castle) is one of my favorite stages in the game. We start off on the underside of a floating castle of some kind, having to constantly climb up and up while dealing with cannons, Shy Guys, rotating platforms, those circle arrow movable platforms, an entire train section, TONS of smart enemy usage…
100. Level: …easy double
101. Boss: 5-8, Raphael the Raven, is easily the best boss in the game, very unique, creative, and most importantly of all… fun…
102. Boss: …for two positives. I honestly wanted to give a third but couldn’t, in fairness, do so because it’s just too simple and short for what it’s going for. I tend to sit here and just enjoy the fight for a bit before defeating it because, y’know, I want to
103. Level: 6-1 (Scary Skeleton Goonies!) feels like a final stage, an exam for all the concepts to date. Spikes, enemies, Chomps flying at you, bottomless pits, push blocks, goonies, tiny platforms with enemies on them that you can’t defeat traditionally and therefore need to avoid or knock off…
104. Level: …fun stuff
105. Level: 6-2 (The Cave Of The Bandits) is absolutely what this kind of difficulty should be, brutal but with recovery, and all leaning on the player. We get hit with a bandit almost immediately, and get introduced to the more subtle type of lava (let’s call it Surface Lava, where it’s just kind of hanging out there on the surface). Follow this up with a mean enemy spam section, and finish up with an entire swath of spikes that have to be invincibled across…
106. Level: …and you get a solid double
107. Level: 6-3 (Beware The Spinning Logs) may be as close as we get to a level negative. These logs really physics badly, and combine that with lots of tight platforming, magma enemies that interrupt jump arcs, and some friggin’ Fuzzies… but no it’s still good. Amusingly the shortness of the stage works in its favor
108. Level: 6-4 (Tap-Tap The Red Nose’s Fort) is a very fun pseudo maze with multiple branches and fun minibosses. The multiple floors of the pipe area, the usage of the Tap Taps and the Shy Guys, the mice which just want to rob you blind, the corner shots the terrain wants you to do, and of course the ferris wheel you push across the rolling lava (and the tiny wooden platform!) make…
109. Level: …for two positives
110. Boss: 6-4, Tap-Tap, is honestly a very fun iteration on the Mario 3 Bowser fight. You break platforms so he falls into the lava, but of course those are the same platforms YOU are standing on. Have fun!
111. Level: 6-6 (The Deep, Underground Maze) is exactly what it says on the tin. A huge maze with tons of different themes, enemies, and obstacles (so many I feel silly even trying to categorize all of it). There’s a lot of smart backtracking here, your route can change based on your skill level, and the whole time there’s plenty of recovery all over the place…
112. Level: …another solid double
113. Level: 6-7 (KEEP MOVING!!!!) is my favorite stage in the game, bar none. First we race away from a massive Chomp, then we have track platforms, then rotators with momentum, then more temporary platforms, then fast track platforms, and the whole while if we stop we’re screwed. Sometimes it slows down to give you a chance to breathe, sometimes it speeds up to force you to use reflexes (or memorization), but in all cases it’s simultaneously brutal and fair…
114. Level: …an easy…
115. Level: …triple
116. Outro: Level: 6-8 (King Bowser’s Castle) starts off simple, but where it shines is the randomness. I think I mentioned this on camera but it’s a development of the themes of Mario World’s final stage and castles in general. We start off picking a more or less random door with its own themes, then have a slow autoscroller while Kamek flings beams at us which hits the terrain and turns it into random enemies
117. Outro: Boss: Fantastic and fun final boss fight. And I LOVE that song. The only reason I’m not giving it more positives is the aiming is super finicky and comes out of nowhere (nothing in the game really properly tutorializes this type of arc). Could be a lot worse though. The game is more than fair about giving you opportunities to smack his big head, especially as he gets closer, and those eggs spawn the instant you need them
118. Level: 6-E is a nice thematic finale type stage at the end of everything
119. Replayability: Yeah this is a fun one to replay

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Raspberry Jam: Mario crying
2. Padding: The fact that collectibles have to be gathered in one run and then the level beaten
3. Level: 6-5 is long, boring, and padded… and worst of all, no mid mission checkpoints across the bad part

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Crateria. The thunderstorm, the cracked ruins of Tourian from Metroid 1, and the cold caves formerly known as Brinstar
2. Brickwork: Ceres Station. While brief, it can’t be underestimated how much this segment does visually to set the scene of the empty but mostly pristine station… which quickly turns into the bloodsoaked station, and finally the about to explode station
3. Brickwork: Brinstar 1. The green, the lush vines and plants everywhere, the platforms jutting out of the foliage
4. Brickwork: Brinstar 2. The spores, the deep red thrumming, the brilliant more mechanized look
5. Brickwork: Norfair 1. The rocky crags, cold facilities
6. Brickwork: Norfair 2. This is wild… there’s so many different tilesets and biomes here I can’t even summarize, such that I will simply give this and Norfair 3 their own…
7. Brickwork: …double positives
8. Brickwork: The Wrecked Ship. God I love how this place looks. It looks like someplace that’s lain dormant in a swamp for ages, and that works great, especially since it has
9. Brickwork: Maridia 1. I love this place; the sandy dunes, the chunks of the Pirate Mother Ship jutting out of the swamp
10. Brickwork: Maridia 2 is even better, showcasing the interior of the ship long since dragged below the water
11. Brickwork: Ridley’s Lair. The molten, heat-infused hellscape absolutely littered with Chozo designs
12. Brickwork: New Tourian. Cold, clean, and new; the only place in the game that gives off that clinical vibe
13. Architecture: As with most of the great Metroidvanias, a lot of work is done to make each of these areas feel like fully fleshed out, developed areas. Brinstar feels like a vast underground field, the Wrecked Ship feels like a huge frigate, Norfair is littered with enough ruins and columns that you can see how it was once a city, et cetera…
14. Architecture: …for a solid double
15. Spritework: Samus. There’s slightly better sprites for her, but not by much, she has such a huge range of motion and design…
16. Spritework: …that she earns two positives
17. Spritework: Enemies. The sheer variety and design to the dozens of enemies in this game is bonkers…
18. Spritework: …easily earning two positives
19. Spritework: Bosses! They may have issues gameplay wise, but they look awesome…
20. Spritework: …easily earning two positives
21. Cutscene: Opening scrawl. The narration, the summary of the previous two games, and the build up
22. Intro: The tempo, the tone, the quiet walk through the dead facility, followed immediately by the unlosable fight with Ridley and the exceptionally intense and escalating escape from the self destructing station…
23. Intro: …for a full…
24. Intro: …three positives
25. Atmosphere: The entire opening segment oozes it
26. Pacing: I love the variance. We start ruminating, we shift to gloom and doom, excitement and action, followed by another ‘dead’ segment of empty abandonment, and then the slow lift into Brinstar 1
27. MSQ: Sporespawn. The music is perfect, the slow creeping dread of this surreal monster just… moving, as if you’re not even there, but still trying to kill you
28. MSQ: The build up to Kraid. Callbacks, visuals, corpses, audio
29. Moment: Kraid. I’m sorry, this moment is awesome, even if you never played 1. Just riiising up from the depths, as this bombastic music plays
30. Moment: Poor Crocomire. The death is already horrible, the return even more so
31. Music Direction: Lower Brinstar. Good lord, Lower Brinstar. This music really, really sells the area
32. Music Direction: Gloomy sequences in general. There’s so much atmospheric music that helps with the calmer scenes
33. Music Direction: Uplifting sequences. There’s a weirdly large amount of music that helps sell the ‘breather’ moments where things aren’t dreadful
34. Music Direction: The Wrecked Ship. This deserves its own mention for being goddamned horrifying in all the right ways
35. Atmosphere: The Wrecked Ship. Jesus this place is horrifying. Empty, rotting, but occasionally skulls pop out… yay
36. Sound Design: The Wrecked Ship. The haunting echoes and screams of the ‘enemy’
37. MSQ: The Wrecked Ship, Phantoon, and then the powered up Wrecked Ship
38. Atmosphere: New Tourian in general. This place feels so pristine and clinical in the otherwise very organic and natural Zebes
39. Moment: The reveal of the baby… and it backing off upon noticing who we are
40. Moment: The reveal of the Mother Brain is one hell of a moment
41. External Continuity: To 1 and 2, obviously
42. Cutscene: The Baby… this is still probably the second best single scene in the franchise. Swooping in to save us at the last second, the Mother Brain losing control and attacking her meal ticket…
43. Cutscene: …the Baby reeling to fight her back…
44. Cutscene: …and that horrible death wail as the Baby is killed, leading immediately into…
45. Moment: …the Hyperbeam Moment
46. Outro: The final destruction of the pirates, the Mother Brain, and the escape
47. Outro: The destruction of the planet is really well done, especially for the time
48. Atmosphere: General. The whole game oozes it from every screen and every second…
49. Atmosphere: …easily earning…
50. Atmosphere: …triple positives
51. Animation: Really solid stuff, mostly in Samus herself but still
52. Lighting: Especially in some of the lower depths and darker regions
53. Visual Storytelling: Everywhere. So many small details I couldn’t possibly list them all. The dead soldier by Kraid’s lair, the broken glass, the Wrecked Ship in its entirety…
54. Visual Storytelling: …all earning…
55. Visual Storytelling: …triple positives
56. Moment: The broken Hatchling container right past Ridley. This moment catches me everytime I see it, and it’s near perfect; the music, the sound, the empty shattered glass. This is wonderful visual storytelling and says and does so much without a word…
57. Moment: …earning two positives

