Mega Man Legends

Mega Man Legends exists alongside Half-Life and Shenmue as those series with fanbases eternally waiting for a conclusion and probably never getting one. It's hard to say which one suffers the most. Half-Life with a developer with piles of cash and willing writers who just doesn't do it because they don't think they have anything innovative to do (or it just isn't another infinite money machine), Shenmue that had its chance but ended with a deluded director deciding to continue to stretch it out instead of just giving an ending, or Mega Man Legends with its cliffhanger ending that is probably permanently torpedoed out of spite for a creator leaving the company. I have no idea, I just didn't know how to start this review.

Really looks like a dungeon crawl from a distance

  For years I thought Mega Man Legends was some kind of vaguely actiony but grid-based dungeon crawler, based on screenshots in magazines depicting very blocky dungeons. I though it looked cool but, you know, sometimes it takes decades to get around to a game. It turns out it's actually a third-person shooter rpg with a mix of dungeons and action set pieces. It's also wrapped in the bluest skies of low poly anime aesthetics, depicting a flooded world dotted by ancient ruins that sky faring treasure hunters plunder for the only remaining batteries in the world. The bulk of the story is actually just Mega Man and a group of pirates fighting to get the motherload of batteries located on one such island. And it uh. It pretty much doesn't progress past that until the very end, which reveals a bit about the world while teasing a sequel. How foreboding.

The happiest warzone

For whatever reason I don't really associate PS1 era RPGs with third person 3d. Most games gravitated towards pre-rendered backgrounds, and the few actual 3d ones still tended towards some flavor of overhead or isometric. So in that regard I find it to be a real novelty, maybe even more so today since the choice makes it much closer to the modern reality of every other single player game being an action RPG hybrid of some sort. But it's also a third person game released before Ocarina of Time, so that means it controls like garbage. While it does feature a lock on system, it also doesn't let you move while locked on- that just controls where you're aiming. This results in some awkward start/stop gameplay where you move, stop to shoot until the enemy's bullets (or body) is about to hit you, and then move again. Yet for as bad as it is, what makes it remain playable is that the developers also understood how clunky it is. Most enemy attacks are designed around the start/stop, and the game plays a warning sound any time you're near an enemy to minimize getting hit from unknown enemies while slowly swinging the camera around. Even the final boss that moves around a whole lot more, resulting in having to dodge off-camera attacks, does at least have smart sound design where you can hear the current attack even if you can't see it. In a weird way I actually found it quite refreshing because no one builds action games like this now that camera and targeting controls are a solved problem. They're bad controls, but good designers managed to make them work (with some terrible boss exceptions and don't get me started on the impossibly awkward L1/R1+X dodge roll).

Bit of a lack of confidence when you have to tell players how to fight a boss.

 The bulk of the game alternates between dungeons and set piece action segments. The latter involves a variety of situations- shooting at an airship while ontop of one, defending a town being destroyed by tanks, shooting at boats while ontop of a boat, fighting a giant robot in a city, general boss fights, etc. They're conceptually fun, but are also the place where the controls are at their worst fighting wide open spaces and having to aim at things. The dungeons meanwhile are quite streamlined with minimal branching paths and few puzzles, focusing more on the resource management of not exhausting too much health before reaching the end. While visually blocky and repetitive, I found them to be the better part of the game since they have a decent amount of enemy variety, traps, and just enough navigational complexity to be satisfying to explore without being easy to get lost in. Plus the constrained areas worked well with the limited lock-on targeting. 

There wasn't the budget to animate a kiss with a random NPC.

 The one really clever bit of the dungeons is that they're secretly one big dungeon- as you get upgrades you find ways to shatter the barriers between them, letting you metroidvania poke your way into new parts. Doing so is rarely required for the main progression as it's more of an optional way to find new weapons and an excuse to grind more money for the game's wonderfully stingy economy. That said, while I was thrilled by this system at first, by the end of the game I really couldn't be bothered to scour the remaining areas. The game's map system doesn't allow viewing any area other than your current area (and every dungeon consists of multiple areas), so finding the final secrets becomes a real chore.

Fighting a giant robot in a destructible city where you can jump onto the building's roofs still feels kind of next gen.

