This is the sequel to Superstar Saga, and represented a jump from GBA to DS. The main gimmick is that the brothers go back in time to team up with their baby selves, who are controlled with the DS’ X and Y buttons. The babies can also contribute to attacks in battle, making the action commands more complicated.
The game was decent but nothing outstanding. I think I liked Superstar Saga better overall.
Super Paper Mario is the third entry in the Paper Mario series, and markedly different from its predecessors. It’s now a platformer with RPG elements rather than a turn-based RPG, and the playable characters are entirely comprised of established Mario characters rather than new ones. Overall, I liked these changes, and I think the game is a much better experience than The Thousand-Year Door overall. The plot was also much more complex and compelling this time around, though it does unfortunately suffer from the kiddie-game problem of needing to signpost all its twists with sledgehammer levels of subtlety.
The sequel to Paper Mario. It features many improvements to battles and core gameplay that I greatly appreciated, but everything else was a bit of a letdown. The writers tried to do something different with the plot by using an all-new setting and villain this time, but I felt they lacked the charm of Paper Mario‘s. There was also a disconcerting rise in Anime Horniness.
jegus why are there so many innocuous-looking fantasy titles that are actually incredibly depressing
Wandersong is an adventure game where, instead of an action hero, you play as a bard whose only ability is singing. You’re told that the world is ending and the only way to save it is to sing the Earthsong, which can only be taught by the spiritual overseers of the spirit world, so you have to go on a quest, solving all your problems along the way with singing.
The story takes a big swerve about halfway in and is actually incredibly dark and bleak, with later segments even borrowing elements from horror. This isn’t one of those fantasy stories where the apocalypse is an all-or-nothing abstract threat; the world and the overseers are slowly dying and you see them deteriorate in real time, all while the protagonists and NPCs contemplate the end of existence. It got to the point where I was genuinely expecting the ending to be “LOL j/k, world ends everyone dies.”
A Metroidvania that’s further to the Metroid end of the scale than the Castlevania one; I haven’t played many of those, so this was interesting. This game had a really great plot and aesthetic: You play as a physicist who, after a lab accident, wakes up in a creepy machine on an alien planet. A voice in his head tells him he needs to grab a gun to defend himself, and then he’s off to explore a bizarre world that’s equal parts biological and mechanical. Compounding the weirdness is that you are quickly told the world’s present state is the result of a deadly pathogen that mutated all life into monsters; you are suffering from the pathogen as well, and this occasionally manifests in bizarre hallucinations that force you to doubt your senses. The gameplay mechanics are diegetic as well, with the main character explicitly remembering every time he dies and returns to a checkpoint, further blurring the lines of reality.
I just finished the first Paper Mario. It was good, and surprisingly different from Superstar Saga! The action commands were much less difficult and complex, but that helped the game regain that tactical element I mentioned. I can definitely see how it started as a sequel to Super Mario RPG.
I really enjoyed this! It reminded me a lot of UnderTale with how personalized (and delightfully silly) every enemy was, and I’m impressed by how much strategy they got out of pretty simple mechanics with the three regular attacks. I also loved the Metroidvania-like feel of getting new exploration abilities along with your battle abilities and just, it was really cool!
Unworthy is a Soulslike Metroidvania I found in a recommendations list somewhere. Its main defining feature is that you can’t jump. It accomplishes this much better than Mable and the Wood, mainly by not trying to be a platformer anyway. There are no bottomless pits and shockingly few spike traps. There is rather severe falling damage, but this is mainly to prevent you from bypassing levels and not as a way to create a disaster cascade from getting hit. There’s no knockback from enemy attacks at all, actually, which is both a blessing and a curse because there’s no mercy invincibility either, so enemies will quickly combo you to death if you don’t get out of the way on your own. There is a midgame upgrade that gives you the ability to move vertically, but it works very differently than a jump ability and I overall found it delightfully fun and inventive, plus it made moving around areas a breeze.
In 2019, Yahtzee Croshaw (the game reviewer who does Zero Punctuation) challenged himself to make 12 games in 12 months and document his progress every fortnight. As someone interested in game design myself, I checked them out and I recommend you do too. They’re all short, free, and incredibly varied.
In this post I’ll give my own ranking, and short thoughts on each one.
Another RPG by the developer of Sojourner. I had hoped he had learned some lessons and improved from last time. He did not.
I’ve wanted to check out this game ever since it was billed to me as a “Metroidvania of knowledge”. It’s a first-person puzzler where you explore a mysterious island covered in computer terminals with puzzles to solve. You can access nearly the entire island from the start, but some areas build on puzzle rules taught in other areas, so you need to learn and understand new mechanics in order to progress.
It left me with very mixed feelings.
Most of these weren’t bad so much as “This should have been a novel or indie film.”
Inside: Pinstripe, TIMEFrame, Mages of Mystralia.
It’s that time several months past that time of the year again!
Inside: Ittle Dew, Mini Ghost, Papers Please, Pyre, Out There Somewhere, Toki Tori 2, Antichamber.
Another big Nintendo game I’m getting to fashionably late. I’m very much of two minds about this one.
Aesthetically, the game is an absolute delight. The premise of making the different worlds feel genuinely alien in a way that even the planets of Galaxy didn’t by giving them all radically different aesthetics and art styles was wonderful, and a fantastic way to make even this old franchise feel fresh. I loved all the kingdoms and all the inhabitants, especially the steam gardeners — despite being robots they actually seemed like the most emotional of all the characters, and the duality of their earnest joy at their work and snarky pettiness was so adorable. (I particularly love the one that is very obviously the robot equivalent of drunk hollering that the Steam Gardens are objectively the best kingdom.) I loved the possession mechanic. I loved the 8-bit segments and the callbacks to earlier games, especially the New Donk City festival, which felt like a reflection on how far the franchise has come. I loved that we got to explore Bowser’s kingdom and that it was a completely different flavor of medieval palace than the Mushroom Kingdom. I loved getting to fight a giant frickin’ dragon that looks like it wandered in from Dark Souls. I loved that we got to revisit Peach’s castle as it was in Super Mario 64. I loved that the designers put in the detail that Bowser didn’t just dress up for the occasion, he also delicately coiffed his hair. I loved following up the final boss fight with getting to possess Bowser for a super awesome Metroid-esque escape sequence. I loved all the outfits, and I took a particular delight in dancing around Bowser’s kingdom in a clown suit.
But I feel they really dropped the ball on actually putting a compelling game on top of this phenomenal backdrop. It was clearly trying to experiment with the same open-world approach as Breath of the Wild, but that doesn’t work nearly as well for a platformer than it does for an action adventure. The actual platforming challenges feel tiny, empty, and unsatisfying, and the game as a whole feels like it’s pulling in too many directions.
Finally got around to this, 4 years late. It’s good!
I think my most important takeaway from this game is that it’s very different from other Zelda games. It’s good at what it is, but it scratches a different itch. I wouldn’t want all Zelda games to be like this one going forward.