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Info In Game: The opening demo actually does a lot to really help guide the player in what they can do and where
2. Controls: The game controls exceptionally well. It has several hiccups (listed in the negatives) but the rest of it is smooth as butter…
3. Controls: …earning a solid…
4. Controls: …triple positives
5. Controls: Rebinds. This game, from 1994, lets you rebind controls. No excuses, modern games
6. Intro: Ceres Station. Levels designed to tutorialize movement and jumping, the Ridley fight encouraging you to aim upwards (but not penalizing you too hard if you don’t), and the escape sequence slowing you down BUT not actually doing damage…
7. Intro: …for a full…
8. Intro: …three positives
9. Intro: The initial ‘brinstar’ segment, the fully safe tutorial zone. How to jump, shoot, grab power ups, and break open missile doors
10. Map: Honestly the same high quality map we’ve seen in several Metroids before now…
11. Map: …with the usual indication and helpfulness thereof
12. Minimap: And of course the minimap works quite well as well
13. HUD: Simple, but solid
14. Itemization: Reserve tanks. These are hard to explain but they’re a great idea; one last emergency reserve that helps with the flow of combat
15. Itemization: Drops. This game introduced dynamic drops, and also the drops themselves are very well designed in general to reduce padding and grind…
16. Itemization: …earning a solid…
17. Itemization: …triple positive
18. Itemization: Spacing. The actual upgrades are well paced and well positioned
19. Terrain: Absolutely excellent terrain design. The best singular example I can give is the ‘down right’ of Brinstar 1 and 2 which itself is then played with to encourage the player to backtrack and explore…
20. Terrain: …easily earning…
21. Terrain: …triple positives
22. Enemy Variety: Really great enemy variety in this one. Tons of different types of attacks and weakpoints throughout…
23. Enemy Variety: …for an easy double positive
24. Enemy Design: Alongside that, the enemies themselves are very well designed. Each zone containing what it should to help you either avoid what you shouldn’t, go where you should, defeat what you can, and avoid what you can’t…
25. Enemy Design: …earning double positives
26. Encounter: Crocomire. I unironically love this whole sequence
27. Save: Placement is better than I remembered, rarely are you far from a save point
28. Intro: Crateria 1. Lots of specific areas designed to help you to get used to platform jumping (the Mother Brain fight area), vertical progression (the former exit shaft), aiming upwards (lots of enemies and attacks coming from an upwards angle), and how to interact with shafts, bombs, and refill spots..
29. Level: …for two positives
30. Core Combat: Fun, interesting, intense, and engaging…
31. Core Combat: …earning double positives
32. Level: Brinstar, first sequence. Very directed; some ‘branches’ but most are ‘come back later’. Inclination is entirely down right, which guides you to a door you cannot open, forcing a brief backtrack to Sporespawn which then gets you the Supers to progress, and finally into Noob Bridge and our first major lockdown point…
33. Level: …for two positives
34. Level: Brinstar 2 is fascinating example of ‘locked in’ progression; the moment you fall into the pit, you are locked in until you get the ice beam. So now you have a decent area of progression, but one way or another the metaphorical door has slammed shut behind you, and now you have to roam until you find more stuff to roam until you find the all important ice beam…
35. Level: …for two positives
36. Level: Guidance away from High Jump (no way to go but back to Brinstar 2), guidance towards the Spazer (huh what’s this hole in the ceiling, aha), and guidance towards Kraid (cracks and holes)
37. Boss: Kraid. He’s easy, but well designed and complex
38. Level: Norfair 1. It’s extremely on rails still, but feels open as you progress to the bubble room, whereupon you find several side areas and multiple pickups but all ultimately looping back to the upper area of the bubble room and our first big upgrade, dash, which opens up quite a lot…
39. Level: …for two positives
40. Level: First major Backtracking pass. With the dash we know we can access Ice Beam, and with Ice Beam we unlock the door behind us and can now go up the tower. (side note: Backtracking involves different kit and is a treat to do). Then we go up the tower via careful ice beam jumps and encounter the room from hell (a room made much easier with… ice beam). Immediately after we see a weird block, leading to the all important power bombs, and their icon is EXACTLY the same as the one we just saw in the Ice Beam room, so now we have our destination. (We also can unlock a LOT of optional stuff at this point, as between Dash, Ice, and Power we have access to a huge swath of Crateria and Brinstar). There’s a lot here…
41. Level: …for double positives
42. Level: Norfair 2. This loop is quietly brilliant; a little obtuse to reach (the Power Bombs in the Ice Beam area) but once in it loops beautifully into Norfair 1. The dash sequence, a simple loop right back up but also a section designed around Grappling (two, actually), enemies that drop power bombs as high priority, and another ‘door closed behind us’ mini sequence leading us to the grapple…
43. Level: …earning it…
44. Level: …three positives
45. Kit: Honestly this is mostly ‘the usual’, with a couple of nice bonuses (the X Ray, while problematic, is actually really helpful)…
46. Kit: …earning two positives
47. Level: First real freedom point. We have grapple, wave, dash, ice, super, and bomb. Aside from parts of Maridia and Ridley’s Lair, we have access to the whole world, and this is a great time to just explore and find power ups and optional items. This is also when the connective areas and looping level design really start to shine as the player is allowed to start doing the all important routing
48. All Roads Lead To Rome: In spades. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game do routing better than this. The amount of freedom and movement options and routes possible are absolutely bonkers…
49. All Roads Lead To Rome: …leading to…
50. All Roads Lead To Rome: …triple positives
51. Backtracking: I’ve seen better (in Fusion and Dread) but this is still a golden standard of backtracking. Enemies, terrain, kit varying up backtracking and keeping it quick and well paced…
52. Backtracking: …earning two positives
53. Guidance: Walkthroughitis issues aside, the game is exceptional at guidance. The map, the enemy placement, the terrain stylings, the power ups, all constantly help give you an idea of where to go…
54. Guidance: …easily earning…
55. Guidance: …triple positives
56. Flow: The looping level design makes this game flow so, so smoothly it’s hard to even put it into words, so instead I will simply give it…
57. Flow: …a full…
58. Flow: …three positives
59. Level: Wrecked Ship. The first run through is purely for story, but the second is interesting… lots of damage coming from lots of angles but all dealable with, but the point here is the Wrecked Ship is a weirdly combat heavy segment (fitting for how small it is), and it opens up very quickly and smoothly into a Map, a Super, the way forwards into Maridia 1, and Gravity Suit
60. Level: Maridia 1 is extremely limited in where you can go, but still filled with good, tight segments of platforming and puzzle as it guides you back down to the proper entrance
61. Flow: Bonus point to the brilliance of this whole segment. The Wrecked Ship doesn’t naturally lead to the glass jar, and while there are (multiple) other routes they needed some way to help guide the player down here, hence Maridia 1
62. Level: Maridia 2 does several things wrong (looking at you, grapple beam) but it still does a lot right. The entire level design ‘sifts’ down to the entrance, so if you get lost or stuck you can sift down to loop back up
63. Secondary: Maridia 3 is all about puzzles to get items and power ups, and while I’ve seen better, it’s still good
64. Overworld: There isn’t as much of one as in other games, but it’s still there and the connective spine does good work as a navigation tool
65. Level: Ridley’s Lair is so damned good. This is a final exam and, functionally, the last dungeon, and it shows… but it never gets to the point of unfair, it’s always mean but allows for recovery. It also functions as a playground for the recently acquired Screw Attack (and offers a backup loop to either avoid it or circle back)…
66. Level: …earning it double positives
67. Boss: Ridley. I know boss design isn’t this game’s strong suit, but the Ridley fight is a great way to make a simple fight engaging
68. Music: I mean, yeah, this game has an absolute banger soundtrack. There’s a reason so many Metroids kept remixing it years later…
69. Music: …earning a full…
70. Music: …three positives
71. Song: Brinstar 2, or Lower Brinstar. This song perfectly encapsulates the soothing, peaceful depths
72. Song: Norfair 2, or Ridley’s Lair (sometimes called just Norfair). The deep thrumming, the choir, the drums, great stuff
73. Outro: Mother Brain 1. This fight is actually a really good take on the original MB fight and works for it
74. Outro: Mother Brain 2. This fight is deceptively hard, as she hits like an absolute truck, but it has just the right plodding pace to work for it considering how swift it is
75. Hyperbeam Moment: The namer of the entire concept. Getting the Hyperbeam, absolutely obliterating the boss, and the boss screaming in horror at each shot…
76. Hyperbeam Moment: …earning itself a full…
77. Hyperbeam Moment: …three positives
78. Outro: The escape sequence. One of the better ones in the franchise, with tons of enemies, destructible terrain, and a clear path… all while obliterating everything with the Hyperbeam…
79. Outro: …earning two positives
80. Difficulty Curve: Really, really smooth. I’ve seen better, but not by much…
81. Difficulty Curve: …for two positives
82. Encounter Design: I really like the thought that goes into what enemies are in which areas and alongside which other enemies…
83. Encounter Design: …for another two positives
84. Pacing: Holy crap does this game have good pacing. Explore, fight, run, explore, puzzle, fight, boss, explore… and it all follows the wave fantastically and throughout the whole game…
85. Pacing: …earning a full…
86. Pacing: …three positives
87. Power Progression Curve: We start off pretty weak. We end off destroyer of worlds. And the pace throughout is smooth progression…
88. Power Progression Curve: …for two positives
89. Sound Design: Excellent Nintendo standard sound design, for enemies, puzzles, and bosses alike…
90. Sound Design: …for two positives
91. Tutorialization: The whole game never stops tutorializing every time you gain a new ability or kit, all the way up to the Screw Attack and the ceiling positioned just so to help you figure out how it works…
92. Tutorialization: …for two positives
93. Replayability: The game is generally replayable, of course…
94. Replayability: …but the game also has tons of routing and options in how you play it, for the second
95. Visual Continuity: Very, very easy to tell where you are and to navigate based solely on the visuals and terrain, between tilesets and colors…
96. Visual Continuity: …earning a full…
97. Visual Continuity: …three positives
98. Visual Distinction: Further, you can always tell what you’re looking at, what it means, and keep everything in focus for some of the best visual distinction in the business…
99. Visual Distinction: …earning a solid…
100. Visual Distinction: …triple positive
101. Viscerality: Less than several other Metroids, but still there a bit