Between the two main action bits you can go to the town to buy upgrades, develop new subweapons from junk you found, donate to the museum, and do some pretty basic sidequests. There are things to appreciate here, but it really feels like they were struggling between trying to make a 3d town feel appropriately scaled while also not having enough stuff to put in it. The solution they landed on was to simply allow talking to NPCs by knocking on doors, while major public buildings (bank/police station/library/etc) can be entered to find the sparse number of side quests in the game. The end result is mostly an empty chore to walk around with suboptimal fast travel options, but it's not a complete bust as a break from the action.

 Misc Notes:

• Game has a lot of weirdly ambitious bits to it. There's a single fight where buildings in the town can get destroyed. They stay destroyed until you donate enough money to repair them, and the repairs seem to take time.
• There's also a bomb threat side quest that can get buildings blown up again, forcing you to rebuild.
• And there's a morality system where you can take money for yourself instead of giving it back along with a few other actions that can make yourself look evil. I didn't mess with it, but the game only vaguely mentions it as an option in the library.
• I despise games that do the "items/money spill out of enemies" thing because it just creates a chore out of a desire for visual splendor, but to this game's credit money despawns so fast and you can have so much range that it can occasionally tempt you into dangerous situations before it despawns. So good on it for at least using the system to interesting effect

Things to ask a dancing monkey.

• There are like a billion subweapons you can get, but you can only change them in town so I barely got to use half of them (more so from some of them being required to unlock areas, making you afraid to switch off). 

• Money is the primary way to progress your stats, and the game does a surprisingly good job being stingy enough with it that you constantly want more. I've played so many games lately with economies you can break long before the halfway point that it was quite delightful to reach the final boss without being able to afford everything, even when doing lots of optional stuff (indeed that morality system actually makes some sense here in that being the good guy gets you way less money rather than banal equality). That said the subweapon upgrade system might be a bit too much, as they cost ridiculous amounts and I could barely touch them while still getting armor/health upgrades (and considering how hard switching is, investing in them was hardly tempting). I ended up grinding money for maybe 15-30mins to round out my upgrades for the big ol' difficulty spike final boss (even the health potion system, while instant, is limited enough to not break the game balance like a whole lot of modern action rpgs).

One of the more interesting credits in a game

 So should you play Mega Man Legends? Yeah, probably, it's a delightful time and only takes like 12 hours to beat. It's a little disappointing how little the relationship between Mega Man and the pirates evolves despite how many voiced cutscenes they devote to it, but whatever they're cartoon villains that never learn. Provided you can see the charm in awkward early 3d controls and can stomach a big empty town, it's a good time.

Pikmin 3

 The original Pikmin was something more than the sum of its parts. It had a certain thematic cohesion where the premise of being stranded on an alien planet and needing collect the pieces of your ship in 30 days or you'd die meshed perfectly with the light RTS gameplay of learning to be more and more efficient with your time. In conjunction with the logs at the end of each day, and only your Pikmin as friends, you started to feel like you really were stranded on a planet. Pikmin 2 removed the time limit and I skipped it because I just didn't see the point- the individual pieces of the game like combat were fine, but they only really came together when the player was compelled to be efficient. Pikmin 3 marked the return to the time limit so I was pretty excited.

Rather than a hard 30 day limit, it introduces the concept of juice- every day on the planet consumes 1 juice and finding fruit (of which there are a finite amount) adds more juice to your reserves. I imagine the intention was to make the time limit feel less negative to people who are afraid of time limits. In practice there is so much fruit that it actually just undermines the tension completely. The original game was also a paper tiger in this regard, you'd have to be remarkably terrible to get anywhere near the time limit even on your first playthrough, but it still had enough unknowns that I felt pressured most of the way through. In Pikmin 3 it takes very little time to get a juice surplus and you will find yourself pretty much constantly getting +3 days almost every day such that there just isn't any tension. After cleaning up the game for 100% fruit I had like 40 remaining when I beat the final boss, and even before that I probably had a 20 surplus when reaching the final boss. The game does introduce one curveball to the system in the middle of the game which was appreciated, but still not enough.

It's kind of unfortunate too because the game also introduces so many more options for being efficient. You have 3 characters to direct pikmin with and are able to swap between them at any time. You can also use the touch screen to command them to move places while you're doing other things. You could really do some work with these new tools, but I only used them out of occasional convenience because there just wasn't any pressure. It also dissuades you from it in the early game because there are numerous puzzles requiring one commander to throw another one up inaccessible cliffs- so even if you wanted to be an efficiency machine, it might bite you later when the game requires the commanders to be together.