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Walkthroughitis: Some of the items you can gather in this game are absolutely bonkers hidden, in a ‘scan literally every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling’ kind of way…
2. Walkthroughitis: …making gathering 100% a colossal pain
3. Walkthroughitis: Some other issues, but the biggest one is of course entering Meridia
4. Controls: The usual Space Jump issues, plus some general jank
5. Kit: Grapple. It’s a great idea, and it sucks. The physics jank is already weird, and the weird momentum makes it even worse, especially given how mandatory it is
6. Raspberry Jam: Love those low health beedleeps
7. Level: The wall-jump pit. You know the one. It’s possible to get stuck down there AND it’s possible to save down there, screwing players into being stuck down here. All of this would honestly be FINE if wall jump wasn’t… wall jump…
8. Controls: …earning wall jump its own distinct negative
9. Boss: Phantoon is a bit too much for where he’s at. Too much damage that’s difficult to avoid, the runback from the nearest save (the ship), and far too small of vulnerability windows
10. Level: Hope you like Grapple because there’s two major sections of Maridia 2 that lean on it, hard, and they absolutely suck

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The green grasslands of Hyrule. I have actually used the grass in this game as an example of how to design brickwork without going crazy
2. Brickwork: Kakariko is mostly the same tileset, but still does a lot with the floors, walls, cooking implements, washbins, and all sorts of other wonderful stuff
3. Brickwork: Death Mountain, especially in the Dark World
4. Brickwork: The Dark World. The rotten looking grass, the broken ground, the skulls, the trees with faces, the sickly water
5. Brickwork: Skull Woods. This is when the Dark World really ramps up the horror and stops pretending to be anything but what it is. The additional palette and detailing and fog and other horribleness really make this place just scream. Special mention to the giant insect statue eating another giant insect statue… alive
6. Brickwork: Dungeons. While few stand out on their own, the variety and distinct styles help tremendously…
7. Brickwork: …for two aggregate positives
8. Architecture: I’ve mentioned this a few times. The whole of Hyrule is pretty small, and the actual towns even more so, but between loading screens, plenty of interiors, good usage of interactable NPCs, and some building density tricks, it feels larger than it actually is
9. Spritework: Some of the best stuff we’ve seen so far, beat only really by Minish Cap. Characters, enemies, bosses…
10. Spritework: …easily double positive territory
11. Intro: The entire opening sequence is astonishingly good for how simple it is. The music, the narration, the crude yet effective in gameplay cutscenes showcasing the dead king and the controlled soldiers
12. Intro: Atmosphere and tone, dialogue, visuals, audio. The entire intro nails it on every point. We walk outside, the music gets louder, the rain gets louder, and the screen gets darker, and it’s all downhill from there. From the very beginning we get the exact vibe and tone of this game
13. Background Lore: Quite a bit just all over the place, between geography, discussions from people, and tidbits in the dungeons
14. MSQ: The Kakariko segment. Lots of people to talk to, lots of flavor
15. Visual Storytelling: Slow devolution of the overworld as things get worse. More enemies (of worse types), less helpful NPCs out and about
16. Music Direction: The music sells so many scenes in this game. From the castle to the woods to the dungeons to the Dark World…
17. Music Direction: …easily earning a second positive
18. Moment: Your first REAL interaction with the Dark World. You’ve just beaten the last boss, which the entire game structures to be the big bad, and now you’re in the Dark World… the sunset in the distance, red skies, a tower ominously casting a shadow on the horizon, and a great golden pyramid, all while that wonderful songs plays. And if you open the world map…
19. Visual Storytelling: …the whole world suddenly looks wrong. Sickly, like a warped version of the map we’ve been using up until now. Swamps, sickly grass, skulls litter the landscape, and everywhere are these trees…
20. MSQ: …all those who befell the same fate as the flute boy. And of course, using this tragedy to carry on…
21. Theme: …which honestly is the theme of the game in a nutshell. Things are bad everywhere, but we push forwards despite it. This also feeds neatly into one of my favorite overall story points of the game; the world…
22. Atmosphere: …is on the edge of the knife. A world on the very verge of an apocalypse in a dozen quiet ways
23. World Building: The maidens, the Dark World itself (fragments of ages past but, as we see, even recently people are still slipping into the Dark World), and the mythos and backstory for Ganondorf
24. MSQ: Skull Woods. Everything about this place is horrifying, from the visuals to the music, to that frickin’ dessicated insect eating another insect
25. Outro: Everything about the final push up through Ganon’s Tower and the final encounter with Ganon
26. Outro: The ending is just legit. Satisfying, earned, great music, great showcasing of all the people we’ve helped…
27. Outro: …and the slow credits crawl over the Dark World finally reverting to the Golden Land

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: The game controls fantastically. Dedicated swing, grab, and dash, as well as items (well indicated), and very precise usage in all situations…
2. Controls: …earning a full…
3. Controls: …three positives
4. Combat: Not as good as a few games we’ve had, but still very solid and weirdly fun, especially given how much of it there is
5. Music: I mean, yeah. There’s a couple of songs I’m not a huge fan of, but the rest is fantastic…
6. Music: …and really adds to the experience
7. HUD: Quick, easy, and at-a-glance. Mana, equipped item, rupees, bombs, arrows, keys, life…
8. HUD: …for two positives
9. Kit: Some great stuff here. Not the best, but still good, especially with some of the weirder items…
10. Kit: …like the canes, the cape, and of course the old standby; the hookshot
11. Penalty For Failure: The usual Zelda quality here
12. Overworld: The Light World is a very well designed overworld. Quick, smooth, and intuitive access to all points (most of which you can find right out of the gate), and tons to do in all directions…
13. Overworld: …easily earning two positives
14. Visual Distinction: Honestly one of the best games for visual distinction in the franchise. At all points you can tell exactly what you’re looking at and how to interact with it, even basic little things like different shapes for grabbable objects and switches and the like…
15. Visual Distinction: …earning a solid…
16. Visual Distinction: …three positives
17. Sound Design: Absolutely excellent sound design, some of the best in the franchise to date. Distinct sounds for enemies, interactions, pickups, just… wonderful audio feedback everywhere…
18. Sound Design: …for two positives
19. Enemy Design: Some great enemy designs throughout. Static enemies with lots of damage but easily avoidable, mobile enemies that home in on you with low health but high numbers, stunners, avoiders, flyers… there’s a bunch of great design here…
20. Enemy Design: …for two positives
21. Enemy Variety: I’ve seen better (in this series, even) but there’s still a good spread of enemy types throughout
22. Pacing: I’ve seen slightly better, over in Minish Cap, but there is still some great gameplay pacing across exploration, puzzle, and combat sequences
23. Replayability: I mean of course it’s replayable. It’s short and fun…
24. Replayability: …and the Dark World can be done in a lot of different ways
25. Intro: Hyrule Castle, narrow corridors, audio design and locked doors, enemy encounters… a lot of very basic concepts are brilliantly tutorialized very quickly and build the baseline for all future puzzles to build upon
26. Intro: The encounter design in Hyrule Castle is very smart. We start off with non combative knights, followed by one knight who will attack, followed by combining the two, and then escalating to higher health and more aggressive enemies, then backing off for a bit but still keeping things tense… it’s great stuff
27. Tutorialization: General. Similar to Mario World, a huge swath of the game is still tutorializing. In fact there’s three major sweeps of tutorials; First is the Intro, of course, already covered earlier… but then there’s the ENTIRE Light World. The expansive overworld, the micro puzzles and small caves, the easy and guided dungeons, the slow escalation of enemies…
28. Tutorialization: …then there’s the majority of the Dark World, which builds and builds up to the big final exam of Ganon’s Tower. Virtually every type of enemy, encounter, and puzzle spread across the Dark World is then followed through on in Ganon’s Tower
29. Encounter: Generally good encounter design, and some great mix and matching of just the right types of enemies…
30. Encounter: …for two positives
31. Itemization: Manual placement of items, with some very smart things throughout…
32. Itemization: …for two positives
33. Power Progression Curve: Items, weapon upgrades, hearts, bottles, and armor…
34. Power Progression Curve: …for two positives
35. Viscerality: Swords, spells, dashing, fun
36. Map: I’ve seen better, but it’s not bad. In dungeons it indicates shape of rooms which can help, and in the overworld you can gauge most of where you can access and how
37. MSQ: Kakariko and activities. Lots to do: Good exploration with good rewards, minigames, and it’s all optional
38. Level: Eastern Palace and tutorialization and escalation. While Hyrule Castle obviously functioned as a tutorial, this follows through by being a mostly lowball sequence of introductions of puzzle and encounter types, culminating in a boss that doesn’t even need the dungeon item to defeat
39. Level: Desert Palace, showcasing all roads leads to rome dungeon design and offering an increase in overall danger
40. Level: Tower of Hera is the first really good dungeon so far. The initial showcasing of switches and how they operate as well as being able to access them from a distance, the dead end and helpful guidance towards using the Mirror in dungeons, the climb up showcasing the primary theme of the dungeon (falling). This is on top of enemies best defeated by knocking them into puts, and having to fall at several points to progress…
41. Level: …all earning two positives
42. Level: Hyrule Castle Tower is a fascinating dungeon. There’s almost no puzzles at all, instead it’s one solid gauntlet… but interestingly several of the encounters are optional, and even if you destroy each one it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The whole thing nicely fits the tone of ‘final dungeon’ as you go to rescue Zelda
43. Song: The Dark World. The hauntingly triumphant song, fighting up against a tide of awful. The song that perfectly encapsulates a world falling into ruin, while you refuse to let it
44. MSQ: The route to the Palace of Darkness. This is a surprisingly small segment (it’s only three cells total and that’s counting the Pyramid) but it’s mean and starts really encouraging the player to learn enemy patterns and deal with them appropriately. It’s worth noting that there are no new enemy types here really, just stronger versions of existing ones
45. Level: Palace of Darkness. The game has stopped kidding around, and this dungeon is huge and complex. It loops in and out of itself constantly, with a handful of routes possible depending on which directions you take, but nothing is ever a dead end or locks you out without also giving you something to progress, and most branches loop back into the central chamber…
46. Level: …earning it two positives
47. Boss: Our first solid boss fight of the game, the Helmasaur King. Nice big obvious weak spot, weak to the item from the dungeon, but also multiple attack patterns that can be learned quickly, and the whole thing is a good ‘here’s what bosses are now’ deal
48. All Roads Lead To Rome: The Dark World. You have to do Palace of Darkness first, no avoiding that, but after that the world opens up drastically. Everything you need to access a huge swath of the world is available, and once you get the titan’s mitt from Thieves Town you have basically opened everything. There’s a whole lot of natural design that encourages the player to do things in whatever order they choose to…
49. Overworld: …which is part of why the Dark World works so damned well. Past the initial blockade of the hammer, there’s an incredibly Metroidy flow and design to the areas and what you can access and interact with. I struggle to properly explain, but it’s essentially the Light World but more so; there’s no freebies here, everything has to be earned and sought out, but it retains the good connective tissue, routing, and rewarding nature of the Light World…
50. Overworld: …earning it…
51. Overworld: …three positives
52. Fast Travel: A bit limiting, thanks to the few spots to warp to, but still usable pretty much at will with little preamble or padding and great for navigation in both worlds (thanks to strategic portal placement, see the above Overworld positives)
53. Guidance: Indicators on the map of dungeons and number as a vague guide
54. Level: Swamp Palace. A few flaws drag it down (the switch puzzle, mandatory backtracking) but it still retains its gameplay theme nicely (water) and is still fun to navigate
55. Boss: Arrghus. One of the only bosses requiring the usage of the item from the dungeon, and a smart and quick one two punch of its phases
56. Level: Skull Woods. This is a mean dungeon, especially at first, but in all the right ways. The gameplay theme of the dungeon (traps) is used throughout, but there’s always a route back up or to return to where you came from, and ‘recovery’ rooms where you can catch your breath and re-adjust…
57. Level: …and the divided nature of the dungeon as well as the multitude of entrances work in its favor
58. Boss: Mothula. This boss could have sucked, but the low health, the infrequency of attacks, and the short runback time help make this a pretty fun and challenging fight
59. Level: The Ice Tower does a decent amount right, and with some changes could be one of the best dungeons in the game. It loops into itself brilliantly, retains the ‘ice’ theme without relying on icy terrain too heavily, and has good pacing between types of rooms
60. Level: Misery Mire. This place could be better, but it’s still solid; One giant maze of doom, but not a traditional maze, but rather just a whole lot of interconnected rooms, and trying to figure out which to do in which order. What drags the dungeon down is reliance on backtracking (especially if you got the switches wrong)
61. Level: Turtle Rock. This dungeon is just plain awesome; mean, but fair. Intense, but with recovery rooms. Great pacing between combat, puzzle, and slow paced exploration rooms, and everytime it punches you in the face it pulls back to let you catch your breath…
62. Level: …earning a full…
63. Level: …three positives
64. Boss: Trinexx. The requirement of the rods drags this down a bit, but it’s still a good mix of attack styles and phases
65. Outro: Ganon’s Tower, the amazing final exam that never overstays its welcome nor leans into bullcrap. The usage of gauntlet rooms, terrain hazards, mixing types of enemies, great escalation, the whole dungeon is fantastic…
66. Outro: …and earns a full…
67. Outro: …three positives
68. Outro: Ganon himself. For being relatively simple, each of his four phases has its own theme and structure and is still appropriately challenging to push through
69. Viscerality: Lots of pots and grass to smash, cut, and enjoy. I’m especially fond of charging through stuff with the dash

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Walkthroughtis: Good luck figuring out how to get to dungeon 2! To be clear; immediately after finishing the Eastern Palace, Sahasrahla guides you to… Lake Hylia where you can get the nearly useless frost rod. If you hit a fortune teller they’ll mention the library (though not where exactly) and if you chase the dude in Kakariko he’ll mention hitting things… and that’s all the hints you get about getting the Book of Mudora, which is mandatory to access the Desert Palace
2. Boss: Moldorm. Frickin’ Moldorm. It’s an interesting fight, really, and it even follows the theme of the dungeon (falling) but the problem is each time you fall Moldorm’s friggin’ health resets
3. Raspberry Jam: The low health beedleeps are honestly really bad in this one. Loud, piercing, and relentless…
4. Raspberry Jam: …for a second negative
5. Walkthroughitis: General smatterings. Little tidbits of ‘how the hell was I supposed to figure this out?’
6. Music: Repetition. It’s not as bad as in previous Zelda titles, but it’s still an issue
7. Enemy: The Wall Masters. They only really show up twice, but both times they are a giant middle finger to the player
8. Level: The Ice Tower screws up twice. First and most importantly, unless you do the dungeons ‘out of order’ by doing Misery Mire first, you have to redo almost the ENTIRE dungeon in the worst kind of backtracking
9. Level: Secondly, there’s this one small key you need to progress. There is NOTHING indicating where it is or how to get it, and only after memorization can I find it on replays. It’s ridiculous and very easy to get lost here. And yes, this is the same basic issue as the Water Temple over in Ocarina
10. Boss: Kholdstare, the awful combination of punishing and boring
11. Boss: Vitreous, same general problem. He hits VERY hard, and he’s very boring