The controls are also frankly a mess. You can throw/gather pikmin using the gamepad's analog stick, or its touch pad, or the wiimote's sensor, or the wiimote's wiimotion+ gyro. Every option has drawbacks. Using the pure gamepad is awkward because a lot of targets (especially flying) are a nightmare to target. Using the touchpad is awkward because you have to re-center it frequently. The wiimote is the best way to play the game, but it offers no way to use the map on the TV so you'll have to awkwardly swap between it and the gamepad. I ended up using the wiimote for bosses, and the pure gamepad for exploration. It was not ideal. Even the touch screen map itself is lacking- there's no zoom options (because your cursor is linked showing the area itself on the TV which is kind of necessary since the map itself makes terrain indistinct), and there's no quick way to direct your commanders- you have to switch, scroll to where you want them to go, lock it in, then switch back. Given the touch screen I expected to be able to direct them by just dragging on the commander or something. I expected this to be one of the few games to justify the wiiu's gamepad, but I ended up wishing that I had the Switch version that lets you use the map on the TV (even if gyro aiming is probably a little worse than a wiimote pointer).

So should you play Pikmin 3? Even though this review consists entirely of gripes, I'd still say I had a pretty good time. It's a strange hybrid of RTS and adventure that is very light, but also enjoyable since there's not much like it (or possibly because a short game is incredible after playing so many 200hr monsters). I didn't really go into it, but the game has far more elaborate boss encounters than the original that often mix exploration/puzzles and battle in clever ways (though the final one is more annoying than anything). There's still a tinge of sadness since it could have been so much more if the developers were a little less afraid of hurting players (maybe the Switch version's hard modes even fix this). It's certainly not a must play, but if you see it for cheap go for it? Certainly play the original game instead if you haven't.

Xenoblade 3

The original Xenoblade came as quite the surprise to me, even with the preceding years of fans yelling at Nintendo to release it in America. It felt like the first advancement in Japanese RPGs in quite some time, since the PS3 generation raised the requirements so high that Japanese developers struggled to put anything out at all. At most you had Final Fantasy XIII with very pretty graphics and one hell of a battle system, but struggling to have any vision since most of Square-Enix's directorial talent had left either from failed movies or getting worked to death. Or you had something like Tales of Vesperia which was well-crafted, but extremely traditional and anime. Xenoblade, even though it was on the Wii, comparatively blew the doors down with an enormous world scale that resembled a linear MMO more than anything (with accompanying fast travel that was borderline instant), a bold level of quality of life that let players die with no penalty (yet also using that to drop level 80 monsters in early game areas or having spider bosses climb out of pits to get the drop on you), surprisingly well crafted in-game cinematics, and took Final Fantasy XII's offline MMO combat idea and made it actually work by making player movement and positioning actually matter with just a generally more active approach to it. While you can poke flaws at it in retrospect, it was a hell of a surprise coming from a game that wasn't really on my radar at all.

Now we're 4 games deep into the franchise. Xenoblade X kept up the experimentation by introducing an open world that actually required you to engage with optional content to be powerful enough to deal with the main story content (much to reviewer's despair and my delight), while Xenoblade 2 rolled back the innovation in favor of refining the formula- adding timing-based attack inputs, ramping up the action cutscene budget, and making the character models more appealing if also a bit more generically anime. That left me wondering where Xenoblade 3 would end up going and the answer is, for better or worse, even more refining and ramping up the budgetary scale?

Xenoblade 2 was extremely shonen. I'm talking boy meets mysterious girl who go on an adventure to find some magical place with some magical artifact (well I guess the artifact is also the girl in this case). I'm talking boy accidentally falls on girl's boobies and gets yelled at for it. I'm talking cutscene after cutscene of the heroes getting their ass beat followed by getting angry from some emotional revelation and overcoming it with their newfound power. I didn't entirely hate it (those fight scenes have some legit well done anime fight choreography), but with it being the series first actual bonafide financial success I was worried it was going to go down the path of big booby babes forevermore.