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Title crawl. Mood, atmosphere, music, the field
2. Intro: Navi’s initial pan. It’s a great little scene and does what it needs to very quickly
3. Intro: Brickwork: Kokiri Forest. Innocent, carefree, with light colors, bright lighting, and fairies flitting to and fro, amongst tree-bound houses
4. Brickwork: Deku Tree. Surprisingly high detailing in here, really getting across the feel and vibe of being inside a massive, living tree
5. Brickwork: Death Mountain and Goron City. The rocky crags, the earthy terrain, and the mountainous landscape
6. Brickwork: Fire Temple. I chewed on this one for a bit, but while a bit simple at times the vibes and tones of the dungeon and its architecture and stylings work pretty well for selling the scene
7. Animation: Shockingly good for an early 3D game. In almost every cutscene, effort is put into making the characters and the scene work through how they interact with each other…
8. Animation: …earning a solid double positive
9. Intro: Moment: Goodbye to Saria, goodbye to the woods… goodbye to childhood
10. NPC Set Dressing: Mostly in Castle Town, but general
11. Brickwork: Castle Town! A dinky place that still feels like a whole city, with back alleys, busy stalls, and a crowded plaza
12. Architecture: Shockingly good architecture design for an early 3D. Special praise to Castle Town which uses side alleyway sections that makes the whole residential segment feel substantially larger, and lots of visible terrain in the distance to help the central square look decent
13. Doodads: Castle Town has the best doodads in the game. I can’t possibly list them all, but every single house and area has tons of work done fleshing it out wonderfully…
14. Doodads: …for two positives
15. Doodads: General. Mostly in the town areas, as usual
16. Camera: Really, really good camera work for a game from 1998, let me tell you. Some great panning and establishing shots, and they help to focus in on characters as well as establish scale…
17. Camera: …earning a solid double positive
18. Cutscene: Zelda’s big exposition scene. Despite being mostly dry exposition it’s done well, between camera, animation, tempo, changing angles and even locations, and it establishes the stakes very quickly
19. Atmosphere: Child section. Adventure!
20. Background Lore: Basically everything to do with the society and the war the country is still reeling from
21. Moment: Darunia dancing. The moves, the dialogue, the camera, Navi dancing along
22. Characters: General support cast, as per usual…
23. Characters: …but I do also think the Sages deserve their own mention. Memorable and interesting
24. Humor: Mweep. Mweep
25. Moment: The devastation of the future…
26. Moment: …the empty, dead remnants of the villagers in Castle Town (yes I know the official canon no I do not care for the purpose of the review)
27. Moment: This is an aggregate, but there are several micro moments on the route to the Forest Temple
28. Atmosphere: The Forest Temple. Good lord I love the vibe this dungeon gives off. The classic haunted manor, lost in the deep forest
29. Brickwork: The Forest Temple, again. You really get the feel of this old, lost fortress long since reclaimed by the wilds
30. Moment: More like moments… each of those little, one-sentence tidbits from the Sages after they pass are surprisingly potent for how minute they are
31. Plot: The deaths of the Sages. While it’s debatable who dies, when, and where, it’s a part of their story which we intersect, and it adds to each of them as we go
32. Atmosphere: Shadow Temple. As much as I don’t like it, this dungeon absolutely oozes atmosphere, even with the reduced blood in the 3DS version
33. Brickwork: Shadow Temple. Good lord. Corpse walls, cold stone bricks, guillotines, torture devices…
34. World Building: General… thanks to the Shadow Temple in particular. We get juuust enough snippets about the war that predates Ocarina and, in many ways, informs the entire plot of the game
35. Brickwork: Spirit Temple. The desert temple vibe is strong here, and they even vary up the specific bricks to keep them fresh and interesting compared to most of the other ones we’ve seen
36. Theme: Time (finally) with the Spirit Temple, and the usage of paradoxes in both this and the plot as a whole
37. Moment: Several, but everything to do with Nobooru. She’s not on screen much but they use her well, and helps to add quiet horror to what Koume and Kotake are doing
38. Moment: Okay so I’m not a fan of what happens after, but Zelda’s reveal to Link is actually a pretty solid scene and a good twist; it recontextualizes all of Sheik’s interactions with Ruto (her childhood royal friend) the Sheikah (who were her bodyguards) and Link (obvious)
39. Outro: The entire final climb up Ganon’s Tower is fantastic. The slowly escalating music, the visuals, the final encounter with Ganondorf
40. Outro: One of the better One Winged Angel moments in gaming; Ganondorf, dying, calls upon his Triforce and sacrifices mind and self to become GANON. No subtitle, no nothing. I love this moment, and unfortunately it won’t get more positives as this is one of the VERY few times the N64 version nails it better. Still great though
41. Outro: Zelda’s Great Mistake. The kindest act done for all the right reasons that causes two timelines worth of issues
42. Outro: The ending here is fantastic. The empty shots of the future fields, everyone celebrating their victory in the wake of the last 7 years, and one final goodbye from Navi… and then Link goes to talk to Zelda in the past, before the game even began
43. Internal Continuity: It’s clear they had a strong throughline for this game, as it references itself smartly throughout
44. Localization: As per usual for Nintendo at the time, good and memorable localization
45. Music Direction: I don’t care for most of the songs in this game… but damn are they used extraordinarily well. Each area has its own motif and approach, but also literally different instrument usage to help differentiate them…
46. Music Direction: …earning two solid positives
47. Spritework: This is pretty much a 3DS exclusive positive, the updated models look so, so much better this time around…
48. Spritework: …for two solid positives
49. Storyboarding: The amount of work that goes into a lot of these scenes deserves its own recognition. To use just one example, Bongo Bongo’s attack on Kakariko is a great example of using limited hardware and resources to still sell the scene thanks solely to proper storyboarding and camera usage…
50. Storyboarding: …thus earning a double positive

Story Negatives:

1. Moment: Ganondorf’s sudden capture of Zelda and the abrupt diminishing of her from character to plot coupon is jarring and a disservice to an otherwise interesting character

Gameplay Positives:

1. Intro: Guidance: Kokiri Forest. The amount of guidance in the Intro here is bonkers, from usage of doodads and color, to who you can talk to, to signs that literally tell you what to do
2. Intro: Tutorialization: The Kokiri town is one of the better tutorials I’ve seen in the entire franchise. This one area teaches you everything you need to know about navigating the game. What to watch for, what types of actions you can take, how to navigate the world, and rewarding you for doing all of these things. This is great…
3. Intro: Tutorialization: …and easily earns a second positive
4. Intro: Flow: Kokiri. Again. The entire area has a wonderful flow to and through it, and you can spend as much or as little time as you want here as each subsection leads neatly into another one
5. Sound Design: I’ve held this game up as some of the best sound design in the business for years, and I stand by it. Every action has its own sound, those sounds are distinct from each other, they’re properly balanced, and they’re constant. This is fantastic stuff…
6. Sound Design: …easily earning…
7. Sound Design: …three positives
8. Sound Design: A bonus positive for its usage as feedback: Doors, unlocks, timers
9. Music: Feedback! Usage of music as a method of feedback is still more awesome
10. Controls: Fantastic controls as per usual for the franchise, improved by the 3DS version, then even better than usual thanks to the 3DS version’s inclusion of the additional quick shortcuts…
11. Controls: …earning a solid…
12. Controls: …triple positive
13. Controls: Bonus point for the gyro controls and how much better it makes aiming
14. Core Combat: Not the best in the franchise, but still some surprisingly solid stuff. Multiple swings (which can be done with BUTTONS, Skyward Sword!) and multiple types of weapons and plenty of good enemies to use them on…
15. Core Combat: …earning two positives
16. Animations: The better enemies in the game do a great job of indicating which attack they’re using at what time
17. Penalty For Failure: Usual Zelda approach
18. Replayability: I mean of course it’s replayable…
19. Replayability: …but what pushes it into double territory is the malleability of the adult segment
20. Difficulty Curve: Solid, smooth, and good… for the most part
21. Enemy Variety: Fliers, fighters, chargers, static… there’s a few
22. Fast Travel: A bit late to get and only a few spots, but it’s still good fast travel
23. HUD: Very good in the 3DS version, especially thanks to the lower screen…
24. HUD: …for a solid double positive
25. Kit: Some of the basics but still, the boomerang and hookshot are great, and of course the spells (while quite optional) really add to it too…
26. Kit: …earning double positives
27. Music: Generally good music, and a few bangers
28. Map: Decent map design
29. Viscerality: Swings, spells, charge attacks
30. Visual Distinction: Some of the best in the franchise, honestly, and unique to the 3DS version. They really, really did a lot of great work with the color usage and sharpening textures to make it always clear what you’re looking at and how you can interact with it…
31. Visual Distinction: …earning a solid…
32. Visual Distinction: …triple positives
33. Guidance: The new Sheikah hint stones in the 3DS version. They’re optional, they’re helpful, and they don’t spell everything out completely…
34. Guidance: …earning a solid double positives
35. Minimap: Shockingly good for what it is, especially with how good with ‘at a glance’ it is and the showcasing of your location, facing, and where you entered a room…
36. Minimap: …for two positives
37. Minigame: There’s quite a few and, weirdly, they’re pretty fun…
38. Minigame: …earning double positives
39. Guidance: Deku Tree, initial floors (one way to go, locked door to progress, pointed towards the puzzle solution but not told it, and then how to progress upwards past the skulltulas)
40. Tutorialization: Deku Tree. Again, everywhere, there’s so much done to emphasize how to interact with things, the entire dungeon is one long tutorial
41. Level: Deku Tree in general. Smart, tight Intro dungeon that introduces most of the concepts of the game in a natural and fluid way
42. Itemization: Manual placement relative to need of item drops
43. Tutorialization: The Sheikah stones are smart and well edited tutorials and walkthroughs for puzzles, hidden collectibles, and what to do nexts
44. Interface: The Ocarina screen. You can do it manually of course, but you can also literally pull up known songs and play them without having to leave that menu
45. Secondary: Gold Skulltulas. Rewarding, not too many, decent distribution (mostly), and audio indicators
46. Enemy Design: Dodongos. They’re a nice escalation enemy from previous ones; much more aggressive, requiring some thought, and they explode on death which not only is an obstacle… but a tool you can use
47. Flow: Dodongo’s Cavern looping and shortcutting
48. Guidance: Dodongo’s Cavern and presence of interactables and…
49. Terrain: …which helps you to figure out what to do and where
50. Pacing: Dodongo’s Cavern really has very tight pacing even within itself
51. Boss: King Dodongo. Very simple, but fun, good spectacle, and well designed arena
52. MSQ: The Zora river and domain. Not a lot to do, but a few things that are well guided and fun (the diving game many people point you to leads you smoothly to the Lake Hylia teleport, the letter leading to the next dungeon and the king, the layout of the entire area guiding you upwards)
53. Level: It has some issues, but Jabu Jabu’s Belly still has good looping and creative use of a good item
54. All Roads Lead To Rome: The moment you get the hookshot and Epona, most of the world is quite open to you in the future, and while there’s a clear intended order you can do whatever whenever
55. Level: So this is a weird one. The Forest Temple has… issues, but it still has fun puzzles, great encounter design, good escalation, and (barring backtracking) good flow…
56. Level: …earning it two positives
57. Boss: Phantom Ganon. Usage of the item, multiple phases, nice escalation, and avoids the issues from the N64’s camera
58. Level: Bit of a backtracking problem in the Ice Cavern, mostly centered around the blue flames. Most other issues are smoothed over by the 3DS version and a vastly improved map and minimap system
59. Level: Fire Temple. For its issues (which it definitely has) it still has some solid Zelday design in here. Timed switches, looping after getting the hammer, and a nice finishing point (you start and end at the same spot)
60. Level: The Water Temple, weirdly enough. Yeah I know, but there is still some clever and creative stuff here, especially in the 3DS version which allows for dynamic control of your height on the fly
61. Enemy Design: Shadow Link. A lot of work was done on this one enemy to flesh him out and give him the complexity he has
62. Boss: Bongo Bongo. Fun, intense, quick phased
63. Level: Spirit Temple, Child. Great loops, clever iteration on previous puzzle designs, and no fat or padding whatsoever…
64. Level: …for a solid two positives
65. Enemy Design: The Iron Knuckle. Big, hits like a truck, easy to stay away from but their swings have enough reach to keep them dangerous, and their tactics change based on the amount of armor they still have on as you peel it off
66. Guidance: Spirit Temple. There’s so many little things they do which guide the player’s attention and vision towards whatever they need to see
67. Level: Spirit Temple, shortcutting. Some really good shortcuts here, especially with regards to the looping design
68. Encounter: Spirit Temple, again. Really smart combinations of enemies and terrain
69. Flow: Spirit Temple. I can’t put into words how smooth this whole dungeon is; the perfect combination of not too easy and not too frustrating
70. Outro: Ganon’s Castle. There’s a bunch of nice micro puzzles here, and (almost) all of them are awesome. Good, tight, dense, and fun while doing a good job of providing a final exam for all the mechanics to date…
71. Outro: …earning a full…
72. Outro: …three positives
73. Outro: Ganon’s Tower. The final gauntlet, the intensity of it, the fun of it
74. Outro: GANON. This is actually an even better final boss than I thought; Phase 1 has a lot of options for outmaneuvering or pushing through him, and he has the same basic pattern as one of the best designed enemies in the game (Iron Knuckles) plus an arena that has refills and is designed around his mode. THEN there’s Phase 2, which ups the intensity and speed of his turning, attack rate, and movement speed. Great fight…
75. Outro: …earning a full double positive
76. Level: There’s several new types of item interactions that nothing really indicated in the original quest that are required for MQ. For the most part these are logical continuations and, more to the point, actually add to the depth of dungeon design. Also a special mention for a drastically increased emphasis on bombchus (an item which was effectively optional in the vanilla game)
77. Level: Deku Tree MQ. The level plays with a lot of expectations from the first time around, and pushes the player to be far more thorough in their exploration and puzzle solving
78. Level: Weirdly, I do think the Jabu Jabu MQ does improve on the original. The flow is mostly the same and there’s more and meaner enemies, but what makes it work is the additional mechanics and greater emphasis on clever progression interactions. Even the Ruto section is less frustrating. I will add, in a game with worse drop mechanics this would get very irritating very fast due to the requirement of so many ammo related gimmicks
79. Level: Spirit Temple MQ. This is a weird one, because the Spirit Temple’s two halves feel much more detached from each other in MQ than in vanilla. As a result, the child version works pretty well and rewards the player for doing several aspects of setup and being creative… and of course, it’s just about as long as the temple should be. Which leads to its issues…

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: The ‘no’ auto response and double tap text render trap
2. MSQ: The infiltration of Hyrule Castle. Nothing really tells you the steps, and they’re a bit esoteric (talk to Malon, wait til night while outside, go in, go BACK out to get the cucco from her, wait until day again, sneak in, talk to Talon)
3. Audio Spam: Rolling. Hyah! Hyah!
4. Walkthroughitis: Hidden stuff in general
5. Traversal: Walk walk walk
6. Raspberry Jam: Beedleep. Beedleep
7. Secondary: Gold Skulltulas. Some of these are fine, honestly, and some… are not. You also need a LOT of them, and the last 50 give no reward at all
8. Graphics: Camera wobble issues periodically (Jabu Jabu’s, Dodongo Caverns, etc.)
9. Walkthroughitis: Quite a few moments of how to progress in the game are exceptionally vague or obtuse, and have either no or very few hints on how to progress
10. Walkthroughitis: The Forest Temple. There’s… a lot of ‘good luck finding the key’ moments which lead to a lot of backtracking if you don’t get them in the right order
11. Level: The Fire Temple, in general, has a bit of a backtracky problem. Plenty of points where if you slip or trip or fall, have fun walking back up the whole segment you just did
12. Level: The Fire Temple must get notice for a specific room; the room where you get the hammer. It’s a narrow walkway which you’re in a hurry to rush up and if you slip the wrong way… you can fall all the way down to the second floor or, worse, the FIRST floor and have to walk up the entire dungeon again. There’s worse examples of this nonsense in gaming, and it’s not as bad on the 3DS version (or with Farore’s Wind), but this is still bad
13. Level: The Water Temple… and the block. There’s this one block and this block can go directly to hell. Literally the first thing you can do in this dungeon is move this block out of the way, unlocking the way forwards much later. Failure to do so and… good luck figuring that out, nevermind having to redo the loop to fix it
14. Backtracking: The Water Temple… the keys. There’s at least three keys that are very out of the way to procure and you need all of them, and it’s easy to get VERY far into a particular path only to find a locked door and good luck finding that key
15. Padding: The Water Temple… padding. There’s seconds in minutes with changing the water level, there’s mandatory backtracking even if you know where you’re going, and there’s likely backtracking inclination due to how unguided the flow of the dungeon is
16. Itemization: Shadow Temple and magic reliance
17. Level: Shadow Temple and lack of design
18. Guidance: Shadow Temple. I mean honestly, there’s a lot of ‘huh?’ moments in the temple but that bit at the end takes the cake
19. Outro: The Shadow Temple segment of Ganon’s Castle deserves its own mention for bullcrap. Big empty pits with invisible or timed platforms, a frickin’ Like Like which will spit you into the abyss, and any fall means starting over
20. Seconds In Minutes: There’s so many, but they’re all so small we lump them into this one aggregate; Playing the ocarina songs, opening chests, just dismounting Epona, all of it takes entirely too long
21. Unskippable Cutscenes: Only really a few, but boy are they memorable
22. Difficulty: The added damage from enemies in Master Quest isn’t great. It’s not the end of the world, really, and can encourage the player to be more cautious… but what it also does is heavily penalize any mistakes, to an irritating degree. This also leads to a pretty bad…
23. Early Game Hell: …problem with the early parts of the game. This is made even worse due to essentially mandating…
24. Grind: …to do all the side stuff just to survive past the early game, also known as when it really gets bad
25. Backtracking: Several MQ dungeons expect you to just go back through areas multiple times because you probably didn’t bring the right thing, or ran out of items on the way
26. Encounter: There’s… quite a bit of enemy spam in MQ dungeons, my goodness
27. Level: Dodongo Caverns has a few MQ issues… most notably certain areas that require some precise maneuvering and a very tight, irritating camera to maneuver with, respawning enemies along timed escort sequences, a lot of block puzzles which just… take forever cuz of animation times, spawning enemies near a pickup you can’t see unless you know they’re there basically guaranteeing having to do puzzles twice, punishing you by forcing you to redo entire sections of dungeon if you screw up at a critical juncture, and other irritations…
28. Level: …for two negatives
29. Level: Forest Temple MQ. Leaning even heavier into the block puzzles was probably not the right call, and there’s a few spots where you can screw up and have to reset the room, and there’s a decent amount of having to traverse around trying to figure out what goes where thanks to limited camera issues. Also there’s a few Seconds In Minutes issues here and there with puzzle solutions, even if you know what you’re doing
30. Level: Fire Temple MQ. So we start with some vagueries, which is fine if a little irritating, but then they start to really amp up the enemies that can two shot you, of which you fight multiple in a row. They also like to put you in a VERY small area with Like Likes, because ha ha. The rest of the dungeon is fine though
31. Level: The addition of the damned boulders to the Ice Caverns does not help an already problematic dungeon
32. Level: Water Temple MQ. You saw this coming, but even I was shocked at how bad this dungeon really is. The Water Temple is already problematic (memes aside) but not that bad… but THIS monstrocity? So first, there’s multiple interactions that flat out are not tutorialized anywhere even in passing as being possible to do which are required to progress. This leaves the player staring at the puzzle and having no idea what they can do with it to begin solving it. Then you make sure every major puzzle AND encounter occurs in small areas where the camera constantly gets in the way of things. Then we add in puzzles that require lengthy backtracking where any screw up makes you start all over. Then we add in the general arduousness of the entire temple, because EVERYthing takes SO damned long to do, even once you’ve actually figured out what to do. And finally and most damning of all, they pull the trick that early Zelda 1 dungeons do; One way failure loops. If, at certain points in the dungeon, you screw up? Good luck getting the state of the temple back the way it was. Generally speaking the only way to do so is to essentially start the whole central room over and go through all the motions all over again… just like in Zelda 1. Screw this stupid dungeon. I actually think this goes above and beyond the usual triple, so we’re going to do this. First, a negative for the interactions…
33. Encounter: …then a negative for the bad encounter design…
34. Padding: …then the delay in between solving and solved…
35. Penalty For Failure: …and then a solid two…
36. Penalty For Failure: …for the failure loop problem
37. Level: Shadow Temple MQ. Yeah this one shouldn’t be surprising. Gotchas, a weirdly large amount of platforming in a game that barely supports the concept, and the linearity of the vanilla version is actually worse now since you’re just shuffled along an awful frustrationfest…
38. Level: …for two negatives
39. Level: Spirit Temple, MQ. Yeah what’s usually the bastion and relief after the Shadow Temple doesn’t quite land in the Master Quest. I won’t even mention the room where the only way to progress is to drop a Like Like on your head (in a small, enclosed space of course), but the real issue comes from everything after the initial child playthrough. The dungeon just… drags and drags and drags and drags, and turns what otherwise is one of the better MQ dungeons into just a slog