Xenoblade 3 might be some flavor of anime plot, but it sure didn't continue going down that route. Instead we have a bleak setting where child soldiers who can only live for 10 years are locked into an infinite war where neither side can ever win. There's a certain emphasis on mourning, with the protagonist being an off-seer who plays on his flute to see the dead off. Elements even start to resemble parts of Xenogears (though I don't know enough to substantially comment on that). The main cast don't entirely rely on likable one-note anime tropes either- compare Lanz to his Xenoblade 1 counterpart of Reyn for example: Reyn is the rock-solid upbeat meathead best friend archetype from start to finish. Lanz looks like that, but he's actually more of an arrogant dick that's somewhat dimwitted but is aware of it and his respect can be earned. I'm not an English major so I'm mangling my descriptions here. The point is that the game tries to have more depth with its main characters, containing tons of flashbacks fleshing them out. That's commendable. But it also didn't really work for me. I didn't particularly like or dislike anyone, and the flashbacks did not force me to re-evaluate the characters like a good season 1 Lost flashback, so much as just going, "oh. ok".

Up until this game, Xenoblade has been stuffed to the brim with sidequests. The cheap kind that mostly revolve around some text boxes at the beginning/end, and just involve killing things or collecting things or getting to a place (with a few more involved ones here and there). I suppose someone must have slipped them a copy of The Witcher 3, because Xenoblade 3 takes a turn into dramatically upping the production value on some them to nearly matching the main story while still having a hell of a lot of them. That sounds great on paper, but in reality the quality of writing tends to take a huge hit. 

Often it's just cruddy writing, but part of the problem is also just the game's commitment to the setting of an infinite child soldier war. People make fun of Japanese RPGs for always having teenage protagonists, but in this case the entire world is literally populated almost exclusively by teenage soldiers. It's exhaustively samey. Even as someone who tends to love deep dives into how an interesting hypothetical world could actually function, it isn't handled that well here. I cannot count the number of quests that boiled down to a villain monologuing about how one aspect of the world functioned, only for the protagonists to get mad about how wrong and evil it is for things to be that way. While the "how it works" aspect was often interesting (though sometimes dumb), the fact that the response to it was always just righteous outrage starts to make it almost feel like parody. Doesn't feel like it really explored the ideas presented.

I think it ultimately just made me appreciate cheap sidequests for the first time. My previous experience with the franchise has always been to do quite a lot of them, but once I started getting tired I'd just pull the plug and finish the main story. This worked quite well- the quests themselves contain enjoyable bits of world building, incentive to explore the world, but also aren't so high quality that I felt bad about skipping them. Xenoblade 3 meanwhile made me play it for way longer than the game itself could hold my interest because it felt wrong to skip such substantial content. The fact that the content in question was sometimes pretty bad made things even worse (compare to The Witcher 3, which while the gameplay runs out of steam almost immediately, at least the sidequest writing manages to be so consistently high quality throughout that I was only kind of grumpy about the whole affair).

On paper this should be the best Xenoblade battle system yet- it involves unlocking tons of classes and by leveling them enough you can then use their abilities on other classes. It even includes a Blue Mage style class that allows unlocking like hundreds of abilities and creating custom versions all 3 roles in the trinity (tank/damage/healing). Having 6 characters instead of 3 allows a lot more creativity in party composition. They finally let you change leaders mid-combat. It still retains Xenoblade 2's addition of timing while having a more understandable version of chain attacks and sort-of giving you more abilities at a time (sort of less too). 

But in practice the nature of having to level up classes to use their cross-class abilities (and the UI making it difficult to see what the cross-class abilities even are without looking up names) just means you have to spend the entire game constantly changing classes across 6 characters to level up all the classes. While in previous games I would happily tweak my party every so often, occasionally changing leaders when things got dull, in this game I pretty much resigned myself to letting the game set up my party instead- there was just too much crap to be changing it every 2 hours or so. Actually executing combat has gotten pretty rote and stale at this point too despite the number of classes. So in the end, despite sinking so many hours into the game, I basically feel like I never actually got around to really getting to play the game (which is to say actually building a party of my own). I suspect if I sat down and did the endgame monsters I would probably find some satisfaction, but I'm kind of too burned out to want to (as is I ran into a couple bosses that demanded tweaking my party, but out leveling them is an equally viable strategy)