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: The enemy designs are just crazy good, well animated and well varied…
2. Spritework: …in addition to the tremendous variety of NPCs roaming the various areas…
3. Spritework: …which are excellent
4. Spritework: The character art in this is truly fantastic, and alongside the previous NPC and enemies lead to some very good…
5. Animation: …animation. There’s some truly excellent usage of animation to make the characters really bop, bounce, and feel alive…
6. Animation: …for its own double positive. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t also give credit to…
7. Storyboarding: …how the characters are used in cutscenes to keep things excellent on the visual spectrum. Though what really surprised me…
8. Brickwork: …is the quality of the brickwork. At first glance it’s your usual N64 bleh, but then you start to see the incredibly smart art direction to keep each area distinct and visually fantastic. Green fields, rugged mountains, blasted deserts, wild jungle, colorful fields, and the frozen north…
9. Brickwork: …all earning up to…
10. Brickwork: …an easy triple positive
11. Architecture: Good time to mention that the several towns in this game pull a lot of the usual SNES era RPG tricks to make them feel substantially larger and more fleshed out than they actually are. Multiple interiors, nice backdrops, camera, etc.
12. Doodads: Towns. It’s not much, but it’s solid where it’s there, especially indoors
13. NPC Set Dressing: All over the place, really, but most especially in Toad Town itself
14. Character: Bowser continues to be the best character in almost every Mario RPG. Dorky, boisterous, ridiculous, and entertaining in every scene he’s in
15. Character: Chapter 1 Supporting Cast. The Goomba family, the Koopas in Koopa Village, and of course the Toads of Toadtown
16. Character: Chapter 2 Supporting Cast. More Toads, more random people on the road, and of course the Dry Dryites
17. Character: Chapter 3 & 4 Supporting Cast. There’s a couple of mis-steps here, but the Shy Guys in Chapter 4 are astonishingly cute, and the Boos vary but there’s some decent stuff there
18. Character: Chapter 5 Supporting Cast. The Yoshis carry this almost entirely by themselves, but bonus points for all the amusement with Kolorado
19. Storytelling Mechanic: Text rendering. It’s not at the level of some later games (or, y’know, Earthbound) but this is the all important ‘voice’ in a game with no voice acting. Pauses in the text, different effects like flickering or waving, and text size all convey tone and emotion…
20. Storytelling Mechanic: …for a solid double positive
21. Storytelling Mechanic: Let’s be clear, the Tattle command is crazy good. I’ve done entire playthroughs where I just use Goombario just to get the extra lore. First, insanely enough, every single NPC in the entire game that you can interact with has a different lore tidbit for them. This conveys world building, character, you name it…
22. Storytelling Mechanic: …so that’s an easy…
23. Storytelling Mechanic: …triple positive
24. Storytelling Mechanic: Did I mention Tattle also works for every single enemy in the game too? (except for like… 5) It’s, again, a crazy amount of additional background story…
25. Storytelling Mechanic: …and that earns up a solid…
26. Storytelling Mechanic: …triple positives
27. Storytelling Mechanic: Finally, every single cell in the game also has its own Tattle entry. Yes that includes all 49 Desert tiles. There’s just so much this adds to everything that, once again…
28. Storytelling Mechanic: …it’s a solid…
29. Storytelling Mechanic: …triple positive
30. Background Lore: Every ‘town’ area has a few NPCs which update what they say every chapter, and of course there’s also the letters you get from the post office
31. Dialogue: It rambles a bit, but it’s still good, with a bit of variety in tones and dialect, which is probably a good time to mention…
32. Localization: …the localization. I’ve seen better, but this is still very solid. There’s just so much attention to detail in how they had people talk in this one…
33. Localization: …and it deserves a second positive
34. Tone: Quirky, amusing, and a bit whimsical. This is the Earthbound effect; not a lot of direct jokes, but plenty of generally humorous tone throughout…
35. Tone: …for a solid double positive
36. External Continuity: Weirdly, yeah. The way this game utilizes Mario as a setting is really, really good. From enemies to power ups to even basic plot points, like dragging huge chunks of Yoshi’s Island into the mix…
37. External Continuity: …for a very solid double positive. And all of this ties into the World Building because…
38. World Building: …this is, in many ways, the first Mario game to truly have world building. SMRPG was a bit too… alien, too self contained, didn’t feel like an actual place. And most Mario games only dip their toes into this, like 3 and World. But this… this established, towns, trade lines, cultural norms. I’ll mention this later but the first friggin’ town you see is a town of Goombas. Prior to this game, with the sole exception of one town in one game (Monstro Town in SMRPG) these were just enemies you stomped on. It’s all brilliant…
39. World Building: …and it deserves a second positive
40. Humor: Puns. Entirely too many to list, but special mention to the various Toads, who usually truncate their last name to just T. Thus… Tayce T., Russ T., Minh T., et cetera
41. Humor: General. Seriously, this game still gets a laugh out of me to this very day
42. Intro: So it’s a slow burn, but it works quite well. We start off with a surprisingly good transition from storybook right into the story itself. The opening cinematics show off just how much they can have moving on screen at a time (which helps with setting said scene). Then we have an extended section of (optional) world building and flavor before the plot kicks off. This whole sequence is well paced, leads neatly into even more world and tone building with the Goomba family (showcasing Mario’s classic enemies as friendly folk was honestly pretty brilliant in hindsight). This leads into an introduction of the format of the game (Peach doing her thing, Mario gaining party members and advancing), but also really emphasizes just how much story there is everywhere. All of this is great…
43. Intro: …and earns a solid…
44. Intro: …triple positive
45. MSQ: Goombas and Koopas and Bob-Ombs. I mentioned it earlier, but the game does something brilliant by making your very first town be filled with Goombas, who are friendly and jovial. This is an immediate indicator of the type of world this is, but your second major town continues this by making you help a bunch of Koopas… and immediately after that, rescuing Bob-Ombs. It’s quiet, and nowadays it’s automatic since the Mario setting has been fleshed out so much more, but it’s still a good and well designed tone setter
46. MSQ: Kolorado and the eternal punishment of being british. No seriously, for all his irritation, Kolorado just gets run over in Chapter 5 and it’s awesome
47. Princess Peach Segments: So hey, the trope namer! What really works here is the variety of interactions you end up doing in order to get the information for Mario. Sometimes you’re snooping, sometimes you’re interrogated, sometimes you bake a cake, sometimes you play a quiz show
48. MSQ: The penguin murder mystery section is short, fun, and delightful
49. Outro: The vignettes of everyone getting their invitations, and how their lives are going
50. Outro: The final parade is a delightful little fun romp of multiple small skits

Story Negatives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Can’t hear every party member’s reactions to events and characters due to only having one out at a time (functionally the same as the ‘limited party member’ Bioware negative)
2. Character: Jr. Troopa. No, really, screw this guy. He’s an irritant, a recurring irritant, and incredibly one-note
3. Character: Chapter 6 Supporting Cast. So almost every chapter has good, interesting, unique, and fun supporting NPCs. Chapter 6 has assholes. Nothing but assholes. In one case it’s someone who’s literally okay with one of her comrades dying, even though she could effortlessly help

Gameplay Positives:

1. HUD: Simple yet informative. Good at a glance for health, mana, and star points
2. Music: General. There’s a few great songs and a few that work well periodically
3. Core Combat: Action Commands. This is the very core of what makes the Mario RPGs what they are, but as we discussed at length on camera, a mechanic like this is not inherently good or bad. Whereas SMRPG was a bit too tight in timing (though I’m told that’s fixed in the remaster) and whereas the later Mario & Luigi games rely entirely too much on entire minigames to do attacks and defense, Paper Mario hits a good sweet spot. The inputs are natural, they’re not too ridiculous, and the timing of them is well designed both for offense and defense. There’s also a good variety for the different types of attacks you have access to. Overall, playing the game is just a treat…
4. Core Combat: …earning the action command system…
5. Core Combat: …a full three positives
6. Animation: So, there’s a few exceptions here (which is why this is only one positive) but for the most part, the animations do a good job of naturally informing you when you should block and when you should attack
7. Core Combat: So, one other thing Paper Mario does almost perfectly, more so than possibly any other Mario RPG, is the low numbers. When you have 5 HP and 1 attack, any attack is a big deal… and any block is a big deal. It also means any kind of buff (equipment, badge, or companion) is a huge increase in input or output. It’s also very easy to quickly math in your head what you can do on a given turn, and actually adds to the overall tactics of each fight. All in all it’s a fantastic implementation of a great idea…
8. Core Combat: …and deserves a solid…
9. Core Combat: …triple positive
10. Core Mechanic: Enemy weaknesses. This is deceptively in depth, but very intuitive. Enemies have certain ‘states’. Maybe they can’t be attacked from the top, maybe they’re spiked, maybe they’re on fire, maybe the attack things in front of them. So you’re always thinking about how exactly to attack any given enemy at any given time. This is helped by…
11. Enemy Design: …the enemy design itself, which is top notch. There’s a LOT of thought in what enemies can do, how their states are, what their stats are, how they can attack you, how you can block them, what you can do to tactically avoid them (flipping koopas, dousing fires, igniting bob-ombs, etc.) and it really deserves its own…
12. Enemy Design: …aggregate…
13. Enemy Design: …triple positive
14. Enemy Variety: This is even further complimented by the sheer variety of said enemy designs, which varies so much any summary I give will not do it justice…
15. Enemy Variety: …so that’s another…
16. Enemy Variety: …triple positive
17. Encounter: But wait, there’s more! This is right up there with Doom in how much thought was put into which types of enemies should be combined with which others, and the result is some of the best encounter design in the business…
18. Encounter: …for yet another…
19. Encounter: …triple positive
20. Power Progression Curve: This is related to the small numbers thing mentioned earlier, but it’s worth noting that the upgrades in this game are very precisely designed and placed. Upgrading party members, getting new equipment to boost your stats, levels which can be distributed, and the biggest thing of course…
21. Power Progression Curve: …which are the all important…
22. Kit: …badges. Now, the thing here is badges are great and all, but they’re actually fairly limited in this game. There’s a finite number of what you can get and a very finite number of badge points to work with (30 at most), buuut they’re still a great bit of kit
23. Kit: Similarly, your companions and their variety of moves, your star powers and their eternal usefulness, and the surprising usefulness of items add to said kit as well…
24. Build: …which makes for surprisingly good Build gameplay. I’ve done a handful of different builds in my various playthroughs of the game and while there’s some variance in value, they’re all viable
25. Minigame: I have to mention here the cooking thing. At first you can just turn an object into something slightly better (or worse…) buuut then there’s when you upgrade the cook to be able to mix items, and suddenly cooking explodes. This is only a single positive range because there’s only so many recipes and no real way to determine them outside of just trying stuff, but there’s still some very useful stuff you can make here that helps with the aforementioned Kit
26. Minigame: Also there’s several fun little side things. The Playroom and fighting through the Dojo both come to mind immediately
27. Guidance: Aggregate, but decent throughout. There’s only a few times where exploration and progress aren’t at least given some direction
28. Info In Game: Some of the tooltips and otherwise do a decent job of explaining what to do and what they do
29. Hub: Toadtown. I chewed on this for a bit, but navigating it is relatively quick, most of the super relevant things are bundled near each other, and the nearby warp pipes are… nearby
30. Pacing: The overall game follows the same general flow (except for Chapter 6…) and it works in the game’s favor. Hub, overworld section, town section, dungeon, boss, Princess Peach segment. It keeps things varied and flowing smoothly
31. Sound: Not the best, but still good general quality nintendo sound design
32. Visual Navigation: Helps with navigating… well, everywhere. Map aside, there’s rarely a moment where one gets stuck or lost because there’s good signposting and…
33. Visual Distinction: …visual distinction to make things clear as you’re progressing
34. Encounter: The entire game does this; give a star at the end of chapter, and the next chapter’s encounters take advantage of that star’s powers. Chapter 2 has poisoning enemies, chapter 4 has large groups of enemies with 7 health, etc.
35. Level: Peaceful Path is one of those simple but solid overworld segments. It actually has a higher density of enemies than most areas in the game, but that’s due to trying to quickly tutorialize most of the basics of the earlier-mentioned good enemy design. Koopas, paragoombas, goombas, and spikey goombas all in one area, alongside several bonus blocks and a couple of secrets
36. Level: Koopa Bros Fortress. Simple puzzles, but fun, with good encounter design (mixing and matching Bob-Ombs and Koopas) and some good tutorialization for what the game expects of you going forwards
37. Boss: The Koopa Bros are surprisingly well designed for a first boss. The first phase is essentially a joke, possible to completely no-sell with minimal effort, but the actual fight involves them standing in a tower and getting a big hit in… but if hit in that form they ALL knock over. At this point you can keep them stunlocked, or let them pile back up to knock them all over again. Further, they’ll make the tower with however many are up at the time, so it’s valuable to either focus fire or keep one or two locked down to minimize the damage taken
38. Level: Dry Dry Ruins is, weirdly, even smaller than the Koopa Bros Fortress but arguably more dense for it. Good, interesting puzzles and surprisingly good usage of backtracking
39. Boss: Tutankoopa. Again a well designed fight; he’s immune to several types of attacks, he summons an add that has a big chunk of defense and attack power so you have to decide how to deal with that, and periodically his own attacks will make himself vulnerable, giving you windows of dps
40. Princess Peach Segments: I wasn’t sure about these, but even in gameplay these are simple but fun little stealth and minigame sections (the variety helps)
41. MSQ: The entire stretch up to Tubba Blubba’s castle. Navigating the forest, the enemy design of the Hyper enemies and the Clubbas (both have tactical weakpoints to bypass with the tools you have at this point)
42. Boss: Tubba Blubba…’s heart (and himself). The heart is simple (avoid the big hit, block the others) but the fight with him is fascinating because he has several attacks, they’re all mean… but he only has like 10 health
43. Level: Chapter 5 lead in. Smooth looping and shortcutting of the jungle, and some fun puzzles
44. Level: Chapter 7 has some rough patches going up to it, but it really shines in the dungeon itself. Probably the best single dungeon so far; Tricky, dense, interesting puzzle design, fun enemy designs…
45. Level: …easily equaling for a second positive
46. Boss: The Ice King is interesting for what he is. Kind of a combination of Huff ‘n Puff as well as having the ‘mirage’ mechanic, both of which encourage AOE abilities
47. Song: Bowser’s Keep. The yoshi drums, the escalation, the awesomeness
48. Outro: Level: Some clever puzzles and fun fights in the final dungeon
49. Outro: Boss: Bowser. He has several attacks that hit like a truck, each one varies up its pattern a bit, but periodically he’ll make himself invincible. This costs Mario a turn, but then leaves the companion free to do whatever, giving you a bit of a free action (and a breather for regen effects to take place). On top of that his three heals are big, but controllable, and add a much needed layer of tactics to the fight (he won’t heal if his health is above yours)
50. Outro: Playable outro! It’s not much, but it’s fun
51. Itemization: Actually pretty solid in terms of what you get and where. Mostly in items, but special mention to some smart design on where certain badges become available